In his recent op-ed column, one argument Max Boot made is that we should stay in Iraq out of deference to the Iraqi people’s wishes: “An early American departure is the last thing that most Iraqis or their elected representatives want. (In a recent ABC/BBC poll only 38 percent of Iraqis said that coalition forces should leave at once.)”

This is a pretty selective reading of the poll’s results. It’s true that only 38 percent said that coalition forces should leave at once. It’s also true that only 36 percent of Iraqis say that the surge of forces has improved security in areas where the surge forces have been sent (53 percent say they’ve made things worse), only 30 percent percent say the surge has made things better in the non-surge areas (49 percent say they’ve made things worse), and that only four percent say that they have “a great deal of confidence” in American troops. Sixteen percent say they have “quite a lot” of confidence, 33 percent have “not very much” confidence and 46 percent have “no confidence” in our soldiers.

41 percent of Iraqis say they “strongly oppose” the presence of Coalition forces in Iraq and 31 percent “somewhat oppose” their presence. And yet, despite all this, John McCain thinks we can stay there peacefully for 100 or 10,000 years and Max Boot wants us to believe that Iraqis are eager for us to stay the course. But there’s just no evidence of it. Iraqis are, naturally, concerned about the consequences of an American departure. But we also decisively lost the confidence and support of the Iraqi population years ago. Under the circumstances, it’s nearly impossible for us to play a constructive role.

Peter Feaver, the too-clever-by-half former White House politics of Iraq honcho, has an enlightening piece in Commentary where he explains that the purpose of the surge was to create political space in the United States to ensure that George W. Bush could pass off a large U.S. troop deployment in Iraq to the next administration.

As Justin Logan says, this has a nice heads I win, tales you lose quality to it:

If, by the grace of God, some subsequent U.S. president can manage to extricate us from the Iraqi quagmire without a total meltdown, the Bushies will clap each other on the back, declaring themselves visionaries. If, on the other hand, Iraq flames out entirely on the watch of a subsequent administration, the Bushies can play the Dolschtoss card and explain how The Surge Was Working and would have continued working were it not for the fecklessness of the Obama/Clinton/McCain administration.

The idea that there are, as we speak, brave young men and women risking their lives for the sake of the vanity of the fools who launched this war is more than a little maddening. But that’s how it is.

I have paid approximately no attention to the election in Zimbabwe, but I have to agree with Dave Weigel that this is no way to rig an election:

President Robert Mugabe’s party has lost its majority in parliament, the Zimbabwe Election Commission says. It says Mr Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party has taken 94 of the 207 contested seats, while opposition parties have won 105. One seat has gone to an independent.

Matthew Weaver is running a Zimbabwe blog for the Guardian. Timothy Burke often has interesting things to say about Zimbabwe, and I’ve found the information in his March 28 post to be useful background. Going forward, part of the issue here, as it often is, is that Mugabe and other members of his regime will be much more willing to give up power if they think they’ll be able to retire in peace. These kind of situations then pose a dilemma between the desire to find a peaceful and constructive solution to the conflict at hand, and the sense that there needs to be accountability for the crimes of the past.

I don’t think I have the stomach to try to do any serious original analysis of John Yoo’s now-declassified torture memos. As usual, you can find a lot of great legal analysis at Balkinization. But Yoo aside, you need to really be staggered by the mental processes of his employer. Some subordinate shows up in your office with a memo about how it is, in fact, legal to break all kinds of laws — specifically laws that seek to entrench a few hundred years’ worth of conventional wisdom about the moral and political unacceptability of torturing people. What do you do? Fire the guy? See if you can recommend that he get counseling? Not if you’re George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, if you’re those guys you adopt the legal reasoning and move on to the torturing.

Except eventually it becomes clear that the torture’s gotten out of hand — it’s happening to innocent people, it’s spreading throughout the U.S. detention and interrogation system, it’s producing all kinds of possibly spurious information, etc., so naturally you respond by classifying the whole thing and pretending that it would imperil national security for everyone to know what a bunch of sickos you are. It really makes the stomach churn.

It seems that the Bush administration is refusing to produce a declassified version of their latest Iraq National Intelligence Estimate because they’re concerned about national security afraid of the truth. But any spies in the audience should ignore Spencer Ackerman’s pleas for leaks and leak to me instead. Or, better, just post the whole thing in the comments thread.

Journalism!

In case this is unclear to anyone, I think Muqtada al-Sadr was the big winner from last week’s battling:

“The Iraqi government looks silly in the face of their ardent statements,” said Joost Hiltermann, the deputy program director for the Middle East and North Africa at the International Crisis Group, a private group that studies international conflicts. He said the outcome shows “the Iraqi military doesn’t have the ability to do much of anything.”

Sadr, who was in Iran during the offensive, came out of the confrontation stronger, Hiltermann said.

“He remained undefeated and he looks like the moderate,” he said. “He was the one that called for his forces, who were attacked, to stand down.”

That said, unless you just stipulate that American interests require us to locate an Iraqi leader who’ll consent to America staying in Iraq for 100 or 10,000 years then I’m not sure that Sadr strengthening his position is such a terrible thing. It’s bad for the Bush/McCain vision of perpetual war for perpetual occupation, but if you think the U.S. should be getting out of Iraq, then a Sadr-led Iraq is no worse than a Maliki-led Iraq. Neither has a stellar human rights record, of course, but given the practical alternatives available, Sadr seems about as good as anyone else.

Think Progress notes yet another instance of John McCain’s fuzzy thinking on Iraq. In an April 1 CNN interview, McCain says “I said he was still major player and his influence is going to have to be reduced and gradually eliminated” thus establishing the prescience for which he’s well known. But in mid-march he told CNN that “His [Sadr’s] influence has been on the wane for a long time.” Basically, McCain has no idea. Because this is what when you’re getting briefed by campaign staff you hired away from the know-nothings at the Project for a New American Century. Someday we may look back with nostalgia on the Steven Hadley Era.