I think I agree more with what Andrew says here about Dick Cheney than I do with Ross’ belief that Cheney and others were perfectly sincere in their WMD scare stories. Among other things, it’s worth recalling that there were always sort of two different Iraq debates happening on parallel tracks.

One debate, for the cognescenti, was about America’s strategic posture in the Persian Gulf vis-a-vis Iraq. You have Ken Pollack worrying that a nuclear-armed Saddam may invade Kuwait again, forcing us to either fight a second war to dislodge him (potentially subjecting our troops to nuclear attack) or else to acquiesce in Iraqi hegemony in the Gulf. You have concerns that a nuclear-armed Iraq might feel able to become much bolder in its sponsorship of anti-Israel groups. You have concerns that a nuclear-armed Iraq might become incredibly prestigious in the Arab world, making Saddam a kind of new Nasser and creating problems for our friendly governments in the region.

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Steve White at Tapped sees in Transformers an apologia for militarism grounded in Michael Bay’s close relationship with the defense-industrial complex. To which I say, eh. In purely ideological terms, Bay’s oeuvre doesn’t carry much of a message. The invasion of Cuba in Bay Boys II is egregious beyond belief but Transformers is, I think, basically sound.

Obviously, the film is soaked in enthusiasm for military hardware. On the other hand, the threat from the Deceptacons is quite real. Meanwhile, until the climactic battle with the Deceptacons, the tension in the film within the “good guy” camp. Mostly, the paranoia of the national security apparatus — represented by the chief of Sector Seven and the guys who want to imprison Bumblebee — versus the correct liberal view that we need to widen the circle of allies, distinguish between good and bad alien robots, etc. Similarly, the Autobots have a minor conflict between the more hawkish Ironhide and the more dovish Optimus Prime on the subject of killing humans, in which Optimus’ more pacifistic stand gets a positive portrayal. All-in-all, I saw a balanced, patriotic, security conscious liberalism not the run-amok nationalism and militarism of the Bush-era GOP.

UPDATE: If you’re interested, you might want to read a blog post on this subject from John Rogers, who has a story credit on the film in question, though I genuinely don’t believe that the views of members of the creative team should be given special weight on these issues (he agrees with me, basically, but authorial intent is still irrelevant).

Stephen Biddle makes the point that while withdrawing some troops and leaving many behind to continue training makes a certain amount of political sense as a compromise, it’s nonsense on the merits. If you’re going to have a whole bunch of troops in the country, you need enough troops to make a difference. Withdrawing tens of thousands of Americans is only going to leave the tens of thousands who remain in a more dangerous and fundamentally untenable position. If we want to withdraw troops — and we should — we need to get essentially all the way out.

Defense Department photo by Corporal Samuel D. Corum, US Marine Corps.

John Podesta, Lawrence Korb, and Brian Katulis warn progressives not to be taken in by the recent revival of interest in the Iraq Study Group. That comes via Michael Crowley. I promise I have a piece on closely related topic on the Guardian’s Comment is Free thingy, but I can’t load the site at the moment.

UPDATE: Here it is.

I followed a link from The Weekly Standard‘s blog to a post by David Axe discussing Air Force Monthly‘s coverage of an F-22 getting shot down in some simulated combat by an F-16. Lieutenant Colonel Dirk Smith notes that “the beauty of Red Flag is that we were able to go out and practice our tactics in a challenging scenario, make a mistake, learn alesson, and be that much better prepared for actual combat.” Axe, in a section the Standard quotes favorably, concurs:

I totally agree: failure is the best way to improve. And if losing one simulated dogfight against other Americans flying F-16s was such a profound experience for our Raptor jockies, imagine what they might take away from a no-holds-barred match with experienced foreign pilots flying a genuinely dissimilar aircraft, say Indian aces in Su-30s or veteran Russian pilots in Su-27s – or even top British aviators in the Royal Air Force’s new Typhoons.

Uh huh. But think about that. Why would the US Air Force be fighting Indian aces in Su-30s? And that’s to say nothing of the Royal Air Force. I don’t want to say it’s inconceivable that the United States would find itself engaged in a struggle for air superiority with a near peer-competitor but it’s way, way, way, down on the list of contingencies that any reasonable person would be hedging against. Alien robots seems like an only slightly less plausible adversary.

