Reading a Seymour Hersh article is a bit like panning for gold: You have to dig through a lot of dirt to find any nuggets of possible value. Relying almost exclusively on vaguely described anonymous sources, he makes sweeping claims about top-secret operations that can only be known to a small number of people inside the government with access to the relevant “sensitive compartmented information” and “special access programs,” and they aren’t allowed to comment one way or the other. And his “reporting” is always colored by a sixties-leftist, anti-American, conspiratorial worldview.

To get my full read on Hersh’s latest red alert–this time about supposed U.S. plans to go to war with Iran–click here.

Remember when the “benchmarks” for Iraq were all the rage in Congress? They were constantly being cited last year by opponents of the war effort when Iraq was failing to meet them. Funny how, now that Iraq has met 15 of 18 benchmarks, we don’t hear loud huzzahs from Democrats. In fact we don’t hear anything about the benchmarks, period. Yet another sign of the shifting goalposts when it comes to Iraq: Some critics are so committed to a narrative of American defeat that they seem unable to acknowledge our success.

Liberal bloggers Andrew Sullivan and Josh Marshall are furiously attacking my comparison between Iraq and Germany. “There are almost countless differences between the two historical situations,” Marshall writes. And he’s right. But that’s the way historical analogies work: They are always imperfect and partial, but nevertheless everyone uses them to draw conclusions about international politics. In fact, Marshall himself draws comparisons between Iraq and Germany in the very same post!

Needless to say, I wasn’t denying the substantial differences between the two historical situations. I brought up the analogy only in a very limited context–to demonstrate what I meant by a long-term U.S. troop presence in Iraq. I didn’t mean years of fighting. I didn’t mean years of occupation. I meant years of the same sort of presence we have in Germany to this day.

Sullivan thinks it’s impossible to imagine that we could have this sort of long-standing military presence in the Mideast without perpetual fighting. Perhaps he doesn’t realize that the U.S. already has a string of bases in Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and other Middle Eastern countries. Having visited many of these installations I haven’t noticed a lot of fighting there. In fact they are peaceful and relatively uncontroversial. Granted, the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia was more controversial: Osama bin Laden cited it as a justification for his campaign of terrorism. But we now know that was simply a pretext, since his calls for violence in his homeland have not ended even though we have withdrawn our troops.

What I find curious is that neither Marshall nor Sullivan has commented on the other historical analogy I drew when I wrote that

lots of Iraqis may well want an American presence to reassure competing sectarian groups that their historical enemies will not slaughter them. That is essentially the role that NATO troops still play in Kosovo and Bosnia, years after the end of the conflicts that brought them there. That is the kind of role I envision American troops playing in Iraq.

Lots of people couldn’t imagine when we first intervened in the former Yugoslavia that our troops would stay there for years and that they would not be violently contested. But that is, in fact, what’s happened. Obviously there are major differences between the Balkans and Iraq, which Sullivan and Marshall can no doubt cite ad nauseam. But those deployments also show the kind of long-term role that U.S. troops can play.

The broader point is that the success of American military interventions has usually been closely related to their length. The longer we stay, the more successful we are. When we get out too quickly–as we did in Haiti in the 1990’s–the situation often goes to hell. So if we want to secure a lasting victory in Iraq we need to stay around for a good long while.

But I get the sense that Marshall and Sullivan, like many of their antiwar compatriots, don’t really care about whether we win or lose in Iraq. They simply want to get out, and damn the consequences. That brings up another historical analogy that I’m sure they would rather forget: the way we pulled out of South Vietnam after the defeat of the North’s Tet and Easter Offensives when a decent outcome (namely the long-term preservation of South Vietnam’s independence) was within our grasp. A lot of antiwar voices back then said it would actually be good for the locals if we left, just as they now say it would be good for Iraq if we skedaddled. Tell it to the Vietnamese boat people or the victims of the Cambodian killing fields.

