Full text here.

The “vision thing” is what Obama’s good at, and I think it’s on display here. An appealing vision of American leadership embedded in an interconnected, fundamentally cooperative world. I think he does a good job of putting the terrorism issue in the appropriate context, as a serious problem on a par with several other serious problems rather than the organizing principle of everything we do in the world. He’s also very strong on nuclear non-proliferation, which happens to be the most important issue. The section on when to use force is fuzzy, and manages to not distinguish Obama’s view from things Edwards or Clinton could also espouse. There are a couple of head-nods in the direction of indicating that Obama understands the central role the Israeli-Palestinian conflict plays in the mess that is the broader Middle East, which is great if I’m reading the head-nods correctly.

Matt Welch concludes an interesting rundown of the tangled congressional debate over the Armenian genocide on a somewhat upbeat note:

Hitler reportedly said, just before invading Poland, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” It’s a chilling reminder that forgetting is the first step in enabling future genocides. Yet Hitler was eventually proved wrong. No temporal power is strong enough to erase the eternal resonance of truth.

I don’t think that’s right. I think what Hitler’s trying to say here is that history will forgive Germany brutal measures — no matter how brutal — as long as Germany wins. That historical memory is determined by political power rather than by the objective merits of historical claims. And if you read Welch’s account, it’s hard to see it as anything other than a vindication of Hitler’s thesis. The US government’s official position, for perfectly understandable realpolitik reasons, is to avoid talk of an Armenian genocide. The only reason this position hasn’t managed to carry the day is the determined lobbying of a politically effective Armenian expatriate community. And, now, the Armenian cause has been boosted by people looking for a kitchen sink’s worth of arguments for keeping Turkey out of the EU. People, in short, do speak today of the annihilation of the Armenians, but not because of “the eternal resonance of truth,” they do it because the temporal power of Turkey is counterbalanced by the temporal power of Turkey’s foes.

Paul Krugman: “There are two ways to describe the confrontation between Congress and the Bush administration over funding for the Iraq surge. You can pretend that it’s a normal political dispute. Or you can see it for what it really is: a hostage situation, in which a beleaguered President Bush, barricaded in the White House, is threatening dire consequences for innocent bystanders — the troops — if his demands aren’t met.”

Indeed. Krugman seems disinclined to end his column on a defeast note, but the maddening thing of it is that all signs indicate that this tactic is likely to succeed and Bush will achieve his goal of ensuring that the war is left on the desk of the next president. Perhaps he thinks this’ll mean it’ll go down in the record books as something his successor “lost” rather than a catastrophic error he made.