The final report:

Despite some skepticism from many areas within the international community, in hindsight, it has now become clear that the UN inspection system in Iraq was indeed successful to a large degree, in fulfilling its disarmament and monitoring obligations. Crucial to the inspection system was the underlying backing of military, political, and economic pressure particularly from the permanent members of the Security Council. While it will be for others to judge the level success or shortcomings from the UN inspections regime in Iraq, it seems clear that without such international pressure, even limited success was not assured.

See also Robert Farley and Arms Control Wonk. In the immortal April 2003 words of Charles Krauthammer, “Hans Blix had five months to find weapons. He found nothing. We’ve had five weeks. Come back to me in five months. If we haven’t found any, we will have a credibility problem.”

Daniel Levy makes the case that what Israel needs is a school of “realist” thinking about its policies:

What is missing and needed is for an Israeli school of realism to emerge, capable of addressing the new challenges of the region. This realist school should set out four strategic goals for Israel: to stabilize Israel’s security environment; prevent Al-Qaida copycats from gaining a foothold on Israel’s doorstep; pursue an end of occupation that will allow for realization of permanent, agreed, recognized and legitimate borders on all fronts; and more effectively isolate the Ahmadinejadist wing in Iran’s leadership.

This sounds correct to me. Israel is an interesting place in that it’s extremely close — both chronologically and ideologically — to its essentially Romantic origins, which seems to make it difficult for the political system to wrestle honestly with what the country is trying to achieve. Is establishing a peaceful relationship with its neighbors a strategic priority, or is it something that might be nice if and only if it can be achieved consistently with other, more important, strategic parameters? If the nuclear arsenal is deemed insufficient to deter the use of an Iranian nuclear weapon, then what’s it for?

If fewer civilians in Iraq really are dying that’s great news, but I don’t understand why we’re supposed to take the Defense Department’s word for it when the Pentagon “refuses to count civilian casualties, argues that civilian casualty counts are irrelevant to an evaluation of war aims, and either ignores or disputes the most sophisticated methodology for counting civilian casualties.”

And I don’t really mean this as a cheap “gotcha” — it’s a real problem. The US military seems to have weirdly conflicted views on this subject. They recognize that, on some level, reducing civilian casualties is important. On another level, they seem to think that reducing media coverage of civilian casualties is even more important. The latter goal leads them to reject efforts to quantify civilian mortality. But if you don’t quantify civilian mortality, you can’t effectively reduce. At the same time, however, they want to be seen as minimizing civilian casualties so they genuinely do expend a considerable amount of effort trying to do so. But because they’re not measuring anything, nobody knows how well any of these tactics work.

DoD photo by Sgt. Tierney Nowland, U.S. Army

In light of this British car bomb terrorist plot can we all agree that the presence of British and American soldiers in Iraq does not, in fact, constitute a physical barrier against terrorists attacking western countries? You stop terrorist attacks with law enforcement and intelligence.

Unless I’m mistaken, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s main point here is that he thinks we should continue the surge if and only if he thinks we should continue the surge. Does he think we should continue? Well, he couldn’t say. But he definitely will do the thing that he thinks he should do, whatever that is. Possibly. Also: He’ll keep the country on offense. Fortunately, we have David Frum’s word for it that vague and evasive though Rudy may be, he’s less silly than Mitt Romney.