The improving security situation in Iraq appears to be un-improving as five soldiers were killed today in an increasingly unstable Mosul.

I’ve gotten some pushback from Obama supporters for my less-than-enthusiastic response to his foreign policy messaging in this piece. And, indeed, there’s a pretty strong section of his stump speech:

I am running for President because I am sick and tired of democrats thinking that the only way to look tough on national security is by talking, and acting, and voting like George Bush Republicans.

When I am this party’s nominee, my opponent will not be able to say that I voted for the war in Iraq; or that I gave George Bush the benefit of the doubt on Iran; or that I supported Bush-Cheney policies of not talking to leaders that we don’t like. And he will not be able to say that I wavered on something as fundamental as whether or not it is ok for America to torture – because it is never ok. That’s why I am in it.

This is, I think, a great criticism of Hillary Clinton and it nicely expresses the key set of reasons why I’d rather see Obama be the nominee. But that said, this is still all pretty meta — it’s talking about how he’d talk about foreign policy, or talking about which things can and can’t be said about him. A primary campaign has plenty of space for that kind of thing, but in a general election one does need to directly engage with Republican arguments. Now I know that one of Obama’s quirks is that, for the purposes of the primary, he does much less direct Bush-bashing than one would expect and the foreign policy section of his speech reflects that. And if that’s the choice he wants to make, that’s the choice he wants to make. But it still does leave me sitting here a bit nervous about what the argument will look like when he’s up against a Republican.

All that said, as I’ve said several times before, I think he’s been clearly superior to Clinton on foreign policy issues throughout the campaign.

It seems we have 50 FBI agents who speak Arabic out of 10,000. Suppose that instead of deciding to spread our scarce language assets thinner by invading Iraq, the Bush administration had done something much cheaper like a $15 billion per year effort to massively boost America’s base of people who speak Arabic, Turkic languages, Urdu, etc.? Wouldn’t that have been more helpful?

A while back I remarked that “I’m not sure there’s very much the US government can or should do, in practice, to push Egypt into becoming a democracy.” In response to that, Jonathan Kulick noted the existence of a CRS report, “Democracy Promotion: Cornerstone of US Policy?”, on the subject. My read of the report, which, as is frequently the case with CRS reports, is a very useful summary is that we should be skeptical. As the report makes clear, the US does have a good deal of success with democracy promotion programs. But the bulk of the success is concentrated in efforts to assist countries that genuinely want to make a democratic transition. There’s also some record of success in programs designed to bolster post-conflict situations. What there isn’t is much of a track record of success for initiatives designed to coerce an autocratic regime into becoming democratic.

Shadi Hamid also offered an impassioned defense of the view that there’s stuff we can do:

Egypt is one of our closest allies in the region. They depend on us for economic and military support. This means we have leverage, and we shouldn’t be afraid to use that leverage to push for change. For starters, this can mean making the billions we give to Egypt conditional on political reform (for more on this, see here). For more forward-thinking policymakers, we can also explore ways to show the Egyptian regime we’re serious (this could include starting a dialogue with the strongest opposition group in the country – the Muslim Brotherhood. For more on that, see here). Now there is a legitimate debate about how much we can do ultimately do to change Egypt. But the basic point remains – we can at least do something.

On the aid, here’s the thing. Presumably Mubarak’s government would rather have our aid money than not have our aid money. But Mubarak’s government would really prefer to hold on to power than to lose power. Thus aid-related threats aren’t going to persuade them to adopt meaningful political reforms unless our bureaucrats manage to succeed in tricking Mubarak’s into implementing reforms whose implications are more meaningful than the Egyptians realize. But given that the government of Egypt is stacked from top to bottom with people who spend just about all day every day thinking about how to maintain their regime and who are really good at achieving this goal, I think it’s much more likely that we’d be tricked. Then next thing you know you’ve got the President of the United States and the Secretary of State proudly laying on hands and pronouncing a great victory for democracy, the reform remains ephermal, and ordinary Egyptians grow ever-more-skeptical of US activities.