Jennifer Rubin, Paul Mirengoff at Powerline, and Pete Wehner at National Review have all weighed in cogently on Joe Klein’s outrageous assertion, which he refuses to back down from, that “a great many Jewish neoconservatives–people like Joe Lieberman and the crowd over at Commentary–plumped for this war, and now for an even more foolish assault on Iran, raised the question of divided loyalties: using U.S. military power, U.S. lives and money, to make the world safe for Israel.” Not only did Klein not back down, but he expanded his outrageous accusations:

You want evidence of divided loyalties? How about the “benign domino theory” that so many Jewish neoconservatives talked to me about–off the record, of course–in the runup to the Iraq war, the idea that Israel’s security could be won by taking out Saddam, which would set off a cascade of disaster for Israel’s enemies in the region? As my grandmother would say, feh! Do you actually deny that the casus belli that dare not speak its name wasn’t, as I wrote in February 2003, a desire to make the world safe for Israel? Why the rush now to bomb Iran, a country that poses some threat to Israel but none–for the moment–to the United States…unless we go ahead, attack it, and the mullahs unleash Hezbollah terrorists against us? Do you really believe the mullahs would stage a nuclear attack on Israel, destroying the third most holy site in Islam and killing untold numbers of Muslims? I am not ruling out the use of force against Iran–it may come to that–but you folks seem to embrace it gleefully.

Pete and Paul have already made the correct and obvious rejoinder that Israel was not particularly hankering for an invasion of Iraq. In fact most Israelis were skeptical all along of the chances of implanting democracy in Iraq, and Iraq was never their biggest security concern. Iran was. If they had their druthers, they would much rather have seen American action against the mullahs rather than against Saddam Hussein. As for American Jewish supporters of the war effort, no doubt some thought that taking out Saddam would increase the general security of the Middle East and redound to the benefit of, inter alia, Israel. For that matter, a lot of non-Jewish supporters of the war thought so too. Does that mean that they were primarily motivated by Israel’s concerns and not America? Not exactly, since by an odd coincidence Israel’s enemies-Syria, Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah-happen to be America’s enemies as well. (Iran has been waging war on us since the 1979 hostage crisis, and, with Syrian assistance, it has often employed Hezbollah proxies-not only in Lebanon in the 1980s but more recently in Iraq.) It is very hard in the Middle East to disentangle the security concerns of the United States from those of Israel, since both countries are liberal democracies whose interests lie in promoting peace and stability and countering Iran’s bid for regional hegemony.

The notion that only Jews whose first concern is for the security of Israel could possibly favor the invasion of Iraq is laughable. In the first place, as Wehner notes, most of those who supported the invasion of Iraq weren’t Jewish, unless by some miracle 70% of the American population (roughly the percentage that supported the initial operation) has been converted to the Hebraic faith. Moreover, there is not an iota of evidence that any Jews supported the invasion even though they thought it would be detrimental to American security, simply because they thought it would help out Israel-which would have to be the case for the “dual loyalties” smear to have any validity. Why, after all, did Joe Klein, an American Jew, support the invasion? Was he thinking primarily of Israel’s interests? Or did he perhaps think that deposing Saddam Hussein was in America’s interest?

It is equally outrageous to claim that only Jews primarily concerned with Israeli security could possibly favor military action against Iran. I am agnostic on the question of whether we should strike Iran, but anyone who has been to the Middle East lately knows that many Sunni Arabs are secretly hoping that we will do so. They are as worried as Israel about the implications of the “Persians” getting their hands on nuclear weapons, and as desperate for us to do something about it. Israel, of course, has special cause for concern because the leader of Iran keeps making blood-curdling threats to eradiate it. That is of concern not only in Jerusalem but in Washington-and it should be. Threats against our allies are threats against us, and Israel is the closest ally we have in the Middle East.

It is dismaying to see Klein repeat the outrageous anti-Semitic fallacy which holds that any American action which benefits Israel to any degree and with which one disagrees is the product not of legitimate policy calculations but of a Zionist conspiracy. Why do we so seldom hear such accusations made when the U.S. comes to the defense of countries not run by Jews? In the past century, hundreds of thousands of Americans have given their lives to safeguard, among others, France, Britain, South Korea, and South Vietnam. By contrast no American soldiers have lost their lives defending Israel, unless one thinks, as Pat Buchanan and David Duke do, that the Gulf War of 1991 and the Iraq War of 2003 were waged at Israel’s behest.

