STANDING UP....George Bush says "we'll stand down as they stand up" — they being the Iraqi army and security forces. And guess what? They're up! We're pretty close to meeting our original target of 300,000 trained soldiers and police.

So can we come home now? Of course not. As Thomas Ricks reports, "the meaning of the phrase appears to have changed":

More recently, Bush has...added more conditions, saying the troops can come home "when our commanders say . . . the Iraqi government is capable of defending itself and sustaining itself and governing itself."

Military officers and other experts interviewed in recent days said that the Iraqi training program has worked but that its success is undercut by the lack of strong Iraqi political leadership. "You fix the government, you fix the problem," said an Army battalion commander who has seen hard fighting near Baghdad this summer.

No kidding. And how long will that take? Ricks's sources suggest five to ten years.

You know, I really wish Bush would just acknowledge this. I'd like to hear him give a speech something like this:

Yes, I'm a stubborn guy, and I continue to believe that success in Iraq is absolutely vital to our future security and to the overall war on terror. A failed Iraq would be a disaster.

But you know what? It's turned out to be a lot harder than we expected. Still, we have to succeed in Iraq, and our best guess is that this will require us to stay there for at least another decade. So tomorrow I'll be asking the Pentagon to extend overseas combat tours to 18 months, which will allow us to increase our troop strength in Iraq to over 200,000 soldiers. I'll also ask Congress for authorization to permanently stand up 30 new combat brigades for the Army and Marine Corps. And then I'm going to personally review the records of our senior officers in Iraq, and I'm going to fire every single one of them who doesn't get the fact that we're fighting a counterinsurgency, not World War II. And that business of discharging Arabic linguists who happen to be gay? I'm stopping it right now. The Iraq war is more important than our own piddling culture wars.

Oh, and I've asked Don Rumsfeld for his resignation. A fresh start needs a new leader.

Or something like that. Don't get me wrong: I'd oppose this plan because I don't think it would work. But I'd at least have some respect for Bush if he concretely acknowledged what it would take to accomplish his goals in Iraq and was willing to fight for them with at least the same tenacity that he fought to wreck Social Security. After all, wrecking Social Security is hardly the "calling of our generation," is it?

Of course, this would require Bush to take some genuine political risk, so I think it's safe to say we'll never see it happen. He'd rather kick this particular can down the road to whichever sap happens to occupy the Oval Office in 2009.

TRUTH SERUM....Indian police are continuing to investigate the Mumbai bombings from last July. Here is a report from September 20:

Two of the suspects arrested for the serial blasts have admitted to links with the terrorist groups, Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister R.R. Patil said here today.

The breakthrough came after investigators subjected two brothers, Faisal and Muzammil Sheikh, to narco-analysis or truth-serum tests.

Here is an AP dispatch from today:

[Mumbai police Commissioner A.N. Roy] said the Pakistanis slipped into India, some going over their shared border, while others went through neighboring Nepal and Bangladesh. There they were met by Indians who brought them to Mumbai and housed them in rented apartments, he said.

....However, Roy said that many of the suspects had been trained to resist interrogation and only the use of truth serum helped tie loose ends together.

Truth serum? Indeed. Apparently it's common in India to interrogate suspects after injecting them with a solution of sodium pentathol. In fact, it turns out that just recently a videotape was aired on Indian TV showing the pharmaceutical interrogation of one Abdul Karim Telgi, a con man at the center of a sensational and long-running story about a fake stamp paper scam — whatever that is. You can read the story here, and you will be unsurprised to learn that authorities seem to have unilaterally decided that some of Telgi's confession was reliable and some of it wasn't. Good stuff, that truth serum.

But there's more: a day after the truth serum interrogation, Telgi was strapped up to....something....and made to take a "brain-mapping test." According to this story, "the brain-mapping test establishes Telgi's link to a number of top political and police official in Karnataka and Maharashtra."

I don't really have anywhere to go with this. But apparently that's how they do things in India. Now you know.

IT'S NOT THE CRIME, IT'S THE....Our story so far: Republican congressman Mark Foley has resigned after a 16-year-old former House page complained that he had received repeated emails from Foley that he described as "sick sick sick sick sick....." You can see Foley's emails here, and the New York Times reports that there were more:

By Friday, other pages had come forward with more blatant instant messages. “What ya wearing?” Mr. Foley wrote to one, according to the network. “Tshirt and shorts,” the teenager responded. “Love to slip them off of you,” Mr. Foley replied.

