In a recent remark that has stoked considerable controversy, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey said that it is. Dempsey underscored the importance of this assertion when he said that it was based on this conclusion -- that the regime is a "rational actor" -- that he felt the current U.S. approach to Iran "is the most prudent path."

To determine whether Gen. Dempsey is right or wrong, it is important to understand what it means for a government to act rationally. It does not necessarily imply that the government sees the world the way we do, or makes the decisions we would make. Simply put, there are two essential criteria for rationality -- first, that decisions are arrived at through a process of logical reasoning; second, that the decisions made are the best ones given the choices available.

Most discussions of whether the Iranian regime is rational focus on the first criterion. Does the regime make its choices by weighing costs and benefits, or through a capricious process guided by whim and claims of divine revelation? The U.S. intelligence community believes that it is the former: for all of the regime's unhinged rhetoric, the regime is calculating in its decisionmaking. The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear program puts it this way: "Tehran's decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic, and military costs."

However, this conclusion raises a critical question -- what does the Iranian regime see as costly, and what does it see as beneficial?

This leads to the second criterion for rationality: a rational actor makes the best decision given the choices available. But "best" according to whose interests, and whose values? Whether an action is costly or beneficial, and thus whether a decision is best, depends vitally on the answers to these questions. Our own domestic political experience -- witness the Democrat-Republican divide over the national debt -- demonstrates that two rational actors, faced with the same sets of facts and circumstances but holding different interests, philosophies, or values, can reach very different conclusions about what to do.

So for a conclusion that the Iranian regime is rational to be useful in predicting its behavior -- not to mention making and judging our own policy -- we must assess how the regime perceives its interests. Otherwise the "costs" we impose may not be viewed as costly by the regime, and the "benefits" we offer may not be seen as beneficial.

All indications are that the regime values its own survival above all. This likely fuels its drive to obtain a nuclear weapon, which it may see as a guarantee against external foes. To the extent the regime defines its interests parochially rather than as national interests, it may also discount the economic suffering of the Iranian people except to the extent it leads to political turmoil. Thus, to be perceived as truly "costly" by the regime, any sanctions or other measures imposed or threatened by the U.S. and our allies must place at risk the regime's interests, including its prospects for survival. What's more, they must threaten those interests so much that the regime is willing to sacrifice something it apparently values greatly -- a nuclear weapon.

Likewise, any benefit offered by the U.S. and our allies, if it is to affect the regime's calculus, must be seen by the regime as advancing its interests. Many things the U.S. sees as "carrots" -- for example, free trade or normal diplomatic relations -- may in fact be seen as threatening to an authoritarian regime which is leery of the West. Conversely, what the regime would see as beneficial -- for example, assurances that the U.S. would cease its support for human rights or democracy in Iran -- we are unlikely to be willing to offer.

There are two other important points to consider about how the regime decides which option facing it is best. First, we must be aware that there are other costs and benefits at play than simply the ones we generate through sanctions or diplomatic appeals. Individuals in the regime face their own incentives -- for example personal wealth generated in the black markets that sanctions give rise to -- as well as disincentives -- for example the possibility of ending up imprisoned or worse for too vocally bucking the regime's line.

Second, we must also be aware that the regime likely lacks complete information or anything close to it. This is where the assumption that Iran acts rationally runs into the most trouble. Decisions in Iran are made by one man -- Ali Khamenei. By all accounts, he has not traveled outside Iran since becoming Supreme Leader in 1989, is likely insulated by his aides from bad news or criticism, and depends on an increasingly narrow and homogenous power base which may not expose him to alternative opinions. One is unlikely to make a good decision if ill-informed or unaware of all the options. Nor can the regime make accurate judgments about U.S. intentions if we do not clearly communicate our policies or red lines.

There are indeed examples that suggest rational cost-benefit decisionmaking by the Iranian regime, including the one cited in the 2007 NIE -- the regime's apparent decision to suspend its nuclear "weaponization" research in 2003 following the U.S. invasion of Iraq. But other Iranian actions seem untethered from cost-benefit considerations. For example, why would Iran try to blow up a restaurant in Washington in an effort to assassinate the Saudi ambassador, when such an action could spark a war that Iran would surely lose? Or, why would Iran not make a show of cooperation with the IAEA delegation that recently visited Iran, if for no other reason than to delay an Israeli military strike that seems increasingly likely?

More importantly, even if we were to conclude that the Iranian regime is a rational actor, we would not necessarily be able to predict its decisions or behavior. We have a poor understanding of how the regime sees its interests, what it perceives as costly and beneficial, what information is available to its leader, and therefore what it would consider the best decision in a given circumstance. And of course, even otherwise rational actors are prone to the occasional -- and sometimes very consequential -- irrational decision. And in an authoritarian state with an aging and increasingly isolated leader, this risk goes up exponentially.

The Obama administration is sending contradictory messages on a crucially important national security subject. At the NATO Defense Ministers' meeting in Brussels, Leon Panetta seemed to accelerate the withdrawal timeline for Afghanistan from the end of 2014 -- what NATO nations have been committed to -- to "mid-to late 2013." In Chicago, meanwhile, the President's Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes insisted there will be no change to the 2014 plan, warning that "We will need allies to remain committed to that goal." The president's Special Assistant for European Affairs Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, evidently ignorant of Panetta's statement, assured reporters that the Secretary of Defense "will be very clear about our plans to remain on the Lisbon timeline."

The evident confusion among senior policy makers in the administration prefigures the administration's cratering commitment to win the war in Afghanistan. The White House has narrowed its war aims from defeating all threats to only defeating al Qaeda. The Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, testified to Congress this week that the deaths of senior al Qaeda leadership have brought us to a "critical transitional phase for the terrorist threat," in which the organization has a better than 50 percent probability of fragmenting and becoming incapable of mass-casualty attacks. 

The White House appears set to use progress against al Qaeda as justification for accelerating an end to the war in Afghanistan. Since the president has concluded that we aren't fighting the Taliban, just al Qaeda, no need to stick around Afghanistan until the government of that country can provide security and prevent recidivism to Taliban control. The president will declare victory for having taken from al Qaeda the ability to organize large scale attacks, and piously intone that nation building in Afghanistan is Afghanistan's responsibility.

This policy will not win the war in Afghanistan. It will not even end the war in Afghanistan. It will only end our involvement in that ongoing war. Because arbitrary timelines do not translate into having achieved the objectives that cause enemies to throw down their weapons. And it is the enemy ceasing to contest our objectives that constitutes winning. Interrogations with prisoners in Afghanistan have caused the American military to conclude that "Once ISAF is no longer a factor, Taliban consider their victory inevitable."

