I was turned on the other day to the fact that Time Magazine‘s Tony Karon has a blog about foreign affairs, Rootless Cosmopolitan. It’s really good. Good enough that a ten day old post on the subject “What’s Iraq Actually About Now?” is very much worth your time. It’s an excellent question to ponder when you hear debate about whether or not the surge is “working” — working to do what? And why?

At any rate, if Time were smart they’d incorporate this content into their Middle East blog, though I think you could safely classify a lot of Karon’s posts as “Too Hot for Time.”

As you’ll recall, back in December, the government of Ethiopia made conservatives across the land happy by proving that if you put aside liberal qualms, it’s easy for foreign invaders to crush a domestic Islamist movement. Or something: “Artillery fire rocked Mogadishu on Saturday as Ethiopian and Somali troops launched a third day of a major offensive against Islamist insurgents and clan militiamen that has killed scores of civilians.” Alternatively, nobody likes a foreign invader.

I’ve gone back and forth on this a bit, but John Judis has me convinced that Hillary Clinton’s forward-looking position on the Iraq War is worse than the alternatives. First, her position:

As she recounts in her interview, her solution to Iraq rests partly on a “very vigorous diplomatic effort on the political front and on the regional and international front.” This would include “a track with Syria and a track with Iran.” But the main part of the strategy would be its military dimension. While Clinton does not favor having U.S troops intervene in an Iraqi civil war, she would retain a significant force in Iraq. This force would try to “contain the extremists,” “help the Kurds manage their various problems in the north,” “provide logistical support, air support, training support” to the Iraqi government, and try “to prevent Iran from crossing the border and having too much influence inside of Iraq.”

Clinton’s idea of a residual occupying force goes well beyond that of the recent Senate resolution. The resolution provides for a “limited number” of troops after the pullout date, which would be devoted to training and to “targeted counterterrorism operations.” By contrast, Clinton’s force would have larger geopolitical responsibilities, including the restraint of Iranian power. Clinton says she doesn’t know how many U.S. troops her plan would require, or how many military bases would be required to house them. But Michael Gordon and Patrick Healy, who conducted the interview, noted that former Pentagon comptroller Dov Zakheim, who has developed a strikingly similar plan, estimates that 75,000 American troops would be needed to carry his plan out. That’s about half of the current force stationed in Iraq.

Initially, Clinton’s plan differs from what Bush is doing. While Bush is still seeking victory over Iraqi insurgents, Clinton would withdraw from urban centers and from the civil war that is raging. But in its broader objectives, Clinton’s plan is not dramatically different from that of the Bush administration. The White House certainly isn’t expecting to maintain 160,000 troops in Iraq indefinitely, but it is planning a long-term occupation anchored in what the Pentagon has described as “enduring bases.” As Spencer Ackerman has shown, it continues to construct these huge, imposing bases. Clinton’s residual army, like Bush’s, would not merely provide training to the Iraqis in the manner, say, that some European countries have done. The remaining force would have a larger geopolitical mission of keeping Iraq in the American orbit and away from either Al Qaeda or Iran. Their presence in bases would be reminiscent to that of the forces that the United States stationed in Cuba after 1901 or the British stationed in Iraq after 1921– after they had abandoned colonialism for an informal imperial approach.

I think the right thing to say is that the consensus Democratic plan, and variants on it like Barack Obama’s proposal, are consistent with Clinton’s more-spelled-out vision, but not the same as it. The literal text of Obama’s proposal, in short, doesn’t rule out something as grandiose as what Clinton’s proposed, but it also doesn’t commit him to it and there’s no particular reason to think that he or Edwards or anyone else means the same thing that Clinton means. The alternative:

Similarly, if the United States wants to bring stability to Iraq and to the region, it will have to forego any hint of an imperial ambition inside Iraq . This means dismantling its military bases and allowing the Iraqis to develop their own oil industry. It will have to subordinate its military to its diplomatic policy and focus on getting Iraq’s neighbors to take responsibility for stability in the region and for marginalizing Al Qaeda–an objective on which Jordan, Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia should be able to agree. It’s not clear if the U.S. will be able to assemble a multinational force that could carry out training and combat terrorism. But as American experience has already shown, a necessary condition of assembling such a force will be a commitment by the United States to cease playing the role of a dominant occupying power.

Many policy experts in Washington, including Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, favor this kind of approach. It enjoys adherents at most of the left-center think tanks. But it has not been embraced by Capitol Hill and the White House. Only two presidential hopefuls, retired General Wesley Clark and Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel, clearly support it, and neither of them are declared candidates. The leading Republican candidate, Senator John McCain, favors an even more extreme version of Bush’s policy. (If Clinton is Bush lite, McCain is Bush heavy.)

Right. Edwards and Obama right now are pretty light on where they stand as to these questions, but I’d sure like to know.

Later, in the same Robin Toner article that I linked to before:

The broader question is whether the war forges an enduring change in the Democratic Party, its stance and its credibility on national security. Many strategists are already warning that over the long haul, it is not enough to be antiwar: the Democrats need a strong, affirmative vision of foreign policy.

