Jacob Weisberg has a very excellent column on “four unspeakable truths about Iraq” that, frankly, surprises me for making all four dovish truths about Iraq, without some token poke at liberals. I actually don’t think his fourth truth is true, though:

fourth and final near-certainty, which is in some ways the hardest for politicians to admit, is that America is losing or has already lost the Iraq war. The United States is the strongest nation in the history of the world and does not think of itself as coming in second in two-way contests. When it does so, it is slow to accept that it has been beaten.

I really think this is wrong. We won the war in Iraq. Saddam Hussein and his regime were deposed. We installed a new regime. The Sunni Arab insurgency remains active and will continue to remain active for osme time, but shows no realistic capability of defeating the regime we installed. We won the war. This is not Vietnam where the VC and PRVN drove US forces from the country, toppled the US-backed regime in Saigon, and unified the country under control of the Communist Party.

The problem in Iraq is that, we won a hollow victory. Defeating Saddam and replacing him with a new regime based around exiled Shiite political parties has a negative impact on America’s strategic position in the world. Even were Iraq to grow substantially less chaotic over the next 2-5 years this would continue to be the case. The win-lose frame, while factually wrong, is also politically counterproductive. As Weisberg indicates, voters are reluctant to declare defeat for understandable psychological reasons. But there’s no need to do that here. It’s the fact of American victory that makes further involvement so untenable — this is what winning looks like and, frankly, it looks like shit; there’s no earthly reason to keep doing this; becoming “more successful” at backing the Maliki government wouldn’t accomplish anything.

In the midst of yet another post on unions, Tyler Cowen observes: “By the standards of labor economics, it does not suffice to note that the 1950s had both a more equal income distribution and more unions, or to call Western Europe a kinder, gentler place. Those citations don’t sort out cause and effect, and in fact we do have more advanced ways of scrutinizing the data.”

Obviously, that is true. Equally obviously, it sounds bad to speak in a disparaging way about empirical studies. That said, the result of my meta-survey of the empirical economics literature on unions is that it’s . . . rather murky. Under the circumstances, I’m really not sure there’s anything wrong with the heuristic methods Cowen disparages here. High levels of unionization are associated with politico-economic orders that are congenial to those of us of a certain political persuasion. Strong unions are simply part of the social democratic issue suite; social democrats support strong unions, strong unions support social democracy, and strong unions are partially constitutive of social democratic politics and policies.

Efforts to empirically disentangle the precise nature of the interrelationships here are, of course, an interesting scholarly endeavor and I don’t begrudge anyone for spending their time looking into it. As a matter of political commitment, though, there’s great wisdom in the example of anti-union semi-liberal Mickey Kaus who wisely recognizes in his book that he’s abandonned egalitarian politics as they are traditionally understood. Consequently, I’m not sure it’s in any real way worthwhile for non-specialists to engage in this debate since I assume we can all do an adequate job of Googling to try to find papers that support our conclusions or asking readers with access to superior specialized search tools to help us out.

I’ve finally gotten the chance to get through Joseph Cirincione’s report for the Center for American Progress on recommended Iran policy options. They come out in favor of a sensible strategy they call “contain and engage.” The basic idea is that you maintain a running dialogue with Iran offering carrots in exchange for verifiable steps at disarmament, while simultaneously maintaining a running dialogue with America’s main allies and the other major powers about ratcheting-up Iran’s diplomatic and economic isolation. The idea is to ensure that the United States is consistently the reasonable party, consistently the one prepared to strike a deal, and therefore that international diplomatic momentum remains on our side.

Among sensible people this is one major school of thought. The other, represented by Flynt Leverett’s late 2006 report for the Century Foundations holds that we should be aiming at a “grand bargain” to resolve all the outstanding bilateral issues. This is, obviously, an appealing vision. The Center’s authors say they “agree with the vision of a ‘grand bargain’ outlined by Middle East expert and former Bush administration official Flynt Leverett, who argues that the resolution of the nuclear issue requires ‘an overarching framework in which outstanding bilateral differences are resolved as a package’” but that they think this is “not practical.” Leverett, by contrast, thinks it’s not practical to separate the issues.

I have no idea how to decide who’s right about that, but it’s a pretty small difference at the end of the day, since “engage and contain” could easily become “grand bargain” if the “engage” track seemed headed in that direction. It would be nice to have sensible people running the country.