Blaming Maliki

I'm really not sure about the approach Carl Levin is taking to these hearings. Basically, he's saying the Iraqi government is inept and hasn't done what it needs to do. I think this is essentially true, but I'm not sure it supports the conclusion Levin and I are both aiming at. After all, if Iraq has failed to meet all its benchmarks, maybe that shows the need for us to stay in Iraq? It sets the bar such that all the defenders of an open-ended engagement need to do is to claim that some progress has been made in the right direction so, yes, we're disappointed but blah blah blah blah.

The current situation calls for a broader strategic argument that doesn't merely consist of nitpicking with Ryan Crocker about the precise state of Iraqi politics. The point I would make is that our current allocation of resources reflects bad priorities (primarily Bush's desire to rescue his legacy) and that the ongoing American presence in Iraq is per se contrary to our real interests which involve refocusing on the core problems of al-Qaeda, nuclear proliferation, and then getting moving on a broader international policy agenda that includes economics, climate change, etc. Levin, to his credit, is moving on to some of these points, namely that Iraq is plagued by problems that fundamentally don't have very much to do with us and that are simply beyond our capacity to solve.