The Obama administration has changed U.S. strategy toward Iran three times. At the administration's inception, President Obama shed the Bush administration's refusal to negotiate with Iran's government, ending support for regime change, sending flowery good wishes at Persian new year and declining to condemn that government for election fraud in 2009. This was a strategy of unconcern for the nature of Iran's government, banking instead on working with it to achieve mutual interests. Let's call that strategy detente.

The administration's second policy shift was to give up hope for progress in government-to-government channels (after remarkably little effort), and instead emphasize multilateral sanctions. In order to gain support of reluctant potential partners, the administration further dialed back U.S. policy in two areas: threat of military strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities, and condemnation of Iranian domestic policies. Even the Pentagon leadership -- civilian and military -- downplayed what could be achieved by destroying elements of Iran's programs.

The main limiting factor on the effectiveness of a sanctions strategy is our ability to cajole or coerce other countries to comply. The United States has had near complete sanctions against Iran since the 1979 seizure of our Embassy; there is little we can do directly. But to their credit, the Obama administration has done much to persuade Europeans and the countries of the Gulf to enforce sanctions. The EU is seriously considering an embargo of Iranian oil purchases; Gulf countries with close banking and commercial ties to Iran have even for the first time curtailed their activity. 

And Congress, to their credit, has done even more, passing legislation to sanction companies that do business with Iran's central bank. Congress took the administration at its word and put in place sanctions that Iran could not circumvent. Ken Pollack, one of the best Middle East hands, estimates the new sanctions could impose a 30 percent penalty on the Iranian economy. That will put enormous pressure on the government of Iran, especially in the run up to Parliamentary elections in March.

The White House objected to the legislation so vehemently that Congress suspects the administration will stint on implementation. But Treasury Secretary Geithner was sent to China and Japan, lesser officials to South Korea and other purchasers of Iranian oil to explain the administration will have only narrow avenues to exempt countries temporarily from exclusion from the dollar zone unless they comply with the legislation.

The administration's third policy shift on Iran was necessitated by two things: the Arab spring, and Iran's provocative behavior. An administration that didn't want to champion democracy was pressed into it by the fact that the so-called Arab Street -- so often depicted as virulently opposed to American values -- actually wants the political liberties we have and is taking responsibility for outcomes in their own countries. But the way the Obama administration navigated our response to the Arab spring managed to infuriate both democrats in the region and authoritarian governments we are allied with.

Here the administration's incapacity to develop a strategy has had deeply detrimental effects. They don't seem to realize their writing off Iraq has fanned sectarian tensions throughout the middle east, how their inactivity on Syria is further destabilizing Iraq (and vice versa), or their approach to the peace process undercut Palestinians working to build a state and further isolated Israel, can't tell the difference between success in Libya and success in Egypt, what fleeting opportunities now exist to contain Iranian activity and influence in the region, how far -- and even just how -- to support the transition to democracy, whom to partner with, or coordinate their rhetoric about priorities (a pivot to Asia?) with in this once in a century set of changes occurring in the middle east.

Our saving grace, at the moment, is that governments in the region see the effects of our strategic incoherence and are taking actions that mostly help them and us. The two crucial changes are in Saudi Arabia and Turkey, both precipitated as a reaction to, not an endorsement of, our policies. Many middle easterners see Turkey as a model for their own countries' development as democratic governments in Muslim societies, a position the government of Turkey thirstily wants to retain. Turkey refused to support U.N. sanctions against Iran and gets 30 percent of its oil there, but its policies have evolved and oil refiners are now moving to comply because of Iran's recent bellicosity and continued support of Bashir al Assad's bloody crackdown in Syria.

Saudi Arabia is even turning the screws on Iran, offering to provide additional supplies of oil to countries that refuse contracts with Iran. Iran reacted with predictable threats that Saudi and others will be considered accomplices of the West. That approach used to worry the Saudis, when Iran could plausibly claim the crown of Islamism to delegitimize governments. But Iran's use of religion to justify a fraudulent election, assassination plot involving the Saudi Ambassador, and stoking of sectarian tensions has devalued that currency even more than sanctions have devalued the rial.

This is worse than leading from behind: being handed a propitious set of circumstances, we are failing to set the conditions for a middle east that will be conducive to American security. Syria's chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood actually declined Iranian offers of mediation, saying Iran's support for Assad made them unacceptable as an interlocutor. Allegiances cast in stone for generations are fracturing -- what opportunities the rocking of boats in the Middle East presents! What a pity the Obama administration can't come up with a strategy to capitalize on them.

Over several different posts, I have been exploring the eerie echoes between Obama supporters' critique of the entry into Iraq and the way Obama has chosen to exit it. Up until now, I have focused on the policymaking process rather than the policy itself. In the final analysis, however, it is the policy that will matter most and so it is worth investigating whether the same overall pattern that is so marked on the politics applies to the substance as well. Here are three echoes that may prove to be consequential.