Did we wage the earlier, costlier wars at the behest of some insidious French, British, Korean or Vietnamese lobby? Actually we have heard such accusations in the past. In the wake of World War I, another unsatisfying conflict, there were many who claimed that the British, “merchants of death,” and the international bankers, with an assist from the international Zionist conspiracy (which we all know is closely aligned with the capitalist conspiracy), bamboozled us into the war. America Firsters in the 1930s picked up the charge and claimed that the only people who wanted us to fight Hitler were British bankers and the Jews.

You don’t hear much talk along those lines these days. It is generally recognized that the United States took part in World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War because it thought that doing so would be in its own interest, even if the benefits that accrued to our allies were actually greater. (After all, we saved a number of countries from occupation, whereas there was never a credible threat of enemy armies showing up on our shores.)

Likewise, we are now entangled in Iraq because the president, Congress, and a large majority of the American population thought it was the right thing to do. To blame the current war on “the Jews”-or even to make the more qualified claim that Jewish supporters of the war were compromising American security for Israel’s benefit-is not worthy of a serious publication. Which makes it all the more puzzling that Joe Klein is peddling precisely such rubbish from his perch at Time magazine, and that Andrew Sullivan is endorsing him from his perch at the Atlantic.

Joe Klein and Andrew Sullivan, who used to be for the war before they were against it, are having conniptions over my suggestion, itself made in response to an intemperate posting by Klein, that we need to make

long-term commitment in Iraq–for 100 years if need be, as John McCain has said. That doesn’t mean 100 years of fighting; clearly, that would be unsustainable. It does mean a long-term troop presence designed to reassure Iraqis of our commitment to their security against an array of enemies.

Klein accuses me of being a “squealer” and demands disingenuously: “So anything less than 100 years is precipitous?” Sullivan writes in a more ominous vein in a post entitled “The Mask Slips.” He sneers:

Their security? Heh. In fifty years’ time, the Iraqis will not be able to defend themselves against Iran? Or Syria? Please. If they’ve managed this much progress in the last year, we could be almost out of there in the next president’s term of office. Even under Saddam, the Iraqis weren’t defeated by the Iranian mullahs. Notice also how a few months of relative calm are instantly deployed to justify a century of occupation. Can you imagine what the next platform for invasion will be? And on what planet does Boot live to think that permanent US troops in the heart of the Muslim Middle East will not require endless, endless fighting?

This obviously isn’t about Iraq, as we are fast discovering. It’s about an ever greater American entanglement in the Middle East in part to secure oil supplies we need to wean ourselves off and in part a foolish attempt to protect Israel.

I could just imagine an Andrew Sullivan of the 1940’s writing something similar about Harry Truman’s crazy idea to station troops in Germany and Japan without an exit strategy: “In fifty years’ time, the West Germans will not be able to defend themselves against the Soviet Union? Or East Germany? Please.” As it happens, the West Germans wouldn’t have been able to defend themselves against a broad array of enemies without a long-term American troop presence. That presence has served other important goals too, namely reassuring Germany’s neighbors that it would never threaten the peace of Europe again and fostering Germany’s internal democratic development. But just because we’ve had troops in Germany and Japan for 60 years–and in South Korea for more than 50 years–doesn’t mean we’re occupying those countries. We are there are the request of democratically elected governments.

The same is true, whether Klein or Sullivan concede it or not, in the case of Iraq. The occupation of Iraq is over. Iraq has a sovereign government that, if it so desires, could tell us to get lost, and we would do it. At the moment the Iraqi government is giving us a hard time over the terms of future American commitment, but there is no denying that the government of Iraq does want and need an American troop commitment for the foreseeable future. Granted, the enemies that Iraq faces aren’t as formidable as the enemies that West Germany faced for so many decades, but Al Qaeda, Iran, and its various proxies are dangerous enough, and Iraq isn’t nearly as strong as West Germany was. In fact, Iraq is just now starting to recover from the early stages of a civil war–a civil war that would still be consuming countless lives if Sullivan and Klein had had their way and the surge (and related strategy changes) had never occurred.

