I missed the news earlier today that Blackwater’s security contractors have now been banned in Iraq. This will probably serve to make American policy in Iraq even less sustainable if the ban is enforced, but it’s a no-brainer on the merits. As Mark Kleiman explains: “Blackwater’s fighters-for-hire aren’t subject to military discipline, which excludes them from the protections of the Geneva Conventions. They’re exempt from prosecution in Iraq under rules left over from CPA days. And recklessly killing people in Iraq violates no U.S. domestic law.”

Letting people like that wander around the country was a kind of criminal negligence on the part of the Iraqi government and the fact that it took years for this measure to get enacted is fairly shocking. Nevertheless, though Blackwater is the highest-profile contracting firm involved in Iraq, I don’t think they’re the only one and such unaccountable mercenaries haven’t been banned in toto. That that hasn’t happened, and that the CPA-era immunity hasn’t been repealed, tells you a lot about the imperial character of this venture.

Unfortunately, while it’s very easy to describe incredibly wrongheaded approaches to non-proliferation policy (“bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran,” for example, or “faster, please”), outlining a sounder course tends to be a more complicated undertaking. To get a flavor for what a serious (as opposed to “serious”) might look like, though, take a gander at Jessica Matthews:

As she says near the beginning, this really needs to be put into a broader context. If we really want the international community to hold Iran to its NPT commitments, we need to demonstrate some real commitment to the arms control process. That means ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and starting to work in a cooperative way with Russia. In principle, all of the existing nuclear powers have a pretty clear interest in there not being any more nuclear powers, so it should be possible to work with Moscow on the Iran front. But that would mean not picking fights with Russia on other strategic issues.

Advocates of international trade agreements frequently express wonderment at their adversaries’ alleged inability to understand the basic principles of the economics of international trade (see, e.g., Clive Crook’s latest column in the print Atlantic) but what’s truly baffling is the tendency of the proponents of such agreements to totally mangle the theoretical basis for their policies. Check out this McClatchey account of wrangling over proposed trade deals with Peru and other Latin American countries:

“Members of Congress need to understand that a ‘no’ vote on any one of these (free-trade agreements) will not create a single job in the United States or sell a single pound of meat or a single piece of medical equipment or software,” U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab told an “FTA rally” last Monday on Capitol Hill. [...]

“This is a time to step it up,” said Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, who took a delegation of nine lawmakers to Peru, Colombia and Panama last week. “It’s good for exports, good for the economy and good for leaving a solid record for the future as to how we treat our friends and how we treat our allies.”

Gutierrez argues that U.S. exports have risen faster to countries that have signed free-trade agreements with the United States. He points out that the United States is running a trade surplus with five Central American nations and the Dominican Republic after enacting CAFTA, as the free-trade agreement with those nations is called.

This is very odd stuff. Schwab and, especially, Gutierrez appear to be arguing that the purpose of these agreements is to generate trade surpluses. This, of course, is mercantilism, precisely the approach to policy that trade advocates have traditionally disparaged. And they’ve disparaged it with good reason. If Schwab and Gutierrez really want to run trade surpluses, signing these deals is a terrible idea. Instead, we should erect really high barriers to imports and try to use our non-trade forms of geopolitical leverage to force other countries to be more open to US exports than we are to their products.

Not that I’m saying we should implement those policies — we shouldn’t — but that’d be the way to maximize our trade surplus.

And, of course, Schwab and Gutierrez aren’t really confused about this. Rather, they think, as apparently all politicians do, that the American people aren’t grown-up enough to hear the actual case for lowering trade barriers. But given the public’s apparently diminishing tolerance for these agreements, it seems to me that one potentially promising approach to rebuilding support would be for the advocates of diminished barriers to start putting the real argument on the table.