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.