Nothing is over!!! Nothing!!! You just don’t turn it off! It wasn’t my war! You asked me, I didn’t ask you!

–Rambo: First Blood

The juxtaposition of David Brooks and Peter Beinart both opining that nobody cares about Iraq any more right before a New York Times poll came out revealing that “more people cite the Iraq war as the most important issue facing the country than cite any other matter” sure is odd. Equally odd, in many respects, is the logic Beinart used to reach his conclusion:

Last month, Katharine Q. Seelye of the New York Times live-blogged the Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas. As the discussion bounced from subject to subject, she marked the topic and the time, then gave her thoughts. At 8:34 p.m., it was driver’s licenses; 8:55, Pakistan; 9:57, the Supreme Court. By night’s end she had 17 entries totaling almost 1,500 words. And she hadn’t typed “Iraq” once.

Basically, the evidence for Beinart’s side is that media elites who control the debate questioning process don’t want to talk about the war. Conversely, the public does seem to think the war is very important. This is particularly interesting since historically elites care a lot more about foreign policy questions than does the public at large, which tends to be more focused on so-called “bread and butter” issues.

This seems akin to what I wrote about over the summer in the LA Times when we had a spurt of calls for a lowering of the partisan temperature over the Iraq issue. And, of course, we saw something similar about a year ago when all the little people were supposed to hush up and let the Iraq Study Group sort things out for us.

There is, in essence, a powerful desire to avoid an “accountability moment” in which the people who played a role in bamboozling a large swathe of the public into backing the war are called onto the carpet. There’s a desire to believe that there’s only one strategy the United States could possibly be pursuing in the world and that, therefore, the only debates to be had are boring tactical ones that couldn’t possibly engage the public mind. Invading Iraq was, perhaps, an error — but an unavoidable one, something that just happened. Then mistakes were made in the implementation, but now better implementation is at hand, so the debate is over. After all, if Bush has now largely adopted the tactics the liberal hawks once criticized him for not adopting, what could there possibly be to argue about? And so how could the public possibly care? After all, there aren’t any questions about it in Kit Seelye’s notebook?

Obviously, though, this is a big deal. To observe that monthly casualty rates for American soldiers are now lower than they once were (2007 is still the deadliest year) s neither here nor there — one big, obvious virtue of the “let’s leave” alternative is that it gets our troops’ fatalities down to nothing. Meanwhile, the small mercy of this war has always been that fatalities among our soldiers have been pretty low by historical standards. But despite that there’s the small issue of whether or not we should really be proceeding on this course. Of course it’s a big deal!

One point people have tried to make over the past few years is that the Bush administration needs to stop thinking of public diplomacy as simply a need to put a better sales pitch on the same American policies. Our pitch is actually fine and people understand what we’re saying — they just don’t like it.

Relatedly, someone told me earlier today that Jim “Dow 36,000″ Glassman was replacing Karen Hughes. I laughed at this pretty funny out-of-left-field joke. Obviously, the same George W. Bush who thinks public diplomacy is just about salesmanship wouldn’t give the job to one of the least credible salespeople on the planet. Funny stuff. And imaginative! But no, this is really happening.

Dahlia Lithwick on the broader implications of Jamie Leigh Jones: “If Jones’ allegations are true, the lesson is that this government’s convenient little ‘law free zones’ at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and black sites around the world don’t discriminate between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ If an innocent American finds herself in such a law-free zone, she’s as unlikely as any alleged terrorist to find her day in court.”

And how could it not? Over time, the mechanisms of imperial governance abroad are bound to erode democracy at home. You see it from the top down in the ways in which prominent military commanders have been inserted into partisan politics, and you see it from the bottom-up in the erosion of the rule of law.