Secretary Panetta's public affairs folks will likely spend a few days prettying up the mess, emphasizing the secretary was referring to the transition from combat operations to advising and training Afghans. But the damage has been done. As Michael Clarke of Britain's Royal United Services Institute said, "the suspicion that America is going to pull out early will create a self-fulfilling prophecy and there will be a rush to the exit." The Obama administration created this problem by the president's own arbitrary timeline. It is hard to blame Nicolas Sarkozy for playing politics with the issue; politicization is contagious, and allies caught it from President Obama.

On his current tour of Latin American outliers, Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stopped in Venezuela this week to share a belly-laugh with his compañero Hugo Chávez over the supposed nuclear threat either of their countries poses to the civilized world.

Gesticulating outside the presidential palace, Chávez said, "That hill will open up and a big atomic bomb will come out," with Ahmadinejad adding that any bomb they would build together would be fueled by "love."

A couple of real cut-ups.

While their mockery should fall flat amongst most sober observers, the fact remains that much of Washington is still unable to grasp the nature and dimensions of the Iranian threat in Latin America.

For example, elsewhere on this site, Michael Shifter, a perceptive analyst of Latin American politics, fails to contemplate the worst of Iran's intentions and argues instead that Iran hasn't managed to meet many of its economic pledges in the region, and has equally failed in making inroads with the biggest power players of the region, such as Brazil.

That, indeed, may be true, but neither is relevant to Iran's covert agenda of evading international sanctions and developing contingencies if the cold war with the United States was to suddenly turn hot.

Indeed, for the past twelve months or so, skeptics have proven more diligent in attempting to debunk reports of Iranian-Venezuelan collusion than following where the (prodigious) trail leads. The hoary "no smoking gun" is continually trotted out to summarily end any discussion.

But for anyone who cares to look, the public record is filled with more than enough information to elicit serious concern about the Iranian threat and spur demand that Washington take more concerted action. Consider just the following:

Money Laundering: Iran has already been caught evading sanctions through Venezuela when an Iranian bank in Caracas was sanctioned by the Treasury Department for providing financial services to Iran's military.

Drugs: U.S. law enforcement officials believe that a weekly commercial flight between Caracas and Tehran and Damascus (dubbed "Aero-Terror" by Brazilian intelligence because no one knows who or what are on those flights) is used to traffic illicit drugs from South America to the Middle East.

Uranium: Venezuela possesses vast amounts of uranium, primarily in the Roraima Basin along its border with Guyana. Across the border in Guyana, a Canadian company is mining uranium. On the Venezuelan side of the border, we are to believe Iran is operating a "gold mine."

Weapons: In two cases made public, ships smuggling either bomb-making equipment from Iran to Venezuela or weapons to Hezbollah from Venezuela were intercepted.

Terrorism: A member of the terrorist network plotting to detonate fuel tanks at JFK International Airport in New York in 2007 was arrested on the run to Venezuela where he planned to board a flight to Tehran. An explosive documentary, "The Iranian Threat," aired last month on Univision, presenting not only incriminating information on Venezuelan and Iranian diplomats discussing cyberattacks on sensitive U.S. computer systems (the State Department subsequently expelled the Venezuelan diplomat from the U.S., where she had been re-posted), but also compelling evidence on how young Latinos are targeted for recruitment and paramilitary training in Iran and Venezuelan camps visited by Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Colombian FARC.

Again, this is but a sliver of the information that has already been made public about Iran-Venezuela machinations. Instead of pundits pining for that "smoking gun," they should be demanding what is it that we don't know?

Thankfully, Capitol Hill is starting to get active on this issue and will press the administration for answers on these important questions when they return later this month. The White House will also likely find itself on the defensive on this issue during this election year -- and that is all to the good if it focuses policymakers minds on the problem.

And as the layers of the Iranian-Venezuelan relationship continued to be stripped away, it is a virtual certainty that even more distressing details of the threat posed to the United States will emerge. But the longer we wait, it will prove only more difficult to counteract.

Iran's bellicose rhetoric and Gulf wargames in recent days have given rise to the question of whether Tehran could close the Strait of Hormuz. As many analysts have observed, the answer is no -- not for a meaningful period of time. Less frequently addressed, however, is whether Iran would even try. The answer to that question is also "no" -- even the attempt would have devastating strategic consequences for Iran.

The presumable target of an Iranian effort to close the Strait would be the United States. However, while we would of course be affected by any resulting rise in global oil prices, the U.S. gets little of our petroleum from the Gulf. The U.S. imports only about 49 percent of the petroleum we consume, and over half of those imports come from the Western Hemisphere. Less than 25 percent of U.S. imports came from all the Gulf countries combined in October 2011 -- far less than is available in the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, were Gulf supplies to be interrupted.  

China, on the other hand, would find its oil supplies significantly threatened by an Iranian move against the Strait. China's most significant oil supplier is Saudi Arabia. China also happens, however, to be Iran's primary oil customer and perhaps its most important ally: Beijing provides Iran with its most sophisticated weaponry and with diplomatic cover at the United Nations. Thus a move to close the Strait would backfire strategically by harming the interests of -- and likely alienating -- Iran's most important patron and cutting off Iran's own economic lifeline, while doing little to imperil U.S. supplies of crude.

It is perhaps no coincidence, then, that China quickly dispatched Vice Foreign Minister Zhai Jun to Tehran in the wake of Iran's bellicose statements. In typically opaque fashion, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said only that "China hopes that peace and stability can be maintained in the Strait;" this is essentially diplo-speak for "Cool it."

Even if Iran ignored these considerations and proceeded with an effort to close the Strait, the U.S. and others would move to keep it open, and would be unlikely to stop there. As Iran has crept closer to a nuclear weapons capability, the possibility of military action against Iran has also become more imminent. President Obama has been reluctant to threaten Iran militarily, and any U.S. president would think long and hard before engaging in another armed conflict in the Middle East. 

An effort by Iran to shut down the oil trade in the Gulf, however, would make such a decision straightforward. The U.S. would react with force, and once engaged in hostilities with Iran, would likely take the opportunity to target Iran's nuclear facilities and other military targets. It is difficult to envision any scenario beginning with an Iranian effort to close the Strait of Hormuz that does not end in a serious strategic setback for the Iranian regime.