The first is the concern that we entered Iraq with too few troops to do the mission and now we will be exiting Iraq leaving behind too few troops to do the mission. For -- make no mistake of it -- while President Obama claims that the Iraq war will have ended, the Iraq mission has not. The State Department has committed to its largest, most ambitious, and most challenging set of operations it has ever attempted without the cover of a sizable U.S. military presence. The security and logistics vacuum left by the departing U.S. uniformed troops will be replaced, at some lower level of functionality, by U.S.-contracted private security forces. Many experts inside thought some residual force would be needed and I do not know many people who have high confidence that the State Department is up to the task that it has left itself.

Shouldn't critics who thought the entry to Iraq involved overly risky operational choices about the resources needed for the subsequent phase of the mission be equally concerned about the resources left for the next phase now?

The second is the concern that shifting focus so rapidly from the Afghanistan theater in 2002 to Iraq relaxed the pressure on the core al Qaeda network and its Taliban sponsor. By "taking our eye off the ball," we snatched defeat from the jaws of victory and allowed al Qaeda and the Taliban to reconstitute itself. Indeed, this was quintessence of the Obama war critique of 2008: he claimed it was time to focus on the "real" threat in Afghanistan and stop diverting resources to the "secondary" theater of Iraq.

A recent New York Times article underscores the extent to which this same phenomenon is happening, but in reverse. Bush's surge strategy of 2007 put the Iraqi-based al Qaeda affiliate, al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), on the defensive. Progress on both the security and political fronts allowed many observers inside and outside government to speculate that AQI might even be defeated. Now, according to the NYT, some in the U.S military fear that the failure to secure an arrangement for a more robust military mission in Iraq after 2011 has thrown a life-line to AQI. The description of the debate inside sounds remarkably like debates about the beginnings of the Iraq war, with a White House pushing to move on while others in the Administration are pushing to finish the job first:

The Qaeda affiliate's nascent resurgence has helped fuel a debate between some Pentagon officials on one side, who are seeking a way to permit small numbers of American military trainers and Special Operations forces to operate in Iraq, and some White House officials on the other, who are eager to close the final chapter on a divisive eight-year war that cost the lives of more than 4,400 troops.

Shouldn't critics who believed that in entering Iraq the Bush administration took its eye off of the ball and thereby allowed the enemy to reconstitute itself worry that in exiting Iraq the Obama administration is doing the very same thing?

The third parallel concerns Iran. As measured by our national interest, one of the gravest charges leveled against the Bush Administration was the claim that Iran benefited the most from the toppling of Hussein. Under Saddam, Iraq was Iran's most formidable foe -- they fought a bloody war throughout the 1980s, after all -- and Iraq helped check Iran's regional aspirations. Saddam was replaced first with chaos, which Iran was able to exploit, and later with a new government controlled by political factions with deep ties to Iran. Bush's National Security Strategy claimed, "We may face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran." But, the charge goes, invading Iraq made that challenge much greater than it otherwise would have been.

Critics are making exactly that charge about Obama's exit plan today, and quoting Iranian leaders to substantiate it. By failing to negotiate a longer-term strategic presence inside Iraq, President Obama may have tilted the U.S.-Iran balance of power even more decisively in favor of Iran. The United States is now scrambling, to recover from this set-back, but the challenge is daunting.

Shouldn't critics who believed the entry into Iraq hurt U.S. interests by empowering Iran also believe that the exit from Iraq has further empowered Iran and thus further hurt U.S. interests?

Am I too pessimistic? Perhaps. The most compelling piece with a cautiously optimistic take that I have read is the one by Brett McGurk, one of the key negotiators in the latest phase of the U.S.-Iraq saga. He makes two hard-headed pragmatic points. First, in the end this was Iraq's choice to make and the Iraqi people did not want U.S. forces to stay with the immunity that U.S. lawyers insisted we had to have. Second, this is not the end of the relationship and there are many ways in which the U.S.-Iraqi partnership can blossom in a mutually productive fashion.

Because of his analysis, I am not willing to declare mission failure yet. But it sure looks like we are embarking on a needlessly risky path.

It is a cliché that history doesn't repeat itself but it may rhyme. Here is another over-used aphorism: just because it is a cliché doesn't mean it can't be true.

In a recent post, I flagged an inconvenient fact that is rarely touted in White House press releases: the extent to which President Obama's greatest foreign policy successes have come when he followed in his predecessor's footsteps while his most frustrating foreign policy set-backs have come when he charted a whole new path.