Notwithstanding the surge’s success (which I am glad to see Klein is willing to concede), it will take many, many years before Iraq is strong enough to completely control its own territory without any outside help. And even then lots of Iraqis may well want an American presence to reassure competing sectarian groups that their historical enemies will not slaughter them. That is essentially the role that NATO troops still play in Kosovo and Bosnia, years after the end of the conflicts that brought them there. That is the kind of role I envision American troops playing in Iraq.

That does not mean that I think anything less than a commitment lasting a century is inadequate. Obviously when I (or John McCain) refers to “100 years” that is a figure of speech meaning “a long time,” or more accurately “however long it takes.” McCain has talked about his desire to substantially reduce the U.S. troops presence during his first term in office, and, if progress continues at the rate we’ve seen in the past year, there is no doubt we can pull out a lot of our troops. But that doesn’t mean that we can safely carry out the Barack Obama plan–all brigade combat teams out within 16 months. That would be a course of action likely to send Iraq back to the brink of civil war, if not over the edge entirely.

Such a misguided policy would have many consequences. It might well ignite genocide in Iraq, destabilize its neighbors, export terrorism—and, yes, endanger the world’s supply of oil. What is wrong with trying to protect the world’s oil supply especially at a time when demand is as tight as it is? How does Sullivan get from Washington to his vacation hangout in Provincetown, Massachusetts? Does he walk? Bicycle? Ride a donkey? I am guessing he goes by car or airplane–rather important transportation devices that just happen to run on oil, not on carrot juice or granola. I too would love to make oil irrelevant, but that isn’t likely to happen anytime soon. In the meantime, oil remains vital to the world’s economic well being, and the Middle East remains the world’s leading depository of the stuff. Therefore, it makes perfect sense for the U.S. to play a central role in safeguarding the security of the Middle East. That will require a long-term military commitment of the kind we’ve long made in numerous countries such as Qatar and Turkey and that we are now making in the case of Iraq.

Please note that I am not endorsing the half-baked conspiracy theories which hold that the U.S. went to Iraq to grab its oil. Not surprisingly, we have done nothing of the sort; the government of Iraq is collecting its own oil revenues, not the United States. We don’t even get to fill up our Humvees–which are there to safeguard the people of Iraq–for free. But preserving the flow of oil is one of many objectives the U.S. has in Iraq. And the problem with that is . . . what precisely?

I don’t have much to say about Klein’s gobsmacking accusation, which Sullivan endorses, that American Jews who supported the Iraq War or now support firm action against Iran are putting Israel’s interests ahead of America’s. Like Jennifer Rubin, I am simply astounded to hear the old “divided loyalties” canard hauled out by commentators not named John Mearsheimer, Steven Walt, Pat Buchanan, or David Duke.

Opponents of the surge have been forced to acknowledge its success-but that in no way changes their desire to pull out our troops. Thus Frank Rich writes: “If ‘we are winning’ and the surge is a ‘success,’ then what is the rationale for keeping American forces bogged down there while the Taliban regroups ominously in Afghanistan?”

Joe Klein, for his part, “happily acknowledge[s]” that he “was wrong about the surge” but concludes that “what we’re talking about here is whipped cream on a pile of fertilizer–a regional policy unprecedented in its stupidity and squalor.” His recommendation? “But go we must, in an orderly fashion, the sooner the better–this war is simply too expensive and too exhausting for our military. And it is currently drawing crucial resources from the more important war in Afghanistan.” (For a critique of another part of Klein’s article, see Jennifer Rubin’s post.)

Heads I win, tails you lose: Nothing on the ground in Iraq–neither success or failure–can change these pundits’ pre-determined recommendations. Talk about a faith-based policy.

