Looks like Democrats picked a great moment to blink in their confrontation with President Bush over Iraq. Fresh data: “Americans now view the war in Iraq more negatively than at any time since the war began, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.” If only there were an opposition congress or something:

A majority of Americans continue to support a timetable for withdrawal. Sixty-three percent say the United States should set a date for withdrawing troops from Iraq sometime in 2008.

While the troops remain in Iraq, the overwhelming majority of Americans support continuing to finance the war, though most want to do so with conditions. Thirteen percent want Congress to block all spending on the war. The majority, 69 percent, including 62 percent of Republicans, say Congress should appropriate money for the war, but on the condition that the United States sets benchmarks for progress and that the Iraqi government meets those goals. Fifteen percent of all respondents want Congress to approve war spending without conditions.

To me, the only real explanation for Democratic behavior is this. The party’s leadership and political thinkers simply can’t conceive of national security issues as anything other than a source of potential political problems to be coped with, never as a set of potential political opportunities. Since congress can’t unilaterally end the war, then, there’s no reason to have a confrontation with Bush; national security debates are just pure downside. Overwhelming polling data backing the liberal position isn’t a reason to go on offense, it’s a reason to think Democrats can succeed in slinking away.

Steve Clemons has a heck of a tale to tell over it has blog. Roughly speaking, Clemons says Dick Cheney fears that George W. Bush is disinclined to start a war with Iran, and that he’s going to let Condoleezza Rice and her staff continue with a diplomatic approach that Cheney thinks is doomed to failure, but that has the support of Robert Gates, Mike McConnell, and Michael Hayden.

Cheney and his allies, the story goes, are trying to tell the Israeli government that they should find “some key moment in the ongoing standoff between Iran’s nuclear activities and international frustration over this to mount a small-scale conventional strike against Natanz using cruise missiles (i.e., not ballistic missiles).” That done, the political context in the United States will change, and Cheney believes it will set the stage for an abandonment of the diplomatic approach and the deployment of American military options.

Joe Klein’s taking some hits in the blogosphere, and J-Pod’s loving it:

I don’t know what the rules should be, but since today my sometime friend Joe Klein chose to describe the eminent Bernard Lewis, who has forgotten more about Islam than Joe Klein has ever known about any subject, as a “quasi-racist” because of Lewis’s unbelievably well-informed ideas about the interplay of Islam and nationhood — which include the “quasi-racist” notion that Muslims can govern themselves democratically — I say: Let the netroots chew him up.

But here’s the thing: Lewis’ views of Muslims are “quasi-racist” or whatever the appropriate term is for holding the sort of views about the members of a religious group that one would term “racist” were they held about a racial group. This is actually not inconsistent with the fact that Lewis is considerably more knowledgeable about the history of the Islamic world than I am, and my guess is that he knows more about this than Klein does as well. Colonial regimes in Africa were full of administrators who both new a bunch of stuff about Africa and also happened to be white supremacists — both attributes were important job qualifications.

Meanwhile, Bush (and Podhoretz) aren’t relying on Lewis to help them bone up before a Jeopardy appearance — they’re seeking expert support for their pre-existing commitment to the proposition that there’s nothing wrong with U.S. policy toward the Muslim world that a little additional brutality couldn’t fix.

What Rosenfeld said, with emphasis added:

If you don’t have the votes for a withdrawal timeline you don’t have the votes, but the lipstick-on-a-pig rationalizations we’re hearing from some Democrats (see the excerpts from Stoller) are truly crazy. To be blunt, even if the political calculations offered in defense of voting for the bill were correct (and that’s dubious), it’s not even an election year. Democrats are discussing all the mean things Republicans might say about them “during the upcoming recess week” as if voters go to the polls on Memorial Day — and as if the GOP and the president were in the shape they were in, say, five years ago. The instinctiveness of the crouched, defensive posture you see from some of these folks is just sorry (and a contrast with the real sense of momentum that had been notable this year up until now).

This, to me, has been one of the most baffling things about the Democratic Party’s tactical posture on Iraq ever since early 2003. You see politicians talking and acting as if the crucial thing is whether or not what they’re doing will look popular over the next 36 hours. The important thing, of course, is how things look on election day. As Sam says, if the votes aren’t there, the votes aren’t there, but the important point is that liberals who take the position today that there should be a withdrawal timeline will be fully vindicated by November 2008 just as people who avoided the temptation to pander when Saddam Hussen was captured back in late ’03 looked pretty smart by November ’04.

If the way the nose-counting works out is that a supplemental passes with GOP votes plus a tiny rump of conservative Democrats, then so be it. But if you favor withdrawal on the merits, then you’ve got to believe that taking the stand now will look prescient in twelve months. Meanwhile, all the polls indicate that the voters agree with liberals about the issue at hand.

I was going to just ignore New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz’s efforts to bait me, but when Jonah Goldberg piled on it was just too much intellectual firepower to stay out of the fray. Now, seriously, what Brian Beutler said. And what Brian Ulrich said. Honestly, though, I’m done with this feud as there’s really no point in arguing with someone who’s proud of his role in bringing Charles Krauthammer into the national conversation.

Some readers thought I was being too hard on Mark Steyn, who may have just been typing sloppily when he fretted yesterday about “resurgent Islam, freelance nuclearization, and the demographic decline of the west,” making no distinction between Islam as such and violent jihadist ideologies. It was, however, no mistake. Here’s Gideon Rachman on Steyn’s book:

Mr Steyn argues that – “Europe has all but succumbed to the dull opiate of multiculturalism.” Indeed “a fearless Muslim advance has penetrated far deeper into Europe than Abd al-Rahman” – a Muslim general who made it to the outskirts of Paris in 732. With apparent relish Mr Steyn predicts a “Eurabian civil war”. The weak-kneed elites will succumb to militant Islam. But an “unreconstructed minority” will turn to “neo-nationalist strongmen”. The poor old Europeans can’t win. It’s either appeasement or fascism.

Here, again, the “enemy” is being defined very broadly; Europe simply has too many Muslims living in it. Their immigration constitutes a “fearless Muslim advance.”