The Brookings Institution invites me to an event:

The nation is now readying itself to assess America’s Iraq policy against the progress report General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker present to Congress. On September 13, leading Brookings experts representing a uniquely broad spectrum of views will examine the implications of a pivotal Iraq progress report. Specifically, they will review the details of the surge report card; assess if President Bush’s “surge” strategy is working; should be modified or abandoned; and provide an assessment of the way ahead in Iraq.

Participants will include Philip H. Gordon, senior fellow; Michael O’Hanlon, senior fellow; Kenneth M. Pollack, senior fellow and director of research, Saban Center for Middle East Policy; Bruce Riedel, senior fellow; and Peter Rodman, senior fellow. Brookings President Strobe Talbott will provide introductory remarks. Carlos Pascual, vice president and director of Foreign Policy Studies, will moderate the panel. After the program, panelists will take audience questions.

And a broad range of views it is indeed. From Philip “Iraq: Why France Should Join the Coalition” Gordon on the left, to Peter “Some opponents of the Iraq war are toying with the idea of American defeat” Rodman on the right, all kinds of different Iraq hawks will be on the panel.

UPDATE: Bruce Reidel, it should be said, is a good guy. Still, this overall situation is absurd. Would it really kill them to invite people representing an actual broad range of views?

Speaking of the weird Iraq debate inside the Democratic primary, one notable characteristic has been a tendency by some of the candidates to plead logistical incapacity to leave quickly. As Lawrence J. Korb, Max Bergmann, Sean Duggan, and Peter Juul argue in a Center for American Progress report, this is basically BS: “It is certainly possible to conduct a rapid withdrawal of U.S. forces, in perhaps as short a time as three months if the U.S. military (in the words of Iraq war veteran and military analyst Phillip Carter) were to effectively conduct an ‘invasion in reverse.’” That said, I also tend to agree with them that a somewhat more measured pace of redeployment would be wiser, if only because it can be conducted in a more orderly manner:

Deciding between a swift or extended redeployment, however, is a false dilemma. While both options are logistically feasible, this report will demonstrate that an orderly and safe withdrawal is best achieved over a 10- to 12-month period. Written in consultation with military planners and logistics experts, this report is not intended to serve as a playbook for our military planners but rather as a guide to policymakers and the general public about what is realistically achievable. A massive, yet safe and orderly redeployment of U.S. forces, equipment, and support personnel is surely daunting—but it is well within the exceptional logistical capabilities of the U.S. military.

The full report is here in PDF and here’s an MP3 of a conference call on the report.

Related to today’s Bremer versus Bush sniping, check out The Atlantic re-posted December 2005 James Fallows article “Why Iraq Has No Army” (short version: because Bush is a bad President, and his key subordinates are also bad at their jobs).

Ilan Goldenberg counts the ways. It seems that when a Shiite kills a Shiite (as happens frequently in the south) that doesn’t count. Similarly, when a Sunni kills a Sunni, that doesn’t count. Nor does it count when the death was caused by a car bomb since, obvious, well, um, I couldn’t even say. The exclusion of Shiite-on-Shiite and Sunni-on-Sunni violence seems like a clever-if-underhanded exploitation of critics’ tendency to deploy the phrase “sectarian violence” even though there’s a lot of politically motivated violence that isn’t sectarian in nature. The car bomb exclusion seems entirely unprincipled.

Another day, another Mike O’Hanlon op-ed in The New York Times. Looking at his chart and comparing August 2006 to August 2007, it’s shocking how non-impressive the quantifiable measures of progress are. O’Hanlon once again doesn’t address criticisms of his civilian casualties figures. He acknowledges that the political situation is FUBAR. He doesn’t remark on whether he sees the dramatic rise in the number of Iraqis held captive by the US — from 27,000 a year ago to 60,000 today — as progress or what.

