Michael Crowley, author of the best dissection of Hillary Clinton’s support for the 2002 Iraq AUMF (one of about a million TNR articles that seem to be missing from their web archives [UPDATE: here it is]), has a great new piece up about Barack Obama’s record on the war. Here’s the bottom line:

Many of the Clintons’ specific attacks on Obama are unfair distortions. But it’s also true that a close look at his Iraq record reveals more nuance than the Obama campaign acknowledges. It shows that Obama is cautious and pragmatic, hardly immune from political pressures, and sometimes prone to shading his rhetoric for convenience. But, ultimately, in substantive policy terms, he is also open to intellectual reexamination based on changing events. This may not be quite the Obama of the popular imagination, and it is certainly not the Obama of his own campaign ads. Nor is it, after 2002, substantially different from Hillary Clinton’s own course on Iraq. But it is no “fairy tale,” either.

I’m less interested, however, in the past for its own sake than I am in the past for what it makes possible in the future. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but I wrote a book, Heads in the Sand that will be out in April. It’s about the causes and consequences of the Democratic Party’s failure to present a coherent strategic alternative to the Bush foreign policy in the post-9/11 world.

One observation I make is that a record of support for the war resolution makes it difficult to present such an alternative. John Kerry, for example, would now and again start making a very compelling argument about Iraq as strategic distraction that undermined our ability to combat al-Qaeda. I remember watching the first Bush-Kerry debate with friends and the thrill that overtook the room at what I think was Kerry’s best moment of the entire campaign:

Jim, the president just said something extraordinarily revealing and frankly very important in this debate. In answer to your question about Iraq and sending people into Iraq, he just said, “The enemy attacked us.”

Saddam Hussein didn’t attack us. Osama bin Laden attacked us. Al Qaida attacked us. And when we had Osama bin Laden cornered in the mountains of Tora Bora, 1,000 of his cohorts with him in those mountains. With the American military forces nearby and in the field, we didn’t use the best trained troops in the world to go kill the world’s number one criminal and terrorist.

Unfortunately, this line of argument couldn’t really be made central to Kerry’s campaign because, after all, Kerry had voted for the war resolution and Kerry was so determined to rebut the flip-flopper charge that he didn’t dare just say he’d made a mistake. So he switched back over time to less compelling arguments about implementation, nitpicking about the details of the inspections process, etc.

Now of course there’s more to an alternative strategy than just that. There are several different questions in play — unilateral preventive war or multilateral arms control as the preferred method of pursuing non-proliferation policy, an ever-expanding “war on terror” or a narrowly focused campaign against al-Qaeda, an effort to coercively reshape political institutions throughout the Muslim world or an effort to distance ourselves somewhat from unpopular regimes, a full-throttle assertion of US military hegemony or an effort to use our power to build and sustain a liberal world order. But Iraq stands at the intersection of a lot of these issues, and it’s a lot easier to make the case for a different approach if you can credibly put distance between yourself and Iraq and, of course, having reached a different conclusion about Iraq is at least imperfect evidence that the person in question actually believes in a different strategy.

To tie this back to the campaign, Obama hasn’t yet said or done everything that I’d like to see him do by any means. He has, however, done some things. And he’s repeatedly suggested a desire to wage that kind of campaign against John McCain. Clinton, by contrast, has shown a real fondness for opportunistic digs and indicated that her view is that she’ll do better at arguing with McCain about security because she’s more hawkish. But both candidates have given some positive indications and some negative ones, and both of them can and should do more — the competition between them has been disappointingly free of anything even resembling an argument about doctrine. Thus far, though, Obama’s approach shows more promise, and their different stances are an important reason why.

