I was intrigued by the idea of a New Republic masthead editorial purporting to apply the lessons of Kosovo to the situation in Darfur. That, I thought, might provide a respite from the magazine’s usual bomb repeat bomb take on the issue. But no:

But the biggest, and most important, parallel is this: We asked Milosevic to stop killing. He did not. We have asked Sudan to stop killing. And still it kills. Yes, it occasionally appears willing to bargain. But, while Sudan bargains, the aircraft continue to roam over Darfur. The paltry U.N. forces on the ground can do nothing to stop them. And that is probably how things will continue to unfold, until this president or the next one remembers the example of Kosovo, puts together a credible NATO force, and finally says enough is enough.

It seems to me that any serious look at Kosovo has to carry with it the lesson that there’s nothing nearly as simple as a “say enough is enough” option. Coercive military intervention raises a lot of thorny issues. Do we really want to commit ourselves to a Kosovo-style mission in which we wind up administering Darfur for an indefinite period of time? Not that Darfur is 196,555 square miles to Kosovo’s 10,887 square miles. Similarly, what about the wider consequences for Sudan of getting into the partition business? Meanwhile, though they acknowledge that the Darfur rebel groups on whose behalf they want us to go to war are “unsavory” they don’t think through any of the implications of this.

Before a country currently engaged in two wars, plus several peacekeeping operations in the Balkans, starts a new war these are the kind of questions that need to be answered. The good news for TNR is that everyone knows their preferred policy has no chance of being implemented. Which means that there’s no need to think it through, and also that there’s every reason to adopt a maximalist posture. While efforts like the Enough Project to find constructive, practical ways to improve the situation like Darfur necessarily involve awkward compromises with reality, the maximalist gets to ignore details and practical problems and hold the moral high ground for his trouble.

Clifford Levy had a fantastic piece in yesterday’s New York Times, giving a granular, micro-level account of Vladimir Putin’s takeover of Nizhny Novgorod, formerly the political home base of Boris Nemtsov who’s now a leading figure in the anti-Putin opposition.

This was of particular interest to me because I spent the summer of 1998 living in the city in question. And here’s the one area where I feel a lot of this kind of reporting on Putin’s authoritarianism falls down. I never met anyone in 1998-vintage Nizhny Novgorod who was really excited about the state of Russian politics. The general feeling was that rather than democracy, they were suffering from a regime of chaos and corruption. People would talk openly about their yearning for a strong leader who could restore order and prosperity — Singapore, Pinochet’s Chile, postwar South Korea — those were the models on people’s lips. And this, I think, is more-or-less what most people think they’ve gotten from Putin. In reality, it’s almost certainly the case that Russian prosperity is founded on the current high price of fossile fuels (the oil crisis years were very kind to the Soviet consumer) rather than on anything Putin’s done, but that’s how it’s seen.

I think that’s the context you need for Levy’s stories. The kind of tactics Putin used to consolidate control would never have worked if Russia had featured real liberal political parties with meaningful mass support. But by the time Boris Yeltsin put him in power, the screw-ups, deprivation, and corruption of the previous years combined with the sense that Russia’s position on the world stage was slipping had badly hollowed out support for liberalism at non-elite levels.

Via Natasha Chart, the case against cluster bombs — a form of explosive that’s unusually likely to wind up killing and maiming children. Senator Dianne Feinstein authored some anti-cluster bomb legislation that attracted 30 yea votes. Obama was among those voting “yes,” Clinton among those voting “no” which I take as another sign that Obama is willing to think further outside the box than is Clinton on national security issues.

Okay, well, let me say that I’m very glad to see Alex Gibney’s brilliant Taxi to the Dark Side win Best Documentary. I’ve recommended it twice before, but perhaps you didn’t trust me. Now you know: It won an Oscar. Go see it.

Raul Castro pulls out surprise a win to secure election as dictator of Cuba.

