You may recall that last year, Ethiopia launched a major invasion of Somalia timed for right around the Christmas holiday so that nobody would notice. Or else, you may not recall since Ethiopia timed it for right around the Christmas holiday and thus nobody noticed. With this story out of Kurdistan, I wonder if we’re starting to see a new under the radar military action Christmas tradition:

Two Turkish airstrikes on Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq hit more than 200 targets and killed more than 150 rebels, the Turkish Army said Tuesday. [...] Turkish officials have not commented reports by the Kurdish administration in northern Iraq that two more airstrikes took place on Monday and early Tuesday. But Turkish surveillance planes were spotted early Tuesday flying over Cukurca in the Hakkari Province of Turkey’s far southeast, along the border with Iraq, and also above the Kanimasi region in northern Iraq, and shelling was heard, the semi-official Anatolian news agency reported.

Meanwhile, suicide bombing seems to be back in style in Iraq.

If you thought about it for fifteen minutes you could see that introducing heavily-armed unaccountable mercenaries into a combat zone where you were trying to conduct a delicate counterinsurgency mission was a bad idea. But according to The Washington Post, the Bush administration even got repeated and specific warnings that the Blackwater situation was out of hand. At which point, naturally, they did nothing.

My colleague-who-I’ve-never-actually-met Mark Bowden writes in defense of waterboarding for The Philadelphia Inquirer and, I think, misstates the “torture doesn’t work” thesis in the course of it: “Opponents of torture argue that it never works, that it always produces false information.”

This is a strawman that’s easy enough to knock down. The thesis that “torture doesn’t work” isn’t the thesis that one can never torture a guy into saying something that’s true. In the limiting case, if you capture a guy who you think is a terrorist but who is not, in fact, a terrorist and then torture him into giving up information about plots the victim will, at some point, plead that he doesn’t know anything. The question, though, is whether or not torture enhances your overall knowledge of the situation. The problem with torture isn’t that it’s some kind of truth-negator that makes people lie. The problem is that it just makes people talk and talk and talk and talk until you stop torturing them. Will some of the information be good? Possibly. Will any of it be reliable? No.

It’s really too bad that David Rohde, Carlotta Gall, Eric Schmitt, and David Sanger did all this reporting only for The New York Times to bury their story in a Christmas Eve edition of the paper that few people will read. At any rate, we learned back in November that our aid to Pakistan was basically big bundles of unaccountable cash, more like bribes to Pervez Musharraf and other top officials than aid as such. The Times team went looking after where it went and the answer turns out to be: not where it was supposed to:

In interviews in Islamabad and Washington, Bush administration and military officials said they believed that much of the American money was not making its way to frontline Pakistani units. Money has been diverted to help finance weapons systems designed to counter India, not Al Qaeda or the Taliban, the officials said, adding that the United States has paid tens of millions of dollars in inflated Pakistani reimbursement claims for fuel, ammunition and other costs.

Along with various things about the need for oversight, etc., I think this underscores the point that we’ve underinvested in diplomatic efforts to try to reduce India-Pakistan tensions. Pakistan’s sense of beseigement vis-a-vis its largest neighbor is like an acid that keeps eating away at our efforts to convince them to prioritize a fight against radical groups. And understandably so — as long as Pakistan is adjacent to a larger, richer, nuclear-armed hostile country that fact is going to be the defense establishment’s top priority. It’s obviously not something we can wish away with a magic wand, but it’s worth putting some effort into since the payoff would be very large and absent progress on that front it’s hard for any incentive package to be cleverly-designed enough to really work.

Alissa Rubin and Damien Cave of The New York Times take a good hard look at the Sunni “awakening” strategy and how, shockingly enough, a policy of handing out cash, training and guns to whoever’s willing to work with us could wind up backfiring:

How, when thousands are joining each month, can spies and extremists be reliably weeded out? How can the men’s loyalty be maintained, given their tribal and sectarian ties, and in many cases their insurgent pasts? And crucially, how can the movement be sustained once the Americans turn over control to a Shiite-dominated government that has been wary, and sometimes hostile, toward the groups?

Despite the successes of the movement, including the members’ ability to provide valuable intelligence and give rebuilding efforts a new chance in war-shattered communities, the American military acknowledges that it is also a high-risk proposition. It is an experiment in counterinsurgency warfare that could contain the seeds of a civil war — in which, if the worst fears come true, the United States would have helped organize some of the Sunni forces arrayed against the central government on which so many American lives and dollars have been spent.

