War is always confusing. There’s an old saying that “the first casualty in war is the plan”. So what you want to look for is the kind of leader who can separate the Cheney/Wolfowitz kind of plans from the kind that have a chance at working.

Petraeus saw the potential in the surge. I did. And now, after the important differences in principle are beginning to have dividends, Iraq, seen through the eyes of the New York Times, is:

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.

This report from the New York Times’ veteran reporters, Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, is as important as any piece of war reportage yet. I’ve relyed on this pair throughout for a solid perspective - even back when the popular view today was abrasively unpopular - and the significance of this piece stands out in their work. This is not only because I’m pleased things are developing in accordance to the strategy in the regards I expected, or even that things are showing signs of improvement on the ground, but because this is a truly critical time.

Numerous factors now exist that could make this war go either way, very fast: The ‘08 Election. Senate approval ratings. Maliki’s obstinance. Iran’s increasing desperation. A new flood of black money to the Saudis. Above all, a desire for time tables and a military that needs more troops, not less.

Things are finally going according to plan. The word should spread that now, at last, at truly the eleventh hour, we have cause for hope - that we need more support, not less.

It needs to, before things slip back into the total madness of spin and strangeness again.

Has the obliterator of Chechnya decided to cozy up with the Islamist cause? No; Russia’s recent sale of high-tech weapon systems, including long-distance bombers, to Iran isn’t a show of favor - just mud in America’s eye.

As I just said in a previous post, arms build-up begets arms races, and the Middle East is the current racetrack of choice. The US is funding Shiite militias via the Iraqi Army and cops, funding their Sunni rivals in Nationalist militias directly, and giving lump sums of black cash to Saudi Arabia to dole out to all manner of Sunni-extremist cells, some of them al-Qaeda connected. So no sooner does the US roll out new weapon systems for its favorite states of the region - Israel and Saudi Arabia - than Russia decides to help out the same nation it’s lending its strength to sanction - Iran.

This is the logic of imperial powers. The color of the squares on the chess board matter less than whether occupying them keeps your opponent in check. Iran is plenty dangerous to Russia’s interests, but nothing sells arms like conflict and nothing demonstrates power in a conflict like lots of arms sales. Russia is aiming to be ascendant, and so long as the slightest cause to compete, it will be crouched and ready at the starting line.

Iran is grumbling about rising tensions in the Middle East inspired by a promised package of US aid and US arms sales to Saudi Arabia in particular, Israel and Egypt as well. Considering how tense the Middle East is, the last thing we want is rising tensions, right? Actually, no.

Arming our allies to spite Iran is just what to do in the “little Cold War” dynamic of the Middle East today. Iran is right that it increases tensions - as I noted in a recent article, when a strong nation arms itself further, this encourages that nation’s neighbors to similarly arm and consider warfare. In this instance, with Iran suffering under the economic isolation of recent sanctions yet incapable of gaining from a conventional war, it forces Iran’s government to hurt all the more for its aggression and nuclear program.

There are times when complaints about rising tensions are justified. Considering the military adventurism of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union - a legacy Vladimir Putin proudly pronounces he is the inheritor of - continuing to pour certain weapons like the flawed ABM system into states rival to Russia is likely unwise. But Iran is not the half-mad Russian bear, who would counter any measure to stifle its nuclear option with a rush of its copious oil wealth into an augmentation of its already unmanageable arsenal. Iran’s wealth is in jeopardy, its people - from high advisors to students - are demonstrably unhappy about it, and it can ill afford the further chill on its economy of being forced into a little Cold War.

It puts Iran into the hard position we want it in - increasingly looking the poor partner as its chances at regional hegemony slip away the longer it holds onto its nuclear power. And in reply to its cries over peaked tensions, it fires back, “So what are you going to do now? So what?” Are you going to attack somebody, even though you know you’ll unite the Middle East against you and lose whatever short gains you have to Western nation firepower? Are you going to continue developing the bomb despite the public support and prosperity you’re sending down the drain? Or are you going to behave?

Iran is running out of options, and these recent actions help wall them off. Its people understand this. Many of its leaders to as well. Let’s hope that Iran’s clerics apply as flexible criteria for summary removal to Achmedinajad as they did to liberal parliament members.

Iraq’s people came together today in celebration over a football victory, bringing to light an important aspect too often forgotten in the reports of sectarian strife. It showed that though it is extremists and power-brokers who make the news by efforts with divisive acts and deeds the average Iraqi feels a distinct affinity for their unified state. There are pressures breaking Iraq apart, there are cracks in the foundation, but the foundation is real and it is active.

Many who wish to abandon Iraq to its internal discord or want to allow it to stand on the strength of its ailing government alone use the country’s traditional schisms as justification. They argue that Iraq is an artificially composed state, and so attempting to maintain that artificial framework is unrealistic and unethical. But while it is true that Iraq is a confederation composed by outside forces, it has nevertheless developed into an integrated social organism. Just as it can die by the vying interests in its borders, it can and has lived by them.

A more superficial argument is that those interests, no longer oppressed by Saddam’s strict rule and allowed voice through democratic representation, naturally seek a separation of Iraq into ethnic states. They take the inability for the Shiite parties and Sunni parties to affect a reconciliation as a sign of this. Recalcitrance is taken for an inherent desire not to be part of the same nation at all, and that desire is assumed to come from the people. This too is a misperception.

Americans can well understand that two of the fundamental principles of liberal democracy disprove this attitude. First being that the federal representatives of political parties, selected by the parties voted in by the people, do not always voice or vote the interests of the people who elected them. Issues such as health care, gay marriage and the war itself do not show that all politicians simply obey the majority will of the people who belong to their party. Another, more important and more intrinsic point, is that liberal democracy is not meant to be purely populist. Instead, it is structured so that the minorities of the nation can be provided for despite, sometimes even protected from, the majority will of the people. Most civil rights advances in America and the UK were enacted not by legislation, but by judicial and executive action despite polls. So, to assume that the Iraqi people want an uncooperative government that allows no substantial provisions for minorities - most notably the Sunni - is incorrect.

The Iraqi football victory shows that national will is alive, strong, and jubilant in Iraq. It shows that there is a popular alternative to the factious policies of a government that increasingly seems intent on denying the benefits of reconciliation. And it reveals the underlying terrain on which the proverbial “battle of hearts and minds” is fought:

The common people may care about values, but they care about the value of their standard of living more. They may care about ethnic divisions, but it is personal and family security that concerns them most. And they may fight together over their sectarian rights, but they celebrate together over a common national victory.

If the United States can somehow, by force or by diplomacy, provide a government that satisfies these basic concerns, then the war of Iraq can be considered won. And when the negatives in the Iraqi halls of power threaten to obscure any cause for hope, we should look to the Iraqi streets after the Asian Cup’s last match to see the basis of victory.

Love may make the world go round. Irony certainly sets its course. In the instance of a particular piece of reactionary commentary I discovered of late, it illustrates the wayward myopia that has lately navigated America’s factious path.

A recent article by a well-published author and professor of Classics at CSU Fresno, Victor Davis Hanson, is making the email rounds and came to my attention. Hanson’s article contends that higher education’s shift from what he classifies as “traditional education” to “therapeutic education” has denied the future elites - so to speak - of America the proper framework of knowledge to make moral comparisons. In essence, it is an argument that specialization of study focusing on societies’ fringes leads to moral relativism, while traditional studies give one a comprehensive view of the world: a lens through which the entirety of globe and time on earth, not just the particularities of a certain population segment or time period, can be analyzed.

