It’s long and ambitious, so I haven’t yet had time to develop and write up any really intelligent remarks, but late last week the Princeton Project on National Security released its final report Forging A World Of Liberty Under Law. Take a look.

I would have thought this was simply obvious, but a few people at dinner thought it might be useful to make the point plainly. The Bush administration is considering airstrikes against Iran. Some people think the decision has already been made to do it. Most people think this isn’t totally clear, but some folks inside the government want strikes and may win the fight. The options being seriously considered all involve, basically, launching a surprise attack. This means, among other things, a war without any serious basis in domestic or international law. No UN resolution, no congressional resolution, just an order from the President to the relevant military assets. There’ll be vague gestures in the direction of this or that — the crew that’s argued the 9/11 Resolution repealed FISA and the 4th Amendment will argue that it authorized just about anything — but basically they’ll just be making shit up which isn’t at the end of the day, a novel situation for them to be in.

The War Powers Act states that “The constitutional powers of the President as Commander-in-Chief to introduce United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, are exercised only pursuant to (1) a declaration of war, (2) specific statutory authorization, or (3) a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.” Meaning, in other words, that simply launching an attack on Iran would be illegal. Dick Cheney has, however, argued for decades that the War Powers Act is unconstitutional, so this isn’t going to stop them. You’ll be able to file an after-the-fact lawsuit, if you like, but that’s not going to have much practical impact.

Roommate and TNR superstar Spencer Ackerman describes the Other Vietnam Syndrome:

It’s true enough that, for more than 30 years, the left has not infrequently suffered from “Vietnam syndrome”–the assumption that any military engagement will be a moral disaster and a potential quagmire. But, though it has been less examined, the lesson the right took from Vietnam–that the true danger to national security is not misguided wars, but overzealous opposition to misguided wars–is, if anything, more dangerous. Call it the Other Vietnam Syndrome.

Read the whole thing, as the kids say. I actually think there’s also a third Vietnam Syndrome, but that’s a story for another day.

I’m at Princeton talking about national security with various people smarter and more distinguished than myself. At the moment the topic on the table is John Ikenberry’s contention (also made by others) that the whole “war on terrorism” concept ought to be junked. I have genuinely mixed feelings about this; hoping to learn something from the assembled guests, but also would be interested to know what readers think.

“Whenever people asked me how I’d know if we’d won in Iraq,” writes Tom Friedman, “I said: when Salman Rushdie could give a lecture in Baghdad.”

Really? That was his criterion for victory? And he thought the war was a good idea? And he’s the country’s most-influential foreign affairs columnist? I’d best just stop reading things. Picked up (or, rather, stole from my roommate) White Noise on the advice of commenters — that’s a much more palatable brand of surrealism.

Ogged asks: “Isn’t the Say Goodbye to America bill about as unconstitutional as can be? I understand that there are ‘no judicial review’ provisions, but might not those provisions themselves be unconstitutional? Surely some clever lawyer could cook up enough standing to challenge the bill in court?”

There will certainly be challenges, but I wouldn’t count on anything. The court-stripping issue hasn’t been litigated all that much, but the idea that congress has the power to do this kind of thing has some real support from the text of the constitution. What’s more, courts are generally disinclined to interfere in national security questions. And, of course, there’s no particular reason to think that the Supreme Court’s five conservative justices disagree with America’s conservative politicians about this. You never really know what’s going to happen, but we have a political system for a reason . . . if people elect politicians who want to give the president the power to indefinitely detain and torture people on the basis of his say-so that they’re terrorists then the president is going to end up with the power to indefinitely detain and torture people on the basis of his say-so.

I was interested to see GregPStone in comments mounting the argument that assuming the Iranians are, in fact, trying to build a nuclear bomb whose purpose is to mount a suicidal unprovoked nuclear first strike constitutes “erring on the side of caution.”

There’s something to be said for caution, but that’s not what this is at all. Rather, it’s erring on the side of panic an approach that, stealing from Atrios, we might term the Depends Theory of International Relations. Running around constantly freaking out about everything, panicking, and fostering an atmosphere of paranoid alarmism isn’t cautious at all. It doesn’t make you safer. Primarily, it prevents you from focusing and setting priorities. It blinds you to real threats by diffusing resources and effort. It leads to mistakes, and imposes enormous costs. It makes it too easy for adversaries to throw you off your game at very little cost to themselves, while making it hard for friends and potential friends to trust you. It destroys your own credibility leaving you, eventually, alone in the corner covered in your own piss.

Real strength requires the United States to act like its strong, to act with some confidence in our basic capabilities, values, institutions, etc. To be able to use that confidence to calm down, set priorities, focus energies and efforts, and make sure we’re not running around wrecking what is, objectively speaking, a very favorable situation by global or historical standards.

Tony Blair says, “This terrorism isn’t our fault. We didn’t cause it. It’s not the consequence of foreign policy. It’s an attack on our way of life.” It’s disappointing to see Blair, who I really used to respect a lot, just peddling the same old demagoguery you might see on NRO or wherever else. It goes to show, I think, that there are only so many plays in the political playbook. Initiators of unpopular, doomed wars either need to fall on their swords or else start running the obfuscation end-around and you don’t get to become Prime Minister without having the sort of instincts that make you disinclined to fall on your sword.

