Scott Lemieux writes about Québec regulations against voting with a covered face, and efforts to secure an exemption for observant Muslim women. I agree with this bottom line:

Even if the Quebec government can do it, however, we need to ask whether it should. Absent a showing that facial covered was being used to a significant extent to commit voter fraud, I cannot agree that this regulation is remotely justifiable. The state should accommodate minority religions absent a good reason to do so.

Given the generally fraught subject of the relationship of the major western democracies to the Islamic world and to their internal Muslim minorities, it’s worth pointing out that this is a fairly perverse measure. Nobody who feels a serious religious obligation not to uncover her face is going to be shaken from that conviction by being barred from voting. Instead, a regulation of this sort is just going to be experienced as the disenfranchisement of a group of observant Muslim women. What one wants to do, however, is encourage minority groups to participate in mainstream practices and institutions — voting being high on the list — even if that means the practices may need to be slightly modified in order to accommodate such participation.

Kevin Drum notes that the American public expects General David Petraeus will lie under oath to congress “try to make things look better than they are” in Iraq rather than give sworn testimony that “will reflect the situation in Iraq.” It’s worth emphasizing in this regard how much the high regard in which Petraeus is held is a purely inside phenomenon. In particular, politicians and reporters alike who’ve spoken with Petraeus all seem to be very impressed with him. Consequently, other people like me who haven’t ever spoken with him, picked up some of this sentiment through osmosis.

The reality, though, doesn’t really seem to live up to the Legend of David Petraeus, and I’m not sure anything could. And the public is largely unfamiliar with the legend in the first place. So while Democrats should certainly be respectful when he testifies, there’s no reason to be super-deferential. If some other Bush administration appointee showed up and said some stuff that didn’t seem to be true, Democrats would give him shit about it and the public would expect them to. This situation, at the end of the day, isn’t really any different.

UPDATE: Just to drive the point home, Ed Gillespie’s set up a branch of the White House communications staff that’s “hard wired” into Petraeus’ shop. Which, again, is what you’d expect when a Bush appointee goes to congress for some high-profile testimony and illustrates the point that Petraeus should be treated accordingly.

One of the worst-appreciated points in the debate over national security policy is that the Bush administration’s post-9/11 policies shouldn’t be understood as counterterrorism measures that have, in some sense or another, “gone too far.” Rather, we need to grasp that they’ve been wholly ineffective and, as best one can tell, merely made things worse. The fact that George Bush’s invasion of Iraq has killed more Americans than Osama bin Laden’s airplane hijacking is one illustration of the point. Another would be this map I’ve borrowed from the Center for American Progress team. The blue marks are pre-9/11 terrorist attacks, the yellow ones are between 9/11 and Iraq, and the red ones are post-Iraq attacks. Iraq and Afghanistan are just marked in red rather than trying to make pins for each attack in those unfortunately countries.

Some CAP text helps explain what you’re seeing:

A study conducted by Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, research fellows at the Center on Law and Security at the NYU School of Law, found that there was a 607 percent rise in the average yearly incidence of attacks (28.3 attacks per year before and 199.8 after) since the Iraq invasion. When Iraq and Afghanistan, which together account for 80 percent of attacks and 67 percent of fatalities, were excluded, there was still a 35 percent per year increase in the number of jihadist terrorist attacks.

At this point, obviously, we can’t fix the problem with a time machine, but it sure would be nice.

Damien Cave and Stephen Farrell, “Troop Buildup, Yielding Slight Gains, Fails to Meet U.S. Goals”

Seven months after the American-led troop “surge” began, Baghdad has experienced modest security gains that have neither reversed the city’s underlying sectarian dynamic nor created a unified and trusted national government.

One thing to keep in mind about the “surge” is that the overall increase in the number of American soldiers wasn’t especially large relative to either the pre-existing size of the deployment or to the size of Iraq. But along with the “surge” of additional American forces into the country, there was a “surge” of forces away from non-Baghdad portions of Iraq into the capital. It would be extraordinary if that policy didn’t manage to produce “modest security gains” in Baghdad at the expense of problems elsewhere. The question is why one might think this kind of concentration of forces might be a good idea.

Roughly speaking, there are two possible ideas. One is that the security gains might be large enough to reach some kind of tipping point. You start with X troops in Baghdad. Then you “surge” up to X + Y troops. This surge produces a self-sustaining new situation, so now you surge down to fewer than X troops in Baghdad, allowing you to surge up elsewhere. That, though, hasn’t happened. The “underlying sectarian dynamic” is the same.

Alternatively, one might think that the national capital is uniquely important to political events, and that a special focus on Baghdad security might create the environment for political reconciliation. That, though, hasn’t happened either. The whole thing’s failed. Now people would like us to believe that other “bottom up” trends compensate for the failure of the plan. But since this cuts directly against the logic of the policy we’ve been pursuing since January, there’s no reason to think that anything we’re doing is having a substantial positive impact on whatever decentralized processes in Iraq may or may not be evolving in a good situation. The scorecard can’t just credit the US military presence for any good thing that happens anywhere in Iraq, while simultaneously arguing that without the military presence every bad thing about Iraq would be worse.

DoD photo by Staff Sgt. D. Myles Cullen, U.S. Air Force