Like Atrios, I was kind of curious as to what the actual content of the looming free trade agreement with Colombia is. As best I can tell (peruse the text if you’re interested) this actually involves very little changes on the US side at all. In essence, Colombian goods already flow very freely into the United States except for in our more famously protected sectors (agriculture, etc.) and what we’re offering Colombia here is a very solemn promise to keep it that way.

Colombia, meanwhile, is agreeing to implement a series of neoliberal reforms on a variety of issues, most of which don’t have much to do with trade as it’s traditionally understood. As has become typical in these deals, Colombia agrees to undertake various intellectual property reform measures, various investment rules, something having to do with their telecommunications sector, etc. I would be very surprised if the IP rules in question were actually a good idea for Colombia, and can’t really evaluate the rest of it. Colombia’s getting very little out of the deal per se, but its government does get a lot of military support from the US government, and many provisions in here are of interest to American businesses and may well be the sort of thing a right-of-center government would want to do anyway but likes to use the framework of a “deal” to help sell the measure.

All things considered, this seems to have almost no implications for American well-being, and if I were a member of congress I think I would consider this an excellent moment to let me vote be dictated by pure partisan politics or possibly corruption. If I were a blogger, I would say that lowering barriers to the importation of foreign goods on a unilateral basis would be good policy for the United States and that using bi- or multi-lateral trade negotiations to try to get other countries to adopt “pro-business” policies is a pretty dubious undertaking.

I did a Current in which I briefly wonder why it is Republican members of congress seem to have convinced themselves that the alleged success of the surge is a great campaign issue for them. All the data I can find indicates that the war continues to be extremely unpopular, with only a third or fewer of the public wanting some kind of open-ended commitment to seeing the job through.

Phil Carter, at his new WashingotnPost.com home, reviews the Petraeus/Crocker fest:

They overstated the threat posed by al-Qaeda in Iraq in an effort to justify the mission — a mindset that has generated a deeply flawed strategy. They also overplayed the surge’s success — downplaying or discounting factors that likely did more to create today’s improved security conditions. While their “Anaconda” strategy looks cool on a PowerPoint slide, it confuses the issues of control and influence, putting too much stock in America’s ability to engineer success in Iraq. And, perhaps most tellingly, the two men made the case for perseverance without placing Iraq in the context of vital U.S. national interests, offering only apocalyptic predictions of what would happen if we don’t stay the course.

Indeed. And, look, one can hardly blame them. It’s bizarre to take two officials with such a limited (albeit, obviously, important) mandate and have the administration throw them out there as frontmen for a hugely controversial policy that implicates every aspect of national strategy.

There’s something brilliant about this slide from General Petraeus’ presentation. We all know that straight-line extrapolations from past trends aren’t a good way to reason. But it’s a bit fishy when your future projection follows a completely different trend from the past. Of course, how much we appropriate is under our control, so we can just do this if we like. But I’m not sure what it’s supposed to show.

Today’s Washington Post editorial on Iraq and the Petraeus/Crocker testimony seems to me to be a brilliant summation — as Post editorials often are — of the blinkered conventional wisdom of the establishment. You can say many bad things about the Bush/McCain/Kagan worldview, most of all that it’s completely detached from reality, but at least one has to concede that if the real world were like the world they’re describing, then their policy conclusions would follow. The Post, however, knows they’re wrong, knows that things are much bleaker in Iraq than they say, knows that the costs of an indefinite commitment there are high and the prospects for success low, but just wants to do it anyway.

Because, hey, why not? But at the end of the day, the Iraq problem, though thorny, isn’t ultimately all that thorny. We really can just walk away. I first came around to the “set a deadline” point of view in late 2004. In the three years since that strategy was rejected, basically every single bad consequence (ethnic cleansing, civil war, Iranian influence, al-Qaeda propaganda gains) that I was warned would follow from leaving happened even though we stayed. There’s no sense in looking at a complicated, unpredictable situation that crucially depends on dozens of variables outside of our control and simply assuming that all potential ills will flow from U.S. military withdrawal and all potential goods will flow from a continued presence. It’s not being glib to assert confidently that if we do leave Iraq and stop squandering our blood and treasure that, that no matter what happens the United States of America will endure and most likely Iraq will, too. This idea has taken grip that it’s the height of seriousness to contemplate Iraq with nothing but dread and agony, but insofar as the upshot of this is merely to produce paralysis and to de facto endorse the policy prescriptions that follow from the hawk faction’s fantastical analyses, there’s nothing serious about it.

