Insert Miracle Here - There's

Insert Miracle Here - There's a classic New Yorker cartoon showing a genius physicist (we know he's a genius physicist because he's wearing a lab coat and has unruly hair) has completely covered both ends of a chalkboard with a highly complex formula.

In the middle of the board, he's scrawled "Insert Miracle Here".

Another scientists, looking on, notes "I think I've found your problem..."

When it comes to foreign policy, I think I've found Howard Dean's problem. He's inserting a miracle into his formula. Several, really.

On All Things Considered last night, Robert Siegel interviewed the candidate. The transcript's not available (the audio is available on the ATC website).

His main claims re the Iraq war: Get Arab/Moslem troops to take over the occupation, and send the Guard and Reserve troops home ("they don't belong there anyway").

On the second point, one wonders if Dean knows how the US military is structured. After Vietnam, the military vowed that no future war would ever be "Us vs. them" again. The military from the eighties on has been designed so that, beyond the occasional special forces operation like Grenada, it can not carry out any significant operations without using the Guard and Reserve. This is both a cost-saving measure (the military rarely needs very specialized units like Civil Affairs, PsyOps and Water Purification groups - why keep them on the payroll fulltime?) and a political safeguard; when any significant operation requires the calling up of reserves and the Guard, it ensures Main Street will have a stake in the operation.

As to the first: this would play squarely into the hands of the terrorists. Moslem troops - even Moslem troops from nations that aren't intrinsically anti-American, like India, Morocco, Indonesia or the Philippines - would be every bit the target that the Americans currently are for the hard-liners holding out in the Baghdad Triangle. Historically, there is nothing more dangerous in the Middle East than to be a moderate Moslem - they tend to get knocked off before the Jews do. And any attack on troops from moderate Moslem nations would serve to drive a further wedge into the US' relations with these nations, and radicalize their own Moslem populations. Any bets on how long it'd take before someone in the Arab media started calling these troops "mercenaries for the Yankees and Jews?"

Whatever Dean's other attractions - and I'm not a Dean supporter, obviously - his take on Iraq is jaw-droppingly off-base.