I don’t have any kind of principled problem with the idea of NATO membership for Ukraine, but given that Russia seems very opposed to the idea it seems mighty odd for Bush to be pushing forward on the subject at this particular moment. It seems to me that it was just a few months ago when Iran’s nuclear research programs were the greatest threat to humanity since Hitler and we were eager to secure Russian cooperation on UN action against Iran. But now we want to antagonize them over something that’s not going to make any difference whatsoever to Americans one way or the other?

The failure of U.S. policymakers to set priorities is a bit baffling. Why not ease up on Ukraine and try to work with Russia on stuff that matters more? It’s not as if getting Ukraine into NATO will be some kind of boon to American security.

A new web magazine, Triple Canopy, seeks to bring a more authentically “magazine-like” quality to its presentation of content. It’s an interesting technological and aesthetic enterprise and the content’s pretty good, too. There is, for example, an interesting pre-”monster” interview with Samantha Power. I liked this part:

HK: Do you think the UN is a functional organization?

SP: This is a distracting point. Not fully functional, no. But the UN’s dysfunctions are less the problem of the organization as such. They are the problem of governments and what they choose to pursue and neglect. Citizens have the power to make governments act differently; the UN as an organization does not. Sergio’s success would have been more robust, or more frequent, if governments had lined up behind him. Secretary-General Kofi Annan lining up behind him was not the same thing. There are plenty of changes that the UN as an organization can make to decrease its many inefficiencies, but the UN will continue to look dysfunctional until member states decide to prioritize global problems, which will require political pressure from below.

This is spot-on. There’s a tendency to attribute policy failures of the UN’s member states to “the UN” as if “the UN” is supposed to be able to take dramatic action in the face of indifference from the key countries. Meanwhile, you don’t see the main people making this complaint arguing for measures to increase the independent capabilities of the UN organization. I note in Heads in the Sand that there are two kinds of people who point out inadequacies in existing international organizations (including the United Nations) — those who genuinely want to do the difficult work of strengthening them and making it easier for them to cope with the problems they get charged with handling (which just so happen to tend to be the hardest problems in the world), and those who simply want to point to them in bad faith as part of a process of dismantling them.

Meanwhile (and relatedly) one thing critics of the UN tend to get vague about is “compared to what?” When the project isn’t being dismissed as totally ineffectual, it tends to get dismissed as utterly utopian. Both critiques are, in my view, wrong but they’re also a bit schizophrenic. The truth is simply that the UN’s mission is difficult so we shouldn’t be shocked that problems remain nor should we ignore the fact that a great deal of good is being done.

Iraq has chemical and biological weapons arsenals, plus an advanced nuclear weapons program and is likely to use these WMD to stage an attack on the American homeland using al-Qaeda proxies!

Spencer Ackerman posted a powerful email from a junior officer currently serving in Iraq. I’ll just nab an excerpt:

In my opinion, what everyone fails to realize is that this is not a counterinsurgency. If we wanted to stay in Iraq, then it would be a counterinsurgency. But it is clear that our goal is to turn over power and pull out. So, in building our strategic endstate, it’s pointless to set goals that relate to our presence in Iraq. If the “insurgency” is a function of our being there, then it is not an insurgency in terms of our endstate. For example, if one of our goals is to stop IED attacks on US forces, that is pointless. When we leave, there will be no more IED attacks on us forces. So our endstate needs to be different. We need to ask “if we left tomorrow, what would happen in Iraq?” and from there, we need to determine which of those anticipated results are unacceptable to us. Then we must aim our efforts on making sure those unacceptable results do not occur.

When I look at the problem that way, it becomes almost impossible to find a purpose in what we do.

This is correct but of course the policymakers in Washington some time ago shifted to a crazy equilibrium where continuing the war became the war’s own rationale. Initially, we invaded to depose Saddam and destroy his WMD programs. So when at first the programs weren’t there, we had to keep some troops in the country to look for them. What’s more, some kind of new government had to be created. But then, contrary to what the Bush administration had expected, an insurgency started against our presence. The insurgents were killing our troops. Then beating the insurgents became the goal. Our troops had to stay in Iraq and risk their lives in order to kill the people who were trying to kill them to force them out of Iraq — we couldn’t leave until all the people who wanted us to leave were dead.