Sure the defense budget is large, the saying goes, but in percentage of GDP terms it’s lower than it has been for much of the 20th century, so what’s the problem? Cato’s Benjamin Friedman has a good response to this line of argument:

Percentage of GDP is useful for historical comparisons of defense’s economic burden. Carafano substitutes the question of what we can afford for what we ought to spend. The United States can afford to spend four percent of its GDP on defense; indeed we can afford to spend far more. That doesn’t mean we should. Whatever your politics, money spent on defense means money not spent on something else: private investment, deficit reduction, infrastructure, a car, etc. The problem is opportunity cost, not economic malaise.

And, indeed, there you have it. We could spend much more on the Pentagon if the objective circumstances merited doing so. But they don’t. The opportunity costs are large, the need lacking, and the benefits of ever-growing military spending are small compared to the benefits of spending that money on productive investments (both private and public sector) or consumption goods.

Here Robert Wright talks a bit about the problems with our recognition of Kosovo independence:

Meanwhile, whatever one thinks this all says about the liberal hawk movement, it just reflects a staggering incompetence on the part of the Bush administration. At the end of the day, recognizing Kosovo independent was probably the best choice to make, but it’s a very problematic path. It’s the kind of thing that, before you do it, you need to lay the most groundwork possible and also have plans in place for dealing with the fallout. Instead, the administration seems to have kind of wandered into it as a kind of afterthought. In part it just illustrates that Bush is a crappy president, but it also highlights one of the highest prices of the Iraq War — it’s an enormous drain on the attention of senior policymakers. Many aspects of US foreign policy, however, can’t be left on autopilot. Senior political leaders need to be involved and engaged or else nobody’s around to keep things on track.

I’d go see this:

It’s weird to think of something so random as a ten year-old purchase of a television station in Pittsburgh as posing a major political problem for John McCain, but much more so than other politicians he’s made the myth of some kind of preternatural powers of honestness central to his persona. At the same time, he’s told a series of whoppers in the past few days. First we heard that he’d literally never done favors for lobbyists or special interests when, clearly, he did try to intervene with the FCC on behalf of Paxson Communications. Then he said he’d never met with Bud Paxson himself about this, even though in a 2002 deposition he said he had met Paxson.

Now the Washington Post reports that Paxson, too, is contradicting McCain’s story and also contradicting the desperate spin McCain tried to put on his earlier deposition. Paxson also says McCain is wrong about never having met with Vicki Iseman on this issue. Which of course makes sense. We know that McCain tried to help Paxson out on this. We know that Iseman’s job at the time was to get legislators to help Paxson out. And we know that McCain and Iseman were friends at the time. It would be pretty weird if she’d never mentioned the whole thing to him, and he was just inspired to go write the letter by coincidence.

Since Charles Krauthammer is citing Anthony Cordesman’s report on the situation in Iraq to make the point that the surge has worked, I trust nobody on the right will be upset if I quote from a different part of the same report. He says, basically, a lot of good things have happened but a lot more needs to be done. We need, he says, strategic patience. Under the circumstances, it’s worth taking a look at what he says we need to do going forward to succeed.

His report is full of things like “consolidate progress in Iraq forces: Independent for internal security by 2012; create ability to defend against foreign threats by 2018.” He outlines goals like “Create effective criminal justice system and local rule of law (2008-2010)” and “revive national infrastructure in terms of water, power, roads, rail, petroleum exports, financial institutions, communications, etc (2009-2011).” On the security front, we’re also supposed to “resolve the problem of National Police, local forces, ethnic and sectarian militias and integrate into ISF or civil economy (2009-2011).” We also need to “revise constitution to meet needs of all major factions (2008-2009).”

