Suppose you were a US government official and you read the following in a Russian or Chinese state-owned newspaper op-ed page:

One of the most intriguing ideas is the creation of a treaty-based “Concert of Autocracies” that, like COMECON or the Warsaw Pact, would admit members only if they met strict requirements. The new institution would allow the authoritarian states to work together as a concerted force within such institutions as the United Nations and could eventually replace the United Nations as a forum for legitimizing international security actions if the United Nations itself proved resistant to reform.

Holy shit, right? New Cold War! Right there in the newspaper. So how are Russian and Chinese officials supposed to react to Jackson Diehl’s op-ed in The Washington Post?

Jonah Goldberg receives (and republishes) email from some real morons:

1. The toppling of a regime that was a constant threat to its neighbors and, potentially at least, to us.

2. Removing the Iraqi threat allowed us to move our troops out of Saudi Arabia. The US presence in the Kingdom was the #1 motivator for Bin Ladenism, and the long term benefits this will have after Iraq are hard to calculate but will no doubt be significant.

3. Worst possible case scenario, we retreat to Kurdistan. No matter what happens in Greater Iraq, the liberation of the Kurds and the implantation of a nascent democracy there is a genuine success.

4. Also in the worst case scenario, we retreat not only to Kurdistan, but also to Kuwait. The virtual military encirclement of Iran will remain, and that is important. An encircled Iran, even with a nuke, is a far different scenario than the opposite.

Toppling a regime that was a potential threat to its neighbors and to the USA is an accomplishment if and only if it’s not replaced with a more threatening situation like, say, pervasive chaos.

The other points all seem to involve misunderstanding the pre-war status quo. Kurdistan enjoyed de facto autonomy from Baath Iraq before the war. Our troops could have been moved out of Saudi Arabia and into Kuwait and Kurdistan before the war. Iran was “encircled” before the war. And what does encircling Iran accomplish, anyway? This seems like the kind of thing someone who’s been playing too much Diplomacy would care about.

Alcee Hastings drops out of the race for Intel Committee Chair, while Pelosi is still said to be very unlikely to pick Jane Harman. Sounds like a win-win to me. And, frankly, good for Hastings who seems to me to be doing the right thing here rather than allowing questions about him to cloud the broader question.

People have interestingly different views of Russia policy. Eve Fairbanks, for example, is outraged by the Bush administration’s coddling of Vladimir Putin. The Washington Post op-ed page has been known to express the same sentiment. Frankly, I used to say this, too. And I believe I’ve heard similar sentiments from friends who work on post-Soviet issues. These days, I tend to see things differently. Bret Stephens in The Wall Street Journal says we should return to treating Russia as an enemy of the United States. Mario Loyola agrees. And, obviously, any liberal who thinks Bush should get tougher on Putin is going to have to grapple with the fact that they find themselves agreeing with Mario Loyola . . . a pretty damning critique of any position.

In both instances, the complaints naturally blend concerns about Putin’s authoritarian tendencies with complaints about his geopolitical views — in particular, willingness to sell stuff to Iran and Venezuela and so forth. Anatol Lieven’s convinced me that this needs to be put into the context of America’s policy toward Russia. This started out with expansion of NATO into Central Europe. It continued with NATO expansion into the Baltics — former Soviet Republics that have been in the Russian sphere of influence since the 18th century or some such. Then we helped sponsor the overthrow of Russia-friendly governments in Ukraine and Georgia and started talking about adding those countries to NATO.

Now I won’t deny that there’s something to be said on behalf of all of these policies. They do, however, come with a price. If you want to pry countries out of Russia’s sphere of influence and make them formal military allies of the United States, any responsible and patriotic Russian government is going to take alarm and seek countermeasures, including an uncooperative attitude toward Iran. We’re then faced with a question of priorities: Do we care more about Iran, or do we care more about Ukraine? Do we care more about nuclear proliferation, or do we care more about anti-Putin Russians? There’s an obvious deal to be cut here — NATO membership for the Baltics is a done deal, but we can return Russia’s “near abroad” to Russia in exchange for Russian cooperation on Iran and North Korea, or else we can have a series of standoffs across a wide Eurasian arc. Some would call this appeasement and, frankly, the shoe fits decently. It strikes me, however, as preferable to either going to war with Iran or to having Iran build a nuclear bomb.

Dafna Linzer and Thomas Ricks get a leak of a classified Marine Corps memo on Anbar Province. It notes that “The U.S. military is no longer able to defeat a bloody insurgency in western Iraq or counter al-Qaeda’s rising popularity there.” The problem, meanwhile, isn’t one that “surging” troops will solve. Rather, “The report describes Iraq’s Sunni minority as ‘embroiled in a daily fight for survival,’ fearful of ‘pogroms’ by the Shiite majority and increasingly dependent on al-Qaeda in Iraq as its only hope against growing Iranian dominance across the capital.” And, of course, this makes perfect sense. If I were a Sunni Arab Iraqi, and an al-Qaeda dude stopped by my house I would greet him warmly, offer a cup of coffee and my thanks, agree to help him out in any way he asked, etc. The fact that I might be, by conviction, an atheist and a believer in social democracy wouldn’t change this at all. Why wouldn’t I support al-Qaeda? Because they’re the bad guys? Don’t be naive — they’re the guys with guns trying to kill the other guys with guns who are trying to kill me. And if pretending to be a devout Sunni Muslim is the price I need to pay for protection, then why not.

Much the same could be said of Shiite Arabs’ attitudes toward Muqtada al-Sadr. Shadi Hamid’s complaints about “the utter incompetence of Nouri al-Maliki government and its continued willingness to turn a blind eye to the increasingly brutal, roving death squads of its Sadrist coalition partners” might as well come from Mars. Why wouldn’t you support Sadr? He has a fairly effective armed force at his disposal that’s willing to protect Shiites who show their loyalty. Wouldn’t you want to work with such a force? Maliki would be insane to side with Iraq’s American occupiers, its Sunni population, and foreign al-Qaeda types in fighting the Mahdi Army, the Shiites’ own self-protection service.

Iraqis of either stripe are right now caught between a guy with a gun trying to kill them and another guy with another gun trying to kill that first guy. Choosing sides isn’t going to be difficult.