Yeah, it was just a pander. The painful truth is that the State Department doesn’t have any alternatives to protect its diplomats in conflict areas like Iraq. Not only does the military not want to take on the mission, but it would be problematic for U.S. troops to use the protection of diplomats as a [...]

Leila Fadel has an excellent Washington Post piece about the Iraqi Interior Ministry essentially de-certifying 410 Anbar Awakening fighters whom the U.S. turned into police officers. The Awakening vets never graduated from any police academy, and that’s all the pretext the ministry evidently needs. A typical quote from a cashiered cop: “We sacrificed our blood [...]

I’m not so sure I buy Michael Yon’s conclusion that we won the Iraq war. But I’m definitely interested in checking out his forthcoming book Iraq: Inside The Inferno, his photo-heavy account of reporting from Iraq from 2005 to 2008 — in large part precisely because I’m not sure I buy his bottom line. If [...]

I come to quibble with Andrew Sullivan: But I fear, unlike Peter, that [Republican voters and politicians]  have not tired of wars, just counter-insurgencies, and will never support actual withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan ever, because it reveals “weakness” in the war they want to escalate rather than defuse, and to use for domestic purposes [...]

The Iraqi defense minister wants a return on his investment. As Abdul Qader Obeidi tells the Los Angeles Times‘ Liz Sly, Iraq’s purchases of American weapons platforms compel an advisory presence beyond 2011, SOFA or no SOFA: “It’s inevitable,” he said. “We have equipment such as tanks, aircraft, naval equipment, and it’s all coming from [...]

Stephen Farrell recalls hearing this horrendous, chilling summation of the occupation of Iraq in 2004: [M]y colleagues and I outlined the provisional authority’s worldview to get the Ohanians’ reaction. Astrik’s son Hambartzum listened politely. He assessed what he had just heard about democracy and new freedoms, and then pronounced: “I am free to read the [...]

Matthew Yglesias on the, uh, middle of the end of the Iraq war: [T]he policy of disengagement from Iraq over the past 18 months has been a stunning success. Not because it’s solved all of Iraq’s problems — it hasn’t — but because it’s solved one of America’s biggest problems since the war began, the [...]

The defense secretary in Ramadi: Asked directly if the war had been worth it, Mr. Gates replied, “It really requires a historian’s perspective in terms of what happens here in the long run.” The war, he added, “will always be clouded by how it began,” — that is, he said, the premise on which it [...]

Victor Davis Hanson makes a point worth addressing: Obama warns against “open-ended wars,” as if they are almost animate things. But wars end, not when they reach a rational, previously agreed-upon expiration date, but usually when tough, specific wartime choices are made that lead to victory or end in defeat. One party must decide – [...]

1. Kind of a mishmash. Obama tries to go from the theme of ending one war (slowly, gradually, cautiously) to the broader theme of national and global renewal. It doesn’t really work, in my opinion. First because there’s still over a year’s worth of war, if a twilight and diminishing war, to be waged in [...]