Recognizing that Iran is neither able nor likely to try to close the Strait, the U.S. could simply sit back, confident in our superior firepower. This would be a mistake. The real danger in the Gulf is lower-level activity by Iran to harass shipping and confront the U.S. Navy. Iranian commanders in the area are increasingly brazen. If not deterred, Iran's sense of impunity -- rather than its nuclear progress -- may be the spark that ignites a conflict in the region. 

Iran's navy -- especially the naval arm of Iran's Revolutionary Guards -- has invested in vessels and armaments that are well-suited to asymmetric warfare, rather than the sort of ship-to-ship conflict which Iran would surely lose. Thus, they have purchased, with Chinese and Russian help, increasingly sophisticated mines, midget submarines, mobile anti-ship cruise missiles, and a fleet of small, fast boats. In addition, they have reportedly sought to develop a naval special warfare, or frogman, capability.

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Ed. note: As we approach the end of another year, the Shadow Government team is resuming our tradition of evaluating the Obama Administration's foreign policy over the past year. Our contributors will be offering their assessments on one thing the White House got right, and one thing the White House got wrong.  Here is the first installment from Dov Zakheim.

Give the President credit: once Osama Bin Laden had been located, Barak Obama had several options for capturing or killing him and he chose the one that involved the greatest risk but yielded the most satisfying outcome. The President and his advisors all were aware of the disaster that was the Carter Administration's attempt to free the Embassy hostages in Tehran. Desert One was a spectacular failure that helped to doom Carter's re-election hopes.

Obama, knowing that his political opponents often compared him to the man who many reckon to be among the least effective president of the twentieth century, needed a lot of gumption to order the Seals into Pakistan to capture or kill the terrorist icon. He knew that the mission might not succeed, and that he too could go down in history as a failed one-term chief executive. He knew, as well, that a raid on Abbottabad would provoke Pakistani ire to the point where relations between Washington and Islamabad might be damaged beyond repair. The President went ahead anyway, and Bin Laden is dead.

On the other hand, the Obama Administration should hang its head in shame over the release of a terrorist who personally masterminded the killing of five American soldiers. Ali Musa Daqduq is Lebanese national and a high level Hezbollah operative. Like so many other Hezbollah leaders, he has ties to the worst elements of the Iranian regime: he has trained members of the notorious Iranian Revolutionary Guard Kuds force, which is closely aligned with Tehran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. That alone should have prevented Washington from turning Daqduq over to the Sh'ia-led Iraqi government, with its more than cordial ties to Iran. But it was his masterminding the ambush, kidnapping and murder of five American soldiers that should have prompted the Administration to make the "no-brainer" decision to transfer him to an American military detention facility (how about Guantanamo?).

What will the Maliki government do about Daqduq?  Since Iraq, clearly at the behest of Tehran, joined Hezbollah-dominated Lebanon in not even voting with its fellow Arab League states to suspend Syria from membership, the answer is clear. Now that American troops have departed Iraq, it is only a matter of time before Baghdad orders the release of Hezbollah's hero.

Hopefully, Daqduq will no longer be in a position to kill more Americans. But given both the likelihood that he will soon be able to roam around the Middle East, and the extent of his terrorist contacts, we can never be sure. It is therefore truly a shame that, having showed so much courage in its successful effort to eliminate one master terrorist, the Obama Administration showed an equal amount of pusillanimity in its treatment of another. The price of that fateful decision may yet be paid.

Like father, like son. 

Two Syrian dictators, both named al-Assad, brutally attacked their own people. Both started their campaigns of violence in the central Syrian city of Hama. Both caused Syrian deaths. Both followed protests calling for reform and opportunity. 

That's where the similarities end. In 1982, Hafez al-Assad's military killed at least 10,000 Syrians, according to conservative estimates. Neither Syria's neighbors, the United Nations, nor the world's democracies protested, barely uttering a sound in reaction to the state-sponsored violence. With its borders tightly controlled, foreign media denied access and Syrian state media complicit in the cover-up, the world was in the dark. 

Fast forward almost 30 years. Bashar al-Assad, doing what dictators do, responded to calls for political freedoms with the indiscriminate force of his military. The United Nations estimates as many as 2,700 civilian deaths, although the violence continues. But, unlike his father, the younger Assad earned wide-spread condemnation from world leaders.

The French foreign minister denounced the "extreme violence." European Parliament President Jerzy Buzek bluntly demanded "no more killing, no more torture, no more arbitrary arrests." In the U.S., President Obama condemned the "outrageous use of violence," and Secretary of State Clinton urged a ban on Syrian oil and gas. 

To be sure, numerous factors contribute to the difference in international reaction, but one of the most critical is social media. Unlike their counterparts 30 years ago, today's Syrian reformers have new media technologies that enable them to organize and tell the outside world. 

The world learned of Bashar al-Assad's atrocities not from international media but first-hand accounts relayed in real time. The first glimpse was through a camera phone photo that rapidly spread on the Internet last March followed by amateur video on Facebook and YouTube. 

For Assad and his kindred autocrats, social media threatens their iron-clad control over information, ideas and opinion. Accustomed to disseminating what they want, when they want through state organs, social media equalizes the power to inform, persuade and mobilize. It's power to the people in a modern setting.

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The Obama Administration is working feverishly to prevent the government of Palestine from asking the United Nations for recognition as a state. The United States cannot prevent the asking, but has said it would prevent the success by vetoing the measure when it comes before the Security Council. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has declared he will then appeal to the General Assembly for recognition, which he will certainly get. But the Palestinian Liberation Organization has had observer status at the United Nations since 1974, received formal recognition as a state by numerous countries since 1988. What, then, is the big deal of such recognition? 

President Abbas described the purpose as "negotiating from the position of one United Nations member whose territory is militarily occupied by another, and not as a vanquished people." Palestinian official Nabil Shaath said the appeal to the United Nations was the best of their options, which consisted of surrender, return to violence, or appeal to the international community. That is, they consider negotiations with Israel at a dead end. He dismissed Quartet envoy Tony Blair's efforts with "sounds like an Israeli diplomat," and called for "international responsibility toward the Palestinians."

For the last several years, Prime Minister Fayyad has been taking an alternative approach: creating competent government so that Palestine actually has a functional state. It's a significant difference. Our own country endorsed that approach, bilaterally contributing $600 million a year, including direct budgetary support to the Palestinian Authority and significant effort to training Palestinian security forces.

