I’ve been posting for a while now on the odd situation in which the US military has been waging war in Iraq against forces loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr, whose movement also includes members of the cabinet of Iraq’s allegedly sovereign government. Well, the inherent tension of that idea seems to have come to a head recently as the US constructed a series of roadblocks in order to blockade Sadr City only to have Prime Minister Maliki tell us today that we need to lift the seige.

And so it goes. The situation is an intractable conceptual and practical muddle. Political power grows from the barrel of a gun, and the most effective military forces in Iraq are the US military and the smaller British detatchment. But American troops are under the command of Don Rumsfeld and George W. Bush and ultimately answerable to the dictates of the American political system. The British troops answer to Tony Blair and the British political system. But the supreme political authority in Iraq is Maliki and his government, which has to respond to its own imperatives. It doesn’t make sense to bend the disposition of the bulk of the United States Army to what Maliki feels he needs or wants to do, but it also doesn’t make sense for Maliki’s policies to be bent according to the dictates of US Central Command. Which is just to say that the continuation of a gigantic and open-ended American military presence in Iraq doesn’t make sense.

I agree with Kevin Drum that the generals who are learning to love timetables and deadlines are tragically late to the party. Throughout 2004, Iraq was under a state of formal military occupation. 2005, meanwhile, was a year of political transition in Iraq — elections held, constitutions written, assemblies, referenda, etc. The time for announcing a timetable was late ’04 or early ’05 with the actual timetable pegged to the political events of 2005 so that withdrawal was part-and-parcel of the emergence of a new political order in Iraq. That might have contributed to Iraqi stability, and if it didn’t work out would have at least been a face-saving measure. Now, basically, it’s just fucked and there’s really nothing to do but get out of Iraq and start working on diplomacy and so forth aimed at containing the fallout from the subsequent mess.

The strategy, of course, is that as the Iraqi security forces stand up, American forces will be able to stand down, providing not for a precipitous withdrawal, but rather a slow-but-steady drawdown of the US military presence in Iraq as victory is achieved. Except, as Jim Henley notes, our troop strength in Iraq is somehow back up to 150,000, right in the neighborhood of the peak level. It’s almost as if the administration’s strategy for Iraq is a horrible failure, a plan for perpetual war. But that couldn’t be right, could it?

Well, of course it could. After all, “the only defeat is leaving”, according to Bush. Meaning that “winning” just means continuing to do what we’re doing — staying in Iraq — for as long as it takes for us to . . . keep on staying in Iraq.

Noah Feldman’s long article on the Iranian nuclear program manages to be equivocal on such minor issues as “why is Iran building this bomb?” and “what should we do about the Iranian nuclear program?” so I think that if I’d read it blind, I wouldn’t have found it especially obnoxious, except insofar as it’s weird to write such a long article on an important subject and not really say anything about it. But I didn’t read it blind — I got a panicked email from my dad asking if this was “some sort of soft campaign for March’s surprise strike” and saw Martin Peretz call it a “really smart” article. So one starts to worry. And, indeed, there’s much to complain about. So let’s get to the carping.

Read more

Suzanne Nossel has a smart list up of “of 5 issues where progressives are well-positioned to build public support based on existing policies, and 5 areas where more work needs to be done” and wisely includes trade on the list of things where viable progressive consensus seems lacking. A big part of the problem here, I think, is that not only are liberals famously divided about trade issues, but these disagreements almost exclusively conceptualize trade issues as economic policy disputes rather than foreign policy ones. Obviously, though, trade agreements are diplomatic pacts formed with foreign countries and form — along with formal and informal military alliances, economic sanctions, international legal institutions, etc. — part of the wide range of non-military tools that can impact foreign governments’ behavior.

For my part, I’ve become considerably more skeptical about the economic case for the multilateral trade regime as it currently exists than I was three or four or five years ago. At the same time, though, I’ve become more convinced of the central role efforts to construct a globalized marketplace have traditionally played — and should continue to play — in the liberal view of American foreign policy. What’s more, I worry that the people who outline trade policy don’t really consider the national security consequences of some of our ideas. People who are rightly leery of things that might provoke a new arms race with China strike me as all-too-eager to embrace policies that will play in Beijing or New Delhi as America-led efforts to strangle Chinese or Indian prosperity in the crib. Adopting such policies would be, I think, a major problem. At the same time, the existing multilateral process has pretty clearly run aground and is creating way too many problems for far too many people to stay viable. The world pretty desperately needs creative ways to get things back on track and redress the many valid concerns about the impact of these agreements in a way that actually facilitates the opening of markets.

The opening stories of today’s violence and conflict in Iraq are, naturally, sad and horrifying, but they’re also sort of old news. A newer development is closer to the end of the article, as you see the Iraqi government increasingly chafing at being treated as subcontractors for an American colonial administration.

