I should mention with regard to ongoing discussion of the Center for American Progress’ recent Iraq report that one of the report’s main authors, Brian Katulis, had a brilliant (and shorter) piece out earlier this month specifically on the foolhardy nature of the training mission:

The United States has poured more than $20 billion into building an Iraqi national army and police force designed to defend a government that simply cannot forge the key political compromises necessary to unite their own country. The so-called “surge” of U.S. forces, alongside stepped up training of the Iraqi army and police, is supposed to create the political “space” necessary for the country’s squabbling political leaders to reach these compromises, yet that’s not happening.

Why? Most of Iraq’s violence is related to a vicious struggle for power that only has a political solution. Training and skills building are not the fundamental issue for Iraq’s security forces. In fact many of Iraqi security forces have more training than hundreds of U.S. soldiers being deployed as part of this surge. Their problems are motivation and allegiance.

Right. Politics is strictly primary in this kind of situation. If you have a political actor whose goals you support, and that actor has a bunch of people prepared to fight for those goals, then you might come in and offer weapons and training to help them achieve their goals. But the idea that US military personnel are hypnotists whose training methods are going to transform Iraqi fighters into the people it would be convenient to us for them to be is silly.

British journalist Johann Hari hops aboard the National Review cruise in a hilarious TNR article, only to discover the conservative take on the Vietnam War:

There is something strange about this discussion, and it takes me a few moments to realize exactly what it is. All the tropes conservatives usually deny in public–that Iraq is another Vietnam, that Bush is fighting a class war on behalf of the rich–are embraced on this shining ship in the middle of the ocean. Yes, they concede, we are fighting another Vietnam; and this time we won’t let the weak-kneed liberals lose it. “It’s customary to say we lost the Vietnam war, but who’s ‘we’?” Dinesh D’Souza asks angrily. “The left won by demanding America’s humiliation.” On this ship, there are no Viet Cong, no three million dead. There is only liberal treachery.

As Spencer Ackerman wrote in one of his last New Republic articles, this is in many ways the original sin of conservative foreign policy analysis. Trapped in the intellectual prison of Vietnam revisionism, the right is fundamentally incapable of seeing objective limits to US military capacity or domestic political debate as actually vital to the appropriate conduct of national security policy.

Photo by Flickr user Flydime used under a Creative Commons license

With regard to the Dick Lugar question discussed below, the AP’s coverage of his speech clarifies that Senator Lugar doesn’t intend to do anything about his qualms with Bush’s Iraq policy:

“In my judgment, the costs and risks of continuing down the current path outweigh the potential benefits that might be achieved,” Lugar, R-Ind., said in a Senate floor speech. “Persisting indefinitely with the surge strategy will delay policy adjustments that have a better chance of protecting our vital interests over the long term.” . . .

However, [Lugar spokesman Andy] Fisher said the speech does not mean Lugar would switch his vote on the war or embrace Democratic measures setting a deadline for troop withdrawals.

Bush can at least say that he’s implementing a massively wrongheaded Iraq policy, leading to untold deaths and the trashing of American interests, because he doesn’t know any better — Lugar’s doing it because, what, it would be impolite to do otherwise? Because he’s just a bad person and doesn’t give a damn? This stuff makes me angry.

US government having trouble finding countries willing to host the proposed new Africa Command. It’s much easier to get favorable basing agreements when the local government is actually the product of your invasion.

Mark Kleiman notes that one surprising element of the Post‘s recent long account of Dick Cheney’s power is that “is Condoleeza Rice’s passivity in the face of this interference in her communication with her own staff” which one would expect pettiness and thirst for power, if not professionalism and good sense, to keep in check.

Jim Henley counters with the observation “that Dick Cheney played a large role in selecting the Bush Administration’s cabinet and senior staff and he knew what he was doing when he gave the nod to Rice and Powell. Surely at the top of his list of criteria for NSA and Secretary of State was ‘Who can I roll?’” According to Jim Mann’s account in Rise of the Vulcans Cheney very much didn’t want Powell as a colleague (they’d worked closely together in the Bush I administration, and Cheney knew he didn’t like him), but his appointment was ordained by the political situation. Thus, one of Cheney’s key priorities was to arrange the rest of the national security team in which to make ti possible to roll Powell. It wasn’t clear that this was going to work, but Bush apparently felt upstaged by Powell at the press conference announcing his appointment and agreed to Cheney’s Powell-checking scheme.

For Rice, I would take a look at Joshua Kurlantzick’s 2004 examination of her ineffective spell as National Security Advisor.

You can count me as a longtime skeptic that Republicans will ever abandon Bush on Iraq in substantial numbers come what may, but there’s no denying that Dick Lugar took a major step with this statement on the floor.

Still, if the job of a US Senator was fundamentally to make statements, then reasonably sound statements made by Dick Lugar — along with a lot of centrist Dems like Joe Biden — before the war would have put us in much better position than we actually found ourselves in. The difficulty is that at the end of the day what a Senator does is cast votes. Will Lugar be there on efforts to restrain Bush’s discretion over Iraq policy, or will he still be a functional vote for the Decider? For now, though, we do have a pretty solid speech.