The estimable Joseph Cirincione makes the case for a more ambitious non-proliferation policy:

There is now a flurry of efforts crossing party and ideological lines to reduce the number of nuclear weapons and the number of nations that have nuclear weapons. Most prominent is the appeal this January from Democrats William Perry and Sam Nunn and Republicans George Schultz and Henry Kissinger for €œa world free of nuclear weapons.€ These veteran cold warriors strongly supported the nuclear build-ups of the past. Now, their action plan includes many of the elements of the early Truman era: deep cuts in existing arsenals, a global ban on nuclear tests, a halt in production of new weapon materials, and international control of the entire uranium enrichment process, including the formation of an international fuel bank for nuclear reactors. Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohammed ElBaradei urges similar steps, as do projects from a dozen research institutes. And some members of Congress and presidential contenders have picked up parts of these proposals.

He says the country’s political leadership should pick up on these cues and show some international leadership. I should add that while I wouldn’t want to call Cirincione deeply unserious, that along with mocking Very Serious People in the national security world it would do this blog good to point out some good ones, and Cirincione’s on that list.

This op-ed came out a couple of days ago, but I find the argument from Wesley Clark and Kal Raustiala that terrorists are criminals, not soldiers and deserve to be treated as such has a great deal of merit. There was this fad, post-9/11, for deciding that treating terrorism as a “miltiary” rather than a “law enforcement” problem would constitute getting serious about it, but that’s mostly proven to be a huge fiasco.

Now, of course, the “law enforcement” problem of Osama bin Laden ran into the snag that he was located in a country whose de facto government was protecting him and encouraging his activities. That — Taliban control of Afghanistan — was properly defined as a military issue, but it’s been a huge mistake to take the view that, in general, we’re in a “war” with what amounts to an unusually bloodthirsty but only medium-sized criminal syndicate.

Let me note something else from the O’Pollahan appearance on Fox News Sunday. First, O’Hanlon concedes that there’s been no political progress in Iraq. Then Pollack concedes the same. Then he says that “this level of political stalemate is absolutely unacceptable. And I agree with Mike entirely that we can’t give this much more time.” So, if in a few months things aren’t any better then it’s time to leave, right? No, of course, not. As is well known, integral to being Very Serious is the idea that tomorrow is never the right day to end the massive American military presence in Iraq. Instead, Pollack says that “the administration needs to be pushing much harder and maybe even thinking about, if the surge continues to work in terms of providing security, can we move to a different government, one that actually would be able to strike these hard bargains.”

Chris Wallace, journalistic instincts perking up at the sight of a newsworthy coup proposal asks “When you say a different government, meaning ousting Maliki and putting another man in?” Pollack, because he’s a smart guy recognizes that this is a bad idea and says he “wouldn’t necessarily suggest that the United States try to oust anyone” since, after all, “Our experience of ousting foreign leaders has been a very bad one.” At this point, however, he proceeds to suggest ousting Maliki:

But I think what we could do is go to the Iraqis and say, “Look, you’re planning to have national elections in 2009. This government is deadlocked. It can’t do it. You need to move those national level elections up and get a new parliament, hopefully one that actually can produce real results.”

Will we be giving the Iraqi electorate explicit instructions on who they’re supposed to vote for in these elections?

I finally took the opportunity to watch Chris Wallace’s Fox News Sunday interview with Kenneth Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon and it includes this intriguing dialogue:

WALLACE: Now, am I right that both of you are supporting Senator Clinton’s campaign for president? Is that correct?

O’HANLON: It’s correct in my case.

POLLACK: I think that we…

WALLACE: You don’t have to announce right now if you don’t want to, Ken. But go ahead.

POLLACK: I was just going to say, we both work at the Brookings Institution. It’s a non-partisan organization. We make our calls based on what we see.

If you watch the video clip, Pollack appears to be stifling an affirmative answer, but I’m not sure. My main focus, however, is on O’Hanlon due to the previously declared Michael O’Hanlon Primary. Obviously, O’Hanlon endorsing Clinton isn’t the same as Clinton promising to give O’Hanlon a high-level position, but it’s not all that different either.

Ken Pollack, interviewed by Bernard Gwertzman of CFR, tells presidential candidates they should just not talk about Iraq “until early 2008,” which would certainly be helpful to a certain vulnerable-on-Iraq front-runner I can think of.

When Ezra Klein read yesterday’s New York Times article on a British commander asking US Special Forces to get out of his AOR and stop bombing so much, he recommended my old Guardian column on the trouble with air power in Afghanistan.

The Guardian, by contrast, asked me to do a new piece on the situation.

Justin Logan notes neoconservative Eli Lake’s Bloggingheadsed definition of “victory” in Iraq as “€œavoiding a competitive, confessional genocide.”

I continue to want to point out that there’s no particular reason to believe that the alternative to an endless US military presence in Iraq is genocide. As Daniel Chirot & Clark McCauley point out in their excellent study Why Not Kill Them All? The Logic and Prevention of Mass Political Murder, genocide is by no means the typical response to civil conflict between ethnic groups and the odds of a particular conflict avoiding a degeneration to that point can be significantly enhanced by outside actors without resort to direct armed intervention.

James Fallows notes a minor glitch in the PRC’s censorship efforts, as International Olympic Commission chief Jacques Rogge’s statement that, in Jim’s paraphrase,”the air in Beijing was so bad that some events (like, the ones where athletes have to breathe) might have to be postponed” slips through the cracks.

China’s apparent inability to get the situation under control on a sustainable basis is going to lead them to try out some experiments in authoritarian environmental protection like “ordering half of Beijing’s cars off the road for a few days, to see how much difference it makes in pollution” to see if that can take care of their Olympic problems.

Photo by Flickr user Kevin Dooley used under a Creative Commons license