Silly Obama, doesn’t realize the vital importance of democracy promotion according to Fred Hiatt & co:

The message that the Democrat sends is that he is ultimately indifferent to the war’s outcome — that Iraq ‘distracts us from every threat we face’ and thus must be speedily evacuated regardless of the consequences. That’s an irrational and ahistorical way to view a country at the strategic center of the Middle East, with some of the world’s largest oil reserves. Whether or not the war was a mistake, Iraq’s future is a vital U.S. security interest. If he is elected president, Mr. Obama sooner or later will have to tailor his Iraq strategy to that reality.

Oops, did I say democracy promotion? I meant to say that Iraq has a lot of oil so we need to try to micromanage its future. And yet it’s precisely this impulse — the belief that we desperately need to retain “influence” in oil-possessing parts of the world that got us into the corrupt bargain with the Arab autocracies that produced the conditions under which al-Qaeda arose and began targeting us. Remember when Iraq was supposed to be part of a drive for reform that changed that dynamic? Oh for the heady days of the Arab spring.

Robert Farley says:

Indeed; to the extent that the United States must devote years, billions upon billions of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of troops to “winning” in Iraq, the very purpose of the invasion is undermined. It does no good to “throw some little country against the wall” if in doing so our own capacity to act is severely wounded; other little countries that might have been intimidated take note of the fact that we are incapable of acting. This was, of course, why Don Rumsfeld bitterly resisted proposals to go into Iraq with substantially more troops, why he resisted the idea of increasing troop levels, and why he resisted the shift to counter-insurgency; he understood that such moves undermined the purpose of the invasion in the first place. To the extent that the war has been about the extension of American imperium, it has failed disastrously.

I would just emphasize that bit about Rumsfeld. To the extent that post-2006 tactics have proven relatively successful in stabilizing Iraq, this does not provide a viable tactical implementation of the strategy encapsulated in Bush’s preventive war doctrine. That strategy requires that it be possible to subdue medium-sized countries in a sufficiently easy and uncompromising way that we could credibly threaten to do it over and over again.

What we’ve seen in the “surge” era is that not only is stabilizing an Iraq-sized country extremely difficult, but also that having any measure of success requires you to really lower the horizons for success. One of the most successful things we’ve done since General Petraeus took over was simply make peace with groups we were formerly trying to subdue. And of course the fewer people you try to fight the lower your costs get, but also the range of objectives you could achieve gets narrower. Bushism was founded on the presumption that we could accomplish a great deal, with ease, through the use of force unrestrained by law or institutions and it failed miserably.

Tom Friedman is really pissed off that people around the world take a dim view of the United States even though despite our flaws our government is less repressive than China’s and we’ve had a much more constructive policy toward Zimbabwe than has South Africa. One wonders if he really doesn’t understand this, but it’s the hegemony, stupid. America has long sought to play a global leadership role, and under Bush has sought to play this role almost exclusively through methods of coercive domination. Under those circumstances of course America’s sins and flaws look exaggerated. We can write self-congratulatory newspaper columns whining about this, or else we can try to put our policies and our position in the geopolitical structure on a more sustainable basis.

Somehow, I don’t think the whining option is going to do anyone much good. Greenwald has more on this that’s valuable.

Ilan Goldberg says this was the most important result from yesterday’s ABC Iraq poll:

Do you think the U.S must win the war in [Country] in order for the broader war on terrorism to be a success, or do you think the war on terrorism can be a success without the U.S. winning?

Iraq: 34% must win. 60% can succeed without it
Afghanistan: 51% must win. 42% can succeed without it

Frankly, I’m skeptical that expressed public opinion on such fine-grained questions as these is all that significant. John McCain will argue that we can “win” (whatever that means) both if only we put our faith in his leadership. The question is how credible do people find that.

Here’s a tidbit from John McCain’s balanced budget “plan”:

Balance the budget requires slowing outlay growth to 2.4 percent. The roughly $470 billion dollars (by 2013) in slower spending growth come from reduced deployments abroad ($150 billion; consistent with success in Iraq/Afghanistan that permits deployments to be cut by half — hopefully more)

James Kvaal and Robert Gordon note that this only adds up if you assume a total withdrawal. For one thing, “U.S. spending in Iraq and Afghanistan totaled $171 billion in 2007, according to the Congressional Budget Office – and that includes money for Iraqi security forces, foreign aid, and veterans benefits.” Similarly, “According to CBO, rapidly reducing the number of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to 30,000 would save only $55 billion in 2013″ and “Obama’s own, more aggressive plan to withdraw forces from Iraq will save only $90 billion a year, according to his campaign.”

To obtain the sort of savings McCain is counting on, in other words, would require a much more aggressive withdrawal plan than the one he opposes as too aggressive.

U.S. Army photo by Spc. Alan Moos

Gary Farber ponders The Dark Side and says that’s what we’ve been suffering from as a nation.

So yesterday John McCain said that thanks to the success of the surge in Iraq we can withdraw brigades from there and launch a new surge in Afghanistan, and also Barack Obama is a communist appeaser surrendercrat even thought his is precisely the policy he’s been calling for for months. But now it seems McCain didn’t really mean that and instead his plan is to ask NATO nicely to send more troops to Iraq.

Back in the real world, the question of enhanced allied contributions is yet another reason to favor a withdrawal timeline from Iraq. No European government that’s at all concerned about public opinion wants to be seen as doing anything that amounts to facilitating the war in Iraq. Sending troops to Afghanistan so that President McCain can keep his 100 year occupation force at full strength for as long as possible isn’t going to fly in Canada, Paris, Germany or anywhere else. But given a firm commitment to withdraw, and a real determination by the United States to focus on our Afghanistan/Pakistan issue in a serious way, you could see some allies stepping up and pitching in.