I really hate arguments of this form, but it seems to me that you need to give Tony Blair credit for at least having the courage of his convictions in taking on this thankless and doomed to fail task as special envoy to the Middle East. At the moment, his record is largely composed of good things, plus a giant Iraq-shaped stain. To basically double-down on the Mideast-related aspects of his legacy is gutsy.

Gutsy, but also kind of dumb. Not totally unlike risking his legacy on Iraq in the first place.

Brian Beutler gives Jonah Goldberg a good fisking. Jonah seems upset that when I complain that American conservatives are perpetuating a “stab in the back” theory of the war in Iraq to explain away their own hideous errors of strategic judgment without bothering “to make a tight link between the National Socialist reaction to German surrender at the end of WWI.” Kevin Baker’s already lay it out in Harper‘s at some length, so I haven’t bothered personally because it wouldn’t be a Very Serious, Thoughtful, Argument That Has Never Been Made in Such Detail or With Such Care if I did it.

Suffice it to say that I think the main point of analogy is that mainstream contemporary American conservatism, like inter-war Nazism, believes that military defeats are primarily due to failures of national will. They believe this in part because they massively overestimate the significance of will in determining outcomes of this sort. They also, like Nazis, seem to deny that it might ever better serve the national interest to abandon a military adventure than to continue it. These beliefs serve to foster the further belief that several constitutive elements of liberal democracies — committed to free speech, to unfettered political debate, the existence of active political opposition movements — are a source of national weakness.

It’s frustrating to see this level of attention given by the MSM and the Huffington Post alike to the theory that GOP Senators are taking on Bush over the war. I was writing about this yesterday and have a Guardian column out about it but we’re way past the point for this kind of B.S.

Democrats had a bill that passed congress that would have substantially rolled back the war. Bush vetoed it. The GOP helped Bush sustain that veto. When Republicans want to revisit that legislation and vote to override Bush’s veto, then they’ll be breaking with Bush on Iraq. Until then, both the ones talking a good game and the ones talking bad one are, in fact, backing the president.

What’s more, it seems to me that we’re well passed the point where any political purpose is avdanced in a useful way by deliberately exaggerating the extent of intra-GOP disagreement. Before the 2004 election was a good time to hear about Republican dissent. Before the 2006 election, even. But folks who wait until after an electoral drubbing to start distancing themselves from their party’s leaders don’t deserve to be hailed as great independent thinkers.

MJ Rosenberg was impressed yesterday by a Barack Obama statement on the Israel-Palestine situation. Well, at least sort of:

Nevertheless, I don’t judge candidates statements on the Middle East against the ideal but against the pander garbage almost all of them cynically and invariably put out.

By that standard, this is fine.

Well, okay. To me what’s actually more intriguing about Obama on this front is just the fact that I think the campaign has spent some level of energy trying to signal to the MJ Rosenbergs of the world that they should be excited about Obama. Normally, candidates want to get the support of the most fanatically “pro-Israel” people they can find, and don’t really care about anyone else.

It’s worth recalling, now and again, that the Bush administration’s efforts to leverage wartime hysteria into serious abuses of civil liberties is hardly a new story in American history. Amy Zegart, for example, writes up some newly declassified documents relating to the CIA’s LBJ-vintage (and then continuing into the Nixon years) “Restless Youth” initiative:

: The C.I.A.’s Restless Youth study, which appears to have been commissioned in the late 1960s to examine radical American college students. In a meticulously worded 1973 memo, the C.I.A.’s deputy director for intelligence details exactly which version of that study went to whom. Notably, the president, his national security adviser and the deputy secretary of defense got the fully loaded version that included the agency’s highly sensitive investigations of American students. Other Cabinet members got versions without the U.S. student radicals section. And Attorney General John Mitchell got an even more abbreviated edition in March 1969. There’s more: an unsigned 1968 memo on the next page explicitly notes that Restless Youth violated the C.I.A.’s charter AND that it was conducted at the behest of the national security adviser at the time, Walt Rostow.

I suppose the difference is that these days David Addington would have written a memo about how the CIA was under no obligation to abide by the CIA’s charter because the CIA’s not part of the executive branch or something. Back then the mentality seems to have been more, “we want to do X, but X is illegal, so let’s keep things quiet.”