From that point, the quality of the strategic thinking involved has only declined.

John McCain’s supporters get very upset if you suggest he wants the war in Iraq to continue for 100 years. After all, he stipulated that first the war would end, and then 100 years of U.S. troops running around Iraq peacefully would begin. What this misses is that the U.S. presence is one of the main issues at stake in the war. It’s not that peace would suddenly break out if we left, but peace is certain to never break out as long as we stay. Counterinsurgency requires, among other things, political conciliation and conciliation requires us to leave but the hawks’ logic requires us to stay and fight for the right to keep staying and fighting.

U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Jason T. Bailey

Spencer Ackerman catches Paul Berman trying to convince us that he was against the war in Iraq. Berman, in this incident, tries to chalk up the fact that many people think he supported the war to the fact “that afterward I haven’t made a career of running around saying I told you so.” Did he tell us so? The answer is that no, he didn’t. Indeed, he’s been telling us he told us so while simultaneously bragging that he hasn’t been telling us so since at least November 2007.

But the record is clear — Berman didn’t tell us so. He supported the war. He offered some caveats, yes, but they were caveats to his argument in favor of the war. Not only that, but as I showed in my earlier post on this subject, Berman was happy to be counted as a war supporter back in 2004 when he still thought that put him on the right side of history.

I alluded to the troubled financial situation in Iceland yesterday, but if you want a proper explanation check out Claus Vistesen’s post at A Fistful of Euros which will explain what’s happening. The comments thread, meanwhile, turned to an argument over whether or not it’s correct to say that Icelanders are descended from Vikings. Daga says this is a kind of slur:

Its much like saying that all palestinians are terrorists. to “go viking” was an action,neither a profession nor an ethnic entity. At the time it was either “landnaam” (landgrabbing) or pillaging-depending on the strenght and size of the party.

Iceland was settled by people from the West coast of Norway,opposing our first king’s unification og the country. Normandy was settled for much the same reason–this time by “viking” -i.e. by force.

Given that Iceland was completely unoccupied at the time of Norse settlement (no aboriginal population whatsoever), it would seem wrong to suggest that any landgrabbing was involved. My understanding is, however, that many of the settlers stopped off in Ireland en route to capture slaves, giving Iceland’s population its mixed Nordic/Celtic character.

Via Patrick Barry, Max Boot offers a slightly different twist on the emboldening argument: “Just as Islamist militants were emboldened by the Soviet Union’s retreat from Afghanistan in 1989, so they would be encouraged by our premature departure from Iraq.”

This kind of thing really needs to be taken apart. Did the emboldened militants follow the Red Army home from Afghanistan? No. Rather, a few years after Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan the USSR collapsed under the weight of accumulated economic problems that had been exacerbated by the long and fruitless war in Afghanistan. Now it’s true that Osama bin Laden has been known to cite the mujahedeen’s success against the Soviets as evidence that his war on America is feasible. But to argue that Mikhail Gorbachev should have continued the occupation of Afghanistan indefinitely in order to prevent a terrorist attack in Manhattan twelve years later is absurd. In retrospect, there are a lot of things one wishes were done differently with regard to Afghanistan in the years 1989-2001 but endless Soviet occupation isn’t one of them.

Meanwhile, it continues to astound me how focused conservative thinkers are on purely subjective factors as key influences on events in the world. Does it really make sense to think that the main thing we should worry about is that al-Qaeda operatives will get bolder? (for the thousandth time, they seem pretty bold already) The Iraq War is, in an objective sense, squandering American resources and degrading the operational effectiveness of the U.S. security services while also, in an objective sense, bolstering al-Qaeda manpower. This sort of thing — the impact of our policies on the real world — seems much more important to me than the subjective emotional state of hard-core killers.