Our guest bloggers are Brian Katulis, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, and Peter Juul, a Research Associate at the Center.

Earlier this spring, the Center for a New American Security issued an Iraq policy paper with an identity crisis, a paper that poses as an exit strategy but ultimately advocates a course of action that looks a lot like what the Bush administration and its conservative supporters have endorsed in Iraq.

At its core, the “conditional engagement” strategy, as described in the report Shaping the Iraq Inheritance, tries to carve out a “moderate middle” dependent on simplistic renderings of competing policy proposals on the left and the right. But it is important not to get distracted by the framing mechanism CNAS presents on Iraq; the core arguments of the CNAS suffer from four major internal inconsistencies and disconnections from key realities in Iraq and the Middle East.

1. The strategy of conditional engagement does not differ from the Bush administration’s current approach because it fails to clearly define — in precise terms — when the Iraq mission would be accomplished, and when U.S. troops could depart.

2. The strategy assumes that the carrots of continued military, economic, and political support are more appetizing then they are.

3. The strategy doesn’t describe how it would be implemented to achieve its stated ends, however vague those ends are.

4. The strategy is wedded to a narrow, bilateral, U.S.-Iraq prism at the expense of a broader regional view.

What these flaws ultimately reveal is an unrealistic vision for the future of the United States and Iraq, grounded in a narrow focus on U.S. military power as the main determinant of events on the ground. It ignores the complexities of Iraqi politics in favor of a simple military lever American leaders can pull to get the desired outcome. Ultimately, it is less a plan for achieving political progress in Iraq than it is a plan for staying in Iraq.

Over the weekend, Iraq’s foreign minister said that the U.S. should set a “very clear timeline” for withdrawal from Iraq. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) — like President Bush before him — has repeatedly rejected setting a date for withdrawal.

A newly updated report from the Center for American Progress, entitled “How to Redeploy,” demonstrates that refusing to set a date for withdrawal risks endangering the gains of the last year and a half. As the report notes, the recent declines in violence are “due in large part to the emergence of Sunni ‘awakening’ groups and Sons of Iraq militias,” who cooperated as a result of their belief in the fall of 2006 that the U.S. would soon be withdrawing:

Brigadier Gen. Sean McFarland…credited the ‘growing concern that the U.S. would leave Iraq and leave the Sunnis defenseless against Al-Qaeda and Iranian-supported militias …’ as the main reason for the turn around in Al Anbar.

While introducing the report, Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Larry Korb explained, “[N]ow — more than ever — it is important to set a date”:

We would argue now — more than ever — it’s important to set a date, because this is the one thing that all of the factions in Iraq agree on and we need to bring them together. [...]

A lot of people have argued that if you set a date to get out now, you will undermine the gains that have occurred in the last year and a half. In our view it’s exactly the opposite, if you don’t set a deadline you will in fact undermine those gains, because if the…people who have been part of this awakening movement that started in Al Anbar province think the United States will be there indefinitely, they will no longer cooperate with us.

Watch it:

In addition, the report — prepared in consultation with “military planners and logistics experts” — finds “that an orderly and safe withdrawal” from Iraq “is best achieved over an 8 to 10 month period.” The proposed timeline is possible because the U.S. does not need to remove from Iraq “every nut and bolt belonging to the U.S. government”:

The United States clearly wants to remove all equipment of value or sensitive nature from Iraq as it withdraws, but it does not need to remove every nut and bolt belonging to the U.S. government. A 10-month timeframe should be sufficient to remove most heavy or sensitive American assets from Iraq while leaving behind non-essential equipment and supplies.

Digg it!

Illustrating the diversity of views that exists in John McCain’s brain trust, McCain’s two most prominent foreign policy advisers have op-eds today in the country’s two most prominent newspapers disagreeing over whether Putin is the new Stalin, or just the new Hitler.

