We have a strategic arsenal. We should use it.

1. Get out of Iraq

2. Be more balanced with regard to Palestine

3. Combo of carrots/sticks with regard to Pakistan

4. Propaganda offensive (will not work without items 1 and 2 above)

Use of "strategic arsenal" would be counterproductive and immoral. Look at Iraq for exhibit A in that regard...

It's a police matter. Always has been. International policing on an ongoing basis. They can borrow military forces for specific actions, but the whole war metaphor was either a tragic stupid mistake or Republican subterfuge designed to cow certain voters into allowing the GOP power grab that fueled disastrous policies here and abroad.

As far as F. Kagan goes if just one of his chins had as much intelligence as the average chimp he might be worth listening to, but that is not the case.

Yes, that's all the better that particular dimwit deserves. Get a life fatty.

no one wants to start a war with Pakistan.

India?
Only slightly more seriously, aren't there dozens of neocons would would love nothing more? (Maybe after Iran, Syria, China, ...)

Anyone who looks at this objectively knows that the liberal/democrat line about the need to fight the real enemy in Afghanistan is just a phony way to provide some cover for their desire to immediately withdraw from Iraq and to try to secure political power. It is impressive that Kevin acknowledges the phoniness of the argument.

mewling idiot: Anyone who looks at this objectively knows that the liberal/democrat line about the need to fight the real enemy in Afghanistan is just a phony way to provide some cover for their desire to immediately withdraw from Iraq and to try to secure political power.

Apparently our Ambassador to Iraq, handpicked for his ability to whore himself out for the White House - isn't "objective:"

During this afternoon’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) forced Ambassador Ryan Crocker to acknowledge that al Qaeda in the Afghanistan/Pakistan region poses a larger threat than al Qaeda in Iraq:

SEN. BIDEN: Mr. Ambassador, is Al Qaeda a greater threat to US interests in Iraq, or in the Afghan-Pakistan border region? … Which would you pick, Mr. Ambassador?

AMB. CROCKER: I would therefore pick Al Qaeda in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border area

You're breathtakingly dim.

Kagan just wants to do to Pakistan and South Asia what has already been done to Afghanistan and Iraq.

Remember: They Are Liars
By William Rivers Pitt Tuesday 08 April 2008

No one is such a liar as the indignant man.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleezza Rice, along with a slew of administration underlings and a revolving-door cavalcade of brass hats from the Pentagon, have been making claims regarding Iraq for many years now.

They claimed Iraq was in possession of 26,000 liters of anthrax, "enough to kill several million people," according to a page on the White
House web site titled "Disarm Saddam Hussein".

They lied.

They claimed Iraq was in possession of 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin.

They lied.

They claimed Iraq was in possession of 500 tons, which equals 1,000,000 pounds, of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent.

They lied.

They claimed Iraq was in possession of nearly 30,000 munitions capable of delivering these agents.

They lied.

They claimed Iraq was in possession of several mobile biological weapons labs.

They lied.

They claimed Iraq was operating an "advanced" nuclear weapons program.

They lied.

They claimed Iraq had been seeking "significant quantities" of uranium from Africa for use in this "advanced" nuclear weapons program.

They lied.

They claimed Iraq attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes "suitable for nuclear weapons."

They lied.

They claimed America needed to invade, overthrow and occupy Iraq in order to remove this menace from our world. "It would take just one vial,
one canister, one crate slipped into this country," went the White House line, "to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known."

They lied.

"Simply stated," said Dick Cheney in August of 2002, "there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction."

Liar.

"Right now," said George W. Bush in September of 2002, "Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of
nuclear weapons."

Liar.

"We know for a fact," said White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer in January of 2003, "that there are weapons there."

Liar.

"We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction," said Colin Powell in February of 2003, "is determined to make more."

Liar.

"We know where they are," said Donald Rumsfeld in March of 2003. "They are in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad, and east, south, west and north somewhat."

Liar.

"The Iraqi people understand what this crisis is about," said Paul Wolfowitz in March of 2003. "Like the people of France in the 1940s, they view us as their hoped-for liberator."

