Jim Henley reports from a parallel universe:

So many publications have expressed such overwhelming interest in the perspectives of those of us who opposed the Iraq War when it had a chance of doing good that I have had to permit mutliple publication of this article in most of the nation’s elite media venues - collecting, I am almost embarrassed to admit, a separate fee from each. Everyone recognizes that the opinions of those of us who were right about Iraq then are crucial to formulating sane, just policy now.

Man, it's fucking amateur hour.

Copy-editing the Iraq War, second in a series: Here's what occurred to me reading Gawker today: It's time to stop talking about 3,000 US troops dead and start talking about nearly 4,000.

Politico-linguistic intervention of the day: Listening to Terry Gross's meaty interview with WaPo's Thomas Ricks last week (web, iTunes), it struck me that serious, knowledgeable people have begun using the term ethnic cleansing to refer to what's going on in Iraqi cities and neighborhoods. Besides Ricks, the author of one of the most important books on the war so far, and Gross, who's usually pretty careful with her words, it's been all over the NYT in recent weeks, appearing in news stories and opinion pieces alike. David Brooks writes,

Second, the worst of the ethnic cleansing may be over. For years, Shiites and Sunnis have been purging each other from towns and neighborhoods.

But the problem, for once, is not Brooks's limited intelligence. Paul Krugman has this:

Oh, and by the way: Baghdad is undergoing ethnic cleansing, with Shiite militias driving Sunnis out of much of the city.

An early example is this Time piece headlined "Ethnic Cleansing in a Baghdad Neighborhood?"

The term ethnic cleansing originated, during the Balkan conflict, as a euphemism for genocide, often used by the English-speaking media with deliberate irony. It's a little strange to watch it turn into a legitimate, unironic term for mass displacement, especially since the word cleansing carries an ineradicable whiff of Nazi ideology.

But if we're going to use the term, can we at least use it accurately? Sunni and Shi'a are not ethnicities, they're religious denominations. For the most part, the people involved in homogenizing their neighborhoods, both Sunni and Shiite, are Arabs (although some are Turkmen, on both sides). The process is more properly called sectarian cleansing, or if you want to get really technical denominational cleansing, or if you want to lose the Nazi stuff sectarian homogenization. The best example of ethnic cleansing during the Iraq War is probably the expulsion of Arabs from Kirkuk, which seems to have calmed down a bit.

The misusage reminds me of another Fresh Air interview, this one with George Packer, who told a horrifying story about an Iraqi whose beloved kid brother was kidnapped by militiamen. The kidnappers called the Iraqi on his celphone and asked him, "Are you Sunni or Shiite?" The man had to guess whether the kidnappers were Sunni or Shiite, in order to give them the answer they wanted to hear. He said he was a Shiite (a lie), and heard the line go dead: the kidnappers were Sunnis, like him.

Dick Cheney, 1994

Maybe once a week I read something about Iraq and I think, This could be a storyline from an episode of The Wire. It's partly that the war in Iraq is perhaps the only national project as misguided in conception and inept in execution as the war on drugs. It's partly the repeated images of incompatible institutions butting up against one another, and of individuals within those institutions struggling and failing to affect the situation. And then, of course, there's all the stuff from The Wire that reminds me of Iraq. (Just one example: the conflict between Stringer and Avon that's the dramatic spine of season three is a conflict between a modern capitalist culture and a premodern "respect" culture, and the way it plays out as tragedy is a perfect mirror of our tragedy in the Middle East.)

Now we learn that David Simon and Ed Burns, the geniuses behind The Wire, are making a miniseries about the early months of the Iraq War.

It's hard when someone makes one of the great works of art, because then you want their next thing to be another one. And now that they've found the perfect subject ... I can only be disappointed by this, really.

It's based on this book, which I haven't read. The bad news is that it's only seven episodes. My big hope is that it'll become open-ended, and that, just as The Wire grew from a show about cops and gangs to take in the longshore union, City Hall, the school district, and soon the media, the new show, which starts from the perspective of a Marine battalion, will incorporate ordinary Iraqis, militia fighters, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the Coalition Provisional Authority, the Iraqi Parliament, the Kurdish peshmerga, reporters with both the western press and Al Jazeera ... like I say, I can only be disappointed.