There is nothing particularly novel about a White House giving itself credit for inventing wheels (the Bush administration had the same reflex), though the Obama team has been especially loathe to note any parallels with its predecessor ... except in one particular area. In public and private settings, Obama supporters have taken pains to remind people that it was President Bush who negotiated and signed the 2008 Status of Forces Agreement (SoFA) Strategic Framework Agreement that obligates U.S. forces to leave Iraq by the end of 2011. Indeed, some have claimed that this is an inconvenient fact of its own, at least for Republican critics who want to charge that Obama is being reckless in his Iraq policy.

The implicit message is obvious: "we can't be criticized for ending the war in this way because, after all, we are just following the treaty obligations that Bush agreed to. If they were good enough for Bush, they are good enough for us."

That's not quite fair to the Bush policy, however. The Bush team viewed the 2008 SFA, and in particular the 2011 sunset, as a least-worst deal that they could strike with Maliki in advance of Iraqi elections. It was widely understood - and this understanding was directly encouraged by Iraqi interlocutors - that the SFA would be renegotiated after the Iraqi elections, when the new Iraqi government would have a bit more freedom to take necessary but unpopular decisions like allowing a follow-on stabilization force. Bush officials disagreed amongst themselves as to how forthcoming the Iraqis would be in a follow-on deal, but most agreed that it was imperative that a serious attempt be made to renegotiate the SFA at the earliest possible moment.

You don't have to take my word for it. If the plan all along had been simply to implement the 2008 SFA, why did President Obama send a team to Iraq to negotiate a new agreement? Why did the military plan on leaving a residual force? Indeed, as Tom Ricks quotes a colleague as asking, if that was really the plan then why the heck didn't the military plan on leaving at the end of 2011?

In other words, it sure looks like Obama supporters are trying to hide behind the Bush policy, trying to share credit (blame?) for a policy that might be problematic and in need of a little bolstering.

I find it curious that this would be one of the few places where the current team hugs the previous one, and it reminded me of a similar moment in the Bush era. Back in the day, a standard talking point was that it was silly to claim that Bush "lied" about Iraqi WMD because his description of the Iraqi threat was consonant with Clinton's. Moreover, President Bush secured a strong bipartisan Congressional vote in support of confronting Iraq. After reading the same intelligence Bush read, a large number of Democratic leaders voted to endorse the very description of the Iraqi threat that they later pretended was a Bush fabrication. This bit of spin had the virtue of being true, but that didn't mean that every time it was deployed that Democrat leaders merrily conceded the point.

One of those leaders was Senator Clinton who struggled throughout the 2008 primary campaign to explain her 2002 vote. It is not an exaggeration to say that her inability to satisfy Democratic primary voters on this matter explains why President Obama is her boss. Yet her own effort at spin was not without merit. She said that she viewed the 2002 vote as an authorization to confront Iraq with coercive diplomacy -- threatening Iraq with dire consequences unless it revived the dormant inspections regime -- not an authorization to go to war and impose regime change. In other words, she saw this bill as one step in the process, not a blank check -- the next word, not the last word, on the subject.

Do you see the interesting parallel between her frustration with how her vote got used by defenders of the Bush policy and the current frustration of Bush-era policymakers with the way the Iraq SFA is used by defenders of the Obama policy? Obama supporters are now doing the exact same maneuver, mimicking the style as much as the substance of an administration they have hitherto denounced as a matter of course.

As I hope to outline in future posts, I think this pattern holds more widely than the current team would want to admit. In structuring their policy to leave Iraq, there is an uncanny echo to many of the most trenchant critiques that were leveled against how we entered Iraq.

President Obama's best campaign line about Iraq was that he promised to leave Iraq more responsibly than we entered. Far from fulfilling that promise, to a remarkable degree, I think we may be on track to leave Iraq rather in the fashion that critics claim we entered it.

Update: The agreement Bush negotiated in 2008 was a Strategic Framework Agreement (SFA), not a Status of Forces Agreement (SoFA) as I erroneously called it above.  What remained to be negotiated after 2008 was a follow-on Strategic Framework Agreement that would include a Status of Forces Agreement that would permit U.S. military units to remain in Iraq after 2011.  Despite lengthy deliberations, the U.S. and Iraqi negotiators were unable to agree on the terms and that is what precipitated President Obama's recent announcement.

A number of experts share my concern that the Obama Administration is taking undue risks with its Iraq policy. In a compelling analysis, Meghan O'Sullivan lays out the potential upside of a more prudent Iraq policy. And in an equally compelling analysis, Kenneth Pollack lays out the potential downside of the path that the Obama Administration appears to have chosen. Together, they make a powerful argument for reconsidering the current trajectory and for making a mid-course correction.

I worked closely with O'Sullivan on Iraq policy in Bush's second term, and I found her to be one of the most candid and insightful internal critics of our policies. She was an early advocate of the shift to the surge strategy and she was especially good at understanding the interplay of U.S. policy and internal Iraqi politics.

