The Nation‘s David Corn has a copy of a secret government report saying there’s a lot of it. You know what I think a sensible response would be? Engineering the departure of American troops a return to power of discredited former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. There’s nothing like an ex-Baathist whose buddies have, in the past, stolen as much as a billion bucks to help resolve this kind of problem. I’m feeling surge-ilicious already.

Not that I have anything in particular to say about Belgium (took a trip to Brussels one time and found it delightful — I’m personally a huge fan of both Renée Magritte and mussels) but Ingrid Robeyns has an interesting teaser for projected future coverage of Belgian politics:

For those of you in countries where there hasn’t been any reporting – it’s day 82 after the federal elections, and the Flemish and Walloon parties are so bitterly opposed to each other’s demands, that commentators are talking aloud of “the end of Belgium” (which is not going to happen soon, since neither of them wants to give up Brussels – but there are signs that the crisis between the Dutch/Flemish-speaking and Francophone regions is deeper than it has been in decades).

And the more I thought about what I should write, the more it became clear that it’s a complicated issue to write about. One problem is that the interpretations of the political events differ dramatically between the Dutch-language and the Francophone Belgian press – truly as if they are from two different planets – so any (foreign) journalist/reader who masters only one of those two languages will almost inevitably get a distorted or one-sided pictured. Then there is the question whether, as a Flemish person, I can write sufficiently neutral about this.

Whenever I try to chart a course between the “Iraq would have been great if we’d just had smarter people in charge of the occupation” and the “Arabs can’t handle democracy” school of thought, I tend to come back to things like this — the great difficult Belgians have in creating a viable, legitimate binational democratic state. Or think of the Canadians. Or the endless problems in Spain with the Basques. It’s genuinely difficult to work these kinds of things out. And then there’s the former Czechoslovakia where it couldn’t be worked out, or else Northern Ireland where it also couldn’t be worked out but where there proved to be no adequate line of partition. None of these places are precisely like the others, of course, but the general point is just that there’s shouldn’t be anything surprising about the fact that it’s proven very difficult to come up with a vision for Iraq that’s appealing across sectarian and ethnic lines in Iraq.

Brad Plumer sets Jamie Kirchick straight over the latter’s evidence-free assertion that American unions don’t care about their Iraqi counterparts.

Here’s Ilan Goldenberg’s chart of the Pentagon’s changing story about civilian casualties in Iraq:

Hat tip to Brian Katulis at CAP who clued me on to this issue and Spencer Ackerman has already got a great post on this.

Basically there are more serious questions about the violence numbers that are being reported out of Iraq. The Pentagon is congressionally mandated to produce a quarterly progress report to Congress measuring stability in Iraq. Each of these reports has a graphic measuring sectarian violence. The last four reports were August, 29 2006 (pg 35), November 30, 2006 (pg 24), March 2, 2007 (pg 17) and June 7, 2007 (pg 17).

I graphed the levels of sectarian violence from these various reports and found some confusing trends. The abnormalities have been labeled A, B and C. (There is no difference between the November report and the March report and thus they overlap).

It’d be nice to not need to hyper-scrutinize every random bit of official government data this way, but the idea that the Bush administration has no credibility on Iraq isn’t just a cliché — based on his record, one has no choice but to inquire and to be very suspicious.

Via Ilan Goldenberg, a good Jonathan Weisman article in The Washington Post on the truth about congressional delegations to Iraq: “Brief, choreographed and carefully controlled, the codels (short for congressional delegations) often have showed only what the Pentagon and the Bush administration have wanted the lawmakers to see.”

I appreciate Kevin’s point that progressives shouldn’t underestimate the objective political difficulty of taking some of the stands we’d like to see people take. The other side of this, though, is that nervous Democrats seem to me to consistently overrate the political advantages of caving in. Matt Stoller has a great example here in Jason Altmire. He’s a freshman Democrat in a district that leans slightly Republican — a promising pickup opportunity for the GOP. So Altmire wants to be cautious. He went to Iraq, saw the propaganda show there, and returned proclaiming “The president has made the decision to continue the mission at its current level, and I am never going to vote to withhold funding to our brave men and women when they are out in the field of battle serving in harm’s way.”

