My theory about the popularity of a “more troops” strategy for Iraq among pundits and politicians had been that they knew this wasn’t going to happen. By recommending a course of action that you know won’t be adopted, you’ll get to blame the catastrophe on Iraq on (a) treasonous anti-war types, and (b) George W. Bush while leaving super-hawk ideology unscathed. The trouble, of course, is that Bush now looks set to embrace the “surge” strategy. So Jack Keane and Fred Kagan take to the pages of The Washington Post to argue that a three or six month surge “would virtually ensure defeat.” Instead we need “a surge of at least 30,000 combat troops lasting 18 months or so.”

Once you’re talking about an 18 month deployment, of course, you’re not really looking at a surge. And the logistics of producing the surge by extending deployments start to get much more difficult. So Bush may get his surge and Kagan may still get to claim his brilliant strategy was never adopted after all. Be that as it may, the point is that this war will still be in full-swing — possibly even further escalated beyond where it is today — during the 2008 campaign.

Plus: Double entendre of the day: “The only ‘surge’ option that makes sense is both long and large.”

UPDATE: Paradox of the day, J-Pod: “The key here is time. A ‘temporary’ troop surge will be a disaster.” A permanent surge, sure. Just remember, ignorance is strength.

Ann Althouse:

The number of Americans who have died in the Iraq war…

… has now surpassed the number who died in the 9/11 attacks.

ADDED: A key question — with an unknowable answer — is: How many Americans would have died in post-9/11 attacks if we had not chosen the path of fighting back?

Leaving aside the curious “path of fighting back” construction (against whom were we “fighting back” in Iraq), we can probably estimate the “unknowable answer” here by projecting forward based on the total number of Americans killed in Iraq-sponsored terrorist attacks from 1991-2002: Zero. To be generous, a handful of American soldiers might have died trying to enforce the no-fly zones had there been no invasion.

Via Scott Lemieux.

Major Kelley Thibodeau, spokeswoman for the task force of American military personnel based in nearby in Djibouti explains: “Officially, we haven’t put anybody in Somalia. The Americans don’t go forward with the Ethiopians. They are training Ethiopians in Ethiopia.”

Seriously? Here’s how this is supposed to work. Major Kelley is talking to her superior officer: “What should I say if reporters ask about our involvement.” Colonel so-and-so replies, “officially, we haven’t put anybody in Somalia.” Major Kelley, when asked about this by a reporter, either replies “we haven’t put anybody in Somalia” or else refuses to answer the question or somehow evades it. Whatever she does, she can’t just repeat “officially, we haven’t put anybody in Somalia.” That gives the whole game away! She might as well just say “we’ve secretly put people in Somalia” at this point.

The second half of today’s WaPo coverage of the Somalia-Ethiopia war does a good job of calling into question the premises of US policy in the Horn of Africa. We note that Prime Minister Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia “along with the United States, has accused the [Islamic Courts] movement of harboring terrorists” but this is “an allegation it has denied.” Neither Ethiopia nor the United States is prepared to provide names of any terrorists who are being harbored. Meanwhile, “Opposition groups inside Ethiopia say that Meles, an increasingly authoritarian leader, has shrewdly played up the terrorism charges to win U.S. support.” We’re going along with this because “based in part on intelligence out of Ethiopia, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Jendayi E. Frazer has asserted that the Islamic movement is now under the control of an al-Qaeda cell, a claim that regional analysts believe is exaggerated.”

Emphasis added. In other words, we’re backing Ethiopia’s war against Somalia because intelligence provided by the Ethiopian government suggests we should back Ethiopia. But what else would the intelligence say? The US government’s conflict with the Islamic Courts began because “the United States financed warlords in Somalia who described themselves as an ‘anti-terrorism coalition’ but who mostly terrorized local Somalis, who came to despise them.” This “anti-terrorism coalition” was nothing other than the exact same warlords who ruined the country in the 1990s renaming themselves for the post-9/11 era.

I’d really like to see the DC-based media get on top of these questions. Can someone ask Tony Snow or George W. Bush or Condoleezza Rice or Steven Hadley to name the terrorists the Islamic Courts are harboring? To explain what we’ve tried to do to secure their custody short of backing a full-scale Ethiopian invasion of Somalia?

