I’ve been posting for a while now on the odd situation in which the US military has been waging war in Iraq against forces loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr, whose movement also includes members of the cabinet of Iraq’s allegedly sovereign government. Well, the inherent tension of that idea seems to have come to a head recently as the US constructed a series of roadblocks in order to blockade Sadr City only to have Prime Minister Maliki tell us today that we need to lift the seige.

And so it goes. The situation is an intractable conceptual and practical muddle. Political power grows from the barrel of a gun, and the most effective military forces in Iraq are the US military and the smaller British detatchment. But American troops are under the command of Don Rumsfeld and George W. Bush and ultimately answerable to the dictates of the American political system. The British troops answer to Tony Blair and the British political system. But the supreme political authority in Iraq is Maliki and his government, which has to respond to its own imperatives. It doesn’t make sense to bend the disposition of the bulk of the United States Army to what Maliki feels he needs or wants to do, but it also doesn’t make sense for Maliki’s policies to be bent according to the dictates of US Central Command. Which is just to say that the continuation of a gigantic and open-ended American military presence in Iraq doesn’t make sense.

I agree with Kevin Drum that the generals who are learning to love timetables and deadlines are tragically late to the party. Throughout 2004, Iraq was under a state of formal military occupation. 2005, meanwhile, was a year of political transition in Iraq — elections held, constitutions written, assemblies, referenda, etc. The time for announcing a timetable was late ’04 or early ’05 with the actual timetable pegged to the political events of 2005 so that withdrawal was part-and-parcel of the emergence of a new political order in Iraq. That might have contributed to Iraqi stability, and if it didn’t work out would have at least been a face-saving measure. Now, basically, it’s just fucked and there’s really nothing to do but get out of Iraq and start working on diplomacy and so forth aimed at containing the fallout from the subsequent mess.

Jon Chait follows up his article on the gap between productivity and wages, with a published chat with Robert Rubin and Peter Orszag on the issue. The current issue of TAP, meanwhile, has a package of articles on policies to create high-wage jobs.

Let me just observe with regard to Rubin and Orszag that I feel like they’re neglecting the possibility that tax rates influence pre-tax distribution. To take an extreme example for illustrative purposes, if you had a 90 percent tax bracket kick in for people making over $400,000 a year, it would make much more sense to try and hire two people each making $400,000 than to try and hire a “superstar” for $800,000. The additional $400,000 you’d be paying in salary to the superstar would only buy $40,000 worth of labor, which is a pretty crappy deal for the employer. Bush’s cut in the top rate wasn’t super-dramatic on that scale, but if you look at the long-term Carter-Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush trajectory, the top marginal income tax rate actually is way lower than it used to be.

Crooked Timber is hosting an online seminar on Sherri Berman’s book, The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s Twentieth Century featuring, among other things, a contribution from yours truly. Check it all out.

Major Daniels, as we’ve seen on The Wire has an idea that I think all good liberals are supposed to like — the Baltimore Police Department could stop doing “street rips” aimed at nailing low-level offenders and start targeting their energies at building felony cases against high-end drug figures. I wonder, though, how much sense this makes. The guys who pass for high-value targets in Baltimore are, at the end of the day, mid-sized fish at best in the drug trade at large. Arrest as many of them as you like and you’ll still have the wholesalers who bring the coke and heroin into Baltimore around. And you’ll still have all these drug addicts who want to buy drugs. The combination of demand for drugs and supply of drugs is going to ensure an endless stream of middlemen, no matter how many people you arrest.

Street level dealers, by contrast, are a bona fide nuisance. You wouldn’t want those dudes slinging on the corner where you live or right outside the shop where you buy stuff. And there’s no law of nature that says people need to be selling drugs more-or-less openly out in high-traffic public places. Are you going to get the people to stop selling drugs? No. If someone wants to buy them, someone will sell them. But if the cops made it a sufficient hassle to operate an open-air drug market while winking at people who manage to stay discrete, you could envision a world in which the drug dealers start showing some discretion and quality of life for the neighborhood’s taxpayers goes up.

It sort of sounds correct that the key to more effective crime control policy would be taking up Daniels’ suggestion and doing more highly professional police work — complicated investigations and the like — but the important thing is really to focus on what things are and aren’t achievable. A police department’s ability to influence the fact that people use drugs and other people sell drugs to them is going to be pretty minimal. Their influence over where, when, and how drugs get sold, by contrast, could be pretty large as long as you went at it with some focus.

UPDATE: Spencer Ackerman responds with, in part, some recollections of living in Columbia Heights during the great MS-13 War of 2002-2003. I was in that neighborhood for the tail end of the conflict and, I dunno, I recall it as having been scary as shit notwithstanding the fact that I knew, rationally, that virtually everyone getting hurt was in the game and that my odds of being killed were, in fact, extremely low no matter how often one heard sirens by night and saw police tape by day.

The strategy, of course, is that as the Iraqi security forces stand up, American forces will be able to stand down, providing not for a precipitous withdrawal, but rather a slow-but-steady drawdown of the US military presence in Iraq as victory is achieved. Except, as Jim Henley notes, our troop strength in Iraq is somehow back up to 150,000, right in the neighborhood of the peak level. It’s almost as if the administration’s strategy for Iraq is a horrible failure, a plan for perpetual war. But that couldn’t be right, could it?

Well, of course it could. After all, “the only defeat is leaving”, according to Bush. Meaning that “winning” just means continuing to do what we’re doing — staying in Iraq — for as long as it takes for us to . . . keep on staying in Iraq.