Has this led the Pennsylvania GOP to laud Altmire as a hero of the Terrorists’ War on Us? Of course not. He’s a freshman Democrat in a vulnerable district, so here he is being fiercely attacked as a an advocate of “surrender,” a proponent of “retreat and defeat,” and of backing a “slow-bleed strategy to choke-off funding for the troops in harm’s way.”

Given the nature of the situation, if Altmire’s position was to the left of where it is, he would have to weather these potentially damaging attacks. But he could also punch back against his attackers as proposing to give a blank check to an incompetent and unpopular president. He could defend the case for withdrawal on the merits, and complaining about wasting the lives of America’s young men and the vast resources of our country on the president’s ego trip. Maybe it would work. Maybe it wouldn’t work. But the line Altmire’s taken hasn’t spared him from the attacks he’s worried about. Instead, it’s only made it harder for him to fight back against the attacks he got.

And that’s the way it goes. If a guy like Joe Lieberman whose seat the GOP couldn’t possibly take wants to shift right then, sure, the Republicans will hail him. But it’s the people with vulnerable seats who are most inclined to do this stuff but it doesn’t convince the Republicans to lay off — they’re not idiots, they go for the low-hanging fruit, not the politicians with the most objectively un-conservative voting record (Democrats unclear on this concept can probably ask Jim Leach for a primer since he’s got spare time on his hands these days).

I think Bill Richardson is asking good questions:

In the most recent debate, he asked the other major candidates a clear question: how many troops would you leave behind and for how long? We have yet to hear an answer.

All the major Democratic candidates say they are eager to end this war, and they all say they don’t believe there is a military solution in Iraq. Why, then, do they maintain that we must leave an indefinite number of troops behind for an indeterminate amount of time to work hopelessly towards a military solution everyone says doesn’t exist?

Richardson, as he points out, stands for a complete withdrawal from Iraq — the only policy that can reasonably follow from the premises that Clinton, Obama, and Edwards have all joined him in endorsing and the only one that lives up to the promises all three have made to end the war. I’m not sure many liberals have really grasped how absurd it is that we seem destined to witness a 2008 campaign in which both major party nominees support continuing the war. Nor do the Clinton/Obama/Edwards camps seem to have given serious consideration to the fact that their general election adversary will probably find it relatively easy to ridicule this “end the war, but keep fighting it” stance the Democrats have all adopted.

It looks like the Iranian nuclear program is only advancing sluggishly and that some Iranian elites are wondering if it really makes sense to continue down this path. Of course, one way to convince them to do so would be to start bombing their country. But I guess since they’re “already at war with us” we have no choice, right?

Via Josh Marshall, state of the art Iraq talking points:

The Nevada Republican, who returned Tuesday from his fourth trip to Iraq, met with U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus, U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker, Iraqi Deputy President Tariq al-Hashimi and Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh.

“To a person, they said there would be genocide, gas prices in the U.S. would rise to eight or nine dollars a gallon, al-Qaida would continue its expansion, and Iran would take over that portion of the world if we leave,” Porter said Wednesday in a phone interview from Las Vegas.

Josh focused on the oddity of Petraeus and Crocker suddenly becoming commodity market analysts, but one really has to wonder how Iran and al-Qaeda are supposed to simultaneously seize control of Iraq.

Kyle Teamey, writing in The Washington Post, laments the existence of political democracy in the United States:

While debate over a war’s merits — and whether to withdraw — is a sign of a healthy democracy, Iraq unfortunately highlights many of the difficulties a democracy faces in a long-term counterinsurgency or nation-building campaign. Such debate can be detrimental to the battle for perceptions.

Well, maybe he doesn’t lament its existence, but he does think it has some regrettable downsides. But is this really true? It seems to me that the truth of the matter is that counterinsurgency is very hard. Democracies have wages successful counterinsurgency campaigns (the British in Malaya is the classic examples) and dictatorships have lost counterinsurgency campaigns. Indeed, the story of modern losing counterinsurgency starts with Napoleonic France fighting and losing in Spain. One could also consider Portugal (then a semi-fascist dictatorship) losing control of its African colonies. Or, of course, the Soviet Union losing in Afghanistan. There is, overall, very little evidence I can see in favor of tyranny as a counterinsurgency strategy.

