Brian Katulis is a man worth listening to and he says that when assessing Pakistan’s upcoming elections, we should watch what happens with the judiciary:

As Americans know all too well from their own 2000 presidential elections, courts can often play a decisive role in hotly contested elections. And as President Musharraf has probably learned from events in Egypt last year, reining in independent-minded judges is a key ingredient for holding back real democratic progress. A month before the elections, Pakistan’s Election Commission – a key body that overseas and manages the elections usually filled by judges – was incomplete because of the shortage of judges that has resulted from the actions taken last month. Prominent lawyers and judges remain under arrest.

I would say, though, that worrying too much about the nature of Pakistani election procedures is unlikely to get us anywhere in the long run. What’s needed is to articulate what, exactly, we think our main interests are in Pakistan and what we’re prepared to do to see them advanced. With that in place, we should be prepared to work with whatever Pakistani leadership emerges or may emerge in the future. A policy based around trying to identify the “good guys” and then back them hasn’t served us especially well in Pakistan or anyplace else.

As you’ll recall, back when Michael Mukasey was nominated to be Attorney-General, some Democrats wanted him to acknowledge first that waterboarding is torture. He took the somewhat preposterous line that he couldn’t answer the question until he’d been confirmed. Convenient! Well, now it seems Russ Feingold hasn’t forgotten and is formally requesting a legal opinion from Mukasey.

If he finds the techniques used by the CIA to have been torture, which he said is illegal, then he will come under tremendous pressure to prosecute the interrogators and possibly even the administration officials who approved the illegal behavior. If he doesn’t conclude that they’re torture, he’ll be embracing a politically convenient and euphemistic definition of the law.

When you think about it, though, this isn’t a very hard choice to make. He’s going to embrace the politically convenient, euphemistic definition of the law. When Mukasey was up for the job, there was some sentiment that he should be confirmed because he’s a basically honest, ethical, competent guy. Realistically, though, there’s just no way a person in Mukasey’s position could do his job in an honest, ethical, and competent fashion. He’s not going to prosecute people for performing interrogation techniques the president authorized. And yet, those techniques are illegal. You need to either prosecute the interrogators or else (much better) immunize them for the purposes of prosecuting their superiors. But it’s not going to happen.

The nature of the job, now as well as at the time it was offered to Mukasey, is that carrying water for the criminal acts of current and former senior officials is a core responsibility. There isn’t — and wasn’t — any sense looking for an honest and ethical nominee because no honest and ethical person could possibly do the job. Mukasey may well have been a saint the day before he accepted the offer, but putting yourself in a senior position in the Justice Department these days is inherently a bargain with the devil.

I know that to some liberals, Barack Obama’s rhetorical style bespeaks a lack of commitment to progressive values. I don’t see it that way. I’ve always seen it as a pretty transparent trick. He says he’s not one of those liberals, he doesn’t call people “wingnuts,” he understands the conservative point of view, blah blah blah, and then here comes his agenda of tax hikes, tons of new spending, ambitious carbon emissions curbs, less invading of other countries for no reason, gay equality, etc. And, remarkably, you keep seeing conservatives eat it up, discerning something incredibly “new” and “exciting” in a combination of conventional liberal policy views with vaguely conciliatory rhetoric.

Along those lines, Jason Zengerle flags this incredibly positive Steve Hayes Weekly Standard cover story on Obama. Particularly these bits:

[W]hile Obama eventually settles on the mainstream liberal position–path to citizenship, crack down on employers, don’t punish the workers–he does so only after acknowledging (and in some cases, embracing) the concerns of conservatives. He begins by criticizing George W. Bush on immigration from the right and says that his first priority in ending illegal immigration would be securing the borders. (Ask John McCain if it’s important to list border security first when detailing your solution.) [...]

This is the Obama trick, and it explains why, despite his very liberal voting record in the Senate (and in the Illinois Senate before that), he is not viewed as a left-wing ideologue. When a student asks Obama for his views on the Second Amendment, he reminds his audience that he taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago and is thus familiar with the arguments regarding the right to bear arms. He acknowledges “a tradition of gun ownership in this country that can be respected,” and says that his academic studies convinced him gun ownership “is an individual right and not just the right of a militia.”

As Jason notes, the striking thing here is “that Hayes recognizes this as a trick–and he still falls for it!” And also that it’s Steve Hayes who seems like a pretty hard-core hatchet man, “he’s an ideological water carrier of the first order. Is there any conservative writer able to withstand Obama’s charms? A nation turns its lonely eyes to Charles Krauthammer.” A quick Google reveals that back in July when Obama and Hillary Clinton were in their spat about talking to “bad guys” without preconditions, Krauthammer slammed Obama so, yes, he’s immune.

When you read something like this your stomach just turns:

Jamie Leigh Jones, now 22, says that after she was raped by multiple men at a KBR camp in the Green Zone, the company put her under guard in a shipping container with a bed and warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she’d be out of a job.

And, of course, while people who favor an open-ended American military commitment in Iraq probably don’t specifically believe that instances of rape and kidnapping ought to be papered over in silence, I think we can all predict that this is a story that will be widely covered on anti-war websites, and basically ignored on pro-war ones. Meanwhile, Megan McArdle says doves need to acknowledge the improving nature of the situation in Iraq where it does indeed seem that those who managed not to die in 2007 or 2006 can look forward to enjoying 2005 levels of violence in 2008 (but in segregated neighborhoods) after they’re forcibly repatriated from their refugee camps.