UPDATE: Okay. Below the fold you’ll find the State Department’s counterterrorism country report on Somalia. I think you’ll find the lack of menace here striking:

Read more

I don’t want to ruin anyone’s post-Christmas day of recovery, but this Glenn Reynolds post is really distressing. Some Iranian officials come to Iraq, get themselves taken prisoner by the American military, and Reynolds sees this as a convenient pretext for the United States to launch a war with Iran. But what’s the pretext? And why should we be looking for excuses to start a war with Iran?

Okay. To boil this Somalia business down to a simpler question, I read “American officials acknowledged that they tacitly supported Ethiopia’s approach because they felt it was the best way to check the growing power of the Islamists, whom American officials have accused of sheltering terrorists tied with Al Qaeda.” Way back when the Islamists first took over, I read “Already American officials have said that a handful of foreign fighters with links to Al Qaeda are being shielded by Mogadishu’s Islamist leaders.”

What are the names of these people the Islamists are sheltering? How many of them are there? Who are they? What have they done? What diplomatic efforts has the United States made to get the Islamists to turn them over? Pardon me for being cynical, but in this day and age my suspicion is that names aren’t involved in these articles but there’s no one in particular the Bush administration is worrying about and this is mostly hype and paranoia. But maybe not. So name some names.

This sounds incredibly ill-advised to me: “American officials acknowledged that they tacitly supported Ethiopia’s approach because they felt it was the best way to check the growing power of the Islamists, whom American officials have accused of sheltering terrorists tied with Al Qaeda.”

There’s just no way that a foreign invasion by a Christian army of a Muslim country is going to check the growing power of the Islamists in any meaningful sense. The exact quantity of acreage under Islamists control is no skin off our backs. We need to worry about people plotting against the USA being sheltered somewhere in that acreage. Encouraging Ethiopia to go to war with the Islamists merely encourages them to collaborate in efforts to attack the United States. If the Ethiopian military could somehow eliminate Somali Islamism as a social and political force, that would be one thing, but there’s just no way they can do that.

As I’ve said previously, expanding the number of soldiers in the Army is a reasonable idea. But it’s also a very expensive proposition: “every 10,000 new soldiers add about $1.2 billion in personnel costs to the Pentagon’s annual budget. On top of that, equipment for 10,000 new troops would cost an additional $2 billion, according to Army statistics.” What’s more, we’re not talking about 10,000 new troops:

Instead, civilian and military officials said, they are drawing up tentative proposals that would make permanent the 30,000-troop temporary increase approved by Congress after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and then add 30,000 more troops to the Army over the next five years, resulting in an active-duty Army with 542,400 soldiers by 2012.

So this is a $19.2 billion annual commitment that we should probably round up to more like $20 billion since unless you want standards to drop you’re going to have increased recruiting expenditures. Under the circumstances, I just can’t see the case for an increase of that scale in the defense budget which is already giant in a global context. You could easily find the money by cutting back other DOD programs, and that kind of shift in resources would be a good idea. It’s pretty clear, though, that the driving force behind embrace of this idea is mostly about politics and posturing rather than a serious effort to set priorities so I think pessimism is warranted.

Ethiopia decides to really go for it, unleashing warplanes to attack the Islamic Courts Movement that controls most of Somalia in support of that country’s feeble de jure government. The Islamists are being supported by “several thousand soldiers from Eritrea” along with “a growing number of Muslim mercenaries from Yemen, Egypt, Syria and Libya who want to turn Somalia into the third front of jihad, after Iraq and Afghanistan.” The Ethiopian military, meanwhile, has been trained and equipped by the United States, is the class of the region, and appears to be intervening in Somalia with American support:

The question now seems to be if Ethiopia will go into Mogadishu and try to finish off the Islamist military, which many fear could spur a long and ugly insurgency, or simply deal them enough of a blow to force them back to the negotiating table with the transitional government. Ethiopia’s prime minister recently told American officials that he could wipe out the Islamists “ in one to two weeks.”

I still don’t know much about the Horn of Africa (I read this International Crisis Group material but it’s all a bit outdated) but on general principles fear of spurring a long and ugly insurgency seems sound. A war under these circumstances would seem to have a basically religious character insofar as we agree with Jeffrey Gettleman’s characterization that “While Somalia is almost purely Muslim, neighboring Ethiopia has a strong Christian identity, even though it is actually about half Muslim.”

