Vicki Huddleston and Tibor Nagy warn darkly in The New York Times of an insidious bill before the congress that “would destabilize the region and bolster radical Islam’s push to build a Muslim caliphate . . . puts Congress unwittingly on the side of Islamic jihadists and insurgents.” The bill in question, you see, “threatens to cut off technical assistance to Ethiopia, one of our closest allies, if it does not, among other things, release political prisoners, ensure that the judiciary operates independently and permit the news media to operate freely.”

Personally, I’d like to see the list of allies such that Ethiopia comes out as “one of our closest” — it doesn’t seem like an especially plausible claim. The closeness of the partnership seems to consist primarily of using Ethiopia as a site for “renditions” and torture which is not a relationship I’m super-keen on preserving.

“Iraqis Wasting An Opportunity, U.S. Officers Say” according to the headline writers, but what Tom Ricks is really doing in his Washington Post analysis of the situation in Iraq is exposing exactly how ephemeral the “progress” that’s been made. Notably it’s not progress toward our ostensible policy goal of producing some kind of decent Iraqi state capable of running the country:

The U.S. military approach in Iraq this year has focused on striking deals with Sunni insurgents, under which they stop fighting the Americans and instead protect their own neighborhoods. So far about 70,000 such volunteers have been enrolled — a trend that makes the Shiite-led central government nervous, especially as the movement gets closer to Baghdad. [...]

The year-long progress in fighting al-Qaeda in Iraq could carry a downside. Maj. Mark Brady, who works on reconciliation issues, noted that a Sunni leader told him: “As soon as we finish with al-Qaeda, we start with the Shiite extremists.” Talk like that is sharply discouraged, Brady noted as he walked across the dusty ground of Camp Liberty, on the western fringes of Baghdad.

It’s good, of course, that October was a low casualty month for US troops just as it’s terrible that 2007 was the deadliest year yet. But if our goal is reducing American casualties we can easily accomplish that by leaving. Paying Sunni rebel groups opposed to majority rule in Iraq to not attack our troops so that they can use the funds to more vigorously prosecute a war against a corrupt and militia-ridden Shiite-dominated Iraqi government isn’t adding anything of value to American security.

I find myself distinctly unsurprised to be in total agreement with Brian Katulis’ latest on what’s wrong with timid, centrist approaches to Iraq, but I especially liked this ditty on “responsible” solutions:

One other important point to note -simply slapping a “responsible” label on proposals does not exonerate analysts from actually owning up to some very grim consequences of some of the policies that they espouse. Many of the negative consequences feared by those who oppose U.S. troop redeployment from Iraq have already occurred just as U.S. troop levels were INCREASING in Iraq. When historians look back on 2006-2007 in Iraq, they will see this as a period when massive campaigns of sectarian cleansing were underway – killing thousands, displacing millions more, and resulting in the largest refugee crisis in the Middle East since 1948.

When one consider that the current policy of supporting “bottom up” security initiatives means that the U.S. military is actually cooperating with sectarian cleansers and in some cases serial murderers – as Jon Lee Anderson’s excellent piece in the New Yorker highlights – then it raises questions about who is being “responsible.” So instead of posturing about who is most “responsible” and “serious” about “U.S. interests” when we debate Iraq, it is probably better to just say that we agree there are no good options on Iraq and engage in the debate on its merits and facts.

Indeed it strikes me that the yearning for a “responsible” approach most often comes in the course of a kind of abdication of the responsibility to think things through and do the best one can to pick a side in debates about big, important strategic choices. The choices facing the country are enormously consequential in a way that’s a bit frightening, but shying away from those choices is the reverse of taking responsibility.
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