This is bad enough. But Foley resigned very abruptly after the emails came to light, and it turns out this was probably because the Republican House leadership had known about Foley's behavior for some time and had simply been hoping nobody would find out about it. The Republican chairman of the House Page Board learned of Foley's behavior last year and House Majority leader John Boehner learned of it sometime this spring.

And how about Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert? As Brad DeLong points out, Boehner's story has gone from "we told Hastert and he said he was taking care of it" to "I don't remember if I talked to Hastert" to "I never told Hastert a thing about this and if you say otherwise it's a scurrilous lie." Hastert's office may have known about this, but not Hastert.

Sure. Of course. Hastert's office. And the lone Democrat on the House Page Board? He wasn't told about this. And Foley? As a member in good standing of the law-and-order party, he just went on his merry way after some no-doubt stern counseling from....someone.

So: what did Boehner and Hastert know, and when did they know it? Somehow it always comes back to that same question, doesn't it?

"BETTER TO NOT PUT THIS STUFF IN WRITING...." The House Government Reform Committee has released a bipartisan report on the Jack Abramoff scandal, including hundreds of emails between Abramoff and various GOP luminaries, including Karl Rove's assistant, Susan Ralston. And why not? Ralston used to work for Abramoff, after all.

You can see 'em all here. Mostly they seem to be obsessed with the giving and getting of skybox tickets to various sporting events, but Abramoff's bilking of Indian tribes and other clients is an ongoing favorite too. I haven't read the whole bunch, but I've reproduced my favorite exchange so far below. I wonder how many emails to "Susan's mc pager" didn't get into the White House system?

UPDATE: Or is it "Susan's rnc pager"? I can't tell.

BREATHTAKING....You have to give the hawks credit. Here is Robert Kaplan on why George Bush will have trouble getting support for a war with Iran:

Though they may not admit it, the political elites beyond loyal administration circles, and particularly in Europe, simply do not trust Bush's ability to wage another war. Here is where the real problem lies; by delegitimizing his ability to wage war, they delegitimize his right to wage war.

That's a helluva triple gainer, isn't it? The problem, apparently, lies not in the actual fact that Bush has prosecuted the Iraq war with astonishing incompetence, but in the fact that non-Republican "political elites" have peevishly decided to take note of Bush's performance. Wow.

Believe it or not, though, it gets worse later on in the piece:

As someone who supported the invasion of Iraq, I know that the problem with grand assumptions is that they're nice when they succeed; otherwise you require a Plan B. The idea that there is no alternative to diplomacy in dealing with Iran, even after it achieves nuclear status, is another grand assumption, but without a Plan B.

The president and his hawkish enablers are rather plainly trying to maneuver the country into a position where military force will be the only plausible option available to us against Iran. Not only do they have no Plan B, but they're actively trying to close off even the possibility of a Plan B in the future. Is this a problem? You'd think so, but in a breathtaking piece of table-turning chutzpah Kaplan declares that the real problem lies with those who are trying to keep our options open. Apparently they suffer from the unforgivable stain of having been right about Iraq.

The plain fact is that military action is always a Plan B. The Pentagon has multiple contingency plans for war against Iran, and those plans will continue to be updated and available to whoever is sitting in the Oval Office. If, in the end, we truly feel that we have no other choice, military force will always be an option. That's not a problem. It's preemptively closing off all the other avenues that's the problem.

SLEEPWALKING THROUGH HISTORY....According to the New York Times, Bob Woodward's sources in his latest book, State of Denial, are now telling him that the Bush administration was not quite the well-oiled machine that he reported earlier:

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld is described as disengaged from the nuts-and-bolts of occupying and reconstructing Iraq — a task that was initially supposed to be under the direction of the Pentagon — and so hostile toward Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, that President Bush had to tell him to return her phone calls. The American commander for the Middle East, Gen. John P. Abizaid, is reported to have told visitors to his headquarters in Qatar in the fall of 2005 that “Rumsfeld doesn’t have any credibility anymore” to make a public case for the American strategy for victory in Iraq.

....[In September 2003] Robert D. Blackwill, then the top Iraq adviser on the National Security Council...concluded that more ground troops, perhaps as many as 40,000, were desperately needed....The White House did nothing in response.