The UN votes to approve economic sanctions on Iran, but the sanctions aren’t especially tough. “We don’t think this resolution is enough in itself,” says Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, who’s almost certainly correct. Why didn’t a tougher package get through the Security Council?

The administration had pushed for tougher penalties. But Russia and China, which both have strong commercial ties to Tehran, and Qatar, across the Persian Gulf from Iran, balked. To get their votes, the resolution dropped penalties such as a ban on international travel by Iranian officials involved in nuclear and missile development.

To me, this is where the small matter of diplomacy enters the picture. I really don’t want to see the United States start a war with Iran, so I’ve spent a fair amount of time trying to knock down paranoia about the Iranian nuclear program. Nevertheless, it is true at the end of the day that it would be strongly preferable for Iran to halt its quest for nuclear weapons. Under the circumstances, it would be good to be wielding tougher sanctions as a stick. That means not just throwing up our hands and saying “well, Russia and China have strong commercial ties to Iran” but also saying to ourselves, “there are probably some things that are more important to Russia and China than their commercial ties to Iran.” Find out what those are. Find out of those things are less important to us than is getting tougher sanctions on Iran. Maybe there isn’t a good deal to be cut here, but my guess is that there is. Similarly, sanctions and the threat of sanctions will work much better if the Iranians know that a grand bargain would be on the table were they interested in avoiding confrontation.

UPDATE: Incidentally, I would recommend Barry Posen’s Century Foundation paper as putting the problems posed by Iranian nuclearization in an appropriately non-alarmist perspective.

To the administration’s plan for a SCIRI/Hashemi/Kurd coalition aimed at taking down Muqtada al-Sadr. The grand ayatollah says he supports Shiite unity, and will not endorse any coalition aimed at dividing the Shiites. This seems like a smart move to me. Sistani’s early political interventions were highly effective, but quickly began compromising his position as a religious leader. To choose sides in an intra-communal dispute, especially to choose in a manner that put him on the side of the foreign occupiers, would merely further risk his standing.

Drum and Ackerman have already commented on Matt Continetti’s efforts to divide America into a “peace party” and a “power party” with a focus on the tunnel-vision conception of national power implicit in that dichotomy. I thought, however, that one should stick up on some level for the idea of a peace party and recommend this recent post by John Quiggin.

Wars, as he says, are destructive activities. Something one should seek to avoid: “The starting point the observation that war is a negative-sum game, so the fact that one side loses does not mean that the other wins. If losing a war means coming out of it worse than you went in, then Vietnam is not the first war the US has lost. The War of 1812 ended with the restoration of the status quo ante, but 25 000 Americans were dead, Washington had been burned, and huge economic damage had been done.” An even more telling example, in many ways, comes from one of our classic “good wars” — the Civil War. The Union cause was just and the war was one, but the price was high. The quantity of resources spent on the war would have been sufficient to compensate current slave owners at market prices, give the freed slaves much more substantial aid than what was, in fact, offered them after the war. This, needless to say, would have been expensive, but it would actually have saved Union taxpayers money, to say nothing of avoiding massive loss of life and large-scale devastation of Southern infrastructure.

Given the realities of the situation, it seems unlikely that the Civil War really could have been avoided in that manner. Still, the example merely demonstrates the extent to which war is negative-sum; even when successful it’s an extremely sub-optimal method of achieving policy objectives. As Quiggin elaborates, a strong aversion to war does not imply a policy of blanket pacifism or of massive American retreat from a global role: “The Iraq war showed, yet again, that in conventional military conflicts the US is unbeatable, and, for practical purposes unstoppable . . . the US has a unique capacity to enforce the global law that makes wars of aggression a crime against humanity.”

One thing I don’t really understand is the sentiment that America’s military posture in the Middle East is somehow justified or at minimum caused by that region’s large oil reserves. Oil, obviously, is a valuable commodity, but it’s not that valuable. The Iraqi state’s oil revenue is about $20 billion per year, which is a lot of money, but only a small fraction of the annual cost of occupying the country. Looked at another way, Iraq produces about 2.25 million barrels per day of oil and crude sells for around $62 a barrel. 62 times 2.25 million times 365 is a large number — about $51 billion — but still way less than the annual cost of the war.