Pollack was one of the more important outside voices on Bush's Iraq policy. He was an early supporter of efforts to confront the Hussein regime, but he also was an early critic of missteps. By 2006 his critique was especially trenchant. Then in late July 2007, he co-authored (with Michael O'Hanlon) one of the most influential op-eds in the entire Iraq saga. At that time, Republican backers of Bush's efforts in Iraq were losing heart and Democratic opponents of the surge were close to realizing their goal of stopping the new strategy. The Bush White House was reduced to pleading for a few weeks delay so Congress could hear from General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker directly in September, but the mood in Congress was unwilling even to do that. In the midst of the political storm, Pollack and O'Hanlon wrote that the new surge strategy was working and that political opponents at home should give it more time. Since Bush opponents had regularly used Pollack and O'Hanlon's earlier critiques as a club with which to bash the Administration, their surprising notes of optimism gave their op-ed outsized influence.

I hope the Obama Administration is listening to O'Sullivan, Pollack, and others today. If Obama policymakers have a good counter-argument, I would like to see it developed in a thoughtful way -- addressing these real critiques, rather than strawman arguments. The Obama team has the benefit of inside information that even the most well-informed outsiders might lack, so it is possible the Administration understands something that these recent pieces are missing. But it is also possible that the Administration has locked onto a policy that is wrong-headed and the President is in a state of denial over the likely consequences. Only a careful and candid engagement of the arguments can resolve the matter. Time is running out for that engagement.

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.

Read on

The State of the Union speech was almost completely about domestic policy. By my count, roughly 1/7th of the address (about 1000 words in a 7000 word speech) was devoted to foreign policy and national security, the bailiwick of this blog. Perhaps this proportion reflects the mood of the country, or the medium of the platform, or the mode of this administration. However, it is a noteworthy proportion for a president who mentioned national security in his inaugural address before raising any domestic policy issue -- and did so rather dramatically with the words, "Our nation is at war.…"

Last night, President Obama did mention the war, or rather the wars. He described the Iraq war as "coming to an end" and, while he did claim that our troops were leaving "with their heads held high," that was about as far as he was willing to go in terms of claiming success or failure. It was a far cry from the triumphalist rhetoric of Vice President Biden, by comparison. Obama mentioned a "lasting partnership with the Iraqi people," but he placed that squarely with "our civilians," thus avoiding mention of the critical role the U.S. military will play over the next decade in helping train and maintain Iraqi security forces.

Obama's mention of the broader war on terror was brief but otherwise Bushian, combining the kinetic ("we have taken the fight to al Qaeda and their allies") with the police work ("Thanks to our intelligence and law enforcement professionals…") with the war of ideas ("…the conviction that American Muslims are a part of our family.") Left unaddressed is the ongoing controversy over the Obama administration's embrace of the lion's share of the Bush war on terror policies circa 2007.

There were a few optimistic notes about Afghanistan and Pakistan that were doubtless discordant in the ears of the growing number of Americans, especially within the chattering class and most especially among the president's political base, who believe that the mission there is doomed. The confusion over the long-range strategy for Afghanistan was left unaddressed -- the briefest possible mention to the infamous July 2011 deadline and no mention whatsoever of U.S. commitments during the critical period from July 2011 to 2014. I suspect that one year from now domestic politics will demand that the 2012 State of the Union address spend a bit more time elaborating on all of this.

The rest of the foreign-policy references were noteworthy for their focus on the past rather than the present or future. For the most part, they were a series of pats on the back for things done -- New START passed, new Iranian sanctions imposed, new NATO strategic document unveiled, and so on -- rather than a bold vision for how to address the challenges that remain.

President Obama did address the foreign-policy topic of the hour, the popular unrest in the Arab world, but with only the blandest of references to Tunisia and no mention whatsoever of the far more ominous rumblings in Egypt and Lebanon. My objection is not with what the president said ("The United States of America stands with the people of Tunisia, and supports the democratic aspirations of all people") but with what the president did not say, as in "What this means for Egypt is.…," or "So in Lebanon we must.…" Undoubtedly, the president's advisors decided that given the delicacy of rapidly fluid environment, the less said the better.

From my parochial point of view, the president's best national security-related reference was his call to open up all U.S. campuses to military recruiters and to ROTC. This is an issue that has true bipartisan support and is long overdue. It is also an issue on which President Obama has unique influence, given that the target audience -- university administrators -- is likely one of the more ardent factions in the president's political base.

Otherwise, the speech offered little grist for a foreign-policy mill. It was not much of a harbinger of how the president and his team will handle the myriad foreign-policy challenges they face. Yet I am confident that President Obama will spend far more than 1/7th of the remainder of his current term on foreign policy, so Shadow Government folks will have plenty to address in the coming months even if there was not much for us last night.

