Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and the Pentagon have voiced their opposition to the bipartisan Webb-Hagel GI Bill by spouting fears that “too many will use it,” and it will therefore “harm” the military.

A new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report analyzing the impact of the GI Bill shows that McCain is indeed “full of it.” While the report explains that troop retention will decline because some troops will take advantage of their new education benefits, the loss in retention will be entirely made up for by increased military recruits:

Literature on the effects of educational benefits on retention suggest that every $10,000 increase in educational benefits yields a reduction in retention of slightly more than 1 percentage point. CBO estimates that S. 22 (as modified) would more than double the present value of educational benefits for servicemembers at the first reenlistment point — from about $40,000 to over $90,000 — implying a 16 percent decline in the reenlistment rate, from about 42 percent to about 36 percent. […]

Educational benefits have been shown to raise the number of military recruits. Based on an analysis of the existing literature, CBO estimates that a 10 percent increase in educational benefits would result in an increase of about 1 percent in high-quality recruits. On that basis, CBO calculates that raising the educational benefits as proposed in S. 22 would result in a 16 percent increase in recruits.

Ignoring the conclusion of the CBO report, the Army Times prints this deceptive headline suggesting that the GI Bill will only harm the military: “CBO: Better GI Bill would cut retention 16%.”

As Sen. John Warner (R-VA) has said, the flip side of the impact on retention is that “putting a big piece of cheese out there will induce more qualified people to join just to get this. It should be a tremendous incentive for recruitment.” If McCain and the Bush administration truly wanted to repair retention problems, they shouldn’t take benefits away from troops but rather — as Jon Soltz has said — “focus on the role of contractors, who continually snatch up troops, offering them up to 10 times their military pay to do a similar job in Iraq.”

A very troubling article in Salon today explores the events surrounding the apparent execution in cold blood of an unarmed Iraqi farmer by U.S. Army snipers, and asks “why would these elite American soldiers kill an unarmed prisoner in cold blood?”

The answer: pressure from their commanding officers to pump up a statistic straight out of America’s last long war against an intractable insurgency.

A review of thousands of pages of documents from the legal proceedings obtained by Salon shows that in the months prior to [the Iraqi farmer, Genei Nesir Khudair al-Janabi]‘s death, the young snipers, already frustrated by guerrilla tactics, were pressed to their physical limits and pushed by officers to stretch the bounds of the laws of war in order to increase the enemy body count. When the United States wallowed in Vietnam’s counterinsurgency quagmire decades ago, the same pressure placed on soldiers resulted in some of the worst atrocities of that war.[...]

The pressure from above for more bodies was also toxic in Iraq, where the isolated, outnumbered and outgunned snipers of the 1st Battalion had to make split-second life-or-death decisions. When those decisions landed them in a military court, it was the lowest-ranking soldiers, not the brass, who paid the price, and a sergeant who said he was pushed into taking a fatal shot who wound up with a long prison sentence. It was battalion commander Lt. Col Robert Balcavage, who pushed for a higher body count, who initiated the prosecution of three of the battalion’s snipers.

I think we’ve seen this “dead bodies=success” mentality bleed out into pro-war blogs as well, where the numbers of insurgent dead are credulously relayed and uncritically reported as progress, irrespective of the collateral damage incurred in those deaths and of the galvanizing effects that this has on support for insurgency. (Of course, if you’re someone who believes that trying not to create more insurgents is irrelevant to the task of counterinsurgency, then no big deal. I suppose one could always apply the Bush Doctrine on the ground in Iraq, and justify the murder of Genei Nesir Khudair al-Janabi on the theory that he might, one day, have joined the insurgency. But then you’d have to kill his son, and then all his friends, too. Nice war we’ve got going here, huh?)

The murder of Genei Nesir Khudair al-Janabi, and the atmosphere in which it occurred, is reminiscent of the Abu Ghraib abuses. In both cases, a high-pressure environment, hazy rules of engagement, and pressure from above to produce usable intelligence/dead “insurgents” led to atrocity. In both cases, the lowest men down were punished for carrying out the directives of their commanders (and Commander-in-Chief), while those commanders were left untouched.

As the article demonstrates, it is a mistake to regard this killing as an isolated incident. I think it would also be a mistake to see this any of this solely as a failure of command. Rather, the lesson to be drawn here is that we should, if at all possible in the future, avoid invading and occupying foreign countries, and thereby creating situations where tragedies like this one are predictable and inevitable. One of the best ways to support our troops is to ensure that they not be misused as instruments of bad policy.

Our guest blogger is Brian Katulis, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Armed gunmen from the Shi’a Lebanese Hezbollah movement have seized control of the streets in the Lebanese capital city today, surrounding the homes and offices of Sunni and Druze leaders in Western Beirut. This week’s clashes represented the worst violence since Lebanon’s civil war and demonstrated how far the situation has deteriorated in the three years since the Cedar Revolution brought much hope for change in this divided country.

Coming in advance of President Bush’s trip to the Middle East next week, the instability in Lebanon is a reminder of the dangers that can emerge from neglect and inattention and an approach to the Middle East too heavily focused on Iraq. Less than a year after the violent takeover of the Gaza Strip by Hamas, another Middle Eastern civil war in bubbling over – this time with a group that some have called the “A team” of global terrorists which has used violence to seize control of the capital city – hardly the result President Bush was hoping for when he prematurely declared that freedom was on the march in Lebanon and elsewhere in 2005. Ironically, the global trends in freedom have stalled and retrenched on President Bush’s watch, according to Freedom House.

How did the situation in Lebanon deteriorate so rapidly? The immediate cause: the Lebanese government confronted Hezbollah, a group that receives backing from Syria and Iran, by declaring the group’s private communications network illegal and replacing the airport security chief because of his alleged ties to militant groups. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah proclaimed that this amounted to a “declaration of war,” and his movement’s fighters took the fight to the streets against Lebanese government security forces.

But there were numerous and early warning signs that Lebanon was a tinderbox. A year and a half ago, Jordan’s King Abdullah came to Washington and warned of the possibility of three civil wars – between Iraqis, Palestinians, and Lebanese. In the afterglow of the Cedar Revolution, long-standing Lebanese internal divisions endured, and assassinations and political murders, including the November 2006 killing of Christian political leader Pierre Gemayal, continued. In the past year, a deadlock over power-sharing between Lebanese political factions has left the country without a new president.

As the Center’s Middle East Bulletin has highlighted on numerous occasions, the internal divisions in Lebanon has created a dangerous vacuum. Addressing it requires a comprehensive approach with engagement by the United States, countries in the region, and other global powers. Last March’s poorly-attended Arab League summit in Damascus did not result in any concrete plan for addressing the deadlock; no way forward was developed to help Lebanese factions bridge internal divides.

The violence in Lebanon demonstrates more than ever the need for sustained and continued U.S. engagement to stabilize the Middle East. The bipartisan Iraq Study Group headed by James Baker and Lee Hamilton outlined a strategy for a comprehensive regional diplomacy aimed at managing and resolving conflicts in the Middle East – pragmatically recognizing that the challenges in Iraq could not be dealt with in isolation of what happens in places like Lebanon.