I almost missed the key point because the article’s written in feature style rather than with a standard inverted pyramid lead, but Sudarsan Raghavan’s story in The Washington Post contains what certainly looks like a well-documented charge that General Petraeus is creating Potemkin villages in Iraq:

Nearly every week, American generals and politicians visit Combat Outpost Gator, nestled behind a towering blast wall in the Dora market. They arrive in convoys of armored Humvees, sometimes accompanied by helicopter gunships, to see what U.S. commanders display as proof of the effectiveness of a seven-month-long security offensive, fueled by 30,000 U.S. reinforcements. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. military leader in Iraq, frequently cites the market as a sign of progress.

“This is General Petraeus’s baby,” said Staff Sgt. Josh Campbell, 24, of Winfield, Kan., as he set out on a patrol near the market on a hot evening in mid-August. [...]

Even U.S. soldiers assigned to protect Petraeus’s showcase remain skeptical. “Personally, I think it’s a false representation,” Campbell said, referring to the portrayal of the Dora market as an emblem of the surge’s success. “But what can I say? I’m just doing my job and don’t ask questions.”

The article goes on to make clear that though visitors see what they’re told is a marketplace returning to life thanks to American security measures, no such thing is actually happening. The marketplace is, in fact, kept safe through a combination of massive influx of American manpower, severe restraints on the operations of the Iraqi police, and draconian security measures. These last (“Vehicles are not allowed inside for fear of car bombs. Customers are body-searched at checkpoints”) render the marketplace non-viable as an actual venue for commerce. Many of the 300+ stores are said not to sell any meaningful goods, and the whole thing only stays open for a few hours. The businesses are viable under these conditions because of large American cash subsidies and direct expenditures on capital improvements. Thus, when visitors are brought by during the market’s few open hours, they see what appears to be a viable marketplace, even though it is, in fact, no such thing.

I read Greg Sargent’s trenchant analysis of the media’s coverage of the “surge” the other day, and while I agree with essentially all the points he made, it is worth saying that the past couple of weeks have seen quite a few great articles like this one from Raghavan, the AP and McClatchey looking at casualty counts, etc. This really is one of those times when press critics in the blogosphere would have basically nothing to run with if not for our ability to leverage other, better articles like Raghavan’s against the worse coverage.

Yes, it’s a bit like picking sides in the Iran-Iraq War. Nevertheless, in light of the President’s efforts to convince the country that he has no idea why the Iraqi Army was disbanded, Paul Bremer’s decision to unleash the documentary evidence to The New York Times is certainly of interest. Bremer seems to have the goods here:

“We must make it clear to everyone that we mean business: that Saddam and the Baathists are finished,” Mr. Bremer wrote in a letter that was drafted on May 20, 2003, and sent to the president on May 22 through Donald H. Rumsfeld, then secretary of defense.

After recounting American efforts to remove members of the Baath Party of Saddam Hussein from civilian agencies, Mr. Bremer told Mr. Bush that he would “parallel this step with an even more robust measure” to dismantle the Iraq military.

One day later, Mr. Bush wrote back a short thank you letter. “Your leadership is apparent,” the president wrote. “You have quickly made a positive and significant impact. You have my full support and confidence.”

Of course, maybe when Bush said Bremer had his “full support and confidence” as he conducted these measures he had his fingers crossed behind his back and didn’t really mean it. Bet the liberal media didn’t consider that angle.

The Washington Post takes a look at the final days of shooting on The Wire and reveals a little bit of irony: “For the past two years, a good chunk of “The Wire,” the HBO show that critics have praised for the grittiness of its inner-city vérité, has been filmed in an anonymous soundstage in the burbs — a soundstage that reportedly will be turned into a massive Wegmans Food Market.”

Nir Rosen’s super-pessimistic take is a useful corrective to the happy-talk prevailing in the District. Of course, maybe Bush’s surprise visit to Iraq will singlehandedly inspire the troops to acquire magical powers that conjure up forces of liberalism and compromise, thus laying the groundwork for stability.