This notion that in order to preserve the terrorists moral culpability for their atrocities we need to believe that their actions are somehow uncaused is daft. I’ll read now and again Rich Lowry or someone else talking about how, yes, we’re in a kind of global counterinsurgency situation but then you see the leaders they love so dear don’t understand the first thing about it. Their pundits don’t, either. David Brooks accuses his adversaries of falling prey to a Grand Delusion “that if we just leave the extremists alone, they will leave us alone.” But that is not what I meant, at all. That is not it. At all. To be sure, there are some implacable opponents out there who we’ll have to do our best to kill. But there are also lots of other people out there — placable opponents, young kids with unformed views, fence-sitters, whatever — and our actions do, indeed, play a role in whether or not they become implacable opponents. This matters. It probably matters more than anything else. And the domination of western politics by people who don’t understand that is going, one day, to get an awful lot of Americans killed.

Lorelei Kelley highlights the best statements of Democrats who’ve taken the right stand in the House of Representatives’ obscene torture debate. Notwithstanding their efforts, the administration’s pro-torture position prevailed by a depressingly-not-small margin of 253-168. Those Democrats running so scared of GOP attack ads that they’re willing to toss the constitution, basic morality, and common sense about effective interrogations overboard in a futile effort to convince the Republicans not to call them soft on terrorism sure do look “tough,” don’t they?

“Why,” asks Jeffrey Herf “would Roger Cohen, or the leaders of the Council on Foreign Relations think Ahmadinejad has not meant what he has said in public?”

Of all the alleged lessons of Munich, surely this is the dumbest one. What Herf has in mind here are Ahmadinejad’s statements about Israel being wiped off the map. But Herf certainly isn’t proposing to extend this “assume foreign leaders are always telling the truth” principle to Ahmadinejad’s claims that Iran’s nuclear program is entirely peaceful. And Herf is right not to extend it, but simply because it’s a dumb principle. Nothing in the actions — present or historical — suggests a desire to wipe Israel off the map that extends to a willingness to commit national suicide while trying. Similarly, Iran’s actions suggest a desire to either build a nuclear bomb or to create the capacity to build one very rapidly, primarily in order to deter the more powerful militaries (Israel, US, Pakistan) in Iran’s neighborhood.

New polls indicate that most Iraqis want US troops to leave Iraq, and generally see the presence of our forces as contributing to the country’s instability. One would think this would be considered an important data point in the ongoing forward-looking Iraq debate. On the other hand, this polling is consistent with all the polls I’ve seen for years now and it seems to have had very little impact on people.

For book research purposes, I’ve recently been re-reading Kenneth Pollack’s The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq. It’s an interesting experience. This passage appears on page 353:

The United States is not a rogue superpower determined to do what it wants regardless of who it threatens or angers. If we behave in this fashion, we will alienate our allies and convince much of the rest of the world to band together against us to try to keep us under control. Rather than increasing our security and prosperity, such a development would drastically undermine it.

I was thinking about that when I wrote my latest and very shrill column for TAP Online. It’s a much more polite commentary, but fundamentally I think John Ikenberry’s continuing work on the “Security Trap” concept is expressing the same idea.

The enduring popularity of France-bashing in the United States is a fascinating phenomenon. Nick Gillespie spies Marty Peretz getting the bug. What’s especially fascinating is the particular form of the contemporary France-bashing narrative, as reflected in Peretz’ post. According to this story, the USA differs from France in our greater eagerness to go to war and that this disagreement reflects superior wisdom on the part of the United States. Interestingly, neither prong of that narrative is supportable.

Obviously, there was an instance of France being unwilling to fight in a situation where the USA wanted to go in — Iraq, 2003. But here the French position — that Saddam’s WMD programs were not a serious danger, that a western occupation of an Arab country was likely to go poorly, and that such a war would hinger the fight against al-Qaeda — has been utterly vindicated. Other recent American wars — for Kuwaiti independence, against Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbia, agains the Taliban — were undertaken with French support. Before that, you had Vietnam where France fought Ho Chi Minh’s movement first, lost, then let us go make all the same mistakes over again. So French dovishness comes down to one war — Iraq, part deux — that France didn’t want to fight, and that France was right not to want to fight.

France’s “rep” for weakness and appeasement comes, of course, from World War II. But in 1938, France was the non-axis country most eager to fight Germany. Going to war without the support of England, the USSR, or the United States would have been a horrible policy. Once their British ally was on board, they fought. They lost, of course, but the contrast between France, the UK, and the USA in this regard is that France was located adjacent to Germany without a convenient stretch of ocean to block the Nazi advance.

I’m not going to deny that David Ignatius makes a legitimate point or two here, but what’s the deal with “Some extreme war critics are so angry at Bush they seem almost eager for America to lose, to prove a political point.” That’s a serious charge. Does Ignatius have evidence for it? No. Does he cite any examples? No. Does he name any names? No. I find it extremely frustrating that you’re allowed to toss off this kind of liberal-bashing without providing any backing.

This matters not because I doubt Ignatius could find someone or other who “seems” like he’s “eager” for America to lose. It matters because “extreme war critic” is such a vague phrase. For years, perfectly mainstream war critics — Howard Dean, Tony Zinni, Richard Clarke, Dick Durbin, Zbigniew Brzezinski — were portrayed as “extreme” and they still are on Mondays, Wednesdays, and alternate Saturdays. On the other hand, when I was in college there were these members of the Spartacist Youth League (or something) who would sit on the corner calling for the violent overthrow of the US government ranting and raving about North Korea’s inalienable right to nuclear weapons and the need to unify the peninsula under Pyongyang’s beneficent rule. No doubt those “extreme war critics” really do want to see America lose. But is Ignatius talking about crazy people who shout on streetcorners — in which case his observation is silly — or is he talking about meaningful participants in American politics, in which case it’s false? Well, I think, he’s talking about the former, but talking as if he’s talking about the latter.

Which is just to say that, once again, practitioners of the Higher Broderism can get away with saying just about anything about American liberals without needing to seriously support it. As long, of course, as what they’re saying is critical.