To be clear; I’m very, very, very eager to see the Iraq War ended. That said, I think the netroots has tended to put too much emphasis on the ins-and-outs of things like today’s failed Senate resolution. Realistically, there are two ways the war might end. One would be the election of a president determined to end the war. The other way would be if you had 67 Senators and 290 members of the House willing to back a bill demanding the war’s end and overriding Bush’s veto

Suffice it to say, that neither timid Democratic Party leadership nor the Blue Dog Caucus, though both — and especially the latter — are annoying, is the main impediment to that happening. Rather, it will happen when 17-18 GOP Senators (I dunno the House math) worry that they are going to lose their seats unless they break decisively with Bush’s war. Given that kind of bipartisan “cover” the Blue Dogs would gladly go along.

Nothing else really matters. On domestic issues, it’s often worthwhile to pass something that the president vetoes simply because it makes a political point. The passage of the bill and the ensuing veto raise the salience of the issue. On something like the war, though, there’s no real point in staging veto theater. The people know the war is happening and the war is already unpopular. The issue is that Bush cares more about continuing the war than he does about his approval ratings and that too many GOP legislators feel safe in their seats.

I have a combination of lavish praise and criticism for this Michael Hirsch article on foreign policy doctrine in The Washington Monthly. First, lavish praise. It’s the first article I’m aware of to seriously argue a point that I had hoped to be the first one to argue: We don’t need “new ideas” in American grand strategy. The old ideas were basically fine. Then came the combination of 9/11 and George W. Bush’s decision to abandon the old ideas in favor of new and terrible ones. The confluence of the 9/11 disaster and the disaster of Bushism have convinced many people that the old ideas are discredited or inadequate, but actually everything was fine until Bush tried to abandon the tried and true path of prudent internationalism.

I think this is very right and very important. Everyone should read the article, study the argument, and take it to heart.

Hirsch then kind of grafts this doctrinal point onto a point about Barack Obama which, in turn, is parasitic on an argument about two of Obama’s advisors — Samantha Power and Tony Lake. Hirsch argument about those two might be right, but I don’t think he really brings the proof. It’s also always worth asking “compared to whom?” Lake and Power, as best I can tell, have a much better track record over the past 4-5 years than do most comparably establishmentish national security people.

UPDATE: Let me say more. This is not to deny that pre-Bush US foreign policy entailed, over the decades, some very serious pragmatic and moral flaws. I think it used to be the case, however, that the main elements of US strategy were basically sound, and presidents sometimes made bad decisions. Bush has turned things on their head and adopted a fundamentally flawed strategy from which he occassionally deviates by doing non-catastrophic things. In particular, it’s as if Bush ransacked post-WWII history looking for the areas where American policy has been at its worst — Indochina and Central America — and decided to apply the animating spirit of those errors across the board. This is sort of the argument of Empire’s Workshop by Greg Grandin and also sort of the argument of The Folly of Empire by John Judis both of which deserve more attention than they got.

Rudy Giuliani is on the Hugo Chavez payroll. Interesting stuff.

Hillary Clinton is, I think, to be congratulated for stating reasonably clearly that her vision of “bringing the troops home” from Iraq after she becomes president doesn’t actually entail our troops not being in Iraq. Instead, The New York Times reports, “she would keep a reduced military force there to fight Al Qaeda, deter Iranian aggression, protect the Kurds and possibly support the Iraqi military.” The troops will be brought home only in the sense that “Mrs. Clinton said the scaled-down American military force that she would maintain would stay off the streets in Baghdad and would no longer try to protect Iraqis from sectarian violence — even if it descended into ethnic cleansing.”

If Clinton really lived up to her reputation as an unusually “calculating” politician, I think she would have simply kept this under wraps until after the primaries (or maybe even after the general election) but most of the time she’s pretty clear about where she stands. It’s just not where I stand. I’d be interested in hearing what Edwards, Obama, and Richardson think about this. My impression is that most of what passes for the Democratic national security establishment agrees with Clinton.