I trust that by now everyone’s already read Kevin Drum’s two mini-essays on the rise of the chaos hawks who warn “that if we leave Iraq the entire Middle East will go up in flames.”

The only thing I would add is that it’s worth looking at this phenomenon, at least in part, through the perspective that to many people the real risk may be that if we leave Iraq the entire Middle East might not go up in flames. We’ve shifted back and forth from the Shah to Saddam to “dual containment” to regime change to stay the course to “surge” over the decades all on the premise that American domination of the Persian Gulf is vitally necessary in order to prevent something terrible from happening.

What if we get chased out and things turn out to be non-catastrophic? What if bloodshed is limited to Iraq and maybe some areas around the Kurdistan-Turkey border that nobody cares about? What if oil keeps flowing? What if it turns out that, a Shiite-dominated government isn’t interested in the kind of pan-Arabist ideology that could make Iraq a threat to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia? What if it also turns out that it’s not really feasible for a Persian regime in Teheran to control Iraq? And what if Taliban-style governance and global holy war turn out to be really unpopular?

What, in short, if things turn out to be basically okay for America and for Americans? Well, that’d be good, it seems to me. But it would also call into question a lot of habits of mind, past policies, spending commitments, career paths, sacred cows, delusions of grandeur, etc. That, I think, is why relatively few people in Washington seem interested in entertaining optimistic scenarios about the regional context even though an optimistic scenario seems more likely to me than do frequently discussed worst-case scenarios. The truth of the matter, though, is that there hasn’t been a moment when the United States didn’t try to micromanage events in the Gulf since, well, since the British Empire was doing it instead. There isn’t, however, much in the way of evidence that this kind of policy is actually necessary. It does, however, seem to have succeeded in producing one of the most politically screwed up places on the planet.

Kevin Drum says I’m wrong about who wins the testimony battle. In fact, though, we’re talking about two different battles. I’m saying the GOP needed a big win in PR terms to prevent the war’s unpopularity from dragging them even further down in 2008. Kevin’s saying the Democrats needed a big win in order to end the war. Nobody got a big win, so the war will continue, and the Republicans will be dragged down by the war’s unpopularity.

In terms of actually ending the war, I think all prospect of doing so before 2009 was more-or-less signed away when Democrats decided to accept Bush’s framing of the “fund the troops” question and grant Bush an un-amended supplemental appropriation after he vetoed the amended one. Challenging that framing would have been politically challenging, but possibly doable. Having done what they did, though, it’d be extremely difficult to turn around, and there’s no sign of any inclination to do so anyway.

Senator Bob Casey’s taking his turn at the microphone right now and is making the point I made here about Iraqi Security Forces.

He makes a key point: “It is not clear to me that the primary success you’ve pointed to, in Anbar, has anything to do with the surge.”

Eve Fairbanks says the real news from yesterday’s hearing was Ambassador Ryan Crocker:

Crocker is right that Iraqi leaders’ intentions and how much actual power they wield is more important than whether they have accomplished a specific set of benchmarks–or whether withdrawal will do more harm than good. But his cautious optimism didn’t even seem to convince himself. Even when he was describing areas like provincial reconstruction in which he’d had “pretty good luck,” Crocker sounded depressed. I think he’s well on his way to becoming another tragic figure of this war: well-intentioned, capable, but brought to his knees by the mistakes of others and the sheer immensity of the task he was given. Success is “achievable”? You wouldn’t know it from Crocker’s manner at the hearing today–a subdued, this-is-all-hypothetical-anyway spirit, like a doctor whose careful and long-ranging diagnoses are for naught because the patient in front of him is already gone.

I agree with Eve that Crocker didn’t — and doesn’t — appear to me to believe his own testimony on this score. I suppose, though, that I have a less sympathetic take. Rather than a tragic figure, I see yet another figure who’s been corrupted by association with this venture. Either way, I’ve been a bit surprised by the nature of Crocker’s testimony. His career suggests that he’s a serious professional with good judgment — “The memo bluntly predicted that toppling Hussein could unleash long-repressed sectarian and ethnic tensions, that the Sunni minority would not easily relinquish power, and that powerful neighbors such as Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia would try to move in to influence events. It also cautioned that the United States would have to start from scratch building a political and economic system because Iraq’s infrastructure was in tatters” — not the sort of man likely to let ephemera obscure the big picture.

And, as Eve says, something about his demeanor suggests he knows he’s putting up a snow job. I heard him earlier today describe the “legislative reconciliation” issues he’s been downplaying as “fundamental questions” about the nature of the Iraqi state. He knows perfectly well that those questions are the ones that matter. The fundamental ones. And that no progress has been made toward answering them.

Here’s another one of the slides from the Crocker/Petraeus presentation. At first glance, it appears to show impressive progress starting in March 2007. Look more closely at the bars, though, and you’ll see that the top segment of each bar is an essentially meaningless category — “unit forming.” The real meat is in those tiny green bars representing Iraqi units capable of operating independently of US forces. Here, we saw considerable progress between March 2006 and November 2006, followed by a steady decline running through June 2007, and now things have ticked up again a bit so that we’re essentially back to where we were a year ago.

Not only is there no progress here, but the absolute numbers in question are tiny so even if things were to pick up, we’d still be years and years and years away from this policy succeeding.

It’s always good to see bloggish notions getting wider dispersion through newspaper columnists not named “Paul Krugman.” Take, for example, today’s Eugene Robinson column:

The next six months in Iraq are crucial — and always will be. That noise you heard yesterday on Capitol Hill was the can being kicked further down the road leading to January 2009, when George W. Bush gets to hand off his Iraq fiasco to somebody else.

It’s clear by now that playing for time is the real White House strategy for Iraq. Everything else is tactical maneuver and rhetorical legerdemain — nothing up my sleeve — with which the administration is buying time, roughly in six-month increments.

Increasingly, I think Republicans are shooting themselves in the foot politically. More and more people have figured out what’s happening. As I write in a new piece for The Guardian:

Soon enough, though, it’ll be time for another election, and polls have shown for some time now that the American public has no appetite for an indefinite military commitment to Iraq and that, however they may struggle to hide it, is exactly what Republicans are promising as will be perfectly evident if Bush gets his way and more than 100,000 American soldiers are still in Mesopotamia when voters go to the polls in 14 months.

That’s great, if you work at the DCCC or the DSCC. For the country, though, it’s really not so good and it would be much, much, better to implement better policies rather than just waste the next 18 months.

At any rate, now I’m watching John Kerry, and I’m thinking someone should ask General Petraeus how you ask a man to be the last to die for a mistake.

One element of the data that seems unambiguous is that you have many further attacks against American troops happening in Anbar province. This is related, clearly, to new partnerships between American forces and non-AQI insurgent groups in Anbar. Still, that leaves an open question as to the precise source of the reduction in violence. My sense is that surge-lovers would like us to believe that most of the pre-Awakening Anbar attacks were mounted by AQI and that the recent reduction in Iraq is a result of US-insurgent cooperation against AQI succeeding.

An alternative interpretation, however, is that AQI was always responsible for only a minority of attacks and that the reduction has happened because, in essence, we’ve started paying insurgent groups to stop attacking us. Now, either way, it’s good news that fewer American soldiers are being attacked, but, obviously, we could also stop insurgent attacks by just not being in Iraq at all.

The anniversary post is always the hardest one to write. This year, I think I won’t do it. It’s hard for me to contemplate, and one wants to do writing worthy of the magnitude of the thing and I’m not sure I can.