Spencer Ackerman of The Washington Independent has been writing an extensive series of articles about counterinsurgency theory, a relatively new defense “movement” that is rapidly gaining adherents throughout the military (viz. Gen. David Petraeus) and in policy and political circles. His installment yesterday focused on an interesting phenomenon: the striking number of women among counterinsurgency theory’s leading lights.

While women are still underrepresented in the national-security apparatus — and at the Pentagon specifically — counterinsurgency, more than any other previous movement in defense circles, features women not just as equal partners, but leaders.
There’s no one answer for why that is. In a series of interviews, leading woman counterinsurgents, and some of their male colleagues, discussed how the unconventional approach to military operations calls for skills in academic and military fields that have become open to women in recent decades. Others contend that counterinsurgency’s impulse for collaborative leadership speaks to women’s “emotional IQ,” in the words of one prominent woman counterinsurgent. Another explanation has to do with coincidence: the military’s post-Vietnam outreach to women has matured at the same time as counterinsurgency became an unexpected national imperative.

Ackerman introduces us non-defense-experts to such luminaries of counterinsurgency theory as Erin Simpson of the Marine Corps University at Quantico; Janine Davidson, until recently at the Pentagon’s Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict and Special Capabilities unit; Sarah Sewall of Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights (and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense); Michele Flournoy and Tammy Schulz of the Center for a New American Security; and Montgomery “Mitzi” McFate, who’s worked at the Institute for Defense Analysis and the Office of Naval Research.
Though much of Ackerman’s piece involves discussion of why women are so prominent in this particular field, there’s no question it’s a very welcome trend. As Erin Simpson said to Ackerman:

The reason we need women working national security is the same reason we need women in medicine and engineering: this stuff is really hard. And we aren’t going to win by telling half the population they can’t play. It’s always important that we have the sharpest, most creative minds working on defense and security issues as possible.

(Note: this is cross-posted from Salon.com’s War Room site, where I am guest-blogging this week).
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s startling call yesterday for a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. troops from his country has been slow to draw the kind of attention here that it deserves. Perhaps that’s because his announcement was made in the context of complex negotiations over a temporary authorization for the continued U.S. presence in Iraq, and perhaps it’s because the precise meaning of “timetable” isn’t yet clear.
Still, as Juan Cole explains today, Maliki’s announcement reflects the widespread feeling in Iraq that demands by the Bush administration in the course of Status of Forces negotiations represent an offensive infringement of Iraqi sovereignty, requiring a reminder that U.S. troops aren’t necessarily indispensible. Maliki may also be signalling his understanding that he may be dealing with a new president next year named Barack Obama.
In terms of the implications for U.S. politics, Maliki’s timetable gambit exposes the vulnerability of George W. Bush, John McCain, and other “surge” enthusiasts to the argument that conditions in Iraq have improved enough that U.S. combat troops can soon be pulled out. After all, if the political leadership of that surge-blessed country seems to think it’s time to contemplate a withdrawal timetable for U.S. troops, why should Americans resist?
This illustrates the double-bind that Bush, McCain, and the conservative commentariat have created for themselves with their relentless surge-o-mania. If they’re wrong and the surge has failed to significantly change the fundamental realities of Iraq, then it’s time to get out. If they’re right and the surge is succeeding brilliantly, it’s also time to get out. Moreover, if Iraqis agree with either assessment, it’s definitely time to get out.
Theoretically McCain, if not Bush, could get out of the box by agreeing with Maliki that things are going so well that a withdrawal timetable is in order. But having staked a lot on the argument that Barack Obama is flip-flopping on the terms of withdrawal, McCain’s not in a great position to change his tune now.

