Before We Begin II - I've gotten lots of good e-mails on the Grand Strategy brouhaha, and I hope to get to all of them, but this one from Matthew Hogan stands out:

I just saw Juan Cole talking about Perle shilling for Chalabi at a hearing he (Cole) was also testifying at. Now it may not have occurred to Cole until afterwards but if not,.. his writing reminded me of my grievance at too little nastiness -- because why didnt he say exactly that point at the hearing if he could: "Senators, my copanelist is ACTUALLY testifying in favor of turning Iraq into an undemocractic regime for the benefit of a favored man of dubious credibility." We need to say these things, not just carp about it.

I don't like granting the warbloggers the burden of proof. Our answer ought to be "My policy prescription was simply the obvious: to not run into a burning building in an unknown neighborhood while doused in gasoline. The results were easy to forsee and they happened. I don't NEED to explain what I woud have done differently because no one should have to offer an alternative or be an expert on firefighting to have a right to say DONT RUN INTO A BURNING BUILDING DOUSED IN GASOLINE! Do I have an idea what should be and have been done differently? Yes, but it doesnt matter. And if I do have a prescription, it doesnt matter if it's smart or not. It doesnt matter if my answer is a suggestion to do nothing. The point is YOU GUYS said: 'run into a burning buidling doused in gasoline.' I pointed the idiocy out. Correctly. The burden is on you Mr./Ms. Hawk to explain your idocy not make me have to disprove mine as on this issue I have been shown correct for the reasons I stated."

Don't claim or concede the burden of proof on Iraq.

I completely agree with Matt's general point: the hawks don't get to be the ones to judge what's wise or just or anything else. Their fancy that they are the thesis committee before whom the rest of us must defend our ideas and even our attitudes was arrogant before Iraq War Phase III. Now it's just absurd.

However. There are good reasons to wade into the question of How Do We Get There From Here. As a minor matter, some hawks are wavering and others have reversed themselves. While I wish this had happened sooner - soon enough to have prevented this mess in the first place - I have no interest in stuffing, um, non-premature doves into hairshirts. It's not practical, for one thing. Why make it hard for people to join your team? I think the most important political lesson I've learned in the last three years is that a libertarian must take his allies where he finds them - entangling alliances aren't for us, either! And a lot of the waverers and reversers are people I'll be genuinely glad to have "back" - either individuals of whom I've always been fond or simply types of people for whom I have instinctive sympathy.

Next, I'm serious about changing our country's approach to defense and foreign policy. I know what I'd like to see. The question is how to get there. This is not a matter of submitting ideas to the thesis committee for approval. Nor, really, is it a matter of laying down my own law. It is a tricky business to stop riding the tiger, and hegemony is a tiger. Libertarians want to give up all kinds of interventions, in foreign affairs, in the domestic economy, in social relations. The question is how to do so. If you decide to "get rid of social security," what form does that take? What about people very close to retirement age who made a lifetime of decisions on the assumption that it was there? Imagine you got elected mayor on a libertarian platform. What could you do, practically, about the drug war, given the imposing presence of federal law and law enforcement? In the absence of true legalization, would ratcheting down enforcement of what remains a fundamentally criminal enterprise in your bailiwick simply draw crooks from other jurisdictions? In the case of moving from willful empire to non-interventionism, there are a host of practical and moral problems.

One thing I'm certain of is that I am not smart enough to figure them all out myself. If any one person were, then we wouldn't need this cumbersome business of representative democracy. Putting ideas on the transition into the public sphere accomplishes a number of things. It brings more brains to the problem. It demonstrates to people of good will that it is possible to imagine an alternative to the current mess, that we needn't be prisoners of our own momentum.

Even carping criticisms can be useful, because they may spark useful ideas. For instance, my initial stab at the question of North Korea was pretty messed up. I'm not ashamed of this. As you may have noticed, the hawks haven't a clue what to do about North Korea either. We get a mixture of denial - at one point Glenn Reynolds judged that Kim Jong-Il, who actually has tried to use the prospect of nukes as blackmail, was somehow less dangerous than Saddam Hussein, who didn't even have nukes to play with - and fantasy (we'll invade!). The Clinton Administration came up with an unsatisfactory policy. The Bush Administration denounced it, but ended up, so far, pursuing the same approach. Which really is unsatisfactory. But by zeroing in on the Korea section, critics both fair-minded and foul have helped me rethink the matter, about which more in a later post.