This is not the case. If anything, comprehensive education informs us that there has always been complexity and conflict in the world, always hypocrisy and always questioning.

The Results of Traditional Education Examined:

There is something to be said for generality in study. I entered university with the intent of achieving that “catholic education”, and so absorbed a large scope of generalities - Introduction to Political Science, Mass Media and Politics, Theories of War - as well as specialties - 18th Century British Literature, Female Sexuality, Terrorism and Genocide. Yet Hanson’s article uses his argument about the effects of the shift in higher education to dismiss criticisms of conservative attitudes as lacking the proper historical perspective. Particularly, he cites the assertions made by some critics - that Iraq is the “greatest mistake in our nation’s history” and because the US and Israel have a bomb, it is alright for theocratic Iran to have one too - as being a result of this ignorance:

Is the Iraq war, as we are often told, the “greatest mistake” in our nation’s history?

Because Israel and the United States have a bomb, is it then O.K. for theocratic Iran to have one too?

Americans increasingly cannot seem to answer questions like these adequately because they are blissfully uneducated. They have not acquired a broad knowledge of language, literature, philosophy, and history.

Both his basic argument and the extension of it are inherently flawed, and the contemptuous, narrow perspective they espouse are antithetical to the evolving demands of a global community.

The notion that traditional education programs in higher education leads to contemporary conservative values assumes a number of specious factors. One is that contemporary conservative values are synonymous with traditional values. These lodestones of principle would derive from what Hanson categorizes, “absolute truths”:

If there are no intrinsic differences—only relative degrees of “power” that construct our “reality”—between a Western democracy that is subject to continual audit by a watchdog press, an active political opposition, and a freely voting citizenry, and an Iranian theocracy that bans free speech to rule by religious edict, then it will matter little which entity has nuclear weapons.

In the end, education is the ability to make sense of the chaotic present through the prism of the absolute and eternal truths of the ages. But if there are no prisms—no absolutes, no eternals, no truths, no ages past—then the present will appear only as nonsense.

Considering the reaction to wars such as the Mexican-American War (America’s first war of choice, and in which some American soldiers were summarily executed for refusing to fight a “war of choice”), the Civil War (resisted by the Draft Riots and other significant protests) and to FDR’s argument that we should intervene in the adolescent World War II (staunchly resisted by Republicans in particular and much of the public of the 1940 election season in general), I would advance that there has always been political strife in the country, especially in times of debate over the course of a war. Struggles over civil liberties, abuse of power by government and American use of warfare against non-government threats have always been present in our history, even with the vigor and topicality of today - such as the fight over executive privilege involving spying by the Jefferson White House, the concern over the Alien and Sedition Act, and the war with the Barbary Pirates, the famed “shores of Tripoli” from the Marine Corps anthem.

So having a general knowledge of traditional history does not, actually, provide easy answers to the conflicting contentions of our modern times, nor does it negate liberal arguments. Even Hanson’s specific examples, that of whether Iraq is the greatest mistake in our nation’s history and whether Iran having the bomb is simply not okay even though the US and Israel have them, retain their complexity and are not resolved by an instant moral acuity when viewed through history’s long lens.

In the latter case, Hanson should know this all too well. He has written on the war that brought the doom of the golden age and imperial era of what is touted as the “world’s first western democracy” - Athens, Greece in the 5th century BC. The Peloponnesian War was a grueling, exhausting conflict between Athens and its dwindling allies and Sparta and its growing Delian league allies. It saw use of terror on both sides, asymmetrical warfare; many of the principles, if not the specific practices, in use in modern warfare.

It is the basic game theory that the inspiration for the Peloponnesian War can be distilled to that is particularly pertinent.

In this specific instance, Athens was massively powerful following the wars with Persia and wanted to rebuild its walls; Sparta, seeing those defenses as the crowning device to make Athenian defensive power as extreme as its offensive power, objected. The principle of that objection - seen in today’s debates over Nuclear Arms and Anti-Ballistic Missile Defense Systems - is that if you can’t attack your enemy, but he can attack you, he has more incentive to attack you. In short, unless one’s abilities to harm the other and succeed are as co-equal as possible, there is more incentive for conflict than cooperation. This is the “Prisoner’s Dilemma“, and it is the basis of the “MAD” (Mutually Assured Destruction) security arrangement that kept the Soviets and the US from annihilation during the latter half of the Cold War - the mean comfort taken by both nations that if either of them used nuclear arms, both sides would entirely be destroyed, and thus is made no sense to use nuclear arms.

Again - this is the basis of a conflict that spawned a war that Hanson has written an excellent book on: if Athens has a wall, it cannot be attacked, but if Sparta does not have a wall, it can be attacked, and thus Sparta is incentivized to attack Athens before it has a wall. While this specific arms issue did not lead to war, the germ of inequality is what ultimately sickened the peace between Sparta and Athens - helped along by Athenian arrogance, Spartan insecurity and the usual turmoil that comes from history’s progress.

And yet Hanson apparently does not see the applicability of this game theory to whether it is allowable for Iran - and other rogue, developing nations - to have the bomb just as the United States does. While MAD has prevented conflict between we and Russia, the other nuclear superpower, but the building of the Athenian walls led to a fatal inequality that devastated the world’s first democracy, which seems the more “allowable” scenario?

The Value of Specialized Education and the Nature of Critical Thinking:

History is pertinent to the present not only when it is directly compared to today, but when the game theory, philosophical principles and relational dynamics are compared. In essence, though it is helpful to know the minutiae of the kit an Athenian soldier carried or the specific concerns of the Burr Treason Jefferson was spying on, it is when those incidents are distilled to their basic dynamic framework that they can be mined for conclusions to influence the ongoing experiment of history. In fact, it is therein that Hanson’s argument about the relative worthlessness of “therapeutic education” begins to entirely dissolve. He disparages the “deductive reasoning” these courses allegedly inculcate in the student, contrary to the “inductive reasoning” allegedly cultivated by general education:

…The student is expected to arrive at the instructor’s own preconceived conclusions. The courses are also captives of the present—hostages of the contemporary media and popular culture from which they draw their information and earn their relevance.

The theme of all such therapeutic curricula is relativism. There are no eternal truths, only passing assertions that gain credence through power and authority. Once students understand how gender, race, and class distinctions are used to oppress others, they are then free to ignore absolute “truth,” since it is only a reflection of one’s own privilege.

By contrast, the aim of traditional education was to prepare a student in two very different ways. First, classes offered information drawn from the ages—the significance of Gettysburg, the characters in a Shakespeare play, or the nature of the subjunctive mood. Integral to this acquisition were key dates, facts, names, and terms by which students, in a focused manner in conversation and speech, could refer to the broad knowledge that they had gathered.

Second, traditional education taught a method of inductive inquiry. Vocabulary, grammar, syntax, logic, and rhetoric were tools to be used by a student, drawing on an accumulated storehouse of information, to present well-reasoned opinions—the ideology of which was largely irrelevant to professors and the university.

Chicano Studies and Women’s Studies are specialized areas of study, but it is the essentials of the events they study more than the details that have their applicability to positively influencing the course of events today. They study the plight of the oppressed, models of organization, and how change can be brought about. Film Studies is indeed about some technical aspects of film - arguably it is a course of study that has more science to it than most “liberal arts”. But to be a screenwriter, director, even a producer, one must understand the basics of story-telling, narrative structure, the traditional dynamics of drama. And, considering it is not going far to say that life imitates art in many ways, understanding how we interact in narrative forms and why is a close cousin to understanding how we interact in a cultural or political medium.

