Bill Clinton, apparently, is all upset that the media is giving Barack Obama a free pass on some allegedly pro-war comments he once made. If you read Obama’s actual July 2004 comments, however, he makes the following points:

• Based on what he knew as of October 2002, he believed voting for the resolution was a bad idea (and he said so at the time).
• Not having been in the Senate at the time, he couldn’t say what kind of additional information Senators had access to, and wouldn’t rule out the possibility that had he had different information at his disposal, he might have had a different opinion.
• But, he thought at the time that members of congress were doing an insufficiently good job of scrutinizing the Bush administration’s intelligence claims.

Note that this came in the context of a reporter apparently trying to goad Obama into criticizing John Kerry and John Edwards who, at the time, were running for president against George W. Bush. This sounds to me a lot like an anti-war Senate candidate trying to avoid starting some beef with his party’s presidential ticket and not at all like Barack Obama expressing support for the war. Frankly, I think the Clinton camp needs to make up its mind about which argument it’s trying to make about the war. I feel like a little while back they were trying to convince me that we shouldn’t like Obama more on Iraq because Clinton, too, was against the war. Now they want me to believe that I shouldn’t like Obama because he, too, was for the war. But the record is pretty clear — she was for it; he was against it.

I sometimes think I should write more blog posts about Nation articles. Where else, for example, will you find someone deciding that March 2007 is an opportune moment to attack the United Nations from the left as just another instrument of American power. That’s not the argument I would make, but there’s much more truth to Perry Anderson’s view of the matter than to the Martin Peretz critique of the UN as a Franco-Arab tool for the oppression of Jews or the Charles Krauthammer notion of the UN as a Lilliputian effort to tie down the mighty Gulliver.

The way I see it, the United Nations has long been a central part of the effort to construct a viable liberal world order. Such a world order would serve an enlightened account of American interests, but would also serve the interests of the overwhelming majority of the world’s people. At its best, postwar American foreign policy has been aimed at using our country’s considerable economic and military power to try to create and sustain a liberal world order. Ideally, that view would face equal-and-opposite attacks from the right and the left and thus stay in the driver’s seat. In recent years, however, the Nationish vision of a country that sticks to a fairly strict posture of self-defense has become incredibly marginalized in political and media circles opening the door for unilateral militarism to start governing the country in a consistent way rather than being a present-but-submerged element in a basic sound policy.

“This is good counterinsurgency stuff right here.”

That’s General David Petraeus, shining star of the US Army officer’s corps, reduced to talking like a stammering seventeen year-old. Admittedly, the quote is actually two days old. The “good counterinsurgency stuff” is that the American military has succeeded in setting up loudspeakers in town that play “messages from the mayor” along with “verses from the Quran, the Iraqi national anthem and the news, and threw in the latest European scores in soccer, a sport loved by most Iraqis.”