General Petraeus says we’ll be in Iraq for years. John Edwards fired back this morning:

“General Petraeus’ comments are just the latest example of the Bush Administration’s disconnect from the reality on the ground. In order to get the Iraqi people to take responsibility for their country, we must show them that we are serious about leaving, and the best way to do that is to actually start leaving. Instead of talking about keeping our troops in Iraq for another decade, the Administration should begin bringing our troops home to the hero’s welcome they deserve.

I’m not entirely sure how this fits into the residual forces debate but Edwards does seem to be at least playing footsie with the idea of differentiating himself on this issue.

That surge architect Fred Kagan thinks the surge’s failure to deliver results merely proves the need to take more time with the surge is unsurprising. The end of the article, however, is striking. Kagan, according to Time‘s Michael Duffy, “fears a significant increase in Iranian support for those fighting U.S. forces. Finally, he noted that the shaky government of Nouri al-Maliki could just implode.”

While that might not end the cause of progress in Iraq, Kagan said, it could lead to something worse for those who believed a surge would lead to a stabilization of Iraq: a breakdown in political support for the war effort in Washington.

In other words, according to Kagan even the total collapse of the Iraqi government wouldn’t, in his mind, demonstrate that the war had failed. Even under those circumstances he’s going to stick to the stab in the back story that the only problem is the collapse of political support for the war here in DC.

Back in December the wingnut party line was that Ethiopia would be untroubled (“There may be lessons for the United States in Ethiopia’s success”) in its conquest of Somalia thanks to their affinity for brutal tactics (“Ethiopia has less concern than the U.S. about civilian casualties”) and the absence of a troublesome press corps (“The Ethiopian government is generally less sensitive to media criticism than the U.S. government—and is likely to encounter far less criticism in the first place, since the press traditionally gives short shrift to coverage of Africa”) thus guaranteeing success. It turns out, though, that you can have an insurgency anyway just about any time your country invades another one and tries to use its military to prop up a friendly regime on the conquered country’s soil.

Photo by Flickr user ctsnow used under a Creative Commons license.

US forces fight Iranian-backed militias in southern Iraq. Or, as the Pentagon put it:

“During the close air support, at least 20 terrorists were killed and six suspected terrorists were assessed to be wounded by the strafing,” the military said. “A vehicle being used by the terrorists as a fighting position was also destroyed by the close air support.”

This is a somewhat delicate issue to raise, but the war in Iraq seems to have spawned a wholly abusive use of the term “terrorist.” The battle came about because “Coalition aircraft were called in to strafe fighters who attacked Coalition troops in Amarah and Majjar al-Kabir, two Shiite cities in the Mayson province bordering Iran, the military said.” Surely, though, people who use force against soldiers are paradigmatic examples of people who aren’t terrorists — with terrorism being defined by the use of force against civilians.

Atrios nails the problem with a residual force with his customary pith: “What drives me nuts about this residual force stuff, aside from how arbitrary it is, is that there’s never any thought to exactly what these 50,000 should do. Basically, as the violence rages around them they’re supposed to sit there to ensure that… there isn’t even more violence raging around them. But it isn’t really enough people to actually intervene, especially given that not even close to that many would be combat troops.”

Quite so. Unfortunately, in another customary attribute that I’m less enthusiastic about, the target of Atrios’ ire is International Herald Tribune columnist Roher Cohen. Cohen is appropriately mocked as a “Very Serious Person.” But while media criticism certainly has its place, the reality is that the prime advocates of a residual force in Iraq aren’t Cohen or other “wankers” in the press, but Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, and much of the Democratic congressional leadership. That we can be in the midst of a primary campaign during which the candidates are supposedly looking to “pander” to the dread damn dirty hippies of the base and yet none of the front-running candidates will make a clear promise to leave Iraq and attack his or her rivals for failing to do the same is rather astounding.

If a pollster called me tomorrow and asked who I was supporting, I would say “Bill Richardson” out of a hope that perhaps a smallish Richardson surge would convince someone else to adopt his position on Iraq — we should leave.

Defense Department photo.

Let me say at the outset that despite my various criticisms of Israeli policy and of US policy toward Israel, I think efforts by professional associations to organize boycotts of comparable Israeli professional associations or products are essentially wrongheaded and counterproductive. That said, I’ve been very uncomfortable with some of the Anti-Defamation League’s advertising on this point, especially one ad that’s run on this site and says “400,000 murdered in DARFUR and British journalists are boycotting ISRAEL?” Now I see via Brian Beutler that Thomas Friedman’s on the same kick:

So to single out Israeli universities alone for a punitive boycott is rank anti-Semitism. Let’s see, Syria is being investigated by the United Nations for murdering Lebanon’s former prime minister, Rafik Hariri. Syrian agents are suspected of killing the finest freedom-loving Lebanese journalists, Gibran Tueni and Samir Kassir. But none of that moves the far left to call for a boycott of Syrian universities. Why? Sudan is engaged in genocide in Darfur. Why no boycott of Sudan? Why?

Brian points out that many of these countries already are sanctioned, but I see a much larger kind of problem here. One issue is that it’s really sad to see American Jews’ longstanding interest in human rights issues turned here into a crude tool to deflect away criticism from Israel. The American Jewish World Service Darfur campaign is about trying to help people in Darfur. ADL’s interest in the atrocities there seems limited to the argument that as long as conditions in the Palestinian territories don’t devolve to that level, then things must all be on the up-and-up.

More broadly, though, people complaining about double-standards seem to me to be straightforwardly misreading a kind of compliment as a sign of anti-semitism. To me it’s reasonably clear that you get this sort of agitation about Israeli actions precisely because people believe the Israeli government and electorate may be amenable to efforts at moral and political suasion. That Ehud Olmert is no Bashar Asad or Kim Jong Il is precisely the point.