Far be it from me to mock the typos of others, but this one in Mike Tomasky’s great essay on Paul Krugman for The New York Review of Books brings a smile to this comic book fan’s face:

Many liberals would name Paul Krug-man of The New York Times as perhaps the most consistent and courageous—and unapologetic—liberal partisan in American journalism. He has made his perspective on the Bush administration and the contemporary right, and on the need to see politics as a battle, manifestly clear in column after incendiary column.

Conservatives, being a superstitious and cowardly lot, naturally fear and loathe the Krug-Man and his powers of shrill, but the good people of Liberal City look to him as a friend and protector….

A correspondent directed my attention to the second page of Ann Scott Tyson’s Washington Post article on counterterrorism in Pakistan and wondered how long it’s going to be before we see a Weekly Standard article about proclaiming General Ashfaq Kiyani to be the Petraeus of Pakistan. There’s certainly food for thought here:

Nevertheless, U.S. military officials said that Kiyani, Musharraf’s possible replacement as head of the military, is supportive of the counterinsurgency plan in the tribal areas, which he visited within days of assuming his current post last month. Kiyani has also indicated an openness to having the Pakistani military focus on missions other than conventional operations aimed at the threat of India, which senior U.S. officers consider diminished. “He has a different view,” said one senior military official. “I’d expect he will step up and be head of the army, and there will be some changes.”

This reminds me that Americans — from journalists to congressmen to senior miltiary officials — ought to consider adopting a less personality-driven view of how the world works. The fact that a Pakistani general angling for the top spot in Pakistan’s all-powerful military tells American military officials that he wants to concentrate less on the top priority of the Pakistani military and more on the top priority of the American military tells us only that General Kiyani understands how to tell people what they want to hear.

Meanwhile, it raises a good issue. When we think about Pakistan’s security forces, we think about fighting al-Qaeda. When Pakistanis think about Pakistan’s security forces, they think about fighting India. If we want Pakistan to spend less time worrying about India and more time worrying about al-Qaeda, we should be thinking about whether or not there’s something we could do on the India front that would make it worth Pakistan’s while to worry less about India and more about al-Qaeda.

In general, this is what’s really gone awry with the heavily moralized post-9/11 climate in the United States. We spend tons of time worrying about whether or not this or that leader — Musharraf, Putin, Mubarak, Arafat, Sharon, Khameini, Kim, whatever — is or is not a “good man,” a “moderate,” a “man of peace,” a “tyrant,” a “terrorist,” a “pygmy,” whatever — that there’s little thought given to the idea that countries have interests, and the United States has interests, and the name of the game is to set priorities and let other countries have their way on their top priorities if they’ll let us have our way on our top priorities.

To follow up on yesterday’s Vladimir Putin post, this Moscow Times article translates the idea in question as a proposal to create a new post of “National Leader” for Putin to fill, not “Supreme Leader” as I, following Dmitri Simes, had it. It bears mentioning that, when you think about it, if Putin is looking for a model of an authoritarian system that incorporates some pluralism and many democracy-like institutions, Iran is actually a pretty good example of a system that’s lasted a good long while now as a neither-fish-now-fowl sort of thing. Late-PRI Mexico might also be a source of inspiration.

Since Brian Katulis is right about everything, it’s no surprise that his response to Colin Kahl is also spot on.

See also my response to Kahl and Eric Martin’s response to Kahl. Plus my post on the importance of regional strategy. If you’re wondering why it’s worth spending so much time on one guy’s guest post, the basic answer is that there’s a lot of influential thinking along more-or-less Kahlian lines in the most hawkish Democratic circles and he seems much more willing than others to engage in this sort of forum.

It’s been brought to my attention that Barack Obama’s position on a training mission in Iraq is more clear than I’d thought. Here’s Obama talking to Michael Gordon:

We’ve seen progress against AQI [Al Qaeda in Iraq], but they are a resilient group and there’s the possibility that they might try to set up new bases. I think that we should have some strike capability. But that is a very narrow mission, that we get in the business of counter terrorism as opposed to counter insurgency and even on the training and logistics front, what I have said is, if we have not seen progress politically, then our training approach should be greatly circumscribed or eliminated.