Lastly, do not imagine that I overestimate either my own power or that of non-interventionists generally. We are weak now and have been weakening for more than a century. I am prey to the pessimistic counsels you might expect. There was a question Andy Kashdan asked two years ago this month. There is the ending of the I, Claudius miniseries, Claudius on his death bed conversing with the Sybil: And the Empire, he asks? Will the Empire fall? To which the Sybil replies

The Empire will go on and on and on.

Official US policy may continue to ignore me and my ilk as comfortably as it has done so far. Should that happen, we can at least have provided a counter-tradition that may be useful to whoever succeeds us, as someone will, a voice from the jester's chair reminding it didn't have to be this way.

Before We Begin there's something we need to get clear. I am speaking to the hawks here, especially the liberal ones.

You are the last people on Earth who get to say someone else is "naive," "impractical" or ignorant of how the world really works at this point. The absolute last.

I'm glad we cleared that up.

More this weekend, in the meantime, responses, from very different perspectives, from Diana Moon, Josh Buermann and Alan Sullivan.

Everybody's a Critic but some of them are temperate and judicious. Andrew Olmsted responds to my Grand Strategy, as does Jay Currie. Michael Cardwell offers a more Armed Liberalish rejoinder. Responses will be a matter for the weekend.

A Fanboy's Chick Check - This is exciting - Johanna Draper Carlson, legendary proprietor of Comics Worth Reading, has started a blog. She promises a focus on food, reading and writing, including, I suspect, a fair amount of fitness blogging. I'm really looking forward to following this one. The blog format will give her a place for the kind of stuff that doesn't fit in the well-crafted comics reviews that have been CWR's stock in trade - shorter things; longer, rambling things; non-comics-related things. See, for instance, the "Chick Check for This Week's Marvels."

A Mighty Wind - My Grand Strategy has drawn a - analysis? no; critique? not exactly; hm . . . reaction from the self-styled "Armed Liberal" of Winds of Change. (Maybe abreaction would be better.) It's my poetry night, so it'll be awhile before I can tackle such substance as the item contains. But for now, it strikes me that most of what you need to know is contained in his title, "Autarky in the USA." It's a revealing confusion of terms. "Autarky" is the deliberate policy of abjuring commerce with other countries or regions. My Grand Strategy calls for more trade and travel. (In fact, Lean Left took me to task for this very aspect.) But to a self-styled liberal hawk, if you decline to scatter your troops around the globe and attack other countries that have not attacked you, you're just not relating.

(Cf. Patrick Nielsen Hayden on the "war on world conservatism.")

Read All About It - Reader Jennifer Marcalino tips me to ReadPrint.com, an ad-free online library with similarities to Bartleby. What I cherish Bartleby for is the reference library, and ReadPrint doesn't have one, but I really like its layout for the classic works it does have.

The Rest of a Grand Strategy - Interesting reactions so far to the other day's Grand Strategy item. Two things stand out:

1) Boy did I overdo the nuking North Korea thing. The true deterrent is deposing Kim Jong-Il and there are non-nuclear ways to do that. If Kim Jong-Il hadn't outright threatened to sell his country's nukes to third parties, I wouldn't be so concerned about the People's Republic as a threat to the United States. But he did. You could make a case that this is the international relations equivalent to joking about a bomb in the airport ticket line, and say we treat those either too harshly or just right. But I agree with reader Madeleine Ferwerda that the initial version of my proposal touching North Korea was over the line and I plan to modify it accordingly.

2) Lots of people laughed, with varying degrees of bitterness, about the foreign student humanities requirements. It's interesting that this one is such a hot button, since I think it's the section I most heavily qualified in the proposal itself. Certain Agitator commenters took issue with the notion that America's universities are "the glory of our educational system." Hey, I can relate. But: they're a damn site better than the secondary schools; they are clearly a draw, since foreigners flock to them, particularly at the post-graduate level. I might as easily have said "America's graduate schools are the glory . . . "

Also, many people seem to have mistaken my meaning about the value of the humanities course requirements, pointing out that the average collegiate American Studies course is no place to indoctrinate one in love for the American System. True but not the point. The idea is to put foreign students in classes where they must tackle cultural and political issues with people from backgrounds other than their own. And I'd be as happy if they studied Dostoyevsky as Tocqueville.

In any case, I am not without ideological qualms about such a grand federal mandate. Consider it an optional part of the Great Disengagement. Let's face it, a tiny proportion of the Muslim students who come to the US become terrorists, and the proportion of those few who would be saved from sin by my educational scheme is likely to be pretty small.

