On the subject of analogies between the idea of establishing an enduring US military presence in Iraq and establishing one in Germany, mostly what Andrew said. But more broadly, you have to ask yourself what the point is of bothering to construct analogies across obviously non-analogous situations. Nothing about the trajectory of US policy in Iraq since the fall of Saddam has resembled the years 1945-1950 in Germany at all. One hardly needs to enumerate specific points of difference.

The problems with this strategy, meanwhile, have nothing to do with analogies. The problem has to do with the fact that there are large and influential segments of Iraqi opinion that are fundamentally opposed to a permanent American military presence in Iraq and other segments of opinion that are deeply skeptical of it. Meanwhile, the major Iraqi social movement that does favor a permanent US presence is Kurdish separatism. That’s the problem right there. When you define the mission in Iraq as, in part, the construction of an Iraqi government that will be amenable to an intimate long-term security arrangement featuring a permanent American military presence you make the mission much, much more complicated. The pursuit of this policy by the Bush administration makes the American military in Iraq a divisive, destabilizing force int he country despite the best efforts of our soldiers to be playing a constructive role. And as long as we’re there, our presence will always be a divisive, destabilizing force.

Jim Henley unpacks a cliché:

The pretended meaning is, The US increased troop strength in Iraq for a period of time beginning in 2007. The actual meaning is, the US increased troop strength WHILE ramping up a program to pay off Sunni resistance leaders WHILE Iraq’s warring ethno-religious factions finished completely remaking Iraq’s demographic patterns, owing to tens-to-hundreds of thousands of dead and millions of exiled and internally displaced, WHILE the US turned the capital into a warren of barricades. The net result of all those changes has been a less obtrusively violent Iraq for the time being, and the whole arrangement is “The Surge” in practice, but the cheerleaders talk as if it was all due to The Surge in pretense. Meanwhile Iraq’s “calm” would count as calamity almost anywhere on earth but Darfur or Zimbabwe.

Quite so. Understanding the true nature of the business doesn’t undermine the reality of the achievement, but the achievement is to make somewhat more feasible a misguided, costly, and immoral scheme for imposing a semi-permanent semi-colonial status on Iraq. But rather than selling the public on the whole disreputable salami, we’re supposed to swallow it in slices. First, we need to give “the surge” a try, so we can’t leave this year. Now, since “the surge” is working, we need to stay another year. Then the year after that, there’ll be another reason. When conditions are worsening that is the reason to stay (see 2005, 2006) and when conditions are improving that’s the reason to stay.

DoD photo by Cpl. Tyler Hill, U.S. Marine Corps.

Lurking at the end of this Reuters article on potential vulnerabilities in McCain’s alleged strong suit of foreign policy is this intriguing remark about McCain’s idiotic plan to kick Russia out of the G8:

He also dismissed McCain’s comment last October on Russia and the G-8 as “a holdover from an earlier period,” adding: “It doesn’t reflect where he is right now.”

Matt Corley points out that this isn’t quite right. As recently as March, McCain told the Los Angeles World Affairs Council that “We should start by ensuring that the G-8, the group of eight highly industrialized states, becomes again a club of leading market democracies: it should include Brazil and India but exclude Russia.”

My guess is that the McCain adviser here is mistaken — he knows this is a bad idea, so he’d like to think that McCain has flip-flopped away from it. But thought McCain has changed positions on a lot of issues over the years, he’s been pretty consistent ever since 1999 or so on foreign policy questions — taking the most hawkish line on every issue, seeking to ratchet-up tensions with every potential rival, etc. But if McCain has changed his mind about this, and I hope he has, he should say so clearly rather than through an anonymous quote.

The excellent news out of East Asia is that Ambassador Chris Hill has not only managed to strike an okay deal with the North Koreans over their nuclear program, but also triumphed over administration hawks and gotten Bush to do the sensible thing. For a while now, Bush has been tilting in a reasonable direction with regard to the DPRK (after years-worth of screw-ups that have forced us to accept a much worse deal than we could have had years ago), a direction that John McCain has denounced in favor of the only approach he knows — coercion, escalating conflict, and the risk of war. And, indeed, since at least 1999 McCain has been calling on us to reject pragmatism in Korea in favor of war:

McCain repeated this trope throughout the speech, drawing on his personal history and adopting the rhetoric of moral seriousness about the consequences of committing American forces. But awareness of the consequences was, for McCain, no reason to avoid starting a war. Indeed, McCain almost seemed disappointed that the Clinton administration managed to peacefully resolve the North Korean nuclear crisis with the “agreed framework” of 1994. He remarked in Kansas that “a firmer response to North Korea might have triggered a war, a war we would win, but not without paying a terrible price.” McCain was sophisticated enough to recognize that other policy options such as refusing aid to the North might nonetheless have resulted in conflict “as the North’s last desperate measure.”

This analysis, in the hands of a normal person, becomes a defense of the Clinton administration’s policy — though a bit distasteful, the agreed framework was the only way to avoid a destructive war. Not, however, to McCain. In his view, efforts at conflict prevention are fundamentally misguided. He told the Kansas State audience that notwithstanding the Clinton administration’s efforts, Korea’s leaders “remain quite capable of launching in their country’s death throes one final, glorious war. But now, they are much, much better armed.” In short — war is inevitable, so better to get it over with as soon as possible.

But good for Bush and good for Ambassador Hill.