Yes, the sectarian government in Baghdad is the main obstacle to political progress in Iraq and a major impediment to the success of the “surge,” as someof us foresaw when this entire charade began.  The “surge” of brigades did what it could and made some gains in improving security.  It was of necessity a temporary fix to “buy time” for the alleged reconciliation and security training that would make the Iraqi state reasonably viable and self-sustaining.  The time has been bought at great price, and it is being frittered away.  That is why the overall plan  As Ricks reports:

A window of opportunity has opened for the government to reach out to its former foes, said Army Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the commander of day-to-day U.S. military operations in Iraq, but “it’s unclear how long that window is going to be open.”

And again:

Indeed, some U.S. Army officers now talk more sympathetically about former insurgents than they do about their ostensible allies in the Shiite-led central government. 

And again:

The latest news of declining violence comes as the U.S. troop contingent in Iraq has reached an all-time high. This week, the U.S. troop number will hit 175,000 — the largest presence so far in the 4 1/2 -year war [bold mine-DL] — as units that are rotating in and out overlap briefly. But those numbers are scheduled to come down rapidly over the next several months, which will place an increasing burden on Iraqi security forces and an Iraqi government that has yet to demonstrate it is up to the challenge, senior military officials said.

Now this presents an occasion to make realistic assessment of what the U.S. can actually accomplish in the absence of coordinated Iraqi political efforts.  It seems to me that the U.S. can achieve very little.  If that’s right, this offers an opportunity for many war supporters to say, “We did what we could, we tried to do the right thing by these folks, but we can’t fix their country for them and we can’t achieve anything if their government isn’t entirely on board.”  This offers them a way out of the cage of the “Pottery Barn” thinking that has trapped them.  The question is: do they want to take that way out?

Also, here’s something to keep all of the recent “surge” boosterism in perspective:

Indeed, after years of seizing on every positive development and complaining that the good news wasn’t being adequately conveyed, American military officials now warn against excessive optimism. “It’s never as bad as it was, and it’s not as good as it’s being reported now,” said Army Maj. Gen. Michael Barbero, chief of strategic operations for U.S. forces in Iraq.

One should always be wary of optimism, whether excessive or not.  More often than not, it sets you up for a nasty fall.

Update:  As for that “bottom-up reconciliation” you’ve doubtless heard so much about, Ricks’ report has some reasons to be skeptical about its long-term value:

Also, some outside experts contend that U.S. officials still don’t grasp how their empowerment of militias under the bottom-up model of reconciliation is helping tear apart Iraq. Marc Lynch, a George Washington University expert on the Middle East, argued recently on his blog, Abu Aardvark, that partly because of U.S. political tactics in Iraq, the country is drifting “towards a warlord state, along a Basra model, with power devolved to local militias, gangs, tribes, and power-brokers, with a purely nominal central state.”

Then there is the refugee crisis to bear in mind:

Officials identified other potential problems flowing from reductions in violence. Military planners already worry that if security continues to improve, many of the 2 million Iraqis who fled the country will return. Those who left are overwhelmingly Sunni, and many of their old houses are occupied by Shiites. How would the Shiite-dominated Iraqi army and police handle the likely friction? “Displaced people is a major flashpoint” to worry about in 2008, said Fetter.

Ross is right that the war in Iraq is a political albatross for the GOP.  The damage from 2006 to public support for the war has been done, and much of it is not going to be undone.  The middle 20% of Americans has shifted against the war.  54% said as of two weeks ago that winning is not possible, which is roughly the same as in April.  Those are the “good” results on support the war from this year in that poll.  Security in many parts of Iraq has improved, at least temporarily, and this has actually been reported with increasing frequency for a good two months now.  The change in public opinion has been minimal.  This 54-55% seems locked in to the assumption that the war cannot be won in any meaningful sense, and while the numbers on the other side fluctuate they remain trapped at 40-42% or below.  I point all of this out to say simply that whether the war begins to “go well” or “get worse,” the verdict on what U.S. policy should be has been handed down long ago: get most, if not all, of our people out. 

The political class has either decided to ignore this verdict or part of it has been unable to change policy.  The deadlock over war policy between Congress and the White House is probably frustrating the public (and this frustration will increase with another Bush veto of an Iraq-related bill), which will persuade enough of them to risk unified government one way or the other.  Given the majority’s views on the war and the views of most GOP voters and candidates, we can guess that the unified government they select will not be a Republican one.  That bodes ill for talk of a Republican “comeback” in Congress and for the hopes of the ’08 nominee. 

