NYT reports from Baghdad that “the Green Zone attacks Sunday were, symbolically at least, a sign that forces hostile to the United States are still able to strike at the heart of the American nerve center and seat of government power in the capital of Iraq.” It seems to me that they were a pretty literal sign — the Mahdi Army wasn’t shooting metaphors.

Now on the merits of the issue of course it would be good for the Iraqi government to demobilize and disarm militias. But it seems plain as day that what the government is trying to do is disarm Muqtada al-Sadr’s militia while keeping other, rival militias like the Badr Organization as well-armed as they please. Practically and politically speaking, that doesn’t give the Sadrists any reason to comply. And there don’t seem to me to be any genuinely good reasons of national interest or cosmic justice for the United States to be serving as backup muscle in this operation.

As Ilan Goldenberg says it’s wrongheaded to give John McCain credit for professing a desire to improve relations with allies and rejoin the international community. It would be perverse to think that George W. Bush actually wanted the United States to become so isolated. The point is that Bush wanted to pursue policies of rogue state rollback and unilateral preventive war that are incompatible with the United States having a strong relationship with its actual and potential allies around the world. And John McCain wants to pursue those exact same policies; indeed, he was making the case for them before Bush was.

What matters isn’t what McCain says he wants to accomplish (an enduring peace based on freedom!); we need to be asking what would the actual consequences of his policies be.

Oftentimes as a dictatorial regime enters its waning days you face a choice as to whether or not to offer the leaders guarantees if they agree to give up power. The downside is that this seems to create bad incentives — the bad actors get away scott-free when it would be better for evil to be punished. The upside is that with guarantees they may actually give up power, whereas regime leaders who know that if they give up power they’ll be treated harshly will probably hold on to power with the utmost brutality. Timothy Burke, thinking of Zimbabwe, says this kind of thinking is bunk:

So even if we understand people like Mugabe and his inner circle as calculating, incentive-evaluating, rational deciders, I think there is every reason for them to laugh behind closed doors at the hubris of the experts and activists, whatever the latest policy nostrum on tribunals, interventions, sanctions, golden parachutes or so on might be. Because what anyone outside of the rarified settings where generic 12-point plans for peacemaking and incentivizing prosecutions for genocide are composed knows is that every such action is and will be sui generis. The sand castles that the experts build today around one case will be washed away by the tides of history in short order. What happened in the end to Charles Taylor or Auguste Pinochet or Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic has little implication for tomorrow’s dictator and mass murderer. Because the people who play with constructing the machinery of incentive aspire to a kind of reliable managerial authority that they will never have, they are writing blank checks that no one will ever cash. Whether or not someone like Robert Mugabe dies peacefully in his bed, lives out his last years far from his home country, ends up in a pleasant prison while the United Nations dithers for a decade over his fate, is shot by an up-and-coming rival, or ends up torn to shreds by a mob is a matter of particular circumstance. That’s probably something most authoritarians know already, having ridden the vissitudes of history as far as they have.

I guess that seems plausible enough, though I find it pretty unsatisfying as a conclusion and though perhaps it’s just technocratic hubris, I’d like to try to see some data.

There’s something a bit absurd about this Washington Post headline: “Bush Listens Closely To His Man in Iraq: In White House Deliberations on War, Gen. Petraeus Has a Privileged Voice.”

This makes it seem as if Bush suddenly arrived in the White House in media res sometime in 2007 and starting trying to figure things out. The surge was already underway, different advisors had different takes, and Bush came to rely on General Petraeus who now has a “privileged voice” in deliberations. But that’s not how it went at all. Bush has, from the beginning, always listened to people who tell him what he wants to hear — starting a war with Iraq is a great idea, continuing a war with Iraq is a great idea. If Petraeus told Bush tomorrow that he should admit failure and open up a regional dialogue on how best to manage an American withdrawal from Iraq, suddenly his privileged position would be gone. The stature of various advice-givers is baked into the cake of the content of their advice and it’s not at all hard to tell what Bush wants people to tell him.

Photo by Staff Sgt. Lorie Jewell, U.S. Army

Hillary Clinton once again tries to pretend that she was more against the Iraq War than Obama was. It turns out that this is true if you ignore the events of 2002, and those of 2003, and those of 2004 and then misportray the events of 2005.

Bruce Ackerman and Oona Hathaway note that the current legal basis for the U.S. military operation in Iraq is the second prong of the 2002 AUMF which grants the president the authority to use the military to “enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq.”

But here’s the rub. The most recent U.N. resolution expires on Dec. 31, and the administration has announced that it will not seek one for 2009. Instead, it is now negotiating a bilateral agreement with the Iraqi government to replace the U.N. mandate.

Whatever this agreement contains, it will not fill the legal vacuum. That’s because the administration is not planning to submit this new agreement to Congress for its explicit approval. Since the Constitution gives the power to “declare war” to Congress, the president can’t ignore the conditions imposed on him in 2002 without returning for a new grant of authority. He cannot substitute the consent of the Iraqi government for the consent of the U.S. Congress.

But of course Bush (and John McCain!) want a permanent American military presence in Iraq, but they know congress won’t authorize such a presence. Hence, the only solution available to them is to ignore the law and the constitution and just keep the troops. Ackerman and Hathaway suggest merely continuing the U.N. resolution for another year, which will give the next president a legal basis for doing whatever he’s been granted a mandate to do (since no matter who wins the troops can’t be made to suddenly vanish in a puff of smoke in January). But, obviously, for that to happen the administration would need to concede that it lacks the legal and constitutional authority to ignore congress and they’ll never do that.

It sounds almost absurd to need to point out that “war is usually bad” but in a world where John McCain is taken seriously, more people need to listen to John Quiggin:

Finally reaching a conclusion, the central error in pro-war thinking is the belief that every war has a winner. On the contrary, in war there are far more losers than winners, and in most cases there are no real winners apart from the merchants of death mentioned above. Even those who seem to win have usually sowed the seeds of future disaster. The only sane response to war is to end it as soon as possible.

It’s obviously possible to find a few exceptions to this in history, but they’re really, really rare and as he says “I’m more and more convinced that arguments for war, or about the conduct of war, that rely solely on WWII should come under the same embargo as other arguments that invoke Hitler and Nazism.” WWII aside, the main class of successful wars seems to be things like Gulf War I, where a campaign was undertaken for very limited defensive objectives. Over time, I think the wisdom showed by George H.W. Bush and other coalition leaders at that point when they decided not to press momentary advantage and transform the fighting into a larger war with only illusory gains looks more and more impressive.