To me, rather than an endless continuation of the debate over whether (or in what sense) the “surge” has or hasn’t “worked” it would be highly preferable to focus instead on whether or not strategic patience of the sort Cordesman is talking about is a reasonable policy going forward. My view is that it isn’t. If you look at these kind of agenda items that lurk near the back of the report, you’ll see a bunch of things where the prospects for success aren’t particularly good, the costs are high, the time frame is both vague and long, and the benefits don’t seem particularly clear. I’m also fairly confident that if Charles Krauthammer and John McCain just put the choice between Cordesman’s approach and leaving expeditiously on the table, that most people would agree with me. Thus you’ve seen a consistent effort starting in 2002, then continuing into 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, and now 2008 to mislead people about the question at hand into thinking that “success” is something that might come soon and thus that the cut-and-run crowd should be ignored. But if Bush had told people in 2004 that four years in the future his Iraq policy would be so successful that people would be talking about Iraq taking responsibility for its own internal security in 2012 then he never would have been re-elected.

As an intellectual exercise, this sort of thing Cordesman has done strikes me as pretty useful and interesting. I’d like to see more of it. What would Cordesman do to fix Haiti’s deeply entrenched problem if we were willing to commit 120,000+ U.S. troops and $100 billion a year to the problem for an indefinite period of time? Or maybe the federal government wants to dedicate that kind of personnel (though not active duty soldiers) and money to reducing the crime rate in Washington, DC? I’m not at all sure that a forward-looking agenda that has “deal with the issue of federalism in ways that resolve Kurd-Arab-Turcoman tensions; Shi’ite power struggle in south, Sunni concerns in west, mixed areas in center, and create a stable Baghdad and Basra (2008-2010)” can possibly succeed, but I am pretty sure that I’d rather not find out.

In short, I lack strategic patience.

Conservatives have been all over Barack Obama (here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here) for telling the following anecdote during last night’s debate:

You know, I’ve heard from an Army captain who was the head of a rifle platoon — supposed to have 39 men in a rifle platoon,” he said. “Ended up being sent to Afghanistan with 24 because 15 of those soldiers had been sent to Iraq. And as a consequence, they didn’t have enough ammunition, they didn’t have enough humvees. They were actually capturing Taliban weapons, because it was easier to get Taliban weapons than it was for them to get properly equipped by our current commander in chief.

Basically, as you can see if you check the conservative blogs above, that story can’t possibly be true, and the fact that Obama would say it reflects either his dishonesty or else his gross ignorance of military matters. Alternatively, you can read Jake Tapper who got in touch with the Captain in question: “Short answer: He backs up Obama’s story.” The story itself is, as Tapper says, pretty interesting and worth checking out on its own merits. Obama’s conservative critics will, I’m sure, be taking note of this additional reporting.

UPDATE: Phil Carter has an excellent post following up on some of these issues. Bottom line:

In light of my experience in Iraq, Sen. Obama’s comments last night are eminently believable. Sen. Obama is also absolutely right to use this anecdote as a critique of the administration’s decision to go to war in Iraq. It is incontrovertible that the war in Iraq diverted scarce military resources (manpower, equipment, etc.) from Afghanistan to Iraq. The cost for that diversion was paid by America’s sons and daughters, and our Afghan brethren, who continue to fight in Afghanistan against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. We owe our troops better.

Well said.

New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz complains about a double standard:

The Boston Globe is sure that the Kosovans are not ready for independence. But its editors, favored columnists and biased news writers are absolutely certain the Palestinians are.

Now, I’m for Kosovo independence. But at the same time, I really don’t think it’s viable to support independence for every ethnic minority group everywhere around the world. So why Palestine? What makes the Palestinians so special that they deserve their own country when the Catalans and the Québécois and all the rest don’t have them? The answer is pretty simple — the alternative to independence is citizenship. The Québécois don’t have an independent country, but they are citizens of Canada. Catalans are citizens of spain. Flemish and Walloons are both citizens of Belgium. Komi are citizens of Russia. When you see legal discriminatory treatment against citizens — as with African-Americans in the United States until very recently — that’s a problem. People are owed equal citizenship.

