Brendan Green in comments ads some context to my mild surprise that Stephen Biddle doesn’t think the upshot of his views is that we need to leave Iraq:

At APSA last weekend, biddle indicated that his personal view was that we should leave. But for Very Serious reasons, he feels he should maintain that the surge is an intellectually serious longshot (with a 10% chance of success he hazards) for those who think the costs of leaving are unbearable. More fairly, he also wants to cut the ground out from under the middle options, in the hopes that people will draw your obvious conclusion.

That strikes me as a bit of an odd approach. Also: Did Biddle really say that? I’m pretty sure more than one reader of this blog was at APSA.

Presumably OBL is going to emphasize how eager he is to drive the US out of Iraq, thus bolstering Bush’s argument that we need to stay in Iraq, thus continuing the weird years-long collaboration between Bush and bin Laden where both men do everything in thor power to keep the US stuck in Iraq forever.

Andrew seems to see more than I did in Sidney Blumenthal’s report into information the president apparently got from Naji Sabri about Saddam’s WMD programs. The essential problem here is that Sabri was Saddam Hussein’s foreign minister. Obviously, in retrospect we know that Sabri’s claims that Iraq had no WMD were completely accurate. But given the context, the fact that Sabri said Iraq had no WMD had no real probative value. In particular, the headline “Bush knew Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction” seems incredibly overblown. What Bush “knew” was that Saddam’s foreign minister said Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction, which isn’t at all the same thing.

The emphasis Blumenthal puts on the notion that this allegedly vital Sabri information was withheld from congress seems to me to let members of congress who voted for the war off the hook way too easily. Nobody who believed Saddam had an advanced nuclear weapons program would have been shaken from this belief by Sabri’s denials. Meanwhile, anyone who read the information that was provided to congress could have seen that the White House was significantly overstating the case on a variety of fronts. The problem was that all-too-many members of congress either didn’t check the information, didn’t care about the truth, or didn’t want to know too much lest it trouble their conscience as they cast votes out of political opportunism.

This came up in my diavlog debate on Iraq with Jon Chait, but I find it striking how much the non-demagogic arguments in favor of staying in Iraq sound like arguments in favor of leaving. You get things like Anthony Cordesman’s much-discussed tenuous case for strategic patience in Iraq which presents what is, I think, an excellent analysis of the situation followed by what struck me as the slightly bizarre conclusion that we ought to basically just hold on or hope for the best. Or here, Fred Kaplan describes a conversation with “Stephen Biddle, a military analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations, is a key proponent of the patchwork-quilt strategy.” What does Biddle think? Well:

Biddle also said (again, expressing his personal view) that the strategy in Iraq would require the presence of roughly 100,000 American troops for 20 years—and that, even so, it would be a “long-shot gamble.”

Kaplan gets at some of this, but if your analysis is that we should accept a “long-shot gamble” that entails 100,000 American troop serving in Iraq until 2027 then you owe us some kind of explanation of what the payoff is supposed to be. The cost of doing what Biddle’s analysis suggests is necessary would be enormous. The benefits, meanwhile, don’t seem especially high even if you ignore the “long-shot” nature of the odds. Plug the odds in, and the whole proposition looks ridiculous.

I respect Biddle enormously, and think his argument against a middle path in Iraq is absolutely solid. His analysis of what staying would entail also seems solid. I just can’t understand why he doesn’t see that the obvious upshot of his analysis is that we should leave. To conclude anything else it seems to me you’d need to put a near-infinite value on the prospect of salvaging something to label “success” in Iraq.

It bears mentioning that this week has seen a bunch of very strong John Edwards statements on the developing Iraq showdown, starting with this on the GAO report, then this on civilian casualties, and this on Bush’s stunt trip to Iraq, all building up to the call for a congressional agenda of “no timetable, no funding — no excuses”.

That, in turn, was followed up with a good ditty on the insane (but seemingly popular with the Democratic leadership) notion that what Democrats need to do is come up with meaningless compromise language on Iraq that will simultaneously doom us to thousands of additional American deaths at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars while also providing political cover to vulnerable Republicans.

As everyone knows, one of the major things we’re doing in Iraq is fighting al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), which has a major presence in Sunni areas. The reason we’re giving money and weapons to Sunni insurgent groups that were killing Americans a year ago and still wish to overthrow the majoritarian Shiite government we installed is that they’re helping us fight AQI. Even Democrats agree that we can’t withdraw all our troops from Iraq, because we still need some to do counterterrorism (i.e., fight AQI) and training (so that AQI doesn’t take over). But Andrew Tilghman, Iraq correspondent for Stars and Stripes 2005 and 2006, writes in “The Myth of AQI” that this is mostly BS:

But what if official military estimates about the size and impact of al-Qaeda in Iraq are simply wrong? Indeed, interviews with numerous military and intelligence analysts, both inside and outside of government, suggest that the number of strikes the group has directed represent only a fraction of what official estimates claim. Further, al-Qaeda’s presumed role in leading the violence through uniquely devastating attacks that catalyze further unrest may also be overstated. [...]

Yet those who have worked on estimates inside the system take a more circumspect view. Alex Rossmiller, who worked in Iraq as an intelligence officer for the Department of Defense, says that real uncertainties exist in assigning responsibility for attacks. “It was kind of a running joke in our office,” he recalls. “We would sarcastically refer to everybody as al-Qaeda.” [...]

How big, then, is AQI? The most persuasive estimate I’ve heard comes from Malcolm Nance, the author of The Terrorists of Iraq and a twenty-year intelligence veteran and Arabic speaker who has worked with military and intelligence units tracking al-Qaeda inside Iraq. He believes AQI includes about 850 full-time fighters, comprising 2 percent to 5 percent of the Sunni insurgency. “Al-Qaeda in Iraq,” according to Nance, “is a microscopic terrorist organization.” [...]

he view that AQI is neither as big nor as lethal as commonly believed is widespread among working-level analysts and troops on the ground. A majority of those interviewed for this article believe that the military’s AQI estimates are overblown to varying degrees. If such misgivings are common, why haven’t doubts pricked the public debate? The reason is that alternate views are running up against an echo chamber of powerful players all with an interest in hyping AQI’s role.

Seems like an important point.

DoD photo by Staff Sargent D. Myles Cullen, U.S. Air Force

What Paul Krugman said about General Petraeus’ upcoming testimony. This is why I’m glad he doesn’t just write about economics anymore. Someone needs to be saying this stuff in the Times. The paucity of liberalism on a liberal op-ed page is pretty shocking.

Of course, if the alternative to Krugman being a general political columnist for the Times was that, say, I got to be an NYT columnist, then it’d be a whole different story. But I’m not sure the world needs more Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd.

We’re “kicking ass” in Iraq. But whose ass? And why?

Thomas Edsall reports on who’s in Obama’s camp and who’s with Clinton and what it means: “The well-publicized contrast between Hillary Clinton’s early backing of the Bush administration’s war effort and Barack Obama’s early opposition, has to a degree been replicated in the less visible network of foreign policy advisers that each candidate has cultivated — the early war opponents by Obama, and the one-time hawks by Clinton.” There’s more, including some nuance.

Frustrating as it is that the major Democratic presidential contenders won’t just adopt my views on Iraq, it’s even more frustrating that they’re all pretending to share my views. Here’s a neat video Matt Stoller put together highlighting the differences between Hillary Clinton’s “end the war” rhetoric on the campaign trail and her actual policies:

Probably the best guide we have to the thinking of people likely to advice Hillary Clinton on national security issues is CNAS’s “Phased Transition” plan which I believe is what Stoller references in the video.