I think that’s exactly right. He goes on to say he does “not want us to be in the business of training and equipping factions or militias that are going to be turning on each other,” but is willing to hold training and equipment out as a carrot for some kind of hypothetical post-reconciliation government. In short, Obama and Edwards both have the right policy on this and Clinton has the wrong one.

UPDATE: Armando in comments says he doesn’t understand how Clinton’s position differs from Edwards and Obama. The answer is that, as I understand it, Clinton still stands by her proposal to maintain residual forces in Iraq whose mission would unconditionally include “Training Iraqi security forces” and “Providing logistic support of Iraqi security forces.” Clinton’s plans echo CNAS’s phased transition proposal whereas Obama and Edwards have evolved toward CAP’s strategic reset proposal.

Courtesy of Sam Boyd, I see the Financial Times reporting on Joe Lieberman’s views. Apparently, the Wise One “argued that George W. Bush and the Republican presidential candidates remained truer than the Democratic party to its tradition of a ‘moral, internationalist, liberal and hawkish’ foreign policy that was established by Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John Kennedy.”

This reduction of, say, FDR’s understanding of foreign policy to the idea that he was “hawkish” is really insipid. It’s true, of course, that FDR responded to the policy environment he faced in a “hawkish” manner but the situation, clearly, was entirely different. Similarly, I entirely agree that Democrats should continue to emulate the Truman-in-Korea (or Bush-in-Kuwait) model of being willing and able to deploy military forces in order to protect foreign countries from conquest. You’d have to be an idiot to draw from the FDR-Truman school of internationalism the simple lesson that a disposition to start wars is a good idea. After all, JFK was “hawkish,” too, but Lieberman seems to forget that his act of hawkery in Vietnam turned out to be a huge fiasco, and his foreign policy triumph came during the Cuban Missile Crisis when he wisely rejected the counsels of the preventive war crowd and instead struck a pragmatic deal.

Obviously all-war all-the-time has long been Lieberman’s signature contribution to Democratic Party thinking (like Bill Kristol on the other side) but the willingness of others to swallow the idea that the “internationalism” of the liberal tradition amounts simply to a disposition to kill foreigners is really insane. Bush and Lieberman are bloodthirsty they’re not internationalists. They’ve founded no institutions, they’ve made America despised, they actively seek to undermine international law, and they’ve brought our relationships with allies — the ones the real internationalists built — to unprecedented new lows.

Colin Kahl is a guy I’m pretty sure I’d never heard of until a week or so ago, but he’s a real expert on Iraq and stability operations who seems to have emerged as a fairly influential backer in Democratic circles of commitments to a continued training mission in Iraq and other policies I tend to disagree with. Interestingly, the people I do tend to agree with all respect him a great deal (though they still don’t agree) so Marc Lynch is hosting a guest post from Prof. Kahl laying out his views and I think there’ll be responses later today from Lynch and others.

For now, I think Eric Martin makes some good points in response to Kahl.

I would also put giant red flags all around any policies whose own advocates say things like “This could work in theory — although the probabilities are difficult to assess and are probably not particularly high.” That suggests to me that we’re not actually disagreeing about the merits of the sort of scheme Kahl’s putting forward. I think his plan won’t work and he thinks his plan won’t work. He counters that not trying is even less likely to work. That’s true, but of course there are costs (and opportunity costs) to staying and trying. As I said yesterday, the question of regional strategy is incredibly important here. The implicit calculus behind Kahl’s thinking is that though his plan probably won’t work, if it did work the gains would be very large and the costs of attempting it are very small.

I don’t really see things that way. In order to outline goals that we probably can’t achieve but could achieve “in theory,” the bar has been set sufficiently low that the benefits of success aren’t especially high. Meanwhile, the costs of continued involvement in Iraq seem quite high. This is starting to get some traction in the campaign as John Edwards lays out a strategy I agree with and points to the fact that Clinton’s policies will keep us stuck in an occupation dymaic. The Obama campaign hasn’t been clear on several of the points of contention which frustrates Chris Bowers (and me) but it’s worth saying that my reporting indicates this is likely more the result of genuine indecision than calculated ambiguity — Obama is hearing arguments from both sides and isn’t sure who he agrees with.

U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Julian Billma