Yes, right, exactly. In a society full of rival armed factions contending for power, you can’t achieve peace by just building opportunistic alliances with a whole bunch of separate factions. If our commanders and troops are nimble enough — and they very well might be, as they’ve demonstrated a good deal of nimbleness recently — they may be able to keep playing this dangerous game and keeping the US deployment viable, but it doesn’t really achieve anything. Achieve anything, that is, beyond a welcome reduction in American casualites. But going home would reduce casualties further, faster, and cheaper.

Much more consequential than Mitt Romney’s troubled relationship with anecdotes, is this Wired story about Romney’s approach to illegal surveillance issues:

I’m pointing this out because it makes me wonder how the debate over national security is going to shake out as the presidential election proceeds. It sounded as if the Romney team was adopting the Bush administration’s approach of mis-characterizing the placement of minimal checks on the system as harmful to national security.

Well, I don’t “wonder” how it’s going to proceed on the Republican side. Whoever wins the nomination is going to mischaracterize the placement of minimal checks on the system as harmful to national security. The question is whether the other candidate will aggressively fight on these issues — not just defensively pleading “no no mean republicans please stop saying I hate America” and hoping to shift the debate to jobs and the economy but actually going on the attack about the mess Bush has made of our constitution. I’m not especially optimistic, but I try to keep my hopes up.

Former CIA agent John Kiriakou’s been speaking out against torture so, naturally, the government’s now seeking legal methods of shutting him up. The good news is that we haven’t yet reached the point where politically inconvenient types are just sent off to Gitmo without charges and then tortured ’till they confess to something.

Obviously, a lot of neocon types are down in the dumps about the NIE on Iran. Not to worry, though, AEI’s Charlie Szrom, writing for The Weekly Standard and citing the time-honored conservative precept that “everything strengthens the case for missile defense boondoggles” explains that the report strengthens the case for missile defense boondoggles. And, indeed, all indications are that the system would work better against non-existent Iranian nuclear missiles than against the real kind, so in that sense Szrom makes a strong case.

Bush administration lies to 9/11 Commission, says it’s turned over all “documents,” “reports” and “information” related to the interrogation of al-Qaeda members while withholding videotapes:

Mr. Kean, a Republican and a former governor of New Jersey, said of the agency’s decision not to disclose the existence of the videotapes, “I don’t know whether that’s illegal or not, but it’s certainly wrong.” Mr. Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, said that the C.I.A. “clearly obstructed” the commission’s investigation.

But look, people, get real: Al Gore said something that, if deliberately misconstrued, could be understood as claiming that he invented the internet. Think about it.

Kevin Drum makes an argument worth responding to regarding Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy views, but that’ll have to wait for tomorrow. Instead, let me note this post by Ambassador Joe Wilson in support of Clinton. Clearly, securing the support of some prominent war opponents like Wilson has, for Clinton, been an important part of the effort to defuse anger over her position on Iraq. And it really is to her credit that she has the support of several such figures. That said, claims like this from Wilson don’t really fly:

Many of the most prominent early opponents of the war, including former General Wes Clark and former ambassador to the United National Richard Holbrooke support Senator Clinton for President, as do I.

Needless to say, Holbrooke didn’t oppose the war at all. He was a fairly prominent advocate for war, not as influential as Kenneth Pollack, but part of the group of former Clinton administration officials who helped sell the war to Democratic politicians and citizens. The inability or unwillingness of Clinton and her circle to give an accurate account of what she and her allies were up to in 2002 and 2003 really bothers me. I’m willing to forgive people for their errors, but I’d like to know what Clinton et. al. think the moral of the story is (contrast her handling of this issue to the deft way in which she’s plausibly argued that her participation in the failed health reform effort of the 1990s makes her uniquely prepared to grasp the pitfalls and find the path to progress) and what they’ve learned.

Instead, you keep hearing that she was actually opposed to the war! Or if she wasn’t, maybe Bill was! Or maybe Dick Holbrooke was! Or, or, or, or … who knows? It’s an odd way to behave and it makes it hard to clear the air. John Edwards has, by contrast, acknowledged error in a straightforward way and then laid out a compelling vision of American engagement with the world that clearly reflects a new, post-Iraq understanding of how the country should conduct itself on the world stage.

Commenter Sam responded to yesterday’s post on comparative airport security:

Counterpoint: The Schipol airport had more security than any I’ve ever been through, including Ben-Gurion. They quizzed, bugged and pestered me a lot more than people at Reagan do.

