I know things are getting tougher for Joe Biden, but earlier today Atrios raised the other big about him, namely how is it that people who are “knowledgeable about foreign policy” seem to have had such a poor foreign policy track record for the past several years. Elsewhere in the article, after the Quotation of Doom, comes this paragraph:

Mr. Biden says that support for his Iraq plan is growing. The influential New York Senator Chuck Schumer has declared at various times that he supports the plan—albeit in an uncharacteristically quiet manner—as has Michael O’Hanlon, a prominent Iraq policy expert at the Brookings Institution.

O’Hanlon, though, is another Biden. A guy who’s “knowledgeable about foreign policy” but keeps getting everything wrong. It’s really too early to tell at this point, but for me one of the major questions looking at the primaries is going to be what indication we have of whether or not any of our presidential contenders is likely to find the Democratic Party a better group of “knowledgeable about foreign policy” people instead of relying on the same old strategic class types. If not, the wide open road of the future starts looking pretty narrow.

I said in this post that liberals should “keep our powder dry” in terms of Iraq stuff until the supplemental appropriation request comes down in a couple of months. I didn’t mean that in terms of avoiding criticism of the war or of the Bush administration. Rather, I meant liberals should keep our intra-party bickering powder dry. There simply isn’t an important practical difference between the different degrees of anti-warness that various politicians have staked out at this point. There will be important practical differences in terms of how people vote on proposed amendments to the supplemental request. That’s the time to start really worrying about what people are up to.

New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz writes:

If you buy today’s WSJ, you’ll also get a 3/4 of a page premium: Fouad Ajami’s dazzling essay on why the Sunnis are being defeated in Iraq, and why it is right that they should be. It’s my estimate that Saudi Arabia will accede to Shia dominion in Iraq; in any case, it hasn’t many options. It certainly doesn’t have battalions to fight it. Sunni Jordan has even fewer options, and it is not heroic. This is also the end of Egypt as a diplomatic intermediary. It has zero cards to play in Iraq. The Arabs know that increasingly it is standing on very wobbly knees. Soon, its nationhood will be questioned … and not just by me. Sunni Egypt can’t even function as a middleman between Israel and the Sunni Palestinians. But that gets me on to another subject.

What does this mean? Are we questioning the nationhood of Egypt or of “the Arabs”? And why are we celebrating the rise of Shi’a power in Iraq while simultaneously we’re in the grips of white-knuckled fear about Iran? Ajami’s article is no better — full of baffling, unsupported assertions. “Iraq’s Shia majority . . . has come to view the Palestinians and their cause with considerable suspicion.” Since when? Have we forgotten about this so quickly?

As you’ve probably heard if you follow the news at all, for the first time in nine months a suicide bomber has struck Israel, murdering three people in a bakery in Eilat. The Israelis had become quite good at blocking the infiltration of attackers from the West Bank through their use of checkpoints, a giant wall, restrictions on Palestinian movement, etc., but this guy came through from Egypt. What I don’t see in either that Times story or in The Washington Post‘s account is the effort to blame this on the enemy du jour, Iran. Fortunately, yesterday at 3:30 PM Eastern Time my inbox was hit with a press release from The Israel Project glossing the events thusly: “Iran-backed Terror Group Behind Attack in Eilat”. They note, accurately enough, that Iran provides financial support to Palestinian rejectionist groups including most notably Palestinian Islamic Jihad and then swiftly move to the Iranian nuclear program:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called for Israel to be “wiped off the map” and believes it is his duty to bring about an apocalyptic war that will usher in the 12th Imam, a Messiah-like figure of Shiite Islam. A group in Iran says it has recruited 25,000 people to carry out martyrdom attacks against the West, and Tehran is pursuing a nuclear program in defiance of the U.N. Security Council.

You may recall from the Iraq Debate that these kind of truthy charges about Saddam Hussein’s role as a sponsor of Palestinian terrorism played a prominent role. These are good talking points for the hawks because they have the virtue of — unlike many of their talking points — being firmly grounded in some actual facts. The purpose, clearly, is to get people to leap beyond the facts and believe either that Iran is likely to give PIJ/Hamas/Hezbollah a nuclear bomb, that “Iranian support for terrorism” means Iran is hell-bent on sponsoring terrorist attacks on American soil and may have been involved in 9/11, and to believe that Iran is the main cause of Palestinian terrorism. This last you may recall from the “road to Jerusalem goes through Baghdad” school of thought which held that with Saddam out of the way the Palestinians would suddenly fold and Israel could achieve that glorious combination of a stable peace deal without giving anything up they want.