But as for the rest of it, boy am I smart! Do what I say, now!

"It's hard to say which of these sides is more contemptible" - Tim Cavanaugh tells us what he really thinks about the equivocal second thoughts of certain hawks and their hawkish critics.

Boy, do I understand the impulse. I also hear a little "Better late than never" voice in my head. But a lot of the second-thoughters really are going in vile directions, wanting to impose a strong man against the locals' will. They don't seem to have repented of intervention, just the (imagined) kinder, gentler version. I suppose they also serve, if they help well-intentioned "humanitarian" interventionists see how their bright hopes inevitably crash.

I've been toying with the idea that Iraq presents a classic Pick Two Out of Three situation, a la "fast, cheap and good." Iraq's three would be Stable, Democratic and Pro-American. Define "stable" as unitary and mostly free of civil strife, "democratic" as regular change of government by free and fair elections and "Pro-American" as allowing enduring bases, allowing those bases to be used to pressure or conquer other countries in the region and taking America's lead on issues touching Israel. It would be very revealing which two the various interventionist factions would choose if forced. (That one in the middle looks vulnerable!)

Problem is, I can't convince myself that two out of three are possible.

Non-Iraq-Free Blogwatch Item - Ginmar has the latest from the front.

Tacitus says we're too nice re Fallujah. Tex says we're just losing. I say, OUTLOOK UNCLEAR TRY AGAIN LATER.

The Command Post discovers that, per the Jerusalem Post, a French insurance company will "compensate Jews who owned property in Iraq and fled in the early 1950s, a precedent that could pave the way for reparations for some 850,000 Jews who left Arab countries, officials said Tuesday."

Very Quickie Blogwatch - Daniel Drezner suggests a hopeful irony regarding the FCC's sudden enthusiasm for massive fines.

Courtney Knapp has your ice cream futures report.

Cafe Hayek ponders radical calorie restriction diets. For my tastes (as it were), there's a huge difference between 1150 and 1950 calories a day, though.

Andrew David Chamberlain considers how not to be boring about the boring subject of government regulation.

Brett Peters applies the "Don't Tread on Me" principle, with followup links to advice on exerminating the brutes..

PJ Doland reports that Hellboy's success means the Watchmen movie gets the green light. W00t!

Did I use "W00t" right?

Help a Blogger Out - If there's a link to the "final" Sunday Peanuts cartoon on the web, I can't find it. This is the one from early 2000 with Peppermint Patty in the rain after the ball game that is not funny at all - it is rather one of the great achievements in utter bleakness. It may not actually have been the final original-content Peanuts color strip; it just felt that way. If your Internet Fu exceeds my own, and you wish to demonstrate it by sending me a link, I'd be grateful.

(I realize that a browser screen probably doesn't do the cartoon justice. Still, it would be worth having a link to point people to when I want to discuss it. And yes, I realize that the last 30-odd years of Peanuts were not funny at all. This was a very different kind of not funny.)

Now You Can't Say You Didn't Get the Memo - Dig in. It'll probably be Thursday until I've turned it into digestible blog bits. You might want to read Jason Vest's article on same too.

How Waffle - From the Borowitz Report:

OSAMA: PIRACY THREATENS TERROR-TAPE INDUSTRY

Bin Laden Bemoans Free Downloads of Spooky Pronouncements

(I'll grant you that the piece goes downhill somewhat after the subhed.)

Pet 'raq's - Proving that notions of the speed of "internet time" are exaggerated, Matthew Barganier tackles the "pet Iraqi" phenomenon in his latest column. (I should talk about speed, right?) There's a bit of ahistoricism in his account of the Salam Pax Phenomenon - Salam was never universally admired by hawkish bloggers. And by restricting himself to a Salam-Zeyad contrast, he misses how hawkish affections have moved on to even more congenial bloggers like the Iraq the Model folks, whose very site name heralds acceptance of the expansive "reverse domino" theory of Arab democratization. But these days I understand how word count limits work a lot better than I used to. There's just never enough time to cover everything.

Stay Tuned - Our Man Deeds is heading home. He promises

NLT the 23d of April, I hope to publish a two part After Action Report of my time with CPA. What I thought was good, what was bad and what was plain Ugly.

I look forward to reading it. My hope is that, back home, he'll feel free to be a bit more candid than a lot of his on-the-scene blogging struck me.

Late Night Mail to a Defeatist - Yeah, I'm a week late. I apologize. But there's some good stuff commenting on last week's "Late Night Thoughts."

