Whoever David Gardner is, I don’t think I’ve ever read him before. Judging by this Financial Times column, I probably should start:

It turns out those Kalashnikovs went missing on his previous watch, as trainer-in-chief of the still barely existent Iraqi army. Gen Petraeus, a student of counterinsurgency with a PhD from Princeton and a gift for PR, had been lionised for his command of the 101st Airborne division in 2003-04, and especially his “hearts and minds” campaign in the north. After his withdrawal, however, two-thirds of Mosul’s security forces defected to the insurgency and the rest went down like fairground ducks. His forces appear not to have noticed, moreover, that Saudi-inspired jihadis had established a bridgehead in Mosul before the war had even started.

But US commanders seem to have no trouble detecting the hand of Tehran everywhere. This largely evidence-free blaming of serial setbacks on Iranian forces is a bad case of denial. First, the insurgency is overwhelmingly Iraqi and Sunni, built around a new generation of jihadis created by the US invasion. Second, to the extent foreign fighters are involved these have come mostly from US-allied and Sunni Saudi Arabia, not Shia Iran. Third, the lethal roadside bombs with shaped charges that US officials have coated with a spurious veneer of sophistication to prove Iranian provenance are mostly made by Iraqi army-trained engineers – from high explosive looted from those unsecured arms dumps.

Shia Iran has backed a lot of horses in Iraq. If it wished to bring what remains of the country down around US ears it could. It has not done so. The plain fact is that Tehran’s main clients in Iraq are the same as Washington’s: Mr Maliki’s Da’wa and the Supreme Islamic Council of Iraq led by Abdelaziz al-Hakim. Iran has bet less on the unpredictable Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi army, which has, in any case, largely stood aside during the present troop surge.

Well-said. One worries, however, that the relentless blaming of things on Iran is more than a bad case of denial. Justin Logan, for example, notes Max Boot saying of Syria and Iran “Why we’re not at war with them is a little bit of a mystery.” Boot, obtained a position as a Senior Fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations on the strength of his work for the legendarily rigorous Wall Street Journal editorial page, so he must be a person we should take very seriously.

DoD photo by Master Sgt. Robert W. Valenca, U.S. Air Force.

And you can’t take it out of foreign policy, either, as Moira Whelan argues. The idea that national security issues can or should exist in some pristine universe beyong the petty cut-and-thrust of actually existing American politics is dumb and counterproductive.

Great column from the deeply unserious Nicholas Kristof:

At the end of the day, we have only so much money and so much energy. One option is to continue to devote $10 billion a month and countless lives to Iraq in hopes that our luck will somehow turn. Or we could devote those sums to health care at home and humanitarian programs all around the world €” because in the long run, the best hope to defeat the jihadis worldwide isn€™t to drop bombs but to build schools.

With the caveat that I actually think the schools-jihadism connection is widely misunderstood, this is precisely right. When I read something like Anthony Cordesman’s report on Iraq I doubt not so much his analysis of Iraq, as his Policy Analysis 101 skills: “there is still a tenuous case for strategic patience in Iraq . . . strategic patience is a high risk strategy . . . trends are uncertain . . . there is a window of opportunity that could significantly improve the chances of US success in Iraq if the Iraqi government acts upon it.”

None of that actually sounds like a properly assembled case for strategic patience to me. One doesn’t, ordinarily, advocate extremely costly courses of action with low odds of success merely on the grounds that expending gargantuan sums of resources “could significantly improve the chances” of the policy working. By that standard, you could justify doing anything at all.

U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Summer M. Anderson

An excellent Washington Post op-ed by Paul Saunders makes the key point against fashionable schemes for a Concert of Democracies: “Moreover, trying to create a ‘Concert of Democracies’ inevitably invites a ‘Concert of Non-Democracies,’ which could be very damaging to American interests and values.” Indeed, I would say that it would not just invite but in many ways force the leading non-members to form an alternative club. The nominal rationale for doing this is that autocratic UN members can block humanitarian action, but as Saunders writes:

Nor would the world be safer for democracy. In fact, it would be far harder to promote economic development, political change or human rights in an increasingly divided and unstable world. The great global advance of democracy occurred during the relative peace and prosperity after the end of the Cold War — not during the struggle between the U.S. and Soviet blocs.

Exactly. It’s wildly underappreciated, but far and away the best thing we can do for the spread of democracy and human rights around the world is to do what we can to avoid a return to a situation where developing countries were perennially finding themselves playing the role of staging-ground for superpower proxy wars. For the US and China, or the US and Russia to shift from the current mode of wary peace to actual hostility would be a fiasco much, much greater than any sin of omission that might be caused by deference to international law.