This argument in favor of the specialized areas of study is precisely the one that has been customarily advanced to protect the ailing area of study of Classics - the very area of study Hanson teaches. People throughout the 20th century have argued to the inapplicability of Classics - “latin is a dead language”, “the political struggles of that time have no parallel in today’s liberal democracy”, “why study dead Greeks?” And Classics professors - defending the ageless wisdom of Thucydides or the genius insight into human interactions of Homer or Virgil - have argued, accurately in my opinion, “the events may be dated, but their lessons never will be.” In short, they argue that though theirs is a speciality that has millennia between its actuality and today - far longer than Chicano Studies or Film Studies, I feel I should add - the spirit, sinew and lessons of that speciality are living, wondering and dying in today’s world.

Want to study oppression and revolt? One could look to Cesar Chavez or the Spartacus revolt. Want to study the human side of a political battle over an unpopular, dragging war? Read “The Iliad” or study the German film “Untergang”. The value of education is in the mind that seeks the applicability of the material, assesses it honestly, and applies it unflinchingly.

Critical Thought from Specialization vs. Selective Thought to Satisfy an Agenda:

That students acquire a broad scope of knowledge is good, but it is the courage to delve deep enough - to grasp the heart of the lesson, especially if it is unpleasant - that has most value.

It does not seem Hanson applies the same principle. I say this on basis of the limited example of his comparison of the “mistake” of the Iraq war to the significant military reversals of 1776 - Washington’s Army in retreat; 1864 - the flight to Gettysburg; and January 1942 - presumably our retreat from the Pacific Islands in the face of Japanese onslaught. Were those not similar “mistakes,” that could inspire similar handwringing? Were they not greater than Iraq, considering the materiel lost, the lives devastated?

And, no, in fact, they were not. Only if one employs the kind of post-modern myopia that has leftist radical Chicano Studies majors suggesting Chavez’s unionization for farm workers is moral, ethical and functional basis of an argument for total amnesty and open borders. Or that feminism’s analysis of the power dynamic between men and women in the west leads to the necessity of a “gender homeland for women” - Andrea Dworkin’s separatist agenda. But despite how Dworkin or Hanson would like it to be, incidents have to be viewed in their greater historical context.

Unionization is fine, but total amnesty and open borders would be a disastrous financial drain on the US, just as it was for Rome. Men do abuse women more often than women do men - unless you buy some studies with some exceedingly dubious research methodologies - and yet separatism is ridiculous on a number of biological levels. And while Washington was surely worried of the fate of the Revolution, Lincoln of the Union, and Roosevelt of our staging grounds in the Pacific, these were not “mistakes”.

It was not a mistake for us to leave Britain’s rule; it had been brewing for some time, was practically inevitable, and, arguably, turned out pretty good. It was likewise not a mistake to fight the Confederacy, or even switch from McClellan’s strategy to Grant’s, because not only did they attack us, but a divided America would have been nearly unsustainable. And as for whether 1942 was a “mistake”: We had enjoyed an enormous military build-up that left us at parity with, if not superior to, Japan; Japan attacked us and Germany declared war on us, thus pitting what was arguably the greatest military bloc in the world against us; if fascism had conquered Communism, it still would have been us or them, so there was no keeping out of it; and, most importantly, we turned around and beat the bejeesus out of every single nation - replacing Britain, chaining the Soviets behind the borders established immediately post-war, and actually occupying Germany and Japan.

These are not mistakes. These are examples of dire times, yes, but nobody thinks we “blew it” by throwing off the British yoke after we’d been considering it for a good half-century. We were not “woefully unprepared” in 1942. We did not lack a “clear political objective” in the civil war.

But invading Iraq with the intent of regime change was a mistake. We did blow a lot of strategic credibility and moral prestige by shoving the war down the UN’s throat, going anyway without their support, and then failing to resolve things at all. We were woefully unprepared, sending in an army of around 150,000 to conquer Iraq when 650,000 were what we used to merely kick Iraq out of Kuwait, having inadequate post-war provisions for the Iraqi people’s basic securities and human needs, and charting a haphazard political course for their fledgling government, if even that. And we do lack a clear political objective - we are critically lacking. This war is economically disastrous, strategically humbling and morally confused. And many great thinkers knew it would be that way - conservatives included - and the Administration either fired, ignored or talked over them and went anyway. That is a mistake.

“Greatest mistake?” One of the traditional notions of assessing history is that it has “cycles”. Empires rise, decline, must assert power to rise again. Either they redefine the definition of power - like shifting from military to economic and dominating the new way - or they assert themselves militarily. In this era when dearth of human-sustaining resources and conflicts over industry-sustaining resources are the predominant factor in much of the world’s conflicts, American could have used the former course. We could have - and still can - sustain our “Imperial Power” through technology that makes us dominant while mitigating the causes of global poverty, regional dispute and biological disaster. But the Administration did not. Instead, it chose the military course - in keeping with the imperatives set by the perspective of the influential essay, “The Clash of Civilizations“. Fight global Islam, dominate it militarily, replace it with western liberal democracy. It did not work out. At the beginning of the first and biggest ambitious project for an America struggling to define its Imperial nature post-Cold War, we picked on a puny set of nations - Iraq and Afghanistan - and could not win. We have not lost yet, but we have not won either. And for a world that saw us crush the ghost of the Soviet Union in the deserts of Iraq in ‘91, calm the definitive realm of ethnic strife in ‘95 and ‘99, and raise to new heights of human rights commitment and economic power during the 90s, this was a humiliation and an argument against our strength unseen in American history.

In short, we went out to prove we were still the Fascism-thrashing, Communism-throttling, Balkans-conquering Empire, and have ended up wounded, bogged down, and poor. No wonder our enemies crow. No one beats us as thoroughly as we do ourselves through limitation of mind and limitation of spirit.

The military is grinding along in the north of Iraq, taking back Diyala province and hopefully holding onto what they take.

This is more evidence that our military strategy has military merit. And, as if brought out by the contrast, it is a stark illustration that political merit is a whole different issue.

The trend is clear: The less we isolate the Sunni from their role in contributing to, not trying to wrest control of, Iraq’s security, the more military success we have. The more military success we have, the less the Shiites who dominate the nominally-democratic Iraqi government want to reward us with cooperating with the Sunni. The less cooperation between the government and the Sunni, the more the Sunni are isolated politically.

Something in this dynamic has to change for political success to be achieved. Considering our military success isn’t in doubt - being that we’re perfectly capable of winning any battle - it’s only that political success we should really be concerned about. However, beyond another quarterly-annual workday-long meeting between our diplomats and Iran’s that resulted in little more than empty rhetoric, little proactive is being done politically.

In fact, the US seems content to whitewash their real actions defining relations with Iran in Iraq: Open conflict. As shown in earlier posts and in the recent raids on Iran-connected Shiite militia strongholds, the US is more aggressive at countering Iranian infiltration just as it seeks to localize, trap and eradicate al-Qaeda infiltration. Cutting off the tap of foreign involvement - particularly the Saudis, which has always been a concern of this blog but has only of late even been mentioned by the White House - is a necessary step to turn tactical military gains into strategic military successes. But have no doubt - this does not redeem or even salvage the political disaster that is Baghdad.

