It’s rare that I have the opportunity, but here goes — Mark Krikorian’s got an anti-Bush screed up on the Corner that doesn’t even involve immigration:

Croatia and Albania are going to join NATO. So now an attack on Albania will be an act of war against the United States. Can someone explain to me how this is in our national interest? I have three sons myself, and I can’t spare any of them to die defending one pissant Balkan dump against another pissant Balkan dump.

The obvious starting point of analysis here is that the odds of any American troops dying in a war for the defense of Albania are vanishingly small. And that’s the point. Albania is a small and weak country that one could imagine some neighbor maybe trying to push around with military force. But nobody’s going to want to take on NATO over some beef with Albania. Meanwhile, over the longer term the goal would be to bring the entire Balkans into a common security architecture that could help ensure the peace among all of them.

Recall that NATO’s great achievement in the 1940s and 50s wasn’t just that it helped face down the Soviets. That was important, of course, but in many ways equally important was that it allowed the various countries of Western Europe to rebuild their militaries without those militaries appearing threatening to other European countries.

It seems to me that John McCain’s campaign doth protest far too much when they whine about being portrayed as the ticket that wants the war in Iraq to last for 100 years. Of course John McCain would prefer the war to magically end ASAP and then move into his vision for 100 years of peaceful occupation. But as Joe Klein says that vision “betrays a fairly acute lack of knowledge about both Iraq and Islam.”

Meanwhile, McCain has made it clear that he believes the war in Iraq ought to continue indefinitely. He would prefer that the fighting end sooner rather than later, but he has no intention of bringing it to an end nor does he see any limit in terms of time spent or resources expended beyond which it would make sense to end the war. Since McCain can’t serve in office for any more than eight years, he clearly can’t commit the country to 100 years of continued fighting in Iraq. A McCain administration would mean not 100 more years of war in Iraq, but 8 more years followed by a new President taking office. But if McCain lived forever and stayed in office forever, the war would continue forever — he doesn’t want it to continue forever, but he does regard all realistic means of ending it as unacceptable. That means endless war.

David Corn rounds up some expert opinion on the questions David Petraeus ought to be asked in his congressional testimony next week. It’s good stuff.

I would add, though, that the whole idea of having a huge political circus centered around testimony from the theater commander is pretty bad. There’s no genuine informational content to this sort of thing, and it’s not really appropriate for someone in Petraeus’ job to be serving as a press spokesman for administration policy. The White House should send someone with a political appointment to defend their policy on the Hill, this isn’t the role of career military professionals.

I think the idea of creating a “democracies only” international organization has some promise. But I think the idea of creating, as John McCain has proposed, a League of Democracies that would purport to have the authority to authorize Iraq-style non-defensive wars when the U.N. Security Council declines to do so is a terrible idea. But beyond the merits of the idea, there’s another problem as Matt Welch points out:

[R]egardless of whatever Rauch, Welch or McCain might think about a 21st century League of Nations, the main point is that there is no way in hell anything remotely like this is happening any time in the next decade. After eight years of a cranky, go-it-alone White House that won re-election in part by bashing limp-wristed Euro-weenies, the chances of another interventionist Republican winning enough good faith among grumbly allies to create a brand spanking new America-defined Club of Winners are something approaching zero.

Quite so. McCain’s habit of putting this at the center of his foreign policy agenda reveals not just poor strategic thinking on the underlying merits of the concept, but an extraordinary detachment from the realities of the contemporary world. The idea that Canada and France and Brazil and India and South Korea are all just chomping at the bit to join a new McCain-initiated, America-led war club is ludicrous and anyone who thought about it for five minutes could see that.

Kimberly Kagan out to prove that you can never have enough Kagans: “The U.S. should encourage the Iraqi government to defeat Iran’s proxies and agents, and should provide the requisite assistance.” As Marc Lynch observes defeating Iran’s friends in Iraq would require the leading figures in Iraq’s government to defeat themselves somehow.