The quizzing is true. I was standing right by the gate and got a pretty serious third degree — I didn’t have a good, brief explanation of what the conference I’d been attending was about (“it was about progressive America” “what does that mean?” “um…”) and kind of thought I’d be locked away. That said, they let me get away in the end, things actually moved very speedily and the security personnel were much friendlier than Americans.

I’ve said, repeatedly, that to me the defining issue in the Democratic primary is that I think Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy would be worse than would the alternatives. Under the circumstances, I think I owe the world a clearer explanation of what I think the problem is. One correspondent boiled the issue down the other day to the idea that I think Hillary would be “too hawkish.” I don’t really like that way of framing the issue, which I think makes things far too crude. Maybe Clinton will be too hawkish, and maybe she won’t; maybe it’s hard to know what that means; maybe a situation will arise where a hawkish response is warranted. The problem is something else.

The problem is that I think she’s unlikely to try any of the bold strokes necessary to turn our situation around. I don’t see her trying for a grand bargain with Iran, don’t see her making the tough choices necessary to revitalize the NPT, don’t see her taking political risks on the Arab-Israeli confict, don’t see her acting boldly and decisively on Iraq, and don’t see her accomplishing anything particularly innovative and interesting in terms of UN Reform.

By contrast, I think an Obama administration (and probably an Edwards administration as well) will include some people at high-levels who are pressing for those things, and will be led by a man who has some inclinations in those directions. I think Clinton and her people are too narrowly political, too complacent about the depth of America’s problems in the world, and, yes, maybe too inclined to believe that if the shit really hits the fan all that’ll happen is that public support for the use of force will revive and that under new, more competent leadership, the armed forces will resolve the situation by waging a new war.

And, at the end of the day, I’m against Clinton mostly because I have a choice: I can live with President Clinton and Secretary of State Holbrooke but given that there’s a different, better set of people available, I hope they win. If they don’t, I’ll hope Clinton has the good sense to listen to the smarter members of her team

But mostly it’s just that we have a choice: I can live with President Clinton and Secretary of State Holbrooke but given that there’s another, better set of people available, I hope they win. If they don’t, I’ll hope HRC has the good sense to listen to the smarter members of her team: they’re not all bad.

I was on “Marketplace” the other day talking about the presidential campaign’s turn away from national security issues and toward the domestic stuff, and one point I made during the interview (not sure exactly what they actually aired) was that this is likely to change when we move into general election mode. I think there are important differences between the Democratic candidates on foreign policy issues, but they’re relatively subtle. By contrast, as Ezra says there’s a huge gaping chasm between where the Democrats are and where (assuming Ron Paul doesn’t get the nomination) the Republicans are and, as a result, we should expect this subject to come roaring back into view.

Meanwhile, Democrats aren’t going to have an easy time of it. George Bush’s reputation for incompetence won’t automatically transfer to a copartisan, but the press will be very open to stories about Democrats’ generic sins of “weakness” on security. Edwards or Clinton will be attacked as flip-floppers; too weak to stand up to their own liberal base, and thus obviously unfit to stand up to Osama bin Laden. Barack Hussein Obama, by contrast, would have left a nuclear-armed Saddam Hussein in power to blackmail America into submission.

Not that these are irrefutable lines of attack by any means, but there’s going to have to be a big fight about it. The Republican nominee isn’t going to agree to have a lot of fights about who’s best suited to accomplishing broadly shared goals.

Photo by Flickr user phxpma used under a Creative Commons license

It’s too bad The New York Times‘s Patrick Healy has decided to report on Bill Richardson’s point that “Senator Clinton’s comments are a stunning flip-flop — she’s been saying she would keep troops in Iraq for five years, until 2013, and now she comes up with an inconsistent, incredible turnaround” purely through the lens of Richardson’s alleged vice presidential ambitions. Clearly, forward-looking Iraq policy is one of the most important issues on the table in this election. What’s more, unlike health care or global warming, the new president will just get to implement his or her preferred policy by fiat.

I’d like to know what’s going on. Of course, if Clinton really has flip-flopped away from her old position that I disagreed with and adopted a new, better position I’m not going to condemn her for that: being open to persuasive arguments and new evidence is a good thing. But I do want to know what her position is since she’s had a pattern of misleading rhetoric on this score, promising to “end the war” but leave tens of thousands of soldiers in the war zone.