The sooner Americans accept two critical, simple but difficult deductions, the sooner we can adjust our political will to an attitude that will be realistic and productive:

1. The Baghdad government is /not/ a Democracy.

2. The Shiite and the Sunni are /not/ on our side. They are on their sides, respectively, and both realize that nations that /will not/ be going anywhere - unlike us - are right next door and not only ready but resolutely determined to see them victorious.

The first point might be difficult to prove, considering how vaunted the Iraqi government’s inception has been over the past years. Triumphant pictures of purple-dyed fingers and bold defiance of terrorist suppression of voters stirred American hearts. But consider what crucial differences in our democracy and theirs remain not only unsolved, but virtually unsolvable:

They have no Bill of Rights.

They have no state or local governments.

Think on that a moment. Would we still have a “democracy” without the ability of the local governments to represent themselves, manage funds and determine their own laws? The founding fathers argued that we would not. Numerous protections of those non-federal powers exist in our Constitution.

And so, for that matter, what would America be without its Bill of Rights? There is a “framework” for government in Baghdad, but there are no substantial Articles of government vetted by the Parliament, nor any Amendments. This is significant in the extreme. Remember that many of the rights we consider the very sinews of our freedom - freedom of speech, privacy protections, representation in court - come not from the Constitution’s original drafting, but from the Amendments in the Bill of Rights. There is extraordinary obstinance by the Shiite government to not draft such a Constitution.

The reason why this is, is one I’ve talked on often in past posts. Put plainly, it is because the Shi’a and the Sunni have little practical impetus to work with each other, and much to dominate one another. Without forcing a government on them that addresses these concerns - through federalism or through a Constitutional convention that, like ours, is forced to happen until it is complete despite summer months - this will not change.

Alright. It’s official. Dialogue is on its deathbed.

It had a grand mal seizure during the rise up to the fiery, factious ‘04 elections and now is dwindling quickly, unable to sustain so much as a whimper without words being snarled into flaccid, sensationalist nonsense.

This aside has been brought to you by the recent comments of Senator Clinton that her rival for the spot of chief Democratic Presidential contender, Barack Obama, called her names. “Well, this is getting kind of silly.” Clinton lamented like the school teacher she has of late tried to come off as, “I’ve been called a lot of things in my life but I’ve never been called George Bush or Dick Cheney certainly. We have to ask what’s ever happened to the politics of hope?”

What indeed? And surely, this message touches a raw nerve with the American public who, by and large, feel injured and humiliated by the inertia and disillusionment that over a decade of increasingly vicious partisan rancor have developed into. Citizens of all stripe are sore after the dramatic move to shift power in the Congress in order to change the disastrous course of the Administration has earned less than dramatic results. In short, people are dead sick of infighting. The last thing they want is name-calling.

Of course, the only one lowering the tone to that petty level is Clinton herself.

The comments she refers to are as follows, and were issued in light of another extremely stupid tempest in a teapot that Clinton has been trying to inspire - that over Obama’s comments on whether to talk to the leaders of rival nations:

“The notion that I was somehow going to be inviting them over for tea next week without having initial envoys meet is ridiculous,” he said in an interview outside his Senate office. “But the general principle is one that I think Senator Clinton is wrong on, and that is if we are laying out preconditions that prevent us from speaking frankly to these folks, then we are continuing with Bush-Cheney policies.”

So did he call her an insipid, empty-suited martinet? No. Did he call her Bush or Cheney even, as she claimed? No. He didn’t even comment on her specific policies! All he does is equate hypothetical policies with those employed by Bush and Cheney. And now it has officially become “name-calling”. I say “officially”, because it is characterized as such by practically every blogger and journo out there, if the rotten lizard brain of the media’s collective consciousness, The Drudge Report, is any indication.

Obama has countered, and adeptly. It is, after all, why he can speak about communicating with rival heads of state with substance and intent, rather than as just a reactionary political ploy to unseat domestic competitors like Clinton does.

Still, the damage is being done. By politicians devoid of integrity such as Romney and Clinton, and by the media that thrives on scandal, even when it is only show. If we have come to a point where name-calling is a grave concern, that is one thing - that is, indeed, a problem. Invective solves little. But comparison is necessary. And if we have come to the point where even equating another politician’s prospective policies to that of a party, of a statesperson, or of an ideology is considered an irritant, we have truly gone dumb.

The old adage that “those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it” is absolutely true. But this is not just a call to gather trivia. It is a warning that one has to apply the patterns of cause and effect that the experiments of history have yielded in order to make better future judgments. It is, in essence, a duty to compare. If we can no longer compare what is potential to what is proven, we lose the foundation of judgment.

And if we do not judge Clinton’s comments as to be alarmingly rancorous and suggestive of an attitude that she believes she cannot win by other than this strategy of senseless negativity, we stand to inherit only more of the same.

There’s no doubt that Iraq is a significant conflict affecting the global war on terror, but it’s now time to take the temperature of the war that started of the now-disheartening “GWOT” - especially since it seems its starting all over again.

To quickly review the status of things in that nation - to be realistic about how politics actually work there, “borderless region of warring tribes” - we’ll look at each of the players and how they’re doing.

NATO
NATO is suffering some fierce casualties at a greater rate than ever before, tangling with both Taliban and local warlords who think they’re getting a little bit too interested in the opium fields that sprang up overnight when the country fell in ‘02. Many NATO nations contributing forces to the effort there are seriously considering withdrawal - most of them European nations with little to prove. Former Warsaw Pact nations have shown no sign of flagging support.

Taliban and al-Qaeda
While somewhat inappropriate to lump these two together, they nevertheless have developed such a tight operational bond during the GWOT that they may as well be treated as a single entity for the purposes of discussing Afghanistan. And both are doing much better there, thank you for asking, as their regrowth since fleeing the Safed Koh nearly six years ago has been practically unmolested. This is as much due to US complancency as anything - the kind of attitude exemplified by President Bush’s comments on the report linked above, saying that al-Qaeda is not as strong as before 9/11 when, in fact, that is precisely what the report says - but Pakistan helped too. But just as it is Pakistan’s protection and quiet support of the Taliban and al-Qaeda that has aided them, it is difference of opinion over what to do with the fickle, duplicitous military junta that has al-Qaeda reportedly undergoing an ideological split.

Pakistan
Yes, nobody really knows what to do with Pakistan these days, though growing public awareness of this in the US due to the report on al-Qaeda prompted the White House to state that “no options were off the table”, including invasion. Not that this is untrue, but it is a poorly timed statement. Firstly, I doubt it was as reassuring to Americans already wringing their hands over a ghastly, insoluble war and wondering whether their overstretched military will ever get out a country less than a fifth the size of Pakistan as it was disturbing to the people of Pakistan. It may come as a shock, but people generally react badly to when you say you’re seriously considering invading them. This is especially the case when President Musharraf and the army of Pakistan had been enjoying a surge in popularity as regards his policies of opposing Islamic militants with open force since the Red Mosque siege. But America has a right to be doubtful, what with Pakistan’s ISI being a long time supporter of Taliban, al-Qaeda and other Islamist groups it seeks to use as its foreign strong arm of plausible deniability. It surely makes policymakers in Washington eye some very long odds, and ponder whether to go all in on a bet that might be less of a sure thing than the support of Afghanistan’s people.