....The book describes a deep fissure between Colin L. Powell, Mr. Bush’s first secretary of state, and Mr. Rumsfeld....[Andrew] Card then made a concerted effort to oust Mr. Rumsfeld at the end of 2005, according to the book, but was overruled by President Bush, who feared that it would disrupt the coming Iraqi elections and operations at the Pentagon.

There's more, and the Washington Post has its own book plug here, with presumably more extensive excerpts planned for Sunday. Bottom line: Powell didn't get along with Rumsfeld, Rumsfeld didn't get along with Rice, Cheney didn't get along with anyone, the war was going to hell the entire time, and Bush was sleeping through the whole thing. Cheers!

DO THE BRITISH WANT OUT OF IRAQ?....The Guardian reports today that a pitched battle is being waged by British forces against a dogged band of insurgents. These particular insurgents, though, reside not in Basra but in northwest London, and they argue that British troops could be better used in Afghanistan than in an increasingly hopeless holding action in Iraq:

They believe there is a limit to what British soldiers can achieve in southern Iraq and that it is time the Iraqis took responsibility for their own security, defence sources say...."What is more important, Afghanistan or Iraq?" a senior defence source asked yesterday. "There is a group within the Ministry of Defence pushing hard to get troops out of Iraq to get more into Afghanistan."

....The fierce debate at the highest military and political levels in the MoD is reflected in a passage of a leaked memo written by a staff officer at the Defence Academy, an MoD thinktank. It reads: "British armed forces are effectively held hostage in Iraq — following the failure of the deal being attempted by COS [chief of staff] to extricate UK armed forces from Iraq on the basis of 'doing Afghanistan' — and we are now fighting (and arguably losing or potentially losing) on two fronts."

The reference to the "failure of the deal" suggests that this was a pretty serious effort, and one that was not appreciated by U.S. commanders, who were said to be "deeply unhappy about British talk of troop reductions and complained that the British seemed interested only in the south of the country."

The fact that basic strategy is being debated at high levels isn't unusual. What is unusual is that this particular debate suggests that the highest ranking officer in the British Army believes three things: (1) Afghanistan is in serious trouble and needs more troops ASAP, (2) there's very little more that can be accomplished by the military in Iraq, and (3) British troop deployments are essentially being dictated by political considerations in the United States.

There's not much more to say about this except for one thing: the British Army got a new chief about four weeks ago, General Richard Dannatt. Was the attempted "deal" to transfer troops from Iraq to Afghanistan something that his predecessor initiated or something that he initiated? Is the British Army going to be commanded for the next three years by someone who apparently thinks the cause in Iraq is lost?

SMOCKING!....On a somewhat lighter note, I'd like to point out that my wife is on the front page our local newspaper today. "On Saturday she will take a vow to uphold the SAGA oath 'to preserve and foster the art of smocking and related needlework.'" Hooray!

VOTING FOR TORTURE....A reader emails about Sherrod Brown's and Ted Strickland's votes in favor of the detainee/torture bill:

My wife and I have been lifelong Democrats and have contributed and worked on national and Ohio campaigns for the Democratic Party since 1988. This year we were actually looking forward to winning Ohio for the Democratic Party.

No longer. We're livid. We will not work, support or even vote for either Brown or Strickland. Judging from the reaction of many fellow Democrats, we're not alone.

Mark Kleiman writes:

Note to Blue opinion leaders: I hate the torture bill as much as you do. Maybe more....But is it really a good idea to spread the "Democrats are cowards" meme six weeks before an election that might restore the system of checks and balances? Would it be intolerably rude of me to note that you're doing Karl Rove's work for him?

Rude, maybe, but hardly undeserved. Democrats have been voting for stuff I dislike for as long as I've been voting for Democrats, but I have to say that their poll-tested cowardice on the detainee bill over the past couple of weeks has been about as bad as anything I can remember. And what makes it worse is that not only is it craven, it's probably politically stupid as well.

The leadership of the Republican Party decided after 9/11 to govern the country by trying to keep it in a state of permanent panic and tarring anyone who opposed their calculated panic as a weak-kneed appeaser. The way to fight this is not to give in to Karl Rove's political machinations, it's to fight them. It worked for Thomas Jefferson, after all, and Democrats consider him the founder of their party. They should take a lesson from him.

YOUR DAILY DOZEN....I've been pretty consistently negative about George Lakoff and his framing crusade for the past couple of years, so let me turn the tables and recommend this short piece posted a couple of days ago at Alternet, "12 Traps That Keep Progressives From Winning." It's pretty good.

