Max Boot waxes historical:

There is a lesson to be learned here by advocates of an American troop drawdown. Even if the drawdown were to be only partial, it could easily get out of hand by creating the perception that we’re on the way out and can be attacked with impunity. As Napoleon said, “In war, moral considerations account for three-quarters, the actual balance of forces only for the other quarter.” If we set a withdrawal timetable, the moral balance will tip against us even faster than the actual balance of forces—with deadly consequences.

Mona at Unqualified Offerings notes the potentially salient point that Napoleon lost the war. Moral factors, it turns out, couldn’t compensate for the fact that Russia is very big, extremely cold in the wintertime, and pretty far from France. The Emperor could, presumably, console himself with the thought that his forces weren’t so much defeated on the battlefield as that their supply-lines became untenable, but these kind of hair-splitting distinctions are of limited comfort when you’re in retreat.

Boot, though, takes the analogy in another direction, citing the O’Pollahan op-ed from yesterday and hailing it as “pretty significant coming from two Democratic analysts” when it was more like drearily predictable.

The new TNR contains a great piece by Eliza Griswold on the situation in the Horn of Africa “Occupational Hazard: The Other Failed Invasion.”

And so, last Christmas Eve, the Christian-led government of Ethiopia invaded and–supported, later, by U.S. air strikes–successfully dislodged the Islamist UIC, largely because it believed (correctly) that rebels backed by its enemy, Eritrea, were using Somalia as a staging area for attacks. The result is an occupation by Ethiopian soldiers that fuels the local insurgency, threatens to destabilize the Horn of Africa, and offers Al Qaeda an additional talking point in its campaign to persuade Muslims that the West has declared war upon them. Many of the region’s Muslims saw the Ethiopian invasion as a Christmas present from Ethiopia’s leaders to America’s. “When the Americans started backing the Ethiopians around Christmas,” one woman who supported the courts said, “we started calling the Ethiopians kafir, or infidels.” [...]

This is certainly how Al Qaeda would like the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims to view what’s happening in Somalia. In early 2007, Ayman Al Zawahiri called for attacks against the occupying Ethiopian soldiers using “ambushes, mines, raids, and martyrdom-seeking campaigns to devour them as the lions devour their prey.” But his message wasn’t meant merely for Somali ears; it was also intended to inflame Muslims worldwide by suggesting, once again, that the Christian West is at war with Islam.

In the end, though, resentment toward the U.S.-backed occupation may prove to be a greater destabilizing force for the entire region than Al Qaeda ever was, especially in Kenya, where the war on terrorism is directly linked to the rise of radical Islamic identity. In the name of chasing a few bad men, the Christmas invasion played into millennia of distrust between predominantly Christian Ethiopia (4050 percent of the population is Muslim) and Somalia, which is almost 100 percent Muslim. “The popular perception is that Christian soldiers are occupying a Muslim land,” says Roland Marchal, a senior research fellow at Sciences-Po in Paris.

I wonder what James Kirchick thinks now.

I’m doing this on my phone so it’ll be curt.

So far surge architecht keane and the top GOP member have both praised o’hanlon. Keane says we need to stay in Iraq even if there’s no reconciliation and wants two or three permanent bases. He also asserts — contrary to reality — that sunnis are moving toward reconciliation.

Update: General newbold seems cranky — very cranky — about antiwar sentiment but ultimately endorses the idea that we should ‘indicate a start date’ for withdrawal in spring of 2008.

Update 2: General McCaffrey says we shouldn’t even bother to ask whether or not the surge os working until petraeus — ‘the most talented person I have ever met’ — has had a year. He also says we need to give the iraq security forces many more resources. But he says we need to reduce the number of troops we have in iraq or the army will start unraveling in april. He says we can achieve that by leaving the cities. Acknowledges that this is inconsistent with pet’s strategy.

Weird, I know, but it looks like Mike O’Hanlon’s testifying before a House subcommittee in a bit, so I think I’ll head over.

