Speaking of Spencer, his Nation article based on his reporting in Iraq is finally out and about. ” Training Iraq’s Death Squads,” is a good title and gives a general sense of things. Also this:

The militias hardly command the loyalty of every policeman. But police commanders warn that sectarianism has seeped thoroughly into the security apparatus, and it threatens to undermine everything McNellis and his colleagues have accomplished. The professional police they desire may instead become a sharper instrument of sectarian fury.

Right. Politics always comes first. Really well-trained security services do not a pluralistic democracy make.

I wouldn’t bet my life on it, but I’m pretty sure Atrios is right and the Republican nominee is not, in fact, going to be running on a commitment to end the war in Iraq. Predictions aside, though, it’s worth noting that a significant faction of Democrats have persistently believed that the Bush administration was about to begin withdrawing from Iraq ever since 2004.

After three years of that forecast being perpetually wrong, it’s now been displaced onto Mitt Romney or John McCain or whomever. Since this idea is so persistent, I think it bears mentioning that it’s part of a pretty contradictory set of beliefs. The conventional wisdom, in essence, holds that running stridently against the war spells political doom for the Democrats. It also holds, however, that running stridently against the war is unnecessary because the Republicans will end the war anyway. Meanwhile, the Republicans are supposed to be doing this for political purposes.

These things can’t, however, all be true. And, indeed, I think time has proven that the Republicans basically think the “doves are doomed” theory of politics is correct. They attribute their loss in 2006 to corruption and (hilariously) to “earmarks,” attribute their wins in 2002 and 2004 to “toughness” and think that it always makes sense politically for the GOP to mark itself off as more militaristic and nationalistic than the opposition. My guess is that the persistent belief that Bush would end the war was driven by a fear that this theory is correct; it’s a form of wishful thinking. But people should get over it. The war is, in fact, unpopular. The GOP is, in fact, determined to stay robustly to the Democrats’ right on the war. The job facing Democratic politicians and operatives is to learn how to win the argument, not to dream up reasons why that won’t be necessary.

Haaretz reports that “The Bush administration has given Israel permission to discuss the future of the Golan Heights, security arrangements and Israeli-Syrian peace accords if it agrees to talks with Syria.” But Nancy Pelosi’s a traitor — dhimmitude! That said, if I were an Israeli and I woke up to read in my morning paper (though my understanding is that few actual Israelis read Haaretz) that my government was getting “permission” from the United States to conduct diplomacy with an adjacent country I might worry that something had gone awry in the US-Israeli special friendship.

Like the people driving the relationship, and policy to the region generally, are bloodthirsty and crazy, with no actual idea about how to advance American or Israeli interests.

David Ignatius reaches a truly bizarre conclusion about Iraq:

This U.S. training mission in Iraq was the heart of the Baker-Hamilton report’s recommendation last December. And it still seems to me the right way forward. American troops cannot stop a civil war in Iraq, but they can teach soldiers how to fix drive shafts, maintain engines and order spare parts. That’s a basic mission that Congress should reaffirm, even as it questions the surge of more U.S. troops into Baghdad. Time is the strategic resource now; Congress and the administration need to agree on ways to add some minutes to the clock.

This is a kind of awesomely topsy-turvey inversion of the dictum that war is politics by other means. Here, somehow, the political objectives can be screwed up and military objectives can be non-existent and somehow that can all be made allright if only we really, really nail down the logistics. But whether or not it’s a good thing for any given group of soldiers to know how “to fix drive shafts, maintain engines and order spare parts” (or anything else) is entirely dependent on the political issues. The Iraqi Army circa 1990 was, despite its problems, much more functional than the 2006-vintage Iraqi Army and, indeed, was an unusually high-functioning military organization for the Arab world. But guess what? We turned out to be fighting against it and even later it was an instrument of Saddam Hussein’s will, used to crush Kurds and Shi’a insurgents.

Better training of Iraqi troops, in short, might be a good idea if it were a means of resolving Iraq’s political problems. But Ignatius doesn’t think it is. He thinks we “cannot stop a civil war in Iraq.” But so why do we want these highly trained Iraqi soldiers running around? What’s that supposed to accomplish?

After five or six months of wasting time (and God knows how many lives) with the “surge,” it looks like the Bush administration may be reconsidering the Iraq Study Group. You’d think the people working in this White House would just be too embarrassed to wake up some mornings.