ENEMY COMBATANTS....Bruce Ackerman provides a good nickel summary of the main problem with the detainee bill currently wending its way through Congress:

The compromise legislation, which is racing toward the White House, authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States....It also allows him to seize anybody who has "purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States." This grants the president enormous power over citizens and legal residents. They can be designated as enemy combatants if they have contributed money to a Middle Eastern charity, and they can be held indefinitely in a military prison.

Not to worry, say the bill's defenders. The president can't detain somebody who has given money innocently, just those who contributed to terrorists on purpose.

But other provisions of the bill call even this limitation into question. What is worse, if the federal courts support the president's initial detention decision, ordinary Americans would be required to defend themselves before a military tribunal without the constitutional guarantees provided in criminal trials.

I wish conservatives could back away for a few minutes from their fear of breaking with a president of their own party and ask themselves if they want any president to have this power. The constitution is there for a reason, guys, and a day is going to come when you'll wish you hadn't gutted it.

HEALTHCARE FOR ALL!....A advisory panel overseen by the comptroller general has recommended that "Congress should take immediate steps to guarantee that all Americans have access to affordable health care by 2012":

While leaving many details to be worked out, the panel declared, “It should be public policy, written in law, that all Americans have affordable access to health care.”

The panel was created by the 2003 law that added a drug benefit to Medicare. Under the law, President Bush has 45 days to comment on the recommendations and offer a report to Congress.

I'll bet Bush is just going to jump all over this. You know, compassionate conservative and all that. I can hardly wait.

STANDING 'EM UP....Having failed to successfully complete its contracts in Iraq for building a prison ($99 million) and a network of health clinics ($243 million), today we learn that Parsons Corp. has crashed and burned on yet another project. The $75 million police academy they built in Baghdad is so substandard that parts of it will need to be demolished:

The most serious problem was substandard plumbing that caused waste from toilets on the second and third floors to cascade throughout the building. A light fixture in one room stopped working because it was filled with urine and fecal matter. The waste threatened the integrity of load-bearing slabs, federal investigators concluded.

....[Phillip] Galeoto noted that one entire building and five floors in others had to be shuttered for repairs, limiting the capacity of the college by up to 800 recruits. His memo, too, pointed out that the urine and feces flowed throughout the building and, sometimes, onto occupants of the barracks.

Another triumph for the Bush administration, this time on a project that the president has repeatedly told us is the cornerstone of our strategy in Iraq: training police so that we can stand down as they stand up. Unfortunately, it turns out that even the buildings can't stand up, let alone the police.

I NEED A DRINK....It's stuff like this that almost makes me want to give up sometimes. Here is William Arkin today:

The simplistic story line that the Democrats are pushing is all about and solely about Iraq: withdraw U.S. forces, defeat the Republicans, tidy up foreign policy by giving human rights to prisoners and being nicer in the world, and voila, terror subsides.

I write a blog. That means I make sharp points in very brief posts. But even at that, nothing I've written could even be unfairly caricatured the way Arkin does, let alone fairly. Ditto for other liberal bloggers who are even sharper and briefer than me.

Outside the blogosphere, of course, we have the actual Democratic establishment, the one that wields genuine influence. Some of them are in Congress and make floor speeches — about both Iraq and national security more broadly. Some of them run for president and lay out detailed position papers about how best to conduct foreign policy in an age of jihad. Others host symposia at think tanks or write lengthy articles in places like Foreign Affairs and Democracy. Still others write books covering practically every nuance of liberal foreign policy you could ever hope for.

Some of these liberals think we ought to withdraw from Iraq and some don't. I think it's safe to say that virtually all of them believe that a less militaristic and more internationalist foreign policy would be a net benefit. But it's also safe to say that none of them — not one — believes this is all it will take to put a stop to militant jihadism. And yet, after five years of speeches, articles, symposia, and books by Democrats on national security, that's what Arkin writes.

Jeebus. David Ignatius blames Democrats for not figuring out a solution to Iraq, Michael Kinsley thinks bloggers are lunatics, and William Arkin claims that "being nicer" is all Democrats have to say about foreign policy. I expect this kind of stuff from Charles Krauthammer, not sane people. Is there something in the water?

