Good on him — pissed off an AIPAC audience by noting that Palestians are suffering a lot under occupation. Gutsy. And, obviously, true. I was trying to think of the last time someone said something similar to a similar audience, but what I came up with was . . . Paul Wolfowitz, which isn’t the most flattering comparison.

UPDATE: Absurdly, meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi seems to have gotten booed for . . . observing that the Iraq War has failed. You would think pro-Israel advocates would be willing to recognize basic accurate facts about events in the region.

So this is pretty weird. Jim Henley did a post noting that Iraq doesn’t provide the best circumstances for whoring or making time with the local girls, wondering who, if anyone, American troops were having sex with. He handed the assignment off to Spencer Ackerman, who’s in Iraq at the moment. Coincidentally, Spencer was present for a meeting between an Iraqi police commander and a US army officer during which the Iraqi had the exact same question.

The official answer turns out to be that our troops aren’t having any sex at all, but it doesn’t seem especially plausible that this rule is being met with 100 percent compliance.

John Judis makes the point that none of the major presidential candidates have any real foreign policy experience. He also makes the argument that this actually matters, that the post-war presidents with relevant experience — Eisenhower, Nixon, H.W. Bush — managed to avoid the sort of early blunders that he says characterized other leaders:

John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton eventually enjoyed considerable success, but they began poorly–Kennedy in the Bay of Pigs, Reagan in Lebanon, and Clinton in Somalia, Tokyo, and the Balkans. Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush were disastrous flops, and Jimmy Carter (except for Camp David) floundered.

I’m not 100 percent sure on this. Carter, it seems to me, floundered more domestically than abroad. And in foreign policy terms floundered more later than early. His big triumph at Camp David came before his flounder-like handling of the Iranian Revolution. But I think there’s something to it. Inexperienced candidates tend to make reference to the fact that they’ll be backstopped by veteran advisors and professionals which is, of course, true. The trouble is that what inexperienced presidents-elect normally do is decide that they want to keep their options open and parcel out the top jobs such that all the major strains of thought present within his party are represented at a high level. This, in turn, tends to lead to some of the floundering. People with conflicting visions get appointed because the president doesn’t have a clear vision of his own, and then the president approaches his early big decisions as a personnel management issue (how do I keep the whole team on board) rather than figuring it out.

I think there’s potentially a real problem here. A Democrat taking office in 2009 is going to face an ongoing national security crisis — call it “the Bush administration legacy” — from Day One. And, unfortunately, it’s not going to be possible to just press a button and undo it all.

National Association of Evangelicals says:

The NAE board endorsed “An Evangelical Declaration Against Torture: Protecting Human Rights in An Age of Terror.” The 18-page document, which was produced by Evangelicals for Human Rights and can be viewed at www.evangelicalsforhumanrights.org, states: “From a Christian perspective, every human life is sacred. Recognition of this transcendent moral dignity is non-negotiable for us as evangelical Christians in every area of life, including our assessment of public policies. We write this declaration to affirm our support for detainee human rights and opposition to any resort to torture.”

The document affirms the doctrine that “United States law and military doctrine has banned the resort to torture or cruel and degrading treatment. Tragically, documented cases of torture and inhumane and cruel behavior have occurred at various sites in the war on terror, and current law opens procedural loopholes for more to continue. We commend the Pentagon’s revised Army Field Manual for clearly banning such acts, and urge that this ban extend to every sector of the United States government without exception, including our intelligence agencies.”

That’s via Mark Kleiman. The full statement is here in PDF. The NAE board also recently flipped off Dobson et. al. when they tried to excommunicate a newer generation of leaders who decided to stray from some elements of Republican Party orthodoxy. And good for them. The correlation in this country between observant Christianity and political support for agenda of aggressive warfare, torture, etc. has been notably dissonant in recent years. Now, perhaps, things are turning around.

Good post from Eric Martin. Good joke from Jim Henley: “Eric Martin discovers a curious fact: if locals bomb foreign troops when there are no American reporters around to hear it, it still makes a guerrilla war.” The point being that conquering foreigners and reconstructing their political arrangements is objectively difficult, and not just something rendered hard by the liberals in the MSM.