On Jan. 17, 1991, a broad based coalition, led by the United States, launched Operation DESERT STORM to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation. We know much more of the story now, twenty years later, than we did then, even if we do not yet know how it will turn out. In particular, we know much more about the Iraqi side of the conflict, thanks to the millions of pages of Iraqi government documents captured during the 2003 Iraq war. We also have twenty years of subsequent experience to influence our judgment.

In retrospect, the U.S. conduct of the 1991 Gulf War was a success, though one marred by a fundamental failure to compel our adversary -- the most basic object of strategy.

On the positive side, the war was a clear demonstration of the battlefield prowess of the U.S. armed forces. It is hard for many today to remember, but the run-up to the Gulf War saw many predictions that Iraq would inflict massive casualties on the United States, and even that Iraq would defeat the U.S. military. Many analysts predicted that a war would be protracted and costly to the United States. Former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski forecast 20,000 casualties, while Patrick Buchanan predicted 30,000. Senator Ted Kennedy estimated that there would be some 3,000 U.S. casualties per week, while former Secretary of the Navy (and current Senator) James Webb warned that the U.S. Army would be "bled dry" in three weeks. On the eve of the Gulf War, a group of analysts operating under the auspices of the U.S. Army War College wrote "We should ask ourselves whether we are prepared for [war with Iraq] -- in our view we are not."

Instead, the lopsided battles in the deserts of Kuwait and southern Iraq and the seemingly effortless domination of the Iraqi air force indicated to many that warfare had indeed changed. The contrast between prewar expectations of a bloody fight and the wartime reality of Iraqi collapse struck many observers as an indicator of fundamental change. In particular, the war witnessed the emergence of stealth and precision-guided munitions (PGMs) as important instruments of war, even though the more than 17,000 PGMs expended during the war comprised only eight percent of the bombs dropped. What was novel was the intensity of the campaign: In six weeks, the coalition dropped more than double the number of laser-guided bombs released over North Vietnam in nine months.

Read on

Yesterday's election was notable for many reasons -- rejection of President Barack Obama's agenda, the largest opposition pick up in 80 years, the perks of incumbency outweighed by anti-establishment sentiment among voters. Also notable is that although the country is fighting two wars and foiled a terrorist plot just days before the election, national security had almost no place in the contest. To the extent national security was even mentioned, it was in terms of our strategic vulnerability due to massive debt.

But now that the dust is settling on the dimensions of Republican victory, what is it likely to mean for the wars we are fighting? The president has picked up support for winning the wars, although the president himself is hesitant to use the word. Republicans elected yesterday will be concerned about the cost of the wars, but they are basically Jacksonians. They will provide the votes for the president to persevere, and to reverse his damaging timeline for drawing down forces in Afghanistan.

Walter Russell Mead perfectly captured the principled, strong armed, anti-establishment populism of this line of thinking in U.S. foreign policy. His article on the Jacksonian Tradition in the Winter 1999/2000 issue of The National Interest should be required reading for anyone wanting to understand where the 112th Congress is likely headed. The president himself might also want to read former President George W. Bush's soon-to-be-released memoir, in which he considers a premature drawdown of troops in Iraq to have been one of his biggest mistakes.

Where the election will complicate President Obama's war policies is that moderate Democrats were turned out of the House in large numbers; the president has a Democratic caucus in the House significantly more liberal than the Democratic Party. This could limit the president's ability to let slide his end game for Afghanistan, especially if he is forced to trim his sails on other liberal shibboleths.

But the president is not going to carry liberal Democrats on the wars whether or not he sticks to his politically-driven 2011 drawdown. "Ending combat operations" in Iraq has not been the improvement in security the president promised, as Tuesday's bombings sadly illustrate, and the president can ill afford such an outcome in "the good war." Liberal disaffection was less a problem for Democrats than the stampede of independents to the right; moderating his timeline to achieve the objectives of the war would likely appeal to them.

Working across the aisle on the wars may help build confidence between the White House and Republicans, providing a basis for compromise on other pressing issues, like debt reduction and entitlement reform. Americans like divided government. We are a people made great by distrust of our own government, a fact the Washington establishment often forgets.

Perhaps the lesson Democrats ought most to take from yesterday's drubbing (and Republicans from the unsuccessful bids by some of our most divisive candidates) is Thomas Jefferson's caution that great innovations should not be forced by slim majorities. A desire for consensus is fundamental to our political culture, probably the result of our great diversity. As a European once pointed out to me, "you Americans prize individuality, but you all dress alike."

Congressional Republicans are off to a good start with House Speaker John Boehner's poignant decline to grandstand, instead taking the message that voters want Washington to get to work. And much work needs to be done to bring President Obama's national security policies into better alignment with our interests.