That aid to the government of Palestine was a very difficult sell to Congress, who feared we were building the military and paramilitary forces that would threaten Israel. The fear has so far not materialized -- well-trained and disciplined security forces in Palestine have been a stabilizing presence in the occupied territories, often working in conjunction with Israeli security forces. Fayyad's fait accompli strategy has worked well enough that Nabil Shaath now confidently asserts "a new culture of nonviolence." If only.

Using international institutions to threaten Israel is unlikely to make Palestine independent. For all the international sanctimony, who is going to force Israel to cede its territory, and commit to ensuring that territory's independence once arrived at?

What Abbas' gambit is likely to produce is an end to American funding and participation in professionalization of Palestinian security forces (already tenuous because of the April 2011 Fatah-Hamas power sharing agreement), and greater hostility to political engagement with the government of Palestine by the two governments it needs to make a Palestinian state a reality: the United States and Israel. It may also undercut the Palestinian case for a right of refugee return to lands in Israel.

The Obama Administration's veto in the Security Council will incur a high political cost to the United States. It is difficult to argue, as we have, for the independence of South Sudan, the dawn of representative governments throughout the Middle East, and the right of ethnic and religious enclaves to their autonomy while opposing the partition of Israel's territory along those lines. Moreover, as the last two administrations have supported a two-state solution, it leaves the United States in the awkward position of vetoing something we have said we want as the outcome. And then there's the man on the street question: if the Palestinians have a President and Prime Minister, don't they already have a state?

Arab countries will cry foul at our hypocrisy, making more difficult our partnerships in that important region. The Abbas government is surely banking on Gulf states filling in the financial assistance that the Congress will cut off; that may happen, although the record is patchy of fellow Arab states supporting Palestinians beyond rhetoric and Palestinians are already among the world's largest recipients of foreign assistance. There will also be the economic effect of tighter restrictions by Israel.

Skillful working of the U.N. rules could delay the vote until well into October, which would deny Abbas the grandstanding opportunities of the General Assembly convocation in September. That is probably the best the Obama Administration can hope for at this point. 

It is difficult to see Abbas' move bringing Israel to the bargaining table. Israeli fears of international persecution will be stoked at the prospect of their security being adjudicated in the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. An overtly confrontational move like going to the United Nations will not soften Israeli hearts or government policies. Peace in Palestine depends fundamentally on Israel feeling secure enough to trade land for peace -- something it tried before and got burned on -- and reining in the settler movement.

At the end of the day, Palestinian aspirations would be advanced more by appealing for international support on the basis of the dignity of Palestinians creating their own state rather than having a U.N. coronation for one that may not be strong enough to support itself.

On Friday the Obama administration at last announced that the United States will now recognize the Transitional National Council as the legitimate government of Libya. This was the right thing to do. It helps make available an estimated $30 billion in frozen assets for the Libyan rebels, and will help bolster international support for the TNC and further isolate the outlaw Qaddafi. Many questions remain on implementation, as Josh Rogin notes, but even these implementation issues illustrate how diplomatic recognition bears important substance as well as symbolism.

While recognition was a welcome move, it was also much belated. The United States could have done it as long as four months ago when France first led the way, when recognition arguably would have had more impact in decisively shifting momentum against Qaddafi. Instead of leading the multinational coalition, the United States is once again following (insert the obligatory "leading from behind" crack here). Now, as this Wall Street Journal editorial points out, the United States is the 27th nation to recognize the Libyan rebels, in the footsteps of countries such as Qatar, the UAE, Kuwait, Italy, Australia, and Spain. Even Luxembourg did it ahead of us.

Wise and effective statecraft depends much on developing the right policies. But statecraft also depends on a less appreciated factor, and that is timing. It is not always enough to do the right thing, but to do the right thing at the right time. In other words, in foreign policy it is not just what you do, but when you do it.

Here a continuing puzzle of this Administration is its sense of timing. Previously as a political candidate, Obama displayed an appreciation for timing that was both acute and artful. He discerned the political gestalt, and capitalized on it in a way that catapulted an otherwise previously obscure law professor and state legislator first into the U.S. Senate and then almost immediately into the White House.

Yet somewhere along the way, in the transition from campaigning to governing, the Obama White House forgot to sync its clock. This was manifest in domestic and economic policy with the mistaken investment of political capital in the health care bill rather than a jobs agenda. On foreign policy, the administration's deficiencies have been most pronounced as miscast timing. In fact, as in the case of Libya, the Administration often arrives at a sound policy -- yet only when it is too late to be a game-changer. So also with Iran, when the White House sat passively on the sidelines during the 2009 Green Movement protests, only to belatedly offer public presidential support for the Iranian reformers two years later and after the regime had squelched the leading dissidents. Or Syria, where the administration stuck dogmatically to its public posture of hope that Assad would reform, while his henchman locked up, tortured, and killed the opposition.

Poor timing is not just a matter of misreading history and arriving late, but it can also mean mistaken sequencing and taking certain steps too soon. For example, many of the Administration's much-hyped "outreach" efforts in its first year to regimes like Iran, China, Cuba, Venezuela, and Burma, were flawed diplomatic gestures in part because they came before the White House had first taken needful steps such as reassuring U.S. allies, and asserting American strength and resolve towards the regimes in question. Taking those steps first would have generated more respect for the White House's gestures and created more fruitful conditions for eventual diplomatic outreach. Or consider the administration's clumsy treatment of Israel. Whatever one may think of the White House's various pressure gambits with the Israeli government -- such as publicly demanding a settlement freeze, or unilaterally calling for the 1967 borders framework as a precondition for negotiations -- a big reason why these steps failed (besides their dubious merit) is because they came before the White House had established a framework of trust with the Israeli leadership and made clear its firm commitment to Israel's security. Not to mention the lack of a Palestinian leadership able and willing to deliver as a negotiating partner. Timing problems can also come from listening to the wrong clock, as seems to be the case with the administration's recent decision-making on Afghanistan, shaped more by the 2012 electoral timetable rather than the military's assessment of the security clock.

None of this is easy. Reading time and the course of history is notoriously elusive, but it is essential to the best statecraft. Bismarck famously observed, "a statesman cannot create anything himself. He must wait until he hears the steps of God sounding through events, then leap up and grasp the hem of His garment." As the White House wrestles with a full agenda of vexing challenges, perhaps it should start listening a little harder for divine footsteps.

Stephen Hayes over at the Weekly Standard presents a very intriguing angle to the civil-military story behind President Obama's Afghanistan decision. He is emphasizing the wrong part, however.

