I’ll be going to the New America Foundation’s event “The View from a Divided Palestine” with Mustafa Barghouti from the Palestinian Legislative Council, Rita Hauser from the International Peace Academy and the International Crisis Group, and Daniel Levy from New America and elsewhere. Steve Clemons is promising that the event will be record and posted here.

For background, after years of pursuing a mix of disengagement and sporadic counterproductive interventions, Condoleezza Rice decided to call for a peace conference that’ll be happening in Annapolis in November. It’s a little unclear why exactly she’s done this, since in many respects the US government doesn’t seem to have done anything to clear the ground for success and the consequences of failure could be dire. But call it she did, so people of good will may as well try to seize the opportunity to accomplish something constructive — or, at a minimum, stave off some kind of disaster where poor planning leads to failure which leads to years of renewed bitterness and violence.

Apropos the post below, John Judis has a solid piece on the threat of a Rudy Administration that concludes with this great observation:

The centerpiece of Giuliani’s claim, however, is the suggestion that his approach to fighting crime provides a model for conducting foreign policy. In a recent essay for Foreign Affairs, he wrote: “I know from personal experience that when security is reliably established in a troubled part of a city, normal life rapidly reestablishes itself: shops open, people move back in, children start playing ball on the sidewalks again, and soon a decent and law-abiding community returns to life. The same is true in world affairs. Disorder in the world’s bad neighborhoods tends to spread. Tolerating bad behavior breeds more bad behavior.”

This is a foolish analogy. In policing the world, the United States cannot claim to be enforcing its own laws; we lack legitimacy to do so, as we found after invading Iraq. When the NYPD went into poor neighborhoods, it was not an occupying force; when the U.S. military took over Baghdad, it was, and it suffered the consequences. Some of the “neighborhoods” Giuliani wants to clean up, such as Iran, possess their own armies and can call on other “neighborhoods,” such as Russia and China, to deter an attempt to punish them for bad behavior. In short, the world is not New York writ large, and the trade-offs between authority and liberty look very different from the White House than from Gracie Mansion. But these distinctions seem lost on the man who aspires to be the next mayor of the United States.

Right. Trying to treat the entire world as if it were the sovereign territory of the United States is going to produce catastrophic results. The observation that the world needs forces to try to help bring order to some “bad neighborhoods” has a lot of truth to it, but insofar as that order is brought it’s going to need to be done by institutions and through mechanisms — first and foremost, the UN but also regional groups in their own back yards where appropriate — that are capable of doing so in a reasonably legitimate manner. Just having the President dictate to the rest of the world, however, isn’t going to fly.

I would strongly recommend John Judis’ American Prospect article on Iraq as Bush’s neoimperialist war. It’s an important point, not so much because we need an abusive term to throw at the policy, but because it’s important to place the failures of Bush’s policies in a broader historical context of failure. The specific questions the United States faces are new, but the broader debate about the viability of a foreign policy centered on assymetrical sovereignty and the coercive domination of smaller countries isn’t. It hasn’t worked in the past, it’s not working today, and most signs are that technological progress is making it harder and harder to act in this way even though America’s military might is unrivaled.

John developed these things at greater length in his book, The Folly of Empire which also gets into the ways in which Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson eventually came to learn from the pitfalls of the imperialist ventures they’d once supported and started grasping toward something resembling contemporary liberal internationalism, an approach to world affairs centered on international law and legitimacy with major powers working through stable, rule-governed institutions.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohammed ElBarradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, tries to calm things down a bit:

The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog said Sunday he had no evidence Iran was working actively to build nuclear weapons and expressed concern that escalating rhetoric from the U.S. could bring disaster.

Obviously, the man needs to read more Washington Post editorials. A steady diet of Mallaby, Hiatt, and Krauthammer can cure him of his pesky expertise on arms control issues.

Katherine Jean-Lopez passes on an email from Michael Yon:

I intend to support the boycott being launched by Bob Owens. Boycotts against the media have proven effective: I launched one myself last year against a magazine that misused one of my photos and misrepresented me. That magazine collapsed.