Afghanistan
Ah, yes. The people of Afghanistan are somewhat of a factor too. How’re they doing? They’re still locking their women up. They’re breaking records for opium cultivation, now providing 92% of the world’s heroin. And they’re getting a touch disgruntled over the increasing amounts of civilian casualties we’re inflicting on them. But by and large, they are the same “rustic” guys as ever, and as likely to side with whoever’s standing beside them at the moment as shoot him in the back when he looks away.

Of all the nations in the history of the world, Afghanistan is the one classically notorious for grinding armies down into dust with malaise, confusion and the stubborn unpredictability of the people. It happened to the Aryans, to Alexander the Great, and on and on, up to Russia and Britain playing their “Great Game” and both losing to the dusty house dealer, and, now, to us. This is not to say we should withdraw from Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda leadership is a tempting - albeit perpetually regenerating - target. Bagging bin Ladin would be a solid blow and some good PR for the GWOT. It would hardly slay the hydra and doesn’t even scrape the skin of curing Afghanistan’s ills, but it would be a mark of pride.

It is time, however, for the US to consider how expensive pride can be, and how many great empires found South Asia to be the collector of that tally.

At this moment, as we consider our relations with Pakistan and our stance against al-Qaeda, we might take another page from the books of Alexander and the British, and remember that getting the natives to do your fighting for you always ends up more cost-effective in the end.

Opponents of the Obama campaign, namely the ascendant Mitt Romney, today fostered another distortion akin to the one I earlier reported afflicting Mayor Giuliani. However, unlike the distortion of Giuliani’s quote, which was a petty move to fear-monger against a reasoned argument, the assault on Obama’s statements were monstrous on many levels. They also inspire a reflection on political discourse and will that, like my previous post, brings to mind a work of classic literature - Voltaire’s “Candide”.

The smear on Obama is particularly ugly because it raises the spectre of puritanical thought and distrust of government that makes America stand out among the countries of the West. First employed by Alan Keyes in 2004, the assertion of Mr. Romney is that Obama pushed through a law in Illinois that called for sex-education for kindergarteners. Mr. Romney’s response was a strident:

“How much sex education is age appropriate for a 5-year-old? In my mind, zero is the right number,”

Not a small number of distortions are present this recent salvo from Romney. Each are likely worthy of a post on this blog. But since this matter stirred larger and ponderous issues, I’ll iterate in brief:

First, Obama was chairman of a panel that had been tasked for a review of the state curriculum, something every state does from time to time - he did not champion some law from its infancy in left field to victory.

Secondly, victory was not had. The state-ordained committee’s legislation did not pass.

Thirdly, the legislation did not call for any specific program for kindergarteners, but only stated that education about sex would no longer be restricted, as it was by law, to 6-12 grade. In fact, the only part that specifically applied to younger children and that would have had personal resonance with Obama - who claims family members who were victims of pedophilic abuse - was that younger kids should be educated about what kind of touching is appropriate and inappropriate. Thanks to no laws restricting such education, unlike Illinois had and still has, children in numerous states are visited by law-enforcement personnel who tell them about this. The contentious piece of legislation would have lifted restriction on that and seen it implemented. And finally, the legislation specifically stated that all sex-education should be ” ‘age and developmentally appropriate’ and based on the latest scientific studies”.

Lastly, and perhaps most significantly, Romney himself supported such law. The Massachusetts state board of education put into law in 1999 that:

By the end of grade five, the Massachusetts Comprehensive Health Curriculum aims for children to be able to: (1) identify “the components, functions, and processes of the reproductive system,” (2) identify “the physical changes as related to the reproductive system during puberty,” (3) define “sexual orientation using the correct terminology (such as heterosexual, and gay and lesbian)” and (4) recognize “that diet, exercise, rest, and avoidance of risk behaviors such as smoking, drinking, and other substance use contribute to the health of a mother and fetus.”

Romney did not oversee that law’s implementation, but did nothing to affect it save to provide more support and funding for “abstinence” birth control. As anyone who grew up can tell you, being told you should not have sex is not the foolproof way to prevent it.

This assault was classless, crass and sickeningly false. It also played on parents’ basic and timeless fears that their children would be out of their control. These fears are exacerbated in America, which has had more terror about social programs and the socialists that support them than any other country in the West since the demolition of fascism. And once the nonsensical twisting of the Illinois law’s actual intent is dispensed with, it is this disturbing aspect of the nation’s character that is left to be addressed. The alarmism over the Illinois law is refined down to the question of why governing bodies like the state board of health, the state board of education, and the school districts, decide what to teach children at all. The question is one of where the line between the home and the community at large is drawn, why, and to what value?

Namely, is the government that is best the one that governs least?

Health rates and crime rates in more socialized countries are less than in America. Perhaps there is a connection to the provisions that the more socialized governments grant to the needy and disadvantages. Yet the history of social programs, at least anecdotally, suggests that whenever we do attempt to affect a positive with governance, we create a grim collateral cost.

I have two friends who attempted to enlist the aid of child protection services - one in Canada, one here in America - to protect children, and in both cases the results were disastrous. The perpetrators were not punished. The people who brought the issue to child services were, and heinously. The children remained abused without recourse.

Foster home programs in Rhode Island are ailing, with horror stories of children moved from one abusive foster family to the next becoming practically common. Though Rhode Island has suffered recent cutbacks to the program funding, these abuses occured over years. And there is no reason to suspect things are much different outside of Rhode Island.

And for the country that, among the West, “governs least”, we have the highest prison population in the world. Yes, you heard right, in the world. In absolute terms and per capita, we lead all the nations, including such notoriously draconian countries as Russia and China. Considering the effect on a person’s life - especially the devastation to their career - that results from incarceration, this is a grievous problem.

Consequently, Conservatives advocate for less government. The oft-heard excuse for cutting funding to programs, shaving away laws that would clarify education and services, and slashing regulations on industry is that government simply does not work. That anyone disagrees with the assertion that government is disfunctional I often find laughable, as people seem to hold government by standards that assume it should be more functional than any corporation. And so many Conservatives call for less social welfare, less aid to underprivileged groups, less funding for government sponsored programs, less alliances - in essence, less government.

Except there is a disturbing disjunction in their attitude and their policy. They not only assume government to be disfunctional; it is a foundation of their political platform. Yet when matters like incarceration, like privacy, like abortion, like physician-assisted suicide, and like defense strategy arise, this concern about disfunction becomes irrelevant. No matter that incarceration is the very definition of government repression - we need stronger sentencing at the same time we need less funding to care for and protect the incarcerated. No matter that privacy is a fundamental right in liberal democracies like America - it has to be dispensed with to keep our families safe. No matter that unavailability of abortion often produces an unexpected economic burden - keep cutting funding to welfare mothers, social services; keep condemning teen mothers as harlots who failed to listen up at their abstinence only classes; make sure they are brought into this world, then do damn all to help them fit.

The ultimate disjunction is defense strategy. Up until the era of Reagan, being conservative was hand in hand with an isolating or, at least, cost-effective, reluctant foreign policy. Now the Conservative line is aggressive, supporting notions like unilateral action and pre-emptive warfare and dismantling of alliances that were unheard of since the time of James K. Polk. And yet this strikes me as strange considering that the central tenet of Conservatism is that the government should not tell people what to do. More than a matter of plain principal that the state should not bully people, government intervention is clumsy, callous and inefficient. Given this, why then do Conservatives eagerly advocate thrusting government on other nations?

