David Greenberg writes: “At a time when sympathy for Israel’s plight increasingly comes from the right, many of the signatories are liberals or leftists who remind us that supporting the Jewish state is fundamentally a liberal position, even when its government veers farther to the right than many of us would like.”

I’m a little baffled by this ambiguity-ridden claim. I’m not really sure what it means (“support” in what sense?), but I’m having trouble coming up with interpretations that make it non-trivial yet defensible. Liberals should refrain from criticizing Israel when its policies veer too far right? Should criticize Israel but not too stridently? Should oppose efforts to cajole Israel into ending policies that are too far right? Should support the view that Israel is entitled to $3 billion per year of taxpayer money irregardless of the merits of Israeli government policy? Obviously, the question of which Israeli policies do and do not veer unduly far to the right is a controversial (to say the least!) topic, but I should think the meta-level issue here is easy — Israel should be supported by liberals insofar as the things Israel does are worthy of support.

When the going gets tough, George W. Bush digs deeper into the cocoon of ignoramous conservative journalism, hunkering down for a lengthy chat with die-hard administration loyalists from inside the print media universe. As Mike Crowley notes, you can’t get this much raw transcript of Bush without a good dose of hilarity. You also can’t get this much Bush without noticing that, like Rick Santorum, the President of the United States is conducting national security policy under conditions of truly frightening ignorance and dangerous analytic errors.

Here’s Bush on the Israel-Lebanon War: “Iran empowered Hezbollah, Hezbollah takes the attack, and – which creates an interesting dynamic, and it gives us an opportunity to fashion kind of – an alliance of reasonable people headed toward a clash – all kinds of different ways, by the way – with extremists and radicals.” It’s easy to get distracted by the fact that Bush doesn’t seem familiar with the English language and miss the fact that beneath the garbled syntax Bush is making a clear — and utterly incorrect — factual claim here that the upshot of the war was to cement an alliance between the United States, Israel, and moderate forces in the Arab world.

He calls John Abizaid “one of the great thinkers” and attributes to him “this construct: If we leave, they will follow us here . . . As a matter of fact, they’ll be more emboldened to come after us. They will be able to find more recruits to come after us.” He seems unaware that his National Intelligence Council has concluded the reverse (IISS in London, too, along with, I think, just about everyone). In a hilarious reprise of his earlier Lebanon remarks he enjoins the government of Syria: “do not destabilize Siniora . . . helping the Siniora government is in this country’s interests and it’s a priority.” We, um, had our local proxy ally strangle the Lebanese economy and launch airstrikes against its basic infrastructure and military facilities, but stabilizing the government there is a priority?

It goes on and on like this. The President, it seems to me, entered office in January 2000 utterly ignorant of foreign affairs and has spent the past six years filling in the blanks with pleasant illusions and straight-up misinformation.

It’s outside his normal bailiwick, but I think Paul Krugman’s analysis of our twin failures in Iraq and Afghanistan is likely right. We don’t have nearly the requisite level of resources to succeed in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Afghanistan is not, however, yet as bad as Iraq and it’s possible that if we left Iraq then we’d have enough manpower to succeed in Afghanistan — especially when you consider that we’re not ally-less in Afghanistan, and one can imagine that if we agree to do more there we might also be able to secure additional assistance. Insisting on maintaining anything resembling our current commitment to Iraq, however, is just going to guarantee failure in Afghanistan without producing anything useful in Iraq.