Friday Link Orgy

* John McCain gets closer to opting for public financing of his presidential campaign while Wall Street puts its money on the Democrats, and even GOP 527s seem to be having a hard time of late, but somehow the RNC is doing better than the DNC.

* The merely mildly amusing web site Stuff White People Like has been getting a lot of flack lately, but it's also getting an outrageous advance for a book deal. We can only hope the infinitely superior Hot Chicks with Douchebags got a better deal.

* Hey, now you too can shill for your blog on the pages of the Washington Post! Chris Cillizza at The Fix is looking to round up the best political blogs in each of the 50 states and I see the folks over at RealDebateWisconsin and the BadgerBloggerAlliance have already dispatched their minions. Sorry, folks that's not what he's looking for. My guess is that WisPolitics.com and/or the Wheeler Report will win.

* Explore a lost city on your lunch break today.

* A brief look at how the war in Iraq is dissuading the next generation of military leadership in the Army and Marines from re-upping.

* Bad news for Obama? I would imagine it would be even worse news for the State Dept.

* Silly drunk people ...

* There is still an ungoldly amount of spying going on in Russia ... even in the private sector.

* Ricky Gervais might be in the middle of making one of the funniest movies of all time ... no pressure.

Republican Polling Data on Iraq

From Daniel Larison:

Some interesting crosstab data from a recent Rasmussen poll on the question of withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq. 59% of all Americans favour withdrawal either immediately or within a year, including 39% of Republicans. How is it possible that almost four out of every ten Republicans want out of Iraq, and yet the one candidate who promises to do just that receives virtually no support in polling?

The first that comes to mind is that GOP primary polls focus on "likely Republican voters," who would likely be die-hards and more likely to tow the party line, as opposed to people who just identify with the party. But that all depends on how the poll is being taken and by whom. The implication, of course, is that Paul could receive a surprise wellspring of support come election day, but this would depend on what priority GOP voters use the war to determine the candidate they support. I don't know how that will translate during the caucuses in Iowa (where Paul is polling between 1% and 4%), but that may turn into unexpected support in New Hampshire.

More on Barry Posen

Sameer Lalwani at the Washington Note contributes to the discussion of Barry Posen's recent essay in the American Interest.

The more I think about this essay, the more I find myself agreeing with the specific points that led Posen to the general premise.

Curveball

60 Minutes found him.

Just Rub Some Dirt on It

Duncan Hunter -- dipshit extraordinaire -- has come up with what has to be his stupidest, most nonsensical idea yet: Instead of sending Foreign Service officers, some of whom have been understandably reluctant to accept assignments to Iraq, to Baghdad, why not send wounded vets?

[L]et’s turn to those who have bravely followed the American flag in the most dangerous of assignments. The U.S. Marines, soldiers, airmen and Navy personnel presently recovering at our national military hospitals have all the character required by the Department of State. They are brave, loyal, intelligent and fiercely determined to win the War on Terror.”

(emphasis)

Pay close attention to how inartfully this is worded: "Presently recovering"! Not "recently discharged," but currently recuperating.

Christ, haven't they done enough?

The Restraint Doctrine

If you read one 6500+ word essay on the future of American foreign policy this week, make sure it's the one written by Barry Posen in the latest issue of the American Interest. To put it briefly, Posen spends the first half of the essay examining America's role in the post-Cold War world and arrives at an interesting, fairly convincing, and certainly not uncontroversial conclusion:

The activist U.S. grand strategy currently preferred by the national security establishment in both parties thus has a classically tragic quality about it. Enabled by its great power, and fearful of the negative energies and possibilities engendered by globalization, the United States has tried to get its arms around the problem: It has essentially sought more control. But the very act of seeking more control injects negative energy into global politics as quickly as it finds enemies to vanquish. It prompts states to balance against U.S. power however they can, and it prompts peoples to imagine that the United States is the source of all their troubles.

Iraq should therefore be seen not as a singular debacle, but as a harbinger of costs to come. There is enough capacity and motivation out in the world to increase significantly the costs of any U.S. effort to manage global politics directly. Public support for this policy may wane before profligacy so diminishes U.S. power that it becomes unsustainable. But it would be unwise to count on it.

(emphasis added)

Posen then devotes the second half of the essay to arguing that a future American foreign policy based on more restraint and selective engagement in the world's trouble spots will be more advantageous to the nation than a continued doctrine of 'interventionism."