One of the crucial problems with the internal debate within the GOP on Iraq, to the extent that there is now a debate, is that a large majority of Republicans are the same people who want to “remain until the country [Iraq] is stable,” as this 11/1-11/5 NBC poll put it.  They are therefore likely to nominate a candidate who thinks the same, or who at least mouths the appropriate phrases.  But that is decidedly not what most Americans want.  Most Americans (55%) want “most troops” out of Iraq by 2009, so you can bet that they are unlikely to turn around and elect a President who cannot or will not promise large-scale withdrawal within the first two years or so.  They are even less likely to back a Republican who continues to make a long-term commitment of a large number of soldiers to Iraq when there is relatively less violence.  So long as the mayhem was nightmarishly frequent, it could be used to instill fear of worse things that might happen when we left (which, I would add, probably will happen), but as it subsides, at least in some areas for the next little while, the fear of post-withdrawal disaster recedes and it is more difficult to paint apocalyptic scenarios that will sway the public. 

What happens in Iraq in the next year will be less important to voters than the reality that our soldiers are still in Iraq in large numbers and that at least one of the major parties is committed to keeping them there for God knows how long.  The other party may at least make gestures towards withdrawal, and that may be all that is needed.

P.S.  Which party the public trusts more is also going to be a major factor next year.  In the 10/29-11/1 Post poll, 50% trusted the Democrats more on handling Iraq, while only 34% trusted the GOP.  That’s obviously a huge gap, and it represents the loss of trust that the Republicans have suffered on their signature foreign policy position.  The point is that even with dramatic improvements in Iraq over the next year (and I am skeptical that these will materialise), the public isn’t going to trust the GOP to be a good steward of U.S. foreign policy.  It is probably not the best way to rebuild that trust by nominating either an extremely bellicose candidate who seems intent on starting new conflicts (Giuliani) or one closely identified personally with the war (McCain).  Also, when 63% are saying that the war wasn’t worth it, that represents a huge obstacle to a party that overwhelmingly still believes that it was. 

P.P.S.  Remarkably, public opinion on the effectiveness of the “surge” seems to be nothing like the growing elite consensus that it has made some gains, i.e., which has to be very narrowly defined as having “made things better” than they were at the start of the year.  In a 10/12-10/16 CBS poll 54% thought that the “surge” had either had no impact or had made things worse, while only 33% believed that it had made things better.  In short, people who think there is no possibility of winning aren’t buying the pro-“surge” rhetoric (which, as I noted at the time, was overselling the gains of the “surge” early on and talking it up far too soon in the year), or at least they weren’t as of a month ago.

Ukraine is pressing to have the United Nations recognise the Holodomor as genocide, and has called on Israel’s support for the resolution.  Though I am no fan of Yushchenko himself, I wish them luck.  The Ukrainian famine, the result of deliberate state starvation of millions of people, is one of the great genocides of the 20th century and should be called what it is.    

I await the outpouring of commentary that declares that the Ukrainian genocide is a matter that should be left to historians and kept out of politics, as all of Ankara’s apologists have argued for so long.  Somehow I don’t think we’ll be hearing from many of them this time, since they are presumably not working for the Kremlin as well.  Perhaps some will maintain a kind of grim consistency and talk about how the kulaks provoked the authorities into starving them, but I doubt it.  Making apologies for Talat and Enver is one thing, since most people have no idea who they are or what they did, but not too many people want to stand up for Stalin these days.  It would, of course, be no more outrageous and dishonest than what some have said about the Armenian genocide.  Obviously, when the perpetrator was the Soviet regime and the modern-day successor is a government that Washington disapproves of, it suddenly becomes much easier to speak of past genocides and point out the internal repression by the regime.  It suddenly becomes much less “controversial” to state the obvious.   

The tactics of denial are the same in Moscow as they are in Ankara: claims of genocide are deemed “propaganda” and the province of a particular ethnic group.  Yet both official denials of genocide are equally wrong and equally pernicious.  I applaud Ms. Shymko for her article.   

Ms. Shymko writes:

It’s time for Russia to make peace with its past, by showing a willingness to make peace with its neighbors. Acknowledging Stalin’s genocidal complicity in the 1932-33 state-sponsored Famine in Ukraine would be an important first step.

Note that this article is calling for the Russians to acknowledge the famine as genocide, which is a far more “provocative” step than calling on our own President to do so.  Moscow should acknowledge the Ukrainian genocide, but I think we all know that it will not.

Now that Spitzer has rejected the idea, Clinton has managed to discover what her position on driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants actually is (today, she’s against them).  In the end, this is the smart move–expose yourself to some scorn from pundits and reporters now in exchange for taking the safe (and, as it happens in this case, correct) position and avoiding bigger trouble later.  Obama, notably, had already come out in favour of the idea, so on one of the more prominent differences between them Obama is on the wrong side of the issue not just nationally but also among Democratic voting blocs that he already has trouble winning over. 