And this, to me, is the main thing to keep in mind for anyone’s pet schemes for US-driven political change in Egypt, Pakistan, wherever. The United States is a much more powerful country than are those other countries. But that power is a very blunt instrument. We should try to employ it in pursuit of goals for which bluntness is not a problem. Micro-managing political outcomes and manipulating politicians is a delicate task. And savvy third-world leaders from Hosni Mubarak to Benazir Bhutto to the Gulf Sheikhs making multi-million dollar contributions to the Clinton and Bush presidential libraries are much better-positioned to manipulate our guys than we are to manipulate theirs. Rather than try to leverage our relationship into political change in those countries, my suggestion would be to simply say that insofar as these are repressive governments there’s a certain degree of closeness we’re going to put some distance between our country and theirs. In the specific case of Egypt, however, this is complicated by the fact that our aid relationship with Cairo is tied to our relationship with Israel. So you’ve got a thorny problem intimately connected to another thorny problem and I’d say I’m pessimistic that much will get done.

That said, yes, we should be engaging with Egyptian opposition groups including the Muslim Brotherhood and making it clear that we’re prepared to have a relationship with whatever kind of government might emerge, but that we’d envision a closer relationship with a democratic government.

Paul Krugman notes the 32-59 split on the question of whether or not the invasion of Iraq was worth it and remarks with satisfaction “the fact that we’re not squandering lives at the same rate we were a year ago (we’re still squandering money as fast as ever) does not seem to have convinced people that the war we were misled into was a good idea.” Hasn’t convinced people, that is, except for hard-core Republicans and Hillary Clinton who Krugman keeps telling us is preferable to Barack Obama and his unsound deviationism. Or is it that Clinton didn’t think invading Iraq was a good idea but despite her 35 years of experience fighting for change didn’t realize the significance of what she was voting on?

I’m quite certain I’d be happier with the foreign policy Hillary Clinton would conduct in office than I’d be with the one John McCain would conduct, but her actual record on this count seems like a pretty sufficient reason to support a viable alternative in the primary. After all, if neither Clinton nor Obama had decided to run in 2008, it’s hard for me to imagine that a lot of people would have been sitting around early in the cycle saying “you know what the party really needs in a nominee? — an Iraq War supporter. Those people look really substantively and politically savvy, and I want to ensure that their hawkish gamble pays off to encourage future legislators to act just like them.”

Spencer Ackerman has a big ol’ feature on the recent history of CIA interrogations putting the use of brutal and illegal contexts in broader context. Specifically, putting them in the broader context of the fact that the CIA actually has very little experience with interrogations and with best practices involved in doing them correctly. Consequently, you have an equation that involves people who don’t really know what they’re doing working under intense pressure with little practical constraint and faced with an objectively difficult task — torture is the result. What isn’t the result is much in the way of usable intelligence. Specifically, there’s no way to tell what’s accurate and what’s not:

Many interrogators today are, in fact, concerned about that. But the program that developed within the Central Intelligence Agency after 9/11 has left the intelligence community playing a fateful role. Surprising as it may be, the CIA has never really been in the interrogation business. After 9/11, it turned its back on its own limited history of interrogations and never consulted those in the U.S. with solid experience in that difficult art. Even in the seven years since it has built an interrogation capability mostly from scratch, the agency has never applied the best practices in behavioral science to improve its regimen. The result has been to privilege brutality out of ignorance, which, according to many experts and insiders interviewed, means that interrogation practices that produce faulty information are now at the very heart of the U.S. efforts against a mysterious and still-unfamiliar enemy. [...]

Those with intimate knowledge of the program say that in many cases, U.S. interrogators haven’t even been able to learn the basics about many of those they hold or have held, to say nothing of whatever crucial information they possess. “How do you separate the sheep from the wool? There’s no fingerprints, no DNA,” said a former senior intelligence official who helped set up the CIA’s interrogation program, and who would not speak for attribution. “You don’t know if you have Osama bin Laden or Joe Shit the rag-man.”

Worse than a crime, to paraphrase Tallyrand, interrogation by the CIA has been—and remains—a blunder.

I had always thought “it was worse than a crime, it was a mistake” was something Joseph Fouché said (and his background in the secret police is more apropos given the subject of the article) but besides that it’s an absolutely excellent piece. One area of inquiry that, for now, must remain shrouded in mystery and speculation is to what extent the problems with this approach are precisely what made them appealing to Bush. The US government has, after all, plenty of agencies who interrogate prisoners routinely and lots of interrogations have been done historically. If I had been President, I would have tasked such agencies with the new job.