Robert Farley threatened a little while back to write on the question of whether we ought to have an Air Force at all, and I think it’s a topic that needs further exploration. Clearly, the military needs air power, but setting up a separate, coequal, “air” service seems to create very bad institutional incentives to over-invest our resources in the sort of things that would justify the existence of an air force.

Kimberly Kagan writes that the surge is working in The Wall Street Journal. It keeps being funny each time this happens. Is the conservative media machine really so short on wannabe apologists for Iraq at this point that it can’t find enough non-Kagans to write about the Kagan-authored escalation scheme.

Overextension frequently results from local failures of imperial management rather than simply “foreign policy” dynamics. The Spanish Habsburg’s conflicts with England — which scholars often cite as a key factor in Spanish overextension — were, in part, a byproduct of a peripheral uprising in the Netherlands. Both Philip II and Philip III hoped that, by either conquering England or forcing it to capitulate to Spanish hegemonic coontrol, they could cut off England’s strategic support for the Dutch (e.g., Allen 2000). Sustained rebellions represent, in fact, only an extreme case of these dynamics. As resistance to imperial bargains grows, empires will find it more difficult to garner and direct resources — manpower, money, trade, and so forth — from and toward peripheries. As their political capacity to manage peripheries diminishes they will, in turn, be more likely to suffer from overextension. Those who currently advocate American — or American-backed Israeli — military action against Syria and Iran embrace very similar reasoning to that of the Spanish: they argue that American problems in Iraq, and in the entire region, might be resolved if only the United States could neutralize those regimes that sponsor resistance to its objectives (e.g., Kristol 2006).

That’s Daniel Nexon and Thomas Wright, “What’s at Stake in the American Empire Debate?” available in your May 2007 issue of the American Political Science Review. More here.

An interim report from Rand Beers and Ilan Goldenberg details the costs of escalation (600 dead soldiers; 3,000 wounded; $10 billion per month) before concluding:

Unfortunately, this investment has yielded no real progress. The President’s policies have failed to bring security to Iraq. The country remains mired in multiple civil wars with Sunnis fighting Shi’a, Sunnis fighting each other in Anbar and Diyala, Shi’a fighting each other in the South, and Kurds fighting Sunnis around Kirkuk and Mosul. Iraqi Security Forces, who are supposed to be taking on greater responsibilities, cannot be trusted to enforce the law fairly, and all too often turn on American troops or take part in sectarian violence. Meanwhile, the Iraqi government is teetering on the verge of collapse. One third of the Cabinet, including the major Sunni party as well as the party of Muqtada Al Sadr, is currently boycotting the government. Without the participation of these groups there can be no meaningful progress on any of the key political benchmarks including the oil law, de-Baathification, or amending the constitution.

See the full report in PDF. What Beers and Goldenberg don’t seem to consider, however, is that by simply adopting new, different benchmarks we can achieve Success By Definition, the ultimate accomplishment of any armed force.

I’d been assuming that the large-scale departures from John McCain’s campaign staff were an essentially controlled phenomenon — a combination of a purge of people McCain had lost faith in and efforts to control costs. But if it’s true that “Late yesterday, McCain and aide Mark Salter telephoned several other top aides to urge them to stay put” then that’s clearly not the case, and things have metastasized beyond that.

Rick Santorum, appearing on the Hugh Hewitt show, predicts “some unfortunate events, that like we’re seeing unfold in the UK” over the next eighteen months or so that are going to lead people to have a “very different view” of the war in Iraq and the vital importance of “confronting Iran in the Middle East.” Avedon Carol wonders if it shouldn’t “concern us that Republicans are constantly talking about how people will all wise up when the next terrorist attack at home comes?” After all, they seem to really be “looking forward to it, and they take great delight in the thought that, by God, people will see things differently when it happens.”

There’s really, even, a larger structural issue here. Namely that while clearly on some level the conservative movement would like to make the country safer from terrorism, on another level everyone knows that mass fear of foreign threats to Americans’ physical security are a boon to the conservative movement’s fortune. On the one hand, this creates systematic incentives to overstate the extent and nature of the real threats facing America. On the other hand, it creates systematic incentives to ensure that such threats as do exist are never ameliorated. In particular, it gives everyone a very strong self-interest in not understanding the extent to which overreacting can be counterproductive since both the overreaction itself and the counterproductive blowback may serve the interests of the Republican Party.