I suppose they might make the same accusation against those of us who supported the war effort and the surge all along, but to do so would be unfair. I can’t speak for anyone else, but if the surge had failed, as Rich, Klein, and so many others expected, I very much doubt that I or anyone else would be calling for continuing a major troop presence in Iraq. The surge was always seen as a last-ditch attempt to salvage a decent outcome. If it failed, then it would have been appropriate to head for the exits. But, as Rich and Klein now acknowledge, it didn’t fail.

That doesn’t mean, however, that the success that has been won over the past year is final and irreversible. The verdict of battle can always be undone by a determined adversary: Look at how the South managed to subvert Reconstruction notwithstanding its defeat on so many Civil War battlefields. Winning the peace is impossible without a long term commitment-something that we failed to carry out in the case of the post-1865 South but that we did a better job of seeing through in post-1945 Germany and Japan.

In order to build on the success that General Petraeus and his soldiers have had, we need to maintain a long-term commitment in Iraq-for 100 years if need be, as John McCain has said. That doesn’t mean 100 years of fighting; clearly, that would be unsustainable. It does mean a long-term troop presence designed to reassure Iraqis of our commitment to their security against an array of enemies. Having come this far against such heavy odds, it would be the height of folly to throw away our recent success by a precipitous withdrawal. I hope Barack Obama realizes that even if so many of his supporters don’t.

Barack Obama no doubt figured that his offer to hold “unconditional” talks with America’s enemies would be a two-fer: It would advance his standing both at home and abroad. In both places, he probably figured, most people are sick of George W. Bush’s hard-line style.

He must have been shocked, then, if he read this Washington Post article: “European officials are increasingly concerned that Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign pledge to begin direct talks with Iran on its nuclear program without preconditions could potentially rupture U.S. relations with key European allies early in a potential Obama administration.” That’s right: Obama is too dovish even for our European allies. They are concerned that an unconditional offer of talks would dissipate the pressure of four U.N. Security Council resolutions which offer diplomatic and economic concessions to Iran only after it suspends its nuclear program.

A similar article could be written about the unease among our Arab allies to the idea of the American president breaking bread with the “Persians.” Or about the reaction of our friends in Latin America to the idea of talks with Hugo Chavez. Or about the views of our Japanese friends to the idea of a sit-down with Kim Jong Il. While everyone favors diplomacy in the abstract, presidential talks are fraught with dangers which our allies understand perfectly, and that Obama is only learning about.

Iran’s denials that it was arming and training violent militias in Iraq have never been terribly convincing. But now, in the midst of threatening the United States, Ali Larijani, the speaker of Iran’s parliament and its former national security adviser, seems to have given up any pretence of Iranian non-involvement. As reported by the Islamic Republic News Agency, this is what Larijani had to say last week :

The Americans had assumed that the occupation of Iraq would be an easy job and that the Iraqi nation would back them up… The US had assumed it could raise ten democracy towers in Iraq, whose shade would overshadow both Iran and Syria, but the Islamic Republic of Iran’s proper strategy in the region made the Americans wonder what they had better do in Iraq…. [T]hey had better know that another miscalculation would lead them to fall in another beys [sic] in which the more they would struggle for release the harder they would get entrapped.

“The Islamic Republic of Iran’s proper strategy”? Would that perhaps involve sending Explosively Formed Penetrators to blow up American soldiers?

There are a number of points to make about this front-page New York Times article, “Inside a 9/11 Mastermind’s Interrogation,” in which the Times continues its self-appointed task of exposing to the world as many of the nation’s intelligence secrets as they can get their hands on. The first and most obvious point is the newspaper’s decision to name Deuce Martinez, one of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad’s interrogators, notwithstanding the CIA’s request not to do so. In its online edition, the Times prints an Editor’s Note explaining its decision:

After discussion with agency officials and a lawyer for Mr. Martinez, the newspaper declined the request, noting that Mr. Martinez had never worked under cover and that others involved in the campaign against Al Qaeda have been named in news stories and books. The editors judged that the name was necessary for the credibility and completeness of the article.

