Our guest blogger is Peter Juul, a national security consultant at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

For the last five-plus years, America’s foreign policy and national security strategy have been subordinated to a fixation on the tactical problems in Iraq. Pressing strategic problems – the unfinished war in Afghanistan, North Korea’s nuclear program, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and others – have been given inadequate resources, inadequate attention, or both. The U.S. Army is suffering unprecedented strain on its personnel and equipment.

Despite these grave and growing strategic problems, war supporters continue to advocate a tactical argument for an open-ended military commitment to Iraq under the misleading label of “strategic patience.”

In fact, there is nothing strategically wise about maintaining an indefinite military presence in Iraq in the hopes that Iraq’s major political problems will somehow magically be solved. As has been seen in Basra, Iraqis remain all too willing to settle their internal political disputes through violence. Rather, maintaining “strategic patience” in Iraq will lead to a strategic blunder of great proportions.

Continuing to keep 140,000 American has a number of detrimental strategic effects:

– Afghanistan continues to be under-resourced. As Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has noted, “having forces in Iraq don’t – at the level they are at – don’t allow us to fill the need we have in Afghanistan.”

– Iran’s regional position continues to be enhanced. Contrary to the administration’s description, Iran’s best ally in Iraq isn’t Muqtada al-Sadr’s fickle militia, it’s the American-supported Iraqi government – a government dominated by parties with extensive links to Tehran.

– American military readiness continues to erode. Outgoing Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Richard Cody recently told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “…our readiness is being consumed as fast as we build it. If unaddressed, this lack of balance poses a significant risk to the all-volunteer force and degrades the Army’s ability to make a timely response to other contingencies.”

– Al Qaeda continues to derive propaganda benefits from a continued American military presence in Iraq, while continuing to operate largely unmolested in its safe-haven on the Afghan-Pakistan border.

America needs to rectify these existing strategic problems, not exacerbate them through “strategic patience.” What the United States needs is not more of the same in Iraq, but rather a strategic reset of its policy to set its strategic priorities straight.

Our guest blogger, Peter Swire, is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and served as the Clinton Administration’s Chief Counselor for Privacy.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has badly stumbled in discussing the Bush administration’s push to create stricter identity systems. Chertoff was recently in Canada discussing, among other topics, the so-called “Server in the Sky” program to share fingerprint databases among the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Australia.

In a recent briefing with Canadian press (which has yet to be picked up in the U.S.), Chertoff made the startling statement that fingerprints are “not particularly private”:

QUESTION: Some are raising that the privacy aspects of this thing, you know, sharing of that kind of data, very personal data, among four countries is quite a scary thing.

SECRETARY CHERTOFF: Well, first of all, a fingerprint is hardly personal data because you leave it on glasses and silverware and articles all over the world, they’re like footprints. They’re not particularly private.

Many of us should rightfully be surprised that our fingerprints aren’t considered “personal data” by the head of DHS. Even more importantly, DHS itself disagrees. In its definition of “personally identifiable information” — the information that triggers a Privacy Impact Assessment when used by government — the Department specifically lists: “biometric identifiers (e.g., fingerprints).”

Chertoff’s comments have drawn sharp criticism from Jennifer Stoddart, the Canadian official in charge of privacy issues. “Fingerprints constitute extremely personal information for which there is clearly a high expectation of privacy,” Stoddart said.

There are compelling reasons to treat fingerprints as “extremely personal information.” The strongest reason is that fingerprints, if not used carefully, will become the biggest source of identity theft. Fingerprints shared in databases all over the world won’t stay secret for long, and identity thieves will take advantage.

A quick web search on “fake fingerprints” turns up cheap and easy methods for do-it-at-home fake fingerprints. As discussed by noted security expert Bruce Schneier, one technique is available for under $10. It was tried “against eleven commercially available fingerprint biometric systems, and was able to reliably fool all of them.” Secretary Chertof either doesn’t know about these clear results or chooses to ignore them. He said in Canada: “It’s very difficult to fake a fingerprint.”

Chertoff’s argument about leaving fingerprints lying around on “glasses and silverware” is also beside the point. Today, we leave our Social Security numbers lying around with every employer and numerous others. Yet the fact that SSNs (or fingerprints) are widely known exposes us to risk.

There have been numerous questions raised about how this Administration is treating our personal information. Secretary Chertoff’s comments show a new reason to worry — they don’t think it’s “personal” at all.

– Peter Swire