Mad Social Scientist

Noam Schreiber has a nice point:

This has been bugging me since the debate last Thursday. The president keeps insisting there's no way to get more allies helping out in Iraq if you keep insisting the war was a mistake, as John Kerry does. ("I can imagine him walking into the leaders of the world saying, 'We need your help, but Iraq is a mistake,'" the president said yesterday.)

But isn't the reality exactly the opposite? Pretty much every potential ally in the world thinks Iraq was a mistake. As long as that's the case, don't you stand a greater chance of winning them over by acknowledging this rather than treating them like idiots? If I'm France or Russia, I'm going to be much more receptive to a pitch that says, "Look, we know we screwed up, but we need your help so Iraq doesn't become an even bigger problem than it already is." The alternative pitch--"Hey, everything's going great. We'd still do it the same way if we had it to do all over again. Oh, and by the way, would you mind kicking in a few thousand troops?"--doesn't strike me as so compelling.

Other stuff from the net: a thought-provoking essay on the nature of the Iraqi insurgency. The prez keeps saying they're a bunch of terrorists, end of story. I suspect that making peace in Iraq will require understanding a bit more about what the hell is going on.