From Sean T. Collins:

Jim, that really was some post, and I do know how you feel. I just wonder why doves feel this way about human suffering through violence when the U.S. has gotten involved, but such 30-graf long dark posts of the soul are nowhere to be found when it's Saddam Hussein or whoever else who's doing the killing. Hussein, of course, would not be clawing the ground to prevent himself from being dragged into Grozny. He'd go directly to Grozny, do not pass Go, do not collect $200. I look at our current conflict with a Shiite rebellion, and I look at Saddam's conflict with a Shiite rebellion from the early 90s, and I can't understand how anyone can see the former as being somehow worse than the latter

I've been pretty clear all along that I care much more about the United States than any other country, and that my principle is Hippocratic. Sins of omission are less malign than those of commission. Nor am I consoled by the prospect of inserting "not as bad as Saddam Hussein" into the Pledge of Allegiance. And keep in mind that it's early days yet. If we really do resolve to do whatever it takes to win, who knows where we end up? On his own blog, Sean makes it clear how wrongheaded he finds my parochialism:

Though I do not lose sleep over the death of fascist myrmidons, I also do not think that the life of one American is of more inherent value than the life of one innocent Iraqi or Rwandan or Afghan.

He says a lot more, ending by comparing America's duty to that of Christ himself. In other words, a political messiah complex. From there it's a short distance to a martyr complex. Sean's call to continually spend American blood and treasure until some imagined final victory over evil is the international relations version of co-dependency.

Richard Puchalsky writes

I know that this moment in history feels really bad, but you should try to stop giving yourself so much responsibility just so you can agonize over it. You spoke out against the war from the start, but there was no way of stopping it -- the Republicans controlled the Presidency, Senate, House, and Supreme Court, and majority American opinion is divided between the apathetic and the jingoistic. Nor will you have any ability to speed the ending of the war. That will happen as soon as the American middle class starts to feel that its sons may have something to lose, or that they are losing too much financially. At that time they will seize on the writings of a few token peaceniks, which they will suddenly find themselves in agreement with, so that they won't have to feel bad about supporting the war at long as it was other people's families dying. But if there were no currently writing token peaceniks, I'm sure that they could get by on exhuming Gandhi or Jesus or somebody.

Hey, I feel better now!

Aziz Poonawalla offered a personal reflection:

I've hardly been able to marshal my own thoughts recently. I've begun to question my own assumptions, and extricate my own interests. Wouldnt it be great, as an American Shi'a, to fly into Baghdad as easily as I can London, take a taxi to Karbala, and pay my respects to Imam Husain AS? Wouldn't it be great if an Arab democracy existed to give lie to all the arguments of non-believing Clash-of-Civilizations-clutching self-proclaimed experts on my faith? Wouldn't it be wonderful if an Arab Renaissance were to blossom?

I never, not once, believed the neocons' domino-theory. But it is seductive enough to have made me perhaps more willing than I should have to grant benefit of the doubt to the good faith of its architects.

More on his own blog.

About the issue of guerrillas targeting American troops to aggravate antiwar sentiment in the US, Diana Moon writes

Let’s be thankful that the “enemy” in Iraq isn’t terribly hip to this, as the Vietnamese WERE. They were aware of the fact that the free press of the US and the antiwar movement aided their cause. This is something I haven’t wanted to write about on my blog (I did glance upon it only to turn back) because it’s true. It’s not the main reason for sagging morale but it certainly contributes. If the Arabs only understood this (the Pals sort of do, but not really), they would be much more formidable. They really are amateurs.

Steve Wolfson writes

just the other day i was thinking about the reaction of right wingers if the roles were reversed. if the US was the weaker country that is being "liberated" by a stronger country who believes that its ways are better than the USA ways, that they are going to show us what is good for us because they know better than we do, whether we like it or not. my god, the U.S. right wing would be leading the charge of resistance and calling the liberals among us who wanted to negotiate with "the enemy, the oppressors" traitors and cowards. they would be fighting in the name of Jesus, and everything that we value about our American ways. oh my god, the "liberators" would be calling these right wing folks, who see themselves as patriots of the homeland, why they would be calling them "terrorists" and "thugs"! can you BELIEVE the nerve of those liberators, distorting our noble ends to label us as terrorists and thugs?

One of my regular correspondents today was complaining about the war being supported by "Red Staters." The irony is that most of the world consists of "Red States." They just don't happen to have Americans in them.