BLOG HYSTERIA....Michael Kinsley, a man reponsible as much as anyone for putting news on the internet, feels the need to riff not once, not twice, but three separate times in a recent column about the vile impact of blogs on the news industry:

Meanwhile, there is the blog terror: people are getting their understanding of the world from random lunatics riffing in their underwear....So are we doomed to get our news from some acned 12-year-old in his parents' basement recycling rumors from the Internet echo chamber?....But there is room between the New York Times and myleftarmpit.com for new forms that liberate journalism from its encrusted conceits while preserving its standards, like accuracy.

Are mainstream journalists really so shocked by the fact that bloggers sometimes use four letter words? And that some of them use their sites for political activism? Isn't it time to grow up, guys?

POLLING IRAQ....The Washington Post quotes three different polling firms today who say that by a wide margin Iraqis want American troops to leave:

In Baghdad, for example, nearly three-quarters of residents polled said they would feel safer if U.S. and other foreign forces left Iraq, with 65 percent of those asked favoring an immediate pullout, according to State Department polling results obtained by The Washington Post.

....Another new poll, scheduled to be released on Wednesday by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, found that 71 percent of Iraqis questioned want the Iraqi government to ask foreign forces to depart within a year.

....The director of another Iraqi polling firm, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared being killed, said public opinion surveys he conducted last month showed that 80 percent of Iraqis who were questioned favored an immediate withdrawal.

The PIPA poll suggests that Sunnis are a little less likely than Shiites to want U.S. troops to withdraw, which isn't surprising since they're the ones who would be massively outnumbered if we left. The State Department poll, however, doesn't appear to bear this out, showing a stronger desire for U.S. withdrawal in mixed areas than in predominantly Shiite areas.

Overall, though, the results are clear and discouraging for "stay the course" fans. The Iraqi leadership may be reluctant to see us go, but what are the odds that an occupation force can succeed in quelling violence if three-quarters of the population wants them to leave?

PERMANENT BASES....This was buried on page A16 of the LA Times today:

House Passes Ban on Permanent Iraq Bases

Congress is on the verge of barring the construction of permanent bases for U.S. forces in Iraq, a move aimed at quelling concerns in the Arab world that American forces will remain in the war-torn country indefinitely.

....On Monday, House and Senate leaders agreed to insert a ban pushed by Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware...."I have no illusions that this provision will somehow dramatically change the dynamic of events on the ground in Iraq," Biden said Tuesday in a statement. "But...this is a message that needs to be proclaimed loudly and regularly and with the stamp of the Congress."

It's about time. Good for Biden for proposing this, and good for him again for not pretending that it's going to seriously change the dynamics in Iraq at this late date. This is the kind of thing we should have been doing three years ago.

NO PONIES LEFT....I had the same problem with David Ignatius's column today as Matt Yglesias did, but I also had another one. Basically, Ignatius wants Democrats to figure out how to salvage things in Iraq:

Many Democrats act as if that's the end of the discussion: A mismanaged occupation has created a breeding ground for terrorists, so we should withdraw and let the Iraqis sort out the mess....But with a few notable exceptions, the Democrats are mostly ducking the hard question of what to do next....Unfortunately, as bad as things are, they could get considerably worse.

....The Democrats understandably want to treat Iraq as George Bush's war and wash their hands of it. But the damage of Iraq can be mitigated only if it again becomes the nation's war — with the whole country invested in finding a way out of the morass that doesn't leave us permanently in greater peril. If the Democrats could lead that kind of debate about security, they would become the nation's governing party.

I agree that allowing Iraq to spiral into civil war would be a disaster, but it's telling that Ignatius doesn't propose a solution himself aside from a vague allusion to the possibility of federalism and partitioning — an idea that's been floating around liberal foreign policy circles for the past couple of years but has gone nowhere because it has no traction either among Republicans or among Iraqis themselves.

Look: A "debate" is fine, but only if there's something to debate. Should we privatize Social Security? Let's debate. Should we debate about how to fix Iraq? We could, but only if there were some plausible solutions to argue about. Unfortunately, there aren't. We don't have enough troops in Iraq to keep order and the troops we do have aren't trained properly anyway. Nobody appears to have any serious desire to change that. Politically, the sectarian split in Iraq is embedded deeply in their history and culture and is mostly beyond our ability to affect, especially after three years of mismanagement. Globally, we have virtually no influence left with either local power brokers like Iran or with our European allies.