My erstwhile political science partner at Duke, Christopher Gelpi, has written a fascinating paper analyzing how the public's views on war vary depending on what they view on television. He has reached some interesting conclusions which, if correct, suggest that President Obama may be more beholden to Fox News than he might like.

Using a survey that interviewed Americans in September/October 2008, Gelpi analyzed the viewpoints of the general public grouped according to whether they got their news primarily from Fox News, from MSNBC, from Comedy Central, or from other sources. (Why Comedy Central, you might ask? Because when you hang around college students you run into a surprising number who get the lion's share of their current events from watching The Daily Show and Colbert Report.)

Gelpi finds, not surprisingly, that there is a powerful selection effect going on. Fox News and MSNBC report the news in very different ways and the public naturally gravitates towards the news outlet most congenial to their worldview; conservatives and Republicans flock to Fox News and liberals and Democrats flock to MSNBC and Comedy Central. 

What he set out to assess, however, was something more nuanced: whether there was anything beyond this selection effect at work -- whether being a Fox News (or MSNBC) watcher made someone more inclined towards the viewpoint offered on that channel than that person would have been without watching it. The only way to settle this dispositively would be through a complex and coercive experiment: locking subjects in the room for months at a time and forcing them to watch different doses of the news. Such random assignment experimental trials are the gold standard in research on human subjects but for obvious reasons they aren't viable for most of the things we study in my corner of political science. (But as my FP colleague Dan Drezner can attest, professors sometimes dream up such schemes, usually over late night beers at professional conferences.)

To get around this limitation, Gelpi uses a sophisticated statistical technique called "matching" that compares the Fox News watchers in his sample to other respondents who match the Fox News folks in many, many respects (age, gender, religious views, political ideology, etc.) except the crucial one that they do not watch Fox News; the same sort of analyses are done on MSNBC watchers and Comedy Central watchers. He then compares the attitudes of those paired groups on the crucial question of support for the Afghan and Iraq wars.

He finds that MSNBC and Comedy Central watchers are no less likely to oppose the wars than their matched profile counterparts who happen not to watch those channels. Inference: Watching MSNBC and Comedy Central does not appear to make folks less supportive of the wars than they already were, which was not very. However, Fox News watchers were more supportive of the wars than their otherwise matched counterparts who did not watch Fox News. Inference: watching Fox News does appear to make folks more supportive of the wars.

There are other possible explanations that need further analysis before Gelpi can know for sure. Perhaps there is some hitherto unidentified feature that distinguishes Fox News watchers from their matched counterparts that explains who watches what and also explains attitudes on the wars; in other words, perhaps it is just selection effects after all and Gelpi has not yet identified all the factors driving the selection. Or perhaps the greater diversity of the Fox News audience makes them more open to persuasion. The audience for MSNBC and Comedy Central is not just small but also quite narrow, whereas the audience for Fox News is not just much larger but also quite diverse; a surprisingly high number of Democrats, for instance, watch Fox News.

But if Gelpi's inferences are correct and durable, then he expects over time a cumulative "echo chamber" effect with views hardening and polarizing. The implications for President Obama and support for his wars are intriguing. Despite Obama's obvious antipathy toward Fox News, Gelpi's research suggests that the president's best chance at mobilizing public support may involve reaching out to Fox viewers. Gelpi's research is not dispositive on this point because his data is from 2008, before Obama took office. But it is a subject worth studying further and, I would venture to say, a subject worth discussing in the White House.

President Obama's speech a few weeks ago on Iraq left me a bit queasy. I had urged him to make a strong case for why 50,000 American soldiers should remain in the line of fire in Iraq. I wanted him to be as compelling in speaking to the soldiers who remained as I expected him to be in speaking about the soldiers who left. And in my opinion, his speech did not hit that mark as well as it could have.

My concern was that without a stronger line of communication between the commander-in-chief and the troops in the field, we would start to see reports about disconnect and alienation. And so we have. Now a single article quoting one or two disgruntled grunts is hardly an indicator of a budding mutiny. But it could be an indicator of a more widely held sense that the president is losing interest in what the troops are doing over there. The consensus interpretation of Obama's speech -- fairly or unfairly -- was that his call for America to turn the page was a signal that he would be turning his attention elsewhere. That may play well with Obama's political base, but as the Reuters account suggests, it may not play as well to the troops in the field.

Media accounts are also playing up the instances of combat that have occurred since Obama announced that the combat mission was completed. Over time, that disconnect will become increasingly awkward to explain to the American people. But it is the task of explaining the situation to the troops that is the more pressing concern, and I hope Obama's handlers are alert to the issue.

