Something doesn’t add up here, eh? Just yesterday, Helen Cooper, Mark Mazzetti, and Jim Rutenberg reported for The New York Times on “Saudis’ Role in Iraq Frustrates U.S. Officials”. Specifically:

One senior administration official says he has seen evidence that Saudi Arabia is providing financial support to opponents of Mr. Maliki. He declined to say whether that support was going to Sunni insurgents because, he said, “That would get into disagreements over who is an insurgent and who is not.”

The officials speaking to The New York Times had to stay anonymous because “openly criticizing Saudi Arabia would further alienate the Saudi royal family at a time when the United States is still trying to enlist Saudi support for Mr. Maliki and the Iraqi government, and for other American foreign policy goals in the Middle East, including an Arab-Israeli peace plan.” Nevertheless, the sources were “clearly intent on sending a pointed signal to a top American ally” in part “because it appears that Saudi Arabia has stepped up efforts to undermine the Maliki government.”

Today, though, comes a different Times article, David Cloud’s “U.S. Set to Offer Huge Arms Deal to Saudi Arabia”. This $20 billion package had been getting held up by Israeli concerns, but “senior officials who described the package on Friday said they believed that the administration had resolved those concerns, in part by promising Israel $30.4 billion in military aid over the next decade, a significant increase over what Israel has received in the past 10 years.”

Putting this all together, we’re going to give Israel billions of dollars in bribes in order to get them to not object to our decision to sell huge quantities of advanced weaponry to a country that is arming the people we’re fighting in Iraq. Makes sense to me!

Photo by Flickr user al-Fassam used under a Creative Commons license

The essay is a little rambly since it’s structured as a review of a bunch of books, at least one of which seems to have been a bit off-topic, but Samantha Power sure is smart.

Don’t tell Mark Penn or the national press corps, but it seems (via Andrew Sullivan) that the public mostly backs Obama on the question of meetings.

As some people have pointed out, it’s a little bit unclear what, exactly, the policy disagreement here amounts to. The political disagreement, though, is pretty clear. Clinton is making the same kind of calculation that led people to think Democrats needed to authorize the war in 2002, or keep quiet about the NSA surveillance program in 2005, or posture as “tough” on Iran in 2006, etc., etc., etc. Those kind of political calculations, however, have implications for governing. First John Edwards by taking on the “war on terror” construct, and now Obama by challenging the Very Serious People on the subject of meetings are starting to edge toward a new Democratic approach — one that involves actually challenging the post-9/11 miasma into which the national conversation about foreign policy has landed — while Clinton is still fully inside the defensive crouch.

Here’s some more from Brian Beutler on the worsening US-India nuclear deal. As approved by congress, we were going to violate international law and give India nuclear assistance unless India made a new nuclear test. The Indians, it seems, were prepared to look that gift horse in the face, so the Bush administration is hatching one of its ignore the law schemes, whereby “Bush has agreed to go beyond the terms of the deal that Congress approved, promising to help India build a nuclear fuel repository and find alternative sources of nuclear fuel in the event of an American cutoff, skirting some of the provisions of the law.”

Needless to say, we’ll also be urging the international community to clamp down on Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The background here is that conservative Republicans think the NPT is useless and that the correct way to prevent “bad guys” from acquiring nuclear weapons is brute force (c.f., invasion of Iraq, desire to go to war with Iran) — a series of unprovoked, illegal, preventive wars. Liberals tend to think that’s wrong, but Democratic Party elected officials are really, really good at putting important questions of principle aside in order to pander to domestic ethnic lobbies, thus most Democrats backed the bill (including Sens. Clinton and Obama — if John Edwards or Bill Richardson has ever said anything about this please let me know)

In response to Baghdad residents enjoying a decreasing number of hours per day during which their electricity works, the Bush administration has decided to stop keeping track of this indicator.

Here’s a September 25 letter to The Wall Street Journal from General P.X. Kelley, Commandant of the Marine Corps during the Reagan administration, praising a wingnutty Wall Street Journal op-ed as “a superb counterpoint to those ‘nay-sayers’ who have failed to understand how our commitment [to South Vietnam] did, in fact, stem the tide of Communism in the region.” And here he is in the November 25 Washington Post titled “Don’t Give Terrorists A Timetable.” He’s not, in short, much of a liberal.