At issue is the extent to which the senior commanders endorsed the option that President Obama selected: truncating the surge and rushing the withdrawal in a fashion that interrupts the 2012 fighting season (but dove-tails with the 2012 presidential campaign season). As Hayes demonstrates, the White House sought to depict the president's decision as one well within a range of options developed by the military. According to Petraeus' successor, Lieutenant General John Allen, however, the option Obama picked was not on the menu. Obama's plan -- presumably the arbitrary summer 2012 deadline and perhaps also the numbers involved -- was apparently devised elsewhere, perhaps by White House advisors.

Hayes emphasizes that President Obama over-ruled Petraeus's advice, which is true but, as I have argued, he was well within his rights as commander-in-chief. On this, I point to no less an authority than General Petraeus himself. From a civil-military point of view, it is important to know whether or not the military refused to even present this as an option: it would have been inappropriate if they had tried to tie the hands of the president in that fashion. But if they did in fact present a range of options that included ones they thought too risky, and then President Obama chose yet another still-riskier option, that would not constitute a civil-military foul by either side. It is worth knowing whether the military endorsed the option, but that should not be viewed as the dispositive factor.

To me, the most important part of the Hayes story is that, if accurate and complete, it means the White House did not tell the truth about the military advice it received. Rather than admit that the president listened carefully to his generals and then chose something that they did not recommend, someone at the White House tried to pretend that the president simply chose among a range of options endorsed by the military. This is a subtle difference, but in civil-military terms it is a profound one. Civilians do not owe the military prerogatives over policy choices; they do owe the military a decision-making process in which the military voice can be heard and in which military views will be faithfully described to those authorized to hold the president accountable on these decisions, namely us.

If the president wants to elicit from the military an option and an endorsement of an option that the military does not initially prefer, as President Bush did with his Iraq surge, then he must engage in the lengthy back-and-forth that President Bush engaged in, cajoling the military into something resembling a consensus. The president does not have to do that -- he can simply decide, as President Obama did -- but he owes the military (and the voter) to tell the truth about what he did.

Ironically, if this story is true, the White House has just replicated the Johnson-McNamara error that was at the heart of H.R. McMaster's influential Dereliction of Duty account of the Vietnam War. Although many read McMaster's book as accusing the senior generals of dereliction for going along with Johnson's decision to escalate the war more gradually than they thought prudent, in fact McMaster's primary point was that the generals were derelict in going along with Johnson and McNamara's willful misrepresentation to Congress and the American people about the content of the military advice. What McMaster wanted the generals to do was simply tell Congress what their advice had been, correcting the record that Johnson and McNamara had muddied by pretending that their Vietnam decisions were consonant with military counsel.

To their credit, today's senior military leadership have not been derelict. They have saluted and obeyed their commander-in-chief. And they have not shrunk from telling the truth about their military views to Congress, even if it contradicts White House spin. Based on what is in the public record thus far, I cannot give so positive an evaluation to the civilian participants.

The president has a right to be wrong, but he does not have a right to lie about it. As Tom Ricks has argued, the Obama Administration already faces some serious civil-military challenges in the post Gates-Petraeus-Lute era (Lieutenant General Doug Lute has been a key civil-military interface in his role as White House coordinator on Aghanistan-Pakistan issues). Those challenges could quickly become insurmountable if they compound risky strategy choices with serious misrepresentations of the military position.

I hope those with better access to the president than I have will impress upon him the importance of clarifying this matter as quickly as possible. Perhaps the current story has a garble, and the anonymous White House official was misunderstood. I hope so, because otherwise I fear a civil-military rot will set in that could be quite corrosive to national security.

President Obama delivered an excellent speech today. The outstanding question is whether his administration's deeds will follow his eloquent words. Still, as overdue as it was, he at last placed the United States firmly on the side of freedom in the Middle East. Even as the "Arab Spring" has shown signs of faltering in recent weeks, President Obama's remarks today have the potential to provide new support and momentum for the reformers of the region who are facing the challenges of disorderly transition in Egypt, setbacks in Bahrain, an impasse in Yemen, and sadistic violence in Syria.

Make no mistake about just how dramatic today's speech is. In his remarks today, President Obama also found his "inner George W. Bush" -- and effectively departed from the first 2 ½ years of his own administration's foreign policy. Though not mentioned by name in the speech, the strategic logic of the Bush Doctrine loomed large. It was Bush who in a November 2003 address to the National Endowment for Democracy declared:

Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe -- because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty. As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export. And with the spread of weapons that can bring catastrophic harm to our country and to our friends, it would be reckless to accept the status quo. Therefore, the United States has adopted a new policy, a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East. This strategy requires the same persistence and energy and idealism we have shown before. And it will yield the same results.

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As many others have lamented, the administration's fecklessness on Syria is rapidly turning into a national disgrace. It represents a moral and strategic failing of major proportions. If sustained, it threatens to rival the president's tragic decision in 2009 to stand by mutely as millions of Iranians rallied to drive a stake through the heart of a regime whose quest for nuclear weapons poses perhaps the greatest current danger to vital U.S. interests.

Since Syria's uprising began two months ago, the best estimate is that the Assad regime has slaughtered close to a thousand of its own citizens -- though the actual toll may well be much higher. Entire towns have been subjected to full-blown siege by Assad's crack military units. Mass arrests and torture of innocents, including children, is in full swing. The savagery on display certainly exceeds anything witnessed in Egypt during the 18-day revolt that brought down Hosni Mubarak. Not even Qaddafi was able to inflict this level of human suffering before NATO warplanes felt compelled to stay his bloody hand.

But whereas Obama moved with relative dispatch to condemn Egypt's Pharaoh and Libya's Mad Hatter to history's dustbin (at least rhetorically), in the case of Assad -- as with Iran in 2009 -- the president and his team have gone mostly silent, timid, and reactive. When the brutality spikes sufficiently every Friday, and the administration is embarrassed into issuing a statement of disapproval, it invariably has been coupled with some pathetic blather that Assad still has time to implement reforms -- which the good ophthalmologist's thugs, quite predictably, have interpreted as a sign of profound U.S. unseriousness and a green light to continue their killing spree a bit longer.