P.S.  Her opponents will try to make this into a question of her credibility, as well they might, but this will not end up making much of a dent.  A lack of credibility and being on the wrong side of this issue could have hurt her substantially.  Now she is protected, and she can probably spin it with some prattle about having “thought long and hard” about a “difficult issue,” which, in our bizarre political culture, somehow makes her seem more responsible and intelligent than the people who actually say what they think the first time around.

For some perspective on just how ridiculous Giuliani’s “0-for-3” victory strategy really is, consider that Steve Forbes received 30% in Iowa in 2000 and then went nowhere (getting 13% in New Hampshire) and Alan Keyes managed to get 14% and then 6% in N.H.  As of right now, Giuliani is apparently expecting to get only slightly better results than Alan Keyes and go on to win the nomination after also losing New Hampshire with Forbes-like numbers and losing Michigan (whose primary is in some kind of weird limbo at the moment).  He’s also in danger of losing South Carolina….to Mitt Romney?  Strange possibilities.  In the past we have seen how quickly leads in South Carolina both before and after New Hampshire can vanish, so he cannot count on his position remaining stable until late January.  Plus, California isn’t New Jersey–Giuliani doesn’t have some absurdly large, prohibitive lead out there.  There were, at last count, 23 states holding primaries or caucuses on February 5, and I believe Republicans are voting in all but one or two of those states (the New Mexico GOP hasn’t moved up their primary). 

Yes, I know this cycle is allegedly very different because of February 5 (will this day also get its own ditty, “remember, remember, the Fifth of February, the day of that stupid super-primary”?), but if Giuliani’s “strategy” is going to succeed he needs to be building up an insurmountable lead in the most delegate-rich states, and right now he isn’t achieving that.  I talk more about the perverse and unintended consequences of the front-loading of the primary system in an article for Chronicles in an upcoming issue.

P.S.  All of my statements are qualified by the reality that Dick Morris seems to share the same view, which is a good sign that I have gone wrong somewhere.

Dave Weigel is right when he says that “dismissal’s the correct response to an article that claims a Murray Rothbard devotee refuses to speak to Jews.”  I refrained from diving into the absurd argument over the particulars of the charge (I did link to Alex Massie’s response), because dismissing and ignoring it was the best approach.  However, it has reached such a point that I thought I would say a few things. 

Remarkably, I even agree with Jonah Goldberg:

And I agree with you [addressed to Derbyshire], the biggest takeaway from the American Thinker piece is that Paul’s shop needs to get professional. I do think that Paul — if he is the real deal — has a special obligation to draw bright lines between himself and a lot of the fringe-folks who are flocking to him.  

Paul does draw these lines whenever he speaks, simply by stating what it is that he does believe.  Even so, if it would put to rest this nonsense it might be worth doing.  Of course, it is insulting that Paul should have to re-state what must seem to him (and the overwhelming majority of his supporters) to be the blindingly obvious: for him, as for us, racial hatred is abhorrent, all violent, coercive statist ideologies are abhorrent, neo-Nazis are equal parts ridiculous, pathetic and hideous, and so on.  The overwhelming majority of his supporters–conservative, libertarian, moderate and liberal–have nothing to do with these ideas.  

It was insulting and absurd when some people said that Romney was trying to send a message in “code” to anti-Semites everywhere by announcing his campaign from the Ford Museum.  That stupid controversy fortunately died a pretty quick death.  I hope that this one ends this week, today, because it is absurd and based on the insane standard that the allegedly no-hope protest candidate must scrutinise the ideological beliefs of all his individual donors and actively denounce genuinely lunatic websites who happen to be saying positive things about him, as if their lunatic comments had anything to do with the man or his campaign when they clearly do not.  This is a standard, of course, that is not actually applied to any other campaign.  Who knows what you might find if you went rummaging through the donations to other candidates?  If Obama received donations from a Nation of Islam member, would that be treated as a scandal or an irrelevance?  Anyone who treated it as a scandal would be a fool.  Maybe there are some objectionable characters who have donated to Giuliani–in the end, so what?  Unless we’re talking about the buying of access or favours, which is clearly not at stake here, the relevant subject should be the candidate and his own positions.  There are plenty of bloggers, particularly those on the left, who like to complain about “the Freak Show” and the media’s obsession with trivia, as well they should, but everyone should recognise that this is just another part of that obsession.     