In today’s Washington Post he teams up with Robert F. Turner, a Reagan administration lawyer, to point out that George W. Bush is committing war crimes. I can’t imagine Bush or Cheney actually ever being made to stand trial at the Hague but, at a minimum, I look forward to there being some list of countries neither man can visit lest he face an arrest warrant.

William Lind has an article in The American Conservative with a provocative proposal about Iraq that, I think, manages to highlight the extent to which a lot of the Iraq discussion has become misguided. Lind’s basic idea is that we should make some kind of accommodation with Iran, get our troops out of Iraq, and hope that Muqtada al-Sadr (or perhaps and equivalent populist, anti-American Shiite) takes the country over.

As it happens, I agree with Lind that this would be an okay outcome given the realistically possible options. One must see, though, that to many American observers “limiting Iranian influence in Iraq” is a top-tier priority. The way Lind sees it, our top priority is just that someone or other effectively control Iraq territory so that non-state actors (i.e., al-Qaeda) don’t run free. The point, though, is that you can’t talk about which plans will “work” for Iraq unless you talk about what it is we’re trying to accomplish in broader regional terms. The “check Iranian influence” theory is very, very popular in Washington and, I think, is most of what’s actually motivating the “residual forces” crowd. But the disagreement there is about broader strategic priorities and not about Iraq as such.

Defense Department photo by Master Sargent Jonathan Doti, U.S. Air Force

Yesterday, with reference to the bizarre nuclear deal the Bush administration reached with India, Robert Farley made reference to our shift toward an attempt to impose an “arbitrary and self-interested” non-proliferation regime on the world, an attempt that’s doomed to failure. And quite so. It’s worth saying, though, that in the particular case of the India deal and self-interested is doing the bargain a kindness. What’s happening in this deal is that we’re granting India concessions related to its nuclear program and India is giving us . . . essentially nothing in exchange.

This passed congress thanks to a lot of effective lobbying by Indian American business associations, complete with a revolving door lobbying job for former US assistant secretary of state for arms control Stephen Rademaker once the deal was sealed. The negotiations themselves, meanwhile, were all messed up. Bush headed off to India in March 2006 hoping to conclude a deal but without one actually in place. The administration then appeared to be so determined to accomplish something on the trip and stage a big photo op that it was willing to agree to a deal that didn’t achieve anything in particular for the US other than to allow the photo op.

Meanwhile, from a neoconnish perspective the fact that this undermines the nonproliferation regime is probably a good thing. They hate the idea that diplomatic agreements might actually work and undermine their efforts to start an endless series of wars.

Back in March, I wondered why AIPAC was so eager to join forces with a man whose support for Israel is grounded in the belief that his favored foreign policy will spark a giant war that ends in the destruction of Israel at the hands of a Russo-Arab alliance. The man in question was John Haggee and his group is Christians United for Israel. Max Blumenthal went to the CUFI conference and made a video:

Rapture Ready: The Unauthorized Christians United for Israel Tour from huffpost and Vimeo.

And their motives are, in fact, mixed. Some say they support Israel because Islam is a satanic faith. Others say it’s part of their plan to bring about the apocalypse. All seem united in their hopes that someday there will be no Jews. They want a preventive attack on Iran. And Joe Lieberman thinks they’re great. The link is via Rick Perlstein who has more on apocalyptics’ influence on the White House.

There’s a striking paragraph near the top of Fred Kaplan’s latest column that I’ve seen quoted on a bunch of progressive blogs, but his more important point comes deeper into the piece explaining the problem with the idea that success in working with locals in Anbar Province against al-Qaeda is a promising stepping-stone to nationwide stability:

But in these alliances, we’re dealing with tribesmen who are cooperating with us for a common goal. It is not at all clear on what basis these various local Sunni factions can be stitched together into some seamless security quilt—or why, because they’ve agreed to help us kill jihadists, they might suddenly agree to stop killing Shiites, compromise their larger ambitions, redirect their passions into peaceful politics, and settle into a minority party’s status within a unified government.

Alliances of convenience rarely outlive their immediate aims. Josef Stalin formed an alliance with the United States and Britain for the purpose of defeating Nazi Germany. But once the war was over, he had no interest in integrating the Soviet Union into the Western economic system.