The whole thing is a brilliant read, and so are the responses to the piece that AI included. Walter Russell Mead's take is particularly interesting and seems to me to be demonstrative of many of the principles laid out by Posen while disagreeing with his conclusions.

Broken Armies

This is a remarkable paragraph:

The Army needs more than $13 billion within the next 60 days to repair and replace equipment damaged or destroyed in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the service will have to delay efforts to restore battlefield equipment stocks, a senior Army official said Tuesday.

So if the Army doesn't get $13 billion -- let's say that again for good measure: $13 BILLION -- it will no longer have the ability to resupply itself.

Now that could be an exaggeration that a smart Army congressional liaison is using to guarantee he gets the money, but there are enough folks with stars on their shoulders staying something similar (for a while now too) that it's entirely believable.

Getting Paid to Get Married

This seems to me to be a little desperate:

BAGHDAD, Oct 2 (Reuters) - Iraq is offering a cash bonus to married Iraqi couples from different sectarian groups in a drive to heal rifts between communities and foster reconciliation.

At a ceremony in Baghdad to launch the new initiative on Tuesday, 250 recently married couples from across Iraq accepted awards from Sunni Arab vice President Tareq al-Hashemi. Those in mixed marriages received $1,500.

I see three problems with this idea:

(1.) Given what is assumed about the tensions between Sunnis and Shias, is it proper to believe that such an incentive would be applicable to many couples?

(2.) Again, given how bad tensions between could be, would couples who took advantage of this policy face reprisals from their own sects?

(3.) What if couples use the money to leave Iraq?

The WaPo IED Report, Part I

According to the Washington Post, the IED jammers I've noticed coming down the appropriations pipeline (here and here) have been a huge part of explosive countermeasures in bothe Afghanistan and Iraq:

If no one foresaw that within four years more than 30,000 jammers of all sorts would be in Iraq, a few suspected that something big had started. "We're going to need a lot more jammers," Col. Bruce Jette, who commanded the Army's Rapid Equipping Force at Fort Belvoir, told a Fort Monmouth engineer in August 2003. "And eventually we're going to need a jammer on every vehicle."

The history of these jammers is actually pretty amazing and winds through extremely classified Secret Service projects to protect presidential motorcades to measures used by the Navy:

For decades, electronic countermeasures had been a vital part of airborne combat for Navy fliers. Submariners also considered it a "core mission," as did surface ship officers. "It's how I deal with cruise missiles coming at me," said Rear Adm. Arch Macy, commander of the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Washington.

One of the article's more sobering moments is a series of statistics that shed light into just how pervasive the IED probably is in Iraq:

Yet U.S. strategists, who before the invasion failed to anticipate an insurgency, also drafted no comprehensive plans for securing thousands of munitions caches, now estimated to have held at least 650,000 tons and perhaps more than 1 million tons of explosives...

More than a year after the invasion "only 40 percent of Iraq's pre-war munitions inventory was secured or destroyed," the Congressional Research Service reported this summer.

Tens of thousands of tons probably were pilfered, U.S. government analysts believe. (If properly positioned, 20 pounds of high explosive can destroy any vehicle the Army owns.) The lax control would continue long after Hussein was routed: 10,000 or more blasting caps -- also vital to bombmaking -- vanished from an Iraqi bureau of mines storage facility in 2004, along with "thousands of kilometers" of detonation cord, according to a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst.

(Emphasis added)

Think about that bolded parenthetical sentence for a second. That's an incredible neutralizing figure illustrated by this anecdote:

A large explosion along a roadbed near Balad in October of that year flung a 70-ton M1A2 Abrams tank down an embankment, shearing off the turret and killing two crewmen.

If those numbers aren't frightening enough the insurgents have also demonstrated a wily capacity to adapt on the battlefield:

Camouflage remained simple, with bombs tucked in roadkill or behind highway guardrails. (Soldiers soon ripped out hundreds of miles of guardrail.) Emplacers often used the same "blow hole" repeatedly, returning to familiar roadside "hot spots" again and again. But early in the insurgency, before U.S. troops were better trained, only about one bomb in 10 was found and neutralized, according to an Army colonel.

[...]

Each week, the cat-and-mouse game expanded. When coalition convoys routinely began stopping 300 yards from a suspected IED, insurgents planted easily spotted hoax bombs to halt traffic, then detonated explosives that had been hidden where a convoy would most likely pull over.