Since I know a lot of people claim to be perturbed by Obama’s alleged lack of detailed, specific talk about policy issues, I’m sure all those people took the time to read his speech in Jamesville, Wisconsin on the economy but perhaps not everyone got the chance to take a look at the policy white paper (PDF) associated with the speech. The credit card bill of rights has a lot of appeal:

• Ban Unilateral Changes: Currently, credit card companies can unilaterally change the terms of a credit card agreement at any time for any reason with only a 15-day notice to the consumer. Barack Obama will ban these unilateral changes in credit card agreements unless companies have obtained written consent from consumers and have followed the rules and terms of the agreement.
• Apply Interest Rate Increases Only to Future Debt: Credit card companies often apply increased interest rates to both new debt incurred by the cardholder, as well as previously incurred debt. Barack Obama will require increased interest rates to apply only to future credit card debt, and not to debt incurred prior to the increase.
• Prohibit Interest on Fees: Credit card companies often charge interest on transaction fees, such as late fees or paying a bill by telephone. Barack Obama will prohibit credit card issuers from charging interest on transaction fees.
• Prohibit “Universal Defaults”: “Universal defaults” are a practice in which a credit card company raises an individual’s interest rate based on failure to pay a different creditor on time. Barack Obama will prohibit this practice.
• Require Prompt and Fair Crediting of Cardholder Payments: Barack Obama will require credit card issuers to apply payments first to the credit card balance with the highest rate of interest and to minimize finance charges.

But the most substantial proposal from the speech was probably the call for the creation of a National Infrastructure Bank, which I believe is based on a proposal Chris Dodd and Chuck Hagel made back in August 2007. It’s a good issue for Obama, since on one level it’s a kind of goo-goo process reform question about changing the way the budget works, but on another level it’s a very bread-and-butter question of sustaining the demand for workers in the construction sector and building infrastructure to keep America plugging along. Basically, it meshes well with his existing political persona but reaches out to a broader set of concerns than the ones his campaign’s usually been associated with.

When I read Michael O’Hanlon’s ornery remarks in The Washington Times this morning, I suppose I took it for granted that he didn’t also have a Wall Street Journal op-ed. I mean, I know the guy’s prolific, but how many conservative media outlets can he be in simultaneously? Well, I was wrong. The essence of the argument is that if Obama thinks that face-to-face meetings with foreign leaders will single-handedly solve all of America’s policy problems, then he’s sorely mistaken. This is, of course, true but O’Hanlon can’t be bothered to adduce any evidence that Obama does think this. After all, you’d have to be extraordinarily dumb to adopt the straw-man view that O’Hanlon’s attacking here.

Max Boot exhorts us to “ask yourself which presidential candidate an Ahmadinejad, Assad or Kim would fear the most” before observing that “the leading candidate to scare the snot out of our enemies is a certain former aviator who has been noted for his pugnacity and his unwavering support of the American war effort in Iraq.” Kevin Drum remarks:

Now, you might think that after seven years of trying exactly this, with only the current collapse in our fortunes to show for it, the neocon establishment might at least pause for a moment to wonder if there’s more to foreign policy than scaring the snot out of our enemies. But no. The real problem, apparently, is simply that the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld administration wasn’t good enough at it. Not bellicose enough. Not unilateral enough. Not warlike enough. What America needs is someone even more bloodthirsty than the crew that got us into this mess. Time to double down, folks.

The Boot view does provide a window into a fundamental mistake made by the right in its approach to foreign policy. He sees this domain as fundamentally zero sum. Syria, Iran, and North Korea are our enemies. Therefore, what’s bad for them is good for us. Therefore, if they’re frightened, we must be win. Therefore, if foreigners find John McCain frightening, he’s a good president.

The real world doesn’t work this way. If Saddam Hussein wasn’t frightened of George W. Bush and the United States of America in 2002, then he was making a big mistake. He had good reason to fear Bush, just as Iranians would have good reason to fear John McCain. The trouble is that international relations isn’t zero sum. Even America’s relationship with someone as odious as Saddam wasn’t zero sum. We were able to take action that was incredibly harmful to Saddam personally, and to the cause of his followers in Iraq, but it was also incredibly harmful to the United States. Another couple of rounds of conflict with enemies like Syria, Iran, and North Korea (and, hey, why not Venezuela, too) and we may not have any enemies left but we’ll still be weaker than we were before.