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.