Since Charles Krauthammer is citing Anthony Cordesman’s report on the situation in Iraq to make the point that the surge has worked, I trust nobody on the right will be upset if I quote from a different part of the same report. He says, basically, a lot of good things have happened but a lot more needs to be done. We need, he says, strategic patience. Under the circumstances, it’s worth taking a look at what he says we need to do going forward to succeed.

His report is full of things like “consolidate progress in Iraq forces: Independent for internal security by 2012; create ability to defend against foreign threats by 2018.” He outlines goals like “Create effective criminal justice system and local rule of law (2008-2010)” and “revive national infrastructure in terms of water, power, roads, rail, petroleum exports, financial institutions, communications, etc (2009-2011).” On the security front, we’re also supposed to “resolve the problem of National Police, local forces, ethnic and sectarian militias and integrate into ISF or civil economy (2009-2011).” We also need to “revise constitution to meet needs of all major factions (2008-2009).”

To me, rather than an endless continuation of the debate over whether (or in what sense) the “surge” has or hasn’t “worked” it would be highly preferable to focus instead on whether or not strategic patience of the sort Cordesman is talking about is a reasonable policy going forward. My view is that it isn’t. If you look at these kind of agenda items that lurk near the back of the report, you’ll see a bunch of things where the prospects for success aren’t particularly good, the costs are high, the time frame is both vague and long, and the benefits don’t seem particularly clear. I’m also fairly confident that if Charles Krauthammer and John McCain just put the choice between Cordesman’s approach and leaving expeditiously on the table, that most people would agree with me. Thus you’ve seen a consistent effort starting in 2002, then continuing into 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, and now 2008 to mislead people about the question at hand into thinking that “success” is something that might come soon and thus that the cut-and-run crowd should be ignored. But if Bush had told people in 2004 that four years in the future his Iraq policy would be so successful that people would be talking about Iraq taking responsibility for its own internal security in 2012 then he never would have been re-elected.

As an intellectual exercise, this sort of thing Cordesman has done strikes me as pretty useful and interesting. I’d like to see more of it. What would Cordesman do to fix Haiti’s deeply entrenched problem if we were willing to commit 120,000+ U.S. troops and $100 billion a year to the problem for an indefinite period of time? Or maybe the federal government wants to dedicate that kind of personnel (though not active duty soldiers) and money to reducing the crime rate in Washington, DC? I’m not at all sure that a forward-looking agenda that has “deal with the issue of federalism in ways that resolve Kurd-Arab-Turcoman tensions; Shi’ite power struggle in south, Sunni concerns in west, mixed areas in center, and create a stable Baghdad and Basra (2008-2010)” can possibly succeed, but I am pretty sure that I’d rather not find out.

In short, I lack strategic patience.

Conservatives have been all over Barack Obama (here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here) for telling the following anecdote during last night’s debate:

You know, I’ve heard from an Army captain who was the head of a rifle platoon — supposed to have 39 men in a rifle platoon,” he said. “Ended up being sent to Afghanistan with 24 because 15 of those soldiers had been sent to Iraq. And as a consequence, they didn’t have enough ammunition, they didn’t have enough humvees. They were actually capturing Taliban weapons, because it was easier to get Taliban weapons than it was for them to get properly equipped by our current commander in chief.

Basically, as you can see if you check the conservative blogs above, that story can’t possibly be true, and the fact that Obama would say it reflects either his dishonesty or else his gross ignorance of military matters. Alternatively, you can read Jake Tapper who got in touch with the Captain in question: “Short answer: He backs up Obama’s story.” The story itself is, as Tapper says, pretty interesting and worth checking out on its own merits. Obama’s conservative critics will, I’m sure, be taking note of this additional reporting.

UPDATE: Phil Carter has an excellent post following up on some of these issues. Bottom line:

In light of my experience in Iraq, Sen. Obama’s comments last night are eminently believable. Sen. Obama is also absolutely right to use this anecdote as a critique of the administration’s decision to go to war in Iraq. It is incontrovertible that the war in Iraq diverted scarce military resources (manpower, equipment, etc.) from Afghanistan to Iraq. The cost for that diversion was paid by America’s sons and daughters, and our Afghan brethren, who continue to fight in Afghanistan against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. We owe our troops better.

Well said.

New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz complains about a double standard:

The Boston Globe is sure that the Kosovans are not ready for independence. But its editors, favored columnists and biased news writers are absolutely certain the Palestinians are.

Now, I’m for Kosovo independence. But at the same time, I really don’t think it’s viable to support independence for every ethnic minority group everywhere around the world. So why Palestine? What makes the Palestinians so special that they deserve their own country when the Catalans and the Québécois and all the rest don’t have them? The answer is pretty simple — the alternative to independence is citizenship. The Québécois don’t have an independent country, but they are citizens of Canada. Catalans are citizens of spain. Flemish and Walloons are both citizens of Belgium. Komi are citizens of Russia. When you see legal discriminatory treatment against citizens — as with African-Americans in the United States until very recently — that’s a problem. People are owed equal citizenship.