(Note: this is a cross-post from Salon’s War Room, where I am guest-blogging this week).
John McCain’s campaign has released a repackaged “economic plan,” which will be the focus of a series of events this week.
I put the term in quotes because it’s not so much a “plan” as a hodge-podge of McCain’s domestic policy agenda, and it’s less about the economy than about the candidate’s decision to re-embrace a pledge–abandoned in April–to balance the federal budget by the end of his first term.
In fact, the economic and fiscal implications of McCain’s “plan” are inextricably entwined, since most of his concrete budget savings depend on highly dubious and very ideological assumptions about the impact of tax cuts on growth, of pro-oil-and-nuke policies on energy costs, and most of all, of subsidies for individual health insurance purchases on health care costs. Moreover, even a cursory glance at the fiscal math of McCain’s plan shows a vast number of “magic asterisks”–vague but savings-rich goals trucked up as proposals, ranging from nondefense budget freezes and “comprehensive reviews” of federal programs to some sort of latter-day peace dividend contingent on “victory” in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But there’s one fundamental aspect of McCain’s “plan” that ought to be drawing the most immediate attention: nearly all of it would be dead on arrival in the Democratic-controlled Congress that he will definitely face should he be elected president. Barring some wildly unlikely change in the political winds, Democrats will increase their margins in both Houses of Congress, perhaps significantly, as even the most spin-happy Republicans admit. The idea that congressional Democrats are going to even consider health care, energy, or “entitlement reform” policies that are increasingly hard to distinguish from those of George W. Bush is laughable.
And that simple reality illustrates the enduring dilemma of the McCain candidacy. He needs an “economic plan” right now in order to deal with the strong impression that his national-security-and-character focused message thinly disguises Bush-style cluelessness or indifference about Americans’ economic anxieties. But the overarching thrust of his “plan,” and most of the details, appear focused on pleasing conservatives who have convinced themselves that the political disaster of the Bush presidency is mainly attributable to the incumbent’s insufficient fidelity to The True Cause, particularly in terms of fiscal policy.
So here we are in July of 2008, and John McCain’s still struggling to consolidate his electoral “base,” and devoting much of his domestic policy agenda to that effort. Should he somehow win in November, his administration would provide an acid test of the theory that Americans love gridlock.

In a coincidental timing that undoubtedly pleased a lot of his fans, former Sen. Jesse Helms died early this morning after a long, debilitating illness.
I don’t have much to say about Helms’ career beyond what I wrote earlier this year in a Washington Monthly review of a new Helms biography. He was a political pioneer in lots of ways, some having to do with the mechanical practice of politics, but mostly involving the racial and sexual wedge politics of the late twentieth century, which are still with us.
By all accounts Helms had his good points as a person if not as a politician, living a modest life of devotion to family and friends, and to his particular notion of the demands of God and country. That God alone can judge him now, and may he, as well as those he unjustly tormented, now rest in peace.

Each Independence Day, a lot of empty words are spilled, some honorably, some less honorably. But it’s important to understand that different people define the term “patriotism” quite differently.
Peter Beinart’s essay on patriotism in Time this week seeks to distinguish “conservative” from “liberal” patriotism:

[C]onservatives tend to believe that loving America today requires loving its past. Conservatives often fret about “politically correct” education, which forces America’s students to dwell on its past sins. They’re forever writing books like America: The Last Best Hope (by William J. Bennett) and America: A Patriotic Primer (by Lynne Cheney), which teach children that historically the U.S. was a pretty nifty place. These books are based on the belief that our national forefathers are a bit like our actual mothers and fathers: if we dishonor them, we dishonor ourselves….
If conservatives tend to see patriotism as an inheritance from a glorious past, liberals often see it as the promise of a future that redeems the past. Consider Obama’s original answer about the flag pin: “I won’t wear that pin on my chest,” he said last fall. “Instead, I’m going to try to tell the American people what I believe will make this country great, and hopefully that will be a testimony to my patriotism.” Will make this country great? It wasn’t great in the past? It’s not great as it is?
The liberal answer is, Not great enough. For liberals, America is less a common culture than a set of ideals about democracy, equality and the rule of law. American history is a chronicle of the distance between those ideals and reality. And American patriotism is the struggle to narrow the gap. Thus, patriotism isn’t about honoring and replicating the past; it’s about surpassing it.

Beinart goes on to make the pat and uncompelling argument that the two brands of patriotism are not only distinct, but precisely of equal value, presumably at all times and all places. Obviously, a lot of liberals share a reflexive pride in their country that’s not calibrated emotiionally to their precise assessment of America’s validation of its ideals and promise. And there are conservatives who stress the need for America to apply its ideals–sometimes to terrible effect, as in the neoconservative fantasy of a Middle East made over in our image. More importantly, he doesn’t really grapple with how we should think when conservative and liberal models of patriotism are in direct conflict.
But Beinart is definitely onto something, and I would argue that America today particularly needs the form of patriotism he identifies with liberals. To the extent that our country’s past has been characterized by true greatness, it has been when we did take our founding ideals seriously, at the expense of blind obedience to tradition or the kind of sentimental self-praise that is natural to people everywhere. And if we want people everywhere, and future generations of Americans, to consider this country something unique in the annals of nations, it’s a very good time to recommit ourselves to freedom, equality, justice, the rule of law, and the wise and generous use of the blessings we have been given by our forebears.

