John Judis details the sweet deal foreign oil companies are about to get in Iraq. Opening the Iraqi oil industry up to foreign investment is a perfectly reasonable idea, but the clearly correct way to do this would be to have different firms offer competing bids so the Iraqi state gets the best deal possible. Instead, the Bush administration just had BearingPoint devise some arbitrary terms that — surprise! — are super-favorable to oil companies.

With all due respect to both Scott Lemieux and Al Gore himself, I don’t actually think Gore’s Commonwealth Club speech before the war was all that prescient. Frankly, I think expecting people to accurately forecast exactly how a war is going to go south is an unreasonable bar to set, so I don’t take anything away from Gore (he certainly didn’t deserve this) but re-reading the speech isn’t like looking into a crystal ball.

By contrast, given the objective difficulty of the task, I think the Iraq section of Howard Dean’s February 12, 2003 speech at Drake University is strikingly spot-on. It’s notable, in particular, because Dean, has never really acquired a reputation as a national security thinker, even among his fans. The Dean speech is also noteworthy for containing a perfectly good proposal for, even at the late date, extricating the USA from the situation in a favorable manner.

Fred Kagan seeks to explain away the differences between his earlier surge-advocacy and the Bush surge he got. There are a couple of twists and turns, but it finally comes down to this:

Brigade sizes range based on the type of unit, but average around 3,500 soldiers each. The administration’s figures are based on that estimate.

In reality, the U.S. Army does not simply deploy brigades into combat, but instead sends Brigade Combat Teams (BCTs). A BCT includes a brigade as described above, but also additional support elements such as engineers, military police, additional logistics elements, and so on, which are necessary to the functioning of the brigade in combat. In a counter-insurgency operation such as Iraq, these additional forces are fully as important to the overall success of the mission as the combat troops. Sizes of BCTs also vary, of course, but they average more like 5,000 soldiers. Since these are the formations that will actually be deployed to Iraq and used there, I have been estimating deployments on this basis: five brigade combat teams include around 25,000 soldiers; one Marine Regimental Combat Team (RCTs are somewhat smaller than Army brigades) includes perhaps 4,000. So the surge being briefed by the Bush administration now is much more likely to be around 29,000 troops than 22,000–in other words, close to the number of combat troops the IPG recommended, and, when necessary support troops are added, close to the overall numbers I had estimated before the IPG met.

In short, Kagan says we can like the surge because Bush is lying when he says it’s a surge of 22,000 troops.

Via Kevin Drum, Robert Novak’s view is that if America stays in Iraq the GOP is facing disaster in 2008. Frankly, I don’t think you need to be an ace political reporter to see the case in favor of that view. Predictions, however, are difficult.

I think the real question is when more Republicans will start seriously breaking with the White House over the war. Will Chuck Hagel move out of the “sounds smart, acts useless” camp and actually collaborate with anti-war Democrats on bringing this farce to an end? Does someone in the GOP presidential field decide to differentiate themselves by calling for an end to the madness? I think you have to assume that someone will try it. What stake does, say, Mike Huckabee have in this war?

Mik Awake, a blogger whose parents are from Ethiopia and whose spent some time there, emails drawing attention to his take on President Meles Zenawi and the divide between Ethiopia’s largest Christian government and half Muslim — some of it ill-treated Somalis — population. Suffice it to say that Ethiopia’s a diverse country with over 70 million residents so presumably one could find a wide divergence of views on these and other subjects. But, of course, one of the costs of these kind of proxy wars is that Bush has married us not just to Ethiopia, but to a particular Ethiopian faction and thereby gotten us involved in all manner of issues and controversies your average American — even your average American foreign policy professional — doesn’t really understand or care about.