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