“If getting out of Iraq defines entirely who the Democrats are on national security, then over the long run, it will be a disaster,” said Matt Bennett, a co-founder of Third Way, a moderate Democratic group. Rather, Iraq needs to be part “of a larger strategy aimed at showing how to protect America’s national security interests,” he said.

Bennett’s right. But here’s the thing. If Toner had called me up and asked for my view on this question, I might have said something about the Democrats’ larger national security mission instead of talking about how someone should talk about this. Who’s going to talk about it if not those Democrats who the newspapers deign to quote? I can talk about it. I can even link to Matt Bennett’s press release about his group’s “constriction” strategy against al-Qaeda. But the only way for Democrats not to be defined entirely by opposition to the war is for the Bennett’s of the world to say the things they think need to be said instead of saying that someone should say those things. If not Bennett, who? If not now, when? Quotations in major newspapers are a precious commodity; there’s no point in wasting that space on not-very-original meta talk.

UPDATE: Audio recording of Wallace Stevens reading the poem available here.

What to do if Bush vetos the supplemental that includes a withdrawal deadline? I don’t think it’ll be viable for the Democrats to just get into a game of chicken with the White House over this issue at this time. So I’d say congress should pass a “clean” supplemental that Bush’ll feel compelled to sign, but one designed to last a lot less than a full year. Three months, as proposed by Reps. Cardoza and Ross, seems like a good choice to me. That way in three months time, with public opinion even more against Bush and against the war, he needs to come back and ask for more money. Then Democrats pass another supplemental with a withdrawal provision. If Bush vetos again, then give him another three months eventually.

The point is to try to generate as many votes on this as possible. Either at some point we’ll start seeing significant GOP defections (which is the best hope for ending the war while Bush is still president) or else at a minimum GOP incumbents will need to keep casting votes for perpetual war and set themselves up for defeat in 2008.

Robin Toner: “[Congressional Democrats'] aggressiveness and unity on a major foreign-policy challenge to the president is a striking change for a party that has, on many occasions over many years, seemed to be on the defensive on national security issues.”

To me, this is huge. National security is like trying to get a date: confidence matters. A political party that often looked scared of talking about national security (“but what if Rove says we’re weak?!?!”) looked like people who certainly weren’t going to handle any potentially scary problems. It’s a lot easier to seem like a tough, confident political movement in possession of some good ideas when your people are out there saying things they seem to actually believe, instead of offering up a lot of hemming and hawing.

Richard Bush and Michael O’Hanlon offer the following guidelines “that should inform Chinese and American leaders if they found themselves in the early stages of a military conflict” over Taiwan in their forthcoming book, A War Like No Other: The Truth About China’s Challenge to America:

• Not to expand the geographic scope of any U.S.-PRC fight beyond Taiwan’s immediate vicinity, with a particular effort to avoid attacks on mainland China, Japan, and Guam (or the territorial waters surrounding them).
• Not to escalate to general conventional war (with possible attacks on command and control sites or other facilities near Beijing, Honolulu, San Diego, and so on).
• Not to fire (even conventionally) upon the other major power’s nuclear forces.
• Not to ready nuclear weapons for use.
• Not to use nuclear weapons in any way, even against ships or isolated land bases or (via high-altidude bursts) against electronics.

As should be clear from the nature of the discussion, the authors, despite the title, don’t actually believe that China’s “challenge to America” is especially profound. Rather, they worry that China might “challenge” America by seeking to exercize de facto control over the entire extent of China’s de jure territory.

UPDATE: I’m not saying it’s a bad idea to try to preserve Taiwanese autonomy from the PRC, which is certainly a complicated issue (see here for the case for abandonmnet). Nevertheless, this simply isn’t an instance of a Chinese challenge to America (we derive no tangible benefits whatsoever from Taiwanese autonomy). There’s a Chinese challenge to Taiwan and the possibility of an American challenge to Beijing on behalf of Taiwan.

My previous effort at Québec-blogging got bogged down in a discussion of conquering Atlantic Canada, so I didn’t get to return to my core point which was not to be an apologist for the Parti Québécois but simply to note that the ADQ, not the PQ, is the worst of the province’s three parties. I stand with John on this:

It’s so rare for Canadian politics to make it out of the Canadian-blogging ghetto, so let me grasp this moment while I can… I have to say, I’m not nearly as optimistic as Scott Lemieux when he says “Ah, you always have to like it when the ethnic nationalist secessionists finish third.” The ADQ — the party that pushed the overtly-secessionist Parti Quebecois in to third place — is actually chock full of ethnic nationalists (and plenty of other nasty characters besides) and has more than one secessionist in its ranks, though I’m not sure if any one member actually combines both sides. In contrast, the PQ in this election was actually led by a gay man whose aim was to try and present a more multicultural, tolerant view of Quebec’s traditionally racist separatist movement.* He lost votes to a party with a candidate who denied the Rwandan Genocide took place. So yes, ethnic nationalism in Quebec — from which the secessionist impulse flows — did very well this week, at the expense of a more progressive vision of Quebec society.

Right.

Readers alerted me to this Zbigniew Brzezinski appearance on The Daily Show which I found both amusing and informative, like a fake news segment should be.