U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Jeffrey Allen

It seems that Rep. Ellen Tauscher actually thought up an original and potentially informative practical question to ask General Petraeus — what’s he going to do if in January 2009 his commander-in-chief says he wants to withdraw from Iraq and needs his theater commander to start drawing up plans and giving advice on logistics? Apparently, Petraeus wasn’t content to say something straightforward about how he’d do his job:

“I would back up,” he said, “and ask what’s the mission, what’s the desired endstate. And then you advise on resources…” Tauscher said the goal would be to keep the security gains of the surge, fix the readiness problems of the military and cut U.S. costs in Iraq.

“My response would be dialogue on what the risks would be. And, again, this is about risk.” Petraeus sounded a lot like he was saying he would not be willing to advise a President Obama or a President Clinton on withdrawal — something that, unless he was willing to resign, is very Constitutionally dubious.

He then backed up and said “I absolutely support the idea of civial control of the military” (good to hear!) but still didn’t say either that he would offer the requested advice or that he’d resign in protest and let someone new come on board. This kind of thing — resistance from inside the command structure to implementing a new president’s electoral mandate to end the war — is likely to be a substantial political landmine for the next administration. It’s one of several reasons why I think it’s absolutely vital to campaign on a clear and unambiguous determination to genuinely end the war (i.e., without this residual business) to ensure that there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind about where the country stands.

My friend Justin Logan sounds a call for the United States to abandon the concept of nation building. I’m sympathetic to the impulse here — I find it enormously frustrating that a lot of people look at Iraq and say to themselves “we need to get better at this.” No, we don’t. What we need to do is to not do that again. But that still raises the issue of what “this” is. As my other friend Mark Goldberg says:

That said, I still think that there is a great need for nation building and post conflict reconstruction in today’s world. Enter UN Peacekeeping, which has a demonstrated (if under-appreciated) record of success in post conflict zones. Rather than trying to do a better job of invading and occupying countries, it may make more sense to broaden our support for the one organization that has some experience and expertise in this line of work.

It’s worth saying that this isn’t because of some kind of UN pixie dust that makes blue helmet missions work. Institutional knowledge factors are in play, but as I argue in Heads in the Sand a big peace of the puzzle is simply that it’s very different to get involved in post-conflict reconstruction when you’re talking about acting as a third party who steps in to keep the peace after a conflict ends, and getting involved in post-conflict reconstruction when the conflict that you’re “post” was an invasion. In other words, helping to keep the peace when the parties to a conflict in a failed state are looking for a way out of the abyss is very different from deliberately smashing up a bunch of eggs and then deciding you need an omelet recipe.

On top of that, there’s the matter of structure and legitimacy. The U.N., precisely because of many features that sometimes annoy Americans (universal membership, clumsy decision-making structure, etc.) is an exceedingly poor tool for domination, which makes it a good tool for reassuring people that you’re not there to dominate them. Doing more to support these blue helmet missions would be much cheaper than another year in Iraq and would do more good besides.

Of all the pro-college talking points out there, the one I find most baffling is the one offered by my colleague Herschel Nachlis, namely the idea that the NCAA game is somehow more open and free-flowing. I’m troubled by this critique precisely because I sympathize with it, but to me the worse offender here is the amateur game with its long shot clock and sluggish pace.

Now it’s true that because NBA defenders have more tactical acumen, and are larger, stronger, faster, quicker and more experienced, that there is, literally speaking, less space in which for an offensive play to develop. But that lack of space aside, the vastly greater skill levels of NBA players allows them to run more efficient offenses against superior defense with a shorter shot clock and a longer three point line. To me, advantage: NBA.

Photo by Flickr user terren in Virginia

Laura Rozen reports on conservative grumbling about Sheldon Adelson and Freedom’s Watch. It hardly seems fair to me to blame Adelson for not having single-handedly created a MoveOn-style mass movement. That’s just not the kind of thing one person can do. And of course it took MoveOn years worth of campaigning to become the MoveOn that it is today. And beyond that, the essence of the MoveOn project is to identify things that progressives are interested in that aren’t being done aggressively by the existing infrastructure — what the right seems to want is for a vast new organization to spring up to support exactly what they’re doing right now.