At the end of the day, I think this is a major problem for all so-called “plans” for Iraq. At this point, things have simply gone too far for the U.S. government to really impose its will on any of the major Iraqi actors, call them insurgents, militias, the Iraqi government, or whatever else you like.

David Greenberg writes: “At a time when sympathy for Israel’s plight increasingly comes from the right, many of the signatories are liberals or leftists who remind us that supporting the Jewish state is fundamentally a liberal position, even when its government veers farther to the right than many of us would like.”

I’m a little baffled by this ambiguity-ridden claim. I’m not really sure what it means (“support” in what sense?), but I’m having trouble coming up with interpretations that make it non-trivial yet defensible. Liberals should refrain from criticizing Israel when its policies veer too far right? Should criticize Israel but not too stridently? Should oppose efforts to cajole Israel into ending policies that are too far right? Should support the view that Israel is entitled to $3 billion per year of taxpayer money irregardless of the merits of Israeli government policy? Obviously, the question of which Israeli policies do and do not veer unduly far to the right is a controversial (to say the least!) topic, but I should think the meta-level issue here is easy — Israel should be supported by liberals insofar as the things Israel does are worthy of support.

When the going gets tough, George W. Bush digs deeper into the cocoon of ignoramous conservative journalism, hunkering down for a lengthy chat with die-hard administration loyalists from inside the print media universe. As Mike Crowley notes, you can’t get this much raw transcript of Bush without a good dose of hilarity. You also can’t get this much Bush without noticing that, like Rick Santorum, the President of the United States is conducting national security policy under conditions of truly frightening ignorance and dangerous analytic errors.

Here’s Bush on the Israel-Lebanon War: “Iran empowered Hezbollah, Hezbollah takes the attack, and – which creates an interesting dynamic, and it gives us an opportunity to fashion kind of – an alliance of reasonable people headed toward a clash – all kinds of different ways, by the way – with extremists and radicals.” It’s easy to get distracted by the fact that Bush doesn’t seem familiar with the English language and miss the fact that beneath the garbled syntax Bush is making a clear — and utterly incorrect — factual claim here that the upshot of the war was to cement an alliance between the United States, Israel, and moderate forces in the Arab world.

He calls John Abizaid “one of the great thinkers” and attributes to him “this construct: If we leave, they will follow us here . . . As a matter of fact, they’ll be more emboldened to come after us. They will be able to find more recruits to come after us.” He seems unaware that his National Intelligence Council has concluded the reverse (IISS in London, too, along with, I think, just about everyone). In a hilarious reprise of his earlier Lebanon remarks he enjoins the government of Syria: “do not destabilize Siniora . . . helping the Siniora government is in this country’s interests and it’s a priority.” We, um, had our local proxy ally strangle the Lebanese economy and launch airstrikes against its basic infrastructure and military facilities, but stabilizing the government there is a priority?

It goes on and on like this. The President, it seems to me, entered office in January 2000 utterly ignorant of foreign affairs and has spent the past six years filling in the blanks with pleasant illusions and straight-up misinformation.

It’s outside his normal bailiwick, but I think Paul Krugman’s analysis of our twin failures in Iraq and Afghanistan is likely right. We don’t have nearly the requisite level of resources to succeed in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Afghanistan is not, however, yet as bad as Iraq and it’s possible that if we left Iraq then we’d have enough manpower to succeed in Afghanistan — especially when you consider that we’re not ally-less in Afghanistan, and one can imagine that if we agree to do more there we might also be able to secure additional assistance. Insisting on maintaining anything resembling our current commitment to Iraq, however, is just going to guarantee failure in Afghanistan without producing anything useful in Iraq.

Via a gushing K-Lo (“he’s a clear thinker on this war. And isn’t his honesty about the stakes and his principles — even if you’re someone who disagrees with him on this or that — reason enough to want him reelected”), Rick Santorum’s bafflingly stupid speech on “the gathering storm” facing the United States:

Mr. Casey said that “the U.S. should not escalate the drive to place weapons in space and should seek an international ban on such weaponry.” I hate to break the news to you, but Iran and North Korea are already escalating things. . . .

Let me tell you, Mr. Casey, people are concerned when Venezuela is harboring terrorists, many of whom will penetrate our border because of the amnesty bill you support, that puts amnesty before security.

And just think — what if the Venezuelan terrorists get on the Iranian space station? What then Mr. Casey, huh? huh? Seriously, these people are morons. Dangerously dishonest or (I fear) dangerously confused about what’s going on in the world. “Say what you will,” remarks Lopez, “but this is leadership.” Custer-quality leadership at that.

Kudos, incidentally, to Bob Casey for taking on the administration’s bafflingly wrongheaded National Space Strategy. This is exactly the sort of ground where Democrats normally fear to tread.