Surging behind

Remember the surge? The idea behind the surge was that if we pump some more troops into Iraq to jack up security for a few precious months, maybe this will provide enough breathing space for the Iraqi government to hammer out a deal. It was always a hail Mary, a plan forged out of desperation -- the kind of thing that builds up tension at the climax of a movie but that typically fails miserably in real life.

So let's check in and see how it's working. Question one: have the troop increases led to some measurable increases in security for Iraqis? There is some dispute about this, even within Michael O'Hanlon's brain. So let's give the surge the benefit of the doubt and say it is indeed making Baghdad and Iraq as a whole more secure.

Now we turn to question two: Is the bump in security paying off? I.e., is the Iraqi government responding to the improved circumstances by moving toward a settlement on the tough issues (oil-revenue sharing, de-de-Baathification, federalization)?

Well, no. In fact, the Iraqi government has responded to the surge by falling apart.

This would seem to eliminate the surge's entire rationale, no? Even if there is a rapprochement with the Sunni Accordance Front (anything's possible), it's obvious that political reconciliation in Iraq is moving backward rather than forward.

So how does defense secretary Bob Gates explain this mess? “We probably all underestimated the depth of the mistrust and how difficult it would be for these guys to come together on legislation."

Oh Jesus H. Fuck, it's greeted-as-liberators all over again.

Still, now that Gates has acknowledged the error, presumably we're going to call off the surge and start figuring out how to wind this thing down with as few additional corpses as possible, right? After all, the evidence is in: temporary "breathing room" can't bring Iraq's warring factions to the table.

Nope.

Mr. Gates offered a slightly different formulation on Thursday, arguing that political progress would come when Iraqi Army and police units proved able to take over primary responsibility for maintaining security in areas now largely controlled by American troops.

“I think the key is, not only establishing the security, but being able to hold on to those areas and for Iraqi Army and police to be able to provide the continuity of security over time,” he said. “It’s under that umbrella I think progress will be made at the national level.”

Bear with me, because I'm about to make a sports analogy, and we all know that's not my strong suit. But this is what's called moving the goalposts.

With the speed and alacrity characteristic of the U.S. military, commanders will be reviewing the surge strategy in September, at which point, Gates said (in the words of the NYT), "the administration would have to balance the relative lack of political progress with the somewhat encouraging security trends."

Since that last sports analogy seemed to go OK, I'm going to try something more ambitious: this is like saying that, in assessing a football strategy, we'll have to balance the fact that we didn't score any points and gave up three touchdowns with the fact that we did some really strong blocking. The security trends are only relevant inasmuch as they enable political progress. If the surge could be sustained indefinitely, you could argue that the security improvements benefit Iraqi civilians, the people who have suffered for all our blunders, so better security is a good thing on its own merits. But we can't sustain current troop levels too far into next year, no matter how much we lower recruiting standards/extend the tours of exhausted soldiers/starve commanders in Afghanistan of manpower.

As of now, the surge makes no sense as a military strategy. Until yesterday it had a logic, however optimistic. But now that logic is exhausted, and yet the surge continues.

The only possible conclusion is that this is happening because the surge is not a military strategy at all -- it's a narrative one. It's a way to keep a tired show on the air one more season, like an adorable kid cousin or a Very Special Wedding Episode. The surge is the moment when the Iraq War jumped the shark. Can we please, please cancel it?

Haven't posted anything heartbreaking about Iraq recently, so as the Iraqi government -- and with it the rationale for Bush's troop surge -- collapses, I turn as usual to the New Yorker's George Packer, who writes:

After ten days or so, Omer went with a friend to look for his father at the morgue and found a scene of absolute hell. Bodies were stacked two or three high in the hallways, with no refrigeration, the older corpses beginning to decompose and generate maggots. Holding hands, Omer and his friend examined body after body until they found one that had been shot in the torso and might have been his father; they couldn’t be sure. Morgue officials led them to a room where a few dozen Iraqis, many of them women, were staring at six computer monitors. The screens showed a picture of one corpse’s face for a few seconds, then flashed the next face. Now and then, someone in the room would begin to wail. This was the closest thing to “closure” and dignity in death that the victims’ families could expect. Suddenly, the face of Omer’s father appeared on all six screens.

George Packer has a blog.