His arguments are by no means entirely original, but they’re ones that have gotten stunningly little purchase within the realm of establishment figures who get taken seriously by politicians looking for advisors, staff, etc. A former National Security Advisor ought to carry some weight and credibility in this town, but to a shocking extent the mere possession of relevant credentials and good ideas doesn’t actually get you very far in terms of being able to influence the establishment in question.

Greg Sargent does some worthy pushback against the growing media spin that Barack Obama may be “all style and no substance.” The grain of truth that this lie is spun out of is, of course, that as of March 28, 2007 Barack Obama does not have anything resembling a detailed plan for national health care policy. Sargent notes that he has, however, given two major speeches on foreign policy issues.

I would also note that the education section of his issues page contains two substantive and somewhat distinctive policy ideas along with a fairly commonplace-for-a-Democrat higher ed proposal. Obama’s “health for hybrids” plan is certainly a policy idea. Obama’s been working on the Senate on some dull homeland security topics and while one hopes that nobody ever gets credit for having sponsored the legislation that made a terrorist attack on a chemical plant something that killed dozens rather than thousands, I’m glad someone’s minding this topic.

Returning to health care, the relevant section of his website is thin on what you’d traditionally call health care policies. To fill it out, they had to shoehorn in something about fighting the problem of AIDS in the developed world and of protecting children from lead poisoning. Those are, however, real issues and Obama has real policies on them. Meanwhile, for the core health topics let’s just note that it’s late March 2007; all of the candidates have some issue-areas they haven’t yet addressed.

I hadn’t realized that Zbigniew Brzezinski had a new book out. It did, however, spark a great David Ignatius column noting that “Brzezinski was right about Iraq, warning early and emphatically of the dangers of an American invasion at a time when most foreign policy pundits (including this one) were, with whatever quibbles, supporting President Bush’s decision to go to war.”

Brzezinski paid a price for being outspoken — he was excluded from some of the inner circles frequented by former national security advisers who don’t rock the boat. In this respect, Brzezinski’s cranky outsider status served him well (and the uber-insider status of his life rival, Henry Kissinger, proved something of a hindrance for the former secretary of state). So on matters of foreign policy, we should listen especially carefully to what Brzezinski has to say.

James Lindsay is somewhat less impressed but still offers some serious praise. “What Second Chance does offer is a wise insight that should guide any effort to fashion a strategy to restore American leadership . . . if the United States is to avoid becoming the target of their resentment, its foreign policy must be seen as serving their interests as well as its own. That means exercising self-restraint rather than pressing every advantage that comes to a superpower; it means listening to others and not just working to preserve our own peace and prosperity but helping others to build their own.”

Britain steps up the pressure on Iran and releases some fairly convincing evidence for the claim that its sailors were in Iraqi waters when the Iranians seized them. I’ve learned, of course, to treat these sort of official claims with some skepticism, but that applies to Iran’s counter-claims as well, so I don’t really know where it leaves you.

For a while, I was of the “let’s stop coddling Musharraf and get serious about democracy!” school of thought with regard to Pakistan. Then that came to seem a little silly and naive to me. More recently, my internal pendulum is swinging the other way. Blake Hounshell has an article on this that, I think, nicely spells out the biggest problem here:

[Rep. Gary] Ackerman worries that if Musharraf is forced out, be it by politicking military generals or via genuine elections, the United States will be left friendless. Hasan-Askari Rizvi, a visiting scholar at John Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, has a different concern. With the United States being seen as supporting Musharraf’s actions, “any anti-Musharraf agitation also takes on an anti-American shape,” even among groups not especially opposed to U.S. policies in the past.

Of course it’s both/and, not either/or. And this, really, is what went awry in Iran. Having decided that any alternative to the Shah was likely to be worse for us than the Shah, we backed the Shah, which had the effect of making us even more dependent on the Shah as we had no other points of entry into Iran and all other political currents became increasingly hostile to the United States. But nothing lasts forever. America’s policy to Pakistan can’t just be one man; and especially not when unvarnished support for that man cuts us off from any ability to work with other potential leaders — some of whom are essentially destined to become more important in the future. We don’t even really need to support democracy, as such, though democracy is a good thing. The point, rather, is that we need to orient our Pakistan policy around Pakistani policies — enduring ways in which we’d like Pakistan to help us, and enduring ways in which we are prepared to help Pakistan in exchange rather than around transient personalities.

It looks like the Iraq supplemental will pass the Senate with strings attached, laying the groundwork for a furious spinning battle once Bush vetoes the supplemental. It’s interesting that as best I can tell both parties think the veto battle will help them. Brian Beutler helps explain what happens legislatively after a veto.

Let me just say that while I think the legislative tactics in play here are clearly very important to the future of the country, political gamesmanship of this kind isn’t something I feel I can make especially enlightened judgments about so I may write less about this question than its objective importance in some sense merits.

UPDATE: Santamonicamr notes in comments that this appears to have been the long-awaited moment when Chuck Hagel stops complaining and actually does something — breaking with the GOP and voting the right way on the amendment.