As the President readies himself to go to the map for his right to order torture in violation of America’s laws and international commitments, it’s worth putting this in some context. It’s extremely rare for the Bush administration to pick big fights with congress. When the House and Senate were preparing to send him a campaign finance reform bill he regarded as unconstitutional, he tried to get his allies to kill it. But when they couldn’t, he signed it. When it looked like congress might pass a patients’ bill of rights he tried — and succeeded — in getting House allies to kill it, but indicate that he would sign it if it passed. He hasn’t vetoed any bills. He comes from an ideological tradition nominally committed to small government, but has been willing to increase spending by leaps and bounds.

When it comes to this issue, though, no compromise can be brooked. Bush wants to order intelligence agencies to violate all the country’s traditions and several of its laws in order that they might torture people. To that end, he’s willing to say that if he can’t torture people he just won’t interrogate them at all. Abraham Lincoln, while suspending the writ of habeus corpus, wondered rhetorically, “shall all the laws go unenforced except this one?” Bush’s view seems to be something like the reverse. Unless the one law against torture goes unenforced, his plan is to let them all slide. Then something terrible might happen and we’ll all have learned our lesson.

Photo by Skuds

Daniel Benjamin and Michele Flournoy point out that we can’t send any more troops to Iraq because there aren’t any available. There are, of course, literally some additional soldiers hanging around who could be mobilized in a crisis, but at the moment all of the Army’s combat strength is either deployed abroad or else somewhere in the reconstitution phase. This is also the difficulty with the retrospective version of the “more troops” theory which holds the occupation force should have been much larger in the beginning. An operation tempo of that scale wouldn’t have been sustainable. Indeed, even the current tempo isn’t genuinely sustainable — it’s causing recruiting problems and deteriorating troop quality while seriously degrading the amount of available equipment.

I note that Fred Kaplan pointed this all out in June 2005, but nobody seems to have paid attention. Meanwhile, it’s unclear to me that more regular Army troops would do very much good. If you look at it, it’s our Special Operations Forces units who’ve really been able to make a difference but, naturally, such units are in rather short supply. Had we concentrated our energies on a single counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan — a context where we enjoyed more local, regional, and global legitimacy and were able to get some non-trivial assistance from allies — then we might well have had the manpower necessary to pull off a good one. But this stuff turns out to be genuinely difficult, whether in the aftermath of a well-founded war (i.e., Afghanistan) or an ill-advised one (i.e., Iraq) and it was really the hight of hubris to think we could just move on to a second mission while an important one was still incomplete.

Naturally, Charles Krauthammer thinks we should start a war with Iran. Why anyone would pay attention to the man who proclaimed Iran “months away” from a nuclear bomb in January I couldn’t say. There was also this hilarious moment in April 2003: “Hans Blix had five months to find weapons. He found nothing. We’ve had five weeks. Come back to me in five months. If we haven’t found any, we will have a credibility problem.”

So he has a credibility problem. And various reading comprehension problems. The Klein / Rosenfeld tag team at Tapped does a good job of demolishing most of this, but there’s more. Consider: “The mullahs are infinitely more likely to use these weapons than anyone in the history of the nuclear age.” Infinitely more likely than . . . Harry Truman? Just a little sloppy writing and foregetfulness, I imagine, but it’s still pretty bizarre to think that someone would be so slipshod with their own column in a widely read newspaper. It’s also, I think, indicative of a generally slipshod approach to the world, an inattention to detail and Krauthammer’s trademark casual disregard for the truth.

Peter Beinart’s right about this:

That doesn’t make Iran benign. But it does raise questions about whether the claim Arendt made about totalitarian regimes–that their messianic character made them inherently expansionist–fits Ahmadinejad’s, too. A war against Islamic totalitarianism has clear boundaries: It means a struggle against violent salafis. A war against Islamofascism does not, and that is precisely the point: It lets the Bush administration add enemies–first Iraq, now Iran–while implying that they share Al Qaeda’s ideology and represent the same kind of threat. That’s not true, and five years after September 11, it has left Americans increasingly confused about who we are fighting, and increasingly skeptical that we can win.

Quite so. My level of worry about a war with Iran, meanwhile, has just gone up several notches. Was speaking to what’s got to count as one of your more dovish Israeli politicians, someone eager to make peace with a genuinely independent Palestine that would have Jerusalem as its capital city, who kept saying repeatedly that he thought another war between Israel and Iran in the not-too-distant future is all but inevitable. Hezbollah, in his view, is nothing but a “commando division of Iran” and Hassan Nasrallah “is a division commander of Ahmadenijad.” He dismissed a question about a looming Iraq-Iran alliance by saying Iran is simply taking control of the government in Baghdad and that “this is another good reason to topple the regime in Teheran.” I suppose I see where he’s coming from, but a person who thinks that sort of regional dynamic is going to be — of all things — conducive to a comprehensive settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict isn’t thinking very clearly.

The Democrats’ strategy of trying to essentially hide behind the skirts of the handful of Republican torture opponents appears to be working, which I would have thought unlikely as of a couple of weeks ago. I do, however, wonder a bit about its wisdom. At the end of the day, the odds that Democratic candidates are going to pick up a lot of votes from strong torture advocates remains low, this gambit notwithstanding. Conversely, by relying on McCain et. al. to do the heavily lifting, Democrats are essentially denying themselves the possiblity of reaping whatever rewards may exist for standing up for basic decency and morality against Bush’s depredations.

What’s more, it seems to me that ducking national security fights involves some bad optics merely as such. A lot of doubts about Democrats and security issues have less to do with concrete policy than with essentially characterological concerns and if you worry that liberals are timid and easily frightened, well, then this is some fairly timid and frightened-looking behavior.

On the other other hand, however, I do continue to think that the tactical skills of the current Democratic legislative leaders have been largely underappreciated. As Amy Sullivan pointed out in the Spring, they’re actually pretty damn clever and effective considering the objective difficulty of operating as a minority party.