This seeming ambivalence on the part of the administration is all the more puzzling when -- on top of the compelling moral calculus -- one also considers the potential strategic benefits to be had by the removal of the Assad family's 4-decade long criminal enterprise in anti-U.S. tyranny. The bill of indictment is too lengthy to review in its entirety. It includes a long alliance with the Soviet Union; master-minding the destruction of Lebanon; being a charter-member of the State Department's rogues gallery of terror-sponsoring states; an ever-deepening strategic relationship with Iran's Islamic Republic and its proxies in Hezbollah; playing host to the full panoply of Palestinian terror groups; perpetrating one of history's most egregious violations of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty through the covert construction, with North Korean assistance, of the plutonium-producing nuclear reactor at Al Kibar; and actively supporting the multi-year effort by Sunni insurgents, Saddamists, and al Qaeda jihadists to torpedo the U.S. effort to mid-wife representative democracy in Iraq. 

Again, the contrast with Egypt's Mubarak and Libya's Qaddafi is striking. The former was a longstanding ally, a linchpin for 30 years of the Middle East's pax-Americana whose disappearance, at least in the short term, could arguably turn out to be a net detriment to U.S. policy. The latter, though a historic foe responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American innocents, had in recent years bowed to U.S. demands to dismantle his nuclear weapons program and get out of the terrorism business, thereby relegating Libya to the margins of U.S. strategic concerns. The Assad family, by contrast, pere and fils alike, have for the better part of two generations (and seven U.S. presidencies) posed a clear and present danger to Middle East peace and security, and the advancement of U.S. interests. Next to regime change in Iran itself, it's hard to think of a more devastating blow that could be struck against the Islamic Republic than the collapse of its primary partner in crime, the dictatorship in Damascus, at the hands of a popular uprising. Yet it is here, with respect to Syria, that Obama balks.

At least initially, the president's wooly-headedness could be chalked up to his faux-realist determination to "engage" Assad. The goal, articulated from the start of his presidency, was to enlist Syria in a revitalized peace process with Israel and/or to crack the Iranian-Syrian axis by persuading Assad that his true interests lay not in playing wing-man to the expansionist theocrats in Tehran, but prospering under the patronage of a U.S. superpower willing to ply Syria with economic assistance, mediate an end to its conflict with Israel, and help recover the Golan Heights,

This was, of course, a huge conceit -- Obama playing Kissinger, but even better -- one that more or less blindly disregarded the entire sorry history of the United States' unsatisfying dealings with Baathist Syria under the tutelage of the Assad clan and their minority, Alawite regime. To be fair to Obama, it was a conceit that more than one -- indeed, most -- of his predecessors had similarly indulged, and with similarly disappointing results. Forever condemned to rule with a nagging legitimacy deficit, the Assads, lo and behold, simply refused to reprise the role played by Sadat when he switched strategic allegiances from the "resistance" camp to the peace camp. Despite U.S. protestations to the contrary, Bashar, like his father before him, was of the stubborn conviction that he actually understood better than Washington the formula for ensuring the survival of the family business -- and it most assuredly did not include permanently ending the conflict with Israel and addressing the real political, economic, and social needs of Syria's beleaguered citizenry. Not even Barack Obama's arrival on the world stage, which his most delusional acolytes promised would transform the very nature of international politics, proved capable of changing the cruel and sordid reality that was the Assad dictatorship and the type of Middle East it stood for. 

As proved tragically the case with Iran in 2009, Obama's insistence on sticking to his engagement strategy with Syria long past its sell-by date was also driven by an unfortunate brew of ideology and egotism. Obama seemed determined to show himself, evidence to the contrary be damned, the un-Bush -- sophisticated, nuanced, worldly-wise to the gray areas of world affairs inhabited by true statesmen like the one he fancied himself to be, in contrast to the boorish, black-and-white cowboy-ism of his dim-witted predecessor. Never mind that, truth be told, Bush himself spent the first few years of his administration on the fool's errand of reaching out to Assad the Younger in hopes of testing his alleged reformist instincts. And never mind that the West's most important breakthroughs with the Assad dynasty -- from Kissinger's disengagement agreement to Syria's participation in the Madrid peace process; from the eviction of PKK terrorist Abdullah Ocalan to the 2005 withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon -- all could be sourced to moments when the regime felt itself most profoundly weakened and under threat, its very survival possibly in play.

With all the carnage of the past two months, one hopes that the president and his advisors prove capable of realizing that the chance of converting Assad into a viable strategic partner, if it ever existed, has long since passed. Reportedly, that moment of illumination did eventually come in the case of Iran, though only belatedly -- long after the Green Movement had been effectively crushed and an historic opportunity to advance U.S. interests had passed, perhaps indefinitely. It would be tragic, indeed, if a similar mistake was made in the case of Syria. 

Instead, the administration needs quickly to move off the sidelines, declare its full-fledged support for the aspirations of the Syrian people, and develop a serious strategy to expedite the collapse of Assad's rule and a peaceful transition to a new, more democratic order. Barring such an effort, we seem likely on a course that will lead to one of two highly undesirable outcomes: either the total suppression of the uprising (most likely), or a sectarian-based civil war that pits the largely Sunni forces of the regular army against the much smaller, but heavily-armed Alawite shock troops and security services whose very raison d'etre is ensuring the regime's survival. 

The key to a soft landing will be fracturing the regime's elite, particularly by convincing prominent figures in the Alawite community, especially within the security services, that their interests lie not in continuing to support Assad and his family in the commission of their crimes against the Syrian people, but in abandoning them and throwing their weight behind the popular movement for peaceful change. Such an effort would require assembling a diplomatic coalition of states most capable of influencing Syrian events, including the United States, France, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and perhaps Egypt. The office of the United Nations' Secretary General might come in handy as well, particularly in the form of its shrewd and energetic envoy, Terje Larsen, the Norwegian diplomat who proved such a useful ally in helping coerce Syrian troops out of Lebanon in 2005.

The network of contacts, political, military, and intelligence, that these states possess across the Syrian elite would need to be discretely tapped. Inducements -- financial, political, and otherwise -- would need to be offered. Assurances -- both in terms of a future role in the post-Assad order and security protections for the broader Alawite community as well as other minorities -- would need to be provided. Punishments in the form of economic sanctions, travel bans, and international prosecutions would need to be threatened and, as necessary, imposed.

Such commitments at the international level would ideally be matched by pledges from some representative group of Syrians that could credibly claim to speak in the name of the protest movement. That likely means supporting an opposition conference somewhere in Europe or the Middle East. While such an event would unavoidably be dominated by Syrians in exile, provision could be made to solicit through every means possible the views and preferences of those still inside. A visionary, inclusive platform for Syria's democratic future could be developed, one that reaches out to all Syria's communities as well as members of the current regime in a spirit of national reconciliation. A transitional leadership council might be elected -- with half its seats reserved for insiders who will be appointed once Assad is gone, if not before -- whose primary task would be working with the United Nations to draft a provisional constitution and organize free and fair elections. To underscore their selfless commitment to the nation, members of the transitional council might pledge not to stand in the first post-Assad elections.