This is the same newspaper, mind you, that fulminated for years about Robert Novak’s outing of Valerie Plame, notwithstanding the fact that she wasn’t working undercover at the time either. Moreover, it seems fair to guess that the danger of retaliation is a lot greater for Martinez than for Plame.

The Times doesn’t even bother to explain its decision to name Thailand and Poland as the location of secret CIA prisons that were opened after 9/11 and have since closed. That information has previously leaked out, but of course it does great damage to our relations with close allies when their confidential favors for our intelligence services are exposed in the media.

Another point concerns KSM’s initial response to CIA interrogators:

Mr. Mohammed met his captors at first with cocky defiance, telling one veteran C.I.A. officer, a former Pakistan station chief, that he would talk only when he got to New York and was assigned a lawyer - the experience of his nephew and partner in terrorism, Ramzi Yousef, after Mr. Yousef’s arrest in 1995.

But the rules had changed, and the tough treatment began shortly after Mr. Mohammed was delivered to Poland.

One wonders how the CIA will make future terrorist bigwigs talk when the rules have changed once again, effectively back to the pre-9/11 standard, by which even our most murderous enemies will have the potential to “lawyer up” just like an average criminal suspect as seen on so many episodes of “Law & Order.” In addition, Al Qaeda terrorists still on the loose will be helped by reading articles such as this one, full of operational details, which provide a virtual playbook for avoiding arrest and resisting interrogation.

Finally I was struck by the very last lines of the article describing what Deuce Martinez does now:

Like many other C.I.A. officers in the post-9/11 security boom, Mr. Martinez left the agency for more lucrative work with government contractors…. He now works for Mitchell & Jessen Associates, a consulting company run by former military psychologists who advised the C.I.A. on the use of harsh tactics in the secret program. And his new employer sent Mr. Martinez right back to the agency.

Martinez’s job switch is part of a trend that has become increasingly pervasive in all government departments but especially in the military and intelligence services: Employees who have been trained and vetted at government expense leave to work for private contractors doing essentially the same work as before but for much more money. This sort of “outsourcing,” which first became widespread in the Reagan administration and increased as a result of the Clinton administration’s “Reinventing Government” initiative, is supposed to save the taxpayers money and increase governmental efficiency. But it is rife for abuse, since government employees can award lucrative contracts to their friends who will then hire them in the future. And contractors are not as accountable as regular government employees-a problem seen not only with Blackwater in Iraq but also with some outside interrogators hired by the CIA. The next administration, whether Republican or Democratic, needs to conduct a rigorous examination of the whole system of outsourcing and cut back on contracts that don’t make sense.

Jennifer Rubin has already commented on the criticisms from the McCain campaign (which I advise on foreign policy) of Barack Obama for exhibiting a “September 10 mindset.” It’s also worth noting Obama’s response. Here, according to Reuters, is what he had to say:

“These are the same guys who helped engineer the distraction of the war in Iraq at a time when we could have pinned down the people who actually committed 9/11,” Obama said on his campaign plane.

“What they’re trying to do is to do what they’ve done every election cycle, which is to use terrorism as a club to make the American people afraid,” Obama said.

That response is noteworthy on a couple of levels. First, in trying to refute the notion that he has a “September 10 mindset,” Obama actually confirms it by dismissing the threat of terrorism-the No. 1 national security threat we confront today–as a “club” used by Republicans “to make the American people afraid,” presumably for partisan political advantage.

Second, Obama commits a lapse of fact and logic when he blames U.S. commitment in Iraq for our failure to “have pinned down the people who actually committed 9/11.” We did pin done many of the culprits, notably plot mastermind Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, who has now been awarded habeas corpus rights by a Supreme Court decision that Obama applauds. It is true that U.S. forces allowed Osama bin Laden and other top Al Qaeda leaders to escape at Tora Bora in December 2001 because of our unwillingness to put more troops on the ground. (Something that I and others warned of in November 2001, but that I don’t recall Obama commenting on at the time.) And it is true that the Iraq War has drained resources that might otherwise have gone into Afghanistan. But that does not mean that the Iraq War was not worth fighting, or, more importantly, now that we have committed to fighting it that we can withdraw, as Obama suggests, without suffering terrible repercussions.

