Benjamin R. “Randy” Mixon says he needs more troops in Diyala Province:

Mixon, speaking Friday by teleconference from Camp Speicher, outside Tikrit, to a Pentagon news conference, said that he did not have enough soldiers to provide security in Diyala. The local government is “nonfunctional” and the central government is “ineffective,” he said. . . .

Mixon was withering in his criticism of the Iraqi government, saying it was hamstrung by bureaucracy and compromised by corruption and sectarian discord, making it unable to assist U.S. forces in Diyala.

Why, though, isn’t this the reason to take the troops out? After all, what’s the point of throwing ever more American blood and manpower in support of a corrupt, ineffective government? And this is the essential problem. One could easily imagine a post-war situation where Iraq had a government that was not yet competent to run the country, but showed signs of rapid improvement such that if we kept supporting it for a while more, things might turn around. In the real world, though, we’re into the fifth year of this business and instead of improving, things just change and get bad in different ways — what’s the point of responding to the failures of the Iraqi government but sending even more troops to fight?

Okay. Time to defend the Bush administration from Brendan Nyhan’s smears. Just because Nyhan doesn’t approve of high-powered PR techniques, doesn’t mean that it was bad policy for the Bush administration to try to spend $1 million on putting those techniques to work on behalf of the Palestinian Authority. Say what you will about the Bush administration, but they’re pretty good at political marketing.

And while there’s more to life than effective marketing, marketing can be effective. Shoring up Fatah’s popularity vis-a-vis the more radical Hamas was widely believed to an important policy objective for the United States, and there’s every reason to believe that putting better PR tools at its disposal could be helpful in that regard. Obviously, readers are aware that I think Bush’s policies toward the Israel-Palestine conflict have been disastrous and obviously these PR gestures are an inadequate policy, but slamming them for spending the money seems silly.

Fred Kaplan notes that the House Democrats aren’t exactly mounting a huge challenge to Bush’s Pentagon budget:

This $504 billion—measured in real terms (i.e., adjusting for inflation)—falls only a few billion short of the largest military budget in U.S. history, back in 1952, when America was embarking on its Cold War rearmament campaign and fighting a war in Korea.

One difference: The FY 1952 budget included the cost of fighting in Korea. The FY 2008 budget does not include the cost of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. (Those costs are covered in the $95.5 billion emergency-spending bill, part of a supplement to the FY 2007 budget, over which the White House and Congress are currently quarreling.)

Of course, on some level using inflation-adjusted dollars isn’t the best metric. In percent of GDP terms, the current budget is substantially lower than the Korea-era budgets. On the other hand, in relative terms compared to the rest of the world, current defense spending is way higher than it was at the height of the Cold War.