Joe Klein really nails it here on the ethnic composition of the Iraqi Army and generally bogus nature of Iraqi state institutions. Really.

At any rate, it does occur to me now and again that the netroots could probably use some more good cops to go along with the bad cops. If, say, Klein not only got a torrent of critical email when he wrote something that pissed us off but also a torrent of positive email when he wrote something liberals liked, then he’d probably find himself writing more liberal stuff over the long haul, no? Being nice is no fun and I’m basically an asshole as a general matter, so I don’t really want to do it, but surely a big community site like dKos could get the job done.

Foreign Policy magazine has an interview up with Bruce Ackerman about congressional ability to check the president’s war powers. It mostly focuses on what can and cannot be done vis-a-vis Iraq (as I’ve been saying, it comes down to the budget requests) but also gets into Iran. Ackerman says the president can’t so much as bomb Iran without congressional authorization. I’d like to believe that’s true, and it seems consonant with a straightforward reading of the “declare war” clause of the constitution. That said, we all know that declaring war business has been a dead letter for some time. I also seem to recall that Bill Clinton ordered airstrikes against Serbia without congressional authorization.

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I have all kinds of disagreements with today’s Max Boot column, but there’s a deeper meta-level disagreement I also have with him and with General David Petraeus, “Front Man for Bush’s Iraq Plan” namely that I don’t see how all this stuff about counterinsurgency is even relevant to the situation in Iraq today. To the situation in Iraq in 2003? Sure maybe. Maybe even some time into 2004. Back then you had an insurgency/counterinsurgency dynamic. You had a political entity we were wholeheartedly backing — the Coalition Provisional Authority — and you had insurgent groups fighting against it. Chestnuts like “Which side gives the best protection, which one threatens the most, which one is most likely to win, these are the criteria governing the population’s stand” were likely applicable then.

Today, though, we’re beyond all that. The dynamic in Iraq has become complicated and multi-faceted. We don’t wholeheartedly support the agenda of Nouri al-Maliki’s political coalition. There are competing armed groups in Iraq whose power we’d like to check. There is, as everyone knows, a condition of multi-pronged civil war and we’re not eager to take sides in it. Under those circumstances, however, handbooks about beating back insurgencies aren’t relevant. If we had some coherent political goals, it would be worth having a discussion about methods of achieving those goals. But we don’t have them. The administration’s policy is based on the idea that the Middle East is meaningfully divided between an “extremist” team (the Mahdi Army, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, UPDATE: and al-Qaeda) and a “moderate” team (Israel, Sinioria, King Hussein, the United States, Mubarrak) and that we’re trying to help the moderates beat the extremists. This is just a giant, baffling, analytical error and no number of handbooks is going to change it.

Why are most blacks, unless forced by dire necessity to earn their livelihood with ‘the sweat of their brow’, so loath to undertake any work that dirties the hands?

I think we can all take it for granted that a book promising to explore that question is unlikely to find itself on a present-day curriculum approved by the US government. Certainly, one hopes that the insights the author may bring to bear on the subject are unlikely to become the basis for public policy in the inner-city, in Subsaharan Africa, or elsewhere. As this old but still relevant Brian Whitaker article notes, however, the exact same question, asked of Arabs rather than blacks, appears in Raphael Patai’s The Arab Mind which continues to be influential in some quarters of the US government and in neoconservative circles. Also, “In the Arab view of human nature, no person is supposed to be able to maintain incessant, uninterrupted control over himself . . . once aroused, Arab hostility will vent itself indiscriminately on all outsiders.”