John Holbo discusses the difference between television and foreign policy: “Last but not least, there is what we might call the “Lost” factor. Regarding a TV show, it is very charming to learn: what, you had no plan at all?”
Hiding Behind the General
Joe Klein is on the money about Bush, Crocker, and Petraeus.
Charting Iraqi Mortality
This is James Wimberley’s chart of efforts to estimate the death toll on Iraq. You can read here for a fuller explanation of what the chart means, and click on the image to see a larger version. He writes:
We now have four survey estimates from three independent teams of professionals using two different good-practice methods. They all say that the excess deaths in Iraq are hugely greater than the IBC body count, let alone the numbers from the MNF or the Iraqi government. The mean estimate, combining the ORB result with my extrapolations from the three older ones, is 782,000.
Sad. Maddening. I don’t really know what to say.
Gates: I Would Recommend That The President Veto Giving Troops More Time At Home
The Washington Post reported this morning that one of the “best opportunities” for war critics “to change policy” in Iraq is an amendment by Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA), which would “mandate that home leaves for troops last as long as their deployments.” The measure failed in July to break a Republican filibuster, “but it appears to be gaining momentum in the Senate.”
On Fox News Sunday this morning, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said he would recommend that the President veto the bill should it pass. “Yes, I would,” said Gates when asked by host Chris Wallace, calling it a “well-intentioned idea” that would “pose greater risk to our troops”:
GATES: I think that it’s a well-intentioned idea. I think it’s really, pretty much, a back door effort to get the President to accelerate the drawdown, so that it’s an automatic kind of thing rather than based on the conditions in Iraq, with all the consequences that I talked about earlier. I think, if as I believe, the President would never approve such a bill. It would mean, if it were enacted, we would have force management problems that would be extremely difficult and in fact create, I think affect combat effectiveness, and perhaps pose greater risk to our troops.
Watch it:
Later in the show, Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE), whose son is set to deploy to Iraq in 2008, responded to Gates, arguing that the Webb measure is necessary because the “long-term consequence” of “these kind of deployments is absolutely disastrous for the United States of America and for the United States military.”
“If you don’t figure out how to get these folks some time home, you are gonna break, break this military,” said Biden. He also said that Gates’ concerns were overblown because “we can do what we need to do in Iraq with significantly fewer troops”:
BIDEN: What are the consequences of continuing to do what we’re doing with essentially the way in which we’re deploying these troops? As the military said we’re breaking, we’re breaking the United States military. Flat breaking it. And what we’re doing is we’re going to end up in a situation where you don’t have people signing up. you’re gonna end up having to go to draft. This long-term consequence, keeping these kind of deployments is absolutely disastrous for the United States of America and for the United States military. It’s not a good thing the other way either. You choose two very bad alternatives. One very bad and one okay. If you don’t figure out how to get these folks some time home, you are gonna break, break this military. That’s what this is about. and we can do what we need to do in Iraq with significantly fewer troops. That is my contention and the contention of a whole lot of other people outside this administration.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Army Chief of Staff, and other leading generals agree with Biden that the military has been stretched to a breaking point. The Webb amendment is a crucial first step towards guaranteeing it doesn’t actually break.
Oil
Alan Greenspan says he is “saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” I’m saddened, too. The argument on this point never seems to go anywhere. I mean, alternative to it being “about oil” is that it was “about” Saddam’s threat to the wider region and it happens to be a region that’s . . . full of oil so it all comes around the same anyway.
The real question worth debating is whether the policies we’ve enacted in this regard are, in fact, necessary or even useful to securing the energy supply the world needs. It seems to me that they are, in fact, much more driven by paranoia and inability to do cost-benefit analysis (like would the economic damage of marginally more expensive oil really exceed the economic costs of the giant US military presence in the Gulf?) than from sober-minded calculation of what the world needs from its oil-producing regions. When there was a Soviet Union around that might plausible dominate the military east if the US didn’t push back, it may have made sense to adopt such an aggressive posture there, but instead of relaxing following the retreat of Communism we’ve tightened our grip in a way that seems to have achieved nothing.
Arab Spring
Ezra Klein wonders of anyone still remembers it. I still like my November 2006 article wondering the same thing.