A couple of days ago, I was rereading Fred Kaplan’s January piece “Mission Impossible: Bush’s Smart New General Can’t Save Iraq” and was struck by this passage:

In the one successful counterinsurgency campaign, in the northern town of Tal Afar, the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment surrounded the town with a 9-foot-high wall to isolate the city. This was in addition to other counterinsurgency techniques—maintaining a high troop-to-population ratio, dealing in a civilized manner with local authorities, and so forth. (Tal Afar slid back into chaos when the 3rd A.C.R. was redeployed to another hot spot—another indication that clear and hold, much less clear, hold, and build, requires a lot more troops than the United States has ever had in Iraq.)

Will Petraeus wall off neighborhoods in Baghdad? (The U.S. Army in Iraq does have a lot of concrete.) Is such a strategy feasible in a city of 6 million, as opposed to a town of 60,000 like Tal Afar? Moving in the bulldozers and the berms may be a dramatic first step. But then what?

This is about what I took from George Packer’s article on the “Lesson of Tal Afar” as well — you couldn’t possibly scale-up what Colonel H.R. McMaster and the 3rd ACR did there. But according to one of Andrew’s letter-writers that’s exactly what they’ve done:

No one ever mentions the fact that we have literally built walls around each neighborhood and along every highway as the reason the violence is down here. The place looks like an Orwell novel gone wrong. The people cannot shoot each other through walls and the insurgents cannot move around to plant their bombs. A society cannot function walled off form each other.

I think one has to reply to this that while a society cannot function all walled off like this, it can’t function in the midst of constant anarchy either. I believe this technique comes to the US Army’s counterinsurgency theorists via Belfast, where I believe they have been effective in helping the British maintain a degree of order.

To some extent, this brings us back to the question of strategy. If tactics employed in Northern Ireland can be made to work in Iraq (and maybe they can) even though Iraq has ten times as many people as Northern Ireland does and even though Iraqis don’t speak English and even though the sectarian violence in Iraq is undergirded by concrete fighting over valuable resources, then does this really seem like a wise strategic undertaking? It doesn’t seem that way to me. It’s been decades since “the Troubles,” after all, and while Northern Ireland is now in a situation that there’s reason to be optimistic about, you could imagine it all going to shit. All things considered, it seems like the British position there is one we ought to avoid getting ourselves stuck into. Emulating the UK’s more successful tactics from that theater makes sense if we’re going to adopt that kind of mission, but there mere fact that the tactics can maybe kinda sorta work if we give them a few dozen years is no reason to actually do it.

U.S. Army photo by Spc. Alan Moos

Robin Wright reports that new sanctions on Iran are still rolling through the UN process: “The proposal indicates that there is still an appetite for significant new punitive measures against Iran even after the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate last week concluded that Tehran had halted its nuclear weapons program four years ago, according to officials from several countries.” Kevin Drum remarks:

“The international community is not being dissuaded by the NIE,” says an unnamed European diplomat. Perhaps so. Or perhaps the NIE is actually making things easier?

I’d say probably easier. The fact of the NIE’s release seems like a decisive signal that the really nutty war faction inside the Bush administration has been defeated and that policy is being driven by people who are worried about Iranian nuclear activities, but who also have a basic grip on reality. American officials like that are the sort of officials that diplomats around the world are prepared to work with. Foreign officials weren’t, however, interested in being used as dupes who were supposed to provide a veneer of cover for an insane military adventure. I bet that if you saw a new administration with a clearer commitment to laying out a path for improved US-Iranian relations, you’d see even more willingness on the part of the international communtiy to contemplate punitive measures if Iran is unresponsive.

The underlying principle is simple enough: the US secures more international cooperation when people see us as acting rationally and responding in a reasonable manner to events around the world. Acting frightening and erratic, or paranoid and hysterical, isn’t helpful.

Mitchell Cohen notices some signs that rationality may be creeping back into our politics as even conservatives are now back to citing deterrence as an effective method of dealing with rogue actors, in contradiction to the crazy markers laid down by the Bush administration in 2002.

CIA interrogator says he tortured Abu Zubaydah with the approval of higher-ups. He also says the information derived from the torture was useful, contrary to what’s been reported elsewhere. Last, he says that we shouldn’t be torturing people: “”We’re Americans, and we’re better than this. And we shouldn’t be doing this kinda thing.”