The Corner’s Andy McCarthy writes that “At the Weekly Standard Kim Kagan’s account demonstrates in detail that Iran’s war against the U.S. in Iraq goes back some five years.” Just yesterday, Jamie Kirchick scolded readers that “it’s not ‘warmongering’ to simply state the fact that two rogue states are themselves complicit in unwarranted acts of warmongering against the United States and a nascent democracy in the Middle East.”

I’m not sure if Kirchick is entirely clear on what the concept of “warmongering” means, but I’m pretty sure that this is, in fact, warmongering. But rather than quibble over semantics, the basic point is that these writers for America’s top conservative publications would like to see the United States take military action against Iran (and possibly Syria) and to that end they’re trying to convince the public that those countries are already at war with us. They started it, you see. I mean, arming and supporting Iraqi factions! What meddlers! Where do they get the nerve!

The McClatchey newspapers Iraq team did a lengthy interview with Nouri al-Maliki. You can see their writeup here. Not surprisingly, he doesn’t agree with his critics in the US and also doesn’t think he should be removed by a coup. Near the end, though, comes something a bit more interesting as Leila Fadel is asking him why he doesn’t meet with Muqtada al-Sadr anymore:

FADEL: Why not, at this time, when there are troubled relations, and the Mahdi Army is being accused of killing governors and running astray?

MALIKI: I have no problem with meeting him. But he withdrew from the challenges to a large degree and he has big problems within the movement. That is why I have meetings with leaders from the movement but not with Muqtada and I have many efforts for reform and to bridge the mistakes through bilateral or more dialogue. Perhaps what is holding back our talks is my firm rejection of the policies adopted by the movement. And I believe some leaders have begun to understand my position and accept it as the correct position in spite of my firmness. Indeed now is the time for meetings but I believe that meeting the leaders who actually represent the movement is more to the point and more effective in quelling the situation and in isolating the gangs from the good elements and cadres in the movement.

If I read him right, Maliki is contending that Sadr himself doesn’t really control the movement at this point, so there’s no reason to meet with him and Maliki can just meet with faction leaders instead.

A.J. Rossmiller (who, for the record, used to do political intelligence in Iraq for the defense department, so he’s not just bullshitting around) has a great post about the myriad problems with the Allawi Gambit, noting such salient facts as how we already installed Allawi as Prime Minister of Iraq once, he performed horribly in office, and he was overwhelmingly booted out in an election. I like A.J.’s conceit that Allawi-love is a kind of Iraqi corollary to Broderism here at home, with both sides suffering the same problem: “Like Americans, Iraqis have preferences about issues.”

Jane Hamsher’s also reading A.J.:

I still find it mystifying that Hillary Clinton and Carl Levin decided to get out in front of this thing by calling for the removal of Maliki. The danger of winding up once again in a “you broke it, you bought it” situation seem pretty extreme.

I put this alongside the Department of Homeland Security in my “too clever by half” file. The Democrats’ basic feeling seems to be that erring on the side of overly castigating Iraqi political leaders is the smart move since it helps evade charges that you’re Criticizing The Troops when pointing to lack of success in our Iraq policies. Just keep punching Maliki while walking backwards, and maybe everything’ll be okay. But as Hamsher says, there’s a danger here of Levin getting what he asked for and Democrats finding themselves re-entrapped into support for a doomed policy.

I’m not sure I quite understand where Josef Joffe comes from. Or, rather, why it is that a certain number of editors seem to feel that North America can’t supply a sufficient supply of wingnutty commentary on foreign policy without importing additional labor from Germany. But for whatever reason, Joffe has firmly established himself on the post-9/11 scene as Europe’s premiere purveyor of ludicrous neoconservative arguments. In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal he offered a forecast of the things that would happen if the US were to withdraw from Iraq:

• “Iran advances to No. 1, completing its nuclear-arms program undeterred and unhindered.”
• The Sunni Arab states “are drawn into the Khomeinist orbit.”
• “[E]mboldened jihadi forces shift to Afghanistan and turn it again into a bastion of Terror International”
• “Syria reclaims Lebanon”
• “Hezbollah and Hamas . . . resume their war against Israel”
• “Russia . . . rebuilds its anti-Western alliances”

