Via Matt Duss, a great map showing rather conclusively that those who warned withdrawal advocates that the result of leaving Iraq would be ethnic cleansing got their continued war, but also their ethnic cleansing as well. We can also see the dubious success of the surge here. The level of violence kept going up during the early surge months and seems to have died down because the radical decline in the number of mixed communities has reduced the opportunities for violence.

I don’t get the sense that when people talk about “the success of the surge” that this is the sort of thing they have in mind.

But whether or not you want to characterize walling off Baghdad into a series of separated, segregated neighborhoods while the government remains dominated by a sectarian clique and unable to actually govern in vast swathes of the country (areas where rival cliques rule through force) as “success” this is the new reality. And, of course, for liberals part of that new reality is that the levels of violence really are much lower than they used to be. It’s still really violent in that, for example:

At least 20 people were killed or found dead in and around Baquba, the largest city in Diyala Province, which is north of Baghdad. The police said that a suicide motorcycle bomber killed at least seven people and wounded 24 in one of the city’s markets. Six were killed in two separate shootouts. Two died from roadside bombs and the authorities found six bodies in two locations on the city’s western outskirts.

That, however, isn’t typical anymore. The question is what, if anything, follows from that. Iraq might go back to falling apart at the seams if we leave. On the other hand, it might go back to falling apart at the seams even if we stay. The extent of our impact on the situation isn’t clear. What is clear is that the political causes of the conflict are still in place, which is why the violence continues to persist, albeit at a lower level.

Given that, I’d be happy to keep our troops in the country for some reasonably short period of time if there were some reasonable prospects that doing so would push the situation over a positive tipping point where political reconciliation lays the groundwork for lasting peace. But according to our current policy’s architects that’s not on the table and, instead, their belief is that military engagement will need to continue for over a decade to bring about their desired results. That’s not an idea that makes sense to me. The costs would be enormous. And the time-frame itself would be enormous. If American troops just vanished tomorrow maybe Iraq would be at peace again in 10-15 years. There’d be no way of telling if we were really doing any good.

Now if you think it’s strategically useful for the United States to be engaged in the military occupation of a medium-sized country in the Persian Gulf region, then things look different. By I think it’s strategically bonkers — making our al-Qaeda problem worse at vast cost for no good reason — and the “surge” policy itself isn’t promising “success” in the “let’s keep doing this for a bit longer and then we’ll have won” sense, it’s promising to have laid the groundwork for an extremely prolonged new occupation phase that we shouldn’t undertake.

Needless to say, I agree with what Greenwald and Atrios and Digby are saying — given that when Republican members of congress want to put “holds” on things, Reid keeps respecting their hold, it’s preposterous for him to be refusing to do the same for Chris Dodd. The “hold” rule is a bad one — a terrible one, in fact — but like many elements of the congressional process, even bad rules can be used to good effect sometimes. Except not, it seems, in this instance.

The only word of caution I would add is that one shouldn’t exclusively heap opprobrium on Harry Reid. It’s clear that Reid wouldn’t be interfering with the traditional privileges of a Senator like this unless he felt sure of overwhelmingly support within the body. The Senate as a whole clearly wants this to pass, and that seems to include even some members who are going to nominally go against it. Some Democrats simply favor this sort of measures. And others are desperate to ensure that the 2008 campaign doesn’t touch on these issues and thus really, really, really want it to be taken “off the table.” It’s more or less the politics of 2002 all over again, a belief that public distemper with the economy will glide Democrats to victory if only those mean ‘ol Republicans don’t run on national security.

You can read about it here in Foreign Affairs. As Ilan Goldberg says it tends to prompt a sensation of whiplash, “One second he is totally reasonable. The next second I think he’s completely clueless.”

The sad truth is that this is better than most of what you get on this topic from the other Republicans. Rudy Giuliani’s comparable essay, for example, was completely free of “totally reasonable” moments. That said, as soon as Mitt Romney attacked Huckabee for criticizing Bush’s “arrogant bunker mentality” Huckabee decided to back down. Nobody in the Republican field is ready to explicitly argue for a break with Bushism except Ron Paul.

The most recent CBS/NYT poll asked people “From what you know about the U.S. involvement in Iraq, how much longer would you be willing to have large numbers of U.S. troops remain in Iraq — less than a year, one to two years, two to five years or longer than five years?” As you can see, virtually nobody in the United States wants to see American troops remain in Iraq for longer than five years. If you put squarely to people a political and strategic choice between a long-term military commitment to Iraq and trying to wrap our involvement up as quickly as is feasible, it wouldn’t even be a close call.

At the same time, everyone who’s paying close attention to what David Petraeus says, or what gets written on the Small Wars Journal Blog, or what the cool kids in the think tanks are saying, or what the Counterinsurgency Field Manual says, understands that the current strategy envisions us being in Iraq for much much longer than the 1-2 years that the American public seems willing to contemplate. In other words, completely apart from the question of whether or not the surge is “working,” the architects of the surge understand themselves to be engaged in an undertaking — setting the stage for over a decade of intensive, Northern Ireland-style policing and reconstruction of Iraqi society — that public opinion overwhelmingly and correctly believes to be an unacceptable allocation of national priorities.

And yet, this fact is being kept pretty well obscured from the American public. Part of the fault there lies with the press. But a big part of the fault lies with the opposition party which is simply declining to present the public with a clear strategic alternative. The nit-picking over whether the fact that conditions in December 2007 are more like those of December 2006 (unbearably shitty!) or more like those of December 2004 (merely awful!) pales in comparison to the fundamental choice of whether our troops should come home within the next year or two, as the American people want, or whether they should stay in Iraq for an indefinite period of time definitely lasting over ten years, as the current strategy indicates.

It’s not a difficult point to make, rhetorically or conceptually, but it would require the opposition party to actually put the “let’s not stay forever” alternative clearly on the table and stop mucking around with half-measures, “residual forces,” “phased transitions” and all the rest. You rarely get 75 percent of the public agreeing on anything, but it’s right there — over 75 percent of the public rejects the idea of a military operation in Iraq lasting more than five years. Meanwhile, the people leading the current operation are talking about it lasting “at least nine or ten years”.

Petraeus is to be commended for his honest and sober-minded assessment of the challenges on that score and it’s genuinely not his job to say whether or not it’s a good idea to make that kind of commitment to Iraq. But it’s not a good idea, and the people whose job it is to make that decision — the politicians, in short — ought to say so and move to cut this thing off.

Julian Sanchez has a good summary of the legislative fight over FISA legislation that’s going to unfold today as Harry Reid introduces the Bush administration supported Intelligence Committee version of the bill.

Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald has, naturally, a very long and information-rich analysis of some of the latest revelations about run-amok NSA surveillance combined with some warranted outrage at the members of congress who aren’t standing up to this crap.