The Nation‘s David Corn has a copy of a secret government report saying there’s a lot of it. You know what I think a sensible response would be? Engineering the departure of American troops a return to power of discredited former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. There’s nothing like an ex-Baathist whose buddies have, in the past, stolen as much as a billion bucks to help resolve this kind of problem. I’m feeling surge-ilicious already.

Not that I have anything in particular to say about Belgium (took a trip to Brussels one time and found it delightful — I’m personally a huge fan of both Renée Magritte and mussels) but Ingrid Robeyns has an interesting teaser for projected future coverage of Belgian politics:

For those of you in countries where there hasn’t been any reporting – it’s day 82 after the federal elections, and the Flemish and Walloon parties are so bitterly opposed to each other’s demands, that commentators are talking aloud of “the end of Belgium” (which is not going to happen soon, since neither of them wants to give up Brussels – but there are signs that the crisis between the Dutch/Flemish-speaking and Francophone regions is deeper than it has been in decades).

And the more I thought about what I should write, the more it became clear that it’s a complicated issue to write about. One problem is that the interpretations of the political events differ dramatically between the Dutch-language and the Francophone Belgian press – truly as if they are from two different planets – so any (foreign) journalist/reader who masters only one of those two languages will almost inevitably get a distorted or one-sided pictured. Then there is the question whether, as a Flemish person, I can write sufficiently neutral about this.

Whenever I try to chart a course between the “Iraq would have been great if we’d just had smarter people in charge of the occupation” and the “Arabs can’t handle democracy” school of thought, I tend to come back to things like this — the great difficult Belgians have in creating a viable, legitimate binational democratic state. Or think of the Canadians. Or the endless problems in Spain with the Basques. It’s genuinely difficult to work these kinds of things out. And then there’s the former Czechoslovakia where it couldn’t be worked out, or else Northern Ireland where it also couldn’t be worked out but where there proved to be no adequate line of partition. None of these places are precisely like the others, of course, but the general point is just that there’s shouldn’t be anything surprising about the fact that it’s proven very difficult to come up with a vision for Iraq that’s appealing across sectarian and ethnic lines in Iraq.

Brad Plumer sets Jamie Kirchick straight over the latter’s evidence-free assertion that American unions don’t care about their Iraqi counterparts.

Here’s Ilan Goldenberg’s chart of the Pentagon’s changing story about civilian casualties in Iraq:

Hat tip to Brian Katulis at CAP who clued me on to this issue and Spencer Ackerman has already got a great post on this.

Basically there are more serious questions about the violence numbers that are being reported out of Iraq. The Pentagon is congressionally mandated to produce a quarterly progress report to Congress measuring stability in Iraq. Each of these reports has a graphic measuring sectarian violence. The last four reports were August, 29 2006 (pg 35), November 30, 2006 (pg 24), March 2, 2007 (pg 17) and June 7, 2007 (pg 17).

I graphed the levels of sectarian violence from these various reports and found some confusing trends. The abnormalities have been labeled A, B and C. (There is no difference between the November report and the March report and thus they overlap).

It’d be nice to not need to hyper-scrutinize every random bit of official government data this way, but the idea that the Bush administration has no credibility on Iraq isn’t just a cliché — based on his record, one has no choice but to inquire and to be very suspicious.

Via Ilan Goldenberg, a good Jonathan Weisman article in The Washington Post on the truth about congressional delegations to Iraq: “Brief, choreographed and carefully controlled, the codels (short for congressional delegations) often have showed only what the Pentagon and the Bush administration have wanted the lawmakers to see.”

I appreciate Kevin’s point that progressives shouldn’t underestimate the objective political difficulty of taking some of the stands we’d like to see people take. The other side of this, though, is that nervous Democrats seem to me to consistently overrate the political advantages of caving in. Matt Stoller has a great example here in Jason Altmire. He’s a freshman Democrat in a district that leans slightly Republican — a promising pickup opportunity for the GOP. So Altmire wants to be cautious. He went to Iraq, saw the propaganda show there, and returned proclaiming “The president has made the decision to continue the mission at its current level, and I am never going to vote to withhold funding to our brave men and women when they are out in the field of battle serving in harm’s way.”

Has this led the Pennsylvania GOP to laud Altmire as a hero of the Terrorists’ War on Us? Of course not. He’s a freshman Democrat in a vulnerable district, so here he is being fiercely attacked as a an advocate of “surrender,” a proponent of “retreat and defeat,” and of backing a “slow-bleed strategy to choke-off funding for the troops in harm’s way.”

Given the nature of the situation, if Altmire’s position was to the left of where it is, he would have to weather these potentially damaging attacks. But he could also punch back against his attackers as proposing to give a blank check to an incompetent and unpopular president. He could defend the case for withdrawal on the merits, and complaining about wasting the lives of America’s young men and the vast resources of our country on the president’s ego trip. Maybe it would work. Maybe it wouldn’t work. But the line Altmire’s taken hasn’t spared him from the attacks he’s worried about. Instead, it’s only made it harder for him to fight back against the attacks he got.

And that’s the way it goes. If a guy like Joe Lieberman whose seat the GOP couldn’t possibly take wants to shift right then, sure, the Republicans will hail him. But it’s the people with vulnerable seats who are most inclined to do this stuff but it doesn’t convince the Republicans to lay off — they’re not idiots, they go for the low-hanging fruit, not the politicians with the most objectively un-conservative voting record (Democrats unclear on this concept can probably ask Jim Leach for a primer since he’s got spare time on his hands these days).