UPDATE: The Clinton campaign fires back with this rebuttal that, I think, does effectively rebut the charge of flip-flopping. Clinton has consistently said that, in office, she’ll act swiftly to remove one or two brigades a month until we’re down to a “vastly reduced” residual force. That’s a little vague, and given that the incentives during the primary are to shade your position to the left I doubt it specifies a policy I agree with, but it’s one she’s consistently adhered to.

My December 8 op-ed “Beyond Preemption” criticized a 2004 op-ed by Ann-Marie Slaughter and Lee Feinstein called “A Duty to Prevent”.

Slaughter feels I mischaracterized the substance of the article, and argues as much in this “Blowback” column for The Los Angeles Times called “The case for collective force” which I thought I might draw your attention to. I’m going to post something in response to Slaughter on Monday.

Great column from Rosa Brooks in The LA Times “Iraq today also still moves in darkness. We should be glad of the lull in violence, but if stability in Iraq depends on miles of concrete walls and an indefinite U.S. occupation, that’s not ‘victory.’ It’s defeat.”

Right. I should note that I mean that pretty literally: Having a large body of American soldiers bogged down in an indefinite occupation of Iraq is a huge strategic boon to al-Qaeda. I know that nobody cares about foreign policy anymore, and Paul Krugman assures me that “no Democrat is not going to end this war” even though some of them seem to be planning to continue it indefinitely but this stuff seems like a big deal to me.

Kevin Drum, aiming for some kind of wanker prize, posts the following missive from “[a] member in (extremely good) standing of the VSP community”:

One thing you might write about — if only because nobody else has, I think — is how that whole dust-up over the O’Hanlon/Pollack oped looks in retrospect. I mean, clearly they were on to something — the relative quieting down of stuff that has taken place in Iraq over the last several months, etc. Completely debatable whether that was due to the surge, or is sustainable, or is deeply significant, etc. etc., but it’s not like the caricature of them put forth in the blogosphere at the time — as paid lobbyists for the Bushies, reporting back what they were told to after checking out a Potemkin village — holds up, does it?

Well, of course, if you mischaracterize the critique that was made of them, then that fake version of the critique doesn’t hold up well. Pollack and O’Hanlon concluded:

How much longer should American troops keep fighting and dying to build a new Iraq while Iraqi leaders fail to do their part? And how much longer can we wear down our forces in this mission? These haunting questions underscore the reality that the surge cannot go on forever. But there is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008.

This, it seems to me, was deliberately dishonest. Part of the effort to confused people about the nature of the choice facing us, by doling the war out in bite-sized morsels. They also managed throughout the course of their op-ed to obscure the fact that the “surge” hasn’t met its stated goals. It remains unclear whether or not they actually visited any portion of Iraq that wasn’t a “Potemkin village” of sorts. For some reason or other, for example, they seem to have not noticed that Baghdad had become a network of walled-off ethnically cleansed cantons.

Clearly, though, the summertime decline in violence has proven more sustainable than I thought it would at the time. Equally clearly, Pollack and O’Hanlon have a good relationship with General Petraeus and came back from Iraq speaking from a set of misleading talking points designed to advance the political sustainability of the Bush administration’s policies. I’m not shedding any tears for them.

Excellent report by Cara Buckley for The New York Times that shows just how far from normal the new, less spectacularly violent Iraq is:

The government’s widely publicized plan to run free buses from Damascus, Syria, to Baghdad was suspended after just two runs. Thousands of Sunni refugees get no aid because they fear registering with the Shiite-led government. While aid organizations are distributing emergency packets that include utensils, blankets and food, deeper structural issues, like securing neighborhoods, supplying housing and creating jobs, remain unresolved and largely unaddressed.

A small fraction of the millions of refugees who fled Iraq have come back. While the government trumpeted their return as proof of newfound security, migration experts said most of them were forced back by expired visas and depleted savings. Ms. Hashim, for one, pawned her wedding ring and gold jewelry to stay in Syria, but came back after her uncle’s visa application was denied.

Given that the West — and especially the USA — showed little inclination to do anything to help refugees (helping refugees, you see, would be like admitting that Iraq’s all screwed up; better to let people suffer in order to keep up appearances) returning home even under these conditions is probably the right move for many families. It’s a reminder, though, of the tenuous nature of whatever kind of security has been brought to Iraq. None of the underlying issues have been resolved, so the potential for further breakdown is constantly looking over the horizon.