“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.