Robert Kagan says Hitler:

Do you recall the precise details of the Sudeten Crisis that led to Nazi Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia? Of course not, because that morally ambiguous dispute is rightly remembered as a minor part of a much bigger drama.

The events of the past week will be remembered that way, too. This war did not begin because of a miscalculation by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili. It is a war that Moscow has been attempting to provoke for some time.

Thinking outside the box a little, Bill Kristol says Stalin:

When the “civilized world” expostulated with Russia about Georgia in 1924, the Soviet regime was still weak. In Germany, Hitler was in jail. Only 16 years later, Britain stood virtually alone against a Nazi-Soviet axis. Is it not true today, as it was in the 1920s and ’30s, that delay and irresolution on the part of the democracies simply invite future threats and graver dangers?

Understand that these two guys are the “big brains” of the McCain foreign policy shop, but this is how they, and John McCain, see the world: A battle between the forces of freedom and forces of authoritarianism. For Kristol, Kagan, and McCain, Russia falls into the latter category, and thus broader strategic considerations — to say nothing of attempts at historical context — can and must be cavalierly dismissed as America sallies forth to fulfill its destiny.

This isn’t to suggest that Russia aggression is defensible, just that it’s another example of the neocons cloaking their goal of American global hegemony in the rhetoric of freedom, and ending up weakening and discrediting both.

We should seriously question the sort of mentality that insists, as Kristol does, that throwing “the Vladimir Putins and Hu Jintaos and Mahmoud Ahmadinejads of the world” all together into one category is a productive approach to foreign policy. But then, remember that these are the brainiacs who thought it was a great idea to invade Iraq and destabilize the Middle East in order to restructure the regional security architecture in a way more conducive to U.S. interests.

One of the many negative consequences of Kristol, Kagan, et al’s cunning plan has been skyrocketing oil prices, which have resulted in turn in huge oil revenues for Russia, which have been a central factor in Russia’s once again becoming a major player on the international stage, enabling it to pursue its own hegemonic goals against its smaller, weaker neighbors. It would be great if the next president had advisers who understood how this sort of thing works.

Today the New York Times reports that Russia is escalating its war with Georgia, “moving tanks and troops through the separatist enclave of South Ossetia and advancing toward the city of Gori in central Georgia” and even bombing parts of Tibilisi, the Georgian captial.

Russia’s increasing aggression is putting a spark into American neoconservatives. Today on the Times op-ed page, one of their leaders, William Kristol, claims the U.S. must “defend” Georgia’s sovereignty as a reward for its participation in Iraq, while the conservative Washington Times is calling for “maximum pressure” on Russia:

Bill Kristol: [Georgia] has had the third-largest military presence — about 2,000 troops — fighting along with U.S. soldiers and marines in Iraq. For this reason alone, we owe Georgia a serious effort to defend its sovereignty. Surely we cannot simply stand by as an autocratic aggressor gobbles up part of — and perhaps destabilizes all of — a friendly democratic nation.

Washington Times: It is in America’s interest to exert maximum pressure on Russia to withdraw its troops and halt the interference in Georgian territory. This latest act shows the need for greater resolve in establishing a European security system that can be an effective check on Russian power

Writing in the Washington Post today, Robert Kagan goes even further, suggesting that the Georgia-Russia conflict may be the start of World War III:

Do you recall the precise details of the Sudeten Crisis that led to Nazi Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia? Of course not, because that morally ambiguous dispute is rightly remembered as a minor part of a much bigger drama. [...]

The mood is reminiscent of Germany after World War I, when Germans complained about the “shameful Versailles diktat” imposed on a prostrate Germany by the victorious powers and about the corrupt politicians who stabbed the nation in the back.

Like a good neoconservative, Kagan also links the Western response to the conflict and its wider policy towards Russia as “appeasement.”

Matthew Yglesias asks of Kagan’s World War II analogy: “If we launch a war with Russia — which would seem to be the point of busting out the analogy — then how are we going to find the time to launch wars with Iran and China?”

Digg It!