Which is perhaps as good a time as any to restate the basic point that while anecdotes hither and there can make people feel good or bad about the war, the basic strategic questions are fairly indifferent to the ebbing and flowing of news. Back in 2003 and 2004 I thought, as I think most people thought, that keeping US forces in Iraq until a new government could be organized was a reasonable thing to do despite the costs. It seemed to me that the elections in early 2005 were a good time to announce a mutually agreed-upon schedule for the withdrawal of American troops. It didn’t happen. Many argued throughout 2005 that the chances of preventing the sort of ethnic cleansing and civil violence that we saw in 2006 was a good reason to keep troops there. I disagreed, but the troops stayed and the violence came. Then many argued that the chances of preventing the sort of worsening of the violence that we saw in 2007 was a good reason to keep troops there. I disagreed, but the troops stayed and the violence worsened.

Now the violence seems to be ebbing, which is good. The US also, sensibly, seems to have started taking the more conciliatory line toward anti-government Sunni Arab rebel groups that doves had generally been advocating as far back as 2004, which is also good. But the question of what it is our military presence in Iraq is for and why it’s worth the considerable direct financial costs, opportunity costs, and the so-called “human costs” (rape victims held under guard in shipping containers, that sort of thing) is, if anything, more acute than ever. How many casualties is the right price to pay for permanent basing rights in Iraq? How much money should we spend for war advocates to be able to maintain that they weren’t wrong, that Bush just used bad tactics for a while, and that it all turned out for the best in the end? How much damage should be done to our posture in Central Asia for the sake of giving counterinsurgency theorists a chance to show their stuff in a theater where they government is prepared to provide a lot of resources?

Meanwhile, in Iraq violence is down unless you’re one of the nine people killed today and as long as the political situation remains unsettled things could always get worse again (except this time with better trained and better equipped forces on all sides) but maybe they won’t and either way the question about American strategy remains.

Putin picks non-FSB technocrat Dmitri Medvedev to be his appointed successor, over the somewhat better-known Sergei Ivanov who has more of a Putin-style background in the security services. Much baseless speculation as to the meaning of this can be found in the newspapers. Rather than engage in more of it myself, I thought I might look at the New York Times‘s coverage of when Boris Yeltsin first picked Putin to be his designated successor:

”I don’t think we should blow this out of proportion,” said James P. Rubin, the State Department spokesman. ”We have focused our policy on the policies of Russian reform and the policies of the Russian Government, not the personalities.” But he added, ”We do have some experience with Mr. Putin and have a constructive relationship with him.” [...]

Even if he proves to be more effective political player, few observers today gave Mr. Putin a real chance to become a viable presidential candidate, given the depth of popular antipathy to his mentor. For more than a year, Mr. Yeltsin’s popularity rating has been in the single digits, as broad swathes of the Russian population — from disgruntled pensioners to disgusted entrepreneurs — blame him for economic stagnation and rampant corruption. [...]

As he demonstrated today, Mr. Yeltsin is still willing to wield the considerable power vested in his office to try to turn the political tide. As in the hard-fought election campaign of 1996, he and his administration can still use or withhold money from the federal budget to reward or punish wayward regional leaders. [...]

Analysts here are divided over Mr. Yeltsin’s motives. Some argue that he is intent on bequeathing to Russia, as his parting legacy, a Government and a President who are committed to completing the country’s transformation into a functioning democracy, with a market-based economy. The rise of a Primakov-Luzhkov team, backed by a coalition of Soviet-era industrial directors and some of Russia’s more autocratic governors, is seen by Mr. Yeltsin’s circle as a threat to those goals.

That fairly unprescient article did end on an important note of caution: “a year is a long time in Russian politics, in which alliances and promises can evaporate as quickly as they are made.” Basically, though, American analysis of Russian politics seems to be like the old adage about Hollywood’s understanding of how to make hit movies: Nobody knows anything.

Ezra Klein reads Roger Cohen’s interview/column with Barack Obama and hears shades of John Ikenberry in Obama’s thought. Due to the nature of the format it’s a little hard for me to know exactly what Obama was trying to say, since it’s impossible to see what Cohen was asking. But there really are some resonances with Ikenberry’s concept of “strategic restraint.” If you don’t want to slog through After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars, you might want to check out something shorter like Ikenberry’s brief rejoinder to Barry Posen in The National Interest or his Democracy article on the “Security Trap”.

The basic point of all of this is that it won’t really do for the United States to simply “do less” in the world. But as we’ve seen during the Bush years, the manic pursuit of “doing more” not only carries enormous costs, it actually fails to do any of the things it was supposed to do. The reason is that as we claim a wider-and-wider scope for unilateral action, efficacious American power becomes more and more threatening to more and more people. What’s needed is a way to make American power something a critical mass of foreigners can welcome, and that means strategic restraint — especially in the form of institutions that can become foci for international cooperation.

UPDATE: PS, Ezra’s blog has a new URL as an official TAP Online product.

Via Paul Waldman, Eric Black notes that the shift in Bush’s rhetoric from warning about Iranian nuclear weapons to warning about Iranian nuclear knowledge happened back in August, suggesting that this is around the time at which the White House became aware of the Intelligence Community’s view that Iran had no active nuclear weapons program.

That’s plausible, though one can also imagine a more multifaceted process. Under this theory, Bush would have been informed of IC views some time before August, at which point they just got ignored. Then there may have been some moment when Mike McConnell or someone else important within the intelligence world got upset and said “you can’t have people saying blah blah blah” and thus begins the era of what Black calls “Clintonian parsing,” language designed to obscure the new facts while technically staying within the bounds of what the new information says. But eventually even this got to be too much and pressure was obviously brought to bear from inside the executive branch to release the NIE to the public, thus depriving the parsing strategy of much of its utility.