Tacitus tells me stuff I didn't know:

I know that this is focusing on a detail rather than the actual point of your piece, but this awoke the nitpicker in me:

"Artillery is not a precision weapon...."

Not in Russian hands, it's not. But the things we can do with artillery today are amazing. One of the most fascinating days of my brief Army career was Indirect Fire Day at Fort Bragg back in summer 1996. Artillery units attached to the 82nd Airborne spent the day showing us how they could hit pretty much anything they wanted to, EXACTLY on target, with various rounds calibrated to do varying amounts of damage. Surprisingly, modern technology (GPS married to computing power) has transformed artillery into the same sort of pinpoint weapon as "smart" bombs. I'm sure it's only improved in the past eight years.

This isn't to say it's infallible or somehow clean, but I point it out to say that I wouldn't regard American resort to artillery with the same foreboding as, say, Russian resort to artillery. There's a massive qualitative difference.

A useful point, and, for an old wargaming geek, cool. In further correspondence, Tacitus agreed that "Of course there are more collateral damage issues with any heavy weaponry than there would be with small arms."

Robert Theron Brockman:

We aren't sacrificing the soldiers. George Bush isn't sacrificing the soldiers. The soldiers are sacrificing themselves. The US has an all-volunteer military. Each and every one of those soldiers voluntarily swore an oath to uphold and defend the constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic. Each one of those soldiers broke that oath by engaging in war without constitutional authorization. "Just following orders" doesn't help them here -- their loyalty is supposed to be to the Constitution, not the President or their CO.

Now these troops are 10000 miles from home, trying to impose a government on the locals without the consent of the governed. Things are starting to go bad, and both US troops and Iraqi civilians are dying. What a surprise.
I wonder if these troops, having become "experienced in urban pacification," won't later be used to enforce the coming fascism in the US that Arthur Silber keeps talking about.

Recently I had a very ugly exchange with Dr. Palmer over at CATO. In essence, I proposed that maybe we'd all be better off if these dishonorable men with machineguns didn't come home, if the desert swallowed them up as a lesson to others that blind obedience of authority over principles has consequences. It wasn't a very nice thing to say, but for the life of me I can't convince myself that these soldiers aren't fully responsible for what's happened here -- that the "support the troops" stuff isn't just a bunch of crap. (It would be different if this war had been declared properly, as Ron Paul attempted. But this would have required Congress to take responsibility. As if that were likely.)

In light of the above, if you can explain to me logically why I should feel sorry for these soldiers, I shall be much obliged.

I'd feel more inclined to bring logic to bear if the proposition weren't so inherently galling: Presidents spend 55 years flouting the plain meaning of the Constitution; legislators spend 55 years letting them get away with it; courts resolutely run away from the issue, and I'm supposed to expect profiles in courage from the soldiers themselves? Man, the shit really does roll downhill.

Truth is, I would be thrilled if at least one soldier pulled a Michael New over the constitutionality of the sorts of wars Presidents get us into these days. (And I have no beef with Michael New himself, by the way.) But there's precious little encouraging any of them to take that step. The Supreme Court has had numerous opportunities to declare unilateral Presidential wars unconstitutional. Meanwhile, Gulf War Phase III comes closer to having real congressional authorization than any intervention since Gulf War Phase I. Any Congressman or Senator who wasn't willfully naive knew perfectly well he was voting in October 2003 to let George Bush invade.

Wayne Wides writes

I'm writing to point out that even if the worst does come to pass in this situation, I wish to point out that there is still a segment of Iraq that supports the American presence - the Kurds.

It's why I argued on my own weblog that if the situation worsens something can still be salvaged by effectively Balkanizing Iraq itself into three states - a Sunni one, a Shi'ite one and a Kurd one

I have nothing particular against Iraq balkanizing. Us balkanizing it for them is somewhat problematic. That's Iraqi business. But Wayne's point about the Kurds dovetails with Karen Kwiatkowski's own suggestions of ways forward in her latest Military Week column.

Tomorrow: Crux mail and more, including some "manual Defeatist trackbacks."

Department of Plans - Arkhangel responds to criticism from various angles. Useful, especially his clarification of what he means by "training" Iraqi security forces.

A Grand Strategy for the Rest - The Unqualified Offerings Plan, not just for Iraq but for terrorism generally:

1) Stop borrowing trouble.

2) "Wait" for the people behind the trouble we've already borrowed to get old and tired or die off outright.

