“The top Marine officer in Iraq says the victory in Fallujah has broken the back of the insurgents.”
–November 19, 2004.

To review:

All Green Lanterns wield a power ring that can generate a variety of effects and energy constructs, sustained purely by the ring wearer’s strength of will. The greater the user’s willpower, the more effective the ring. The limits of the power ring’s abilities are not clearly defined and it has been referred to as “the most powerful weapon in the universe” on more than one occasion. Across the years, the ring has been shown capable of accomplishing anything within the imagination of the ring bearer. Often the rings are used to form solid-light constructs, the power and size of which are limited only by the ring-bearer’s willpower.

Or, as Mark Steyn puts it: “It’s not the planes, the tanks, the men, the body armor. It’s the political will.” Leading to the following sober-minded policy proposal:

Three years ago, when it was obvious Syria and Iran were violating Iraq’s borders with impunity, we should have done what the British did in the so-called ”Confrontation” with Indonesia 40 years ago when they were faced with Jakarta doing to the newly independent state of Malaysia exactly what Damascus and Tehran are doing to Iraq. British, Aussie and Malaysian forces sent troops on low-key, lethally effective raids into Indonesia, keeping the enemy on the defensive and winning the war with barely a word making the papers. If the strategic purpose in invading Iraq was to create a regional domino effect, then playing defense in the Sunni Triangle for three years makes no sense. We should never have wound up hunkered down in the Green Zone. If there has to be a Green Zone, it should be on the Syrian side of the border.

Indeed, and when that doesn’t work, we can spread the war to, say, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Jordan.

… is that though adversaries can “fact-check your ass” you can still write whatever kind of crazy made-up stuff you like. Similarly, if you mainly publish articles in a magazine you happen to own, you can write things like “Assad has been sending Sunni warriors from all over the Muslim world across Syria’s border with Iraq, where they massacre Shia on arrival” and nobody can ask you to produce, you know, evidence for that assertion.

The Baker-Hamilton Commission’s come in for its share of criticism from the right, but in my latest column the left speaks up: “Bipartisan adoption of the ISG’s recommendations, in other words, may not solve America’s Iraq problem, but it just might solve the Iraq problem facing the bipartisan American national security elite that got the country into this mess.”

By my read of the working group’s personnel roster it is the case that the May-style neoconservative intellectuals who largely formulated the Bush Iraq policy and took the lead role in pushing for its implementation have been sidelined. Also scantily represented on the commission, however, is another important category of people — those who saw the direction things were heading and took a strong stand against the march to war. I don’t want to say that none of the experts here were against the war, which is almost certainly false. But while many of them wrote in support of invasion or worked for institutions like the Heritage Foundation or the Washington Institute for Near East Policy that backed it, virtually none of them — none at all that I recognize — engaged in public opposition to the war before it happened.

This, however, is just the very mix of silence, collaboration, and complicity on the part of “respectable,” “credible,” “mainstream” analysts that produced the war in the first place. The more courageous and farsighted voices who got things right were treated as marginal at the time and, shockingly, are still treated as marginal — excluded from all the coolest bipartisan commissions.

Read it all at The American Prospect Online.

Webb, an early opponent of the war in Iraq, might make his mark in the Senate in foreign and military affairs,” says a Washington Post Metro reporter with an interest in this turning out to be true. “Current and former politicians said they expect him to become the face of the Democratic Party’s antiwar movement.”

Some skepticism about the accuracy of that speculation aside, I’d like to see it become true; Webb has the right cultural and personal characteristics to sell an anti-war message. Post-9/11, I think an awful lot of Democrats have tried to compensate for having bad personal/characterological attributes for the politics of national security by adopting substantively bad policy positions — John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden come to mind — and this doesn’t work very well. Webb’s roughly the reverse, and feels no need to act defensive about being a patriot and supporting the troops and it worked well for him in the campaign despite the fact that he’s not a very natural campaigner.

Jonah Goldberg had a post yesterday wondering if we shouldn’t be doing more to prevent the possibility of an earth-destroying asteroid collision. I think we should. The odds of such an impact event in any given year are low, but not really all that low, and the downside consequences would be terrible. Then, as is all-too-often the case, he follows up by quoting an email from a dumb reader complaining about Ron Suskind’s book The One Percent Doctrine:

The book knocked VP Cheney for saying that even a 1% chance of terrorists getting nuclear weapons merits serious US action to stop them. But multiplying the 1% by the severity of a nuclear terrorist attack in an American city makes Cheney’s statement quite reasonable. Not how it played in much of the press, though.

First, a basic note on probabilities. It’s quite right to say that faced with the possibility of a Very Bad Outcome we should take the VBO seriously even if the VBO is unlikely. Cheney’s actual doctrine, however, was that faced with a one percent risk of a nuclear terrorist attack against an American city, we should respond as we would were such an attack a certainty. This is obviously daft. If there’s a one percent probability of 1 million people dying, the expected value is that 10,000 people will die. If, conversely, there’s a 100 percent probability of 1 million people dying, the expected value is that 1 million people will die. The idea that we should treat those values as if they were the same is crazy.

In the specific case of asteroids versus invading Iraq, though, the more salient difference is the downside risks of action. Cheney’s doctrine, as he operationalized it, involved simply assuming that inaction courted risk whereas action did not. That, again, is crazy. The risk of spending more money tracking asteroids and starting a pilot research program to study how you might blow them up is that some money might get wasted if your research proves useless or if no asteroids come. The risk of invading Iraq is that hundreds of thousands of people will die, America will fail to achieve critical mission objectives in Iraq, America’s international alliance system will end up in tatters, and, generally speaking, the United States will find itself retreating on all major foreign policy fronts. That’s the trouble with starting speculative wars — they’re quite likely to go badly awry.