It’s clear, though, that granting Israeli citizenship on terms of equality to residents of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is incompatible with the idea of Israel as a Jewish state. Thus, Palestinian independence emerges as a reasonable, practical, and moral alternative. Basically, there are four things you could do with Israel-Palestine. One option is partition and independence. Another option is equal citizenship and the end of Israel. A third option is “transfer” and ethnic cleansing. And a fourth option is apartheid. I wonder which of the alternatives to Palestinian independence Peretz favors?

The rioting in Serbia complete with an attack on the U.S. embassy in Belgrade is the headline news out of the Balkans. The real action, though, is a bit further afield. In particular, now that majority-Albanian Kosovo is formally getting out of Serbia, the majority-Serbian part of Kosovo centered around Mitrovica wants out of Kosovo and back into Serbia. On one level, that sounds eminently reasonable. On another level, people I’ve talked to explain that the problem here is that region contains its own Albanian minority. Similarly, there are Serbs in the majority-Albanian parts of Kosovo.

This is, of course, the general problem with partition as the solution to ethnic conflicts. Like those little Russian dolls you can almost always bore down one level deeper. French Canadians want independent for Québec? Sure. But then what about those parts of Québec that are majority Anglophone? And then what about the Francophones living in those Anglophone enclaves?

At the end of the day, the only just solution for Canada, or for the former Yugoslavia, or for Iraq or Lebanon or anyone else necessarily involves the creation of tolerably liberal rights-respecting governments or else intolerably illiberal population transfers and ethnic cleansing. There’s no administrative fix whereby simply drawing the boundaries in just such a way solves the problem. To create really adequate solutions, the international community will have to find a way to create liberal regimes. And this, of course, is precisely what we don’t know how to do. This is the point I was trying to make in my Kosovo article from yesterday — the 1999 bombing campaign made accomplished some important things at a reasonable cost, but while some took our success there as opening a new chapter of a grand new era of military humanitarianism, a more sober look at Kosovo actually highlights rather sharp limits to what we can achieve even under favorable circumstances.

Photo courtesy of the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office

I think Barack Obama and his campaign have a lot of promise to do some of the things I argue are necessary in Heads in the Sand in terms of mounting a meaningful challenge to the big ideas that have dominated policymaking in the United States since 9/11. And beyond showing promise, he’s taken a number of very worthwhile concrete steps. But there have also been disappointments. Michael Hirsch, for example, has a good column about how Obama ought to ditch the “war on terror.” The argument that this conceptual framework needs to be done away with has been made very persuasively by my colleague James Fallows before his exile to China, among others. And as Hirsch says at this point it’s Obama or nobody:

It is a debate that only Obama can start. McCain won’t bring it up. Nor will Hillary Clinton. Apart from being on the verge of oblivion politically, she is too fully vested in the war on terror, having voted in 2002 to authorize the war in Iraq as part of it. And if that debate doesn’t start, we as a country will be effectively doomed to a “war” that has no prospect of ending. Bush has gradually expanded his definition of the war on terror to include all Islamic “extremists”—among them Hezbollah, Hamas, and other radical political groups that have no ties to Al Qaeda, ideological or otherwise. In doing so the president has plainly condemned us to a permanent war, for the simple reason that we will never be rid of all the terrorists. It is also a war that we will wage by ourselves, since no other nation agrees on such a broadly defined enemy. As Princeton scholar G. John Ikenberry has written, “It is perhaps a paradox—and one that is fitting for the strangeness of our current age—that we will need to end the war against terrorism because we cannot end terrorism.”

The trouble is that months ago, all the Democratic candidates were given an opportunity to launch this debate and only John Edwards was willing to “go there.” If Obama didn’t want to do it when facing pressure from his left, it’s hard to imagine him doing it now.

This little GOP web video about Democratic unwillingness to agree to the gutting of the constitution is really pretty striking stuff. In essence, the Republicans are placing a heavy political bet on the idea of a terrorist attack happening some time while their “danger” clock is running. If Americans die, they’ll be in a position to clean up. Conversely, if we still have some semblance of legal protections against government surveillance months from now and that clock’s still ticking even though al-Qaeda hasn’t slaughtered any innocents here in the U.S., they’re going to look mighty silly.

That’s the dynamics of this specific fight but, of course, it’s also a microcosm for 21st century politics as a whole. And it’s part of what makes the Republican Party, as currently conceived, so incredibly dangerous. Democracy is a highly imperfect method of getting good government. One thing that makes it work better is the general sense that if good things happen to a country, incumbent politicians will benefit from that whereas if bad things happen, incumbents will suffer. That often leads to election results that aren’t really “deserved” since Jimmy Carter didn’t cause the 70s oil crisis and Bill Clinton didn’t cause the 90s tech boom. But it does keep the incentives where they belong — insofar as things are under the control of politicians, the politicians try to make good things happen.

But not the post-9/11 GOP. Their political meal ticket is a population terrified of terrorism, and nothing whips that terror up quite like actual terrorism in London, Madrid, wherever. The result is a political party that simply can’t adopt policies designed to ratchet-down the level of danger and anxiety.