One might note that Joffe’s thinking about this essentially parallels the paranoid fantasies of the domino theorists, but Joffe actually acknowledges as much but just insists that this time things are different. But this is crazy. Iran may or may not build a nuclear bomb, but our ability to prevent this won’t be seriously impacted by our presence or absence in Iraq. Similarly, anti-Israel violence from Hamas and Hezbollah wax and wane according to those groups’ own imperatives, it has nothing to do with Iraq. And, again, anti-Syrian forces in Lebanon either can or can’t resist Syrian efforts to impose its will. Outside powers like the United States and France may or may not be able to help sympathetic groups in Lebanon. Having tens of thousands of American countries engaged, at great expense, in an unpopular occupation of a nearby country is neither here nor there.

Why would the Sunni Arab states be drawn into the Khomeinist orbit? What would this even mean? Will Hosni Mubarak convert to Shiism? Will the UAE just hand its oil over to Teheran? It’s very hard to imagine any of our friends in the region deciding that Russia would be a more useful ally than the United States, and if Iran already dominates the whole region then it’s hard to believe Russia will be able to dominate it too. By the end, Joffe has the whole world collapsing into anarchy as American hegemony collapses:

For all the damage to Washington’s reputation, nothing of great import can be achieved without, let alone against, the U.S. Can Moscow and Beijing bring peace to Palestine? Or mend a global financial system battered by the subprime crisis? Where are the central banks of Russia and China?

These are good questions, but the answer is, of course, that the United States will still be the world’s primary economic and military power no matter what happens in Iraq. The United States is, simply put, not nearly so fragile as Joffe imagines. We’ll still have our 300 million people and our $13 trillion GDP and our aircraft carriers, universities, etc. All that stuff that made us an important and powerful country in the first place is still here. We’ve been seeing in Iraq that it doesn’t make us omnipotent. Joffe is acting like facing up to that reality in Mesopotamia would somehow reveal all the rest as just a mirage, but it’s all real. America and the world will survive.

One often hears it said that the Israel-Palestine conflict isn’t really about Israeli occupation of the territories conquered in the 1967 war. That Israel is prepared to withdraw from these territories in order to make a secure peace but that, unfortunately, the Palestinians won’t agree. The New Republic‘s editor in chief, Martin Peretz, had one of his occasional posts in which he usefully points out that this isn’t actually the case a couple of days ago:

Greater Jerusalem is still a vague concept and a vaguer reality. But its outlines are clear. There are some contiguous Jewish neighborhoods east of the city proper, big neighborhoods. There is no way these will be forfeited from Israeli under any agreement. Basta! Finito! Gemacht! Dayenu!

These “neighborhoods” are, of course, settlements built on conquered land. Somewhat similarly, although this time not presuming to speak for the Israeli government, Peretz wrote of his desire to maintain Israeli occupation of the Jordan River Valley and to see the population of 10,000 Israeli settlers living there grow.

Kevin Drum and Ilan Goldenberg raise some doubts as to how trustworthy David Petraeus’ much-anticipated September report on the “surge” is really going to be. And, of course, they’re right to. I’m not sure what else one would expect — when people self-evaluate, they usually come up with positive accounts of themselves. Besides which, as long as Petraeus thinks what he’s doing is working on any level, he’s going to decide that he ought to exaggerate how well it’s working in hopes of bolstering support. And, of course, if the war ever does end Petraeus is going to want it to be because politicians decided to end it despite his brilliant successes rather than because he failed.

At any rate, it seems safe to assume that the most recent round of congressional junkets has adequately previewed what we’re going to hear in DC, namely some misleading spinning of the Anbar Awakening plus some unconvincing data about declining civilian casualties plus the usual screwed up political situation.

I keep forgetting to link to something about Zbigniew Brzezinski’s endorsement of Barack Obama. I see this as a significant development. Brzezinski is one of the leading members of what you might call the foreign policy counterestablishment that’s slowly emerged over the past four years. This all dates back, in my experience, to his electrifying October 2003 speech at the New American Strategies conference that was organized in DC by progressives looking to formulate a meaningful challenge to neoconservatism.

Brzezinski fears (and I think it’s a reasonable fear) that Hillary Clinton and her circle is dominated by the kind of people and thinking who played the dominant role in shaping Democratic policies between 9/11 and Kerry’s defeat in 2004 — Ari Berman’s “strategic class” in short.

