Via an offended Shadi Hamid, Mansour Ijaz reports on Mitt Rommey saying something awfully strange:

I asked Mr. Romney whether he would consider including qualified Americans of the Islamic faith in his cabinet as advisers on national security matters, given his position that “jihadism” is the principal foreign policy threat facing America today. He answered, “…based on the numbers of American Muslims [as a percentage] in our population, I cannot see that a cabinet position would be justified. But of course, I would imagine that Muslims could serve at lower levels of my administration.”

So because there are relatively few Muslims in the United States, Romney wouldn’t consider a Muslim cabinet official? Meanwhile, before Madeleine Albright was Secretary of State, she was UN Ambassador. Her successor at the UN was Bill Richardson who went on to become Secretary of Energy. His successor was Richard Holbrooke who was widely viewed as a likely Secretary of State in a John Kerry administration and, again, is a very likely candidate for that job in a Hillary Clinton administration. John Negroponte had the job before becoming Director of National Intelligence. George HW Bush had the job before becoming CIA Director. But Romney’s telling us that current UN Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad is too Muslim to be so much as considered for a cabinet post? Really? How repugnant.

The general lack of attention US policy has given to the huge numbers of refugees from the conflict in Iraq has attracted some notice. This New York Times article on pressure to fudge the numbers on the number of Iraqis returning home hints at perhaps one reason why the humanitarian hawks don’t actually care about refugee well-being:

A United Nations survey released last week, of 110 Iraqi families leaving Syria, also seemed to dispute the contentions of officials in Iraq that people are returning primarily because they feel safer.

The survey found that 46 percent were leaving because they could not afford to stay; 25 percent said they fell victim to a stricter Syrian visa policy; and only 14 percent said they were returning because they had heard about improved security.

Failing to provide for refugees, in short, drives returns to Iraq which helps bolster bogus arguments about improving conditions and thus bolster support for the war. It’s win-win, unless you’re an Iraqi refugee or an American citizen. Meanwhile, the returnees are re-enforcing the patterns of ethnic cleansing that seem to have been the primary drivers behind the decline in violence:

Underscoring a widely held sense of hesitation, many of those who come back to Iraq do not return to their homes. Clambering off the bus on Sunday, a woman who gave her name as Um Dima, mother of Dima, said that friends were still warning her not to go back to her house in Dora, a violent neighborhood in south Baghdad. So for now, she said, she will move in with her parents in southern Iraq.

That seems like a smart move for Um Dima. Am I the only one who remembers, though, that back in the summer/fall of 2006 this sort of thing — massive refugee flows and ethnic cleansing — was allegedly the reason we couldn’t leave Iraq? Withdrawal was supposed to have precisely the consequences that staying turned out to have, only staying has also impaired all kinds of other important American strategic objectives around the world.

“Top military leaders” at the Pentagon are bending LA Times defense correspondent Julian Barnes’ ear with all kinds of crazy nonsense. Some people think official military assessments of the situation in Iraq should reflect the full range of views held by senior officers, rather than the opinions of a single general. Others feel the President of the United States and the other civilian policymakers whose orders the generals follow ought to take responsibility for their own policy decisions.

One wonders why so many troops hate the troops. Must be phony soldiers. (Look! A MoveOn ad! How disgraceful!)

Spencer Ackerman translates the White House’s principles for perpetual occupation of Iraq out of the obfuscatorese:

A “democratic Iraq” here means the Shiite-led Iraqi government. The current political arrangement will receive U.S. military protection against coups or any other internal subversion. That’s something the Iraqi government wants desperately: not only is it massively unpopular, even among Iraqi Shiites, but the increasing U.S.-Sunni security cooperation strikes the Shiite government — with some justification — as a recipe for a future coup.

I’ll be interested to see what the Democratic hawks have to say about that. For a long time, they’ve been getting by with things like Shawn Brimley’s formula that “The next President will need options beyond simply ‘leave ASAP’ and ‘stay the course.’” This, though, relies on a strawman characterization of Bush’s policies to generate the sense of separation from the administration. The question here isn’t whether we should literally stay the course, the question is whether or not we should undertake an open-ended commitment to propping up whatever form of Iraqi government will agree to pay host to our military bases.

The Bush administration may not have succeeded in building a democratic government in Iraq, but it has succeeded in building a corrupt, brutal, and sectarian government that’s willing to “offer the U.S. a long-term troop presence in Iraq and preferential treatment for American investments” as long as the United States promises to help secure Maliki’s government against foreign and domestic threats. This should serve as a reminder that one reason US policy in Iraq keeps failing to produce a stable government, is that American policy objectives are in many ways incompatible with the goal of stability. An unstable Iraqi regime lacking in state capacity or legitimacy is going to be heavily dependent on the United States to maintain power and therefore more susceptible to American influence.