Various luminaries in the liberal foreign policy community have been proposing Iraq policies right and left for over three years now. Initially, that perhaps we should have kept our focus on Afghanistan and stayed out of Iraq altogether. Then, once we were there, liberal thinkers suggested more troops, dialogue with Iran, a multilateral council to accelerate regional investment in Iraq's progress, a variety of counterinsurgency strategies, a variety of partition plans, more serious engagement in Israeli-Palestinian talks (Tony Blair practically begged for this), and on and on. Every single one of these suggestions was ignored.

Would they have made any difference? Who knows. But to blame Democrats now for not being aggressive enough in trying to trisect this angle is like blaming Gerald Ford for losing Vietnam. George Bush fought this war precisely the way he wanted, with precisely the troops he wanted, and with every single penny he asked for. He has kept Don Rumsfeld in charge despite abundant evidence that he doesn't know how to win a war like this. He has mocked liberals and the media at every turn when they suggested we might need a different approach. The result has been a disaster with no evident solution left.

It's one thing to ask for "debate," but it's quite another to ask for a pony that doesn't exist anymore and to blame Democrats when they're unable to produce yet another one after three years of trying. That makes no sense.

THE MARCH TO WAR....A CONTINUING SERIES....The "faster please" zealots continue to lob their bureaucratic bombs:

In another indication that some in the Bush administration are pushing for a more confrontational policy toward Iran, a Pentagon unit has drafted a report charging that U.S. international broadcasts into Iran aren't tough enough on the Islamic regime....It accuses the Voice of America's Persian TV service and Radio Farda, a U.S. government Farsi-language broadcast, of taking a soft line toward Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's regime and not giving adequate time to government critics.

....Three U.S. government officials identified the author of the report as Ladan Archin, a civilian Iran specialist who works for Rumsfeld....She works in a recently established Pentagon unit known as the Iran directorate.

Ah yes, the Iran Directorate. Staffed by castoffs from our old friend, the Office of Special Plans, which did such a bangup job of misrepresenting Iraqi intelligence at the behest of the Cheney/Rumsfeld axis back in 2002. As Laura Rozen reported several months ago, "Among those staffing or advising the Iranian directorate are three veterans of the Office of Special Plans: Abram N. Shulsky, its former director; John Trigilio, a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst; and Ladan Archin, an Iran specialist."

I guess they're starting to earn their pay. Stay tuned for spine-tingling House hearings on alleged State Department softness toward the madmen in Tehran.

KEY JUDGMENTS....Is the Iraq war fueling terrorism? Here are the excerpts from the "key judgments" section of the newly declassified National Intelligence Estimate that address the issue:

We assess that the Iraq jihad is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives; perceived jihadist success there would inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere.

• The Iraq conflict has become the "cause celebre" for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement. Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves, and be perceived, to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry on the fight.

• ....Four underlying factors are fueling the spread of the jihadist movement:....(2) the Iraq "jihad;"....
  

Al-Qa’ida, now merged with Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi’s network, is exploiting the situation in Iraq to attract new recruits and donors and to maintain its leadership role.

....We judge that most jihadist groups — both well-known and newly formed — will use improvised explosive devices and suicide attacks focused primarily on soft targets to implement their asymmetric warfare strategy, and that they will attempt to conduct sustained terrorist attacks in urban environments. Fighters with experience in Iraq are a potential source of leadership for jihadists pursuing these tactics.

In one sense, this answers the questions about what exactly the intelligence community meant by its assertion that the war was "fueling terrorism." However, because only the NIE's key judgments were declassified, these are still nothing but assertions. Without seeing the context, analysis, and dissenting opinions that shaped them, there's nothing to assess. You either accept the intelligence community's expertise or you don't.

With appropriate redactions, the entire NIE should be released. Then we can all see what this is based on.

RELEASE THE NIE!....Laura Rozen reports on what a contact told her about that leaked NIE — the one that allegedly concludes that the Iraq war has increased the threat of terrorism. It's actually worse than that:

The report highlights the essential dilemma Iraq poses for the war on terror: staying fuels the al-Qaeda-inspired movement, creating a net increase in the terrorist threat; while leaving Iraq in chaos would also worsen the threat.

Of course, this has been the dilemma all along, and it would be instructive to actually discuss this. Unfortunately, if President Bush releases only the "key judgments" from the NIE, that will hardly be possible. It means that nuance, context, and explanation will all be lost. All we'll get is the PowerPoint version of the war.