Does the cognitive dissonance ever get to be too much? Bush warns Iran he’ll “respond firmly” if they interfere in Iraq! We’re honestly in full-on crazy mode, people — we have over 100,000 troops in Iraq and our government threatens to overthrow the Iranian regime every once in a while. Shockingly, the Iranians plan to fight back. Some people wonder why I’m so worried we’re going to get into a war with Iran. No doubt after we bomb we’ll be doubleplus outraged that Iran has the gall to retaliate.

Check this out. It’s so absurdly wrong that one can’t even say exactly what’s wrong with it. Roughly, he thinks that if he weren’t wrong, then he’d be right, and therefore he isn’t wrong.

Sure it’s amusing that some Finnish guy has written a novel comprised entirely of SMS messages but it’s the final graf of the AP story that has the real news: “Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen recently made tabloid front pages after reportedly having broken up with his girlfriend with a text.” That’s seriously cold. And mixed with Finland’s record of pro-Nazi and pro-Soviet foreign polices makes me wonder if we’re taking the Finnish threat seriously enough. It seems to be a country run by madmen. I was actually in the Helsinki Airport for an incredibly long layover once and it seemed frighteningly clean, even by Nordic standards.

Sebastian Mallaby contrasts McDonalds’ success at adapting to the rise of anti-McDonalds’ sentiment around the world with the way the United States just keeps becoming more and more hated:

But McDonald’s has changed in more appealing ways as well — ways that reflect the problem-solving grit of American business. It has listened to its health critics and adapted: It sold 304 million pounds of mixed greens in 2005, and the U.S. operation claims to be the nation’s largest purchaser of apples. The company has bent over backward to demonstrate its interest in the environment and animal welfare; it has teamed up with the University of Miami to improve conditions for tomato pickers and with Conservation International to acquire its fish sustainably. Meanwhile, the franchise has kept up with evolving tastes: It has revamped the easy-wipe decor; its coffee is less watery.

It’s a fair enough point, though government-to-business analogies are always problematic. Then Mallaby ends with a kicker. “American business succeeds in the world because it morphs, shape-shifts, learns from its mistakes; it is too paranoid, too anxious to please its customers, to stick with formulas that aren’t working,” he writes, “The question posed by last week’s BBC poll is whether American government can mimic that agility.” Well, what a nice center-right I-used-to-work-for-the-Economist way of putting things. Business good and nimble, government clumsy and inept. But of course the problem here isn’t that “American government” has proved reckless and stubborn and trashed America’s global image. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Stephen Hadley, etc. have done these things. They’ve ordered the unilateral invasions. They’ve ordered the kidnapping and torture and indefinite detention. They’ve abrogated the treaties and refused to sign the others. There’s not an abstract government problem here, there’s a concrete Bush administration problem.

Joe Lieberman says either Democrats fall in line behind George W. Bush or else he’s voting for John McCain:

“I’m open to supporting a Democrat, Republican, or even an Independent if there’s a strong one,” the U.S. Senator from Connecticut told “Fox News Sunday.” . . .

Asked about the current field of Democrat contenders for the presidency, all of whom have strong opposition to Bush’s Iraq policy, Lieberman said, “You make a decision based on a whole range of issues. But obviously, the positions that some candidates have taken in Iraq troubles me. Obviously, I will be looking at what positions they take in the larger war against Islamist terrorism.”

Do I need to go drag up all the times back in 2006 when Lieberman and his supporters urged Democrats not to make too big a deal out of disagreements on Iraq? I don’t necessarily think Lieberman is wrong about this. If I were in the Bush/Cheney/McCain Crazy Zone I’m not sure I could stomach voting for a reasonable candidate either.

In case you were wondering, here’s the Spartacist take on the Iranian nuclear issue:

Photo by Whiskeygonebad

More nuanced ideas are also available this fine weekend. Laura Secor’s excellent look at the Iranian political scene makes several points explicitly and I’d recommend you read the article yourself though you can also find Ogged’s take here. A couple of additional points are made implicitly by the article. One is simply that Iranian politics is complicated. It’s complicated institutionally, it’s complicated ideologically, and it’s complicated in terms of personalities and factions. The other point is that while you’d certainly rather live in a liberal democracy than under the Iranian political system, this is no kind of totalitarianism and the many people throwing that word around are just warmongering ignorantly.

The other must-read, via David Kurtz, is The Observer‘s look at the actual state of the Iranian nuclear program. It’s not so hot. Building nuclear bombs is hard. The Iranians don’t have access to the method materials, nor is the program funded as heavily as it might be. Right now, they aren’t making very much progress.

Poor Dick Cheney can hardly restrain himself:

Viewed from afar, the stuff inside Hagel looks like the stuff that makes Republican presidential candidates. He is a third-generation party member who grew up idolizing Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower. He says he was the only student in his Roman Catholic high school to support Richard Nixon over John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election—and when he cast his first vote, an absentee ballot from Vietnam, it was for Nixon’s winning ticket in 1968. His conservative credentials are impeccable: according to Congressional Quarterly, he voted with the White House more times in 2006 than any other senator. He is manly, Middle American—and when he talks about military matters, he exudes the cool confidence of a warrior-statesman who knows that war is hell.