Implementing such a strategy would no doubt be enormously challenging, requiring a major commitment of diplomatic resources, including the sustained involvement of the president himself. But the fact that it is hard and offers no guarantee of success cannot become an excuse for policymakers to abdicate their moral and strategic responsibilities to act on behalf of U.S. vital interests and core values. The bitter fact is that the administration's current non-policy almost certainly has us on a path that ends in national shame for the United States, national disaster for Syria, and a festering sore of instability and violence in the heart of a region vital to U.S. interests. We can, we must, try to do better.

Reading through the various detailed accounts, and keeping in mind that we are still learning new things and unlearning things we thought we knew barely a day ago, I am struck by the following aspects of the affair:

• This clearly marks that we are in the post-Gates era. Obama stuck his toe in the Rubicon when he over-ruled his superstar secretary of defense to launch the Libya operation. He crossed over to the other side when he decided to do the SEAL strike rather than the bombing strike recommended by Gates. The baton of "most influential security voice" has passed from Gates to someone else, perhaps to his successor, Panetta, who ran the military operation.
• This was also clearly a post-Clinton choice. Obama took the riskier option, the one with a much higher potential downside, rather than the "safe" choice that would assuredly destroy the target with almost no chance of U.S. casualties or fiascos. During the Clinton era, that was how bin Laden was handled, with a risk-minimization strategy of stand-off strikes. Obama's reliance on drone strikes elsewhere echoes that earlier period, but with this SEAL attack he clearly chose the risk-acceptant option. If the operation had failed, Obama would have been indelibly marked as another Jimmy Carter. It may be an exaggeration, but not by much, to say that he bet his second term on the tactical proficiency of U.S. Special Forces.
• The president showed he could "walk and chew gum." Some early carping noted that the president played a half-round of golf and found time to rehearse his gag skit for the White House Correspondent's dinner on the margins of this operation. He did more than that: around the same time he was making this momentous decision, he also made the decision to end the nonsense about his birth certificate. Outsiders may complain about the incongruity, but insiders will recognize that this is the reality of the office. The president has to go from an emotionally draining meeting with a grieving widow to a photo-op with Girl Scouts to a meeting where he decides on a political strategy for selling his economic policies to a meeting where he decides whether to authorize a drone strike. Each meeting is the most important meeting of the day (or more) for everyone else in the room except the president. Sometimes the different lines bleed into each other -- did the president choose the bin Laden option that offered the best chance of avoiding a "deather" conspiracy theory because he was concurrently dealing with a "birther" conspiracy theory? Other times, the president must compartmentalize.
• The decision parameters played to an Obama strength and away from an Obama weakness. A reporter pointed this out to me: Obama could take his time in making this decision, which allowed him to set up the deliberate process he seems to favor. The administration has not done well when trying to respond to rapidly evolving events visible to everyone else -- witness the shaky response to the June 2009 Green Revolution in Iran, the 2011 Arab Spring, and the rapidly collapsing situation in Libya. On the bin Laden strike, Obama did not have unlimited time, but he did have more time and, importantly, more space away from public pressure, to weigh the decision before acting
• Still no sign of the vice-president. I realize I have belabored this point beyond what it probably merits, still it is striking that the tic-toc describes a debate between Obama and Gates, and the steely-eyed resolve of Panetta and Brennan, and merely the fingering of a rosary bead by the vice president. I asked a reporter who participated in an extensive backgrounder and was told that the vice president wasn't mentioned. What gives? 

A number of folks have pressed me to respond to Tom Ricks' critique) of my civil-military surge article with some variant of the joke: with friends like that, who needs enemies? They were struck, I gather, by the dollops of snark that Ricks ladled onto his hit-piece.

For my part, I am struck by how little there is really in terms of fundamental disagreement. I know the etiquette of blogwars calls for a blistering response, but I think my friend has simply misunderstood what my piece argues. So my reply will not live up (or down) to the standard he has set.

The core of my article concerned some key civil-military relations matters, which Ricks completely ignores: "What is the proper division of labor for strategic supreme command decisions during war?" I describe a debate between "professional supremacists" and "civilian supremacists" and argue that the surge case undercuts the former without fully vindicating the latter.

Ricks disregards all of that, and focuses on one claim I make on pp 113-114: I note "...the extent to which the new strategy was conceived in Washington as opposed to in theater" and "The strategic-level decisions...were pushed and made in the White house." Here is how I summed up the point: "President Bush, who for years had emphasized that he was relying on the advice of his senior military leaders to determine the way forward in Iraq, had decided that his military leaders were recommending the wrong course. The president shifted, and persuaded his military leader to endorse the strategic shift."

Ricks dismisses my account -- "...yep, I am sure this is what he thinks happened"-- and insists I am wrongly crediting Bush at the expense of Petraeus and Odierno. But since I already credit Petraeus and Odierno with playing decisive roles, the disagreement with Ricks, if there is one, is surely only on what Bush's role was.

Consider what I explicitly credit Petraeus and Odierno with:

• Petraeus was "author of the new U.S. Army manual on counter-insurgency" which gave the philosophical foundation for the surge.
• Odierno "conducted a separate review prior to assuming command of ground forces in Iraq in November 2006, and this convinced him that a surge strategy should be tried."
• Both "determined the operational and tactical implementation of the strategy and thus deserve the lion's share of credit for the surge's operational features."
• Existence of pro-surge military voices like Petraeus and Odierno were "a necessary but insufficient condition to bolster the confidence of the civilian leaders to overrule other military advisors."
• Moreover, I credit military pro-surge advocates with effectively working the informal advisory process that helped move skeptical civilians into the pro-surge camp. In particular, I note "Subsequent off-line exchanges with senior military officers who backed the surge gave Secretary Rice more confidence that new, plausible military ideas were being developed to use the "surge" forces effectively. "

That ain't beanbag. Indeed, I am willing to go further and say that what Odierno and Petraeus implemented largely consisted of what they hoped to implement when Bush was deciding what to do. In fact, the only way in which I draw a limit to their role is this:

Neither Odierno nor Petraeus, however, devised a strategic shift and then convinced reluctant civilians and the president to adopt it. Rather, their views were leveraged by pro-surge civilians already determined to try another strategy and dissatisfied with the one being advocated by the top military leadership."