So where does the MRAP fit into the milieu? Rick Atkinson, the article's author, suggests that the delay in moving MRAPs into the theater was both an administrative and field decision:

Two weeks after taking command from the retiring Gen. Tommy R. Franks, Abizaid publicly described resistance in Iraq as "a classical guerrilla-style campaign," a blunt appraisal that reportedly irked the Pentagon's civilian leadership. But the amount of unsecured ammunition in Iraq, particularly in Sunni regions, alarmed him. So did the realization that many Iraqi military officers -- unemployed and disgruntled after the national army was disbanded in late May -- possessed extensive skill in handling explosives.

Abizaid hoped that American technical savvy would produce a gadget that could detect bombs at a distance, "a scientific molecular sniffer, or something," as he put it. "We thought the problem would spread," Abizaid later reflected, "but it didn't appear overly sophisticated." Underestimating the enemy's creativity and overestimating American ingenuity, a pattern established before the war began, continued long after the capture of Baghdad.

Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior U.S. ground commander in Iraq, told Pentagon strategists that he hoped to minimize the military's "footprint" in Iraq by maintaining an occupation force that was two-thirds motorized and only one-third mechanized. "What I don't want is a lot of tanks and Bradleys," Sanchez said, according to a senior Army commander.

The rest of piece details a special forces group that was assembled to assess the IED threat in Iraq and recommend countermeasures. and some of the initial measures (such as up-armored Humvees) that were used against the threat. Atkinson concludes the article by hinting at another struggle likely to be a major part of the IED story: the money issue.

Creation of the Joint IED Task Force would dramatically expand the U.S. effort. A $100 million budget in fiscal 2004 would mushroom to $1.3 billion in 2005. In subsequent meetings with industry executives and the national research laboratories, Wolfowitz declared that there was no higher priority. Within the Defense Department, countering IEDs would be second only to exterminating Osama bin Laden.

In fact, IEDs were likely more important than finding bin Laden at the time or at least quickly becoming so, as the CIA's bin Laden unit was in the process of disbanding in late 2005.

MORE: The Armchair Generalist weighs in.

EVEN MORE: Max Boot: "[T]echnology seldom confers a lasting advantage in military affairs. What counts is not having the right tools per se, but how you make use of them, and especially whether you can adapt faster than your adversaries."

Cholera

In Baghdad.

The Blackwater Thing is Probably Bigger Than You Think It Is

From TPM:

US suspends all land travel by US diplomats and other civilian officials in Iraq over Blackwater incident.

Wow ... That says two things: (1.) Blackwater is such an integral part of the security apparatus of State Dept. and other gov't officials (this would include visiting legislators, consultants, civilian DOD, etc.) that if the company is removed from the equation diplomacy almost comes to a grinding halt ... or at least moves only when a helicopter is available.

That's not good. Remember, it's the "political progress" in Iraq that needs to start showing some legs (or at least that's what the administration says), and that will only happen with a solid diplomatic effort. That will require mobility ... secure mobility.

(2.) Is a little more complicated and basically boils down to either (a.) the U.S. has finally had it with all the shit Blackwater has gotten away with, or (b.) the Iraqis have finally had it with all of the shit Blackwater has gotten away with to the extent that the company is now becoming a political liability to U.S.-Iraqi relations.

P.W. Singer told Danger Room that this was inevitable:

Blackwater has been one of the most visible [private military contractors] -- unusual for an industry that typically tries to avoid the limelight. This notoriety makes Blackwater a fatter target than, say, an unknown British or Bulgarian company.

The relationship between the Iraqi government and Blackwater is particularly tense -- and not just because armed Blackwater guards are the contractors that senior Iraqi government officials run into the most. On Christmas Eve 2006, a Blackwater employee allegedly got drunk while inside the Green Zone in Baghdad and got in an argument with a guard of the Iraqi Vice President. He then shot the Iraqi dead. The employee was quickly flown out of the country. Nine months later, he has not been charged with any crime. Imagine the same thing happening in the U.S.: An Iraqi embassy guard, drunk at a a Christmas party, shooting a Secret Service agent guarding Vice President Cheney. You can see some potential for underlying tension there. In May 2007, there was another reported shooting of an Interior Ministry driver by Blackwater employees. That led to an armed standoff and had Matthew Degn, a senior American civilian adviser to the Interior Ministry's intelligence directorate, describing the ministry as "a powder keg" of anger at the firm.