The main thing is that it helps to not be an alien occupier fighting a native resistance movement. You see some arguably successful counterinsurgencies in Latin America where there wasn’t a difference in nationality between the parties, and you see the British succeeding in rallying the mostly Malay population of Malaya against the mostly Chinese insurgents. Now, arguably, genocide works as a counter-insurgency strategy. Even here, though, a very liberal approach to killing people didn’t ultimately preserve Hutu Power in Rwanda. The big success stories of genocide-as-counterinsurgency were conducted by democracies — the United States and Australia against the native inhabitants of those countries (needless to say, conducting genocidal warfare against the population of Iraq would be immoral and I strongly oppose such policies). Either way, the idea that tyranny is a useful counterinsurgency tool seems to be mostly pernicious myth.

This all via Ezra Klein who aptly characterizes one of Teamey’s subsidiary points (“the appearance of strength or weakness is often much more important than actual strength or weakness”) as arguing that hope is a plan after all.

Karen DeYoung and Thomas Ricks in The Washington Post have a great piece about a draft GAO report that says the administration is full of it on progress in Iraq (though not quite in so many words). The report was leaked by officials who (correctly) fear that the administration will water it down or use the classification process to obscure key findings.

As usual with these things, the question is whether the press can not merely break the big story, but then incorporate this information into future reporting about administration claims.

So how about that political progress in Iraq? Well, Time says it’s actually a fraud. See more from Kevin Drum, Marc Lynch, and Ilan Goldenberg. Basically, the Iraqi cabinet seems to have cobbled something meaningless together so that Ryan Crocker can go before congress and say that just when it looked like the administration was going to need to report (fake) security progress but no political progress — bam! — in the nick of time along comes some (fake) political progress.

The difference, one assumes, is that Crocker and Petraeus won’t be mentioning the part about how it’s all fake. Then whatever they say, Bush will further exaggerate three or four notches, while Dick Cheney goes for five or six and Condoleezza Rice keeps her reasonable rep by leaving it at one or two notches of additional misleadingness. I’m excited. Have I mentioned that Bush wants $50 billio more dollars and that maybe all this cash we’ve been throwing away on Iraq had instead funding productive investments (be they public or private sector) wages might be going up instead of down?

Justin Logan makes a good, if provocative, point about the president’s overblown rhetoric on Iraq has the effect of amplifying Osama bin Laden’s propaganda. We shouldn’t be sending people the message that al-Qaeda really is on the verge of seizing control over Iraq’s oil resources and building a universal Caliphate. The people who blow themselves up for al-Qaeda’s sake are murdering people, but they’re not accomplishing anything and they’re certainly not right around the corner from world domination and people need to know that.

They say that when the only thing you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When it comes to Afghanistan, though, we actually do have tools available to us besides monomaniacal focus on poppy eradication. Unfortunately, as Sameer Lalwani explains, to the relevant American policymakers, everything related to Afghanistan still looks like monomaniacal focus on poppy eradication when what’s needed is a much more pragmatic and comprehensive approach to trying to offer some stability.

It’s hard in many ways to express exactly how deeply crackpottery has bored into America’s discourse over national security. Take, for example, Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy. The good news is that most of the stuff they publish isn’t nearly as crazy as the column calling for the nuclear destruction of Iraq followed by Bush installing himself as a military dictator. That said, a good deal of it isn’t that much less unhinged. Caroline Glick, for example, wrote yesterday not merely that she disagrees with Mohammed ElBarredei’s approach to non-proliferation policy, but that he has deliberately “used his power to facilitate the proliferation of nuclear energy for military purposes.” Her key piece of evidence for this claim was a breathtaking bit of up-is-downism:

Take Iraq for example. Right up to the US-British invasion of Iraq in March 2003, ElBaradei consistently maintained that he either couldn’t tell if Iraq was or was not pursuing nuclear weapons, or that he could see no evidence that Saddam Hussein was pursuing nuclear weapons. Indeed, just before the war, in an effort to scuttle US-British efforts to convince the UN Security Council to pass a new resolution approving the use of force against Saddam Hussein’s regime, ElBaradei reported to the Security Council that Iraq had abandoned its nuclear weapons program.

Needless to say, the reason ElBarredei shifted over time from “it’s uncertain” to “there’s no evidence” to “there’s no program” is that there was no program, as became clear the more the IAEA learned about the situation in Iraq. This appeared not on some random person’s website, but in a daily newspaper, The Jerusalem Post, written by the senior fellow for Middle East affairs of a think tank that boasts an endorsement from the Vice President of the United States.