This is the heart of the matter: while the surge may have been what Odierno was hoping to implement, as Ricks reports, Ricks fails to realize that it was not what Odierno was going to implement in 2007, if Bush hadn't made the decision for the surge. The Iraq strategy was on one trajectory, even with Odierno in place as MNC-I. It took a big strategic shift to move it to a different trajectory. Neither Odierno (nor Petraeus) made that strategic shift, nor could they have without the President.

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UPDATE: The Libya debate just took a very serious turn. After weeks of equivocation, the U.N. Security Council Resolution authorizing "all necessary measures" dramatically alters the situation. The vote was not exactly a ringing endorsement of military action -- two veto-wielding permanent members abstained, Russia and China, as did one of our closest NATO allies, Germany. On the other hand, it passed and the resolution seems to open up a wider range of military action than the minimal "no-fly zone" that was the focus of international debate last week.

The resolution permits action, but of course it takes a coalition of the willing to actually enforce the resolution. According to reports, France and Britain are preparing to act, perhaps with some Arab partners. Will the United States join the posse?

If so, Obama has his work cut out for him. He will have to explain to the American public what the objectives are, what he plans to do, what he plans not to do, and why we should do it. Many people have been making this case in public in the last few weeks. None of them, however, were in the administration. On the contrary, the administration has pretty steadily resisted pressure for military action and talked down the very options that now, at the eleventh hour (and then some), seem imminent. If the administration has joined the hawks, Team Obama will have to answer all of the objections they themselves raised. And while they are doing so, they may also need to explain why they haven't been preparing the American public for this forceful action. They will also discover that the other relevant branch of government, Congress, may wish to have a say. Remarkably, for all the focus on the international diplomacy, there has been rather little reporting on administration consultations with Congress, the sort that would lead to a congressional resolution authorizing the use of force.

The president is off to Rio de Janeiro for a vacation on the margins of an important summit meeting with a major hemispheric partner. The summit is poorly timed but understandable; the vacation even more poorly timed, and harder to explain if we are about to do what Obama's own secretary of defense described as "an attack on Libya." Until now, the president has been somewhat removed from the center of action on Libya. If U.S. forces are supporting an attack on Libya, he won't be able to stay removed -- he will be in the very center of it, even from the beaches of Rio.

EARLIER: My earlier call for more rigor in the Libya debate has provoked a response that perplexes me. Ross Douthat has a curious post, in which he calls my point of view "deeply mistaken." But when he sketches out his own view it sounds fully consonant with what I was arguing. Either we are deeply mistaken together, or one of us is misunderstanding the other. Either way, it is worth a response; not simply because Douthat is a thoughtful observer who has earned the right to be taken seriously but because the issues at stake go to the heart of much of the current debate over whether or not to intervene militarily in Libya (or elsewhere).

Here is where the matter began. I argued that the debate over intervention was sloppy because critics of the military option: (1) used bogus arguments about alleged "unilateralism" in the way the United States confronted Iraq; (2) asked "what if" questions of interventionists and ignored the obvious "what if" questions of their own preferred policy; and (3) used a moral calculus that focused entirely on the costs of action and ignored the costs of inaction.

Douthat was bestirred by my third point, specifically this quote:

Military action makes us morally responsible but military inaction allows us to avoid moral responsibility. Many defenders of military inaction reach their point of view by way of a skewed cost-benefit calculation that assumes the worst about military action and assumes the best about inaction. Every untoward development that happens or is speculated to happen after military intervention is blamed on the intervener, but every untoward development that happens in the absence of military intervention is left out of the calculus entirely. Thus ideologues who bemoan American "militarism" count up all of the casualties in wars the U.S. intervened in and utterly disregard all of the casualties in conflicts the U.S. let fester without acting.

My point was and is that we need a complete calculus (or as complete as we could get it when dealing with uncertainties) in which the likely costs and benefits of action were compared to the likely costs and benefits of inaction.

I do not say that the calculus demands a one-to-one equivalence in which the body count of action is stacked up against the body count of inaction, death for death. I do not propose a ratio at all, leaving open the possibility that some might count "our" dead more precious than "their" dead, or weigh the dead caused by action more heavily than the dead caused by inaction. All I claimed was that it should not be left out of the equation entirely.

I do not say that we are as responsible for the deaths that result from our inaction as we are for the deaths that result from our action. All I claim is that inaction that leads to predictable results -- say inaction that is followed by 800,000 Rwandan dead or inaction that is followed by 6 million Congolese war victims -- warrant some consideration in the cost-benefit equation and moral calculus.

Here is Douthat's assessment:

Does anyone seriously think that the United States bears just as much responsibility for the horrors of the Congolese civil war (which we "let fester," in Feaver's phrase) as it does for the post-invasion violence in Iraq? As much responsibility for the casualties in, say, the various India-Pakistan wars as for the casualties in our own war in Vietnam? As much responsibility for the deaths in Europe from 1914 to 1917 as for the deaths in the Philippines during our occupation of those islands? We may bear a share of responsibility for casualties that result from our inaction rather than our actions, but the two ledgers aren't comparable.

I did not say they were comparable, but I would say they are compare-able (that is, one can weigh them against each other in a comprehensive cost-benefit calculus). Perhaps we should weight the costs that arise after our action more heavily than the costs that arise after our inaction, as Douthat calls for, but we shouldn't ignore the latter altogether. That was my point and Douthat seems to agree because he concedes that we should assess those costs, only discount them a bit.

I can live with a discount factor. Indeed, I would propose an additional refinement to what Douthat suggested: We should deeply discount costs that arise after U.S. inaction when U.S. options for action were so implausible and so unlikely to affect the outcome one way or the other that inaction was almost irrelevant. To pick a relatively easy illustration from the distant past, the United States was masterfully inactive during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870; I don't think it makes much sense to attribute the death and destruction that resulted (let alone the deep cause of World War I, German unification and the "German Problem") as the "costs of U.S. inaction." By contrast, U.S. inaction does seem especially relevant in the current Libyan case and so the discount rate should be different (and rather less favorable to the advocates of inaction than in the historical hypothetical of the Franco-Prussian War). There is no serious military analyst who would say that the United States lacks plausible options for action or is incapable of affecting the outcome. At most they can say that the options are not worth the cost. Fine, let's count all of the costs.

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