(Singer is something of the world's leading expert on, dare I say, "post-modern" developments in warfare, such as the rebirth of privatized armies and the use of children in combat. Corporate Warriors is as comprehensive a history and analysis of the the modern private military industry as one can find. I haven't read his book on child soldiers in Africa, Children at War, largely because I'm pretty sure it would be too depressing.)

RJ Hillhouse thinks this will only be a minor setback for Blackwater and expects to see them back in action:

It looks like the incident happened when BW was performing the contract for State, so it will be interesting to see if the US government allows the Iraqis to put limits upon who it's contracting with--for both white and black contracts. Regardless of whatever gymnastics State goes through to appease the Iraqis, somehow I suspect that the CIA contracts are not going to be subject to Iraqi government licensing. Smart money says that Blackwater is in Iraq for the duration.

Larry Johnson concurs:

First problem. Blackwater does not have a license to operate in Iraq and does not need one. They have a U.S. State Department contract through Diplomatic Security. Instead of using Diplomatic Security officers or hiring new Security officers or relying on U.S. military personnel, the Bush Administration has contracted with firms like Blackwater, Triple Canopy, and others for people capable of conducting personnel security details. State Department is not about to curtail the contract with Blackwater, who is tightly wired into Washington. Plus, State Department simply does not have the bodies available to carry out the security mission.

Second problem. The Iraqi government has zero power to enforce a decision to oust a firm like Blackwater. For starters, Blackwater has a bigger air force and more armored vehicles then the Iraqi Army and police put together. As Spencer Ackerman reported, Blackwater’s little bird helicopter (an aircraft normally used by U.S. special operations forces) that was firing mini guns at Iraqi targets on the ground this past weekend.

Supposedly the Blackwater incident has provided the Iraqi government with enough cause to review all private security firms, which is no small matter since there are currently more contractors in Iraq than there are soldiers. At a very minimum this should provide an impetus for U.S. law makers to codify some kind of legal doctrine for private security firms operating in country because right now there is none:

The legal position of private military contractors in Iraq has long been the subject of controversy, with an order from the former Coalition Provisional Authority, never rescinded, that grants them immunity from Iraqi law.

And under U.S. law?

A court martial of a private-sector employee would likely be challenged on constitutional grounds, the research service said, while Iraqi courts do not have the jurisdiction to prosecute contractors without permission from the United States.

"It is possible that some contractors may remain outside the jurisdiction of U.S. courts, civil or military, for improper conduct in Iraq," the report said.

Basically, because they are not "soldiers" as the armed forces would define the term, the Uniform Code of Military Conduct does not apply to them.

Untangle that mess, if you can ...

Just a reminder: Cofer Black, Blackwater's Vice Chairman, is a principle on Mitt Romney's foreign policy advisory team.

This is simply awful news.

Petraeus Praises the MRAPs

On Capitol Hill today.

The Economist on the Petraeus Spectacle

Congress is a terrible show. It is the dullest gaggle of gasbags ever to be given so much power. If the world's most powerful bunch of legislators, addressing the world's most important subject, can't do better at holding attention and making a point with verve and oration, it's no surprise people tune out.

Brief and damning, the post at Democracy in America does a wonderful at displaying the absurdity of today's proceedings.

MORE: Not mentioned in the aforementioned post was Tom Lantos, the Bay Area Rep. whose opening statement can be found here.

Mic Check, One Two, One Two

On the MoveOn.org ad, two differing views: Mark Kleiman vs. Kevin Drum.

Microphone difficulties at the hearing required a brief recess to remedy resulting in the follow exchange:

Adding to those difficulties, protesters waved signs and shouted loudly, and it took security officers a while to clear them from the room. Unlike Petraeus’s microphone, Skelton’s was working just fine. “That really pisses me off down there, Those a——-,” Skelton was heard saying to the committee’s ranking Republican member Duncan Hunter of California. Hunter, pointing out where the protesters were seated, advised Skelton of their plan to interrupt the hearing every five minutes for the next hour or so and urged Skelton to remove the lot of them if the disruptions persisted.

Rep. Dan Burton (R., Ind.) also added to Skelton’s grief when he attempted to advise the chairman on how to proceed amid the difficulties. Burton later approached Skelton. “I didn’t mean to lecture you,” Burton said. “The hell you didn’t,” Skelton replied.

A staffer quickly switched off Skelton’s microphone.