Via Ezra Klein, Dennis Ross’ plan for Iraq includes the following bright idea: “Second, we should set a date for the convening of a national reconciliation conference. Unlike previous such conferences, it should not be permitted to disband until agreement has been reached.”

How come the Bush administration never thought of that? Previous efforts at reconciliation have failed because nobody ever demanded that the participants not fail. I feel like people who used to be in government service sometimes feel that they had access to some magical diplomatic pixie dust that Robert Blackwill, John Negroponte, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Ryan Crocker unaccountably keep failing to apply. More likely, these people have just been tasked with a series of increasingly-impossible jobs that Dennis Ross would fail at just as badly as anyone else. The real failing in all of this is hubris, an unwillingness to admit that the best thing to do is face up to failure and start trying to make the best of that.

James Fallows reminds us of his fall 2004 piece on Bush’s lost year — the twelve month period during which we could have been putting al-Qaeda out of business, but instead found key resources (most of all, the precious resource of attention) diverted to gearing up for war with Saddam. He remarks:

It is an old story, and it is the fundamental case against Iraq. Not that it was a good idea, poorly executed, that in the right circumstances might have made us safer. Rather, that it was exactly the wrong idea, from the start, because it distracted us from the enemy who had really harmed us, and whom we had a reasonable chance of containing and crushing, and toward an unnecessary fight guaranteed to multiply the number of enemies we faced worldwide. It should be possible to make the case that clearly.

Then again, it should have been possible to make the case in 2004.

I think it’s worth saying that it wasn’t magically “impossible” to make this case in ’04. Indeed, from time to time John Kerry made it. And those tended the most effective moments of his campaign. As in the first debate:

Jim, the president just said something extraordinarily revealing and frankly very important in this debate. In answer to your question about Iraq and sending people into Iraq, he just said, “The enemy attacked us.”

Saddam Hussein didn’t attack us. Osama bin Laden attacked us. Al Qaida attacked us. And when we had Osama bin Laden cornered in the mountains of Tora Bora, 1,000 of his cohorts with him in those mountains. With the American military forces nearby and in the field, we didn’t use the best trained troops in the world to go kill the world’s number one criminal and terrorist.

They outsourced the job to Afghan warlords, who only a week earlier had been on the other side fighting against us, neither of whom trusted each other.

That’s the enemy that attacked us. That’s the enemy that was allowed to walk out of those mountains. That’s the enemy that is now in 60 countries, with stronger recruits.

The problem was that this line of attack, though accurate, politically effective, and reflecting the thinking of some of the people in Kerry’s circle wasn’t clearly the position Kerry had actually taken back in late 2002 and early 2003. Thus, this point got tangled up in the song and dance about flip-flopping and for it before he was against it and the point couldn’t consistently be placed at the center of Kerry’s critique.

It seems that a Frank Gaffney front organization published an article calling on President Bush to engineer a coup to make himself president for life, while Martin Lewis at the Huffington Post put out the call for General Pace and the Joint Chiefs to engineer a coup against the Bush administration.

I’m gonna go way out on a limb and say that neither of these are very good ideas. Meanwhile, Jamie Malanowki’s new novel The Coup, involves a more clever (and funnier) method of toppling the incumbent. I do wonder sometimes what would happen if Bush did something really crazy like just call up the Joint Chiefs one day and order a preventive nuclear first strike (all the GOP contenders say it should be considered) on Iran without congressional authorization. Does the military follow that order?

Should they? My best understanding is that it’s completely within the president’s legal authority to order a nuclear attack on a whim, but that’s a pretty disturbing idea.

Here’s my chosen excerpt from Evan Thomas’ Newsweek cover story on the hunt for bin Laden:

When Franks refused to send Army Rangers into the mountains at Tora Bora, he was already in the early stages of planning for the next war. By early 2002, new Predators—aerial drones that might have helped the search for bin Laden—were instead being diverted off the assembly line for possible use in Iraq. The military’s most elite commando unit, Delta Force, was transferred from Afghanistan to prep for the invasion of Iraq. The Fifth Special Forces Group, including the best Arabic speakers, was sent home to retool for Iraq, replaced by the Seventh Special Forces Group—Spanish speakers with mostly Latin American experience. The most knowledgeable CIA case officers, the ones with tribal contacts, were rotated out. Replacing a fluent Arabic speaker and intellectual, the new CIA station chief in Kabul was a stickler for starting meetings on time (his own watch was always seven minutes fast) but allowed that he had read only one book on Afghanistan.

