I’m not sure I quite understand where Josef Joffe comes from. Or, rather, why it is that a certain number of editors seem to feel that North America can’t supply a sufficient supply of wingnutty commentary on foreign policy without importing additional labor from Germany. But for whatever reason, Joffe has firmly established himself on the post-9/11 scene as Europe’s premiere purveyor of ludicrous neoconservative arguments. In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal he offered a forecast of the things that would happen if the US were to withdraw from Iraq:

• “Iran advances to No. 1, completing its nuclear-arms program undeterred and unhindered.”
• The Sunni Arab states “are drawn into the Khomeinist orbit.”
• “[E]mboldened jihadi forces shift to Afghanistan and turn it again into a bastion of Terror International”
• “Syria reclaims Lebanon”
• “Hezbollah and Hamas . . . resume their war against Israel”
• “Russia . . . rebuilds its anti-Western alliances”

One might note that Joffe’s thinking about this essentially parallels the paranoid fantasies of the domino theorists, but Joffe actually acknowledges as much but just insists that this time things are different. But this is crazy. Iran may or may not build a nuclear bomb, but our ability to prevent this won’t be seriously impacted by our presence or absence in Iraq. Similarly, anti-Israel violence from Hamas and Hezbollah wax and wane according to those groups’ own imperatives, it has nothing to do with Iraq. And, again, anti-Syrian forces in Lebanon either can or can’t resist Syrian efforts to impose its will. Outside powers like the United States and France may or may not be able to help sympathetic groups in Lebanon. Having tens of thousands of American countries engaged, at great expense, in an unpopular occupation of a nearby country is neither here nor there.

Why would the Sunni Arab states be drawn into the Khomeinist orbit? What would this even mean? Will Hosni Mubarak convert to Shiism? Will the UAE just hand its oil over to Teheran? It’s very hard to imagine any of our friends in the region deciding that Russia would be a more useful ally than the United States, and if Iran already dominates the whole region then it’s hard to believe Russia will be able to dominate it too. By the end, Joffe has the whole world collapsing into anarchy as American hegemony collapses:

For all the damage to Washington’s reputation, nothing of great import can be achieved without, let alone against, the U.S. Can Moscow and Beijing bring peace to Palestine? Or mend a global financial system battered by the subprime crisis? Where are the central banks of Russia and China?

These are good questions, but the answer is, of course, that the United States will still be the world’s primary economic and military power no matter what happens in Iraq. The United States is, simply put, not nearly so fragile as Joffe imagines. We’ll still have our 300 million people and our $13 trillion GDP and our aircraft carriers, universities, etc. All that stuff that made us an important and powerful country in the first place is still here. We’ve been seeing in Iraq that it doesn’t make us omnipotent. Joffe is acting like facing up to that reality in Mesopotamia would somehow reveal all the rest as just a mirage, but it’s all real. America and the world will survive.

One often hears it said that the Israel-Palestine conflict isn’t really about Israeli occupation of the territories conquered in the 1967 war. That Israel is prepared to withdraw from these territories in order to make a secure peace but that, unfortunately, the Palestinians won’t agree. The New Republic‘s editor in chief, Martin Peretz, had one of his occasional posts in which he usefully points out that this isn’t actually the case a couple of days ago:

Greater Jerusalem is still a vague concept and a vaguer reality. But its outlines are clear. There are some contiguous Jewish neighborhoods east of the city proper, big neighborhoods. There is no way these will be forfeited from Israeli under any agreement. Basta! Finito! Gemacht! Dayenu!

These “neighborhoods” are, of course, settlements built on conquered land. Somewhat similarly, although this time not presuming to speak for the Israeli government, Peretz wrote of his desire to maintain Israeli occupation of the Jordan River Valley and to see the population of 10,000 Israeli settlers living there grow.