It’s clear, though, that granting Israeli citizenship on terms of equality to residents of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is incompatible with the idea of Israel as a Jewish state. Thus, Palestinian independence emerges as a reasonable, practical, and moral alternative. Basically, there are four things you could do with Israel-Palestine. One option is partition and independence. Another option is equal citizenship and the end of Israel. A third option is “transfer” and ethnic cleansing. And a fourth option is apartheid. I wonder which of the alternatives to Palestinian independence Peretz favors?

The rioting in Serbia complete with an attack on the U.S. embassy in Belgrade is the headline news out of the Balkans. The real action, though, is a bit further afield. In particular, now that majority-Albanian Kosovo is formally getting out of Serbia, the majority-Serbian part of Kosovo centered around Mitrovica wants out of Kosovo and back into Serbia. On one level, that sounds eminently reasonable. On another level, people I’ve talked to explain that the problem here is that region contains its own Albanian minority. Similarly, there are Serbs in the majority-Albanian parts of Kosovo.

This is, of course, the general problem with partition as the solution to ethnic conflicts. Like those little Russian dolls you can almost always bore down one level deeper. French Canadians want independent for Québec? Sure. But then what about those parts of Québec that are majority Anglophone? And then what about the Francophones living in those Anglophone enclaves?

At the end of the day, the only just solution for Canada, or for the former Yugoslavia, or for Iraq or Lebanon or anyone else necessarily involves the creation of tolerably liberal rights-respecting governments or else intolerably illiberal population transfers and ethnic cleansing. There’s no administrative fix whereby simply drawing the boundaries in just such a way solves the problem. To create really adequate solutions, the international community will have to find a way to create liberal regimes. And this, of course, is precisely what we don’t know how to do. This is the point I was trying to make in my Kosovo article from yesterday — the 1999 bombing campaign made accomplished some important things at a reasonable cost, but while some took our success there as opening a new chapter of a grand new era of military humanitarianism, a more sober look at Kosovo actually highlights rather sharp limits to what we can achieve even under favorable circumstances.

Photo courtesy of the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office

I think Barack Obama and his campaign have a lot of promise to do some of the things I argue are necessary in Heads in the Sand in terms of mounting a meaningful challenge to the big ideas that have dominated policymaking in the United States since 9/11. And beyond showing promise, he’s taken a number of very worthwhile concrete steps. But there have also been disappointments. Michael Hirsch, for example, has a good column about how Obama ought to ditch the “war on terror.” The argument that this conceptual framework needs to be done away with has been made very persuasively by my colleague James Fallows before his exile to China, among others. And as Hirsch says at this point it’s Obama or nobody:

It is a debate that only Obama can start. McCain won’t bring it up. Nor will Hillary Clinton. Apart from being on the verge of oblivion politically, she is too fully vested in the war on terror, having voted in 2002 to authorize the war in Iraq as part of it. And if that debate doesn’t start, we as a country will be effectively doomed to a “war” that has no prospect of ending. Bush has gradually expanded his definition of the war on terror to include all Islamic “extremists”—among them Hezbollah, Hamas, and other radical political groups that have no ties to Al Qaeda, ideological or otherwise. In doing so the president has plainly condemned us to a permanent war, for the simple reason that we will never be rid of all the terrorists. It is also a war that we will wage by ourselves, since no other nation agrees on such a broadly defined enemy. As Princeton scholar G. John Ikenberry has written, “It is perhaps a paradox—and one that is fitting for the strangeness of our current age—that we will need to end the war against terrorism because we cannot end terrorism.”

The trouble is that months ago, all the Democratic candidates were given an opportunity to launch this debate and only John Edwards was willing to “go there.” If Obama didn’t want to do it when facing pressure from his left, it’s hard to imagine him doing it now.

This little GOP web video about Democratic unwillingness to agree to the gutting of the constitution is really pretty striking stuff. In essence, the Republicans are placing a heavy political bet on the idea of a terrorist attack happening some time while their “danger” clock is running. If Americans die, they’ll be in a position to clean up. Conversely, if we still have some semblance of legal protections against government surveillance months from now and that clock’s still ticking even though al-Qaeda hasn’t slaughtered any innocents here in the U.S., they’re going to look mighty silly.