Or, for yet another perspective, American consumers use about 20 million barrels a day of black gold — good for 7.3 billion barrels in a year. Now suppose you think that withdrawing military forces from the region would lead to widespread chaos and $100 a barrel oil. That means higher energy prices for consumers. But if US consumers could just pocket the cash that’s instead being spent on military operations in the area, they’d still have much more post-oil money on hand even if consumption didn’t drop at all in response to the price hike.

Looking at Darfur and the strains on US troops being caused by deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq, Michael O’Hanlon argues that we should create a dedicated genocide-prevention division of about 20,000 troops within the Army:

A genocide-prevention division within the U.S. Army would circumvent this problem. Since its only mission would be to stop genocides, deploying the force would never require us to ask more of soldiers who already have their hands full with other conflicts. Moreover, those volunteering for the new force would know exactly what they were getting into and enlist specifically because they embraced the mission. These soldiers could be recruited from the ranks of idealistic college and high school students across the nation who have done so much to keep Darfur in the public eye.

Color me skeptical. Different kinds of soldiers get different kinds of training, but they’re all at least semi-fungible. If we had a spare genocide-prevention division lying around, it would be getting sent to Iraq as part of the “surge” not to Africa. The President would simply argue that escalation of the Iraq War is a genocide-prevention mission because of the sectarian violence. Then on the flipside, I’m not sure there’s a discrete military task called “genocide prevention.” You might, in an effort to halt a genocide, bomb some buildings or troop formations somewhere. Alternatively, as part of a war to overthrow the Taliban you might wind up policing the streets of Kabul and taking responsibility for the safety of the city’s residents. So you want some military forces who specialize in bombing, and others who specialize in policing, but you don’t have some troops who specialize in genocide prevention and others who specialize in attacking hostile governments.

At any rate, though the mass killing of civilians is certainly awful on US foreign policy should seek to minimize violations of the international prohibition of such tactics, I do think pursuit of such a goal needs to be put in a broader context [UPDATE: what follows here is an excerpt from Ye Olde Book Drafte]:

Unfortunately, to many liberals and many members of the administration, Kosovo came to be viewed not as an unusual case — an outlier defining the limits of when liberals would endorse the use of aggressive force absent U.N. authorization — but as setting a baseline for an ill-defined new era of humanitarian militarism. Michael O’Hanlon, a Brookings Institution scholar thought to have been in line for a top post in a hypothetical Kerry administration, penned a 1999 article advocating military intervention “whenever the rate of killing in a country or region greatly exceeds the U.S. murder rate, whether the killing is genocidal in nature or not” utterly without reference to the United Nations or any other sort of multilateral authority. He listed ten countries — Sudan, Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi, Liberia, Angola, Bosnia, Chechnya, North Korea, and Kosovo — where interventions would have been warranted by this standard during the Clinton administration alone. Mercifully, he conceded that fighting the Russian Army in Chechnya was not a very pragmatic option (as he says, it “would have risked a major-power war between nuclear-weapons states with the potential to kill far more people than the intervention could have saved” ) but gave no consideration to the possibility that launching unprovoked unilateral military strikes at the rate of one every nine months or so would destabilize the entire international system. Indeed, despite O’Hanlon’s demurral on the Russia front, later that year The New Republic was lamenting that “Milosevic-like deeds by Milosevic’s allies will provoke only scolding followed by winking” rather than some unspecified more robust action.

I don’t think a 20,000 member division is going to be able to meet the ambitions of a policy like that.

I wonder what it would be like to be a right-wing pundit. No sense of shame. No accountability. I could just write things like “Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has an impeccable sense of timing. Just a week after the Iraq Study Group recommended a heart-to-heart with him, the president of Iran convened a conference in Tehran to examine whether the Holocaust really occurred.”

