I don’t really know how to respond to Jason Zengerle trotting out the hearty chestnut that proponents of withdrawal from Iraq such as myself are in danger of “underestimat[ing] the consequences of it.” I had a draft of a long post written. I decided to delete it. I don’t see a point in getting tied down in side issues about who is and isn’t being too cavalier about what. I’ll just say that my opposition to prolonging or escalating the American military deployment in Iraq has nothing to do with optimism about the consequences of withdrawal and everything do to with pessimism about the efficacy of either “surging” or staying the course.

If Zengerle — or Joe Klein or whomever — has an argument in favor of surging that he’d like to present, I’ll happily respond to it but it’s weird to just debate tone with people who are disinclined to reach a judgment on the substantive issue at hand.

When, as Brian Beutler points out, the junket is organized by a 501(c) 3 organization affiliated with a lobbying organization rather than by the lobbyists as such. As Beutler notes, the major beneficiaries of this loophole are the Aspen Institute, which I think legitimately isn’t a lobbying group, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee which, self-describing as “America’s pro-Israel Lobby,” clearly is a lobbying outfit.

My assumption, though, is that AIPAC won’t be alone among major lobbying groups for long, and that lots of trade associations are going to be developing a newfound interest in establishing not-for-profit “educational” institutions in the near future.

Michael Hirsch reports:

Most top U.S. military officials—even members of George W. Bush’s administration such as National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley—did not recommend a “surge” or escalation of U.S. troops into Iraq when they were interviewed by the Iraq Study Group last fall, says group member Leon Panetta, a former White House chief of staff under Bill Clinton. Instead of a surge—which the president plans to announce in a speech to the nation tomorrow—these officials recommended at the time that more U.S. advisers be embedded in Iraqi units, Panetta says. That later led the bipartisan commission co-chaired by James Baker and Lee Hamilton to come to the same conclusion, he says. Panetta also says that the officials interviewed knew that one of the Study Group’s central recommendations—that U.S. advisory teams in Iraq be quadrupled—was largely incompatible with a ramp-up of troops. The reason? In order to increase the number of U.S. advisory teams to that degree, American combat brigades must be withdrawn so the officers in those units can be turned into advisers. That is apparently not going to happen now, at least not quickly.

Notably, according to the interview even Lieutenant General David Petraeus wasn’t on board for a surge when the ISG spoke to him six months ago. All of which reminds me, in essence, that I should link to Michael Hirsch more often. What’s more, this Center for American Progress report on congressional options vis-a-vis military deployments is vital stuff that I’ll probably write more on tomorrow.

A small-scale special forces raid on an al-Qaeda cell in Somalia sounds like a good idea to me. The article, however, is quite unclear as to who the targets of the operation were, whether or not we hit them, etc. Presumably more information will come out later. One thing I wish I understood better was the specops people’s love of the AC-130 gunship whose primary attributes (loud, slow, hard to maintain) don’t seem all that appealing.

Brian Ulrich notes that the escalation of American military involvement in Iraq is going to be achieved, in part, by withdrawing forces from Afghanistan which is apparently an “economy of force” operation where the important thing is simply not to allow it to drain too many resources from the government’s top priority of wasting resources in Iraq. Sad to say, but I think it’s all-but-inevitable at this point that Afghanistan will, due to neglect, be passed the tipping point by the time we get a new president in this country.

To echo my man Spencer, someone should let Jeffrey Goldberg know that whatever you want to call the fact that the Democratic base thinks fighting AIDS should be a top foreign policy priority means, it can’t mean that Democrats are retreating from internationalism. We’re looking at an intense concern for the well-being of foreigners who live in states too poor or too chaotic to take care of them properly and, perhaps, concern about the second-order consequences of indifference to their fate. As Henley likes to say here, the specter of “isolationism” in this context is merely “a reluctance to travel a long distance to kill foreigners at great expense.”

Meanwhile, why would you be listening to Evan Bayh to put your finger on the pulse of things?

Bayh says it “would be tragic” if Iraq makes people too hesitant to launch a war against Iran “because Iran is a grave threat. They’re everything we thought Iraq was but wasn’t. They are seeking nuclear weapons, they do support terrorists, they have threatened to destroy Israel, and they’ve threatened us, too.” While Bayh’s analysis of this would obviously be more credible if he hadn’t been wrong about Iraq, his analysis is also simply wrong. What “we thought Iraq was” was a country likely to acquire a nuclear weapon that it was likely to deploy in an unprovoked first strike against the United States (possibly delivered via al-Qaeda) as well as a promising venue for an experiment in democratization-by-occupation. Not only was Iraq none of those things, but Iran is none of those things easier.

And so it goes for Goldberg. His basic view seems to be that if you’re an “internationalist” you must agree with him that the war in Iraq should be continued indefinitely, perhaps escalated à la Bush/McCain, and then expanded to Iran. But if this is internationalism — if it means committing an endless series of military blunders — then who needs it? These policy prescriptions need to be defended on the merits, but their exponents don’t quite seem to be able to muster that.