Of course, reading the entire NIE would hardly be an unalloyed blessing for either liberals or conservatives, since the report almost certainly contains analysis that supports both sides. How could it not? But it might sharpen the debate. At yesterday's Democratic hearings on the war, retired military officers testified angrily about Don Rumsfeld's conduct of the war, but as Dana Milbank put it, they also recommended that the answer was "more troops, more money and more time in Iraq."

This is not what most Democrats want to hear, but let's face it: it's not what most Republicans want to hear either. Nonetheless: this is the dilemma in its starkest form. Nearly every serious military analyst believes that even minimal success in Iraq would require a very substantial increase in troop strength for a period of at least several years. Unfortunately, no one has offered up a practical way of finding more troops, President Bush shows no inclination to support a larger troop commitment, and the American public is pretty clearly skeptical about doubling down in Iraq anyway. In other words, even those who still believe Iraq can be salvaged also believe that the Bush administration is not doing anywhere near enough to accomplish that. Under these circumstances, with failure staring at us from both directions, what justification can there be for continuing our present course?

This is what people should be talking about. Releasing the entire NIE might help spark this conversation.

UPDATE: Hmmm. Two NIEs, a real NIE and a pseudo-NIE? Release 'em both!

ONE CALCULATION....At the end of a remarkably thorough piece of reality avoidance in the Washington Post today, Robert Kagan says this:

I would worry about an American foreign policy driven only by fear of how our actions might inspire anger, radicalism and violence in others. As in the past, that should be only one calculation in our judgment of what does and does not make us, and the world, safer.

Crikey. I would be happy (well, happier, anyway) if the Bush administration showed even the tiniest inclination to think about whether their actions might inspire anger, radicalism and violence in others. We are so far away from this being their only consideration that Kagan's unease brings to mind visions of middle-aged Victorian gentlemen harrumphing that the Royal Navy has been treating its recruits with rather too light a hand after that kerfuffle over the Bounty a few years back.

On the other hand, Kagan is right that the classified National Intelligence Estimate leaked to the New York Times the other day should be released. I'm willing to bet that it would require only light redaction, and understanding its context would allow all of us, liberals and conservatives, to judge whether its conclusions are justified. I for one would like to know the analytic basis on which our intelligence community views the world.

COMPETITIVENESS....The World Economic Forum's latest league tables have dropped the United States from first to sixth in global competitiveness. But why? What could we possibly have done to merit this drop? Let's see:

The WEF said the best performing countries were distinguished by their competent economic stewardship....

Oh. Right. I guess that would do it.

"US competitiveness is threatened by large macroeconomic imbalances, particularly rising levels of public indebtedness associated with repeated fiscal deficits," the report said.

"Its relative ranking remains vulnerable to a possible disorderly adjustment of such imbalances."

Thanks, Republican Party!

HABEAS CORPUS....John McCain's compromise with President Bush on detainee legislation may not have accomplished much, but it did contain at least a few worthwhile measures. Now, though, Republicans in Congress apparently want to water it down even more. The plan is to redefine "unlawful enemy combatant" from someone who is

engaged in hostilities against the United States

to someone who is

engaged in hostilities or who has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States

"Supported" is a pretty far-reaching term that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with actual combat. And while this vagueness would be disturbing enough by itself, it's even worse than it seems because other provisions of the legislation prohibit someone accused of "supporting" hostilities from challenging their detention in U.S. courts — even if the detainee is a U.S. citizen.

And the fate of this proposal? According to the Washington Post, Republican crypto-moderate Arlen Specter "assailed the provision as an unconstitutional suspension of habeas corpus," but is "unlikely to derail the compromise legislation over those objections."

Well, sure. Why would a senior committee chairman actually do something substantive to back up a belief that pending legislation is an unconstitutional suspension of habeas corpus? That's hardly worth fighting over, is it?

POSTSCRIPT: And how about the Democrats? Will they fight this? We'll have to wait and see, but their performance has been pretty uninspiring so far.

HOUSING BUBBLE UPDATE....The supply of homes on the market is up by a third over the past 12 months, existing homes aren't selling, and prices are dropping. The glut of unsold homes is the highest since 1993 and the year-over-year price decline is the biggest since 1990. Here are a few reactions:

• Joel Naroff, Naroff Economic Advisors: "Pop goes the housing bubble."