Priceless.

Iraqi Report Card

It's almost exactly noon (1:00 pm EST), I'm watching Gen. Petraeus' report to the House Foreign Affairs committee, and did I just hear crazy-ass Duncan Hunter say that disbanding the Iraqi army was basically a good thing because there would have been too many Sunni generals hanging around if we hadn't?

Have I mentioned how much I dislike Duncan Hunter?

Planning the Withdraw

Lawrence Korb and Max Bergman discuss withdraw from Iraq in the Boston Globe:

A lengthy withdrawal, on the other hand, would play it by the book. The roughly 75 forward-operating bases scattered around Iraq would be meticulously shut down. Every piece of nonessential equipment from kitchen supplies to latrines would be dealt with according to military regulation. In order not to overload Kuwaiti ports and to meet stringent requirements of the Department of Agriculture - which requires each piece of equipment to be power-washed and shrink-wrapped before being transported to the United States - at most only about one combat brigade per month, roughly 3,500 troops, would leave Iraq through "Route Tampa," the one major road connecting central Iraq to Kuwait.

While such a lengthy and meticulous drawdown is often portrayed as the most "responsible" course, this plan would end up putting US forces in danger for the sake of extracting nonessential equipment. This is not just a morally dubious proposition, but one that hardly seems cost effective. The costs of maintaining US forces in Iraq - more than $10 billion per month - and the costs entailed in shipping nonessential equipment back to the United States are considerable.

But a safe and responsible withdrawal of US forces can be completed over a period of 10-12 months if we prioritize getting our troops to Kuwait, and if we seek to extract just critical and sensitive equipment.

This scenario looks at withdraw from a strictly logistic and tactical point of view and makes no mention of efforts to offer remove Iraqis and their families who have assisted American troops during the occupation/reconstruction (take your pick) efforts. I don't hear a whole lot about those people during conversations about facilitating withdraw and their addition to any exit strategy changes the equation dramatically.

If it can take roughly a year to get 170,000 troops and their equipment out of Iraq -- and I have the feeling like this time frame might be more optimal than practical -- then how long will it take to remove the 150,000+ Iraqis who have worked with the CPA, the military, or others with American ties? What about their families? That number could rise to as many as 500,000 Iraqis who may have a justifiable reason for leaving the country when we do.

Before we get too far ahead of ourselves planning for a withdraw we should probably come to an understanding of the human inventory we expect to take back with us.

Rumsfeld & Iraq

This month's GQ will apparently feature interviews with both Donald Rumsfeld (his first since leaving office last year) and Colin Powell.

The Rumsfeld interview is apparently noteworthy for the former SecDef's insistence that the administration was prepared for the events that many people argue contributed to the failure of the Iraq:

Rumsfeld says that, before the war, "I sat down and hand-wrote fifteen, twenty, twenty-five things that could be...could go wrong, could be real problems...I wrote down all of the things that could be problems: That we wouldn't find weapons of mass destruction. That there'd be a Fortress Baghdad, and a lot of people would be killed. All of this... I read it in a National Security Council meeting. Then I went back to my office--I had handwritten it--and I dictated it and added four or five things. And I think there's probably thirty items on it. And then I sent it around to each of the members of the National Security Council, to the president and the vice president. So that all of them had in their heads the things that were difficult, problematic, worrisome, dangerous."

While the whole article isn't online yet, this passage doesn't mention anything about contingency planning for the events that Rumsfeld says he contemplated, nor does it mention any instructions given to or by the National Security Council to plan for any such events.

AQI (or lack thereof)

We're going to follow Brian Beutler's bridge here from the Salon WMD story we linked to earlier to the Washington Monthly's expose on the influence of Al-Queda in Iraq (hint: not as big as the Bush administration would have believe).

Again, I think it's worth mentioning that there will likely be more of these kinds of behind-the-scenes-of-the-marketing-campaign stories that will do a great deal to topple the house of cards the Bush presidency has built. If journalism if the first draft of history, then we're probably entering into the fact-checking phase; and just a many have suspected for some time now, not much is checking out.

Photo-ops

I really just dropped the ball on this scene when I first saw it a few days ago, so in the spirit of better-late-than-never, here we go ...

What's the virtue of choreographing a photo-op in Iraq with conventional humvees as opposed to MRAPs?

Were there simply none to be put in front of a camera?

It's an interesting choice of prop, but I'm not really clear as to what the message is.