Yesterday I said I’d offer up some fuller thoughts on Kevin Drums notion that Democrats actually are in agreement about national security matters. One slight problem with Kevin’s view, I think, is that it comes with the proviso that only “if you take out, say, the Chomsky wing on the left and the Lieberman wing on the right,” then you find that “there’s a surprising amount that the rest of us agree on.” In part it gets a little tautological to say that if you take a political movement, then remove its dissident elements, what you’re left with is unity. That aside, though, there is something to Kevin’s notion. But also, I think, something wrong with it.

The unity he’s talking about has been purchased at the price of a great deal of vagueness. Now there’s always going to be vagueness coming from politicians who have an understandable desire to avoid getting themselves pinned down. Which is fine, politics is politics. But if you watch the community of non-politicians in the progressive camp, you’ll find people who do articulate more specific ideas. And while either set of ideas can be fitted into the same overarching framework of platitutdes, they’re genuinely different ideas. I thought one useful way of exploring this might be for me to talk a little bit about Peter Beinart’s book, The Good Fight. There are a few reasons for this. One is simply that the book took a lot of criticism from bloggers for what I think were sort of the wrong reasons. Another is that my book is going to be on a similar sort of subject, but is going to reach substantially different conclusions. Last, Beinart’s a good case precisely because he’s fully disavowed the Iraq War, but I think still falls on the “hawk” side of an enduring divide within mainstream liberalism so looking at his ideas is a good way of showing that disagreement isn’t just disagreement about Iraq.

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Neoconservative national policy analysis really only had one tune to play, albeit set to occassionally different beats. You need more force, and more will to use force. No matter what the circumstances. So Charles Krauthammer spins and whirls around the issue of withdrawal from Iraq. It turns out, though, that the country is in “A Civil War We Can Win.” If, that is, we have the will. But, of course, our national will won’t be enough:

Yesterday Maliki took over operational control of the Iraqi armed forces, the one national security institution that works. He needs to demonstrate the will to use it. The American people will support a cause that is noble and necessary, but not one that is unwinnable. And without a central Iraqi government willing to act in its own self-defense, this war will be unwinnable. [emphasis added]

How sweet it is. Another typical bit of analysis is that Krauthammer now advocates striking a compromise with the Sunni insurgency. He now sees this as essentially a group of rational actors on behalf of Iraq’s Sunni population looking for more money and political power. The sort of people who can and should be bargained with. This, of course, is the analysis of the situation you could have gotten from liberals one or two years ago. In time to do some good in other words. But that was at a time when Krauthammer was busy calling anyone who thought that appeasers and saying all we needed was the will to crush our foes.

Obviously, they don’t actively coordinate their activities, but I’d think it should be obvious that Bush and bin Laden have a synergistic relationship. OBL fairly clearly times the release of his videos so as to assist George W. Bush’s political career, presumably on the grounds that Bush’s policies generate the high levels of global polarization that can help a fringe group like al-Qaeda gain traction.