George Packer’s reaction to the O’Hanlon/Pollack op-ed yesterday was a good deal more measured than mine, but his eyebrow’s raised at this:

As of a few weeks ago, O’Hanlon advocated a partition of Iraq and Pollack was talking about containing the civil war within Iraq’s borders. Neither of them had much faith that the Administration’s strategy could succeed. Have they changed their minds? If so, what’s their political strategy for sustaining the surge into 2008?

Good questions.

Brad Plumer quoting William Arkin and Tariq Ali notes an interesting wrinkle in the Saudi arms sale deal — both sources say the reason the Saudi military is so terrible despite buying so much expensive US military equipment is that the house of Saud doesn’t want a competent military. After all, a competent, independent military might stage a coup. Similarly, it seems clear enough to me that US policy in the Persian Gulf is centered around Dissuading the Gulf Cooperation Council states from developing the capacity to defend themselves against Iran (or, back in the day, Iraq), the better to leave them as dependent clients of the United States.

Photo by Flickr user John Rawlinson used under a Creative Commons license

Robert Farley has much more on the Pollack/O’Hanlon op-ed, including some discussion of dodgy numbers. Meanwhile, though not intended as a direct riposte to the op-ed, this chart assembled by Nick Beaudrot and the associated discussion is worth checking out:

Meanwhile, it’s worth noting the incentives that O’Hanlon and Pollack face. If they bow to reality and say the US should move rapidly to start cutting our losses in Iraq, then they’re people who advocated in favor of a disastrous policy and this’ll be bad for their careers. If, by contrast, they say the surge is looking good, and then work together with Bush administration officials and The Weekly Standard to construct a stab in the back narrative about Iraq, then they can hope to salvage their professional reputations at the expense of liberals.

(of course, haha, that’s to imply that the policy analysis put forward by Brookings Institution foreign policy program people might be influenced by crass careerism rather than Very Serious Expertise but that’s absurd, right, after all Very Serious People are above such things)

I think it’s a little unfortunate that Will Marshall’s response to my critique of his case for residual forces in Iraq doesn’t really grapple with the arguments I made. Instead, he accuses me of not addressing some other things. And fair enough, I’ll try to address some of Marshall’s concerns. But I would like to see what he has to say about the problems that I think exist with his argument:

And wouldn’t al Qaeda in Iraq be emboldened by a swift U.S. departure? Wouldn’t more foreign jihadists come to celebrate their victory in driving America out of Iraq? Wouldn’t Sunni shieks who have turned on al Qaeda switch back without us there to tip the scales? Yglesias doesn’t say.

Obviously, if US forces aren’t in Iraq on Day X, al-Qaeda will use that fact for propaganda and recruiting purposes. By the same token, however, if US forces are in Iraq on Day X, al-Qaeda will use that fact for propaganda and recruiting purposes. There’s not some course of action we can take such that al-Qaeda’s response will be “fair enough” and then they shuffle off quietly into the sunset.

I really don’t think, however, that “more foreign jihadists” would actually go to Iraq in order to “celebrate their victory.” People interested in fighting infidels occupying Muslim lands are going to go somewhere (Kashmir, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Palestine, I dunno) where that’s plausibly what’s happening. The US military presence is what’s attracting foreign fighters to Iraq, it’s not a prophylactic against foreign fighters coming into the country. Would Sunni Sheikhs flip-flop and side with al-Qaeda? There are no guarantees, but I don’t see why they would. The consistent Sunni Sheikh agenda in western Iraq has been to maximize the power of Sunni Sheikhs in western Iraq vis-a-vis American occupiers, al-Qaeda interlopers, and Shiites in Baghdad. That’ll continue to be their agenda. If we stay, by contrast, we do take the risk that our tactical alliance with the local notables will outlive its usefulness and they’ll turn around and start shooting at our troops again.

