Via Daniel Levy, the UK House of Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs looks back at the West’s recent handling of the Israeli-Arab conflict:

We conclude that the decision to boycott Hamas despite the Mecca agreement and the continued suspension of aid to the national unity Government meant that this Government was highly likely to collapse. We further conclude that whilst the international community was not the root cause of the intra-Palestinian violence, it failed to take the necessary steps to reduce the risk of such violence occurring.

Given the failure of the boycott to deliver results, we recommend that the Government should urgently consider ways of engaging politically with moderate elements within Hamas as a way of encouraging it to meet the three Quartet principles. We conclude that any attempts to pursue a ‘West Bank first’ policy would risk further jeopardising the peace process. We recommend that the Government urge President Abbas to come to a negotiated settlement with Hamas with a view to re-establishing a national unity Government across the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

That seems completely sound to me. Even if you disagree, there’s no denying that there’s something bracing — from an American perspective — about exercises like this one, or like the one the Knesset undertook after the 2006 war in Lebanon. The Bush administration has shifted its policies around here and there since 9/11, and the press has always been eager to exaggerate the scope of these course-corrections, but none of the efforts to change direction — even the real ones — have involved any kind of serious effort to come to terms with the errors of the past.

Brink Lindsey points out that if you dig into the transcript of the interview that the now-famous video comes from, it turns out that Cheney’s changed his tune on Iran as well.

The AP reports on some big news: “The Iraqi prime minister and president announced a new alliance of moderate Shiites and Kurds in a push to save the crumbing government Thursday, saying a key Sunni bloc refused to join but the door remained open to them [...] Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said the new agreement was the first step to unblock political stagnation that has gripped his Shiite-led government since it first took power in May 2006.” In fact, though, there’s nothing to it. Eric Martin says: “So it’s not necessarily a new alliance, just the remnants of the old alliance with a generous application of glitzy lipstick.”

I don’t actually see any lipstick here. This is the same coalition of SCIRI (now with a new name, though) and Dawa that’s been running the show ever since Iyad Allawi got tossed. They also have the parliamentary votes of the Kurdish parties in exchange for the government permitting de facto autonomy for a Kurdistan run by those two parties. Sunnis and Sadrists alike will regard the central government as a Kurdish-American plot to destroy the country and violence will continue. Insofar as the central government ever does get close to consolidating power, that’ll just expose the simmering tensions inside the rump coalition — the looking Kirkuk referendum is an obvious potential flashpoint.

Robert Farley notes that the US-India nuclear deal is so one-sided and favorable to India that it’s hard for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to convince parliament that the deal really says what he says it says.

I don’t blame politicians for not having off-the-shelf brilliant solutions to the question of what our policy toward Pakistan should be, but Ilan Goldenberg’s surely right that something’s amiss when Rudy Giuliani spends 6,000 words on foreign policy and doesn’t mention Pakistan at all.

This, though, is the neocon two-step we’ve been living with for years. Despite the talk of “The Terrorists’ War on Us” the folks Giuliani has associated himself with don’t care about al-Qaeda terrorism. Before 9/11 they mostly wanted a war with China, and then secondarily wars with Iraq, Iran, and Syria. These days, it’s more like they primarily want a war with Iran and Syria (they already got Iraq) with China and maybe Russia as second-tier priorities. Fighting al-Qaeda isn’t even a close second — it’s just not on the map.

Jonathan Weisman and Karen DeYoung refer to the upcoming September reports on Iraq as “widely considered a make-or-break assessment of Bush’s war strategy.” But why should that be. Report or no report, Bush is still president, Democrats still have so many votes in congress, and fundamentally there’s no reason for anything to change. In the next graf, they acknowledge this (“Lawmakers from both parties are growing worried that the report — far from clarifying the United States’ future in Iraq — will only harden the political battle lines around the war”) but the rest of their reporting on the hard-fought battles about the details of staging the report’s presentation make it seem as if folks on the Hill really do see this as a make or break turning point.

But as we read yesterday, the reports are being written by the White House. This is, in my view, appropriate. Petraeus and Crocker work for Bush and it’s always been silly to portray them as independent actors. But the point is that there’s no independent assessment here — the White House is going to make an official statement of the White House’s assessment of the situation and why the White House believes its official assessment supports the policies the White House favors. All that’s fine, and insofar as the White House is persuasive it should sway people. But we’ve already seen what the White House talking points on the surge are — tribal alliances in Anbar Province, unsupported claims that civilian casualties are declining, plus we need more time for progress on the political front to take hold — there’s no particular reason to wait with baited breath to see how they format the official document.

Gary Farber emailed last night “Just a quick note to say that I’m really surprised how
few major left/liberal bloggers have blogged this Wall
Street Journal page one story today. I’m surprised, too! I missed it somehow until this morning I saw it as a day two story in the Post. This seems important. Check out Gary’s post here.

The bottom-line is that all kinds of restrictions on satellite surveillance are being lifted. This has potentially enormous consequences when you consider that as good as satellite imagery and so forth is today, it’s likely to be much better in a few years.

I overheard this on The Daily Show playing in the room next door, and now Fallows is linking to it, too. I dunno why it seems to have just surfaced today, but check it out:

The speaker is Dick Cheney in 1994, pointing out that marching on Baghdad and deposing Saddam Hussein would likely lead to some kind of “quagmire.”