The New Republic needs to be the latest example that the good old days of no-accountability are ending. They attacked American soldiers during a time of war, and they attacked those soldiers without justification. I happen to be in Baghdad with some of the soldiers they attacked. These soldiers have enough challenges with urban combat that they should not have to watch their backs for concern of irresponsible publications stabbing them.

That’s not a very subtle stab in the back allegation now is it? Meanwhile, I don’t know if it’s more or less odd that in this instance the alleged backstabber is actually serving in the military as we speak.

We’ve mostly been getting this in unsigned editorials from The Washington Post but here Sebastian Mallaby puts a name to it:

Likewise on sanctions, Clinton is the only one to insist that sanctions are less a prelude to war than a means of forestalling it. They are more likely to work, moreover, if the military option is looming in the background, which is why bellicose comments from Bush or his vice president don’t prove that war is the preordained strategy. The idea that the threat of war can prevent actual war is the most basic lesson of nuclear doctrine, but it appears to escape the Bush haters.

“Bush haters” is a cheap rhetorical move by which to pre-emptively discredit the notion that one, perhaps, ought not to trust that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney will handle murky and complicated situations with skill and moral rectitude. But why shouldn’t one be, in this sense, a “Bush hater” — one who is inclined to expect the worst rather than the best from Bush and Cheney? I’ll say that I don’t find Mallaby’s line of reasoning to be categorically absurd. It’s in the nature of the office of the presidency that one is entrusting a great deal of discretionary authority to its holder and that one is thereby assuming that he or she will be capable of acting in the broad national interest. But this is obviously a defeasible assumption. And what, if not the actual Bush-Cheney record, would defeat it? I wish I could share Mallaby’s certitude that bellicose rhetoric is all part of a clever and well-designed plan to avoid war, but I have no idea where he gets it from.

As an America, I hope Turkey doesn’t launch military strikes in Iraq, as doing so could have very bad consequences for our policies there and for the well-being of American soldiers and civilians living there. As a citizen of the world, I worry that Turkish incursions will just make the situation in a generally troubled part of the world even worse. And even in terms of advice to the Turks, I would caution that the thrill of retaliatory military action will fade and won’t solve anything in terms of Turkey’s problems vis-à-vis its own Kurdish population and the Kurdish people living near the border with Turkey. That said, I think Kevin Drum’s observation that “Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan is sounding eerily similar to the way George Bush sounded in March of 2003″ is far too kind to Bush.

When Erdogan says something like “The moment an operation is needed, we will take that step. We don’t need to ask anyone’s permission” he’s talking about a bona fide response to actual PKK terrorist attacks that really have happened. Human history’s seen more than its fair share of ill-conceived overreactions to provocations (consider Israel’s summer 2006 attacks on Lebanon) but the invasion of Iraq was considerably nuttier than that an enormous overreaction to hypothetical attacks and a nuclear weapons program that didn’t exist.

Somalia’s Prime Minister is resigning in the context of the “worst fighting in weeks between Islamist rebels and allied Ethiopian-Somali government troops.”

I’m no expert in these matters, but this looks an awful lot like General Petraeus’ spokesman emailed Glenn Greenwald and is now trying to weasel out of responsibility for having done so. And of course if Colonel Boylan is telling the truth, then MNF-Iraq’s computer systems certainly seem to be having some security problems that they ought to address.

Michael Hirsh on the new blame Iran for everything strategy coming out of the White House:

Today the administration is casting Iran as America’s biggest bogeyman on every front. National missile defense? Once Kim Jong Il of North Korea was identified as the target of this expensive project. No longer. In a speech Tuesday at National Defense University, Bush declared that “the need for missile defense in Europe … is urgent” because “Iran is pursuing the technology that could be used to produce nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.” Mideast peace? Never mind that the Palestinians are mixed up in a civil war of their own making and blaming the Israelis. Much of it is really the fault of “Iranian aggression,” as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared on Wednesday. “To see Iranian actual penetration now of these more radical elements of the Palestinian terrorist groups is really quite troubling,” she told the House Foreign Affairs Committee. U.S. generals are now routinely trotted out to blame Iranian interference and arms shipments for the continuing Islamist insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, though Tehran plays at best a minor role there.

