The improving security situation in Iraq appears to be un-improving as five soldiers were killed today in an increasingly unstable Mosul.

I’ve gotten some pushback from Obama supporters for my less-than-enthusiastic response to his foreign policy messaging in this piece. And, indeed, there’s a pretty strong section of his stump speech:

I am running for President because I am sick and tired of democrats thinking that the only way to look tough on national security is by talking, and acting, and voting like George Bush Republicans.

When I am this party’s nominee, my opponent will not be able to say that I voted for the war in Iraq; or that I gave George Bush the benefit of the doubt on Iran; or that I supported Bush-Cheney policies of not talking to leaders that we don’t like. And he will not be able to say that I wavered on something as fundamental as whether or not it is ok for America to torture – because it is never ok. That’s why I am in it.

This is, I think, a great criticism of Hillary Clinton and it nicely expresses the key set of reasons why I’d rather see Obama be the nominee. But that said, this is still all pretty meta — it’s talking about how he’d talk about foreign policy, or talking about which things can and can’t be said about him. A primary campaign has plenty of space for that kind of thing, but in a general election one does need to directly engage with Republican arguments. Now I know that one of Obama’s quirks is that, for the purposes of the primary, he does much less direct Bush-bashing than one would expect and the foreign policy section of his speech reflects that. And if that’s the choice he wants to make, that’s the choice he wants to make. But it still does leave me sitting here a bit nervous about what the argument will look like when he’s up against a Republican.

All that said, as I’ve said several times before, I think he’s been clearly superior to Clinton on foreign policy issues throughout the campaign.

It seems we have 50 FBI agents who speak Arabic out of 10,000. Suppose that instead of deciding to spread our scarce language assets thinner by invading Iraq, the Bush administration had done something much cheaper like a $15 billion per year effort to massively boost America’s base of people who speak Arabic, Turkic languages, Urdu, etc.? Wouldn’t that have been more helpful?

A while back I remarked that “I’m not sure there’s very much the US government can or should do, in practice, to push Egypt into becoming a democracy.” In response to that, Jonathan Kulick noted the existence of a CRS report, “Democracy Promotion: Cornerstone of US Policy?”, on the subject. My read of the report, which, as is frequently the case with CRS reports, is a very useful summary is that we should be skeptical. As the report makes clear, the US does have a good deal of success with democracy promotion programs. But the bulk of the success is concentrated in efforts to assist countries that genuinely want to make a democratic transition. There’s also some record of success in programs designed to bolster post-conflict situations. What there isn’t is much of a track record of success for initiatives designed to coerce an autocratic regime into becoming democratic.

Shadi Hamid also offered an impassioned defense of the view that there’s stuff we can do:

Egypt is one of our closest allies in the region. They depend on us for economic and military support. This means we have leverage, and we shouldn’t be afraid to use that leverage to push for change. For starters, this can mean making the billions we give to Egypt conditional on political reform (for more on this, see here). For more forward-thinking policymakers, we can also explore ways to show the Egyptian regime we’re serious (this could include starting a dialogue with the strongest opposition group in the country – the Muslim Brotherhood. For more on that, see here). Now there is a legitimate debate about how much we can do ultimately do to change Egypt. But the basic point remains – we can at least do something.

On the aid, here’s the thing. Presumably Mubarak’s government would rather have our aid money than not have our aid money. But Mubarak’s government would really prefer to hold on to power than to lose power. Thus aid-related threats aren’t going to persuade them to adopt meaningful political reforms unless our bureaucrats manage to succeed in tricking Mubarak’s into implementing reforms whose implications are more meaningful than the Egyptians realize. But given that the government of Egypt is stacked from top to bottom with people who spend just about all day every day thinking about how to maintain their regime and who are really good at achieving this goal, I think it’s much more likely that we’d be tricked. Then next thing you know you’ve got the President of the United States and the Secretary of State proudly laying on hands and pronouncing a great victory for democracy, the reform remains ephermal, and ordinary Egyptians grow ever-more-skeptical of US activities.

And this, to me, is the main thing to keep in mind for anyone’s pet schemes for US-driven political change in Egypt, Pakistan, wherever. The United States is a much more powerful country than are those other countries. But that power is a very blunt instrument. We should try to employ it in pursuit of goals for which bluntness is not a problem. Micro-managing political outcomes and manipulating politicians is a delicate task. And savvy third-world leaders from Hosni Mubarak to Benazir Bhutto to the Gulf Sheikhs making multi-million dollar contributions to the Clinton and Bush presidential libraries are much better-positioned to manipulate our guys than we are to manipulate theirs. Rather than try to leverage our relationship into political change in those countries, my suggestion would be to simply say that insofar as these are repressive governments there’s a certain degree of closeness we’re going to put some distance between our country and theirs. In the specific case of Egypt, however, this is complicated by the fact that our aid relationship with Cairo is tied to our relationship with Israel. So you’ve got a thorny problem intimately connected to another thorny problem and I’d say I’m pessimistic that much will get done.

