There’s a small-but-interesting story in the Times about how military commanders want to conduct more strikes in Pakistan but the Bush administration is forcing them to exercise more constraint out of deference to Pakistani sentiments. I’m not sure who’s right on the underlying merits here, but the fact that this situation could arise helps illustrate how fatuous the Bush/McCain “We Must Do What Petraeus Commands” theory of Iraq is.

No President — not even the one articulating the theory — would actually behave in the manner Bush is suggesting. When formulating policy toward military operations in Pakistan you of course need to ask the military commanders what they think, but you of course don’t just follow them blindly. There are other considerations in play and it would be absurd to blindly follow any one person’s advice.

This New York Times article about how John McCain’s political strategy is based on fundamentally misleading people about the nature of the situation in Iraq, but that’s okay with the media not because they’re fooled but just because they like John McCain, has gotten a lot of attention, and rightly so. But this particular paragraph is especially telling:

In longer discussions on the subject, Mr. McCain often goes into greater specificity about the entities jockeying for control in Iraq. Some other analysts do not object to Mr. McCain’s portraying the insurgency (or multiple insurgencies) in Iraq as that of Al Qaeda. They say he is using a “perfectly reasonable catchall phrase” that, although it may be out of place in an academic setting, is acceptable on the campaign trail, a place that “does not lend itself to long-winded explanations of what we really are facing,” said Kenneth M. Pollack, research director at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.

At a time like this, you have to ask yourself what is the Brookings Institution for. According to the Brookings website:

The Brookings Institution is a nonprofit public policy organization based in Washington, DC. Our mission is to conduct high-quality, independent research [...] The research agenda and recommendations of Brookings experts are rooted in open-minded inquiry and our scholars represent diverse points of view. More than 200 resident and nonresident fellows research issues; write books, papers, articles and opinion pieces; testify before congressional committees and participate in dozens of public events each year. The Institution’s president, Strobe Talbott, is responsible for setting policies that maintain Brookings’s reputation for quality, independence and impact.

To me, that sounds inconsistent with offering a public defense of the practice of using the term “al-Qaeda” to refer to entities that are not al-Qaeda. High-quality research would be that if some large number of public officials and media personalities started referring to something as “al-Qaeda” when it was not, in fact, al-Qaeda you try to correct the record. Instead, Pollack seems to feel his job is to help push back against the people who are trying to correct the public record.

It’s certainly an interesting development. A lot of very good people work at Brookings. I imagine they enjoy working at a place that has a reputation for “high-quality, independent research . . . rooted in open-minded inquiry” but it’s a reputation they’re in danger of losing. Strobe Talbott, who’s “responsible for setting policies that maintain Brookings’s reputation for quality, independence and impact” might want to think about some of this.

Ray Takeyh had a great op-ed last week that I’m just now seeing:

In the past week, a parade of Bush administration officials have offered a new threat and new justification for prolonging America’s errant war in Iraq: containing Iran.

The ironic aspect of this is that Iran not only enjoys intimate relations with the Shiite government in Baghdad, but that its objectives in Iraq largely coincide with those of the United States.

Meanwhile, it seems that the Iranians have decided to cut Muqtada loose and fully line up behind the ISCI government. That counts as a form of good news, I’d say, but it also shows how ridiculous the administration’s talk of anti-Sadrist operations as somehow crucial to curbing an Iranian takeover are.