Fred Kaplan on the search for a “war czar”:

Actually, there’s another official who, as Baker and Ricks describe the job, has the “authority to issue directions to the Pentagon, the State Department, and other agencies.” He’s called the president of the United States.

Uh-huh. I would just say that czar foolishness aside, the idea that the key to Iraq is shuffling the US-side personnel is pretty absurd. It’s astonishing the number of side-issues the human mind can devise to distract attention from the fundamental dynamics in Iraq, but everything we do there eventually winds up crashing into stubborn reality. There simply isn’t some rejiggering of the configuration of our policies that can make unattainable or nonsensical policy goals suddenly realististic.

The AP reports: “Boris Berezovsky, the exiled Russian tycoon who has emerged as one of the Kremlin’s most vocal opponents, called Friday for the use of force to oust President Vladimir Putin and claimed he has support from some in the country’s political elite.” Unfortunately for the Russian opposition, Boris Berezovsky isn’t an any more admirable figure than is Putin. The extent to which he seems to have been able to get himself taken seriously in the West as an alternative to the Dread Vladimir is kind of bizarre. It’s not as if he ever demonstrated any kind of principled commitment to liberal governance or political democracy until he happened to lose out in intra-Kremlin power struggles.

Johann Hari has a great essay in The New Republic (so good they gave me a link that lets y’all read it for free) about Andrew Roberts, Bush’s favorite historian. Jacob Weisberg had a pretty good takedown of Roberts back in late March, but Hari seems to have waded through a larger quantity of dreck and found some really frightening stuff. To wit:

In 2001, Roberts spoke to a dinner of the Springbok Club, a group that regards itself as a shadow white government of South Africa and calls for “the re-establishment of civilized European rule throughout the African continent.” Founded by a former member of the neo-fascist National Front, the club flies the flag of apartheid South Africa at every meeting. The dinner was a celebration of the thirty-sixth anniversary of the day the white supremacist government of Rhodesia announced a Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Great Britain, which was pressing it to enfranchise black people. Surrounded by nostalgists for this racist rule, Roberts, according to the club’s website, “finished his speech by proposing a toast to the Springbok Club, which he said he considered the heir to previous imperial achievements.”

Roberts emerges not only as a fan of apartheid, but as a defender of the Amritsar massacre, an advocate of “the whole idea of mass internment,” and a fan of the Boer War-era concentration camps. Someone should, perhaps, ask Bush about this. The imperialistic style of his foreign policies have long been clear enough, but the Springbok Club really should be a bit too much even for him — I think Don Imus would be appalled.

The New York Times writes a bit about the human consequences of extending tours in Iraq from 12 months to 15 months, the preferred method of increasing force levels in Iraq in the context of a badly stretched Army. People grumble but, of course, are prepared to do their duty and serve as ordered. For the longer haul, however, one wonders over and over again about the implications for the miitary of the way people have been treated for the past several years. The All-Volunteer Force which, among other things, skews substantially older and more married (with more kids) than the conscript forces of yore, has never really been put to the test in this way previously. Certain expectations built up in the 1980s and 1990s of what enlisting entailed, and Iraq has shattered those expectations on several fronts. About half the West Point classes of 2000 and 2001 have already left the service.