Fareed Zakaria’s through with the Iraq War and says it’s time to pack up and start heading home. Andrew Sullivan comments “I’m not there yet and willing to give the military one last try, if Rumsfeld is fired and a serious new plan for regaining control is unveiled.” Personally, I’m willing to buy a $2 million townhouse if someone gives me $2 million to buy a house with. What does this mean? It’s an escapist fantasy, not a position on the issues.

Rumsfeld isn’t going to be fired and Bush has made his Iraq policy clear — leaving is losing, so we’ll just stay and people will keep dying. One can support that policy or one can cast one’s lot with the opposition, but the leopard isn’t going to change its spots and devise a magical new plan for victory.

Via Greg Djerejian, a classic up-is-down moment from Team Bush: “Yet a number of senior U.S. officials have said privately that they would welcome a North Korean test, regarding it as a clarifying event that would forever end the debate within the Bush administration about whether to solve the problem through diplomacy or through tough actions designed to destabilize North Korean leader Kim Jong Il’s grip on power.”

Or, more briefly, the failure of our policies demonstrates the need to adhere to our policies more rigidly. It’s like we’re being ruled by the cast of a Twighlight Zone episode.

Obviously, like all decent people I wasn’t around the house watching television when the season premiere of Battlestar: Galactica aired Friday not. Less obviously, I forgot to DVR it and I thought all was lost. Fortunately, someone or other decided to mail Spencer screener DVDs of the first two or three episodes, so I was able to watch the premiere yesterday. Rather hilariously, what they sent out didn’t have all the special effects completed, so you’d repeatedly see on-screen text like “VFX: Raptor Landing” or “VFX: Explosions.” Nevertheless, I think I understood what was going on.

It’s pretty bold of them to have gone down the path of offering up such a straightforward Iraq analogy. In particular, they’ve done what really nobody‘s been willing to do in American politics which is try to cast a sympathetic eye on the insurgency. Of course, this is easier to do allegorically where you get a chance to paper over the fact that the Iraqi insurgency’s substantive ideas about the nature of a just Iraqi state are rather repugnant. Nevertheless, I think it does do a good job of capturing the basic logic of occupation and rebellion. The cylons say they’re seizing control of New Caprica for humanity’s own good.

But who on the human side is going to believe them, especially given their past history (and note the USA’s previous support for Saddam’s regime, betrayal of the ’91 intifada, decades-long indifference to the question of Arab democracy, view of Israel-Palestine universally regarded as anti-Arab by Arabs)? So people fight back. So the cylons fight back in turn. But cylon efforts to tighten their control merely reenforces their pre-existing bad image. The insurgents have much more leeway in adopting extreme tactics because they’re not an alien force. They have a presumption of legitimacy while the occupiers have a presumption of illegitimacy. That Baltar is, in fact, the democratically elected leader of the Colonies is neither here nor there, for the simple fact of collaboration with the occupiers trumps the legitimacy of elections.

Jeffrey Herf on the Open University blog announces the launch of NewAmericanLiberalism.org, a rather crudely HTMLed offshoot of the Euston Manifesto project designed, as Herf puts it, to call for “a ‘new political alignment’ among those ranging from the democratic left to ‘egalitarian liberals.’”

In addition to the co-authors, the now 178 signers include many people who are closely associated with The New Republic, notably Martin Peretz and Leon Wieseltier, past and recent contributors such as Daniel Bell, David Bell, Walter Laqueur, Daniel Goldhagen, Robert Leiken, Benny Morris, and Ronald Radosh, and a host of other very distinguished scholars, intellectuals, and policy analysts too long to be included here but readily available on the websites. The full list of signers is at the website.

An awful lot of these people seem to me to just be rightwingers, a stratnge starting point for a reconstruction of American liberalism.

North Korea conducts a nuclear test and America’s non-proliferation policy is officially a mess. At this point, there are two kinds of questions one can ask. One set is about non-proliferation policy as such and what one needs to do to get it back on track. Another specifically concerns North Korea. When we were talking DPRK on BloggingHeads, Dan Drezner made the point that there actually are a couple of steps that could be taken that really would stand a decent chance of bringing the Pyongyang regime to the breaking point, namely an end to the money coming in from South Korea under the “sunshine policy” and a shift in Chinese policy aimed at facilitating, rather than preventing, DPRK residents from crossing the border into China.

The trouble is that nobody especially wants to see the North Korean regime actually collapse. Certainly the South Koreans aren’t looking forward to needing to assume responsibility for a relatively large and incredibly impoverished country. The reuinification of Germany has created a lot of economic and social problems for the former West Germany, and this would be like that situation on steroids. China, meanwhile, isn’t enthusiastic about the idea of giant cross-border refugee flows. The issue for US policymakers then becomes whether there’s anything we might be able to offer in terms of assistance that would make Seoul and Beijing more comfortable with ending their efforts to prop up North Korea’s government, and whether that’s something we would actually want to offer.

Similarly, would we actually want to see North Korea collapse, or would that make the nuclear situation even worse since, presumably, we don’t want to see those weapons and material floating around.