Colin Kahl offered some thoughts in response to my take on his latest op-ed:

It’s not hubris to advocate conditionality — it’s pragmatism. There have been genuine security gains over the past year, and there is some chance of a soft landing that would be good for Iraqi and U.S. interests. Conditionality is not a cure all, and our influence is diminishing. But as we begin to draw down in 2009 we should be using every ounce of our remaining leverage at the strategic (presidential) and tactical levels–which, despite Maliki’s rhetoric, remain considerable–to push for a few political deals on Sons of Iraq integration, elections, and Kirkuk that would consolidate security gains (or at least minimize the prospects of backsliding).

Simply taking a hands off approach to Maliki et al. as we draw down won’t change things and it would almost certainly increase the risks that the withdrawal and its aftermath will be messy and chaotic. Hubris is staying forever OR leaving unconditionally and just hoping that things will work out. They won’t. Pragmatism is trying to play a bad hand well.

Well rather than going back and forth on exactly what’s hubris here, let me say that my main doubts about the wisdom of conditionality isn’t about the extent of our leverage it’s about our ability to know what we’re doing. All throughout the many different iterations of our approach to occupying Iraq, the one thing we’ve been consistently unable to do is micromanage Iraqi internal politics in a satisfactory way. The policy community in Washington always remains steadfastly sure that we’re the manipulators rather than the manipulated even though there’s really no way to tell. Meanwhile, the continued presence of large levels of US forces in Iraq, whether conditional or not, encourages different Iraqi factions to make their relationship with us their primary concern rather than their relationship with each other.

I’m not sure it makes sense to talk about “playing a bad hand well” at this point. Our hand seems okay to me. The lives and money and opportunity that have been wasted in Iraq have already been wasted. But Saddam is gone and a new government is in place, and that new government is — in the form of its repeated timetable requests — offering us a decent and honorable way out that would allow us to refocus our energy and efforts on other problems around the world. We’ve lost a lot of previous hands but our current hand is fine and the smart way to play it is to seize the opportunity to leave Iraq with a handshake and pat on the back rather than desperately hanging on until the situation becomes totally untenable.

I read Kenneth Pollack’s A Threatening Storm and liked it a lot, a view I’ve since had plenty of time to regret. And based on Max Rodenbeck’s review of Pollack’s new book I won’t be picking up A Path Out of the Desert: A Grand Strategy for America in the Middle East. Rodenbeck correctly implies that the flaws he identifies in Pollack’s book are pretty widespread among the American elite. As Rodenbeck writes, “Reading this big, ambitious book by Kenneth M. Pollack, who is the head of research at Brookings’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy, it is hard not to wish that what he refers to as Washington’s ‘policy community’ would more often realize that they are the problem.”

Russia and China, along with a few buddies, set up an international organization called the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. It doesn’t really do anything, but it exists as a sort of gesture of non-NATO solidarity and an implicit threat to do something for real someday. And it seems Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev were expecting the SCO to back them over the Georgia issue in that spirit, but China basically told them to take a hike staying decided neutral on the issue.

There’s a crucial lesson here about not over-hyping the alleged new era of autocracies — there’s basically no there there. And it’s likely to stay that way. It’s actually quite difficult for autocracies to have any but the most limited forms of sustained cooperation unless the relationship becomes one of one-sided domination. States that are internally governed by stable rule-bound liberal institutions can forge enduring institutional ties, but states that aren’t like that find it difficult to move beyond one-off bargains. But still, on something like this, China certainly could give more support to the Russia position if Beijing were so inclined. But it seems Beijing isn’t. And we should work to make sure it stays that way and eschew policies that tend to drive every somewhat problematic state together into a potentially hostile coalition.

Via Eric Martin, Mark Steyn’s thoughts in the immediate aftermath of Ethiopia’s US-backed invasion of Somalia:

One difference between the Ethiopians in Somalia and the Americans in Iraq is that the former aren’t fighting with one hand behind their back just in case some EU ally or humanitarian lobby group or fictitious Associated Press source leaks some “war crime” or other to the media. In fact, the Ethiopians have the advantage of more or less total lack of interest from the Western media. So they’re just getting on with it.

In this he spoke, as Eric documents, for a broad swathe of the American right which uniformly praised the invasion and suggested that its success showed that the US military ought to behave more brutally. Of course, the invasion almost immediately got bogged down in an insurgency battle at which point conservative stopped talking about. The ensuing humanitarian crisis became, of course, much worse for the Somali people than was life under the Islamic Courts Movement. And piracy began to flourish off the Somali coast. Somali Islamists have begun to contemplate an alliance with al-Qaeda. And now the Ethiopians are getting ready to pack up and go home leaving Somalia more radicalized and also more unstable than it was before. This is more or less exactly what skeptics like Eric, Spencer Ackerman, John Judis, etc. predicted at the time when we were greeted with widespread conservative derision by people who decided to stop following the story as soon as the facts became inconvenient.

Did a TAP Online article about John Kerry’s awesome speech last night. For a sense of how much more awesomely attack doggy he was than everyone else, compare this word cloud to these other ones.