I suppose nothing should surprise me anymore, but it seems that conservatives are using the recently-released Pentagon report showing (yet again) that there’s no Saddam/al-Qaeda connection to prove the existence of such a connection. What’s more, they’re even telling the truth about the media not paying much attention to the report. Indeed, they’re taking advantage of the fact that the media hasn’t paid attention to the report to just mislead people about what it says.

Anatol Lieven’s departure from our fair shores to return to England was a huge blow for the DC think tank universe, but I’m glad to see he hasn’t completely given up writing on our issues. Thus, I’ve been distracted from my efforts to write a long piece about how absolutely terrifying John McCain is on foreign policy by Lieven’s brief piece on how terrifying McCain is. If we’re lucky, McCain will only start wars with North Korea and Iran. If we’re unlucky, we may need to add China or (more likely) Russia to that list.

On Spencer Ackerman’s recommendation, I checked out Frontline’s “Bush’s War” last night. It was, to me, physically difficult to watch. The idea of seriously sitting down to interview Richard Perle about Iraq — your interviewer here, your cameraman there, etc. — is, to me, vaguely repulsive. How could you listen to him when you ought to be punching him? I dunno. Do I want to watch him talk on my television? Or John Yoo? Even in the context of a documentary that makes it clear that they’re repulsive sociopaths? Not really.

The die-hards, though, at least stand by their war. It’s puzzling to think about the rest of them. John McLaughlin, Deputy Director of the CIA throughout the pre-war period, has a ton of reasonable things to say about Iraq and the decision-making process. You’re sitting there thinking, this is a smart, knowledgeable, insightful guy if only he’d been a high-ranking government official of some kind maybe he could have stopped this! He could have quite and said “holy shit! the government’s being run by crazy people, don’t let these psychos invade Iraq!” Of course Richard Clarke and Rand Beers did resign and no good came of it. Maybe there was no stopping the madness.

Sudarsan Raghavan did a great piece looking at American success in Fallujah in yesterday’s Washington Post. As he lays it out, the successes are very real — the city was once held by the insurgency, and now it’s basically under control. Specifically, it’s under the control of Col. Faisal Ismail al-Zobaie who served in the Republican Guard, then served as a commander in the insurgency, and then got fed up with AQI’s antics, and now serves, with American approval, as police chief of Fallujah.

He still doesn’t like Americans, still doesn’t like the Shiite government of Iraq, and still doesn’t like democracy. But he is happy to take American weapons and money and to cooperate with the American military. It’s not clear if his cooperation would continue if we asked him to cooperate by, say, running the town along liberal principles or submitting to the authority of the central government, but the local troops are trying to get along and he’s willing to get along. And so there you have your success. It’s real enough. It’s also obviously not what we invaded Iraq to accomplish (after all, the Republican Guard was running the country already before we invaded) and it’s not at all clear where it leads you.

If we leave, it seems to me that Colonel Zobaie will either govern wisely, or else he won’t. He may use a reasonable mix of firmness and good government to maintain control over his town, or he might screw up and tip things back to the insurgency. He may reach a reasonable accommodation with the central government or else he might not. And if we stay, all those same factors stay true.

U.S. Air Force Photo by Staff Sgt. Samuel Bendet

I was on an email list yesterday where there was some talk of whether or not the mortar attacks on the Green Zone coming from Sadr-controlled territory indicated that Sadr’s cease-fire days were done. The consensus was: No. But today it looks like that line of thinking may be overtaken by events, as this BBC report and this McClatchy report certainly make it seem like it’s “fire away” time. Spencer Ackerman says:

At least one theory worth entertaining is that the Sadrists waited out the surge. I don’t have remotely the evidence necessary to support it, but it’s something to consider when Petraeus testifies before Congress early next month.

It could be or it could be something else. In an intriguing development it looks like someSadrists are calling for civil disobedience. Meanwhile, let me say that while it’s definitely been U.S. policy to ally with the Iranian-backed Badr Brigades in order to try to fight the Iranian-backed Muqtada al-Sadr, it’s never been clear that that’s wise policy. So whether what we’ve been doing is a successful effort to crush Sadr or whether it’s about to blow up in our faces in the form of a big increase in violence, I think it’s all questionable policy — a United States that wasn’t determined to maintain a permanent presence in Iraq would have nothing in particular to fear from a populist nationalist like Sadr.

I’ve read it twice, and I don’t really understand what George Packer’s problem with Barack Obama’s Iraq policy is:

Obama offers Iraq as the bad war that we have to end if we want to win the good war in Afghanistan and turn around the economy at home. There’s more than a little truth to this, but I can’t help wishing that his speech on Iraq in Fayetteville, North Carolina, on Wednesday, had anything close to the level of complexity and depth shown in his historic speech on race the day before, in Philadelphia. There was no deep consideration of the fate of more than four million displaced Iraqis, the specter of growing Iranian influence in Iraq, the likelihood of a return to terrible levels of violence as American combat brigades are withdrawn, the border tensions between Iraq and Turkey, the future of Kirkuk, or a strategy for preserving the very fragile improvements of the past six months. Instead, the speech presented what sounded like a fairly cost-free, win-win plan.

Obama’s key contention, as underscored by Packer, is that Iraq is “the bad war that we have to end if we want to win the good war in Afghanistan and turn around the economy at home.” Now obviously if you don’t buy that analysis, you’re not going to like Obama’s Iraq policy. But Packer doesn’t seem to disagree with it. Instead, he says “there’s more than a little truth to” what Obama is saying. But so if Obama’s right, then he right. Packer doesn’t see it that way. He seems to think that Obama should have gone in for some more showy hand-wringing. But why should he do that? Packer’s upset that Obama doesn’t have a viable plan for Kirkuk, but that’s just the point; Obama recognizes that nobody has a viable plan to solve Iraq’s problems so he wants to put our resources where they can do more good.

A policy that puts over 100,000 American soldiers in Iraq in order to not solve Iraq’s problems isn’t a close substitute for solving Iraq’s problems. On the other hand, maybe Packer just liked Obama’s race speech a lot more than I did.

Looks like Mexico is en route to surpassing the United States as the world’s fattest nation. Note that Mexico has an impressive life expectancy at birth of 75.6 years despite being a pretty poor country without first class health care services and a diet that’s not generally regarded as particularly healthy.

This is perhaps related to the so-called “Hispanic Paradox” in US health care outcomes, wherein inside the United States “which most Hispanic groups are characterized by low socioeconomic status, but better than expected health and mortality outcomes.”