Today, as Matt Yglesias earlier reminded us amnesiac Americans, is Canada Day–the Canadian parallel, though not exact, to our Independence Day.
I confess that I am an inveterate Canadaphile, and not for such ideological reasons as its health care system or the striking fact that even its current conservative leaders have chosen to mark this Canada Day with apologies to its aboriginal population. No, it’s the basic decency, civility, and sense of humor of most Canadians that has long attracted me. And their highly sophisticated knowledge of our own political system has always put us to shame.
Back in 2000, our then-Ambassador to Canada Gordon Giffin (an old friend) arranged for me to speak about Al Gore’s policy views to an Ottawa meeting of deputy ministers–the people who more or less ran the Canadian government. They asked far better questions–and not just on issues affecting Canada–than you’d probably get from anything like a similar audience in the U.S.
It’s been a few years since I’ve had an opportunity to go north of the border, but I miss it, from PEI to BC. I wish all our friends and neighbors there a very happy Canada Day.

Today in Ohio Barack Obama announced that he would promote a much more robust initiative than George W. Bush to involve faith-based organizations in anti-poverty and other worthy public works, while insisting that public funds not be used to proselytize or discriminate.
As Steve Benen explains, there was some initial confusion due to a wire story–quickly corrected by the Obama campaign–that Obama would not insist on non-discrimination in the hiring and firing of staff for publicly-funded services.
And that clarification won’t satisfy those who believe that public dollars should not be extended to any organization, religious or ortherwise, that discriminates in any of its activities, however remote from publicly-funded activities.
It hasn’t drawn as much initial attention as the discrimination issue, but Obama also made it clear that recipients of public dollars under his initiative would be required to demonstrate the effectiveness of their programs. That proviso was undoubtedly motivated by the widespread perception that much of Bush’s faith-based dollars were distributed as ill-disguised payoffs to ministers who supported the administration’s broader political and policy goals.

During the DLC event I attended in Chicago over the weekend, I heard a lot of talk (most of it positive) about Barack Obama’s various efforts to “move to the center” in preparation for the general election. In other precincts of the Democratic Party, this alleged phenomenon is being greeted with unhappiness and even panic. A case in point is Arianna Huffington’s post today arguing that pursuing “fickle” swing voters is a disastrous mistake that undermines the enthusiasm and inspiration that has characterized the Obama campaign up until now. Indeed, says Huffington, centrist pandering to swing voters is what ruined the Gore and Kerry campaigns (a highly counter-intuitive take on 2000 and 2004, I’d say).
Since we are likely to hear a lot of this sort of talk in the immediate future, it’s helpful to question some of the assumptions that proponents and antagonists of a “move to the middle” are making.
First of all, a candidate doesn’t really have to “move” at all to create the perception of a different message and strategy once the primary season is over. The general election issue landscape is inevitably going to be different, for the simple reason that the candidate and partisan debate will be different. An example: Barack Obama spent a significant amount of time during the primaries arguing with Hillary Clinton about the relative utility of an individual mandate as part of any plan for universal health coverage. Nobody would expect that issue to matter much in a general election competition with John McCain, who opposes public-sector enabled universal health coverage altogether. Much more broadly, the Democratic nomination contest was in part “about” the various candidates’ applications of progressive principles to policy and political challenges, in detail. The general election is a contest between progressive and conservative agendas, and both candidates will naturally stress those aspects of their agendas that have the widest electoral appeals. That’s not a matter of “moving,” but simply of recontextualizing to a different audience and a different debate.
Second of all, as the TDS Roundtable on swing and base voters earlier this year illustrated, there’s plenty of disagreement about the definition and nature of “swing voters.” They don’t necessarily all reside in the ideological “center” of the electorate on every issue, and moreover, “base” voters don’t necessarily have inconsistent or antagonistic points of view from “swing voters.” The two things that are pretty hard to deny are that (1) undecided “very likely” voters are indeed a disproportionately important electoral prize because winning each of them produces two net votes, and (2) most successful campaigns in a competitive environment manage to energize the partisan base while expanding it into the ranks of independents and even the other party’s base. Huffington’s horror at swing-voter pandering, and her manifest contempt for swing voters themselves, probably reflects the fashionable but very dubious Lackoffian belief that swing voters are cognitively confused, perhaps even stupid or amoral people who can only be appealed to by an even more strongly expressed partisan “frame.”
Third of all, it amazes me that anyone should be surprised by Barack Obama’s willingness on occasion to stray from Democratic Party orthodoxy or from strict down-the-line partisanship. It has been an important part of his political persona from day one. And those who accuse him of cynicism for expressing heretical thoughts on FISA or gun control or the death penalty now are perhaps the real cynics, who somehow thought he didn’t really mean all his early talk about transpartisan politics or overcoming the stale debates of past decades.
Since 1948 (a complicated, multi-candidate contest), there’s been exactly one successful presidential candidate whose strategy was focused overwhelmingly on base mobilization. That was George W. Bush in 2004, and we’ve seen how well his political capital held up since then. You can make the argument that the partisan landscape this year is positive enough that Barack Obama could run a similar campaign and win. But a lot of what has attracted so much enthusiasm for Obama’s candidacy is precisely the belief that he can “break the mold” and win a victory that enables him to achieve things in office that will produce a genuinely overwhelming progressive and Democratic majority in the electorate of the future.
Personally, one of the things I like about Barack Obama as a politician is that he refuses to campaign according to anybody’s playbook but his own. Inevitably, he’s going to disappoint or even anger Democratic activists of every stripe on occasion. Those on the left who fear he’s “blurring the lines” or “moving to the middle” really do need to concentrate on the vast differences between Obama and McCain on a vast number of prominent issues that actual voters as opposed to activists care most about (telecomm immunity or the nuances of gun control not being among them). Those in “the center” who want him to repudiate key elements of his past record to “signal” he’s safe to swing voters are barking up the wrong tree as well.
It’s fine to debate and second-guess Obama’s strategy and message; we do a lot of that here at TDS. But trying to pigeon-hole Barack Obama as a member of one Democratic faction or another, or praising or damning his campaign in terms of our own notions of the strengths and weaknesses of past Democratic efforts, really does run the risk of missing the larger point about this remarkable man.
Let Obama be Obama.

