Iraq: what would YOU do?

Tacitus challenges us to create our own Iraq plans. Pretend you're the President. Tac's questions for you:

1) What is your primary value with regard to Iraq? Secondary?
2) What sort of state and society do you prefer in Iraq if you leave?
3) What are you unwilling to do to achieve goals 1 and 2?
4) What immediate action would you take upon assumption of command?
5) What long-term action would you take?
6) At what point would you declare your plan a failure?
7) How much time are you willing to allot to your occupation?

His answers are interesting, but I'm most attracted to #4:

4) Radically increase troop levels in-country, even if it means reinstating the draft. Once done, throw down the gauntlet and forcefully exclude Shi'a theocrats (and all theocrats) from participation in political processes. Public commitment to separation of faith and state would be a prerequisite for a share in Iraq's future. At the same time, open up all local leadership under provincial governorates to free elections.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: secularism is key. Not Saddamist secularism-- Western-style secularism as understood in America. This is an absolute prerequisite for success in Iraq, and a necessary component of the Islam of the future. Today, even "moderate" Islam (in its public form, at least) has no secularism, no separation of the world into sacred and profane. It's a suffocating absolutism. Iraq (and Islam) needs a secularism that promotes pluralism and tolerance while also making clear that it's the metaparadigm into which all the puzzle pieces fit. It means that religions have to compromise to coexist; the secularism itself must be uncompromising.

How possible is this? Well, that's the question of the hour.
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