Kevin Drum and Ilan Goldenberg raise some doubts as to how trustworthy David Petraeus’ much-anticipated September report on the “surge” is really going to be. And, of course, they’re right to. I’m not sure what else one would expect — when people self-evaluate, they usually come up with positive accounts of themselves. Besides which, as long as Petraeus thinks what he’s doing is working on any level, he’s going to decide that he ought to exaggerate how well it’s working in hopes of bolstering support. And, of course, if the war ever does end Petraeus is going to want it to be because politicians decided to end it despite his brilliant successes rather than because he failed.

At any rate, it seems safe to assume that the most recent round of congressional junkets has adequately previewed what we’re going to hear in DC, namely some misleading spinning of the Anbar Awakening plus some unconvincing data about declining civilian casualties plus the usual screwed up political situation.

I keep forgetting to link to something about Zbigniew Brzezinski’s endorsement of Barack Obama. I see this as a significant development. Brzezinski is one of the leading members of what you might call the foreign policy counterestablishment that’s slowly emerged over the past four years. This all dates back, in my experience, to his electrifying October 2003 speech at the New American Strategies conference that was organized in DC by progressives looking to formulate a meaningful challenge to neoconservatism.

Brzezinski fears (and I think it’s a reasonable fear) that Hillary Clinton and her circle is dominated by the kind of people and thinking who played the dominant role in shaping Democratic policies between 9/11 and Kerry’s defeat in 2004 — Ari Berman’s “strategic class” in short.

Via Ezra Klein, Dennis Ross’ plan for Iraq includes the following bright idea: “Second, we should set a date for the convening of a national reconciliation conference. Unlike previous such conferences, it should not be permitted to disband until agreement has been reached.”

How come the Bush administration never thought of that? Previous efforts at reconciliation have failed because nobody ever demanded that the participants not fail. I feel like people who used to be in government service sometimes feel that they had access to some magical diplomatic pixie dust that Robert Blackwill, John Negroponte, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Ryan Crocker unaccountably keep failing to apply. More likely, these people have just been tasked with a series of increasingly-impossible jobs that Dennis Ross would fail at just as badly as anyone else. The real failing in all of this is hubris, an unwillingness to admit that the best thing to do is face up to failure and start trying to make the best of that.

James Fallows reminds us of his fall 2004 piece on Bush’s lost year — the twelve month period during which we could have been putting al-Qaeda out of business, but instead found key resources (most of all, the precious resource of attention) diverted to gearing up for war with Saddam. He remarks:

It is an old story, and it is the fundamental case against Iraq. Not that it was a good idea, poorly executed, that in the right circumstances might have made us safer. Rather, that it was exactly the wrong idea, from the start, because it distracted us from the enemy who had really harmed us, and whom we had a reasonable chance of containing and crushing, and toward an unnecessary fight guaranteed to multiply the number of enemies we faced worldwide. It should be possible to make the case that clearly.

Then again, it should have been possible to make the case in 2004.

I think it’s worth saying that it wasn’t magically “impossible” to make this case in ’04. Indeed, from time to time John Kerry made it. And those tended the most effective moments of his campaign. As in the first debate:

Jim, the president just said something extraordinarily revealing and frankly very important in this debate. In answer to your question about Iraq and sending people into Iraq, he just said, “The enemy attacked us.”

Saddam Hussein didn’t attack us. Osama bin Laden attacked us. Al Qaida attacked us. And when we had Osama bin Laden cornered in the mountains of Tora Bora, 1,000 of his cohorts with him in those mountains. With the American military forces nearby and in the field, we didn’t use the best trained troops in the world to go kill the world’s number one criminal and terrorist.

They outsourced the job to Afghan warlords, who only a week earlier had been on the other side fighting against us, neither of whom trusted each other.

That’s the enemy that attacked us. That’s the enemy that was allowed to walk out of those mountains. That’s the enemy that is now in 60 countries, with stronger recruits.

The problem was that this line of attack, though accurate, politically effective, and reflecting the thinking of some of the people in Kerry’s circle wasn’t clearly the position Kerry had actually taken back in late 2002 and early 2003. Thus, this point got tangled up in the song and dance about flip-flopping and for it before he was against it and the point couldn’t consistently be placed at the center of Kerry’s critique.