No, they don't "hate us because we're free." Or put it this way, they may hate us because we're free, but very, very, very few people can get worked up enough about our freedom to dedicate themselves to ending it - absent concrete American interference in their business. There's a big difference between hating someone and troubling to cross the world to try to kick their ass.

I want to be perfectly clear that this policy does not instantly remove all dangers. The first law of organizations is self-perpetuation. The existing anti-American terrorist organizations, like Al Qaeda, are not going to call off their jihad just because we pull out of Iraq and Saudi Arabia and stop writing blank checks to the Likud. But absent fresh humiliations, fewer and fewer young Muslim men will find the tired old call to yet more jihad worth heeding.

"Wait" is in scare quotes because it sounds more passive than the policy I intend. For one thing, I would continue to harry the men and organization behind the September 2001 atrocities to the ends of the earth. "Don't Tread on Me" is my policy, and that's what Al Qaeda did. Bite back hard. At the same time, don't pretend that everyone on earth doesn't respond to the same impulse - go tromping in the dens of others and they will bite back too. This country's conservatives of old were smarter about this kind of thing: they didn't think they were the only conservatives in the world. They didn't imagine that you could deploy troops in 150-odd countries without provoking a reaction. They wouldn't imagine that the reaction was noble, but they respected the force of nature that is the essential conservatism of the planet.

For another thing, I believe the American system, as conceived if not always as practiced, is deeply attractive. So let's be American. Let's be free, for one thing. Kill the excresences on the Constitution the current administration as brought forth - the PATRIOT Act, the evisceration of habeas corpus, the asserted power to unreviewably revoke citizenship and declare someone an enemy combatant. Let's trade and travel and welcome visitors to our shores. Let us, in other words, have the faith that we are our own best advertisement. Thence comes your Muslim reformation.

About those visitors. An obvious trend presents itself: young Muslim students who come to the West for a specifcally technical education, who become radicalized politically by a poisonous combination of culture shock, homesickness, youthful hormones and - ironically - insularity (isolating themselves among other young Muslim men). America's university's are the glory of our educational system. And from what I've read, our graduate technical departments depend on a steady stream of foreign students to keep afloat. But I'd make it a requirement of a student visa that recipients take a heavy dose of humanities, especially American studies courses. I'd also have the State Department screen applicants better, though this would probably be of limited use. (I think the salient problem is students who are moderate at home and become radicals here.) Will cramming humanistic education down the throats of engineering students do any good? The college I dropped out of thinks so. MIT always bragged that it had the toughest humanities requirements of any elite school, glossing over the fact that it had to: it's the only way most of its students would take those courses. I don't for a moment believe the humanities requirement would convince every foreign student to love the United States. But it will help engage them with American culture in an open, nonviolent way. If nothing else, it's an opportunity to let off steam.

What about the oil? Buy it, same as we do now. Who's not going to want to sell it to us? Saddam Hussein himself would have sold us all the oil we could use, absent sanctions. You can't eat the stuff. It doesn't even make a good salad dressing.

What about Iraq? Bring the major players together in one room - anyone with a constituency. Tell them, "fellas, we're out of here in time for Christmas. Start talking. You've got a chance to make your country something much better than you could have imagined. Or you can turn it into hell on earth. It'll be your doing one way or another." Stop paying non-Iraqis to do work Iraqis can do.

Who will defend Iraq against its neighbors? Look at the place now. If you were the neighbors, would you want to bite that off? The real military estimated it would take a half-million US troops to secure the joint. You think Iran or Syria or Turkey dare to even try to scrape up that kind of manpower?

What if Iraq becomes a weak state complete with Al Qaeda training camps and weapons labs? See scare quotes around "wait" and the part about harrying the people behind the attacks on the US to the ends of the earth, above. If camps set up, we pound hell out of them. It's not like we don't know how to bomb Iraq.

What About Israel and the Palestinians? Pull them in and tell them two things. 1) Israel will be paying its own way from now on. They can have what military equipment they can buy. 2) But we also will not be restraining them from any action they may wish to take to safeguard what they imagine to be their security. If they really want to kill Yasser Arafat, we're not going to stop them. If they want to nuke Tehran, that's Tehran's lookout. Concentrates the mind. But Israel will have to stand on its own two feet, financially and politically. If Israel can't survive as an independent country without ceaseless American financial aid and political backing, then Israel has failed as a refuge for the Jewish people - it's simply a different version of the very dependence on powerful patrons that the early Zionists were trying to get beyond. I think Israel can survive, with prudent leadership. Ironically, the key to the survival of the Jewish people is actually the diaspora: it's much harder to exterminate the Jews if they aren't conveniently gathered in one place.

