It's a Conspiracy, I Tell You!

"We're through the looking glass here, people. And down the rabbit hole. And we've just had some kind of mushroom...."

Charles Krauthammer and Glenn Beck are on the same page: General Petraeus is the victim of a vast, left-wing conspiracy. As they say, "Great minds...."

I can't wait to learn about how Eric Cantor is actually a Democratic Party mole, or what "they" have on Darrell Issa that would prevent him from issuing a subpoena to Petraeus.

If You Want to Have an Affair, Get Divorced First

I have some sympathy for the "It should be about competence, not marital fidelity" argument, when applied to somebody like General Petraeus, band if people choose to elect a President who has "made mistakes in his marriage" they have no business acting shocked when he makes more "mistakes". I have sympathy for the idea that one of the leading reasons that sexual behaviors put people at risk of blackmail is because of the fear of public disclosure.

But here's the thing: Even if there were no public stigma or shame in having an affair, it would remain grounds for divorce. And thus there would remain an incentive to keep the affair secret and, consequently, the possibility of blackmail would also remain.

So... hit divorce court first, then it's "dating", nobody cares, and you can keep your job.

Looking for Political Solutions in All the Wrong Places

David Ignatius offers his latest musings on the war in Afghanistan, "willpower" and the magic man who comes in the form of General David Petraeus, and pretends that he has a number of insightful questions for General Petraeus. His questions, though, center on how General Petraeus will implement political solutions to Afghanistan's problems. Um... David? Not his job. It may well be that the questions are the right ones to ask, but it doesn't help to ask them to the wrong person.

Paradox? What Paradox?

In yet another effort to reinvent "the surge", David Brooks heaps praise on G.W. Bush. Everybody in the world - the Republicans, the Democrats, the generals, the punditocracy - Brooks tells us, was against the surge.

In these circumstances, it’s amazing that George Bush decided on the surge. And looking back, one thing is clear: Every personal trait that led Bush to make a hash of the first years of the war led him to make a successful decision when it came to this crucial call.

Bush is a stubborn man. Well, without that stubbornness, that unwillingness to accept defeat on his watch, he never would have bucked the opposition to the surge.

This is an implicit endorsement of my theory of the surge - not as a calmly reasoned strategy, but as a "Hail Mary" pass. Brooks also glosses over a lot of the criticism of the surge - which was not just that it might be too late, but also that it was too little. The tenuous nature of the pacts that keep sectarian violence relatively low have even General Petraeus worried that violence may again flare up. Meanwhile, there is scant political progress.

The best sound bite Brooks can find suggests scant political progress:

Iraq has moved from being a failed state to, as Vali Nasr of the Council on Foreign Relations has put it, merely a fragile one.

If the measure is "statehood", by what measure, other than its having being a state prior to the war, would Iraq satisfy the traditional elements of statehood? If it were a territory arguing for statehood, would we accept that there was effective and independent government control of its entire territory? That it can effectively and independently engage in foreign relations? That it controls its own population? Hardly. The real question is what it will take to transform Iraq into an effective state, even in the absence of U.S. troops. Brooks and Bush have no answer to that, and McCain's best answer to date is to post troops in Iraq indefinitely.

Brooks sneers at opponents of "the surge",

The cocksure war supporters learned this humbling lesson during the dark days of 2006. And now the cocksure surge opponents, drunk on their own vindication, will get to enjoy their season of humility. They have already gone through the stages of intellectual denial. First, they simply disbelieved that the surge and the Petraeus strategy was doing any good. Then they accused people who noticed progress in Iraq of duplicity and derangement. Then they acknowledged military, but not political, progress. Lately they have skipped over to the argument that Iraq is progressing so well that the U.S. forces can quickly come home.

So... Brooks is saying that it took him until 2006 to realize that "Bush to make a hash of the first years of the war"? Fair enough. But what about his present attack on those who dare question "the surge"?

• "First, they simply disbelieved that the surge and the Petraeus strategy was doing any good." - Didn't Brooks just tell us (rather dishonestly) that the only people in the entire world who believed in the Surge were G.W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and... a whopping six other people? So this attack is aimed at... the other six billion or so people in the world?

