A person affiliated with a rival campaign directed my attention to this Ted Koppel commentary on NPR in which he observes:

I ran into an old source the other day who held a senior position at the Pentagon until his retirement. He occasionally briefs Senator Clinton on the situation in the Gulf. She told him that if she were elected president and then re-elected four years later she would still expect U.S. troops to be in Iraq at the end of her second term.

I find that the tendency when I talk to people leaning in a Clintonish direction is that they express confidence, as Clinton herself does in the debates, that all of the Democrats will, if elected, move rapidly to end the war. If anything, I think the stronger argument for Clinton is the reverse — that while she seems disinclined to really end the war, it’s not clear that her main rivals are inclined to do so either. Neither Edwards nor Obama has, after all, exactly come out swinging against Clinton on Iraq in a forward looking sense. There have been some indications that Clinton’s envisioned “residual” force would be bigger than what other candidates have in mind, but her main rivals haven’t argued this explicitly.

Zbigniew Brzezinski at the conference says the US and Israel should try to put their demands for Iranian disarmament in the context of support for a regional nuclear-free zone (i.e., Israeli nuclear disarmament). After all, he says, if we’re supposed to believe that Israel’s nuclear arsenal isn’t a sufficient deterrent to ensure Israeli security in the face of Iran’s nuclear program, then it obviously isn’t a very valuable asset.

This sounds smart to me. The odds that nothing would come of such a proposal a pretty high, but even if nothing comes of it, calling the Iranian bluff in this regard would be valuable and it would help reframe the issue, regionally and globally, in a useful way.

Leon Wieseltier sings the praises of The Sopranos:

The only innocent in the show that I remember (who can forget her?) is Tracee, the young, unsiliconed, and doomed stripper; and the only pure villain, beside whom even that cocksucker Leotardo looks complicated, is Livia Soprano, the demon-mother who sets the saga in motion but is its least explored figure. Otherwise there are no heroes and no villains: there are good people who sometimes do bad things and bad people who sometimes do good things.

I think this “ooo, shades of gray!” reading of the show was natural, initially, but would have made for an extremely trite show were it to continue for seasons and seasons. By the end, I think it’s clear that this is all backwards — for the core characters, at least, there’s no gray at all. These are bad people. Evil people, really. Not just people who do bad things. But people who do bad things, confront the fact that the things they’re doing are bad, semi-seriously wrestle with the idea of not doing them anymore, and then deciding to keep on doing them.

What’s true is that at the same time as these are evil characters, they’re also complicated characters — characters with real depth, real feelings, real idiosyncrasies, and even some real virtues. The show makes us confront our own voyeuristic fascination with them, and it also makes us sympathize with them. We sympathize, however, not because they aren’t bad people, but because we aren’t bad people and bad as the bad people may be, they’re still people and we, as good people, recognize a common thread of shared humanity between us. The fact that Tony Soprano isn’t a cartoonish villain doesn’t mean he’s not a villain.

Writing about Democrats’ tendency to want to shoehorn energy policy issues into discussion of national security, Ezra says he “can’t quite decide if the subject is acting in a complementary way to a straight national security policy, or serving as a substitute for an issue Democrats are still uncomfortable talking about.”

The correct answer is that it’s serving as a substitute for an issue Democrats are still uncomfortable talking about. Global warming is an extremely important issue for the country. It’s potentially a favorable issue for the Democratic Party. But when people say they want to hear from Democrats about foreign policy, they’re saying they want to hear a message about war and peace. The trouble is that you can’t articulate a clear theory about war and peace that doesn’t provide a clear conclusion about Iraq. And reaching a clear conclusion about Iraq would involve confronting the large number of Democratic elites who backed the war.

People on both sides of that divide, however, have been very interested in sort of covering up the breach and having everyone play together nicely. And party unity is a good thing. But you’re never going to have a clear, forceful message on the core foreign policy issues unless you’re willing to take a stand on preventive war, on democratization by invasion, etc.

Photo by Flickr user Exquisitely Bored in Nagodoches used under a Creative Commons license

More substantively, Madeleine Albright mostly said things that I think are true but also a bit banal (Bush has squandered American power, China’s rise, Iran’s rise, we’ve “paid for mistakes in Iraq,” “Iraq has made everything harder,” UN reform is good, but it’s difficult) but waded into riskier waters with a forthright defense of the view that we should be backing democratic reform — elections — in the Arab world. Crucially, she conceded that “if Arab democracy develops, it will be to advance Arab interests” as understood from an Arab perspective and, in particular, there’s no reason to expect elections to “soften attitudes toward Israel.”

She didn’t follow that up with much in the way of saying how we should be doing those things. Shadi Hamid, for example, thinks the congress should make aid to Egypt conditional on reform. I see some strong arguments on both sides of that issue, and it’d be interesting to hear more people weigh-in on it, since it seems to me that this is certainly the most obvious lever to use if one were to want to put something more than rhetoric behind the idea of Arab reform.

Madeleine Albright just walked right in to one of my pet peeves, calling for the United States to adhere to a moderate (i.e., neither isolationist nor imperial) foreign policy, and then sets it up with the old “consider Harry Truman.” Frankly, I think people should consider spending less time considering Harry Truman.

If there’s some very specific thing Truman did that you want to do again, that’s great, but overwhelmingly the only point Truman-invokers are making is that they want a foreign policy that’s not too hot and also not too cold. This is nice, of course, and Goldilocks agrees, but it’s really not an especially deep point or one that carries a ton of analytic bite.

It’s telling, for example, that Peter Beinart was able to maintain his “liberals should emulate Truman” message in both his pro- and anti- phases on the Iraq War. Realistically, all we’re seeing there is that “position yourself somewhere between two extremes” covers an extremely broad range of positions. I’m sure that Charles Krauthammer believes he, too, is inhabiting a wise middle ground in some sense. After all, he’s not like Ann Coulter who wants to convert all Muslims to Christianity.

Rich Lowry argues against yours truly that the problem with leaving the Sunnis alone to fight it out with al-Qaeda “is that if we absented ourselves, al Qaeda would prevail.” Frankly, I doubt it. As we’ve seen over and over again, local support matters a lot. It’s extremely difficult for a foreign force to sustain itself in the face of hostile public sentiment even if the foreign force is in some sense superior from a technical point of view.

To me, the overestimation of al-Qaeda’s ability to impose its will upon Iraqis is just of a piece with earlier overestimation of the United States’ ability to impose our will upon Iraqis. This stuff is hard. It’s crucial to recall that the Taliban was not just a religious movement, but also an expression of Pashto nationalism, and that that the Taliban had a lot of trouble expanding into areas where other ethnicities predominated.

I’m gonna be at this conference sponsored by the Center for American Progress and the Century Foundation today. I’m told there’s going to be wifi right there, so the blogging should continue uninterrupted.