The situation in the Palestinian territories has really deteriorated to a level of awfulness that I really don’t know what to say. I suppose I do wonder why the Bush administration, having underestimated Hamas’ electoral strength, then went about implementing a post-election policy that was based on underestimating their military strength. I think I should have linked to this Daniel Levy post yesterday back when it was still more prescient than poignant:

Given the apparent rigid opposition of the Bush administration to a political compromise between Fatah and Hamas, its rejection of the Mecca deal, and the embargo on the Unity Government — it is apparently safe to assume that the second option was rejected. However, the first option, even ignoring considerations of the desirability or ethics of such an approach, simply makes no sense in the Gaza context. Currently Hamas clearly has the upper hand militarily, and that was predictable. But even if Fatah were in a stronger position, a military victory, if at all possible, would likely have come at a massive price in human terms but also in terms of social disintegration, and a likely after-effect of increased radicalization. So the US was encouraging a military confrontation that its favorite could not win, and was further muddying what would anyway have been a very difficult political accommodation.

It’s hard to see this as much of a win for Israel, either. This turn of events could be used as a pretext for reoccupying Gaza, but there’s nothing Israel wants there and the settlers have already been removed.

Is it possible that American desires for a large, semi-permanent military presence in Iraq have something to do with a desire to maintain leverage over Iraq’s oil policy? Nah, that’s impossible.

Good to know. Rudy Giuliani says he doesn’t need an Iraq policy because “that’s in the hands of other people.” This as part of his response to the question of why he didn’t include anything about Iraq in his “twelve commitments.” Greg Sargent correctly wonders if the media really intends “to let Rudy skate by with such answers?”

The answer is: probably! Giuliani has, for example, tended to get a free pass on his effort to position himself as an immigration restrictionist. He’s achieved that positioning by opposing the immigration compromise and saying his opposition is grounded in the fact that its ID measures are insufficiently stringent. Be that as it may, when he was mayor of New York City he went as far as legally possible to create a citywide amnesty zone and even went to court to push the legal boundaries further. The press, however, doesn’t seem to care about this.

And, of course, for years now they’ve been pushing the idea that Giuliani has credibility on national security issues even though he has no experience with foreign policy or military issues. So from his perspective, why shouldn’t he get away with not having answers to Iraq questions.

Back in the 1940s, US Army advice to American soldiers included “There are also political differences in Iraq that have puzzled diplomats and statesmen. You won’t help matters any by getting mixed up in them.” More in PDF form. Via Danger Room and Robert Farley.

In case you were wondering whether Republicans will really turn against the war if there’s not progress by September, note that we’re actually in the midst of witnessing significant regress. Drum and Rosenfeld lay it out, but American casualties are up, the Iraqi government hasn’t met any of its political benchmarks, and the Pentagon is now raising estimates of the number of Iraqi security forces that need to be trained.

Via Andrew Sullivan, another dispatch from my favorite war:

Swedish citizen Munir Awad, 25, who was only released three weeks ago, told Der Spiegel that he had travelled with his 17-year-old girlfriend Safia Benaouda, also a Swedish citizen, to Mogadishu in December. He says that after the Ethiopian troops invaded they fled to Kenya, where they were arrested by local militia and US soldiers and sent to the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa.

Awad claims that they were held on a military base and interrogated, sometimes for 12 hours at a time or longer, and were not given access to a lawyer. He says that they were accused by the Americans of being al-Qaida fighters. DNA samples were taken and they were questioned about Swedish Muslims. He says they were sometimes beaten or choked and only those who cooperated were allowed to sit or were given something to eat.

Questioned about Swedish Muslims? What did they want to know?

Over at Atrios’ place I see Bob Shrum observed that “The blogosphere was a lot more right about Iraq than all the experts in the Democratic party.” This is a nice thing to say to bloggers, but in important ways it’s not really true. After all, lots of progressive bloggers (your truly, Josh Marshall, Kevin Drum, Matt Stoller, Ezra Klein, I’m sure there are more) got this wrong. And, at the same time, it’s just not the case that all the experts got Iraq wrong. What happened was that all the experts the Democratic Party leadership listened to were wrong. Plenty of other, non-obscure voices were around, but the leading figures in the party decided not to listen to them.

This is possibly one good way of getting into the difficult question of assessing the Democratic contenders’ foreign policy differences. As I said to Ramesh it’s my sense that Barack Obama would probably appoint a sounder team, but I’ve found it difficult to articulate what’s driving that sense. After some chit-chat at yesterday’s conference, the basic shape of it comes clear. Basically, left-of-center foreign policy professionals who opposed the Iraq War felt very alienated by the party leadership’s embrace of the war back in 2002-2003. Since Obama opposed the war, and since Obama entered the Senate as a celebrity figure interested in foreign policy, those people have tended to cluster around him. Conversely, the left-of-center foreign policy professionals who won the argument in 2002-2003 tend to find themselves in Clinton’s orbit and see boat-rocking as a bad thing. The Edwards situation is less clear to me.

Now, since the next president isn’t going to hop back into a time machine and redo things, maybe we don’t care about this. The point, however, is that the division over the war has a kind of institutional legacy in terms of what kind of people are likely to influential in one administration versus the other.