As a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom, I was gratified to hear President Obama's tribute to the courage of America's service members, including the Navy SEALs with whom I served in 2003. Over the course of the conflict, American forces have adapted and performed admirably under extremely difficult conditions. As James Russell writes in the latest issue of The Journal of Strategic Studies, American units structured and trained for conventional military operations shifted successfully to wage successfully a very different type of war.

And yet, one could not help to see in the president's words and mannerisms, a man who was distracted, whose heart wasn't in it. In a speech nominally devoted to Iraq, he couldn't help but talk about the U.S. economy.

Obama's speech begged comparison to his predecessor -- indeed, his words invited such a comparison. And it is by comparison that he comes up short. Whereas Bush exhibited great courage in going against his own military to support the Iraqi surge and sell it to his own party and the American people, Obama has yet to put comparable effort into selling his own Afghan surge. The Oval Office speech was a missed opportunity to do just that.

In addition, in tone and substance, Obama's speech failed to prepare the American people for what may be to come in Iraq. Although last night Obama formally declared an end to combat operations, nearly 50,000 American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines remain in Iraq, training and assisting the Iraqi armed forces. It is inevitable that in coming weeks and months these men and women will be attacked by insurgents who want nothing more than to cripple the Iraqi government and humiliate the United States, and is inevitable that more Americans will die or suffer wounds in Iraq. The president did nothing to explain this situation to the public.

Just as it was misleading for President Bush to speak in triumphant terms in May 2003, it was premature for President Obama to give the American people the impression that the Iraq War is over. It may be, to quote Churchill, "the end of the beginning," but we have hardly reached the end.

How did Obama do in his Iraq speech on those Four Essential Items I was tracking? Better than I feared, but not as well as I hoped.

Gimmickry vs. Candor? He did not say "mission accomplished" but he did say mission completed and responsibility met (specifically: "The Americans who have served in Iraq completed every mission they were given" and "we have met our responsibility"). The emphasis is all on what has been done and not on what still needs to be done. If what remains to be done is light and easy, the speech is strong enough to sustain it. But the speech did not prepare Americans for any hard and dangerous  tasks to come in Iraq.

The gestures towards reality -- "Of course, violence will not end with our combat mission" -- felt like nothing more than gestures. And the breezy confidence -- "But ultimately, these terrorists will fail to achieve their goals. Iraqis are a proud people. They have rejected sectarian war, and they have no interest in endless destruction. They understand that, in the end, only Iraqis can resolve their differences and police their streets"  -- seemed disconnected from the real challenges still confronting the Iraqi people, and therefore the United States.

Defining the mission going forward? The way forward seemed dotted with hopes and aspirations -- a vague commitment to "support Iraq as it strengthens its government, resolves political disputes, resettles those displaced by war, and builds ties with the region and the world" -- rather than with hard-headed strategies for achieving realistic goals. He also doubled down on the promise that all U.S. troops will be out of Iraq by the end of the year, leaving no flexibility for responding to the expected Iraqi request for a post-2011 American presence.

Honesty about what worked and what hasn't? Without saying it directly, the entire speech was an acknowledgment that the surge had worked. In that sense, it was implicitly honest. But Obama avoided saying it, and indeed avoided most of the expected explicit discussion of his own record on Iraq. He reminded the audience that he had opposed the war initially, but left unmentioned that he had opposed the surge on which all that he had accomplished depended. More importantly, he did not discuss at all the failure of the "timetable as leverage" tactic -- his primary contribution to Iraq strategy and the centerpiece of his Afghanistan strategy.

He did mention President Bush in a fairly positive light and I am willing to believe that his handlers thought they offered a gracious gesture. Certainly his call to "turn the page" on Iraq debates had a statesmanlike ring to it, even if on the very next page he leveled a campaign-theme attack line about money spent in Iraq not being available to be spent at home. Yet on balance, I am willing to credit this as his most gracious Iraq speech ever.

Speaking to the toughest audiences, those who lost loved ones? His peroration was moving and well delivered. He improved on the radio address by spending more time talking about  military honor and less time talking about military compensation. But he also spent all of his time talking to and about the troops that had left Iraq rather than the troops that remained. I think they and their families would have appreciated a bit more explanation of why it is worth running the risks they must run, and bearing the burden they continue to carry.

Perhaps this will be the last speech he gives on Iraq in 18 months. If Iraq steadily improves, he may not need to say much more. If Iraqis consistently stand up, Americans can consistently stand down. If so, then this will be remembered as his best Iraq speech. But if the gains thus far in Iraq suffer serious setbacks and if the American military are obliged to do more than ferry equipment out of theater, this speech may be remembered as an ill-starred spiking of a ball that is very much still in play.

