This is a bit weird. The Nation has an editorial up attacking proponents of a binational solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict and saying that the outcome of the conflict should, instead, be the creation of two states, one Arab and one Jewish, living side-by-side. This is, obviously, the mainstream position on the issue. But something about the editorial infuriated TNR‘s Jamie Kirchick who saw it as an example of how “the oldest journal of opinion in the United States has yet to find an anti-American cause with which it cannot sympathize.”

Is it Kirchick’s view that to be a decent, patriotic American one must support the dissolution of Israel in favor of a unified secular state west of the Jordan river? Surely not. But that’s the view The Nation was primarily attacking. So are we to understand that Kirchick thinks that to be a decent, patriotic American one must support the creation of a Greater Israel including the West Bank and Gaza Strip from which the Palestinian population will either be “removed” or else kept in a state of permament stateless captivity? I’m fairly certain that’s a good deal more extreme than TNR‘s editorial line.

Via Eric Martin, James D. Fearon’s article on “Iraq’s Civil War” in a comparative context:

In fact, there is a civil war in progress in Iraq, one comparable in important respects to other civil wars that have occurred in postcolonial states with weak political institutions. Those cases suggest that the Bush administration’s political objective in Iraq — creating a stable, peaceful, somewhat democratic regime that can survive the departure of U.S. troops — is unrealistic. Given this unrealistic political objective, military strategy of any sort is doomed to fail almost regardless of whether the administration goes with the “surge” option, as President George W. Bush has proposed, or shifts toward a pure training mission, as advised by the Iraq Study Group.

Well said. You can’t do the impossible, even with a really smart general and his smart field manual.

The news that the Islamic Army of Iraq (one of the main Sunni insurgent groups) fought a battle against al-Qaeda for control of a Baghdad neighborhood would, in a decent world, put to a rest the idea that we’re fighting some consolidated “jihadist” menace in Iraq. We’re fighting a whole bunch of people. Many of those people are fighting other people who we’re also fighting. And only a tiny minority of the people we’re fighting in Iraq are even loosely tied to al-Qaeda.