• "Then they accused people who noticed progress in Iraq of duplicity and derangement." - That seems like a fair response to people who lie to you, repudiate G.W. Bush's own benchmarks as being unfair measures of progress, shift the date the surge began so they can attribute pre-surge improvements to "the surge", etc. But people who lie to you never like to be "called out", so I can see why Brooks takes umbrage.

• "Then they acknowledged military, but not political, progress." - Right. Fierce opponents of the surge like General Petraeus did exactly that. You know why? Because the surge has resulted primarily in military, not political, progress. Again, examine the Bush Administration's own benchmarks.

• "Lately they have skipped over to the argument that Iraq is progressing so well that the U.S. forces can quickly come home." - Because the six billion or so people that Brooks tells us opposed the surge think as a monolith? Well, leaving that aside, those presenting rosy scenarios invite the question - if things are going so well, why shouldn't people ask, "When will the troops come home?"

  By the same token, why do the most dogmatic proponents of the surge suggest that our troops may never come home? Why does Bush want fifty-eight permanent military bases in Iraq (up from a claimed "zero" only a few months ago) if he's expecting it to have a stable, successful government at any time in the foreseeable future? To state the obvious, he wouldn't.

Brooks carries on,

But before long, the more honest among the surge opponents will concede that Bush, that supposed dolt, actually got one right. Some brave souls might even concede that if the U.S. had withdrawn in the depths of the chaos, the world would be in worse shape today.

Actually, I think the surge highlights the worst of Bush - narcissism, ineffectiveness and cowardice. He was afraid of admitting mistakes, so he threw his "Hail Mary", but as with every other stage of the war he was afraid of the political consequences of committing enough troops for enough time to ensure success. The decrease in violence justifies cautious optimism but, despite his cheerleaders' efforts to point the other way whenever the subject of "political progress" is raised, if political progress is not achieved "the surge" will become yet another entry in Bush's long line of missed opportunities.

Life is complicated. The reason we have democracy is that no one side is right all the time. The only people who are dangerous are those who can’t admit, even to themselves, that obvious fact.

That's rich. Here's Bush admitting his mistakes on Iraq: he made "a miscalculation of what the conditions would be" in post-war Iraq." Why? Because he refused to listen to the experts, including his own generals. Yet Brooks tells us, "Bush was at his worst when he was humbly deferring to the generals and at his best when he was arrogantly overruling them." At this point, Brooks' mistakes are compounding almost as quickly as Bush's; but I see no sign that either is going to admit them.

Cornering A Witness

How hard is it for Senators and Members of Congress, some of whom like to brag about their experiences as prosecutors, to corner a witness?

Is it reasonable to expect that we will be able to withdraw our troops from Iraq in less than 1,000 years?

If the answer is still, "I can't promise that they'll be home within that timeframe", you have a concession that no matter how successful the surge we're still potentially looking at endless war.

If you get a more likely, "Of course I expect them to be home within a millennium," you drop down to a century. If the answer is then, "I can't promise that they'll be home in less than 100 years", you have the follow-up question, "So it is your confident prediction that sometime in the next 100 to 1,000 years we can start bringing our troops home?"

If you get a commitment to a century, you drop to fifty years.... If you get a commitment to fifty years, you drop to twenty-five. At some point the person being questioned will have to stop saying, "I expect the troops to be home within that timeframe" and revert to, "I can't commit to that", and you have a range of years (be it "100 to 1,000", "50 to 100", "25 to 50", or something else) that is likely to get a lot of press attention....

Is It Truly That Bad?

The London Guardian opines,

An elite team of officers advising the US commander, General David Petraeus, in Baghdad has concluded that they have six months to win the war in Iraq - or face a Vietnam-style collapse in political and public support that could force the military into a hasty retreat.

* * *

Possibly the biggest longer term concern of Gen Petraeus's team is that political will in Washington may collapse just as the military is on the point of making a counter-insurgency breakthrough. According to a senior administration official, speaking this week, this is precisely what happened in the final year of the Vietnam war. Steven Simon, the national security council's senior director for transnational threats during the Clinton administration, said a final meltdown in political and public backing was likely if the new strategy was not seen to be working quickly.