Chris Bowers reads Bob Shrum’s account of John Edwards’ decision to vote for the war (as Shrum tells it, Edwards was dubious, his wife was very opposed, but Shrum and other advisers convinced him it was politically necessary) and concludes:

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Found on the MNF-Iraq website:

Sgt. Tierney Nowland teaches the Macarena dance with an Iraqi soldier of 2nd Battalion, 1st Brigade during a break with Soldiers from Company A, 1st Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment, 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division out of Fort Lewis, Wash., on a cordon and search mission in Ameriyah, Iraq, May 16. Nowland is combat camera with the 982nd Signal Company, Wilson, N.C. U.S. Army photo by Spc. Elisha Dawkins.

Disturbing stuff.

Fred Kaplan and Price Floyd discuss the Bush administration’s catastrophic misunderstanding of how public diplomacy should work. In Floyd’s words, he resigned as head of media relations at the State Department because he got tired of trying to convince people “that we should not be judged by our actions, only our words.”

In essence, the Bush administration has tried to employ the same approach abroad as it has at home — ignore peoples’ real concerns and hope aggressive spin can check them. The trouble is that these tactics don’t work nearly as well abroad as they do at home, since the foreign press isn’t cowed by the American conservative movement, and foreigners don’t have Americans’ instinctive impulse to want to believe the best about the US government. Even at home, meanwhile, the White House’s positition has eventually collapsed in the face of overwhelming reality.

I still recommend Daniel Levy if you’re looking for analysis of the Labour Party leadership fight in Israel, but only The Spine offers discussion of former Shin Bet chief Ami Ayalon’s “taut body.”

David Ignatius says the White House is adopting the ISG recommendations after all, and it’s a case of “better late than never.” But is it, really? It seems to me that to a very large extent we’ve gotten to the sorry position we’re in precisely through the Bush administration’s longtime habit of doing the right thing 6-12 months too late.

Sometimes, things just can’t be done too late. I keep trying to construct an analogy involving boats going over waterfalls, but the point is this. At each phase of the venture, suggests have been made of ways the US could lower our goals in the hopes of achieving something rather than just letting things get worse and worse and worse forever. The Bush administration then dismisses these critics as unduly pessimistic and things further deteriorate. Then, critics step-up their level of pessimism in response to the deterioration. At that point, the administration says the critics are being too pessimistic and adopts the policy recommendations they rejected months ago. But thanks to the continued deterioration of the situation, those old recommendations don’t work anymore.

The ISG, meanwhile, was already several shades too timid back in December. It was, however, at least cleared-eyed about the situation in Iraq. Months later, we’re further than ever from sectarian reconciliation, and the other points are essentially moot.

Joe Lieberman visits with the troops in Baghdad, and McClatchy Newspapers’ Leila Fadel is on hand to see what the troops weren’t willing to say to Lieberman’s face. Things like “We’re not making any progress. It just seems like we drive around and wait to get shot at.”

Lieberman himself endorses the Green Lantern theory. “I think it’s important we don’t lose our will. To pull out would be a disaster.” I hear willpower cures gunshot wounds these days.

Bush’s decision to analogize the US presence in Iraq to the one in South Korea is truly telling. The two situations could hardly resemble each other less. If we take Nouri al-Maliki’s government to be something like Syngman Rhee‘s dictatorship at the core of the analogy, then who plays the role of the North Koreans? How do the Kurds and the Sunnis fit into the picture? Where’s the USSR? Approve of it or not, the decades-long American military presence in South Korea has a very clear-cut rationale — it was there to defend America’s South Korean client regime from the USSR’s North Korean client regime and now inertia keeps it there because the DPRK still exists even if the ROK doesn’t really need outside protection.

In Iraq, none of this stands up at all. It’s just a raw expression of a desire to keep our troops in Iraq more-or-less forever. For no real reason. In a country where they’re clearly not wanted by either the Sunni Arabs or the Shiites, and where our “allies” in the government are as much Iran’s proxies as ours.