File this under “Things Known for Years by Those Paying Attention”:

Since the signing of the 2009 Security Agreement, we are guests in Iraq, and after six years in Iraq, we now smell bad to the Iraqi nose.

Those are the words of Col. Timothy Reese, a U.S. adviser to the Iraqi military, in the rarest of communications — a soldier suggesting that he and his colleagues should actually withdraw.

Pundits like Larison and Bacevich have been saying this for years; the former a “paleoconservative” and the latter a military expert of the realist school. And their overarching premise has been this: American pols have never undertaken to understand Mesopotamia, have little if any understanding of what drives these people, and can never be a real agent of change there as long as the goal is something as romantic as “liberation” or “democracy.”

Iraq never attacked us, and in fact does not play any sort of strategic role in the region; all along its borders are our allies, places with no organized ill intent toward us or any real ability to mount an offensive. It’s time to leave, and in fact it was never time to arrive.

From a column at The American Conservative:

Before either a President Obama or McCain sends 10,000 more troops into Afghanistan, he should conduct a review as to whether this war is winnable, and at what cost in blood, money, and years.

Afghanistan is the longest war in U.S. history. Why have we not yet won? First, because we lack the forces. In World War I, we put 2 million men in France in 18 months. In World War II, 16 million served, with 12 million in uniform at war’s end. Today, we have 31,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

Why so few troops? Because, despite what Americans say, few truly believe the survival of the Hamid Karzai regime is vital to our security or that we would be in mortal peril should the Taliban return. Indeed, Petraeus says we should seek “reconciliation,” presumably with the more moderate of the Taliban.

Wilfredo Lee/AP

Well, my first two predictions didn’t come true. But the third did: BORING.

Like I’ve said before, that’s just what these things are. Surprising to the pundits in the background are Palin’s saying she’d expand the vice presidency, her misnaming the commander in Afghanistan, her suggesting a U.S. embassy in Jerusalem (which apparently is way out there, but I’m no Mideast expert), and a senseless answer on climate change. Biden, meanwhile, could not form a sentence without the words “John McCain” in there somewhere.

The only time my interest was really piqued was when she said Obama-Biden want to “wave the white flag of surrender” by setting a date certain for withdrawal from Iraq, and then went on to say something to the effect of “We will leave when our commanders decide the Iraqi government can handle it.” Think about that for a second: In a place where we went in to get weapons of mass destruction unseat an evil dictator fight terrorists help set up a democracy — a democracy that the hawks say was necessary and one that now has an $80 billion surplus — America is going to decide when the sovereign nation of Iraq is sovereign enough to handle itself. If you were looking for “straight talk,” this is it, and it sounds absolutely insane (which is why even Bush has never said such a thing in such stark terms).

Overall, she cleared the low bar and Biden didn’t get in any real knockouts… which, ultimately, means she won.

Frank Rich at the New York Times picked up on an interesting little quirk of the McCain campaign:

Mr. McCain’s sorest Achilles’ heel, of course, is his role in facilitating the (Iraq war) fiasco in the first place. Someone in his campaign has figured this out. Go to JohnMcCain.com and, hilariously enough, you’ll find a “McCain on Iraq Timeline” that conveniently begins in August 2003, months after “Mission Accomplished.” Vanished into the memory hole are such earlier examples of the McCain Iraq wisdom as “the end is very much in sight” (April 9, 2003) and “there’s not a history of clashes that are violent between Sunnis and Shiites” (later that same month).

To finesse this embarrassing record, Mr. McCain asks us to believe that the only judgment that matters is who was “right” about the surge, not who was right about our reckless plunge into war. That’s like saying he deserves credit for tossing life preservers to the survivors after encouraging the captain of the Titanic to plow full speed ahead into the iceberg. [Bold mine — R.]