Recall something similar from before the Iraq War, not only a particular tendency to inflate the Iraqi nuclear front and the Iraqi ties to al-Qaeda, there was this habit of dramatically overstating Iraq’s significance in the broader world. Not only was Saddam’s support of Palestinian rejectionist a bad thing about his regime, but somehow ending this support was the key to peace. And now again we see that if the administration’s “get tough” strategy toward Iran’s nuclear program isn’t working and getting tougher is unlikely to work, so now we’re told that getting tough will solve all kinds of problems all around the world.

Guess who “has re-emerged as a central figure in the latest U.S. strategy for Iraq” accord to McClatchey’s Nancy Youssef? That’s right: Ahmed Chalabi! Let the good times roll.

I’m not sure Wesley Clark’s defense of Hillary Clinton’s support of the Kyl-Lieberman amendment was convincing, but it was the sort of thing that might convince. Clark is, after all, a great proxy to have doing outreach to more dovish voters for you — an Iraq War opponent, a committed multilateralist, and someone with deep ties to the blogosphere. Madeleine Albright not so much. When people worry that an HRC administration might be too hawkish, Albright is part of what we’re worrying about, she a member of the hawkish “strategic class” circle that Clinton was aligning herself with when she voted to authorize war with Iraq.

David Ignatius: “Military action would be irrational for both sides. But that doesn’t mean it won’t happen. I wish the Bush administration could see that with each step it takes closer to conflict, it is walking toward a well-planned trap.” The thing is that the planning behind this trap isn’t really all that impressive and it’s pretty obvious what’s going on. The scary thing is that even though the trap’s not particularly clever, it’s very plausible that we’ll stumble into it anyway.

There’s a lot to chew over in this Washington Post feature on the experiences of 1st Battalion, 18th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division in Baghdad’s Sadiyah neighborhood. Perhaps the most important is what the story suggests about the declining violence in Baghdad (and perhaps elsewhere in the country), namely that the spike in violence was associated with competing sectarian efforts at ethnic cleansing and the decline in violence represents the success of those efforts:

American soldiers estimate that since violence intensified this year, half of the families in Sadiyah have fled, leaving approximately 100,000 people [...] Shiite militias, particularly the Mahdi Army, went from house to house killing and intimidating Sunni families [...] “It’s just a slow, somewhat government-supported sectarian cleansing,” said Maj. Eric Timmerman, the battalion’s operations officer.

This is the basically fraudulent nature of the American enterprise in Iraq. We’re told we can’t leave because of the civil war that would break out or intensify or whatever if we do. But our troops aren’t really capable of meaningfully impacting the result of the sectarian conflict anyway. Instead, they’re just being plopped into the middle of it and exposed to harm, so that when the conflict eventually ends (as conflicts tend to) we can call the results “victory” and stay in Iraq forever. If the violence waxes, that shows the war needs to continue. If it wanes, that shows that we’re winning and need to keep on keeping on. Meanwhile, in the real world the civil war and ethnic cleansing we’re supposed to be preventing are things that have already happened.

Whatever happened to the people being held without charges or due process in a network of “ghost sites” (i.e., secret prisons)? Well it turns out that we’re not so sure:

Some have been secretly transferred to their home countries, where they remain in detention and out of public view, according to interviews in Pakistan and Europe with government officials, human rights groups and lawyers for the detainees. Others have disappeared without a trace and may or may not still be under CIA control.

I wonder what Hillary Clinton’s review of executive power will say about holding people in illegal secret detention facilities.

In honor of his trip to France, there’s been a legal complaint filed against Donald Rumsfeld in French court alleging that he “authorized and ordered crimes of torture to be carried out … as well as other war crimes.” Obviously, this isn’t going to result in a prosecution in the near-term, but I hope Rumsfeld and others involved in Bush-era war crimes will find themselves unable to travel to much of the world and maybe someday some of the younger ones will actually face the trials they so richly deserve. Back in the day I think I’m not the only one who didn’t adequately consider the hypothesis that Team Bush’s opposition to the International Criminal Court might be driven more by self-interest than by ideology per se.