Let’s be very clear: Paul is being attacked in this case not because of anything he has actually done or said, but because of what other people say while misusing his name as a symbol for their own purposes and because of who those people are.  There are other candidates out there today who are open to “pre-emptively” nuking other countries, seem indifferent to the state’s use of torture and cheer on aggressive war, but when they themselves actually espouse these horrible ideas it is deemed a “policy” difference and therefore permissible on national television.  Ron Paul gets a check from some fanatic, and suddenly you’d think the world is coming to an end.  There is an incredible imbalance here.

One of the reasons we, the vast, reasonable majority of Paul supporters, support Paul is that he vehemently, publicly, repeatedly rejects the assumptions on which all of these ideologies are founded.  Obviously.  It shouldn’t have to be said, but now it’s been said.  You can now resume thinking about things that matter.  Goodness knows I’ve already wasted too many words and too much time on this trash.

On another campaign with a heavy dose of idealism and amateurism, here is Dan McCarthy on Barry Goldwater and his legacy:

To answer that question, one has to look to the sharpest division that split the Goldwater movement of the ’60s. It wasn’t the division between libertarians and traditionalists, it was the division that separated idealistic libertarians and traditionalists alike, the campaign amateurs, from the campaign professionals. The conservative movement still pays lip service to economic liberty, social order, and military strength—but on all three points, Republicans have become hollow men who have preserved the rites of Goldwaterism but who long ago lost its spirit. That was an amateur spirit—in both the best and worst senses of the word—and it drew together in common cause traditionalists and libertarians as different as Brent Bozell and Goldwater speechwriter Karl Hess.   

It is indeed this same kind of idealistic amateurism–and I mean that phrase as a compliment–that you see in the Paul campaign, but the price of that amateurism is that the campaign does not, perhaps cannot, engage in the kind of rapid-fire response press handling and spinning that we have come to expect from the other consultant-bloated campaigns.  Certainly, this is a technical liability, but it is a perfect example of what has been until very, very recently a shoe-string operation that has inspired its supporters partly through its very modesty.

Fatima Bhutto reminds us that the cover girl for democracy in Pakistan was awful in her own right when she was in power and remains an utterly cynical politician who will try to manipulate everyone for her own advantage.  Both of these claims are true.  I think she is also right that if Bhutto were to come to power the democracy that she would be promoting there would be as farcical as it has been in the various “colour” revolution states.

Only people bewitched by the myth of “People Power” could think that given Georgia’s disillusionment any good come from another coloured-coded revolution endorsed by the same journalists and “human rights” activists who have praised Georgia as a model for change. Many of the Western groups who funded and trained the so-called “rose revolutionaries” in Georgia in 2003 have been behind the scenes of the “saffron revolution” in Burma. If Burma’s military rulers should go the way of Eduard Shevardnadze will Burma fall through the floor into the same politics of corruption, drugs smuggling and backstabbing which have pock-marked Georgia’s tragic post-Soviet history.

Proponents of “People Power” from the Caucasus to South-East Asia ignore the poverty, oppression, disease and death which have followed events like the “Rose Revolution.” Western media like The Economist and so-called human rights watchdogs like the Council of Europe have a lamentable record of fellow travelling with successive corrupt and cruel regimes in Tbilisi since 1991. It is not too much to say that there isn’t any bad situation which the nexus of Western intelligence agencies, media and human rights agencies cannot make worse, while singing their own praises as the proponents of a new dawn of human happiness.

The infighting and mutual accusations of crime, corruption and killings among the Rose Revolutionaries is the starkest case yet of the reality of a post-People Power country contrasting with the myth peddled abroad in the Western media. No journalists who painted a rosy picture of the new rulers of Georgia has yet come forward to correct, let alone apologise for their myth-making under the guise of reporting. ~Mark Almond

Mr. Almond has an extremely long, but very important post detailing how things have come to the current pass in Georgia.  He also had this to say:

However disillusioned Georgians and other long-suffering people around the world may be with the West’s cult of revolution, so long as bogus revolutions to suit geo-strategic purposes can be passed off as the work of the people, then Georgians will have to suffer another false dawn of freedom and prosperity.

My thoughts exactly.

How badly is Fred Thompson doing?  So badly in Iowa that he is considered less honest about his beliefs than Mitt Romney.  When asked whether a candidate says what he believes, 56% say yes for Romney, while only 53% say the same for Thompson.  How poorly must your campaign be going when you are viewed as more of a panderer than the monumental fraud himself?  Wasn’t Fred’s appeal supposed to be that he was the straight-talking, no-nonsense Tennessean?  He can’t persuade anybody that he’s really motivated, and he can’t even persuade all that many people that he’s sincere.  Does he have anything left to offer?