At any rate, you’re welcome to pick your own paragraph, but that’s my favorite. Certainly, it’s a point that I think Democrats are going to want to emphasize in the 2008 election, which is why I think it would be smart for Democrats to, insofar as possible, not nominate people who think authorizing the invasion of Iraq was a good idea.

As best I can tell, David Petraeus’ doctoral dissertation on learning the lessons of Vietnam is, as Brian Beutler says, an exercise in saying nothing at extraordinary length. Check out the thesis paragraph of his conclusions section:

History in general, and the American experience in Vietnam in particular, have much to teach us, but both must be used with discretion and neither should be pushed too far. The Vietnam analogy, for all its value as the most recent large-scale use of American force abroad, has limits. Most importantly, the applicability of the lessons drawn from Vietnam, just like the applicability of lessons taken from any other past event, always will depend on the circumstances of the particular situation at hand.

That’s his conclusion. I even agree, but one would really hope for something firmer….

The Atlantic‘s website has a kind of review essay by Robert Kaplan about the “forgotten” Vietnam literature that provides a kind of user’s guide to the revisionist accounts of the war that the president has decided to endorse. To me, the noteworthy thing about this case is how hollow it is even on its own terms. For contemporary political purposes, here’s the key point:

While historians cite 1968 as a turning point because of the home front’s reaction to the Tet offensive, the My Lai massacre, and the protests at the Democratic party convention in Chicago, on the ground in Vietnam, 1968 marked a different trend: William Westmoreland was replaced by Creighton Abrams, population security rather than enemy body counts became the measure of merit, “clear and hold” territory replaced the dictum of “search and destroy,” and building up the South Vietnamese Army became the top priority. “There came a time when the war was won,” even if the “fighting wasn’t over,” writes Lewis Sorley, a West Point graduate and career Army officer, in A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam (1999). By the end of 1972, Sorley goes on, one could travel almost anywhere in South Vietnam in relative security, even as American ground forces were almost gone. [...] Sorley told me he isn’t sure what would have happened had Congress not cut off aid to South Vietnam at about the time the ground situation was at its most hopeful. He felt that a respectable case might be made that it would have survived.

The question naturally arises that even if one accepts all of this, what would the point have been? Propping up the South Vietnamese government was an expensive and diplomatically costly proposition. The initial strategic rational for propping up the South Vietnamese government was that preventing South Vietnam from going Communist was necessary to prevent the triumph of Communism worldwide. In retrospect, however, while “a respectable case might be made” that South Vietnam could have been saved, we know conclusively that the strategic case in favor of saving it was mistaken.

Recently, an indefinite military commitment to South Vietnam has been repackaged as some kind of humanitarian gesture, but that boat won’t float. The Saigon regime was a dictatorship like the northern one, and Abrams-era US military actions like the Christmas Bombings killed thousands of people. Insofar as the point of a military activity is to accomplish something worthwhile at some kind of reasonable cost, Abrams/Kissinger/Nixon never did anything of the sort. Now, it’s not Creighton Abrams’ fault that there was no good reason to expend vast resources propping up the shaky South Vietnamese government indefinitely, but it’s still the case that whatever tactical accomplishments the forces under his command may or may not have achieved that nothing he did actually vindicates the political agenda of indefinitely continuing the war.

Kay Steiger thinks about the professional military’s responsibilities to provide strategic advice:

Officers are trained to work on the “how” of a problem and they never are allowed to question the judgment of the decision itself. The administration called on generals to plan a war, but it was never their role to think about whether going to war was a good decision. Is this a good way to train the highest level of advisers to the commander in chief? Probably not.

This is inspired by Fred Kaplan who takes the view that the officer’s corps is repeating the mistakes condemned in H.R. McMaster’s Dereliction of Duty where he argues that the Vietnam-era military “betrayed their professional obligations by failing to provide unvarnished military advice to President Lyndon B. Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara as they plunged into the Southeast Asian quagmire.”