More to the point, it does not mean that we failed to finish off al Qaeda because we went into Iraq. Our best opportunity to finish off its senior leadership occurred, as previously noted, in December 2001-more than a year before we became embroiled in Iraq. By all accounts Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri are now hiding out in the rugged frontier regions of Pakistan. How exactly does Obama think we could have tracked them down if we weren’t in Iraq? Perhaps we could have committed more surveillance technology and more commandos to the task, but we’ve already devoted plenty of resources and we’ve found that all of our ultra-expensive systems are helpless to find two men hiding in a cave. We would increase our odds of success, while of course creating fresh problems, if we sent large numbers of American troops into Pakistan to hunt down bin Laden and Zawahiri as they previously hunted down Saddam Hussein in his rathole in Iraq. Is this what Obama thinks we should have done? Invaded Pakistan rather than invaded Iraq?

That seems unlikely. More likely he is simply repeating clichéd criticisms of the Bush administration whose implications he has not fully digested. During the primary campaign he could expect nothing but adulation for such sentiments from liberal audiences. It will be interesting to see how the rest of the country reacts.

It’s nice that France is rejoining the military arm of NATO, but how much of a contribution can it make given that it continues to spend so little on its armed forces? Granted France has the second highest defense budget in Europe (behind the United Kingdom), but that’s not saying much, considering that all of the European states have let their militaries wither in recent years.

This Financial Times article reports that President Nicolas Sarkozy is planning to cut military strength by another 20%. France’s “deployable army” will be roughly 88,000, about the same as Britain’s-and less than half the size of the U.S. Marine Corps. That’s not all bad: Sarkozy is using some of the money that would have gone for troops to pay for satellite equipment and missile-detection systems. That’s useful. But the long-term projection is for defense spending to remain anemic. As the FT notes:

Defence spending, which in 2008 amounts to €30bn or 2.3 per cent of gross domestic product, will be frozen in real terms until 2012, and will then rise by 1 percentage point ahead of inflation until 2014.

To put that into perspective, the U.S. currently spends a little over 4 percent of GDP on defense-a low number by historic standards but far higher than any of our European allies. No wonder Bob Kagan is talking about Europe’s “slide toward irrelevance.”

Unfortunately the situation in Afghanistan continues to get worse. The latest bad news was the Taliban assault on the main prison in Kandahar, which freed some 400 militants. The story has gotten a fair amount of coverage but an important element has been missed: namely, why were so many terrorists being held by Afghan forces who obviously do not have the capacity to keep them locked up? The answer is that most NATO countries operate under rules that forbid them to hold detainees for any length of time. They have to turn over whomever they capture either to Afghan or U.S. forces pronto.

But, as the prison break proves, Afghan forces don’t have the capacity to hold large numbers of detainees in safe and secure conditions. The U.S. has spent more than three years and $30 million to build a high-security detention facility for the Afghanistan government outside Kabul, but the project has not succeeded in creating room for very many detainees. The U.S. continues to hold over 600 detainees at its own facility in Bagram Air Force Base.

That may sound like a lot, but keep in mind that Afghanistan is a country of some 31 million people. It’s bigger than Iraq, yet in Iraq the U.S. is currently holding more than 20,000 detainees at two facilities, Camp Cropper in Baghdad and Camp Bucca in southern Iraq. That total swelled to almost 30,000 at the height of the surge last year. (The Iraqi government holds a substantial number of prisoners in its own facilities.) Granted, there is less terrorism in Afghanistan than in Iraq, but is there 33 times less? It seems to me that, with violence on the increase in Afghanistan, it is imperative to lock up more wrong-doers-and not in revolving-door prisons. This should be a top priority for General David McKiernan, the new NATO commander in Afghanistan.

From Peter J. Boyer’s profile in The New Yorker:

Olbermann, who is six feet three and a half, once bumped his head while leaping into a subway car; it permanently upset his equilibrium . . .