On Marshall’s other points — yes, as I said, preventing a wider regional war is desirable. I don’t, however, see how a residual US military presence in Iraq helps accomplish that goal. On genocide, Marshall accuses me of being callous offering the old “Not our problem, apparently.” Here’s my point. Marshall says we need to “get U.S. troops out of the business of mediating Iraq’s sectarian conflicts.” I agree. Marshall also wants us to prevent a hypothetical genocide in Iraq. Given the choice, obviously, I, too, would like to prevent this hypothetical genocide. There isn’t, however, any way to prevent the possibility that Iraq’s sectarian conflicts will result in genocide or ethnic cleansing other than to mediate Iraq’s sectarian conflicts. If we’re going to abandon the goal of mediating Iraq’s sectarian conflicts, then we need to admit to ourselves that that means the sectarian conflicts might get really, really, really nasty and we’re . . . not going to mediate them.

It seems that at least part of the explanation for the Liberal Democratic Party’s curious ability to almost always win in Japan is that the CIA set things up to work that way. The story seems a bit similar to how the old Christian Democratic Party dominated postwar Italy, before falling apart in the Tangentopoli scandal.

Commentary “Harry” challenges me to “address the substance” of the Pollack/O’Hanlon op-ed. Okay, here goes. The critique of US occupation policy since, say, the fall of 2003 has been that US policy in Iraq has focused overwhelmingly on military goals and ignored the fact that the essential problems in Iraq are political. That was true in 2003. It was true in 2004. Interestingly, it was also true in 2005. And, indeed, it was true in 2006. How about 2007? Well, here’s Pollack and O’Hanlon:

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. [...] In the end, the situation in Iraq remains grave. In particular, we still face huge hurdles on the political front.

In short, according to the people who think the surge is working, the surge has, in fact, done nothing whatsoever to address the crucial problems in Iraq.

I’m shocked, shocked to discover that Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack think the surge is great and should be extended “at least into 2008″ (another Freidman unit!) — who could have guessed? As Greg Sargent notes, the twosome actually tries to present this as a counterintuitive statement by administration critics, though O’Hanlon’s been way out in front as a surge booster since it first started (I’m told he’s good friends, personally, with General Petraeus, from back in grad school or something) and Pollack, obviously, has been synonymous with the war for years.

I’m going to repeat my desire to see an O’Hanlon Primary — Democratic contenders can gain my support by providing assurances that Michael O’Hanlon won’t be serving in your administration.

Photo by Specialist L.B. Edgar, US Army

Unless Bob Novak is just making things up, his congressional sources are telling him that key members have congress have been briefed on a Pentagon plan under which “U.S. Special Forces are to work with the Turkish Army to suppress the Kurds’ guerrilla campaign” against Turkey. The strategic pretzel thus acquires another twist. We’re giving Israel billions of additional dollars to get them to not object to us selling advanced weapons to Saudi Arabia. We’re selling the Saudis the weapons to check Iranian influence.

Meanwhile, we’re complaining that the Saudis are undermining Maliki’s government in Iraq. The Saudis are doing that in order to check what they see as Iranian influence. Maliki wants us to sack our commanding general in Iraq or, at least, to stop arming what he sees as anti-government Sunni rebels. We think we need to arm those rebels to check al-Qaeda influence. And now our special forces are going to attack Kurds — along with Israelis, the one group in the region that seems to genuinely welcome American influence — ostensibly in order to head off a more dramatic Turkish intervention.

Is the intersection of these trends — the logical extension of these colliding agendas — really more frightening than the prospect of just leaving?

Nick Beaudrot directs my attention to this passage of a July 10 speech by Hillary Clinton on Iraq:

So as we redeploy our troops from Iraq, I will not let down my guard against terrorism. I will devote the resources we need to fight it and fight it smartly. I will order specialized units to engage in narrow and targeted operations against al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations in the region.

They will also provide security for U.S. troops and personnel and train and equip Iraqi security services to keep order and promote stability in the country, but only to the extent we believe such training is actually working. I would also consider, as I have said before, leaving some forces in the Kurdish area to protect the fragile but real democracy and relative peace and security that has developed there.

