How did Foreign Affairs’ experts get to be, er, experts? Rather, how did they get to be clueless?

A Foreign Affairs roundtable about Iraq revealed cluelessness squared, with none of the four people even thinking to advocate a U.S. troop withdrawal, whether now or some semi-solid future date certain, whether slow or fast.

(See Washington Monthly for the background to this.)

Anyway, here’s my take:

Foreign Affairs’ experts responses to Biddle are mostly clueless. Kaufmann's "harm reduction" strategy would be OK, if accompanied by at least a partial drawdown if not the start of a withdrawal.

Leslie Gelb’s decentralization will work just as long as it takes the different Iraqi successor countries to start fighting over boundaries, as well as pulling in outside countries as part of this. See my comments on James Dobbins to show how this would likely play out.

James Dobbins is right on one thing: the Shia have no reason to concede anything. If civil war gets stronger, they know that Turkey will reign in the Kurds while Iraq, the most populous country in the area, will back Iran. Sunni Arab countries will have little chance of luring us (back) in, and most are too small individually to offer troops in support themselves.

The other thing Dobbins gets right is the number of troops needed to have done Iraq right.

The United States put 500,000 troops into South Vietnam, a country that in 1970 had a population that was little more than half the size of the population of Iraq today. Nato put over 100,000 troops into Bosnia and Kosovo, societies that in combination are around a fifth of the size of Iraq's. Coalition forces are currently not numerous enough even to suppress the Sunni insurgency; they are certainly insufficient to take on the much more powerful Shiite and Kurdish militias as well.

So, we really need(-ed) a million-man Army. No way of doing that without a draft. Does, or did, Dobbins favor that?

Other than that, with what he said, he STILL preaches “stay the course lite.” To justifiably continue a Vietnam analogy, that’s trying to get by with fewer ground troops and more “advisors.” They would be more liable to be kidnapped, just delaying the inevitable withdrawal and further complicating it.

And Larry Diamond is just parroting the Administration/neocon bottom line until he gets new instructions. But, you probably already knew that, didn’t you?