The Dish

The premise of this new English blog is simple:

Moving to Northumberland from London was not my idea. My husband was in fact the only one terribly keen on the move. When I asked my younger son what he thought, he confided: "Bears might eat me". "There are no bears," I told him as I looked into the darkness and the growling started.

Read on.

(Photo: Richard Webb.)

Charles Krauthammer has reached a position that is close to indistinguishable from where I now find myself:

We need to find a redeployment strategy that maintains as much latent American strength as possible, but with minimal exposure. We say to Maliki: Let us down, and we dismantle the Green Zone, leave Baghdad and let you fend for yourself; we keep the airport and certain strategic bases in the area; we redeploy most of our forces to Kurdistan; we maintain a significant presence in Anbar province, where we are having success in our one-front war against al-Qaeda and the Baathists. Then we watch. You can have your Baghdad civil war without us. We will be around to pick up the pieces as best we can.

Sane and realistic. So let’s drop the Plus Up fantasies, shall we?

From the "You Can’t Make This Up Dept":

Specter: Now wait a minute, wait a minute. The Constitution says you can’t take [habeas corpus] away except in the case of invasion or rebellion. Doesn’t that mean you have the right of habeas corpus?

Gonzales: I meant by that comment that the Constitution doesn’t say that every individual in the United States or every citizen has or is assured the right of habeas corpus. It doesn’t say that. It simply says that the right of habeas corpus shall not be suspended.

There are parallels but there are major differences as well. Here’s an engaging discussion of both by a reader of Alistair Horne’s "A Savage War of Peace".

Your moment of Wiggum:

He says it’s a bad idea but he’s for it anyway:

Keane appears to be saying that the plan works at an acceptable cost only if the United States can pacify the Shiite militants without forcibly confronting them. To me, and possibly also to the Sadrists, this looks like what gamblers call a bluff. So why shouldn’t the Democratic Congress block such an unpromising strategy?

He has three answers.

San Francisco, California, 7.40 am, from inside the Muni train.

Moqtada says his militias won’t attack for a month; and his chief aide is arrested. What this means is unclear, like a lot of things in Iraq. But these seem like significant developments to me because either a) they reveal the sit-it-out policy of Iraq’s Shia in response to "Plus Up," given a fig leaf by a symbolc arrest; or b) they represent real, if tiny, progress. Here’s hoping it’s the latter.

Here are two sentences to make your head spin:

As required by law, the manual prohibits statements obtained by torture and "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" as prohibited by the Constitution. However, the law does allow statements obtained through coercive interrogation techniques if obtained before Dec. 30, 2005, and deemed reliable by a judge.

So evidence procured by torture is unconstitutional, unless it isn’t. George W. Bush really is president, isn’t he?

Fred Kagan responds to the rather obvious point that his initial assertion that some 80,000 troops would be needed to secure Baghdad has not, er, been borne out by the actual plan. There’s a big difference between 80,000 and 17,500. Or is there? Kagan argues that his 80,000 number was for the "entire Baghdad capital area." 50,000 would be needed for Baghdad proper. 30,000 would be necessary if we were to ignore Sadr City and just clear Baghdad of Sunni insurgents in phases (what Maliki wants). Got that? Still, Kagan has to concede that 17,500 for Baghdad is only around half the number he first proposed. How does he explain that? Here goes:

Brigade sizes range based on the type of unit, but average around 3,500 soldiers each. The administration’s figures are based on that estimate. In reality, the U.S. Army does not simply deploy brigades into combat, but instead sends Brigade Combat Teams (BCTs). A BCT includes a brigade as described above, but also additional support elements such as engineers, military police, additional logistics elements, and so on, which are necessary to the functioning of the brigade in combat.

In a counter-insurgency operation such as Iraq, these additional forces are fully as important to the overall success of the mission as the combat troops. Sizes of BCTs also vary, of course, but they average more like 5,000 soldiers. Since these are the formations that will actually be deployed to Iraq and used there, I have been estimating deployments on this basis: five brigade combat teams include around 25,000 soldiers; one Marine Regimental Combat Team (RCTs are somewhat smaller than Army brigades) includes perhaps 4,000. So the surge being briefed by the Bush administration now is much more likely to be around 29,000 troops than 22,000 – in other words, close to the number of combat troops the IPG recommended, and, when necessary support troops are added, close to the overall numbers I had estimated before the IPG met.

So the Bush plan is actually, according to Kagan, 29,000 troops, not 21,500. Somehow the president forgot to mention that. (For the full monty on this numerical pas de deux, check out this definitive post by Greg Djerejian.) And then we have this rather devastating sentence by Kagan:

It remains to be seen if the Bush administration will adhere to this plan, of course.

The "of course" is priceless. To recap: first Kagan wanted 80,000; then he settled for 50,000; then he was fine with 29,000; when confronted with the Plus Up number of 17,500 for Bahdad and 4,000 for Anbar, he argued that it is actually 29,000, except the president didn’t say so, and except Kagan doesn’t know for sure. So, under these cloudy circumstances, with so much at stake, is he for Plus Up? Here’s the answer:

The new commander, Lieutenant General David Petraeus, has not yet taken up command, and it would be best to await his plan before commenting in detail on proposals that may or may not take concrete form.

The Bush message is now what it has always been: our very civilization is at stake. So let’s wing it.