Why, if we cannot govern our own people, do we find it either moral or cost effective to govern another? Why, if we should not tell families when they should explain that babies don’t come from the stork, should we tell a people of faith that they cannot include too many references to the Koran in their Constitution? Why, if we have such an abhorrent prison population, do we think we can and should tell people how a civil society gets along - instructing them at the barrel of a gun?

Whether it is motorcycle helmet laws or restrictions on gun ownership, Conservatives advocate telling government to leave them alone. But when it comes to drug laws or stepping in to lay American men and women’s lives down for monetary and strategic interests abroad, it becomes perfectly acceptable to tell other people what to do. Is it because they believe that the people we force into submission are less advanced, less intelligent, or so incapable of deciding their own political will that they need to be told what to think and do, whereas we do not? Can they not see that the laws, like in Massachusetts, that set benchmarks for their children’s sex education are predicated on that very notion?

On the other side, liberals argue that “it takes a village” to raise a child, and take a similar view of the globe. They often stand for international institutions and for invention on moral grounds in conflicts, as in the Balkans in the 90s. And yet, for every Balkans, there is a Rwanda, a Mogadishu, a Haiti - some vile episode in failed or flawed interventionism. Barack Obama recently said in a Foreign Affairs article that we need to force the UN Humans Rights Council to have more integrity in who it censures, citing that it has eight times condemned Israel and yet has not condemned nations like Cuba and Myanmar. Yet how much integrity does America show the world when he just today said that concern over a genocide in Iraq is not cause enough to remain there in force?

Obama sounded just like a Conservative talking about how welfare doesn’t work when you consider cost-assessment when he said:

Well, look, if that’s the criteria by which we are making decisions on the deployment of U.S. forces, then by that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now — where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife — which we haven’t done,” Obama said in an interview with The Associated Press.

“We would be deploying unilaterally and occupying the Sudan, which we haven’t done. Those of us who care about Darfur don’t think it would be a good idea,”

Whenever strategic defense commitments become costly, Democrats seem inclined to leave them. They say they simply do not work. It is the same argument, with the same sound evidence and same numbers and same philosophy that Conservatives happily apply to domestic government welfare services.

In Voltaire’s “Candide”, the sunny Dr. Pangloss often consoles Candide during the grostesque hardships they suffer that things could be worse - that they are living in “the best of all possible worlds”. A professor mine once joked that the best of his all possible worlds would be a President who taxes like a Conservative and wages war like a Democrat. He liked his money. By comparison, the Libertarian Party likes, above all else, their appreciation of freedoms. They stand by that they do not want government to tell them what to do, nor to waste money and blood trying to tell other countries what to do - with welfare or warfare.

In the end, I believe one’s principles come down to the same thing government’s hamhanded, high-idealled actions do - individuals and their experiences.

Of the two friends I mentioned earlier who called out for social services to protect children and suffered to achieve futility, one was fond of gutting the Bush administration over its cuts in spending on government programs. When I argued the inefficiency of many of those programs, she would say of the families in poverty and being bankrupted by everything from health care costs to simple cost of living, “you just can’t see that and do nothing.”

The other looks at Iraq, and despite all the horrible cost and turmoil in the conduct of the war, is resolute that we should stay. She sees the possibility - the likelihood - of ethnic cleansing, and tells me, “you just can’t see that and do nothing.”

Hopefully, somewhere in the middle, good intentions will meet flawed action, and together we will achieve the best of all possible worlds.

Since Congress seems to be putting on a theater production with its debate of the latest measure on the war and withholding of an important defense bill, I thought I would add some of my lines to the Chorus.

A comment by a visitor to this blog, Truth Hunter, characterized Congress’ performance succinctly: It is “shameful”. Both attitudes towards the war could and should agree on this.

For those that see no virtue in a military solution or demand a change of strategy backed by legislative will, it is shameful because it abandons effective, bi-partisan options to enact this in favor of a bullying, hubristic tone. The measure put forth by Lamar Alexander, a prominent Republican, would have written the “change in strategy” that polls show most of the American public desires into enforceable law. It would not have had set timetables for withdrawal, but it would have effectively taken the strategic conduct of the war out of the President’s hands and shown a bipartisan consensus to scale down troop commitment. Instead, the Democrats have in essence declared that unless the Legislature’s control of the war is done their way, by their word, it will only continue to be a source of fear and discontent for the public. This sounds rather familiar. But unlike President Bush, who many Americans invested great hope and solidarity in as Commander-in-Chief, reasons to trust the vacillating and compromising Democrats have yet to be presented. It is not their ordained role to direct military affairs, unlike the Executive Branch, but they act as though it is.

Their “my way or the highway to hell” attitude is petty, more interested in demanding submission from the opposition than achieving cooperation. It implicitly demands that the opposition and its present and former supporters in the public concede that the Democrats are right and the President wrong. This statement is not only irrelevant considering the urgency of the mortal struggle in Iraq, it is also empty. In the latter case, even staunch supporters of Bush have acknowledged he made serious mistakes in the planning and execution of the war. No one needs to be told his management of the war was poor - we’ve heard it enough times; it’s been proven. We now care to know how the management was poor and what to do about it. And this concern is unaddressed by the former assumption of the Democrats’ implicit demand - that they are right. For, in authorizing the war, in offering no resolve to achieve alternatives, and in presenting no allowances for the real, dire, human cost of what happens after a withdrawal, they have most certainly not been “right”.

And for supporters of a sturdy military presence in Iraq to secure the ailing government as best as it can be, Congress’ actions are shameful because they refuse to respond to the specific facts on the ground. They do not speak to how to manage the “political solution”. They do not give any credit to the narrowing of focus in our security operations that has occurred due to Petraeus, aiming at encircling and destroying the other major foreign influences in Iraq - al-Qaeda and Iran - rather than going after Nationalists. Most significantly in terms of the message the Democrats send, they are not waiting for Petraeus’ assessment on the Surge strategy, nor waiting to see how it plays out for its closing two months. In the bloody and confusing business of war, resolve is important - looking beyond the numbers - but it requires a political vision and will. Can anyone concerned with what a draw-down in troop strength will do to security in Iraq take comfort in what the Democrats have projected will be the result? Have they ever done an actual analysis of the result, and presented it? I don’t think even their supporters can answer that most crucial question about our reduction in fight against the insurgents: “What then?”

In “Hamlet”, an upstart monarch debates over which of his “bad dreams” - assumptions and fears - to act on when deciding whether to commit regicide. All the while, the bodies hit the floor and the madness mounts. In the end, only an orgy of violence and self-destruction settles the matter, leaving a country without a king, only a slaughter.

America’s course in Iraq is not a forum for the Democratic leadership to present itself as a dark hero in the maelstrom. It is a real slaughter, and daily, and it is real consensus, not uncompromising domination, that is required to end it.

Our best hope now seems to be that the Chorus - the classic theatrical role of the people’s voice - will roar loud enough to drown out their arrogant ramblings and force a united will to resolve this conflict.

Prime Minister Maliki has announced that US troops can leave “any time they want”, and in essence added that we could also not let the door hit us on the ass on the way out.

Is this a show of confidence? Unlikely. More likely, considering the wealth of criticism of US actions he heaped on us, he expects that the US’ plan is dashing his dreams of arming Shiite militias through the Iraqi Army we finance, and crushing the Sunni militias as soon as the US, exhausted of war, departs. For now we have a more effective and balanced military strategy. Now we have - at least rhetorical - emphasis on the primacy of a political solution. Now we have accountability leveled against his government.

