I want to say something about Undersecretary of State Nick Burns’ presentation on Iran policy which I attended this afternoon, but for now just follow along with Spencer Ackerman’s points that Burns says it’s now US policy that al-Qaeda is less important than Iran and his willingness to go beyond the president’s claims about the Iranian government’s culpability for weapons getting into Iran. Meanwhile, here we have Hillary Clinton following the precedent that’s been set by Harry Reid and some other Democratic leaders in staking out a clear stance on presidential authority to initiate a war with Iran:

It would be a mistake of historical proportion if the administration thought that the 2002 resolution authorizing force against Iraq was a blank check for the use of force against Iran without further Congressional authorization. Nor should the president think that the 2002 resolution authorizing force after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 in any way authorizes force against Iran. If the administration believes that any, any use of force against Iran is necessary, the president must come to Congress to seek that authority.

As a matter of politics, optics, etc. I like to hear this kind of thing from our major Democratic legislators. As a citizen concerned about the course of events in the world, the problem is that I continue to think it’s false. The War Powers Act grants the president authority to initiate hostilities against anyone he likes for a period of sixty days. The Clinton administration’s Department of Justice, meanwhile, took the view that, by granting the Clinton administration’s request for an emergency supplemental appropriation for military operations in Kosovo, congress had implicitly authorized the continuation of hostilities after the sixty day time frame. The Bush administration, for obvious reasons, is unlikely to take a more restrictive view of presidential power in this regard than did its predecessor. Meanwhile, congress is very unlikely to refuse to grant a supplemental appropriation to continue hostilities if they are initiated — just look at their view on providing supplemental appropriations for Iraq.

UPDATE: Sorry, my initial effort to cut-and-paste what Clinton said went a bit awry and I had her saying the wrong thing. The correct line is up there now.

UPDATE II: Okay, as Henley points out, the War Powers Act actually requires “a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.” Obviously, the administration is already laying the groundwork for a suitable predicate along these lines with this IED business. Which, when you think about it, is more than Clinton bothered to do in Kosovo.

One thing I worry about on the Iraq issue is that the anti-war side has tended to be fighting with one hand tied behind our back. People mostly try to be relatively honest about the fact that leaving Iraq is not likely to produce a particularly happy outcome, people who nominally agree with us about the policy write columns saying we’re still being too cozy, and meanwhile on the other side people just make up all kinds of crazy lies. It’s a difficult way to win an argument. So I’m glad Robert Dreyfuss went and wrote up (via Kevin Drum) the optimist’s guide to leaving Iraq since, as he says, “If it was foolish to accept the best-case assumptions that led us to invade Iraq, it’s also foolish not to question the worst-case assumptions that undergird arguments for staying.”

Fundamentally, I don’t think anyone really does or can know what will happen when we leave. I personally tend to be a pessimist as a general matter and would put my bet on a fairly poor outcome if you made me. But things also could go not so bad. In particularly, the widely held view that you’d see a Saudi Arabia versus Iran proxy war inside Iraq strikes me as unsupported. Just over the past few months those two countries have been working together to try to prevent violence and disorder in Lebanon and there’s no particular reason to think they couldn’t do the same in Iraq.

I think the only time I’ve ever mentioned Roger Cohen on this site was to complain about something, but today’s piece about why it’s time for “an end to uncritical American support of Israel, a real push to persuade Olmert to engage with Abbas, enough boldness to reach beyond the details to a vision of what is needed to bring a Palestinian state into being.” A minor emendation would be that Cohen says “the Democrats who now control Capitol Hill have shown little inclination to debate a related subject, Israel and Palestine, where a shift in American policy at a time of fluidity could make an important difference.” The truth is in some ways better and in other ways worse. The House Committee on Foreign Affairs’ Middle East Subcommittee is having a hearing today on the “Next Steps in Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process.” The trouble is that the subcommittee’s arranged for the roster of witnesses to be former AIPACer Martin Indyk, David Makovsky from WINEP, and Daniel Pipes.

On the other hand, as Daniel Levy points out there are some positive developments as well that people could lend their support to:

Rep. Susan Davis (D-CA) has introduced House Resolution 143 urging the President to appoint a Special Envoy for Middle East Peace. H. Res. 143 has already attracted a number of co-sponsors, including Jewish members and Congress’ only Muslim member. (Co-sponsors include Blumenauer (D-OR), Ellison (D-MN), Klein (D-FL), McCollum (D-MN), Schiff (D-CA)). H. Res. 143 includes a lot of sensible language such as “it is directly in the national interest of the US to reengage both sides…a lasting peace…will reduce tension in the region…help repair America’s image in the international community…and help reduce Iranian influence in the region” (Read the full resolution here and for the APN campaign see here).

That would be good.