Max Boot, the author of those sentences, isn’t a fool. He isn’t ignorant. He knows Ahmadinejad doesn’t run Iran’s foreign policy and that, therefore, proposals for negotiations with Iran have nothing to do with heart-to-hearts with Ahmadinejad. He just doesn’t care. He opposes negotiation with Iran. So he wants to make negotiation with Iran look bad. So he states — falsely and knowingly — that the ISG proposed negotiations with Ahmadinejad which sounds worse than an accurate presentation of the ISG proposal would sound. He knows that his colleagues in the conservative punditocracy won’t think less of him for deliberately misleading his readers, and he knows that his editors at The Los Angeles Times would never consider saying “sorry, Max, we don’t like to print columnists who deliberately mislead our readers” for to not give free rein to whatever kind of wingnuttery some conservative wants to publish would merely confirm that the media is liberal.

Yesterday, Josh Marshall noted that the Brookings Institution, an erstwhile left-of-center think tank, will be hosting an event featuring Frederick “Surge” Kagan and remarks “I don’t know off-hand what other Iraq confabs Brookings is holding on Iraq this month. But highlighting the one truly nutball idea about what to do in Iraq — and none of the more sane ones — seems an odd stance for Brookings.” If you read the transcript from Kagan’s unveiling of his plan at AEI you’ll see that Ken Pollack, who takes the lead on Brookings’ Iraq stuff, was on hand and very positive about Kagan (“We put together a 150-page report in February of this year which looks remarkably like the plan that Fred’s team put together”) and overwhelmingly devoted his critical remarks to tackling the straw man of “people who oppose continued involvement in Iraq particularly but not limited to many in my own party, basically assuming, asserting that there would not be any consequences from withdrawal in Iraq.”

Whether the Kagan-Pollack meeting of the minds enhances Kagan’s credibility or detracts from Pollack’s I’ll leave as an exercise to the reader. Certainly my general approach to life is to listen to well-respected experts, then where their advice turns out to be terrible keep on listening to them rather than turning to different voices, so I don’t see why one would have any doubts about this.

Lawrence Korb and Max Bergmann call the Kagan plan “unrealistic and dangerous” before noting: “The neoconservative architects of the war claim that those who oppose increasing the number of troops do not understand the implications of failure in Iraq. But they have it backwards. Those who opposed the war from the outset understood the difficulty and scope of the task at hand, while the war’s architects are the ones only now coming to grips with the catastrophic implications of a possible civil and regional war.”

Hot on the heels of Mahmoud Ahmadenijad’s supporters suffering various setbacks in Iran’s semi-democratic elections, the dormant-for-a-while Iranian student movement seems to be revving back up again in its protests against the system. People have gotten their hopes up about this sort of thing before, obviously, and been disappointed. People have also sought to leverage the bravery of these people into a lot of unseemly chest-thumping — “if I blog about this a lot, then I’ll be a hero of the revolution!”

At any rate, you may recall my blog dustup with Ali Eteraz a couple of weeks ago. I guess you could say he and I have our differences, but his site turns out to have lots of content related to domestic developments in Iran and other Islamic countries, much of it quite interesting and will presumably have something on these developments.

UPDATE: See, e.g., here.

The former Soviet world’s most wild and crazy strongman is dead. Good obituary fodder: “Niyazov, 66, who crushed all dissent in his reclusive state and basked in a unique and bizarre personality cult while ruling a country with huge natural gas reserves, died overnight of cardiac arrest, state television said.” Next up, political instability:

“I expect there will be a massive fight for power now in Turkmenistan and it’s likely to take place between pro-U.S. and pro-Russian forces,” said a Russian gas industry source, who declined to be named. “Gas will become the main coin of exchange and the key asset to get hold of.” . . .

“Our first task is to return to Turkmenistan within hours … In Turkmenistan there is no opposition, they all sit in prisons or under home arrest. But outside the country opposition exists and it is coming back,”one activist, Parakhad Yklymov, told Reuters by telephone from Sweden.

Russia said it hoped Turkmenistan would stick to Niyazov’s course. “We count on the new Turkmenistan leaders continuing their course and further developing bilateral ties,” top Kremlin aide Sergei Prikhodko told Itar-Tass news agency.

I think trying to compete with Russia for influence in Russia’s “near abroad” is something of a mistake. The situation in Turkmenistan is always going to be more important to politicians sitting in Moscow than it will be to politicians sitting in Washington, and we’re just going to end up losing any struggles for influence that we engage in.