Byron York’s not much of a deviationist, so when he finds himself musing “should deadlines be off limits in the Iraq debate?” and concluding “Maybe at this point, a deadline for the Iraqi government wouldn’t be a bad thing” I think you have to see some significance in that development. At long last some of the mainstream right is getting tired of this morass.

Dave Weigel has a bit more on this.

Via Ramesh Ponnuru, I see that Rudy Giuliani is joining Barack Obama, John McCain, and Hillary Clinton in calling for a larger Army. One can’t help but wonder where these troops are supposed to be conjured up from. The strongest thing coming through from Brian Mockenhaupt’s article on basic training is that it’s really hard to recruit an Army up to the current size.

That’s not to say that the military isn’t going to hit its goals. Clearly, they will. Already, though, they’ve stepped up recruitment bonuses enormously as well as relaxing standards for who they’re allowed to recruit. Less quantifiably, the obvious upshot of Mockenhaupt’s reporting is that at this point the message coming down to the people in charge of training new recruits is that at the margin they should worry more about losing soldiers than they should about passing on sub-par ones. The only really reliable way of increasing the recruiting pool would be to have a recession, and I hope that’s not what these candidates have in mind.

These sort of concerns about National Guard units being too tied up in foreign deployments to do state-oriented disaster relief and so forth constitute the best rationale I can think of for the belief that the Army needs to get bigger. One could use a larger regular Army in order to curtail the need to call on Guard units and thereby increase domestic disaster preparedness. On balance, though, that would have to be an incredibly cost-ineffective means of addressing natural disasters, so I don’t see the argument carrying the day on the merits.

Has John Edwards specifically come out against the larger military? Obama and Clinton are for it, and Kerry/Edwards endorsed a version of this idea back in 2004.

Al says, “The problem always has been: what do you replace GWOT with? Rumsfeld tried to change it to GSAVE, which is probably a better phrase. I think Matthew mocked him for it.”

I disagree. The difficulty with finding an apt replacemen for GWOT highlights the inaptness of the term. The reason nobody can come up with a good name for the thing “GWOT” is supposed to denote is that it doesn’t denote anything. Instead, insofar is it isn’t merely a piece of goofy rhetoric (and I think John Edwards went a bit too far in suggesting this is all it is) it’s a conceptual confusion — an effort to lump together a bunch of loosely-related issues that 9/11 all happened to highlight and turn them into a single “thing” even though there’s nothing there.

To take an example, a lot of critiques of “GWOT” begin by noting that “terrorism is a tactic, and you don’t go to war with a tactic.” Which is true. At the same time, while on the one hand 9/11 highlighted a specific problem with a specific enemy, it also did highlight America’s vulnerability to the generic tactic of terrorism. Something like “we should harden cockpit doors” isn’t part of a “war on Islamic fundamentalism” (or whatever more precise term you might like) it’s a counterterrorism measure just like the longstanding practice of using metal detectors is.

So there’s a specific al-Qaeda issue (we’re not going to invest tons of effort into crushing ETA). Then there’s a general terrorism issue (we do want to reduce our generic vulnerability from any group that may arise in the future). Then there are the geopolitics of the Middle East. Then there’s the issue of nuclear proliferation. These questions are relate, but there’s not a single thing that should have a single name. There’s fighting al-Qaeda, there’s counterterrorism, there’s the Middle East, there’s non-proliferation — those are all good words. “War on Terror” should just be demoted to the status of somewhat silly name for the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan.

Spencer Ackerman reviews George Tenet’s At the Center of the Storm: My Years In the CIA. He’s not impressed! “Like much else in the book, Tenet’s focus on the “slam dunk” quote is actually sneaky — he serves to obscure the real issue at hand while oscillating between contrition and a fiery, if dubious, defense of his tenure.” On the other hand, Tenet turns out to have a good eye for an NCAA basketball rivalry.