John McCain has disowned his comments about how safe the streets of Baghdad are. From a CBS News press release [via TPM]:

Presidential candidate Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) says he misspoke in comments he made about security in Baghdad and acknowledged that heavily armed troops and helicopter gunships accompanied him when he visited a market there. McCain tells this to Scott Pelley in his first interview since the visit for a 60 MINUTES report. [Before the trip] the senator said security had improved in Iraq. Upon his return, he also told a news conference he had just come back from a neighborhood one could walk around in freely. The remarks made headlines and he now regrets saying them.

Then comes the funny part:

“Of course I am going to misspeak and I’ve done it on numerous occasions and I probably will do it in the future,” says McCain. “I regret that when I divert attention to something I said from my message, but you know, that’s just life,” he tells Pelley, adding, “I’m happy, frankly, with the way I operate, otherwise it would be a lot less fun.”

I love the way McCain tries to pretend his remarks were more of his characteristic straight talk. That John McCain -- his handlers want to rein him in, but he can't help caling it like he sees it! Otherwise it would be a lot less fun! But of course, his comments about security in Iraq weren't straight talk, they were self-serving bullshit.

CBS News correspondent Allan Pizzey on John McCain's recent Baghdad walkabout:

Brian Montopoli: It seems that some reporters, including yourself and CNN's Michael Ware, have really taken umbrage at John McCain's recent comments, essentially saying that there are a lot of neighborhoods where you can walk around relatively safely. Is it fair to say that that really sort of bothered reporters?

Allen Pizzey: Yes. It's disgraceful for a man seeking highest office, I think, to talk utter rubbish. And that is utter rubbish. It's electoral propaganda. It is simply not true. No one in his right mind who has been to Baghdad believes that story.

Now, McCain and some other senators were there on Sunday, and they claimed, "Oh, we walked around for a whole hour…and we drove in from the airport. Gosh, aren't we great, we drove in from the airport." Excuse me, Mr. McCain, you drove in in a large convoy of heavily armed vehicles. The last one had a sign on it saying "Keep back 100 yards. Deadly force authorized." Every single car that they approached or passed pulled over and stopped, because that's the way it is. When one of those security details goes by, every ordinary person gets the hell out of the way, in case they get shot.

If he did walk around that market, and I didn't see him do it, and he didn't announce he was going to do it, you can bet your life there were an awful lot of soldiers deployed to make sure that nobody came near that place. He's talking rubbish. And he should not get away with it.

Since the Washington Post's excellent series on conditions at Walter Reed, other publications have jumped on the wounded-soldier beat. Today's crop includes Salon on injured troops being sent back into combat and the NYT on the military health-care system's scramble to deal with the influx of brain-damage cases: "Largely because of the improvised explosive devices used by insurgents in Iraq, traumatic brain injury has become a signature wound of this war."

"I thought we would have to pay oil for freedom and democracy, but not our life's blood": Iraqi citizens are becoming nostalgic for Saddam.

One thing that's going to be kind of fun over the next couple years -- and I mean fun in a bleak, masochistic way -- is rereading some of the comments that Iraq war advocates made before the invasion. Some are already famous ("greeted as liberators," "cakewalk"), but there's a lot of undiscovered gems out there. Here's one from National Review's Jonah Goldberg, writing in April 2002:

So how does all this ... justify tearing down the Baghdad regime? Well, I've long been an admirer of, if not a full-fledged subscriber to, what I call the "Ledeen Doctrine." I'm not sure my friend Michael Ledeen will thank me for ascribing authorship to him and he may have only been semi-serious when he crafted it, but here is the bedrock tenet of the Ledeen Doctrine in more or less his own words: "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business." That's at least how I remember Michael phrasing it at a speech at the American Enterprise Institute about a decade ago (Ledeen is one of the most entertaining public speakers I've ever heard, by the way).

Yeah, that does sound pretty entertaining. Do these guys sleep at night?

Wanker of the Day: George Will.

Regarding Iraq, the Democratic-controlled Congress could do what Democrats say a Democratic president would do: withdraw U.S. forces. A president could simply order that; Congress could defund military operations in Iraq. Congressional Democrats are, however, afraid to do that because they lack the courage of their (professed) conviction that Iraq would be made tranquil by withdrawal of U.S. forces.

But does any leading Congressional Democrat argue that a pullout would make Iraq "tranquil"? What they argue is that it's the best of a bunch of terrible options.

I don't get why it's okay to just make up stuff in the Washington Post. Dick.

Listen to this: Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio)'s amazing speech during last week's House debate on the anti-surge resolution.

