Benjamin R. “Randy” Mixon says he needs more troops in Diyala Province:

Mixon, speaking Friday by teleconference from Camp Speicher, outside Tikrit, to a Pentagon news conference, said that he did not have enough soldiers to provide security in Diyala. The local government is “nonfunctional” and the central government is “ineffective,” he said. . . .

Mixon was withering in his criticism of the Iraqi government, saying it was hamstrung by bureaucracy and compromised by corruption and sectarian discord, making it unable to assist U.S. forces in Diyala.

Why, though, isn’t this the reason to take the troops out? After all, what’s the point of throwing ever more American blood and manpower in support of a corrupt, ineffective government? And this is the essential problem. One could easily imagine a post-war situation where Iraq had a government that was not yet competent to run the country, but showed signs of rapid improvement such that if we kept supporting it for a while more, things might turn around. In the real world, though, we’re into the fifth year of this business and instead of improving, things just change and get bad in different ways — what’s the point of responding to the failures of the Iraqi government but sending even more troops to fight?

I hadn’t realized that Charles Krauthammer, America’s worst columnist, is in the absurd “pro-choice, anti-Roe” camp:

Legalizing abortion by judicial fiat ( Roe v. Wade) instead of by democratic means has its price. One is that the issue remains socially unsettled. People take to the streets when they have been deprived of resort to legislative action.

I’m always baffled by these claims — what’s the evidence for them? Abortion is a controversial issue in Mexico. It’s a controversial issue in Ireland. As best I can tell, it’s a controversial issue anywhere you have large religious communities who strongly believe that fetuses have the moral standing of human persons. Which, indeed, is what you would expect topics remain “socially unsettled” for as long as there are major blocks of opinion that have significantly different views about that. Tax policy in the United States, for example, is entirely out of the hands of the courts. Nevertheless, the issue of tax rates hasn’t been “settled democratically.” Rather, it’s the subject of constant legislative and electoral dispute.

Scott McLemee discovers the Euston Manifesto YouTube Channel: “Hot damn! I’ll make popcorn.”

I think anyone whose satan-to-Jesus ratio is this high doesn’t have much of a future in American electoral politics.

Okay. Time to defend the Bush administration from Brendan Nyhan’s smears. Just because Nyhan doesn’t approve of high-powered PR techniques, doesn’t mean that it was bad policy for the Bush administration to try to spend $1 million on putting those techniques to work on behalf of the Palestinian Authority. Say what you will about the Bush administration, but they’re pretty good at political marketing.

And while there’s more to life than effective marketing, marketing can be effective. Shoring up Fatah’s popularity vis-a-vis the more radical Hamas was widely believed to an important policy objective for the United States, and there’s every reason to believe that putting better PR tools at its disposal could be helpful in that regard. Obviously, readers are aware that I think Bush’s policies toward the Israel-Palestine conflict have been disastrous and obviously these PR gestures are an inadequate policy, but slamming them for spending the money seems silly.