And so now Maliki fears that we are on to his vision of a state-sponsored Shiite insurgency. If not “on to him”, at least that we are canny enough to know that arming Sunni extremists puts a check on Shiite extremists. He doubtless fears the outcome that we have suggested the Surge strategy could enable - armed Sunnis, armed Shi’a, and an Iraqi Parliament forced by the presence of a high-level US delegation to enact effective reconciliation, or at least to be held more accountable. He must be reading my blog.

Or he sees the writing on the wall. Either way, he knows that we’re now taking a subversive approach towards Sunni opposition, and that deflates the Shi’a predominance of the Iraqi state’s struggle against the militias. He also must suspect that while we work to focus on al-Qaeda with all Nationalist forces we can muster to our cause, we will also not tolerate the blatant intervention of another foreign agency - Iran. That Maliki’s announcement came merely a day after we hit a Shiite police station suspected of being a nexus of collaboration with Iran’s “Delta Force”, the “Quds Force”, and attacked the financial assets of that force, is no coincidence.

Now Maliki has given the White House a poison pill to swallow in reply. The Administration’s options to respond are severely limited. His critics, even moderate Republicans among them, will surely say, “You are being told by the American people to leave. Now the Iraq people have said you can leave. Do you think you know better than the American people and the Iraqi people?”

And, of course, we do know better - we know that Maliki is not an ally, has never been an ally, but is an adversary. He is an extension of the will to Shiite dominance that has in its factious ranks such other charming characters as Mukhtada al-Sadr. By further extension, he is connected by a singularity of vision to Iran.

I have sometimes felt Iraq could be well-served by simply acknowledging that it is a Shi’a dominated state. The Shi’a are the leading force in the political structure we endorsed - a democratic structure. If we, too, have been forthright in our stated aims for the Iraqi government’s formation, we would abide by their wishes and leave.

But if we are to be honest with ourselves, we need to recognize that in Prime Minister Maliki we do not face a mere difference of opinion over the course of the Surge, but a hostile regime of our own creation.

A co-worker recently asked my opinion on the bloody outcome to the Red Mosque siege in Pakistan.

I noted I hadn’t commented on it because it lacked the kind of qualities that would drive American debate asunder on the issue. Democrats and Republicans alike would be resolved that the storming of a mosque that abducted citizens for “re-education” would be a good thing. But after a minute’s discussion, I realized it would be worthwhile to post something about how the West would do well to recognize it as not too good a thing.

Many might see the storming of the mosque as a sign that Pakistan’s President Musharraf is making a new effort to eradicate extremism in his country. It is not. It is a case of Musharraf and his handlers in the Pakistani intelligence network - the ISI, which has essentially brokered power in the country for the last three decades - protecting themselves. The Red Mosque was not a problem because it was an extreme religious voice, or a nexus of terrorist support, or a de facto theocracy in a major urban center.

It became a problem when it bit the hand that fed it. The ISI and the Red Mosque had collaborated on a number of matters and, as a result, the Mosque received a blind eye when it came to many of its misdeeds. But when some of its over-exuberant students burned down a government ministry and then sparked violence with the government pickets set up around the Mosque in response, things turned extreme. At that point, the Pakistani government surely wrote off the Mosque as more harm than good, and took a bold move in eradicating its influence in Islamabad.

This does not change the matters that Americans most care about: It does not jeopardize the resurgent, centralized leadership of al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan’s frontier provinces - a process the ISI at least abetted, if not entirely facilitated. It does not mean Pakistan’s power is shifting towards the Democratic. It is, in essence, little more than good vintage for bloody watercooler talk.

The mixed report on the progress of the Iraq situation coming out of the White House this week has been reviewed by both supporters and critics of the President’s policy with too general a perspective. Detractors have been quick to seize on the eight of eighteen grades that the Iraqi government has been found making unsatisfactory progress in. The White House and its advocates have fixed on the eight satisfactory grades. But an objective observation finds a definite divide in the report that again underscores the point this blog and other defense analysts have noted - that in Iraq, there is a distinct party that is now making the grade and a distinct party that is failing.

The US military and the sectarian groups it has coaxed to join in its security efforts are passing the grade. The Surge, while not entirely successful, has begun to isolate the greatest threat to current objectives for stability - al-Qaeda’s coalition. It has done this tactically, by securing neighborhoods with an enduring presence and by changing the mission objective from clearing the enemy to fixing, surrounding and eliminating it. And it has done this strategically, by enabling the ire of Nationalist militias against the al-Qaeda interlopers who endanger their own ploys for control. In the once-lethal Anbar province, in the south and in the areas around Mosul, regions that were once meat-grinders for Americans now have local militias striving to drive out al-Qaeda. This is progress. It is not final, nor will it endure without real reconciliation, but it is real. It should be appreciated.

Conversely, the Iraqi government has failed. While the bodies of American soldiers and their Iraqi comrades provide the scar tissue, the infectious political factionalism is still being allowed to fester. Giving militias more ability to control their neighborhoods makes them better enemies to al-Qaeda, not better allies of a unity government. The measures of true reconciliation and power sharing - provincial rule; even-handed enforcement of the law; oil revenue sharing; the reverse of de-Baathification - all are stalled and no one with power in Baghdad has their shoulder to the wheel to force them to move. There is no incentive for them. The common people throughout Iraq want better lives; the politicians in Baghdad want to fire up their base for what most see as an inevitable all-out civil war.

One grade on the checklist, militia disarmament, seems ludicrous in its inclusion. Is the Iraq government really expected to disarm militias? How can this be when the US is actively arming the overtly sectarian Sunni militias while by extension arming the Shiites who dominate the legitimate security force structure? The notion is absurd - it asks the Iraqis to take away the very guns we are giving the militias. Then again, absurdity never got in the way of a war: just today a significant assault intended to disarm Shiite militias with likely connections with Iran enflamed public hatred and disgust of America’s forces.

But many of the “benchmarks” are not absurd. They are clear and concrete measures necessary to achieving unity. The problem with them is, as we’ve observed consistently, that no one is advocating or acting on them with the same sense of duty and sacrifice as they are the military aspects of the Iraq strategy. The White House has sent a sustained, innovative and forceful troop presence into the conflict, but not a diplomatic presence. It has allowed commanders to sit down with former enemies in the Sunni Nationalist brigades until some kind of alliance is reached, but has not demanded that the Iraqi government similarly sit down with high-level American politicians until an alliance is reached. It feels at liberty to lock entire townships like Baqouba and Sadr City in a vice grip of troops, but has not locked in the only people who can truly enact an end to sectarian strife with legislation - the Iraqi parliament.

It must. There will be no enduring peace without its framework being laid now, and laid strong. In order to achieve this, the White House has to abandon its position of isolating itself from responsibility for Iraq’s political attitude and has to adopt a stance like Eisenhower when he said of the Korean conflict in ‘52, “I will go to Korea”.

Go to Iraq, President Bush. If you will not send yourself, send someone with true muscle and significance, such as Vice-President Cheney or Secretary Rice. Send them to some air-conditioned complex in the heart of the Green Zone now declared “satisfactory” in its safety, lock the doors, and do not come out until legislation is drafted and enacted - until Iraq has as substantial a foundation for peace as it does for security.

