Spencer Ackerman notes Michael Kamber’s excllent account of what Spencer calls “the new imperial reality”:

During the war in Iraq, young Army and Marine captains have become American viceroys, officers with large sectors to run and near-autonomy to do it. In military parlance, they are the “ground-owners.” In practice, they are power brokers.

“They give us a chunk of land and say, ‘Fix it,’ ” said Capt. Rich Thompson, 36, who controls an area east of Baghdad.

The Iraqis have learned that these captains, many still in their 20s, can call down devastating American firepower one day and approve multimillion-dollar projects the next. Some have become celebrities in their sectors, men whose names are known even to children.

One is never to speak ill of The Troops, but I don’t think you need to be a hard-bitten anti-American to have some doubts about the soundness of this kind of set-up. Suppose we replaced the mayor of your town with a twentysomething foreigner who didn’t speak English but did have a ton of firepower at his disposal and no real checks on his power. You’d probably feel that was a step in the wrong direction. And conversely, it’s not genuinely reasonable to expect relatively junior Army officers to do this sort of job well. I find there’s often an element of fantastical thinking in counterinsurgency doctrine, where if we establish that it would be desirable for things to work in such and such a way, then it also becomes possible for them to work like that.

But it’s not an army of mutant superheros we’ve got, it’s an army of soldiers. How’s it supposed to suddenly be filled with people well-suited to the task of governing foreign towns? The British had a whole separate civilian agency set up to train and recruit their colonial administrators and make sure they had the right skills. If we’re going to want to run foreign countries effectively, we’re going to need to do something similar. An alternative, and superior, option would be to back away from running foreign countries.

This is some pretty striking stuff from the president:

President Bush said Thursday that Iran has declared that it wants to be a nuclear power with a weapon to “destroy people,” including others in the Middle East, contradicting the judgments of a recent U.S. intelligence estimate.

As the article goes on to point out, Iran has not, in fact, ever declared that it wants to be a nuclear power and a fortiori has never declared an intention to use a nuclear weapon to destroy people. The official line from the NSC spokesman is that “the president shorthanded his answer ” with “shorthanded” apparently being a new term meaning “lied.” This brings me back to something I wrote in 2006:

Some hawks, like Jeffrey Bell, writing in the February 6 Weekly Standard, have adopted a strategy of simply making things up, like claiming that Ahmadinejad not only “says the Jewish Holocaust never happened” (which he did say) but also “muses about the possibility of correcting that Nazi failure by dropping a nuclear bomb on Israel.” This last seems a highly unlikely statement since Iran officially denies that it has a nuclear program, it’s hard to imagine — and there’s no evidence — that Ahmadinejad ever “mused” about dropping a nuclear bomb on anyone.

Bell later explained to me that he was using “poetic license,” which I think is somewhat more elegant than the “shorthanded his answer” formulation. Still, the fundamental point is that some folks would really like people to believe that Iranian leaders are running around saying “let’s build a nuclear bomb and drop it on Israel!” even though no leaders are, in fact, saying that. It’s really not a small difference.

Sunni militias going on strike, feeling miffed that they’re not still getting the love they feel they deserve:

But dozens of phone calls to Sahwa leaders reveal bitterness and anger. “We know the Americans are using us to do their dirty work and kill off the resistance for them and then we get nothing for it,” said Abu Abdul-Aziz, the head of the council in Abu Ghraib, where 500 men have already quit.

“The Americans got what they wanted. We purged al-Qaida for them and now people are saying why should we have any more deaths for the Americans. They have given us nothing.”

There’s no way for the U.S. to build a coherent strategy in Iraq without there being a coherent, genuinely national, Iraqi political movement for us to get behind. In the absence of such a genuinely national movement you can’t build from localized successes to national ones and anything you accomplish will eventually be undermined.

I think Barack Obama’s speech on Iraq and the economy was just okay, which for Obama is pretty bad. As Chris Bowers says, it was redolent with a kind of narrow-minded transactionalism that kind of misses the point:

The broader point that needs to me made is not that Iraq specifically has prevented money from being funneled directly to your specific demographic group, but that excessive military spending in places like Iraq drains massive amounts of money from our nation as a whole. The Iraq war is our major national project right now, equivalent to the Apollo program or the New Deal. Do we want that as our national project? I don’t think many Americans would agree. Do we want a series of transactions to specific demographic groups and issues to be our national project? Even if is vastly preferable to making the Iraq war our national project, the truth is that isn’t very appealing either. We need a different framing around what we want our national project to be, and we need a Democratic leader who is willing to make that case to the country as a whole.

I think that’s right. Democrats are going to want to be featuring Iraq/economy linkages as we head toward November and the right way to do this is isn’t in terms of eleventeen different micro-initiatives that could have been paid for with Iraq-style levels of money. The point to make is that we could be making our “big project” some kind of productive investment in the future of our country — something that would provide jobs, yes, but also pay off over the long run.