The UN votes to approve economic sanctions on Iran, but the sanctions aren’t especially tough. “We don’t think this resolution is enough in itself,” says Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, who’s almost certainly correct. Why didn’t a tougher package get through the Security Council?

The administration had pushed for tougher penalties. But Russia and China, which both have strong commercial ties to Tehran, and Qatar, across the Persian Gulf from Iran, balked. To get their votes, the resolution dropped penalties such as a ban on international travel by Iranian officials involved in nuclear and missile development.

To me, this is where the small matter of diplomacy enters the picture. I really don’t want to see the United States start a war with Iran, so I’ve spent a fair amount of time trying to knock down paranoia about the Iranian nuclear program. Nevertheless, it is true at the end of the day that it would be strongly preferable for Iran to halt its quest for nuclear weapons. Under the circumstances, it would be good to be wielding tougher sanctions as a stick. That means not just throwing up our hands and saying “well, Russia and China have strong commercial ties to Iran” but also saying to ourselves, “there are probably some things that are more important to Russia and China than their commercial ties to Iran.” Find out what those are. Find out of those things are less important to us than is getting tougher sanctions on Iran. Maybe there isn’t a good deal to be cut here, but my guess is that there is. Similarly, sanctions and the threat of sanctions will work much better if the Iranians know that a grand bargain would be on the table were they interested in avoiding confrontation.

UPDATE: Incidentally, I would recommend Barry Posen’s Century Foundation paper as putting the problems posed by Iranian nuclearization in an appropriately non-alarmist perspective.

The good news about the forthcoming surge is that everyone now concedes that addition troops sent to Iraq “must be given clear instructions” and while “U.S. commanders in Iraq have not settled on what that mission should be” they do assure us that they will “decide before calling up new units.” This does strike me as strongly preferable to sending 20,000 young men and women to Iraq and just letting them get shot at for a few months before deciding what to do with them. At any rate, this highlights my career advice for General Petraeus as we see that the very same American commanders who’ve been opposing the “surge” idea are now on board for it. They report to the President, after all, and the president wants to “surge” so the generals need to support the surge as well. This is a chain-of-command you want to stay far away from.

Meanwhile, Kevin Drum says this is a bad idea but he’s glad to see it happen anyway:

Conservatives long ago convinced themselves against all evidence that we could have won in Vietnam if we’d only added more troops or used more napalm or nuked Hanoi or whatever, and they’re going to do the same thing in Iraq unless we allow them to play this out the way they want. If they don’t get to play the game their way, they’ll spend the next couple of decades trying to persuade the American public that there was nothing wrong with the idea of invading Iraq at all. We just never put the necessary resources into it.

I think it’s good to see liberals worrying some about this long-term issue. I think Kevin’s way of thinking about it, however, is a bit misguided. Irrespective of what objective events occur on the ground, there will be a revisionist movement to blame American failure in Iraq on a liberal stab-in-the-back. It’s on us — Kevin, me, anyone who writes about politics for a living, hell, anyone who reads about politics frequently — to prevent this from becoming the conventional wisdom.

To the administration’s plan for a SCIRI/Hashemi/Kurd coalition aimed at taking down Muqtada al-Sadr. The grand ayatollah says he supports Shiite unity, and will not endorse any coalition aimed at dividing the Shiites. This seems like a smart move to me. Sistani’s early political interventions were highly effective, but quickly began compromising his position as a religious leader. To choose sides in an intra-communal dispute, especially to choose in a manner that put him on the side of the foreign occupiers, would merely further risk his standing.

Drum and Ackerman have already commented on Matt Continetti’s efforts to divide America into a “peace party” and a “power party” with a focus on the tunnel-vision conception of national power implicit in that dichotomy. I thought, however, that one should stick up on some level for the idea of a peace party and recommend this recent post by John Quiggin.

Wars, as he says, are destructive activities. Something one should seek to avoid: “The starting point the observation that war is a negative-sum game, so the fact that one side loses does not mean that the other wins. If losing a war means coming out of it worse than you went in, then Vietnam is not the first war the US has lost. The War of 1812 ended with the restoration of the status quo ante, but 25 000 Americans were dead, Washington had been burned, and huge economic damage had been done.” An even more telling example, in many ways, comes from one of our classic “good wars” — the Civil War. The Union cause was just and the war was one, but the price was high. The quantity of resources spent on the war would have been sufficient to compensate current slave owners at market prices, give the freed slaves much more substantial aid than what was, in fact, offered them after the war. This, needless to say, would have been expensive, but it would actually have saved Union taxpayers money, to say nothing of avoiding massive loss of life and large-scale devastation of Southern infrastructure.

Given the realities of the situation, it seems unlikely that the Civil War really could have been avoided in that manner. Still, the example merely demonstrates the extent to which war is negative-sum; even when successful it’s an extremely sub-optimal method of achieving policy objectives. As Quiggin elaborates, a strong aversion to war does not imply a policy of blanket pacifism or of massive American retreat from a global role: “The Iraq war showed, yet again, that in conventional military conflicts the US is unbeatable, and, for practical purposes unstoppable . . . the US has a unique capacity to enforce the global law that makes wars of aggression a crime against humanity.”