I’m not 100 percent sure about this. It seems to me that insofar as the generals are going to disagree with civilian officials, it makes sense for them to be somewhat subtle about it. At the end of the day, it’s up to civilians to decide whether or not to start a war, and with good reason officers want to avoid actions that will render the chain of command unworkable. The trouble is that when officers try to be duly discreet, they just get ignored if people don’t want to listen.

An excellent example is the case of General Eric Shinseki. He testified in public, before congress, that it would require “on the order of several hundred thousand” soldiers to secure Iraq. To an uninformed member of the public (as I was at the time) this sounds like professional military advice on a technical military question. As we can now see in this era of “surge,” however, the Pentagon can’t deploy several hundred thousand troops to Iraq — there just aren’t enough people in the whole Army. One has to assume that, as Chief of Staff of the Army, Shinseki knew perfectly well how many soldiers the Army contains. He was saying, in other words, that it was his opinion that stabilizing Iraq would be impossible.

His message was just ignored. And to a substantial extent, it continues to be ignored, as one still hears this frequently cited as an example of Bush and Rumsfeld mishandling the invasion. But unless you assume that Shinseki was just totally unaware of Army logistics, it’s pretty clear that he was trying to send a message that we shouldn’t invade Iraq without doing anything insubordinate. Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton or John Warner or Richard Lugar or Tom Lantos could have asked their staff “hundreds of thousands of troops: can we do that?” and they would have heard back “no.” But the politicians who wanted to back the war didn’t want to hear such things.

Besides which, it wasn’t actually a secret in elite quarters that the professional military thought it was a bad idea to invade Iraq, anymore than it was a secret that diplomats and intelligence professionals (to say nothing of international relations academics and middle east studies specialists) thought it was a bad idea to invade Iraq. As this classic June 10, 2002 New Republic editorial sneered “That the military brass opposes going to war shouldn’t surprise anyone not frozen in amber.”

Last week, as thousands of Europeans took to the streets to protest American plans to topple Saddam Hussein, a similar cry went up along the Potomac. It didn’t come from liberal editorial writers; and it didn’t come from Democratic members of Congress. No, the opposition to invading Iraq came from the very force that would be doing the invading: the U.S. military. We know this because high-ranking officers have been leaking like sieves–to The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and others–about how silly they consider the whole enterprise to be. In the Post, for instance, “one top general” told reporter Thomas Ricks that “the ‘Iraq hysteria’ he detected last winter in some senior Bush administration officials has been diffused.” And indeed, over the past week, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and President George W. Bush himself have gone to unusual lengths to downplay the possibility of military action against Saddam. We find that disappointing and hope that in the coming months the president will remember what he seemed to understand so well in the searing weeks after September 11: The case for taking on Saddam doesn’t require believing that an invasion carries no risks, but merely that they pale beside the risk of allowing his regime to remain in power. But in the meantime, the president needs to make another decision: He needs to fire some of his generals. Not because they oppose going to war with Iraq, but because they have been advertising their opposition in the nation’s newspapers.

Under the circumstances, I really don’t think that generals speaking out more loudly would have done any good. Sure, if they spoke out more forcefully Bush might have come under more attack in the press from folks like TNR for his famous habit of being overly-tolerant of dissent and hyper-deferential to expert advice, but it wouldn’t have stopped the march to war.

This debate (one, two, three) about Barack Obama and genocide between Hilzoy and Jamie Kirchick over at Andrew’s site reminds me of a broader point I’ve been meaning to make forever.

When you look at different takes on the Darfur situation, you see them divided into two main camps. On the one hand, you have people who are interested in Darfur who don’t normally write about humanitarian issues or Africa, but who do frequently write in support of militarism and in derogation of the UN. In this camp you have Kirchick, The Weekly Standard, Leon Wieseltier, Marty Peretz, etc. These people believe, naturally enough, that unilateral American military intervention in Darfur is the only responsible option. On the other hand, you have people whose interest in Darfur stems from a larger interest in humanitarian issues and in Africa. I’d take the International Crisis Group, the Enough Project, and Africa Action as typical of the latter. If you follow the links, you’ll see that none of these organizations think that what Kirchick is saying about this is correct.