Some have feared that anti-Israeli terror groups would make the US actually evicting Israel's Jews by armed force the price of peace. We would refuse, of course, and destroy those groups if they messed with us. See "Don't Tread on Me," above.

What about cooperation against international terror? I'm for it. For instance, I favor using American law to interdict fundraising and organizing for Hamas, Lashkar, the Tamil Tigers and the IRA within the United States. "Terrorism" will be strictly defined as war crimes by non-state actors, so say that we'll suppress fundraising for any armed rebellion - it's bad international relations juju. For the duration of our Al Qaeda problem, I'd keep bases at Diego Garcia, in Turkey, Oman and Qatar and Afghanistan. I'd be willing to provide American troops to help overmatched foreign governments against anti-American terror groups in their midst, but I'd do due diligence to make sure we weren't just being suckered into settling someone else's quarrel for them.

What about NATO? Remember when you were a kid, and you had a really good friend, so you started hanging out together constantly, and staying over at each other's house all the time and suddenly you realized you were really getting on each other's nerves? That's us and continental Europe. And the way Iraq is going, I think there's a good chance it's us and Great Britain within one to five years. We all need some quiet time to ourselves, in a politico-military way.

What about Korea? Something like 50% of the South Korean population lives within artillery range of the North. I don't recall recommending that settlement pattern, do you? On the theory that South Koreans aren't stupid, I take it to indicate their true estimate of the danger from the North. South Korea is a rich, powerful country that can afford as much defense as it needs. Nevertheless, North Korea has to be watched carefully, since it is desperately poor and either on the verge of becoming a nuclear power or already one. We tell Kim Jong-Il that if he so much as glances in the direction of anyone remotely associated with Osama bin Laden, including the Pakistani ISI or the "government" of Saudi Arabia, we will make his country look like a jamboree of Osirak reenactors. And if we get the idea that he's trying to sell a nuke, we will provide him more than one of our own.

That's more or less the Grand Disengagement at a high level. Like I said, I see it taking a generation for the aftershocks to subside. That is, I'm solving the terror problem in no more time than the "reconstruct the entire Middle East" hawks, for a lot less money, with a lot less ammo and preserving a lot more freedom here. If they hate us because we're free, they'll really fucking hate us when I'm done.

What if there's another catastrophic terror attack? That will really suck. It will be important to summon up the resolve to stay the course if that happens. Look, there are no guarantees in life. And if we get attacked tomorrow, do you think the uberhawks will tell you that this proves they were wrong all along? No. They'll say it proves how urgent it is that we reconstruct the entire Middle East and probably Venezuela when we get a chance, and they'll remind us that it's going to take a generation. Like I said before, Fine, but then non-interventionism gets a generation too.

It takes time for things to play out. The atrocities of September 11, 2001, were in many ways the culmination of two taste treats that decidedly did not go together - the US buildup of militant Islam against the Soviet Union in the latter days of the Cold War and Phase I and II of the US War Against Iraq. (Now in Phase IV.) Phase III of the Iraq War - the invasion that began in March 2003 - was the sort of hideous foreign policy mistake that a country simply can't avoid paying for in numerous ways. Pulling out will lead to a loss of prestige and will embolden our enemies. For a time. Dragging things out another year or five will cost even more prestige and foster even more emboldening. But we are not looking at the Apocalypse either. Losing Vietnam cost us prestige and emboldened our enemies. Within five years we were tightly cooperating with one of those enemies (China) against the other, and within 15, the other (the USSR) was no more. We cut and ran and won. The Soviet Union stayed the course in Afghanistan and bled to death.

UPDATE: Now with less promiscuous nuking of North Korea. See modifications item from 4/21/04.

The Military Side of War, the Clarification - Look folks, I've been writing a lot about the supply situation, which I think looks bad. "Bad" in this case means a serious threat to take the lives of many US troops. This doesn't make me happy. Actually, it scares the crap out of me.

Of course, for it to even be a problem, there would have to be an actual war, as opposed to just proper or improper attitudes and stances toward a war and discussions of who has which. Maybe I'm getting worked up over nothing.

Must - Control - Snark - of - Death! - From the BBC:

[Tony Blair] insisted that the 30 June deadline for handing back power to the people of Iraq would remain.

Advice to any Iraqi readers: Do not get anywhere near Paul Bremer on June 29th.

But perhaps there is one man adequate to the task.