Liar.

"No one ever said that we knew precisely where all of these agents were," said Condoleezza Rice in June of 2003, "where they were stored."

Liar.

"I have absolute confidence that there are weapons of mass destruction inside this country," said Gen. Tommy Franks in April of 2003. "Whether we will turn out, at the end of the day, to find them in one of the 2,000 or
3,000 sites we already know about or whether contact with one of these officials who we may come in contact with will tell us, 'Oh, well, there's actually another site,' and we'll find it there, I'm not sure."

Wrong.

"Before the war," said Gen. Michael Hagee in May of 2003, "there's no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction,
biological and chemical. I expected them to be found. I still expect them to be found."

Wrong.

"Given time," said Gen. Richard Myers in May of 2003, "given the number of prisoners now that we're interrogating, I'm confident that we're
going to find weapons of mass destruction."

Wrong.

"Do I think we're going to find something? Yeah, I kind of do," said Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton in May of 2003, "because I think there's a lot of
information out there."

Wrong.

Gen. David Petraeus, commander of US forces in Iraq, is about to give testimony before the Senate regarding the current state of affairs in that battle-savaged country. He is a political general, one of many America has seen and heard over the last five years, one who would leap nude from the Capitol dome before telling the real truth about matters in Iraq ... or who
would speak using words fed to him by liars, and thus be wrong.

Remember: they lie. They all lie, from the top man down to the bottom. If their lips are moving, a lie is unfolding. If they say water is wet, get into the shower to make sure.

They lie.

Period.

Well, ConDeflator, that's quite a list.

I'd make it easier on everyone:

Would the Bush Administration (or the Pentagon for that matter) have allowed all those embedded reporters with live video feeds to join the invasion of Iraq if they really believed there was a chance of Iraq using chem/bio weapons? Can you imagine the devastation of watching a chem/bio war on live tv?
No, there was no chance of that. So sure, the more reporters the merrier. Oh, and let's give everyone a scary mask to make it seem like they're heading to a potential armageddon.

Kagen was on the News Hour debating Gen. Odom about progress in Iraq. Jabba was positively effusive. I thought that at any minute that he was going to bust out singing “Everything's Coming Up Roses” a la Ethel Merman to whom he bears a certain resemblance. Odom was having none of that and was not amused.

Kagen is an ideology in search of some willing facts. The man is just not credible.

Well, let's say a new President in the US keeps them out of Afghanistan. Iran keeps them out of Iran (as it has done), and India keeps them out of India. Then al-Qaeda is bottled up and can't do anything to the US or any Western country.

al-Qaeda is powerless and loses influence every year and the government of Pakistan keeps stomping on them. Sounds like a win to me.

I think I've read/heard before actually many liberals- blog commenters, bloggers, and politicians- say that Iraq is a distraction and that the real war on terror is to be fought in Afghanistan and Pakistan. So not only is Kagan jumping to conclusions by claiming that liberals don't want to fight the "real" war on terror, either, he's not giving credit where credit is due.

To me, the conservatives are all starting to sound like they're mentally dull on military matters.

This stuff Kevin wrote about "not wanting to start a war with Pakistan" is unfortunate, too. Nobody is suggesting we start a war with Pakistan, and it's troublesome that Kevin is claiming that people want to do that.

We've already been doing operations in Pakistan. We have no interests that are at odds with Pakistan's vital interests. We're not going to need to destroy Pakistan's infrastructure, property or people to get rid of a few Al Qaeda terrorists.

Even if we did it without their permission, the Pakistani response to what we'd do would be something like "Oh" (or at worst their government would feign indignation to try to guilt some goodies out of us-- which we'd probably be all to willing to give in trade, anyway). Pakistan is not going to come over here and kick our ass in retaliation.

Please lighten up, Kevin.

To clarify a little:

I think occupying part of Pakistan- if that's what it takes to find Al Qaeda- is totally off the table. Nobody wants to do that.

