Yet another serving from BTN‘s video horn o’ plenty. He’s talking about the Reed-Levin resolution but this is also the easy critique of B-H, the one most Americans can instantly grasp: if, as the left rightly says, it’s often difficult to tell whether someone’s aligned with Al Qaeda in Iraq or one of the native (especially Salafist) insurgent groups, what sense does it make to limit the mission of combat troops to targeting AQI? For every instance in which they end up targeting a genuine AQI jihadi, there’ll likely be another instance of them targeting some other group erroneously and still another instance of them having to sit by and let a massacre play out because they know it doesn’t involve anyone from AQI and hence is beyond the scope of their mission.

I doubt U.S. troops would tolerate that, so what you’ll end up seeing is U.S. troops intervening in sectarian clashes as they see fit and then attributing them to AQI afterwards to justify the intervention. Like Stephen Biddle says, if you’re not going to commit to victory, don’t half-ass it. Just get out.