It seems to me that calls for a “new Marshall plan” of some sort or another are frequent enough that it’s a bit odd for John Edwards’ campaign to be implying that Mitt Romney’s ripping them off when he calls for “a new type of Marshall plan” that ““ould assemble resources from developed nations to work to assure that threatened Islamic states had public schools, not Wahhabi madrassas, micro-credit and banking, the rule of law, human rights, basic healthcare, and competitive economic policies.”

On another level, Team Edwards is even selling itself short. Their proposal for a “Marshall Corps” — at least as it was explained to me as a group of civilian experts who the president would be able to deploy where needed — is significantly more interesting (albeit at this point still somewhat vague) than Romney’s rather banal and totally undefined proposal for some new foreign aid program.

Joe Courtney, freshman Democratic representative and all-around good guy, has become a China hawk, ginning up baseless fears of Beijing’s submarine fleet and demagogically helping to launch a new, needless arms race. After all, his district contains 6,000 jobs in the nuclear submarine business and the whole Democratic caucus is really, really eager to help him get re-elected. Brad Plumer has the story.

Photo by Flickr user Wandering Thinker used under a Creative Commons license

I feel like Tony Blair would have to be insane to take a job as special envoy for the Israel-Palestine conflict. Obviously, bringing about a peace agreement there would assure Blair’s legacy, but the odds are not only dim, but would to a large extent be left hostage to George W. Bush. Unless Blair is completely addled he surely must have learned the lesson that putting himself in the middle of risky, speculative endeavors involving Bush in a crucial role isn’t a good idea.

What Blair needs to do is find himself a nice, fairly uncontroversial issue to work on. HIV/AIDS is always a solid choice, but I think Bill Clinton’s cornered that market. Access to safe drinking water would probably be a good idea.

Andrew joins the unhinged left:

If the Times interview is what Petraeus is telling Bush and Cheney, then they have only begun to ramp up this war in Iraq. My bet is they will try to extend the war into Iran if they can, and are obviously looking for a trigger to do so. But until then, they have no intention of changing a thing, except perhaps putting even more troops on the line. From everything we know about Bush, he will continue on, even if a majority of both Houses oppose war-funding. He doesn’t need his party any more. Only a veto-proof margin will suffice, and if that happens, expect a massive Rudy-driven, Romney-approved “stab-in-the-back” campaign, accusing all critics of being supporters of Iran or al Qaeda. Or Bush will force the Congress to cut off all funds, and then declare the troops abandoned and betrayed by the “enemy within”.

Woo! Okay, for my part, I’d actually reel that back somewhat. This pretty clearly reflects the thinking of some people inside the administration (“Cheney” is a good shorthand, though I obviously have no idea what’s going on inside various people’s heads); for some, a wider war’s been in the cards from the get-go, and the Podhoretz’s of the world wouldn’t be warmongering unless they were getting some kind of signal that such mongering might succeed.

That said, if Bush himself were determined to expand the war to Iran, you have to imagine it would have happened already. The administration’s actions vis-a-vis Iran over the past 18 months have been rather contradictory. Had this president a long record of foreign policy success and diplomatic masterstrokes, one might assume he was cooking up something inspired and brilliant. Given the actual record, one has no such confidence.

One curious tick the Bush administration has developed is the habit of deflecting questions about its actual policies toward large-scale musings about the grand sweep of history. It’s a fairly pathetic dodge in a fairly obvious way, but George Packer hits the key points with perfect pitch in this week’s New Yorker: “By this light, Bush’s habit of declaring A to be B—for example, claiming that the surge reflects the public’s desire for a change in war policy, or interpreting increased violence in Iraq as a token of the enemy’s frustration with American success—becomes a sign of clarity and resolve, not delusional thinking.”

You may have seen Spencer Ackerman report that only 10 out of 200 foreign service officers in our giant Baghdad embassy can speak Arabic. The truth is actually somewhat worse than that, though, because the technical factoid is that they have ten officers at our above “the 3 reading / 3 speaking level in Arabic.” This 3/3 comes from the Interagency Language Roundtable scale which is actually a five point scale so at least some of the embassy’s rather paltry contingent of Arabic speakers don’t necessarily know the language all that well.

UPDATE: I’m getting substantial pushback on this point from knowledgeable quarters. People say that a 3/3 maybe is a perfectly fine level of competency to do work in the foreign language without the help of an interpreter.