But if we can get them with something less intrusive than that, we can probably do it, and it won't at all risk any war with Pakistan.

But it's totally unfair to throw that in liberals' faces- to claim that, since liberals focus on doing terrorism-fighting where it's more worth-while (not in Iraq) that we somehow are dishonest because we haven't thought up how to talk some old Pakistani woman into admitting that she's hiding Osama bin Laden in her barn. We don't stop having a good point to make just because we don't have all the answers.

1) If your nightmare scenario is terrorists getting their hands on weapons of mass destruction, and if you believe that Saddam Hussein has these weapons of mass destruction, then your first priorty after overthrowing said dictator is finding and securing those WMD. When no attempt was made to do that, when it was all on the basis of "Sooner or later, the WMD will turn up," you could tell it was all a sham.
2) The reason the US invaded Iraq and overthrew Saddam was because the Bush cabal wanted to. The reason we stay, the reason we are not fighting the terrorists somewhere else, like the wilds of Pakistan, is that we don't know how to. The Global War on Terror is also a giant sham.
3) At the time of the Cuban Missle Crisis, the US was far superior to the Soviet Union militarily. The crisis convinced the Soviets to begin a massive military buildup. By the early 1970's there was rough parity. Which is why Nixon went to Moscow in 1972 to sigh a detente treaty with Brezhnev. At that point the Cold War was over as a military confrontation, and the inflated DOD budgets became nothing more than a jobs program: the govt. spending money on weapons we didn't need just to create jobs. The GWOT didn't end up there -- it started out there. It's only purpose is as a jobs program. Some people call it war profiteering. The threat to our civilization and way of life from the Soviet Union was real. What is the most damage al Queda could do to us, even if they had an atomic bomb? 100,000 dead? More? This country and our way of life would go on. Where is the existential threat the Bush administration wants us to be so afraid of?

DennisS is absolutely right - it's a police matter to keep Al Qaida from carrying out another attack. An armed invasion of Pakistan would be completely counterproductive, even if we could afford it and had the men, which we don't.

By invading and occupying Iraq, we have done more to strengthen terrorists than they could ever have done themselves. By exhausting the armed forces on a useless imperial occupation we've weakened the ourselves in multiple ways. This war is a debacle in just about every possible way, and those who launched it and continue to defend it should be repudiated and ignored henceforth.

(against the "hyper-sophisticates" who oppose the war)

That's right! Who would want to be "sophisticated" when they could be a simpleton instead!

Howsabout we all decide to have an honest conversation to define what, exactly, is this "war on terror" Kagan and his ilk keeps yakking about?

We know, in all honesty, that this is really about having a war with Extemist Islamic Fundamentalism and that, being a religious war, would be a taboo thing to say.

So let's go back and have some fun trying to pin these ass-bites down on some "war on terror" and how that might differ from, say, a "war on air"?

Start by cutting off funding to the Pakistani military, which continues to surreptitiously back AQ and the Taliban.

Not only is AQP (AlQaedaPakistan) a police issue, but it is really mainly a Pakistani (and Arab) problem. We have so grossly blown up the degree of the threat that we can't think rationally. I think that was the main point of our propaganda effort, to destroy our ability to judge the scale of threat -so they could have their way with us politically. The only people even remotely fooled by our own propaganda are the RedState Americans. So the solution isn't all that hard to come by:

(1) Grow some national nads. There always will be a low level terrorism threat. It can't be eliminated, it can only be managed. We gotta keep in mind the cost of the management actions we take, versus the effect on our risk level.

(2) The most effective way to manage the level of terrorist threat is to stop ticking off the worlds people! Duh!!!! We gotta stop being arrogant bastards dropping bombs whenever we perceive someone we don't like might be in some house. Unfortunately this requires taking a hard look at ourselves in the mirror. This seems to be a political impossibility.

(3) Stay within the accepted internation rules, and be consistent with our stated goals.

None of this is rocket science. But I fear it is way beyond the cognitive ability of Americanus Politicus.

'Boundaries' of military force vs. "limits" of military force. We are bounded by our morals from unleashing our practically unlimited capacity to blow anyplace up. Thank God we still have those morals.

