Here’s a column I did about how depressing the little Clinton-Obama tête-a-tête on who’s ready to wage the politics of national security was:

Meanwhile, for the purposes of the campaign I’d certainly like to believe that faced with a choice between a Republican decorated war hero and veteran senator, and a Democratic ex-first lady and junior senator, both of whom supported the invasion of Iraq, both of whom became early critics of Donald Rumsfeld’s conduct of the occupation, and both of whom support long-term American military engagement in Iraqi affairs, that the American people will come down on Clinton’s side. But I pay attention to this stuff. I know that Clinton’s an open-minded person who takes advice from a wide circle of people and may well conduct an excellent foreign policy once in office. I also know that McCain is a committed militarist, a pre-September 11 advocate of “rogue state rollback,” and a politician who seems to have few firm beliefs beyond an inchoate nationalism. But, realistically, insofar as the campaign turns on national security issues (the economy will, of course, also matter) the average person is going to go for the popular war hero.

Obama’s approach is better but not, frankly, anywhere near as much better as one would hope. For months, he’s been unwilling to make a forceful case from the left on national security issues in a Democratic primary, so it’s far from clear that he would, in practice, make the sort of strong arguments his record leaves him capable of making. If McCain (or, for that matter, Mitt Romney) starts talking about how in a Democratic administration North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Hamas, al-Qaeda, and some Iraqi dude who doesn’t like having a foreign army occupy his country are all going to team up and kill your children, it won’t do to respond by whining about the politics of fear. He’ll have to learn to say something in response, perhaps about how the real best way to keep Americans safe is with a focused, targeted effort that gives us the maximum chance of actually killing or capturing our deadliest foes rather than one that lets them escape while needlessly stirring up unrelated trouble that multiplies the number of adversaries we face.

Here’s hoping….

The New York Times‘ look at Concerned Local Citizens getting blown up and the prospect that some of their recruits are going to start deserting is interesting, but for my money the most interested part is in the eighth graf (emphasis added):

Officials say that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia has a two-pronged strategy: directing strikes against Awakening members to intimidate and punish them for cooperating with the Americans, and infiltrating the groups to glean intelligence and discredit the movement in the eyes of an already wary Shiite-led government. “Al Qaeda is trying to assassinate all the Awakening members that support the government, but I believe that criminal militias are also doing this,” Mr. Bolani said during a recent interview in Taji.

This infiltration issue was, as I recall, the fatal flaw in what was really Version 1.0 of the Awakening strategy several years ago when we were first trying to build up the Iraqi police force. We wanted to get Sunni personnel to join the police in Sunni areas, but what would up happening was that Sunni insurgents just signed up to join the police. Our trust-based approach to recruiting and arming our new CLC allies seems to be vulnerable to the precise same flaw. Since the whole point is to sign up former insurgents, there’s no real way to screen out tell the difference between an insurgent infiltrating the operation and an ex-insurgent who’s decided to change his ways.

I’ve seen a lot of bloggers mine Jeffrey Goldberg’s Atlantic article on the future of Iraq for the hilarious section where he reports that Norm Podhoretz doesn’t know what a Kurd is, but I thought I might say something about a more serious issue Goldberg raises. In particular, this near the end:

It is true that the neoconservatives’ dream of Middle East democracy has proved to be a mirage. But it’s not as though the neocons’ principal foils, the foreign-policy realists, who view stability as a paramount virtue, have covered themselves in glory in the post-9/11 era. Brent Scowcroft, President George H. W. Bush’s national security adviser and Washington’s senior advocate of foreign-policy realism, told me not long ago of a conversation he had had with his onetime protégée Condoleezza Rice. “She says, ‘We’re going to democratize Iraq,’ and I said, ‘Condi, you’re not going to democratize Iraq,’ and she said, ‘You know, you’re just stuck in the old days,’ and she comes back to this thing, that we’ve tolerated an autocratic Middle East for 50 years, and so on and so forth. But we’ve had 50 years of peace.” Of course, what Scowcroft fails to note here is that al-Qaeda attacked us in part because America is the prime backer of its enemies, the autocratic rulers of Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

And indeed, both sides are right in this dispute between Rice and Scowcroft. But Scowcroft’s point of view at least reaches a minimal standard of coherence. The Bush administration’s strategy, by contrast, is a mess. You see that resentment over US support for the despotic governments in Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf is fueling anti-American terrorism and decide that the solution is to . . . keep supporting those governments and invade Iraq. After all, we support our clients for a reason so any modification to those policies would entail a cost. Iraq, by contrast, had been a regional adversary for quite some time. So why not support democracy by supporting it in Iraq? It’s about on a par with worrying about gangrene developing in your right hand, but also worrying that you’re right-handed and may not be able to write without it, so instead you decide to amputate the left hand and hope for the best.

Shockingly, it didn’t work out.

But the point still holds. The US faces two different kinds of problems in Iraq. On the one hand, there are the geopolitical aims of revisionist powers like Iran and Syria and (back in the day) Iraq. On the other hand, there’s the relationship between populist Arab anger at the United States and our dysfunctional relationships with sundry clients in the region. These are both thorny issues, but they don’t get less thorny if you mix them together and decide to go for a double bankshot the way the Bush administration did.