President Obama has twice in recent weeks highlighted his achievement in ending U.S. combat operations in Iraq by the end of this month. The president had nothing to say on the five-month political stalemate that has followed elections in Iraq, other than that it will have no effect on U.S. troops leaving, and nothing to say about the increase in violence to Iraqis.

President Obama should be clear about our continuing combat commitments in Iraq, reconsider the transfer to civilians some of the inherently military tasks our civilian mission in Iraq will require, and revise the security agreement with Iraq to provide for continuing presence of some U.S. military forces after 2011.

The president's argument that setting a deadline to end operations would force Iraqis to make hard political choices has proven false. Instead, the deadline has disinclined Iraqi political leaders to compromise and diminished U.S. influence. This has significant implications for the Obama administration's strategy in both Iraq and Afghanistan (where the drawdown of that surge is arbitrarily set for July of 2011).

In his Disabled American Veterans speech, Obama declared that "our commitment in Iraq is changing -- from a military effort led by our troops to a civilian effort led by our diplomats." But our State Department lacks the capacity to scope or conduct a mission of this magnitude. It balked at the hundreds of tasks the military identified that would need to be transferred. Rather than define what needs doing and persuade the Congress to provide the necessary resources, State defined down the requirements. When Congress refused even that level of funding, neither State nor the White House fought for the necessary resources.

In order to bring U.S. effort back into line with our equities as we conclude the war in Iraq, the president should make three crucial changes to his policies:

First, be straightforward that some combat responsibilities remain. The president makes it sound as though the only mission remaining for U.S. forces in Iraq after Aug. 31 will be training Iraqi security forces, but we are supporting as well as training Iraqis. That support extends to providing for Iraq's air defense and conducting air operations, because Iraq has no air force to speak of yet. They are working towards self-sufficiency, but as Gen. Shawkat Zebari, the head of Iraq's security forces admitted this week, Iraq will not be able to fully secure their country until 2020. Gen. Ralph Baker, deputy commander of forces in central Iraq, also confirmed that timeline.

If the debacle of Clinton administration intervention in Somalia taught us anything, it is that one of the worst mistakes an American president can make in national security policy is to carry commitments without informing the American people. When the mission shifted from humanitarian assistance to fighting Somali warlords, the president did not prepare Americans for the casualties that would occur when we became a party to the conflict. President Obama is setting himself up for a similar crisis. Both Turkey and Iran have made military incursions into Iraq in the last several months; the Iranians have constructed a fort inside Iraqi territory. An attack on Iranian nuclear facilities by either Israel or the United States could provoke attacks on U.S. installations and allies in the region. The president needs to be clear we will protect Iraq in these and other eventualities.

Second, reconsider full civilianization of the mission in Iraq. The State Department has 5,000 civilians in Iraq, its largest deployment anywhere in the world. Fully half those State Department personnel are involved in providing security. Most are contractors. Even if equipped with DOD helicopters, mine clearers, and armored vehicles, the State mission will be consumed by providing security. And do we really want civilians undertaking these inherently military jobs? We need to build an integrated politico-military strategy, not a strictly civilian one.

Third, make clear in public that we are open to renegotiation of the Security Agreement to assist the government of Iraq for as long as it seeks U.S. support. It would help stabilize the political machinations of Iraqis and others who would influence Iraq for us to be engaged beyond 2011.

None of these changes requires major increases in our commitment to Iraq. None of them would likely increase the risk to U.S. forces, and they will reduce Iraqi casualties by stabilizing the fracturing political landscape in Iraq. Failing to acheive peace in Iraq will be all the more disgraceful because so little is now needed to help Iraqis stabilize their country in a way consistent with our interests.

I have a few more musings on the "readjusting the war clocks" issue, specifically the question of accelerating the Afghan battle clock by getting more help from Pakistan. What might the outlines of a deal with Pakistan look like? I don't have specifics, but I can think of some design features and suggest some out-of-the-box things to think about. In the spirit of stimulating the strategic policy planners who have better access to the information necessary to do this exercise right, here are some considerations.

General Design Features

The absolutely essential element is explicit quid pro quo. It is fine for us to offer intangible, mood-setting quids, but their quo better be tangible and clearly spelled out in advance. The entire deal would not have to be public; indeed perhaps some elements would have to stay confidential. But the deal would have to be worth it to risk the inevitable leaks and set-backs and it is only worth it if Pakistan delivers concrete action.

The United States would also have to be willing to step back from the deal if the other players are not doing their part. This is harder to do than it sounds because, once established, every "deal" develops political inertia and American leaders can be reluctant to break it off even when it is clearly not delivering.

What should we ask for?

I would let General McChrystal draw up the list of asks, but I am pretty sure it would involve the movement of sizable Pakistani military units to put pressure on the areas that most affect the Taliban's freedom of movement as well as the sharing of intelligence that would substantially change the local balance of power on either side of the Durand line.

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