So: after a massive electoral repudiation of the president's policies, the Senate finally tries to have a say in military policy -- not with any actual legislation, but with a non-binding resolution. They can't even get a vote on that -- they can't even discuss voting on it -- because the Republican minority voted to block the debate.

What does the White House press secretary say? He says, “This week’s voting gave the world a glimpse of democracy’s vigor."

Right approach, wrong time?

It looks like George Packer may finally get the war he's been asking for. In his 2003 New Yorker essay "War After the War," which was the basis for the book The Assassin's Gate and which is one of the single finest pieces of journalism I've ever read, Packer made the case that Iraq would be won or lost not in battlefield victories or large-scale campaigns but in tiny human interactions, ground-level points of contact between Iraqis and Americans. His intimate, scene-based reporting became an example of the thing he was advocating, the attentiveness to nuance and context that the military couldn't get right.

As the American effort went into a tailspin, Packer wrote a couple of pieces on military freethinkers who were urging subtlety and finesse instead of bombast: Col. H. R. McMaster, who had one of the war's few impressive successes in the city of Tal Afar in late 2005, and David Kilcullen, an Australian army captain who wrote his PhD dissertation on counterinsurgency and who is "on loan" to the U.S. government. These pieces (here and here) inspired a mixture of hope and despair: there are smart people in the military who are thinking pragmatically about this stuff (check out Kilcullen's widely circulated "Twenty-Eight Articles: Fundamentals of Company-Level Counterinsurgency"), and no one with any clout is listening to them.

Things change. Gen. David Petraeus, who appeared in Packer's Tal Afar article leading what seemed like a particularly worthy and irrelevant effort -- inviting academics, journalists, and human-rights activists to a workshop to discuss a draft counterinsurgency manual -- is now U.S. commander in Iraq. According to the Washington Post, Petraeus "is assembling a small band of warrior-intellectuals," including McMaster and Kilcullen, to form a brain trust. Thomas Ricks writes, "Essentially, the Army is turning the war over to its dissidents, who have criticized the way the service has operated there for the past three years, and is letting them try to wage the war their way." Unfortunately, it's pretty clear that the change comes too late.

Frederick Kagan, the neocon who originally proposed the Iraq troop "surge," now says, "This is not our plan. The White House is not briefing our plan."

How's that 'national greatness' bit going these days, David?

Earlier this month, you might remember, I made fun of Brent Scowcroft for his easy-as-pie Iraq solution (step one: bring about a peaceful settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians). I made a big deal out of it because you don't expect someone like Scowcroft, who is by all accounts a genuinely smart person, to paper over the reality of the situation like that.

With David Brooks, on the other hand, that's exactly what you expect him to do, and I'm going to make a big deal out of it because I think it's funny that David Brooks is such a fathead. (The piece is behind the Times's stupid subscription wall, unfortunately.) This week he's become an advocate for a Bidenesque partitioning of Iraq into three regions -- everybody gets one! "Sooner or later," he writes, "everyone will settle on this sensible policy, having exhausted all the alternatives." (Perhaps the most annoying thing about Brooks -- I know, tough call -- is his habit of acting as though whatever he's saying today is exactly what he's always said, while other people were proposing whatever stupid ideas have failed already.)

So how does sensible, Brooksian partitioning work? Let's take a look:

Step one: rewrite the Iraqi constitution to allow the Sunnis a share of oil revenues. Brooks doesn't mention that only the Iraqis can do that, or that the Shiites and Kurds were less than enthusiastic about the idea back when (a) U.S. influence amounted to something; (b) the Iraqi government wasn't overrun by well-organized Shiite militias; and (c) sectarianism was barely a shadow of what it is today. Other than that, though, no problem.

Step two: get all three sects to agree to a federalist system. Wasn't this proposed during the original constitutional negotiations in 2005? Why yes, it was. And didn't it prompt the Sunnis to walk out? Why yes, it did. But hey, this time it's bound to work.

Step three: relocate everybody in the country who doesn't live in their designated regional sector, i.e. reverse Saddam's massive, multi-year "Arabization" project in Kurdistan and uproot huge regions of Baghdad and other cities -- all with the same delicate touch and careful regard for local conditions that have characterized the U.S. effort so far.

Step four: get buy-in from Iraq's neighbors. I particularly like "The Turks would have to be reassured that this plan means no independent Kurdistan would ever come into being." A diplomatic mission so simple that even a total fathead could do it! I nominate David Brooks.