• Ian Shepherdson, High Frequency Economics: "With inventory still rising, there is no chance of any short-term relief. Prices and volumes have a long way to fall yet."

• Thomas Lawler, former economist at Fannie Mae: "You've got a ways to go. You still have affordability issues in a lot of markets."

• David Lereah, National Association of Realtors: "This is the price correction we've been expecting — with sales stabilizing, we should go back to positive price growth early next year."
  

Question: Can you tell which of these guys is living in a dreamworld?

FAMILY VALUES....FaithfulDemocrats.com was at James Dobson's Values Voters Summit this weekend and reports back today. Click the link to read their "Top Five Bizarro World Moments" from the event.

THE END OF THE DREAM?....Karl Rove has long boasted about constructing an electoral strategy that doesn't just win elections for Republicans but instead puts them in a permanent majority. A big part of that strategy has been his effort to woo Hispanics — who tend to be culturally conservative and not as historically bound to the Democratic Party as blacks — into the GOP fold. George Bush won a sizeable chunk of the Hispanic vote when he ran for governor in Texas, and if the Republican Party could do the same thing nationwide it might well convert America from a 50-50 nation to something more like a 55-45 nation — with Republicans getting the double-nickel.

Today that dream is in shambles, and in the current issue of the Monthly Rachel Morris reports that talk radio shoulders a big part of the blame:

Until [mid-2005], Rove’s strategy of wooing Latinos without actually doing anything that might offend the conservative base had worked remarkably well—perhaps because his outreach to the base and to Hispanics had advanced along separate tracks. So far, he hadn’t been confronted with anything that might cause these tracks to converge, forcing the disparate elements of the Republican voting coalition towards collision.

The convergence began on right-wing talk radio....Casting around for something to talk about, hosts discovered the Minutemen. Illegal immigration has always been a perennial source of talk-radio outrage, but the Minutemen, with their warnings that terrorists could enter the country via Mexico, set off a veritable storm. Suddenly, the self-styled border patrols, along with their champion in the House, Rep. Tom Tancredo, became fixtures on radio shows and cable TV.

According to a former senior White House official, the administration became concerned by this phenomenon and conducted some research. Staffers listened to hours of talk radio and found that the obsession with illegal immigration on talk radio had appeared virtually from nowhere. “Two years ago, this wasn’t on the radar screen,” he said. House Republicans, already eyeing the midterm elections, also took note. By then, Tancredo’s immigration-reform caucus had grown to more than 80 members (in 2001, it only had 15).

Live by the sword, die by the sword. But hey — at least they've still got the Voter Vault! Something tells me that's a pretty short-term advantage, though.

DID HE OR DIDN'T HE?....This story may or may not be true, but legend has it that during one of Lyndon Johnson's congressional campaigns he decided to spread a rumor that his opponent was a pig-fucker. LBJ's campaign manager said, "Lyndon, you know he doesn't do that!" Johnson replied, "I know. I just want to make him deny it."

I have a feeling that George Allen can relate.

UPDATE: I should probably revise and extend here. I don't actually think the charges against Allen are false. The fact that Allen is now spending a lot of time denying the charges just happened to remind me of the LBJ story, that's all.

But it was a bad analogy. At this point, three separate people have confirmed Allen's use of the word "nigger" during the 70s and 80s (Larry Sabato, Chris Taylor, and Ken Shelton) along with a couple of other anonymous sources. What's more, it fits pretty well with what we know about Allen's youthful efforts to reinvent himself as a Southern redneck after growing up in Southern California. Sounds to me like he's toast.

NUMERICAL LITERACY....Mark Kleiman nominates the following as a "list of concepts journalism students should be exposed to":

1. Institutional culture
   

2. Regression toward the mean
   

3. Moral hazard
   

4. Expected value (of an uncertain outcome)
   

5. Present value (of a stream of gains and losses over time)
   

6. Statistical control
   

7. Correlation v. causation
   

8. Benefit-cost analysis and willingness-to-pay
   

9. Cost-effectiveness
   

10. Separation of powers
    

11. Mill's "harm principle"
    

12. Rent-seeking
    

13. Opportunity cost
    

14. Cognitive dissonance
    

15. Milgram experiment
    

Obviously we all have our favorites, and your list would probably be different from Mark's. But I will note one thing: by my count, nine out of his fifteen items are related to numerical literacy of one kind or another. That sounds about right to me.

THE NEW