I haven’t read Kenneth Pollack’s A Path Out of the Desert so I won’t vouch for Lee Smith’s gloss of its argument but I thought that what Smith says is worth commenting on:

He identifies America’s chief vital interest in the region without embarrassment: Persian Gulf energy resources. Until the United States develops an adequate substitute for oil, we are stuck in the Middle East protecting the free flow of affordable fossil fuel that not only fills American SUVs but also ensures the stability of global markets. Pollack makes a good case that were it not for our presence in the Gulf, we would not be such a valuable target on the jihadist hit list, and were we to leave tomorrow, the threat to the United States from Arab terror outfits would largely subside.

Since we are not leaving, we need to repair the region with a broad program of economic and political reform, different from the Bush administration’s quick-fix obsession with elections that merely lent democratic legitimacy to Islamist groups in the Palestinian Authority, Iraq, Lebanon, and Egypt. Pollack argues that a process of real liberal reform will take decades, if not longer.

I suspect that views of this sort are widespread both in elite Washington and around the country, and it’s worth pointing out that this really doesn’t make much sense. The basic proposition here is that if our military weren’t so intimately involved in the Middle East, that this would run the risk of economic harm via instability in oil supplies. And fair enough, but our current policies have economic costs of their own in terms of both monetary expenditures (about $1 trillion on Iraq thus far, more than that in terms of bases and fixed infrastructure over the past couple of decades) in terms of terrorist attacks, in terms of pricey efforts to secure ourselves against terrorist attack (been on an airplane lately?), as well as in various other familiar airy senses.

That’s the short-run tradeoff. In the longer term, we could massively mitigate the harms Pollack is worried about here by investing in making our country less oil dependent so that fluctuations in the price of oil wouldn’t be such a big deal. A move of that sort would, of course, be a costly and difficult undertaking. But the alternative “a broad program of economic and political reform” that “will take decades, if not longer” to complete certainly doesn’t sound any easier. And certainly there’s no effort here to make an explicit cost-benefit calculation and explain why our past ten years’ worth of forward-leaning policy in the Gulf have brought us more in economic benefits than they’ve cost, or that completely remaking the politica and society of the Arab world would be easier or cheaper than building a lot of windmills and trains.

Beyond that, this agenda is completely incoherent. Let’s say you’re a reform-minded Arab young professional surfing the web somewhere. And you read that Kenneth Pollack, leading American Middle East expert, has put forward a new book on grand strategy. The book argues that the US needs to promote a broad program of reform in the Arab world in order to prevent a violent Arab backlash against efforts to use American military domination to exploit the natural resources of the Arab world. What are you going to think about that? What’s that going to make you think the next time you hear the American government talk about reform? Are you going to believe that invading Iraq was a well-intentioned effort to promote reform that perhaps went badly, or are you going to believe that it was an ill-intentioned effort to use American military domination to exploit the natural resources of the Arab world?

Reform is hard. Promoting reform is harder. Promoting reform in the name of cheap oil and military domination is almost certainly impossible.

Meanwhile, Smith seems to have decided to move to an even-more-wrongheaded position. His basic critique of both Pollack and the neocons is, basically, that they aren’t racist enough (“As we saw with Hezbollah’s orgiastic celebrations for released child-murderer Samir Kuntar, the problem with the Arab world is Arab societies themselves”) and need to recognize that since Arabs are kind of subhuman all this democracy talk isn’t going to get us anywhere.

Photo by Flickr user smatkins used under a Creative Commons license

If you look back to the summer of 2005, you’ll see that few people at the time regarded conditions in Iraq as “good” or even acceptable. And yet things got so much worse over the course of 2006 and early 2007, that improvement in 2008 to bring us back to the kind of level of violence we had three years ago — except with more walled-off and ethnically cleansed neighborhoods in place — is now represented as a great triumph. James Vega has a forceful post up at The Democratic Strategist reminding us of how perverse this is.

And then you get things like today’s newspaper headline “Bomb Attacks in Baghdad and Kirkuk Kill Dozens”. The essence of the “success” of the surge is that, as in 2004 and 2005, you only sometimes read about that kind of thing, whereas at its worst you read about it frequently. That’s not nothing, but people should understand that even in its “better” state Iraq is very much a shattered society featuring an unenviable quality of life.

DoD photo by Spc. Richard Del Vecchio, U.S. Army

The military is fessing up about a bad shooting in Iraq a little while back:

The American military admitted Sunday night that a platoon of soldiers raked a car of innocent Iraqi civilians with hundreds of rounds of gunfire and that the military then issued a news release larded with misstatements, asserting that the victims were criminals who had fired on the troops.

The thing you need to remember when you hear this kind of story of misconduct is that literally hundreds of thousands of foreign personnel have served in Iraq since the invasion in 2003. In that context, it really and truly is just a small handfull of bad apples who’ve done this kind of thing while the overwhelming majority have exhibited exemplary conduct by historical wartime standards.

But by the same token, what you see is that when such a massive undertaking goes on for years and years then even in a military where the overwhelming majority are well-behaved, a certain number of terrible things happen. And that is why Iraqis, quite rightly, don’t want to see a foreign military operating on their soil and not subject to their laws. No sensible country would want to see such a thing happen, precisely because even under the best case it’s still going to lead to the occasional tragedy. And of course the Defense Department, also quite rightly, has no intention of letting American military personnel engage in active operations on Iraqi soil while subject to Iraqi criminal jurisdiction rather than to American military law. Which is precisely why it makes sense for both countries for us to begin the process of packing up and leaving. Completely apart from the quality of the troops’ performance (generally very high) or the quality of their tactical missions (seemingly very high recently) the overall situation is inherently untenable.

DoD photo by Senior Airman Julianne Showalter, U.S. Air Force

James Wimberly observes that the NYT‘s Steve Erlanger seemed pretty hard-up for a “to be sure” graf in his article about Barack Obama’s triumphant European tour:

Obama was vague on crucial issues of trade, defense and foreign policy that currently divide Washington from Europe and are likely to continue to do so even if Obama becomes president. The issues include Russia, Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan, as well as new refueling tankers and chlorinated chickens, the focus of an 11-year European ban on U.S. poultry imports.

And it’s true, Obama was so busy talking about Afghanistan, Iraq, international terrorism, climate change, and human rights policy that he didn’t find time for the long-festering chicken issue. Similarly, I didn’t here President Sarkozy mention anything about America’s ban on the import of unpasteurized soft white cheese. So basically nothing of substance transpired.

Photo by Flickr user Fuzzy used under a Creative Commons license

John Quiggin calls attention to the fact that Lovemore Matombo and Wellington Chibebe, the President and General Secretary respectively of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, are going on trial July 30 on trumped-up charges launched by the Mugabe regime. The We Are ZCTU website is seeking gestures of support from readers abroad.