Lorelei Kelly writes: “The world public opinion poll that found seven in ten Americans favor Congressional candidates who will pursue major changes in US foreign policy, want less emphasis on use of military force to solve problems and want to work more cooperatively with the United Nations. Most favor direct talks with North Korea and Iran to boot!” See more here.

I do think the political prospects for candidates espousing “dovish” views is considerably worse than a simplistic read of the polling data would indicate. On the other had, I also think the political prospects of such views are considerably better than is commonly accepted inside Democratic campaigning circles, where the thinking seems to be that you always want to position yourself as hawkishly as you can manage. Here’s John Hostettler (R-IN) touting his 2002 vote against the war — “In October 2002, when America was clamoring to go to war in Iraq, I voted against sending America’s sons and daughters into harm’s way because the intelligence did not support the claim that there were weapons of mass destruction there.” No doubt he took a lot of shit, politically, for his stand at the time. But there are probably a lot of perfectly cynical pols out there who think they’d be in better shape today if they could make Hostettler’s claim honestly.

America’s worst Thucydides scholar takes on twentieth century history:

I thought these who advocated such nonsense might at any second suggest that because Mussolini’s fascists, Hitler’s Nazis, and Tojo’s militarists all had quite different agendas, separate racial ideologies, and particular aims in WWII, then, they could hardly be lumped together as the Axis that threatened Western republics and needed a generic anti-fascist response. All during the Vietnam War, we were lectured daily about the intricacies of Vietnamese, Russian, and Chinese Communists — their rivalries, hatreds, and quite separate aims-as they combined to defeat the United States, and trumped their own tensions with an all-encompassing hatred of Western democratic capitalism.

Now then. Germany and Italy formed a formal military alliance and Germany and Japan had a looser, but similar arrangement. Nobody was “lumping” them together, they were actual allies. Meanwhile, this view of Vietnam is bizarre. The distinction-drawers were completely correct. Where Communist parties were seen as alien impositions of Moscow (Warsaw, Prague, Kabul, Budapest) you had one dynamic, but where they had authentic roots in local nationalism (as in, say, Vietnam) the situation was very different. Nixon seized advantage of the Sino-Soviet split to greatly enhance America’s strategic situation. Does Hanson really deny this? How stupid is he?

As I said below, we certainly have had some good journalists in this country, especially for the past couple of years (2001, 2002, and 2003 were not nearly as good) and these days at least, Tom Ricks of Fiasco fame is certainly one of them. Today’s article from Ricks rocks: “The text of President Bush’s news conference yesterday ran to nearly 10,000 words, but what may have been more significant were the things he did not say.”

That response left unclear how the benchmarks would be different from previous times when the United States has set out intentions, only to back down. For example, the original war plan envisioned the U.S. troop presence in Iraq being cut to 30,000 by the fall of 2003. Last year, some top U.S. commanders thought they would be able to significantly cut the U.S. troop level in Iraq this year — a hope now officially abandoned. More recently, the U.S. military all but withdrew from Baghdad, only to have to have to reenter the capital as security evaporated from its streets and Iraqi forces proved unable to restore calm by themselves.

Right, exactly, the “plan” has always been to reduce troop levels as the Iraqi government hit awesome benchmarks. The problem in Iraq has never been a lack of a “plan” to (a) have the Iraqi government hit benchmarks, and then (b) reduce US troops levels dramatically, leaving behind a few tens of thousands of soldiers on permanent bases to lay the groundwork for the next round of the Mideast Transformation Project. The problem has always been that the “plan” has no relationship to reality. Churning out new “plans” doesn’t change that.

The Vice President loves torture. “It’s a no brainer for me.” Of course, he denies that it’s actually “torture” which I’m certain American soldiers would love to hear were they to be subjected to such techniques in the Brave New Post-Geneva World the Bush administration is busy creating.

Some may tire of Spack‘s determination to blog each and every DOD death notice from Iraq, but yours truly reads everything and notices that today’s batch includes Seaman Charles O. Sare of Hemet, California, age 23. That’s right, Seaman Charles O. Sare, meaning he’s in the Navy, specifically the Naval Ambulatory Care Center in Port Hueneme. He managed, however, to get killed by “enemy action while conducting combat operations in the Al Anbar Province, Iraq.”

Anbar, we’ll note, is rather far from the ocean. What’s happening here is that as part of the ongoing efforts to cope with Iraq-related manpower problems while denying that such problems exist, you’re seeing more-or-more efforts to find Navy personnel who can be dispatched into the basically non-Navy context of the Iraq War. That’s probably the smart play insofar as one wants to continue this war (which one really shouldn’t want), but it’s yet another reminder of the damage persisting in this futile policy is doing.