That, of course, is what every politician wants but it’s not how you create a new grassroots movement. I bet that if a new grassroots movement were springing up on the right, most pillars of the conservative movement would like it very much — it’d probably be Huckabeeish or some other trend that’s well-represented in public opinion but poorly represented in DC.

A further thought on John McCain’s “as long as our soldiers are not being wounded or maimed or killed” proviso to his Iraq forever policy. If we’re so sure the soldiers aren’t going to be in harm’s way, then what’s the base for? We’re all very glad that our troops in South Korea aren’t engaged in combat, but the point of having them there is that they might have to engage in combat. The hope is that they deter war with North Korea, but the risk is that they won’t.

In McCain’s world our troops need to continue fighting, killing, and dying in Iraq indefinitely in order to create a situation where, at some point, it becomes safe for them to stay in Iraq for no reason? It doesn’t seem like he’s genuinely thought this idea through. Maybe instead of lashing out at his critics, McCain should take some time to consider the issue and come up with a new position.

To back up something Josh Marshall’s been pounding, the idea that there’s something unfair about the “out of context” use of John McCain’s line about being willing to stay in Iraq for 100 or 10,000 years is pretty silly. Obviously, it’s hard to quote anyone or refer to anything without taking it a bit out of context. But the context in which McCain is saying this stuff, is a context in which McCain genuinely believes that there is no level of resources which would be too great for the United States to invest in his futile quest for some ephemeral concept of “victory” in Iraq. There’s no amount of money that’s too much to spend, there’s no amount of time that’s too long, and there’s no amount of American deaths that’s too many.

Of course McCain hopes it doesn’t take 100 to achieve that end state. But since his vision of the end state is utterly unrealistic (and includes a fantasy vision in which we peacefully organize a 10,000 basing agreement or something) it might as well. Clearly in a literal sense President McCain can’t commit us to anything more than eight years of additional war in Iraq, but he’s given us no indication that he would pull out any sooner than that, and no reason to believe he can succeed any faster than that. Maybe the DNC and the RNC can reach some kind of agreement in which both parties stipulate that we won’t discuss the year 2108, but McCain will admit that he’ll gladly have our troops still fighting in Iraq in 2016. But probably not.

And so as long as the hawks persist in not presenting to the public what they’re actually talking about, the doves are going to have to use the footage available — which is McCain talking about 100 or 10,000 rather than eight — to make the point that in their more candid moments the hawks do concede that they’re talking about a long hard slog in Iraq.

I don’t think I have the heart to try to watch and liveblog today’s House version of the Petraeus/Crocker testimony. Watching the Senate version yesterday all day on television nearly drove me insane. Of course if anything particularly noteworthy happens, I’ll say something, but life’s too short to watch this all over again.

I think Kevin Drum’s being too kind to Fred Kagan here (and really “too kind” is not a difficult bar to pass when you’re talking about Kagan), in semi-endorsing Kagan’s argument that Iraq can’t be a distraction from the “real” war on terrorism in Pakistan and Afghanistan because nobody wants to mount a huge invasion of Pakistan. That’s true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t really go all that far. For one thing, the “Afghanistan” side of “Pakistan and Afghanistan” is a place where there’s a role for an increased U.S. troop presence, both directly and as a signifier to our NATO allies that we’re actually taking this seriously and they ought to take it seriously, too.

But beyond that, the large American deployment in Iraq involves more than just the 100+ soldiers who are there — consider our foreign language, diplomatic, and human intelligence resources. All of those things are in shorter supply than are soldiers per se, and all could be useful in Pakistan without any talk of an invasion. And perhaps most of all there’s the question of high-level attention. From the President on down, there are a lot of busy people in the military, diplomatic, and intelligence chains of command and at the top level of the interagency process and having them make Iraq their own top priority, and a top priority on the agenda of every international meeting has real costs.

So, yes, it’s true that I don’t have a brilliant off-the-shelf “let’s eliminate al-Qaeda in Pakistan in twelve easy steps” scheme, but it’s still the case that everything we try to do there is made more difficult by the scope of our commitments in Iraq.