Kagan criticizes those who oppose the war as a bunch of appeasers like Neville Chamberlain. I suppose he prefers guys like "he who must not be named" who was a champion of preemptive wars against perceived national enemies based on fallacious evidence and, far from feeling pleased, was actually totally pissed when Chamberlain made him put off WWII for 3 years.

Dilemmas are par for the course for people who actually think in terms of "wars on terror".

For the record, just to play along for a second, the status of Iraq being a distraction to another war has nothing to do with the difficulty of winning or succeeding in the other war, if it's a distraction, it's a distraction (and, also for the record, in terms of actionable impact, the most critical distraction occurred in the invasion and immediate occupation of Iraq, as well as the lead up to the invasion, when we actually had Al Qaeda on the run and could have crushed them with the right focus, will, material and manpower).

We can confuse the issue all we want, but the fact that Al Qaeda has got harder to track down and neutralize over the past several years has nothing to do with Iraq being a distraction, aside from the obvious insight that Iraq continuing to serve as this distraction from the time we had AQ on the run has obviously contributed to the situation where succeeding against them has become more difficult (and this confusion thus becoming somehow a defense for Kurgan).

In other words, the obvious failure of the policy that Kurgan has advocated has led to a situation where he now uses the result of this failure to advocate for his original position, only marginally modified, since this failure has led to such a FUBAR situation in terms of the real enemy that he's basically shrugging his shoulders and saying what's the point?

Of course, the point is obviously that Iraq was a distraction, in the preparation to invade when we let off Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, in the invasion itself, and in the aftermath of the invasion and clusterfuck occupation, so that we went from a position where we had Al Qaeda on the run and up against a mountain wall, with massive worldwise sympathy and support, to a position where we've lost most world sympathy and support, as well as lost track of Al Qaeda in the netherlands of one of our so-called allies, while also creating a continuing situation in Iraq where our enemy has infiltrated there, with the potential to bleed us there like a leech for a very long time (see John McCain).

Iraq serves as a "distraction" to a lot more than just us.

Writing from Karachi: I think it is hard to overstate the damage the Bush administration has done to our options here. According to people in the US, we have paid the Pakistani government a whole lot of money and gotten an equivocal response in terms of the war on terror. According to, say, the papers here, the Musharraf government took a whole lot of money for the army - not the people -- and became, in exchange, a puppet of the US, to the extent of being willing to deploy its army against its own people.

As a result, it would be a very serious political problem for any government here to be seen to be doing the US' bidding, especially if it involved fighting Pakistanis within Pakistan. Not to say that they won't, but we have made it toxic for them to be thought of as doing our bidding.

It didn't have to be this way. We could have actually used our own forces and gotten bin Laden and the AQ leadership that was with him in Tora Bora, thereby minimizing the number of favors we had to ask Musharraf for. We could have done Afghanistan right, minimizing the instability on Pakistan's borders. We could have done a lot more for the Pakistani people, as opposed to its military. We could have been a lot more respectful and looked less like a bully. We could have done something to make all our nice words abut democracy seem like something other than hypocrisy here, where we were backing a military dictatorship. We could have refrained from sending Negroponte and the Assistant Sec. of State for South Asia to Pakistan while they were debating the formation of a new government -- a move that has, rightly or wrongly, been seen as an attempt to influence the shape of Pakistan's new government and apply pressure to it.

Now that we have done all these things, we're in a much tougher situation than we were in before. Had this administration tried to shrink our options and reduce our leverage, they could hardly have been more effective at doing so (short of invasion, which would be insane.)

We need to begin by recognizing that Pakistan is a country with a real AQ problem in its border areas, but one that is very, very unlikely to be taken over by Islamists in the foreseeable future; that, like most people, Pakistanis do not like their governments to be puppets; and that any attempt to force them to do something is likely to backfire. We need to begin to reconstitute our reputation here by doing actual good things, and also by helping to government to succeed. But our options are very limited, largely as a result of this administration's stupidity and ham-handedness.

