The Los Angeles Times runs down the options to replace John Abizaid as head of US Central Command, the outfit overseeing the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq. The article outlines two competing schools of thought. One would be a strategy of continuity in which George Casey, currently commanding American forces in Iraq, is promoted to Tampa. Another would be a reform strategy involving either David Petraeus (commanded the 101 Airborne in Iraq, is now running the military schools, was the lead author of the new Counterinsurgency Field Manual) or Peter Chiarelli who was Casey’s deputy until last week.

I guess my take on this is that if Petraeus knows what’s good for him, he’ll do everything possible to stay away from either Casey’s job or Abizaid’s. At this point in time, he’s essentially the only person whose reputation has been enhanced by working for the American government in Iraq. If he stays away from Iraq policy, his reputation will only be further enhanced as he’ll likely become the central figure in the inevitable revisionist account of the war whereby it could have been awesome had it only been done right.

If he goes to CENTCOM or back to Baghdad, however, he’ll join Zalmay Khalilzad in the ranks of people whose formerly glowing reputations have been tarnished by association with inevitable failure and the need to engage in spin on behalf of the Bush administration. The last thing you want to do is become a spin artist on behalf of a lame duck administration fighting a failed war. That means staying as far away as possible from the chain running from the White House to the Pentagon to Tampa to Baghdad. Under the circumstances, the US Army Combined Arms Center is an excellent place to be.

So press conference:

“We began the year with optimism after watching nearly 12 million Iraqis go to the polls to vote for a unity government and a free future. The enemies of liberty responded fiercely to this advance of freedom.”

We’re in Iraq to build a democracy.

“And I want the enemy to understand that this is a tough task, but they can’t run us out of the Middle East; that they can’t intimidate America.”

No, we’re in Iraq to find a permanent base for US military forces in the Middle East or, at a minimum, to demonstrate resolve detached from specific policy goals.

“What is going to happen is we’re going to develop a strategy that helps the Iraqis achieve the objective that the 12 million people want them to achieve, which is a government that can — a country that can sustain itself, govern itself, defend itself.”

No, we’re in Iraq to build a internally stable government.

“A free country that will serve as an ally in this war against extremists and radicals.”

No, we’re in Iraq to create a government that will take America’s side in regional disputes.

Needless to say these are different and, in some ways, contradictory goals. This is why we’re not winning in Iraq and never will. We don’t have coherent objectives we’re pursuing. And there is no set of objectives such that the objectives are both achievable and worth the cost of achieving them. The sane thing to do at this point is to set a goal of removing American troops from the killing zone quickly and then to start thinking and arguing about how, exactly, this can be done in a way that minimizes risks to the troops and the rest of the region.

The President says he wants to increase the end-strength size of the Army. What to think? One point to note is that this is a longstanding Democratic Party idea, something backed by John Kerry. Is it actually a good idea? The answer is that it depends.

In a world without tradeoffs, a larger Army would certainly be useful. Life, however, is all about tradeoffs. A bigger Army is a more expensive one: “Army officials have estimated that for each addition of 10,000 soldiers to the force, it would cost about $1.2 billion.” One can easily imagine worse things to spend $5 billion on than adding 40,000 troops to the Army, but one can also imagine better things. The Kerry campaign’s proposal was to pay for the troop increase by scaling back spending on national missile defense. That would be a good idea. Similarly, any additions in troops that can from scaling back or canceling weapons systems like the V-22 Osprey, the Virginia Class Submarine, the DD(X) Destroyer, the F-22 Raptor, or the size of the American nuclear arsenal would be a good idea. Reasonably independently of specific ideas about foreign policy it makes sense to shift military spending away from hardware and toward quantity and quality of personnel. Likewise along these lines, if we end our deployment in Iraq in 2007 rather than in 2009 or 2012 we’ll save hundreds of billions of dollars that would be better spent on enhancing the Army’s manpower.

Conversely, simply borrowing additional money to further increase the Defense Department budget or reducing the budgets of other agencies to increase the Defense Department budget is not an appealing option. We should be changing America’s security-spending priorities to better-suited the contemporary world, not increasing the overall scale of our spending at a time when America’s objective security from foreign threats has rarely been higher.