That would have resulted in “non-physical, non-coercive techniques like building rapports with detainees—much like the FBI does, and much like what worked 60 years ago at places like Fort Hunt against hardened, sadistic Nazi officers.” And it wouldn’t have even resulted in that outcome because I’m an especially humane kind of guy. It’s just that that is, in fact, what the FBI does and what the military did when it had to interrogate Nazis, etc. That’s the process, the process works, and it doesn’t raise any moral or legal qualms so it’s all good. Why on earth would I turn to the CIA and have them re-invent the wheel? Well, I suppose Bush might have if deep down he’s just the sort of person who likes the idea of torture and brutality; someone who at some level would be disappointed to hear an agency official not respond to 9/11 by immediately requesting permission to start torturing people.

But whatever the reason, it’s just a huge, huge, huge mistake. Just as with surveillance policy, the Bush administration seems incapable of processing the idea that a certain level of formal constraint on what the security services are allowed to do may be necessary to make them work properly. Instead, the underlying presumption seems to be that transparency, the rule of law, accountability, etc. are all incredibly weaknesses in a system of government and that liberal democracies have been prevailing for the past couple of centuries despite the integral features of such a political system rather than because of them.

John McCain, seeking to redirect the conversation in Florida away from the economy, about which he knows nothing and has little to say, back to his perceived strength of national security decides to tell a whopper about Mitt Romney’s record. I have no particular desire to defend Romney, who’s a liar and a buffoon himself, but one would hope that McCain’s affection for such tactics might enter the media consciousness about what kind of “straight talker” he is. On that note, good for Jeffrey Toobin.

“Clinton says insurgency is failing”, Associated Press, February 19, 2005:

As 55 people died in Iraq on Saturday, the holiest day on the Shiite Muslim religious calendar, Sen. Hillary Clinton said that much of Iraq was “functioning quite well” and that the rash of suicide attacks was a sign that the insurgency was failing.

I’ll just observe that I don’t think that take on things has been borne out by the subsequent years.

Via Spencer Ackerman, Leila Fadel and Hussein Kadhim report for McClatchy on the state of political reconciliation in Iraq:

“The new flag is done for a foreign agenda and we won’t raise it,” said Ali Hatem al Suleiman, a leading member of the U.S.-backed Anbar Awakening Council, “If they want to force us to raise it, we will leave the yard for them to fight al Qaida.” [...]

A slim minority of parliamentarians approved the new flag, which doesn’t have Saddam Hussein’s handwriting or the three stars that represented his Sunni-dominated Baath Party.

The good news is that I assume our new friends aren’t literally going to turn around tomorrow and fight alongside al-Qaeda over this flag issue. Still, if you’re looking for a clearer indication that the “Awakening”/CLC movement is not going to be the basis of national unity in Iraq I don’t think you need to look much further than this.

It seems that the U.S. Army has once again lowered recruiting standards in order to meet the manpower exigencies of the Iraq War. Fred Kaplan goes through what this is likely to mean in terms of the performance of our troops in Iraq. Read him for the gory details, but the short version is: nothing good. What’s more, the context for this is a prolonged counterinsurgency of the sort that, as General Petraeus’ field manual makes clear, requires soldiers who are smarter than we’ve usually relied upen even as, in reality, they’re getting less smart. Kaplan observes:

Petraeus and officers who think like him are right: We’re probably not going to be fighting on the ground, toe-to-toe and tank-to-tank, with the Russian, Chinese, or North Korean armies in the foreseeable future. Yet if the trends continue, our Army might be getting less and less skilled at the “small wars” we’re more likely to fight.

This is all true. But I also think that this turn of events is not only bad news for our prospects in Iraq, but bad news for counterinsurgency enthusiasts in general. After all, these recruiting issues aren’t something that just happened out of the blue. The proximate cause of the bad-for-counterinsurgency recruiting situation is the fact that we’re trying to wage a counterinsurgency. And it’s not just the rank and file, either. Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, one of the Army’s handful of top counterinsurgency thinkers, decided he’d rather work at a think tank. The Army we had in 2003 didn’t have enough of the right kind of people to do counterinsurgency well, and the effort to do counterinsurgency has pushed the trends in the wrong direction.

