Since Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s article about Coalition Provisional Authority personnel practices specifically took on Kate O’Beirne’s husband and Michael Ledeen’s daughter, I’ve been eager to see the pushback from the Corner. Ramesh Ponnuru and Katherine Jean-Lopez oblige, but both seem off-target to me. They focus their ire on the implication on the insinuation that the CPA was handing out “posh perks” and plum patronage jobs pointing out, plausibly, that these are basically hardship assignments and not really super-desirable.

That seems like a reasonable riposte on the narrow issue, though my understanding is that life inside the Green Zone was actually fairly pleasant during the relevant period. It also completely misses the point, however, which is simply that the CPA was being treated as something more like an extension of the Republican National Committee than a serious institution of government. Not only did this compromise the quality and qualifications of the personnel, but it had an insidious impact on the operations of the CPA. “They don’t call it the Republican Palace for nothing” was the joke at the time. The upshot being that the civilian side of the operation was being run with a mindset in which there was perfect overlap between the political interests of the Republican Party and with the national interests of the United States in its policy toward post-war Iraq.

The upshot was that the entire thing was being run as a propaganda operation, an enormous press conference for U.S. domestic consumption. That ends up desperately compromising various things, most crucially the flow of information up and down the chain of command and from outside and inside the government. The political interests of the GOP just ran toward painting as pretty a picture as possible of events on the ground, while the interests of sound policy required an accurate assessment of the situation and a realistic portrait of events. If, for example, people had a more realistic understanding of what was going on in Iraq then various political milestones might have been used to much greater advantage as a way of getting the U.S. out of Iraq in a credible way that left a not-absolutely-horrible situation behind. Instead, deep institutional commitment to the view that we were making progress when we were, in fact, regressing led us to let these milestones slide and then publically commit the country to unrealistic — and often incoherent — long-term objectives.

Jackson Diehl explains that “the still-evolving unity pact” between Hamas and Fatah to form a coherent government in the Palestinian Authority and a unified approach to Israel and the West, “isn’t likely to impress either Olmert or Bush, since it almost certainly won’t commit Hamas or the new government to formal recognition of Israel or an unqualified renunciation of violence.” I have to say that I find this kind of mindset — which was also in evidence last week when I discussed these issues with an Israeli politician — a little bit puzzling. From where I sit, it seems to me that formal recognition of Israel and an unqualified renunciation of violence would be Israel’s main objectives in a negotiation aimed at a permanent status treaty.

Such a treaty would demarcate the borders of Israel and Palestine, provide for the mutual recognition of those borders by the two states, entail recognition of the two states by the rest of the world’s countries, and establish peace between the two states. That’s the goal — something that would be the outcome of negotiations, not a precondition for them. That’s how wars end; first you have a cease-fire to facilitate negotiations, then if you reach an agreement the agreement contains provisions for recognition and a renunciation of violence. Insofar as Hamas simply isn’t amenable to any kind of reasonable settlement (which certainly seems plausible) it seems to me that it would be in Israel’s interest to get that fact plainly on the table rather than having everything stuck in a meta-negotiation about preconditions.

Andrew Sullivan takes on the incompetence question: “the more we find out about the spectacular recklessness of this administration’s conduct of the war the less persuasive it is that this operation was always doomed to failure. In my view, although the war was always going to be extremely difficult, it wasn’t necessarily doomed from the start. It was the administration’s relentless, politicized incompetence that doomed it.” Let me just note that this is an extremely weak claim being made on behalf of the underlying policy concept. It “wasn’t necessarily doomed” though it was bound to be “extremely difficult.”

I’d be interested in seeing someone who thinks along these lines venture some vague probabalistic estimates. It wasn’t “necessarily doomed” but was it likely to succeed? Or are we merely claiming that there was some chance of success? Ten percent? One percent? And how does that feed into policy analysis? Obviously, you wouldn’t want to try and introduce a bogus false precision to these kind of calculations. Still, it seems to be that before launching a war of choice, you’re going to want some better odds of success than “not necessarily doomed.”