Josh Marshall is, if anything, being significantly too generous to the attack Iran brigades in his answer to his third question “Would successful aggressive action against Iran materially improve our current situation in Iraq?” It’s obvious, I think, that aggressive action against Iran would make our situation in Iraq much, much worse. We can debate how much of what we see in Iraq today Iran is responsible for; I think it’s clear the administration is seriously exaggerating this, but it sort of doesn’t matter. What can’t be debated is that much more could be done. Shiite groups could be spending more time killing American troops. What’s more, Iran could be giving such groups much better weapons than they have today. As I’ve pointed out before, just look at Hezbollah, whose weaponry is vastly more sophisticated than anything we’ve seen in Iraq. If we start bombing Iran, Iran has at its disposal cheap, effective means of retaliating against US forces in Iraq.

Bombing Iran in response to alleged Iranian meddling in Iraq won’t help anything in Iraq in part, I think, because it isn’t designed to. Rather, the Bush administration thinks it can’t sell a second counterproliferation war against a Gulf country beginning with “Ira” because it’s just too absurd. Hence, it would be nice to gin up a casus belli with Iran that’s only tangentially related to the nuclear program. Not that bombing will help us with that problem either, but it’s at least widely believed that it will. I don’t think even the Bush administration is dumb enough to think that attacking Iran will help stabilize things in Iraq; the Iran-Iraq nexus is just a red herring designed to make it politically difficult to oppose what they’re doing.

Lots of people have noted Bill Kristol’s efforts to argue that 1858-vintage Barack Obama would have been a slavery supporter. The really noteworthy thing here, however, isn’t Kristol’s novel take on race relations, but his continuing effort to paint Abraham Lincoln as some kind of Kristol-style war enthusiast. Clearly, Lincoln was no pacifist, but nothing could be further from the truth. He was a staunch opponent of the Mexican War which he saw as driven by the political power of slaveholders and a desire to expand the same, rather than by the moral principles of international relations or a sound assessment of the national interest. Nor was he eager to embrace a military conflict with the South. He believed that slavery was a great evil, but also saw that civil war would be incredibly destructive, a great evil of its own. Lincoln opposed Stephen Douglas’ compromise-at-any-cost mentality that would merely serve to further entrench slavery. His hope, however, was to preserve the union peacefully and end slavery through the methods of the political process.

It’s harder to imagine anything more un-Kristolian than Lincoln’s reflections on all this in the second inaugural address:

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To be clear, the reason I say liberals should fear Mark Penn actually has little-to-nothing to do with Iraq. My strong guess is that Penn and I disagree about foreign policy, but that would just be inference based on the people and organizations he’s associated with; he doesn’t have a strong profile on the topic and I don’t really know what it thinks. The trouble with Penn is his monomaniacal insistence that what the Democratic Party needs to do is move to the right on economic issues in hopes of becoming more appealing to prosperous white men.

I’m not sure if Jon Chait’s 2002 Penn takedown is available to non-subscribers (maybe this works) but if so it should be read. Alternatively, this (PDF) from Ruy Teixeira makes many of the same points albeit at greater length. The “populism” debate inside the Democratic Party isn’t really my issue and I have mixed feelings about some aspects of it, but I think it’s fairly clear to everyone that relatively downscale white voters — especially, but not exclusively, women — who tend to have progressive views on many topics are where the electoral action is. I bet these guys like Penn’s ideas, though.