Veteran Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus provides an update today on a small but important organization that is doing invaluable work to help Iraqis who have helped us. The List Project was begun in early 2007 by Kirk Johnson, who spent a year working in Iraq for the U.S. Agency for International Development and was appalled at the suffering of translators and other Iraqis who have risked their lives to work with American forces. Many of them, and their families, have been targeted for death by insurgents. And too often, as George Packer described in the New Yorker last year, the U.S. has seemed uncaring about their concerns. We have not done nearly enough to safeguard employees and their families within Iraq, and we have done even worse when it comes to helping them leave the country.

The State Department has erected elaborate bureaucratic mechanisms to make it almost impossible for them to get visas to come to the United States. As Pincus notes: “In the two years that an Iraqi visa program has been available for people who worked for the United States, only 763 of more than 7,000 Iraqis have been granted entry. When spouses and children are included, the number of Iraqis who had come to the United States under the program through the end of May is 1,696.”

Kirk Johnson has intervened and so far his List Project has helped to bring 31 Iraqis and 61 of their family members to the U.S. But he has a thousand more names on his list of Iraqis desperate to come here. (Readers can contribute to his important work via his website.)

Last week at the Council on Foreign Relations I hosted a roundtable discussion featuring Kirk; Owen West, a Marine reservist who has served two tours in Iraq; and “Alex,” an Iraqi translator who worked with Owen in Iraq and whom Owen has generously sponsored to relocate to the United States. Alex related a harrowing tale of how insurgents tortured and killed his brother because of his work for the Americans. Countless other translators and others have similar tales to tell, and many of them can only dream of coming to America. Indeed another one of Owen’s former translators, “Reyes,” remains trapped in bureaucratic purgatory.

It is a real blemish on our honor as a nation that we are not doing more to help these brave allies. It is not only immoral but stupid: How can we expect others to risk their lives to help us in the future if we don’t take care of those who have volunteered in the past? Some might object that making it too easy for Iraqi translators to leave the country will make it more difficult to accomplish our mission. But many have already left and are now stranded in countries such as Jordan and Syria. The surge is improving security conditions in Iraq, but locals on the American payroll still remain on too many insurgents’ death lists for them to have any confidence of a future in Iraq.

Helping Iraqis who have helped us should not be a partisan issue.  Senator Ted Kennedy, an opponent of the war, has sponsored legislation to increase the number of visas available and to expedite their processing in Baghdad. That’s a good start, but the prime imperative now is for President Bush to get off its keister and do more to help our allies. The administration’s foot-dragging in this regard is as inexplicable as it as counter-productive. We need some high level intervention to break through the bureaucratic logjam. If this requires personal attention from the commander-in-chief, so be it. We owe the Iraqis nothing less.

It’s a small story on an inside page. But its length and placement were out of all proportion to the amount of aggravation this New York Times article caused me: “Iraq Troops Mass for Assault in South” by Andrew E. Kramer. What annoyed me was the opening paragraph (or, in newspaper parlance, “lede”):

Aiming at a power base of a rival Shiite leader, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki sent troops into the southern city of Amara on Saturday.

That makes it sound as if there is something illicit about this offensive. In fact, it is merely a continuation of the operations that Iraqi security forces have mounted in recent months to clear Shiite militants out of Basra and Sadr City and Sunni militants out of Mosul. Critics initially cast the Basra assault in the very terms now employed by Andrew Kramer: as a political move by Maliki to weaken Moqtada al Sadr in advance of upcoming provincial elections. That interpretation was invalidated when it emerged that Maliki’s offensive was welcomed not only by other Iraqi political factions but also by the people of Basra who had been held hostage by Sadr’s thugs for too long. Far from being partisan political moves, these operation are now seen by most Iraqis as exactly the kind of law enforcement operations that the democratically elected government of Iraq should be undertaking against violent militias. Only it seems that Mr. Kramer has not gotten the news. He is still writing as if this were a case of President Bush sending Delta Force into Hyde Park to seize Barack Obama’s campaign staff.