Kaplan notes that this idea appears to have come to the administration via Steven Biddle, a very sharp analyst, who thinks his own plan has “maybe one in 10″ chance of generating “something like stability and security in Iraq.” You’d have to be out of your mind, really, to adopt a military strategy whose author thinks the odds of failure are overwhelming unless the alternative was something like national extinction. In many ways, I feel like the requirement of “serious prospects of success” is the most unfortunately overlooked aspect of just war doctrine. Unfortunately for us, the country has George W. Bush on hand so a strategy that you’d have to be out of your mind to adopt is precisely what we’re going to get

Andrew linked yesterday to Zeyad Kasim’s map of ethnic cleansing in Baghdad — the city has become substantially segregated by now, as every occasional massacre prompts a larger number of people to move before they become the next victims.

That’s the state of play right now with 160,000 American troops in the country and with a policy decision made to station a larger proportion of US forces specifically in Baghdad than had been the case earlier. So, yes, it’s true that terrible things will happen if we have the military leave Iraq, but terrible things are happening right now and our military can’t stop them.

As you’ve probably heard, Israel has for some time now been constructing a “security fence” — i.e., giant wall — to keep Palestinians in the Palestinian territories and Israelis safe on the other side of the wall. Reasonable enough, in my view. The only problem is that they’ve also peppered the Palestinian territories with Jewish settlers and the government isn’t about to abandon them to danger. The result is the situation described in this fantastic Washington Post article on Hebron, a place where “the separation is enforced not only by Israeli barriers but also by military checkpoints and curfews intended to protect the roughly 700 Jewish settlers living within the city’s most historic and religiously important areas.”

These 700 Jews, voting, passport holding citizens of Israel, live in the same city as 150,000 Arabs, citizens of noplace, but subjected to the political authority of an Israeli government which makes every decision about how to administer Hebron with the interests of the 700 in mind, irrespective of the ways in which “securing the small Jewish minority has a potent impact on the lives of the city’s 150,000 Arabs.” I take the view that, taken as a whole, the “apartheid” rap on Israel is seriously unfair. But take a closer look at the specific situation in Hebron and I don’t see what else you could call that particular state of affairs. And there’s just no legitimate anti-terrorism reason for any of this. Far and away the easiest way to provide security for Hebron’s 700 Jews would be for them to leave and go live in Israel.

In an apparent outbreak of good news for John Edwards, the Obama-Clinton spat seems to be escalating today rather than declining, with the Senator saying “First of all, what is irresponsible and naïve is to have authorized a war without asking how we were going to get out. And I think Senator Clinton still hasn’t fully answered that issue. The general principle is one that, I think, Senator Clinton is wrong on. And that is, if we are laying out preconditions that prevent us from speaking frankly to these folks, then we are continuing Bush-Cheney policies, and I am not interested in continuing that.”

One thing I’d note here is that the thing Clinton actually said during the debate struck me as fairly reasonable. Then again, so did what Obama said. Her campaign’s behavior since then — trying to make big political hay out of Obama’s alleged weakness, seeming to reverse her previous position on the direct talks issue, etc. — has been pretty problematic. And it’s worth saying that she actually did this before, attacking Obama after an earlier debate for having said that he would respond to a terrorist attack by first organizing emergency relief, and then second assessing intelligence to see who was responsible. According to Clinton’s campaign, the “correct” answer was to immediately call for war (against whom?)

What this says about Clinton’s actual foreign policy beliefs, I couldn’t it. It does, however, obviously reflect a certain set of beliefs about politics — specifically that more militarism is always better — which happen to be the exact same set of beliefs that helped drive so many Democratic elected officials to duck and cover during the initial drive for war. To get the foreign policy right, you need on some level to have someone willing to challenge the hawkish political box. Clinton isn’t just failing to do that, she’s going way out of her way to re-enforce it.

An awful lot of liberals I know seem unduly confident that when their favored candidate is elected President of the United States, he or she will withdraw American troops from Iraq. I think people should pay attention to Progressive Policy Institute chief Will Marshall when he notes that the major candidates at least sometimes seem to more-or-less agree with his case for indefinitely extending the US military occupation of Iraq. Marshall is also to be congratulated for, unlike the candidates themselves, speaking reasonably plainly about what it is he’s proposing and trying to defend the idea on the merits. He endorses the CNAS plan favored by the more hawkish elements of the Democratic establishment and specifically endorses the idea that the goal of our Iraq policy should be not ending the war, not ending the occupation, not bringing the troops home, but rather:

Specifically, we should redefine our military mission in Iraq as enforcing three “noes” that are essential to protecting America’s strategic interests — no safe havens for al Qaeda, no genocide, and no wider regional war.

I have a long counterargument below the fold:

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