The problem is in ourselves and Kagan is a symptom. Nevertheless, he was remarkable on the News Hour; an absolutely shameless liar peddling failed policies that (1) perpetuate a war profiteering frenzy and that (2) pass on the largest strategic disaster in our history to the likely Democratic successor. Wringing the last dime our of this mess is just what war profiteers do. The dangerous part is that by transferring the blame, the lies he tells make the whole thing possible again. What was telling is that the News Hour set him up, and gave him extra time plus the last word, to peddle his lies in ways that made it very difficult for Odom to offer rebuttals. Surely, the News Hour staff knows all this.

I surmise that they do it in service of a Washington "Village" consensus. They learned the lesson Tomlinson taught them, which is that they aren't independent. The lobbyists, the think tanks, and the web of communications and influence that constitutes durable Washington money and power operate in service of those who dominate our financial, military/industrial, and energy sectors. Since it is all about the money, and there is very little money to be made from the insight that islamist terrorists along the Pakistan border are best addressed through international police actions and a worldwide cooperative interaction with the national interests of the vast majority of Pakistanis, the "Villagers" won't accept that truth. The result will be a bigger disaster, a bypassing of American leadership, and a consensus formed around interests other than our own. I wish I saw a better way.

what should we do about al-Qaeda in Pakistan?

How about, um, nothing? They don't pose any kind of serious threat, and the damage done in trying to do something about them would be much greater than any damage they can cause.

See http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200609/fallows_victory

Still, he's got a point about Pakistan.

No, he doesn't. He's not trying to make any substantive point about Pakistan, he's merely engaged in a more elaborate version of "ohmigod look over there and not at what I'm doing quick quick no really look over there!"

That is where al-Qaeda is mostly holed up these days, and no one — not liberals, not conservatives, not anyone — really has any bright ideas about how to root them out.

That's ridiculous. Many people, many liberals, have had quite a few ideas about how to root them, out, including re-emphasizing police and intellgence work, applying diplomatic pressue, economic subsidies, etc. Now none of these are easy, and none of them rely on magic ponies or Green Lantern super-powers, as would be the preferred conservative approach, but that's doesn't mean that these ideas aren't out there and that they couldn't work.

Long story short, it's not clear if the U.S. military could do it even if we wanted them to, and in any case, no one wants to start a war with Pakistan.

No one's proposing starting a war with Pakistan. This is merely a conservative straw man fantasy.

Irony alert: brian, everybody's favorite faux-reasonable GOP concern troll, writes about "objectivity" and better yet, "phoniness" in pursuit of "political power."

brian, you've been pushing the meme that the the modern conservative movement has some kind of inherent advantage in foreign / military policy that centrists like Kevin, let alone liberals, don't have. As far as I can tell, though, the credentials for your own bullshit "analysis" consists of intimate familiarity with GOP talking points. Given the stone obviousness of the Bush regime's mendacity, incompetence and corruption, that dog just won't hunt.

Hey, now, Stefan, if conservatives couldn't make straw man arguments, they couldn't make any arguments at all.

Oh, wait..

Kagan: how, exactly, is Iraq a distraction from the war on terror?

Our resources in money, men and time are not infinite. The large amount of resources we are devoting to Iraq inevitably means we have to give short shrift to efforts elsewhere. Therefore, here's how:

1. Most US military and non-military intelligence resources are currently directed towards Iraq, not al-Qaeda.

2. US diplomatic resources and prestige is being squandered in a vain effort to justify an unpopular war of agression, rather than in a justified effort against al Qaeda.

3. The vast bulk of American Arabic speakers and linguists are tied down in Iraq, rather than being used againt al Qaeda.

4. Most high-level government attention at all levels is focused on Iraq rather than being used against al Qaeda.

For example:

Shifts from bin Laden hunt evoke questions
By Dave Moniz and Steven Komarow, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — In 2002, troops from the 5th Special Forces Group who specialize in the Middle East were pulled out of the hunt for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan to prepare for their next assignment: Iraq. Their replacements were troops with expertise in Spanish cultures.

