I missed the news earlier today that Blackwater’s security contractors have now been banned in Iraq. This will probably serve to make American policy in Iraq even less sustainable if the ban is enforced, but it’s a no-brainer on the merits. As Mark Kleiman explains: “Blackwater’s fighters-for-hire aren’t subject to military discipline, which excludes them from the protections of the Geneva Conventions. They’re exempt from prosecution in Iraq under rules left over from CPA days. And recklessly killing people in Iraq violates no U.S. domestic law.”

Letting people like that wander around the country was a kind of criminal negligence on the part of the Iraqi government and the fact that it took years for this measure to get enacted is fairly shocking. Nevertheless, though Blackwater is the highest-profile contracting firm involved in Iraq, I don’t think they’re the only one and such unaccountable mercenaries haven’t been banned in toto. That that hasn’t happened, and that the CPA-era immunity hasn’t been repealed, tells you a lot about the imperial character of this venture.

Unfortunately, while it’s very easy to describe incredibly wrongheaded approaches to non-proliferation policy (“bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran,” for example, or “faster, please”), outlining a sounder course tends to be a more complicated undertaking. To get a flavor for what a serious (as opposed to “serious”) might look like, though, take a gander at Jessica Matthews:

As she says near the beginning, this really needs to be put into a broader context. If we really want the international community to hold Iran to its NPT commitments, we need to demonstrate some real commitment to the arms control process. That means ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and starting to work in a cooperative way with Russia. In principle, all of the existing nuclear powers have a pretty clear interest in there not being any more nuclear powers, so it should be possible to work with Moscow on the Iran front. But that would mean not picking fights with Russia on other strategic issues.

Well, not really. But I’ll say this for his contrarian take on disbanding Iraq’s army — I bet he’s right that if Bremer had kept the army in place, I bet that would have led to a bloody fiasco in much the way that disbanding it led to, well, a bloody fiasco. The point is: Bloody fiasco either way. If Hitchens (or, for that matter, Paul Bremer) would just admit that the whole enterprise of the war was incredibly ill-advised then they’d be much better-positioned to question the judgment of the second-guessers on this particular point.

I know a lot of folks who are upset at MoveOn for the General Betrayus thing, but via Matt Stoller here comes a different use of the “Betrayal of Trust” theme that I think Democrats will be pretty happy with:

Here’s some background from Fred Kaplan on Giuliani’s deciding he’d rather cash in than try to serve his country on the Baker-Hamilton Commission.

Barack Obama shifts toward the Edwards/Dodd position on Iraq funding.

CORRECTION: Obama campaign notes that he voted against the last supplemental, so there’s no shift in position here. Apologies for the error.

Coming Wednesday, another national security discussion from the liberal Brookings Institution:

Participants include Anthony Blinken, staff director for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and an advisor to Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr. (D-Del.); Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.), the ranking member on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and an advisor to former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-Mass.); and Randy Scheunemann, a foreign policy and national security analyst who has been a long-time advisor to Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.). They will examine how the politically charged issues of extremism and terrorism can—and should—affect next year’s election.

Hawkish Democrat on the left, conservative Republican on the right, and another conservative Republican in the center. Sounds great. Michael O’Hanlon, naturally, will moderate.

This “news analysis” from Peter Baker and Jonathan Weisman in yesterday’s Washington Post was so ridiculous that I couldn’t bring myself to complain about it on a low traffic Tuesday. As many people as possible need to slam their collective heads against the wall and ask themselves why. Why people would actually be paid money to write this lead:

When Army Gen. David H. Petraeus last week proposed withdrawing more than 20,000 U.S. troops from Iraq, some congressional Democrats nodded their heads and saw it as a positive, if insufficient, step forward. Some wanted to take credit. After all, they reasoned, the drawdown, the benchmarks report, even Petraeus’s Capitol Hill testimony came about only because of Democratic pressure.

Within hours, that idea was shot down. When House Democratic leaders convened in the office of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) at 5:30 p.m. Monday, strategists concluded they were already getting credit for what was happening but that voters wanted much more. So Pelosi, according to aides at the meeting, insisted that Democrats coordinate their message and dictated what that message would be: The general’s plan meant 10 more years of war, or even “endless war.”

Yes, yes, Pelosi is the one to blame for the failure of a compromise to emerge, even though what Bush (pardon me, “Petraeus”) proposed wasn’t a compromise at all, unless “keep as many troops in Iraq as possible for as long as possible” now counts as a compromise. And it keeps going on like that. They warn that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton may be unable to bring the congress together because “Even if they could find a compromise that enough Republicans would accept, it is not clear that the candidates would agree to anything but a hard-line position given the antiwar fervor in the party base.” This fervent party base would, I take it, be the 60-70 percent of the American public who wants to see drawdowns in Iraq and these base-beholden presidential candidates would, I guess, be the ones who are sticking to their base-displeasing stances in favor of residual forces in Iraq.

In contrast to these intransigent Democrats, Baker and Weisman suggest that Bush “has signaled that he is starting to shift.” Really? I guess so:

In fact, although senior officials did not use the term “exit strategy,” the outlines of one emerged from the various statements and speeches they made last week. Petraeus plans to begin redefining his mission in December from leading combat operations to partnering with Iraqi security units and eventually to supporting them. At least 21,700 troops, and perhaps more from the buildup, will be pulled out by July. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates told reporters he hopes to bring the overall force, now at 168,000, down to 100,000 by the end of next year. And Petraeus told The Washington Post that he foresees “sustainable security” in Iraq by June 2009, a point at which the U.S. presence could be scaled back even more.

Now, again, what happened here is that Petraeus said that some troops will be withdrawn when it is no longer possible to avoid withdrawing that. At that point, we’ll have as many troops in Iraq as we did a year ago. After that, Petraeus gave us a chart that contained no dates and where the final point still had tens of thousands of American soldiers in Iraq. That’s not an exit strategy. And, indeed, a couple of paragraphs later they note that Bush “made no commitment to do anything beyond the initial drawdown of forces sent for the buildup.” But this is the key point — there was no compromise! They then go to Peter Rodman, a former Don Rumsfeld aide now cooling his heels at Brookings, and who “said he was particularly surprised at how Democratic presidential candidates reacted to Bush because they have a vested interest should they win the White House.”

I’m ready to explode. The goal, in article-writing, should be that a person who reads your article comes away from it with a better understanding of the subject — this does the reverse.

U.S. Army photo by Spc. Charles W. Gill