I didn’t see this AFP story last week:

The Iraqi officer leading a U.S.-financed anti-jihadist group is in no mood for small talk — either the military gives him more money or he will pack his bags and rejoin the ranks of al-Qaeda.

“I’ll go back to al-Qaeda if you stop backing the Sahwa (Awakening) groups,” Col. Satar tells U.S. Lt. Matthew McKernon, as he tries to secure more funding for his men to help battle the anti-U.S. insurgents.

This, I think, does more than a little to underscore the limits of the “bribe our former enemies to be our friends” approach to Iraq. Of course, though the limits are real so are the possibilities. If keeping these guys on the payroll indefinitely were really crucial to American national security, I’m pretty sure we could find a way to work things out for quite a while. But it really isn’t crucial to American national security. Having insurgents not shooting at US troops is much preferable to the previous situation, but insofar as the safety of our soldiers is the primary concern then getting the soldiers out of Iraq is a much more reasonable long-term strategy.

The “cash for allies” approach makes sense as a way to make a military presence more sustainable in a place where the presence is strategically important. But for some time now, the main strategic purpose of our presence in Iraq seems to be simply to sustain our presence in Iraq. That’s not a good enough reason.

John McCain is asked whether he would order US forces to strike Osama bin Laden in Pakistan if they had a read on his location, and he bizarrely doesn’t commit to doing so citing Pakistani sovereignty as his concern. That seems a bit odd to me; it’s well-known and well-understood (though perhaps not by McCain) that the Pakistani government doesn’t exercise effective control over significant swathes of its nominal territory and that this is a large part of the problem of al-Qaeda hideouts there.

Under the circumstances, Pakistani sovereignty can’t be your top concern. The legitimate hesitation (though perhaps not the thing to say during an election) I would have before blasting away at OBL would have to do with collateral damage. Killing or capturing bin Laden would be an excellent thing to do, but with any of these targets it’s probably more important to check first and make sure you’re not also going to blow up a school bus or something as you go after the main target.

As you may recall, back during the 2004 campaign John Kerry said something about counterterrorism being primarily a question to be dealt with through law enforcement and intelligence rather than something that should be understood as primarily a kind of war. George W. Bush was eager to pounce:

Some are skeptical that the war on terror is really a war at all. My opponent said, and I quote, “The war on terror is less of a military operation, and far more of an intelligence-gathering law enforcement operation.” I disagree—strongly disagree.

Today, Barry Schweid writes for the AP about a new Pentagon-funded RAND Corporation report:

Its report said that the use of military force by the United States or other countries should be reserved for quelling large, well-armed and well-organized insurgencies, and that American officials should stop using the term “war on terror” and replace it with “counterterrorism.”

“Terrorists should be perceived and described as criminals, not holy warriors, and our analysis suggests there is no battlefield solution to terrorism,” said Seth Jones, the lead author of the study and a Rand political scientist.

That comes via Spencer Ackerman. Press release here, full study here, congressional briefing here. In the spirit of credit where due, let’s raise a glass to John Edwards and his 2008 presidential campaign team for being the only ones willing to stand up and explicitly repudiate the “war on terror” conceptual framework when given a chance back during the primaries.

Gareth Porter reminds us that this isn’t the first time Nouri al-Maliki has tried to get the Bush administration to agree to a timeline for withdrawing from Iraq, writing about a summer 2006 episode that the Bush administration tried, successfully, to walk back. Jim Henley wonders if Bush could have saved the GOP’s electoral prospects by just agreeing to what, at the time, pretty much all the major Iraqi factions were looking for. It’s a bit hard to say, but it’s just incredibly saddening to think of the fairly large number of decent opportunities to extricate ourselves from Iraq that were passed up in 2005 and early 2006 — what if we’d followed up the famous 2005 “purple finger” elections with a negotiated plan to withdraw forces from the country? — in the name of Bush’s imperial dreams.

DoD photo by Pfc. Sarah De Boise, U.S. Army.

Dean Baker notes that press coverage of a “record” deficit projection is based on measuring the deficit in terms of nominal dollars. You can do that if you want, of course, but there’s no good reason to use this metric. Measuring by nominal dollars will give you the result that deficits always tend to get bigger over time (because of inflation) and also that larger, richer countries tend to run bigger deficits than smaller, poorer ones. Those, however, aren’t the kind of results you want if you’re looking for meaningful information about the state of public finance. For that, you need to turn to the deficit-to-GDP ratio. Historical chart below:

Dean observes that “the 2009 deficit will be equal to about 3.3 percent of GDP,” similar to the deficits earlier in the Bush administration and to the deficits ran in the mid-1970s. The real “record” deficits hit in the 1980s and early 1990s were substantially larger than today’s deficits.