In this week’s edition of bizarre right-wing quasi-journalism follies, The Weekly Standard gets Kimberly Kagan to team up with “surge” plan creator Fred Kagan to write a cover story hailing the surge:

The new strategy for Iraq has entered its second phase. Now that all of the additional combat forces have arrived in theater, Generals David Petraeus and Ray Odierno have begun Operation Phantom Thunder, a vast and complex effort to disrupt al Qaeda and Shiite militia bases all around Baghdad in advance of the major clear-and-hold operations that will follow. The deployment of forces and preparations for this operation have gone better than expected, and Phantom Thunder is so far proceeding very well. All aspects of the current strategy have been built upon the lessons of previous successful and unsuccessful Coalition efforts to establish security in Iraq, and there is every reason to be optimistic about its outcome.

No word on why Robert and Donald weren’t available to cosign the piece.

rather rambling article from Alastair Crooke in The London Review of Books contains this intriguing insight:

The problem for Hamas is that its constituency – the rank and file – and the wider Islamist movement have now embarked on a period of introspection. What is apparent – and this can be ascertained on any number of Islamist websites – is that the mainstream Islamist strategy of pursuing an electoral path to reform is now being questioned. This will have an impact well beyond Palestine – most obviously in Egypt and Jordan. Three events have triggered this reassessment: the sanctions imposed on the Hamas government; last summer’s US-backed war to destroy Hizbullah in Lebanon; and the repression of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which raises not a peep of protest from Europeans. Continued Western hostility towards all Islamists, however moderate their policies, has also frustrated the grass-roots.

At a conference held in Beirut in April, the senior Hamas official present, Usamah Hamadan, was strongly criticised by Fathi Yakan, the leader of Jamaat Islamiyah in Lebanon, for having embarked on the electoral route in the first place. Yakan pointed to the failure – experienced by all Islamists without exception – of those who have participated in their national parliaments. No MP or deputy, from Islamabad to Cairo, or anywhere in between, has succeeded in bringing any significant change to their society. At the same time, young Egyptians in the Muslim Brotherhood have been debating whether their eighty-year-old movement has lost its way. Commentators have been arguing that for it to sit in parliament – while its leaders are being interned, its economic base is being attacked, and legislation is being passed aimed at excluding movements with a religious basis from elections – undermines its credibility and invites derision. The movement, it’s suggested, is too big, rigid and ungainly, and needs to be rethought – and perhaps broken up.

In other words, while Western governments dream up ways to promote moderate alternatives to Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood, events on the ground may be trending in the opposite direction. Meanwhile, I always find that there’s strikingly little self-awareness about the fact that when you hear talk of political reform in Egypt or Pakistan or Saudi Arabia that it’s always taken as a premise that the US will only tolerate US-approved political parties to take power in those countries and that the debate over democracy is a debate over whether democracy would result in a US-approved outcome or how reform can be structured so as to ensure one.

Noah Shachtman notes that some in the Army have decided that the US military has the whole counterinsurgency routine down pat and needs to refocus its efforts on conventional war fighting. The enemy, I guess, would be North Korea, though even in this eventuality the post-war management of DPRK territory would seem to be a substantially more challenging task than defeating North Korea’s large army of starving people using obsolete equipment.

Peter Howard and Robert Farley discuss the use of analogies by wartime leaders, and in particular the Bush administration’s recent efforts to deploy Korea analogies in the Iraq debate. Analogies at War is the classic examination of this, and Jeffrey Record’s Making War, Thinking History looks at more recent events through a somewhat similar lens.