But Hagel, who as of late last week was in the final stages of weighing a presidential run, is never mentioned in the top tier of Republican candidates for one, simple reason: since the initial buildup to the war in Iraq, he has assailed the Bush administration’s policy—in sharp words, in constant refrain and, most unforgivably, in public. His outburst last week was the culmination of a four-year campaign to raise public outrage about a war he’s always considered disastrous. His stance has earned him the enmity of the White House. Asked about Hagel last week in an interview with NEWSWEEK, Vice President Dick Cheney said: “I believe firmly in Ronald Reagan’s 11th Commandment: THOU SHALT NOT SPEAK ILL OF A FELLOW REPUBLICAN. But it’s very hard sometimes to adhere to that where Chuck Hagel is involved.”

Incidentally, I’ve always wondered did even Ronald Reagan adhere to this principle? What was happening during the ’76 primary? Isaac Chotiner raises the relevant point about Cheney: There doesn’t seem to be anyone in the White House powerful enough to prevent him from mouthing off in weird ways.

Oh, excellent, now Jonah Goldberg says I’m Charles Lindberg. Fantastic. See Ezra. I’ll cop to not actually knowing anything about the real historical record of Lindberg, but I take the point of the reference to be a not-so-thinly veiled effort to once again call Wesley Clark and myself anti-semites. One noteworthy thing about the way these debates unfold is that people taking the Jonah G. side of these arguments invariably twist people’s words around. Look back through this current controversy and you’ll see that I don’t accuse “the Jews” of having a pernicious influence on anything. If you do want to talk about “the Jews” as a class, we’ve had a beneficial impact on US foreign policy lately, voting in overwhelming numbers for congressional Democrats, putting Nancy Pelosi in the Speaker’s Chair and thereby somewhat restraining Bush’s poor national security policies.

The claim is that specific American Jews and the organizations they run and finance have had a pernicious impact on American foreign policy (these guys, say). Lots of Jewish Americans — Russ Feingold, M.J. Rosenberg, Eric Alterman — are trying to have a positive impact on American foreign policy.

As you can see here there have been some persistent attempts by someone at the Council on Foreign Relations to scrub the Max Boot Wikipedia page of some unflattering information. Boot, of course, is a fellow at CFR and a columnist for The Los Angeles Times. What information? Well, as you can read here on Altercation, what this is about is the fact that Boot is involved in some scandalously corrupt backstory. Before he was a prestigious military policy writer, Boot was simply a generic rightwing hack at The Wall Street Journal‘s hack-laden editorial page. While there he, among other things, wrote an editorial attacking public health officials that was edited by tobacco lobbyist Steven MIlloy.

The only reason we know anything about this is that it happens to have come up in tobacco-related litigation. It’s possible, in principle, that when Boot was writing rightwing regulatory policy journalism for the Journal he just so happened to let one of his pieces be edited by a lobbyist and that that piece just so happened to have come up in a lawsuit. Much more likely, however, is that he did this on various occasions and there just so happens to have been a lawsuit that uncovered this.

And now Boot, or someone working on his behalf, is trying to keep this incident hushed up. I wonder why he’s bothering. In case Boot hasn’t noticed, he’s a conservative. The rules of the media game are clear — no jobs for the left, no accountability for the right. Corrupt or not, Boot seems like a smart, perceptive guy . . . surely he’s picked up on this.

That’s an epistemology joke in the title, in case you don’t get it. That said, I read in my New York Times that “President Bush and his senior aides on Friday justified American actions against Iranian operatives inside Iraq as necessary to protect American troops and Iraqis, and said they would continue as long as Tehran kept up what they called its support for Shiites involved in sectarian attacks.” In this context, “actions” refers to killing people or else capturing them by threatening to kill them.

In large part, I think this shows the limits of the language of justification in considering the use of violence abroad. Whether or not US forces are justified in doing this or that depends on a whole variety of controversial questions relating to, among other things, the legitimacy of the very presence of American forces in Iraq. The real question here has to do with the wisdom of the policy. We learned in the Post yesterday, that “Advocates of the new policy — some of whom are in the NSC, the vice president’s office, the Pentagon and the State Department — said that only direct and aggressive efforts can shatter Iran’s growing influence. A less confident Iran, with fewer cards, may be more willing to cut the kind of deal the Bush administration is hoping for on its nuclear program.” This is, of course, a reminder that our country is being run by deeply unwise people who appear to ground their policies primarily on a series of staggering wrong assumptions about human behavior. No possible good is going to come of this. Meanwhile, I know plenty of smart people who insist to me that a military confrontation with Iran is unlikely even as one is unfolding before our eyes.