Nick focuses on the fact that this plan to bring the troops home from Iraq seems to involve leaving a lot of troops in Iraq. That sort of thing, though, has gotten a lot of blog coverage (the proviso that training must be “actually working” seems like a step in the right direction). Now I’m curious as to which “other terrorist organizations in the region” she thinks our troops need to be fighting. Hamas? Hezbollah? Or is that just a throwaway line to cover all the semantic bases?

Doyle McManus, card-carrying member of your liberal media. doing some “news analysis” for The Los Angeles Times. points out that if you vote for Democrats, terrorists will kill your children:

Although fireworks erupted last week among the leading Democratic candidates, those differences are narrow compared with the chasm between the two parties’ worldviews, one focused on battling the threat of radical Islam, the other on ending the war.

The point, of course, is that ending the war in Iraq isn’t something contrary to improving the country’s ability to reduce its vulnerability to terrorism, nor is it something other than improving the country’s ability to reduce its vulnerability to terrorism, rather, it’s a constitutive part of improving the country’s ability to reduce its vulnerability to terrorism. If someone had given me a bunch of money to start a Democratic-oriented national security think tank and an LA Times writer had called me up to discuss this issue, that’s the point I would have made. Instead, the powers that be decided that Kurt Campbell should start a think tank instead:

Foreign policy is playing a role in this campaign unlike any election since the Cold War,” said Kurt Campbell, a former Clinton administration official who heads a new centrist think tank in Washington, the Center for New American Security. “The debate so far has made the two parties’ positions appear polarized, more than they need to be…. The election may well be decided on foreign policy and national security, but it’s all about just two issues: Iraq and the war on terror.”

Very Serious!

David Ignatius assures us that the real question in Iraq is “How to extricate ourselves in a way that minimizes the damage to the United States, its allies and Iraq?” That is a good question. Ignatius’ not-so-good answer is that “A good start would be for Washington partisans to take deep breaths and lower the volume, so that the process of talking and fighting that must accompany a gradual U.S. withdrawal can work.”

In short, we’re supposed to believe that the Bush administration is eager to commence a sensible withdrawal plan but the main obstacle standing in their way is congressional Democrats’ stubborn insistance that Bush . . . commence a withdrawal plan from Iraq. Brilliant. Sure. Have we really not yet figured out that George W. Bush wants to stay in Iraq in full force through the end of his term and is also a kinda stubborn guy?

On top of whatever else has been said, Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Post op-ed seems to involve an odd definition of “partisan”

The true believers in the Bush revolution are furious. John R. Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, sounded the alarm in February with a broadside against the agreement that the State Department and its Asian negotiating partners had reached with North Korea, warning President Bush that it contradicted “fundamental premises” of his foreign policy. [...] Tony Smith published a blistering essay on Iraq in The Washington Post several months ago, attacking not neoconservative policymakers but liberal thinkers who had, he argued, become enablers for the neocons and thus were the real villains. [...] In the blogosphere, pillorying Hillary Clinton is a full-time sport. [...] Obama has come in for his share of abuse as well.

Say what you will about this stuff, but none of it is partisan. Bolton was, after all, perfectly correct to say that the deal Nick Burns struck with North Korea and that Bush agreed to contradicts the basic premises of the Bush foreign policy. The partisan thing for Bolton to have done would have been to keep his qualms quiet and let the Great Leader bask in praise. Similarly, for Democrats to attack Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama isn’t partisanship. What’s partisanship is when people refrain from criticizing their party’s leading figures.

Maybe if the Prime Minister of Iraq doesn’t like our commanding general in Iraq and wants us to stop arming Sunni groups, but the US government thinks our commanding general is a smart guy and we want to intensify the arming of Sunni groups that we ought to step back, take a deep breath, and decide to leave Iraq to the Iraqis.

It would be ridiculous, after all, to sack an American general because Nouri al-Maliki wants us to. But it would also be ridiculous for an American general to be running around Iraq implementing policies contrary to those of the Iraqi government we’re supposed to be supporting. The best solution is to shake hands and go our separate ways.