Meanwhile, as Kirchick himself notes, Obama is pretty close to Samantha Power who wrote the book on genocide. Like the people in the second camp, she’s a skeptic about unilateral military intervention as the prime tool of fighting genocide. Indeed, she explains in the book that she thinks this kind of Kirchick-style thinking is counterproductive; sending people the message that if you care about this issue you need to sign on for a costly and geopolitically problematic military intervention leads far more people to say “I should stop caring about this issue” than it leads to say “I should support a costly and geopolitically problematic military intervention.” Thus, they favor thinking pragmatically about actions that might realistically be implemented.

The difference, though, is that if you’re more interested in wielding Darfur as a bludgeon against liberals, the UN, Arabs, etc. than you are in saving people’s lives, this kind of pragmatism becomes less appealing.

This is really Fallows’ beat, but this New York Times article about China being really, really, really polluted sure is something. Manufactured Landscapes, a film I’ve recommended previously, is full of really eye-opening images.

This is, perhaps, the achilles heel of Chinese authoritarianism. The Soviet Union was full of just astounding things, like the incredible shrinking Aral Sea pictured above. China, by contrast, used to be too poor for anything truly awful to happen on the environmental front, but capitalism has set the table for nightmare scenarios. Democracies have, obviously, our share of environmental problems, but this really is one of those situations where it’s the worst form of government except for all the others.

Public domain photo by Wikipedian Staeker

There’s an awful lot wrong with this Moshe Ya’alon op-ed in today’s LA Times and I don’t have the time to go through the whole thing right now, but just note the first sentence: “After a few years of benign neglect, Israel is back on the itineraries of well-meaning foreign emissaries.”

Israel was hardly being neglected by the United States during the years before Condoleezza Rice semi-rediscovered the Arab-Israeli peace process — it was, then as now, our country’s largest recipient of taxpayer dollars. Less quantifiably, but also significantly, Israel continued to receive a very large quantity of American diplomatic support. One can sympathize to some extent with Israeli officials feeling like their country attracts a disproportionate quantity of busybodies pushing peace plans, but while it would be one thing for Ya’alon to genuinely argue that Israel should be left to its own devices, it’s another thing entirely to say that the United States should just be totally indifferent to how our most generously subsidized client state relates to its neighbors and to the millions of stateless Arabs over which it rules.

David Ignatius displays his mastery of deliberate obtuseness in The Washington Post:

In “back to the future” mode, the name being mentioned these days is Ayad Allawi, a former Baathist who was interim prime minister and has strong support among Sunnis, even though he’s a secular Shiite. Allawi has bundles of money to help buy political support, but it comes from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, rather than the United States.

Being mentioned by whom? And why? Might Allawi have published any op-eds in prominent newspapers that Ignatius works for? Mightn’t there have been some reporting recently on this “money to help buy political support” going to a powerful Republican lobbyist and communications operation here in DC? Meanwhile, this description of where the money comes from seems pretty misleading. A good friend of his runs a CIA-funded “Iraqi” intelligence service that doesn’t report to Iraq’s government. Another friend stole a billion dollars (much of it presumably from the US Treasury originally) from the Iraqi government.

I want to just reiterate how crazy the idea that we’re ten years from victory in Iraq by briefly recollecting America’s attempted intervention in Lebanon’s 1980s-vintage civil war. We went in, you’ll recall, in 1982, about six years into the fighting, and really expanded our mandate in 1983. This led to the bombing of the Marine barracks later in ’83, and US forces were withdrawn in early 1984.

Some people think the Reagan administration made the right call by withdrawing; others think it did the wrong thing. Nobody, however, regard the intervention as a great success. Nevertheless, the civil war ended just five years later with the 1989 Taif Agreement. To say that our current policy is working and needs just ten more years to stabilize Iraq is lunacy — just leaving stands a perfectly good chance of working just as quickly at radically lower cost.

UPDATE: Yes, I know that the total duration of the Lebanese Civil War was longer than that. The point is to put the ten years time horizon into some perspective. Even an effort to stabilize a country that everyone agrees was a failure, like America’s 1983 peacekeeping efforts in Lebanon, can come fewer than ten years away from the dawn of stability. By a similar token, the American Civil War ended fewer than ten years after James Buchanan’s blunders. Ten years isn’t just longer than America has political will to sustain, it’s genuinely too long. Policies that work accomplish their goals faster than that, something that’s supposed to unfold at the speed Petraeus is talking about isn’t working at all.