I didn’t choose to “live-blog” the Democratic Leadership Council’s National Conversation this year, partly because I was too busy (moderating three Sunday workshops on election reform, new social media, and “a look ahead to November”), and too ill with a flu-like bug, and partly because internet access in the conference areas of the cavernous Chicago Hyatt was so poor.
But as usual, the focus of the DLC event was on the three-hundred-plus state and local elected officials who attended, and who filled nearly every room in the nineteen Sunday workshops on issues ranging from immigration and poverty to pre-K education and state greenhouse gas initiatives. Attendees were unsurprisingly disappointed that presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama didn’t show up (he didn’t do any public events on Sunday), but there was a strong sense of unity and optimism about the general election.
I had one very unusual experience in Chicago: introducing Markos Moulitsas. The fiery founder of DailyKos, a noted DLC-hater in the past, agreed to speak at the event as part of a agreement he struck with DLC chairman Harold Ford during a joint appearance on Meet the Press last year (Ford will reciprocate by attending the DKos-oriented Netroots Nation event in Austin later this month).
Markos was on a panel I moderated with Jennifer Duffy and David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report to discuss the general election outlook (mostly at the congressional level), which all agreed was very rosy for Democrats. You can read Markos’ take on the appearance here, but as I told him after the session, I didn’t share his surprise at the applause he received for referring to Sen. Joe Lieberman as an “asshole.” Whatever residual admiration of Lieberman in DLC circles that existed after 2006 vanished the moment he endorsed John McCain for president. Like them or not, DLCers are committed Democrats, not, as Markos has been in the habit of calling them, “Liebercrats.”
I have to share a small but hilarious moment that occurred after the session. As moderator, I thought it was only right that I buy Markos, Duffy and Wasserman a drink in the hotel bar. At one point, Markos drew our attention to a television monitor over the bar that was displaying one of those blue-and-red-colored maps of the states, and said, in shock, “Where did that map come from?” (It had much of the South colored blue). Turns out it was a map of salmonella outbreaks. We all got a good laugh at our mutual political-junkie inability to look at the states as anything other than bearers of electoral votes.

It’s been pretty clear for a while that the conservative assault on Barack Obama as a scary, radical, racially threatening figure is going to rely in part on subsidiary calumnies against his wife. I’ve got an article up on the New Republic site today that tries to place the attacks on Michelle Obama in a historical context of political spousal abuse, while examining the aggressive steps the Obama campaign is taking to respond, which I think will be successful.