Furthermore, the five years or so we’ve been fighting in Iraq is actually small beer by the standards that counterinsurgency theory suggests is necessary. So how are we supposed to prevent this kind of counterinsurgency-induced collapse in capacity to do effective counterinsurgency? The job is, after all, by its very nature pretty arduous and unpleasant the kind of thing that most people with bright prospects elsewhere are going to wind up avoiding in favor of more pleasant opportunities elsewhere. This is true of even very public-spirited people who are going to be able to think of plenty of other ways to serve their community, their country, or the world that don’t involve the kind of sacrifices entailed by repeated deployments to a war zone. There will be exceptions, of course, but an effective military requires more than exceptions — it’s by definition a mass institution.

The exception, of course, is that in a situation of genuine national emergency you can convince/conscript pretty much whomever you want into military work. But it’s hard to imagine the United States being faced with a serious domestic insurgency. And it’s also very hard to imagine an insurgency abroad rising to that level of threat.

Spencer Ackerman has the penetrating analysis of The New York Times‘s somewhat unclear reporting on efforts to negotiate a status of forces agreement for American troops in Iraq. Basically, as Spencer says, it would be a huge mistake to make a big deal out of the fact that the agreement won’t say “these bases of yours are permanent.”

It took the Philippines nearly 100 years to get the U.S. out of Subic Bay and the Clark Air Base. That’s because the fact of the U.S. presence creates additional, subordinate facts—economic dependency in the area around the base, for one, and more fundamentally, a political dependency on the U.S. for a security guarantee, which is the whole point of the bilateral deal. In Iraq, a weak central government requires the U.S. to keep it alive against its multitudinous armed adversaries, a weakness that Iraq’s sectarian quasi-democracy actually fuels. (Elections in Iraq tend to become sectarian census counts in a power struggle.) So while the Iraqis may push back, no Iraqi government that could actually take power—one led by the Sadrists, for instance, or the harder-line Sunnis—would actually kick the U.S. out. That in turn drives a divide between the fearful Iraqi government and the anti-occupation Iraqi populace, further entrenching the government’s dependency.

Meanwhile, I’d also note that there’s little sign that the training and equipping missions we’re doing in Iraq are actually geared to creating a situation whereby Iraq can defend itself without outside support. Instead, security institutions are being set up in such a way as to presuppose enduring American involvement. Spencer’s post, incidentally, appears in The Washington Independent a new and exciting online media venture dedicated to investigative reporting on a non-profit basis.

There’s nothing surprising about the fact that the Bush administration seems to be seeking to ensure that US mercenaries contractors serving in Iraq be legally unaccountable but it is shocking. That’s not something any genuinely sovereign government in Iraq or anywhere else would ever agree to, and it makes a mockery of the pretense that the purpose of our policy in Iraq is to help Iraqis (for a way to help Iraqis, check out this refugees bill) or that we’re doing everything we can to shield civilians from harm.

Here’s a column I did about how depressing the little Clinton-Obama tête-a-tête on who’s ready to wage the politics of national security was:

Meanwhile, for the purposes of the campaign I’d certainly like to believe that faced with a choice between a Republican decorated war hero and veteran senator, and a Democratic ex-first lady and junior senator, both of whom supported the invasion of Iraq, both of whom became early critics of Donald Rumsfeld’s conduct of the occupation, and both of whom support long-term American military engagement in Iraqi affairs, that the American people will come down on Clinton’s side. But I pay attention to this stuff. I know that Clinton’s an open-minded person who takes advice from a wide circle of people and may well conduct an excellent foreign policy once in office. I also know that McCain is a committed militarist, a pre-September 11 advocate of “rogue state rollback,” and a politician who seems to have few firm beliefs beyond an inchoate nationalism. But, realistically, insofar as the campaign turns on national security issues (the economy will, of course, also matter) the average person is going to go for the popular war hero.

Obama’s approach is better but not, frankly, anywhere near as much better as one would hope. For months, he’s been unwilling to make a forceful case from the left on national security issues in a Democratic primary, so it’s far from clear that he would, in practice, make the sort of strong arguments his record leaves him capable of making. If McCain (or, for that matter, Mitt Romney) starts talking about how in a Democratic administration North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Hamas, al-Qaeda, and some Iraqi dude who doesn’t like having a foreign army occupy his country are all going to team up and kill your children, it won’t do to respond by whining about the politics of fear. He’ll have to learn to say something in response, perhaps about how the real best way to keep Americans safe is with a focused, targeted effort that gives us the maximum chance of actually killing or capturing our deadliest foes rather than one that lets them escape while needlessly stirring up unrelated trouble that multiplies the number of adversaries we face.

Here’s hoping….