The Military Side of War, the Continuing Series - Tacitus finds a Reuters report on continuing trouble along our lifelines. Tac's notes a proposed solution: "declare the outbound highways off-limits to civilian traffic, and then feel free to blow away what remains." In addition to the military and moral difficulties with this approach that he himself identifies, it would pretty much kill the import/export traffic vital to the reconstruction effort, wouldn't it? (Remember Iraqi reconstruction?)

Guys, I meant the Stalingrad comparison metaphorically. But you know, this doesn't look so good.

UPDATE: By e-mail, Tacitus confirms something I surmised and meant to put in this item: "reconstruction" traffic is already at a standstill because of the uprising itself. Good point. Is that also true for foreign trade generally, not just KBR convoys but ordinary international commerce? Iraq is not an autarky.

Touched by Arkhangel - More on Arkhangel's "Victory" item of the other day. As I said, this is a thoughtful, substantive detailed plan. And it's doomed, for all kinds of reasons. Matthew Yglesias explains one reason: too much of the plan constitutes "Shit that Ain't Gonna Happen." And Arkhangel commenter and frequent UO correspondent Rich Puchalsky explains why that's just as well:

The proposal is a tissue of fantasies. Let me take them in order:

Increase Troop Strength: Sending in lots of poorly trained conscripts results in -- Grozny.

Intense Cultural Training: A 5 day (!) course is supposed to make a difference?? Look, there's a reason why real life training takes longer.

Mixing It Up With the Locals: AKA "presenting lots of targets for the guerrilas" and soon, as the conscripts react with paranoia and rampant violence, AKA "pissing off the locals".

Properly Training Iraqi Security Forces: to be what, Quisling-led death squads? What kind of proper training helps someone support the occupation of their country and shoot their own people?

Reconstructing Infrastructure: the reason it's in bad shape is because people keep blowing it up, not because of investment problems.

Dismantling the Militias: let's see -- there is no order in the country, no source of legitimate political power, and you want people to communally disarm themselves?

We Have to Give Iraqis a Stake in Their Destiny: we can do that by getting out of their country.

I largely agree with Rich's take. Where I disagree, it's in an arguably more pessimistic (from the perspective of US "victory") direction. Frex, we appear to be, unwittingly, training Iraqi security forces to be an at least partially-effective nationalist force - that is, there seems to be a real limit to what they'll do for us. I would also say there's no way we can "dismantle" the militias. The most we could hope for is that the militias voluntarily disband. There is no way, no way in hell, we can disarm the militias by force. Not with the troops we have now, not with the 200-300,000 troops of Arkhangel's dreams.

I am also, for the record, not sanguine about what happens after a US pullout - I am not sure that it leads to Iraqi factions feeling a stake in their common destiny rather than commencing a war of all against all. Pulling out is a bad option, strategically and morally. It's also, I am convinced, the least bad option.

There's another huge problem with the Arkhangel Plan: timing. To pass the laws and implementing legislation relating to a combatant and non-combatant draft, staff the bureaucracies, induct the recruits and train them to a passable level is the work of, at a high-level guesstimate, one to two years. In which time, much happens in Iraq and none of it good.

The arguably more practical approach is to immediately denude pretty much the entire rest of the world of US troops and shift everything into Mesopotamia and Afghanistan - including our Korean troops. Ironically, from a libertarian perspective, this has a certain appeal, since on the surface it means going from troops in 150-odd countries to troops in a half dozen or so (Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Qatar, Jordan (shh!), Turkey and a couple of 'stans) The anti-interventionist can even hope that a few countries will be so ticked off at losing their cohort that they'll refuse to let us back in afterward.. It's not that simple, of course. Various bases between here and there - in Central and Eastern Europe particularly - are important links in the supply chain. And the wheels of diplomacy grind slow. In any case, every regular Flit reader knows you need two troops at home to support one troop abroad, and of every three troops in theater, two exist to enable the third guy to actually fight. (Which also means that Arkhangel can only double troop strength in Iraq if he increases the Army and Marines total strength by a half million, not a mere 150-200,000.)

Note that the shifting deployments strategy suffers from many of the same training deficiencies that Rich Puchalsky identifies.

So the Arkhangel Plan is a non-starter and wouldn't work if it weren't a non-starter. What makes Arkhangel so important then, as an analyst? He grasps the scale of the problem. He troubles to actually define victory, as distinct from somehow "not losing," and he shows what would have to happen to achieve said victory. If what has to happen is too outlandish to credit, that tells you something important.