Neocon war advocates including Kenneth “Cakewalk” Adelman concede the Iraq War is a disaster, blame Bush’s incompetence. This is what it comes to. We’re all supposed to believe that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Steven Hadley, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, etc., etc., etc., are just random freaks of nature. Nothing they or their other subordinates have done in office or the fact that everything they’ve done has worked out terribly is in any way supposed to reflect on the wider conservative movement.

Suffice it to say I find this all very unconvincing. These guys aren’t repentant hawks, they’re in denial.

Bob Wright and Henry Farrell eviscerate the Noah Feldman article on Iran that so upset me earlier. Thinking about this more, it’s worth saying that Feldman’s is far from the worst article that’s appeared on this issue. What makes it so troubling is that even though it doesn’t reach a Weekly Standard level of egregiousness, it appeared in The New York Times Magazine and seems to me to represent a kind of creepy hawk infiltration of mainstream opinion. As Farrell says, “he’s trying to establish a case not by argument, but by innuendo” and he’s doing it in a publication whose audience I imagine is mostly liberal and will probably regard the source as credible.

Robert Farley disagrees with me about the new counterinsurgency push inside the US Army. Or at least he thinks he does. I’m not sure we actually do disagree. I don’t think it’s a bad idea at all for the Army to start thinking about this issue more clearly. My worry is that they’re not actually getting this right. In his critique of US counterinsurgency policy of the typical American errors Jeffrey Record identifies is a proclivity for apolitical and astrategic thinking that ignores the linkages between military operations and policy objectives.

The new field manual pays lip-service to political-military linkages, but I don’t feel like it really grasps them. In particular, I worry that this is implicitly promoting the view that Vietnam and Iraq were primarily operational failures that could have “worked” had the US government adopted sounder counterinsurgency tactics. In fact, I think a clear-eyed look at counterinsurgency theory would tell you the reverse. In Iraq, we almost certainly could have produced a less FUBAR situation with better counterinsurgency tactics, but adopting such tactics would have entailed abandonning the main policy goal of the war — transformation of Iraq into an ally of America’s quest for regional hegemony.

Obviously, it’s not really the Army’s job to set overall foreign policy for the United States. At the same time, however, the top brass ill-serves the country if it promotes the idea that it’s prepared to achieve things that it is not, in fact, prepared to achieve. People need to be aware that there are real, objective limits on what military force can accomplish and that our military is composed of soldiers rather than magicians.