The CIA, meanwhile, was stretched badly in its capacity to collect, translate and analyze information coming from Afghanistan. When the White House raised a new priority, it took specialists away from the Afghanistan effort to ensure Iraq was covered.

Those were just two of the tradeoffs required because of what the Pentagon and CIA acknowledge is a shortage of key personnel to fight the war on terrorism.....

[Richard] Clarke said...."Because during those two years when forces were diverted to Iraq ... al-Qaeda has metamorphosized into a hydra-headed organization with cells that are operating autonomously, like the cells that operated in Madrid recently."

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2004-03-28-troop-shifts_x.htm

Here's some strategy:

1) Give Fred Kagan a one month supply of Jello pudding pops, which given his pudding pop addiction should distract him from hyperventilating about where and who else to bomb for a few weeks.....

2) Give conservatives (who have until now taken pudding-addicted neocons seriously) a chance to listen to opinions from *other* military historians and scholars who view war as the evil that it is rather than as the board game Risk with real people instead of plastic pieces.

3) See if political discourse improves enough for folks to realize that putting another Republican warmonger in office isn't a brilliant idea considering we're broke, despised and laughed at by most countries around the world, less safe than before invading Iraq, and without moral standing because of Bush's policies................aw heck, who am I kidding - there are almost as many Kagans running around as their are relatives and children of Fred Phelps.

Fred, the war in Iraq hasn't just been a distraction from the War On Terror(TM). It's also been a distraction from living and breathing for few million people. Give or take.

Well, at the end of the day, you don't tackle Al Qaeda militarily. That is the root of the whole mess. You tackle them directly by legal and diplomatic means by indirectly by undermining the root cause of their strength: the radicalization of Islam against perceived (and actual) American imperialism. We will never, ever, ever, ever rid the world of Islamic or any other kind of extremism. America will never, ever, ever be 100% safe against radicals with suitcase bombs or hijacked airplanes. But we can tilt the odds in our favor by being citizens of the world rather than failed would-be despots of the world.

If we were really serious about theWar on Terror, we'd take out Wes Craven and David Fincher and replace then with Nora Ephron aand John Hughesr.
Iraq is just a distraction.

"Experts" like Mr. Kagan who get their Information third and fourth hand are as trustworthy as race track touts who get their info "straight from the horses mouth". Let's check Mr. Kagan's passport and see where he's been lately. Berlin ,to see Curveball's cousin? Vienna , to talk to Iraqi counterintelligence?
Any one whose batting average is below the Mendoza line should be immediately sent back to Walla Walla to relearn the difference between research and the Telephone Game.

and that none of those insisting that the U.S. abandon Iraq to fight the "real" enemy in Afghanistan have proposed any meaningful plans for dealing with Chitral and Waziristan where that "real" enemy actually is [...] how, exactly, is Iraq a distraction from the war on terror?

Maybe I'd have a meaningful plan if I weren't so busy arguing with you about getting out of Iraq. That's why they call it a distraction, you dumb fuck.

That is where al-Qaeda is mostly holed up these days, and no one — not liberals, not conservatives, not anyone — really has any bright ideas about how to root them out. Long story short, it's not clear if the U.S. military could do it even if we wanted them to, and in any case, no one wants to start a war with Pakistan.

This is not as hard as it appears. First of all, there is one "bright idea" and that's to beef up our forces in Afghanistan and make it much more difficult for the Taliban and their allies to roam willy-nilly around the country and in and out of Pakistan.

Second, we should be fostering democracy in Pakistan, and sapping the militants in Waziristand and the other provinces of their strength by a) depriving them of their allies in the government and b) giving them an out for their legitimat grievances. The reason flaming morons like Kagan don't think this is a "bright idea" is because it doesn't involve bombing the shit out of someone. But intelligent and informed critics of the Iraq war have been making this argument for some time now; it is apparently bloggers and other pundits who are having trouble hearing or understanding it.

In other words, no Kagan does not raise a good point. That point has been addressed.