Nancy Pelosi, as you may have heard, has gone to Syria to, among other things, meet with the leaders of that country, one with which the United States officially has diplomatic relations but which the Bush administration has been seeking to coerce into adopting a more cooperative attitude through the cunning method of . . . refusing to meet with its leaders and saying mean things about them. Before going to Syria, Pelosi was in Israel, a country whose leaders are apparently afraid that there’s going to be an accidental war with Syria over a mix-up in which the Syrians think the Israelis are planning to attack them. Israel, unlike the United States, has no diplomatic relations with Syria and thus Pelosi “will deliver a message of calm from Israel.” But not, of course, if the Bush administration gets its way! Greg Djerejian remarks:

Bush remonstrates dastardly Nancy for her passage through Damascus, at the very time the Israelis are reportedly using her to pass a message to Bashar Assad to help avoid a possible conflagration with the Syrians. Soon, Bush will be telling Bibi Netanyahu or Avigdor Lieberman they’re wimps, and to hang Crawford tough against the ‘Palis’ or such. This is all so pitiable, isn’t it? How many more months left of this bungling amateurism and fake machismo do we have left? 22, is it? Sigh.

The whole thing is, of course, ridiculous. This is exactly the sort of thing we maintain a State Department for . . . so that the Speaker of the House doesn’t need to conduct America’s regional diplomacy by herself and get all-but called a traitor for her efforts.

Kevin Drum says it’s hard to know what the candidates think about foreign policy:

Unlike in domestic policy, where candidates fight each other with dueling white papers, most of the time there just aren’t very many specific, detailed foreign policy issues on which candidates disagree. It’s very much a rhetorical battlespace, and one where it’s very difficult to draw sharp distinctions.

There’s a lot of truth to that, especially with regard to Edwards and Obama. I do think Hillary Clinton laid out a reasonably clear vision in her January 2006 speech to Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School. The way I read the speech, Clinton has very serious tactical disagreements with the Bush administration, but on some level agrees with the basic Bushian idea that actively seeking the political transformation of the Arab world ought to be America’s key priority. Certainly, given the opportunity to argue that there’s been something fundamentally misguided with the Bush approach to the post-9/11 world, she didn’t choose to do so, expressing instead qualms about the ways Bush has handled this or that, but support for the general orientation of American policy.

Rich Lowry reports on a Giuliani campaign appearance:

Then he began to muse about, after a veto, “would the president have the constitutional authority to support them [the troops], anyway?” He said he’s a lawyer so he wouldn’t offer an opinion “off the top of his head,” then he proceeded to do just that. He seemed to suggest that Bush could fund the Iraq war without Congress providing funding, but it was confusing. In an interview with a New Hampshire TV reporter after his remarks, he seemed more categorical and said, since the war had been authorized by Congress, the president has “the inherent authority to support the troops.”

Lowry kindly notes that this incident “could be seized on by his critics to argue that he has a dangerously out-sized view of presidential powers.” Frankly, people with an outsized view of presidential powers shouldn’t be tarred by association with Giuliani, a power-hungry egomaniac who just happens to be running for president at the moment. When he was Mayor, he thought he had the power to abrogate the City Charter and illegally extend his term in office. If he winds up as Borough President of Brooklyn he’ll take an outsized view of the powers of that office. The difference is that there are pretty strong institutional checks on the power of local government officials — even mayors of giant cities — in the United States so it didn’t matter all that much that Giuliani was a power-hungry egomaniac.

Greg Sargent and Eric Kleefeld conducted a side-by-side comparison of votes cast by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama since Obama joined the Senate in January 2005 and discovered that their records are essentially identical. Max Blumenthal opines in The Nation that “In no way does Sargent and Kleefeld’s study negate the importance of Obama’s oppositon to invading Iraq, but it does add some nuance to an otherwise simplistic debate.”

I think a better thing to say was that the Sargent/Kleefeld study demonstrates what anyone who follows politics for a while will quickly see — voting records don’t tell you all that much about where politicians’ stand. In the contemporary world both parties remain overwhelmingly united on the overwhelming majority of votes; the Democratic leadership tries to outline positions that all its members will support and the GOP leadership tries to outline positions that mainstream Democrats will oppose in an effort to put pressure on a handful of vulnerable members representing “red” areas. What’s more, to really add nuance to the debate, you’d need to produce some example of Obama being less neoconnish than Clinton and I’ve never seen that. Obama appears to have an advisory team drawn disproportionately from the ranks of Iraq War opponents whereas Clinton is the reverse; Obama’s AIPAC speech was somewhat less fanatically devoted to the cause; etc., etc., etc.

Not to level any particular charges at Blumenthal, but it does seem to me that at some point the Clinton camp needs to stop trying to blur the differences between her foreign policy views and Obama’s and, instead, defend her views as better superior to his.

I dunno. It’s just too depressing, I guess, but for a while now I haven’t really said much of anything about Iraq the country as opposed to Iraq the political issue. But just in time to confirm that the surge can’t possibly “work” if by “work” we mean something like create a functioning pluralistic polity in Iraq, Ayatollah Sistani (the good kind of Shiite theocrat, we’ll recall) has come out against rolling back de-Baathification. Spencer Ackerman notes that this more-or-less marks the complete collapse of Zalmay Khalilzad’s agenda in terms of bringing about political reconciliation in Iraq.

Khalilzad, it’s worth saying, was the General Petraeus of his time — the lone high-ranking administration official who actually had a good reputation and seemed as best I could tell to more-or-less deserve it. He couldn’t, however, deliver the goods. Not through any particular fault of his own except that he was a diplomat rather than a magician. Just as Petraeus is only a general, only a man, only an American, not someone capable of conjuring the social bases of a liberal pluralistic Iraq out of the ether.