Once was the time that the US and a starving, belligerent North Korea were working directly to satisfy the ailing nation’s energy needs without giving North Korea the opportunity or incentive to develop nuclear weapons.

Now, seven years and seven North Korean nuclear warheads later, we are almost back to that point. North Korea remains a fugitive from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, has made no binding agreements as to working towards a non-nuclear Korean peninsula, and has only just today set a date to allow the inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) back into the country. There’s no telling what they’ll find or, rather, what their unsmiling handlers will allow them to find.

What happened in the intervening years? What dismantled the hard-won “Agreed Framework” of the Clinton era that had kept North Korea without a weapon or effective delivery system?

Not to point fingers or anything…

The Agreed Framework got tossed out the window little after Clinton’s successor took office. Things went rapidly downhill from there, with the US Administration speaking with censure against the DPRK and then sitting around, doing nothing to back it up. What commenced was a tete-a-tete with the North Koreans creeping closer to their weapons program ways and the White House waving its finger while still refusing to talk.

Vice-President Cheney allegedly summed up the policy well by saying “We don’t negotiate with evil. We defeat evil.”

North Korea is really evil. Its enormous army - nearly the size of our entire armed forces combined - is designed for the sole purpose of conquering the Korean peninsula. It has huge counterfeiting organizations, kidnaps people for the sexual delight of its autocratic leader and maintains a seedy presence in classic espionage settings such as Macao. And yes, it aids and abets terrorists. If there actually had been an Axis of Evil - and give it time; could happen - it surely would have been the “Dr. No” of the organization. However, shutting it out and refusing direct talks with it - the only kind of talks that have ever worked to achieve something of dire significance with North Korea - only isolated its mighty resources for nasty deeds. It kicked out inspectors, enriched uranium, developed a delivery system that could strike the US, and sold all manner of this weaponry to such “rational actors” as Libya. And the fact is that with weapons inspectors there, with the incentive of being able to prop up its hellish robot state with foreign-financed energy, these things might have been prevented. Limited oversight was still better than no oversight. Limited incentive to comply with international will was still more than no incentive.

And as for “defeating evil”? And “not negotiating with it”? Well, after North Korea’s downplayed nuclear test, talks resumed mighty fast, and now the beginnings of another assistance “framework” have been formed.

The point of this is not that inspections in the 90s were foolproof - or autocrat-proof. Surely the IAEA was deceived. It was not until the dismissal of inspectors that the DPRK undertook its boldest acts, at a pace now unrestricted, but the IAEA presence alone may not have been enough to keep the Korean Peninsula nuclear-free. The point is that the US forgot a basic principle of foreign relations - as with Iraq, with Afghanistan and with the ABM Treaty:

Do not break something before you know how to rebuild it.

Now, seven years and seven warheads on, we are returning to the North Koreans with an even more limited, more sweetened offering in order to get them to restore what, a long time back, was not really working in the first place.

We noted in last post that as far as foreign entanglements go, Iraq is a thicket of razor wire. We’re doing a good job driving the main insurgent activity into Diyala and out of Baghdad’s immediate environs, but this only serves to give the political factions in the capital the latitude to improve the infrastructure there, and those factions are doing no more than fighting over how best to be factious. Even that latitude is jeopardized by insufficiencies in the Iraqi led and comprised security forces committed to protecting the Green Zone, as an attack this last hour suggests.

So we are investing critical billions - is there any other kind? - into creating a fragile shell for power players who use it as an arena. And why should they do otherwise? The Shia expect Civil War to be an inevitability if they wait long enough, just as they consider their victory in it to be similarly inevitable. The Sunni expect no less from the Shia, and spend their time waving for help with one hand while hoarding weaponry with the other - those that aren’t already formal or informal members of the insurgency. And the Kurds realize they’re running their own show. They profit from the current situation because it means the other two factions are ignoring them. But meanwhile, their house of cards risks tipping into the quagmire as the Turkish Army, some 140,000 strong, stomps their feet and prepares to invade in order to prevent terror cells from striking them from within Iraq’s borders.

That - more so than the July 15th assessment, from which we can only expect more tongue-clucking - is the real Sword of Damocles in this scenario. If the Turks invade Iraq, it will effectively bring a whole different level of conflict to the ailing state, with not a simple two but three major parties involved. It forces the Coalition of the Willing to either defend Iraq from the Turks, defend the Turks from Iraq, or somehow work out an accomodation.

And yet, we have heard nothing from the White House but a bland statement of “concern” from Tony Snow. Not exactly hard words that demand action, nor give the potential crisis it’s due priority - just like the factional disputes in Iraq are shrugged off as someone else’s responsibility. It has to be realized that it’s not a matter of whether the Iraqis can or cannot “stand up” on their own - it is that they have very little incentive to do so. US withdrawal is not a stick that the Shia militias - Prime Minister Maliki’s Dawa party included - are especially concerned about. They have to be made to care, one way or another, otherwise we are acting inadequately and in vain.

So why do we continue to fight? Why sacrifice for a cause that is not only not our own, but directed by people uninterested in having us?

The answer is succinctly put by Colin Powell: “You break it, you buy it.”

This is our mess, whether we want to lay down lives on it or not. When we wrested control of Iraq from the Hussein government, we had to have the means to control the country ourselves. We didn’t. But the necessity still has not gone away, and abandoning Iraq because it’s unstable only means we enable that instability - enable it and will have to suffer the consequences when it afflicts neighbors we won’t so readily abandon, such as Saudi Arabia and Israel.

I’m not echoing the line about the terrorists following us home. It is not a matter of “fight them there or fight them here”. That’s not the way terrorists operate. Iraq has been a financial sinkhole for al-Qaeda in many ways, but it doesn’t prevent international terrorism from striking directly at the nations of the West. If anything, our presence in Iraq increases the recruitment of organizations like al-Qaeda by making membership in its ranks seem to Muslims like valid forms of resistance against an occupier. Remove us from Iraq and the conflict becomes one between Mesopotamian nations, not between a Muslim resistor and a non-Muslim occupier. Even if resentment against American doesn’t decline, the actual motivating factor of the ongoing resistance will be removed. Internationally, membership in al-Qaeda will suffer.

No, al-Qaeda will do as it always has - strike us however best it can. But, as the war’s detractors have long insisted, Iraq is not about al-Qaeda. The consequences of abandoning it aren’t either.

They are about Turkey, invading to protect itself from a lawless neighborhood harboring terrorists, now without the protection of the US. They are about Iran fostering the rise of a Shia puppet state and stirring the pot of ethnic conflict. They are about Saudi Arabia quietly financing Sunni nationalists to counter Iran. In sum, they are about complete regional upheaval. Doomsday scenarios of an enormous caliphate under Iran’s control are unlikely. More likely are skyrocketing gas prices, a spike in regional terrorist attacks, and a dire risk to American allies.

They are about having to go back, under yet worse circumstances, for yet more unclear objectives.

The political solution does not readily present itself. So far, surprisingly, we have been far more readily disposed to scrap our relatively-successful military operations than we are to scrapping the far more flawed, more important political exercise of the Iraqi government. This seems absurd. We are talking about dismantling the military authority in Iraq avidly enough, when what /really/ is the issue is that political authority needs to be built up - even if it’s from the ground up.

British Raj style of governance may be unappealing. But we need to consider if failure to save Iraq and its surrounding nations from a catastrophe we caused and the likelihood of having to return is even less appealing.