Carlos Pascual led foreign policy experts in a discussion on the Petraeus-Crocker report , noting that
Iraq’s future remains in doubt.
"Let's not be overly optimistic about what to expect on the economics. Iraq is not just a country that has been through a war and is in a civil war but it has gone through a wrenching transition of going from a command economy. Let's remember what happened in command economies after they have gone through their transitions. They have usually gone through a period of 5 to 8 years of economic contraction to begin with, and put on top of that a civil war in the midst of it, and let's be realistic about what can actually be achieved there. We shouldn't be expecting a huge amount of progress on the economic side.
"And on the political side, I think one of the core questions that we need to ask is, is there even a political strategy, because right now the political strategy in my view has essentially been telling the Iraqis who are in the middle of a war to fix themselves and there is not something, an alternative, to in fact actually try to broker agreement among them. If anything that we have learned from civil wars through the last 25 years of history, is that those civil wars have needed some kind of brokered agreement. That agreement might be influenced as Bruce said by whether people are exhausted of fighting and they are willing to come to a peace, it might be influenced by whether or not there is a significant military force on the ground, but eventually you have to bring it back to a negotiating table and you have to have the ability to make tradeoffs across issues and the expectation that a political strategy with Iraqis will sequentially legislation in a rational and orderly basis case by case on each individual is absolutely inconsistent with anything that we have seen in the history of conflict, and to expect that it could happen now is just simply a departure from any historical example that we have ever seen."