Of course the best way to have curtailed Iranian influence in Iraq would have been to not invade the country. But at this point, an Iraq where Iran has substantial influence is essentially inevitable and we may as well try to reconcile ourselves to that fact and figure out ways to deal with it. Alternatively, we got adopt the Joe Lieberman strategy and start fighting made-up organizations like “al-Qaeda in Iran.” Sounds fun!

I wish John Nagl well in his quest to get the United States military to increase its commitment to having American soldiers serve as advisors to foreign militaries. Capacity-building in partnership with other states is likely to be just as important as traditional “blowing stuff up and killing people” (the cool kids call it “kinetic”) operations in the future. But I also hope he has success because I can then start writing somewhat skeptical posts that involve “Train in Vain” references.

For example, Nagl writes that “Based on American experiences in Korea, Vietnam, El Salvador and now in Iraq and Afghanistan, an advisory strategy can help the Iraqi Army and security forces beat Al Qaeda and protect their country.” This has something of an assume a can opener air about it, but more to the point with regard to Iraq it’s missing a big part of the picture, namely politics, motives, and goals. The U.S. military hasn’t quite gotten around to crushing al-Qaeda yet, and it’s not because our soldiers aren’t trained. And of course what well-trained Iraqi security forces do is going to have a lot to do with what their leaders want them to do. As of last week, it seemed like what their leaders wanted them to do was to engage in internecine fighting with Shiite militias belonging to rival political parties.

Training, in short, is all well and good, but its advocates sometime talk as if governance problems abroad are purely technical issues that will somehow melt away in the force of really excellent training. History and common sense tell us otherwise. The Republic of Vietnam government, for example, had legitimacy problems that well-meaning foreigners couldn’t solve — part of the problem, after all, was a sense that it was a tool of foreigners whereas its adversaries were authentically Vietnamese.

Sounds like a good idea, right? After all, it’s got “reliable” right there in the name and who doesn’t like reliability? The only problem is that developing a new nuclear weapon is incredibly counterproductive to all our important non-proliferation goals. Naturally, as Brian Beutler explains, the Bush administration just can’t quit the idea.

Things like Joe Klein’s treasonous call for fewer Kagans and more knowledge is the sort of irresponsible hysteria we’ve come to expect from the anti-American Left. As everyone knows, the main problem in Iraq (aside from MSM efforts to only report bad news in the hopes of encouraging attacks on our troops) has been in insufficient number of Kagans. If we could replace the entire military presence in Iraq with an Army of Kagans in a 20 Kagans for every 1,000 Iraqis ratio, then our problems would rapidly be solved.

We need, in short, more Kagans, not fewer. And as much ignorance as possible which, of course, additional Kagans could also supply. The only thing standing between us and victory is the need to develop better cloning technology.

Check out Spencer Ackerman on how the Battle of Basra reveals the limits of what the surge has or can accomplish.

Sameer Lalwani, blogging live from the NATO summit in Bucharest, raises another set of questions about the idea of NATO membership for Ukraine — is it really a good candidate state? He cites some insights from Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves:

Ilves went on to explain that countries attempting to wield the threat of internal upheavel, civil war or political collapse to leverage entrance into NATO would likely fall short or undermine their own case for membership. “Don’t say you’re owed anything” he argued. Rather, prospective countries needed to make the case on their own merits — that they are on par with other admits and have made domestic reforms that warrant entrance. Overall, he argued that entrance needed to be sought for the sake of the country, for the citizens of the nation.

Ukraine, as Sameer notes, is suffering from various sorts of ills that make it questionable at the moment as to whether or not bringing it into the alliance would be any kind of real asset. Meanwhile, we have President Bush arguing that NATO is not an anti-Russian alliance but Ukraine needs to be a member so it can fight Russia (or else perhaps robots) so there continues to be some underlying confusion among proponents of further expansion as to what they want to do. It’s worth noting, however, that John McCain is a real outlier in terms of anti-Russian sentiments and seems to take the view that the proper role of the President is to go out of his way to cast all U.S. action in as an aggressively Russophobic light as possible, so things could get much worse.