That’s the dynamics of this specific fight but, of course, it’s also a microcosm for 21st century politics as a whole. And it’s part of what makes the Republican Party, as currently conceived, so incredibly dangerous. Democracy is a highly imperfect method of getting good government. One thing that makes it work better is the general sense that if good things happen to a country, incumbent politicians will benefit from that whereas if bad things happen, incumbents will suffer. That often leads to election results that aren’t really “deserved” since Jimmy Carter didn’t cause the 70s oil crisis and Bill Clinton didn’t cause the 90s tech boom. But it does keep the incentives where they belong — insofar as things are under the control of politicians, the politicians try to make good things happen.

But not the post-9/11 GOP. Their political meal ticket is a population terrified of terrorism, and nothing whips that terror up quite like actual terrorism in London, Madrid, wherever. The result is a political party that simply can’t adopt policies designed to ratchet-down the level of danger and anxiety.

Obama’s policy isn’t as far-reaching as I’d like to see, but this is still night and day between him and Clinton. I have no idea what she’s even trying to say about Cuba. Obama is talking sense, directly labeling our policy a failure, and then drawing at least a few of the correct implications from them with regard to remittances and travel.

On the occasion of Kosovo’s independent, I take the opportunity to take a look at the humanitarian hawk movement the NATO bombing campaign against Serbia spawned and contrast it a bit to the rather messy realities on the ground there.

At any rate, I wrote the column before this shitstorm hit Belgrade, though I don’t think it materially affects the argument.

According to John McCain’s website:

John McCain strongly supports the development and deployment of theater and national missile defenses. Effective missile defenses are critical to protect America from rogue regimes like North Korea that possess the capability to target America with intercontinental ballistic missiles, from outlaw states like Iran that threaten American forces and American allies with ballistic missiles, and to hedge against potential threats from possible strategic competitors like Russia and China. Effective missile defenses are also necessary to allow American military forces to operate overseas without being deterred by the threat of missile attack from a regional adversary.

For starters, north Korea doesn’t possess ICBM capabilities. Second, it’s hard to see how national missile defense will protect our forces from Iranian missile attacks when our forces are right next door in Iraq and Afghanistan. Indeed, it’s unclear why we’d be particularly worried about any sort of ballistic missile attack given the close quarters situation at hand. But while this is a bit dishonest and ignorant, the business about hedging against “potential threats from possible strategic competitors like Russia and China.” Simply put, a scenario in which the United States possesses an effective ability to shoot down a Russian or Chinese ICBM threat would be completely intolerable in Moscow or Beijing. It would, in effect, give the United States a viable a threat of a nuclear first strike.

Neither Russia nor China is going to let that happen. Instead, they’ll spend money on building up their nuclear arsenals in order to maintain their deterrent capacity. Thus, at great cost to the Unites States, to Russia, and to China we’ll be back at the status quo. But beyond the monetary cost, the large buildup in Chinese nuclear capabilities that would result from this situation would force India to engage in a nuclear build-up of its own. And that, in turn, would force Pakistan to follow suit. This large increase in the global stock of nuclear weapons would, of course, imply an increase in the odds of a nuclear accident or the loss or theft of nuclear material. At the same time, a nuclear buildup of this sort might create incentives for Iran to reinitiate its nuclear weapons research program. And even if it didn’t, revitalizing the Non-Proliferation Treaty desperately requires the status quo nuclear powers to be working together on nuclear issues, and fulfilling our treat obligations to move toward reduced arsenals.

In short, what McCain has on tap here is a recipe for disaster — a breakdown in great power relations, new arms races, massive nuclear proliferation, etc. And why? I suspect the last bit is the real reason. He wants “to allow American military forces to operate overseas without being deterred.” Basically, we need to spend huge sums of money and encourage an enormous amount of nuclear proliferation because that would facilitate the launching of new aggressive wars. Probably the proliferation McCain’s policies helped induce would become the rationale for a new round of warfighting.