Brought to you by Laura Rozen.

James Vega has a provocative post up about how Democrats can do better next time they face a high-profile political confrontation with a military man. I have to say, though, that I think it’s important to reject the premise that the Petraeus/Crocker hearings were some kind of political setback for Democrats. Here’s the sequence of events as I recall them:

• [in the murky past]: War in Iraq becomes unpopular.
• [November 2006] Republicans lose tons of congressional seats.
• [December 2006] Baker-Hamilton commission attempts to frame a proposal for gradual withdrawal in a way that would be politically possible for Bush to embrace.
• [January 2007] Bush rejects Baker-Hamilton out of hand, says unpopular war will continue indefinitely and be escalated via unpopular surge.
• [Spring 2007] Nervous Republicans back Bush in legislative showdown, but are afraid to endorse his proposal for endless war, say instead that nothing should be decided until Petraeus reports in September.
• [June 2007] War is unpopular.
• [July 2007] War is unpopular.
• [August 2007] war is unpopular.
• [Early September 2007] Petraeus and Crocker testify that despite the surge’s failure to accomplish its stated goals, progress is being made, and the surge should continue for six more months.
• [Mid-September 2007] War is still unpopular.

Basically, a whole lot of nothing has been happening . . . the war keeps being unpopular and the Republicans keep being intransigent.

You’d think that General Petraeus’ civilian casualties data and the Defense Department’s civilian casualties data would at least show the same trend lines. You’d be wrong.

Noah Schactman reports on Bush administration efforts to lay the groundwork for massive bloodshed in Iraq:

Sunni political and tribal leaders are increasingly throwing in their lot with U.S. forces here against Al-Qaeda in Iraq and other insurgent types. But, to get them to come over to our side, the American military has fed them a steady diet of anti-Shi’ite propaganda.

Arrests and killings of Shi’ite militants are announced from loudspeaker blasts; President Bush’s bellicose rhetoric towards Shi’a Iran is reported on friendly radio programs. But the majority of this country is Shi’ite. Are we setting ourselves up as the enemies of the majority here? Are we priming the pump for an all-in sectarian battle royale? It seems like a possibility.

Robert Farley and Kevin Drum make some smart comments. I think this supports my view that our policy may, on some level, be deliberately aimed at fostering sectarian conflict in order to keep both sides friendly to the idea of an open-ended American military presence. Eric Martin has his doubts about that.

I’m reminded, however, of Alex Cooley’s commentary on Daniel Nexon and Thomas Wright (PDF) “What’s at Stake in the American Empire Debate?” from the May issue of The American Political Science Review:

In fact, the extreme implication of the Nexon/Wright model for U.S. policymakers would be to more vigorously pursue “divide-and-rule” policies in Iraq instead of its contradictory nation-building policies of “unite and rule.”

I don’t think one need necessarily see this as an incredibly deliberate development. Rather, the top political leadership in the country, from Bush and Cheney on down, has consistently failed to articulate meaningful objectives in Iraq beyond a stubborn refusal to answer calls for withdrawal. Under the circumstances, we shouldn’t be surprised that this priority filtered down over time and has, increasingly, led our strategy to evolve in a divide and rule direction rather than a nation-building one.

Even arch-imperialist Nial Ferguson is afraid of the prospect of Rudy Giuliani in the White House. And rightly so.

We seem to be witnessing a bit of a harmonic convergence of counterinsurgency skepticism as Andrew links to Edward Luttwak’s skeptical take in the February Harper‘s and Josh Marshall asks the ever-salient question: “At the risk of asking a really silly question, can we list off the successful counterinsurgency operations in history?”

And, indeed, it turns out that there are really, really few. What’s more, those that do exist mostly seem to have lacked the counterinsurgent-as-foreigner dynamic that would be involved in essentially any US counterinsurgency campaign. I would recommend Jeffrey Record’s book for even more counterinsurgency skepticism.

Retired General and former CENTCOM CINC John Abizaid argues that we could live with a nuclear Iran. And, indeed, we could. Iran getting a nuclear bomb wouldn’t be a threat to the United States and wouldn’t even be an especially serious problem for Israel or any aspects of American power projections in the region.

Somewhat ironically, I think getting clearer about this might make it easier to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. Acting in an unduly paranoid manner about the Iranian nuclear program suggests to Iranians that there are some large gains that might accrue to their country from developing nuclear weapons. In fact, a nuclear weapons program would be a largely useless waste of money. The United States has good reason to worry about nuclear proliferation in general and, therefore, to worry about the Iranian program as an instance of the general phenomenon. But Iranian nuclear weapons, as such, aren’t a big problem for us.

Photo by Flickr user Hamed Saber used under a Creative Commons license

– Matt Yglesias

Readers have no doubt noticed that I’ve gotten in the habit of throwing brickbats in the direction of the Brookings Institution’s work on Iraq and the Middle East (it’s a very big institution and I don’t want to over-generalize since the dynamics of different programs seem very different to me) but as Ilan Goldenberg points out in a well-argued post, while this stuff makes for good blog-fodder it doesn’t ultimate change anything. Rather, as he says:

Ultimately, the problem with the liberal VSP community has less to do with being “serious” and more to do with institutions On the right, groups such as AEI and Heritage act as a conservative VSP machine that systematically nurtures and promotes its experts. On the left, there are not enough mechanisms for picking out the best scholars, elevating their work and increasing their media profile. We all assume that because so many liberal experts sit inside CFR and Brookings, these institutions should play that role, but it’s not what they were set up to do. Heritage and AEI are there to push an agenda. Brookings and CFR are meant to be purely idea factories, without a coherent advocacy strategy.

Right. We now have a couple of institutions, most notably the Center for American Progress, but also the smaller National Security Network where Ilan works and some extent the things Steve Clemons has done at the New America Foundation that are capable of pushing a coherent progressive approach to national security issues (the newish Center for a New American Security is also potentially promising, though I’m a bit skeptical). What we need, in essence, are more institutions like that, and more capacity at the institutions we have. Meanwhile, there are plenty of good people lurking inside the corridors of Brookings and other shops and, in a world with a bigger and better progressive ideas infrastructure, those people might be situated inside places where they can work more effectively.

At any rate, there’s been a great deal of progressive infrastructure building in Washington and around the country over the past five years or so, but considering that 9/11 and Iraq have been the defining political events of the current era, remarkably little of it has gone into national security issues.