That said, yes, we should be engaging with Egyptian opposition groups including the Muslim Brotherhood and making it clear that we’re prepared to have a relationship with whatever kind of government might emerge, but that we’d envision a closer relationship with a democratic government.

Paul Krugman notes the 32-59 split on the question of whether or not the invasion of Iraq was worth it and remarks with satisfaction “the fact that we’re not squandering lives at the same rate we were a year ago (we’re still squandering money as fast as ever) does not seem to have convinced people that the war we were misled into was a good idea.” Hasn’t convinced people, that is, except for hard-core Republicans and Hillary Clinton who Krugman keeps telling us is preferable to Barack Obama and his unsound deviationism. Or is it that Clinton didn’t think invading Iraq was a good idea but despite her 35 years of experience fighting for change didn’t realize the significance of what she was voting on?

I’m quite certain I’d be happier with the foreign policy Hillary Clinton would conduct in office than I’d be with the one John McCain would conduct, but her actual record on this count seems like a pretty sufficient reason to support a viable alternative in the primary. After all, if neither Clinton nor Obama had decided to run in 2008, it’s hard for me to imagine that a lot of people would have been sitting around early in the cycle saying “you know what the party really needs in a nominee? — an Iraq War supporter. Those people look really substantively and politically savvy, and I want to ensure that their hawkish gamble pays off to encourage future legislators to act just like them.”

Spencer Ackerman has a big ol’ feature on the recent history of CIA interrogations putting the use of brutal and illegal contexts in broader context. Specifically, putting them in the broader context of the fact that the CIA actually has very little experience with interrogations and with best practices involved in doing them correctly. Consequently, you have an equation that involves people who don’t really know what they’re doing working under intense pressure with little practical constraint and faced with an objectively difficult task — torture is the result. What isn’t the result is much in the way of usable intelligence. Specifically, there’s no way to tell what’s accurate and what’s not:

Many interrogators today are, in fact, concerned about that. But the program that developed within the Central Intelligence Agency after 9/11 has left the intelligence community playing a fateful role. Surprising as it may be, the CIA has never really been in the interrogation business. After 9/11, it turned its back on its own limited history of interrogations and never consulted those in the U.S. with solid experience in that difficult art. Even in the seven years since it has built an interrogation capability mostly from scratch, the agency has never applied the best practices in behavioral science to improve its regimen. The result has been to privilege brutality out of ignorance, which, according to many experts and insiders interviewed, means that interrogation practices that produce faulty information are now at the very heart of the U.S. efforts against a mysterious and still-unfamiliar enemy. [...]

Those with intimate knowledge of the program say that in many cases, U.S. interrogators haven’t even been able to learn the basics about many of those they hold or have held, to say nothing of whatever crucial information they possess. “How do you separate the sheep from the wool? There’s no fingerprints, no DNA,” said a former senior intelligence official who helped set up the CIA’s interrogation program, and who would not speak for attribution. “You don’t know if you have Osama bin Laden or Joe Shit the rag-man.”

Worse than a crime, to paraphrase Tallyrand, interrogation by the CIA has been—and remains—a blunder.

I had always thought “it was worse than a crime, it was a mistake” was something Joseph Fouché said (and his background in the secret police is more apropos given the subject of the article) but besides that it’s an absolutely excellent piece. One area of inquiry that, for now, must remain shrouded in mystery and speculation is to what extent the problems with this approach are precisely what made them appealing to Bush. The US government has, after all, plenty of agencies who interrogate prisoners routinely and lots of interrogations have been done historically. If I had been President, I would have tasked such agencies with the new job.

That would have resulted in “non-physical, non-coercive techniques like building rapports with detainees—much like the FBI does, and much like what worked 60 years ago at places like Fort Hunt against hardened, sadistic Nazi officers.” And it wouldn’t have even resulted in that outcome because I’m an especially humane kind of guy. It’s just that that is, in fact, what the FBI does and what the military did when it had to interrogate Nazis, etc. That’s the process, the process works, and it doesn’t raise any moral or legal qualms so it’s all good. Why on earth would I turn to the CIA and have them re-invent the wheel? Well, I suppose Bush might have if deep down he’s just the sort of person who likes the idea of torture and brutality; someone who at some level would be disappointed to hear an agency official not respond to 9/11 by immediately requesting permission to start torturing people.

But whatever the reason, it’s just a huge, huge, huge mistake. Just as with surveillance policy, the Bush administration seems incapable of processing the idea that a certain level of formal constraint on what the security services are allowed to do may be necessary to make them work properly. Instead, the underlying presumption seems to be that transparency, the rule of law, accountability, etc. are all incredibly weaknesses in a system of government and that liberal democracies have been prevailing for the past couple of centuries despite the integral features of such a political system rather than because of them.