Brian Beutler alterts me to Jonah Goldberg’s curious proclamation that “realism, properly understood, demands that we pay some respect to the idea of promoting democracy.” Interested to find out what Jonah meant, I clicked through and found:

Andy may not have liked all of the democracy-mongering in defense of the Iraq invasion, but the case for regime change would be beyond impossible without appeals to America’s sense of decency and, yes, mission. There’s a lot of unrealistic realism on display out there when people talk about how we should have — and could have — destroyed the Saddam regime and then walked away. It’s a seductive position, but I have a hard time seeing America or Congress supporting that or being able to stay on the sidelines as America-induced chaos took-over in post-Saddam Iraq.

Now it’s probably true that it would have been politically unrealistic to try to sell the war in pure realist terms, but it’s also true that that’s now what “realism” means in this context. In foreign policy terms “realism” isn’t just an adjective meaning the same thing as “practical,” it’s a school of thought with defined tenets including, notably, the view that the internal political organization of states is irrelevant to international relations.

You’ve probably read this on some other blog already by now, but it seems Harry Reid has decided to further raise the stakes in the Iraq standoff. The structure of the situation is that the Senate was slated to consider the authorization bill for the Defense Department. Democrats want to attach an amendment to the bill that would provide a framework for withdrawal from Iraq. The GOP is using the filibuster to prevent a vote on this amendment. Now Reid is saying that he’s going to pull the whole Pentagon authorization bill from the floor and just move on to other subjects unless the Republicans allow a vote.

It’s worth keeping in mind that even if the GOP backs down eventually and an amended bill passes congress, Bush is likely to simply do what he did with the war supplemental — veto the bill and then accuse the Democrats of refusing to fund “the troops” unless they pass an un-amended bill. To make a long story short, the country is still many, many Republican defections away from a point where congress will be able to end the war without the cooperation of a less stubborn president.

Jennifer Rubin warns in the Politico that “Left could push pro-Israel voters to GOP.” And, I suppose in some sense that could happen. It’s worth recalling, though, that by the standards of AIPAC, The Weekly Standard, etc., the vast majority of Jewish Americans hold dastardly “anti-Israel” views and want to see the US government get more involved in pushing for regional diplomatic settlements and the institution of a two-state solution.

Thomas Friedman wants Bush to talk to America’s top negotiators:

“I want you to move to the Green Zone, meet with the Iraqi factions and do not come home until you’ve reached one of three conclusions: 1) You have resolved the power- and oil-sharing issues holding up political reconciliation; 2) you have concluded that those obstacles are insurmountable and have sold the Iraqis on a partition plan that could be presented to the U.N. and supervised by an international force; 3) you have concluded that Iraqis are incapable of agreeing on either political reconciliation or a partition plan and told them that, as a result, the U.S. has no choice but to re-deploy its troops to the border and let Iraqis sort this out on their own.”

The last point is crucial. Any lawyer will tell you, if you’re negotiating a contract and the other side thinks you’ll never walk away, you’ve got no leverage. And in Iraq, we’ve never had any leverage. The Iraqis believe that Mr. Bush will never walk away, so they have no incentive to make painful compromises.

Friedman claims to believe that Bush’s reluctance to do this is baffling. I’m not sure if that’s just a columnists gamesmanship, but my fear is that Friedman is genuinely baffled. But here we are, over four years after the invasion, and it’s time to face up to the possibility that the Bush administration’s policies in occupied Iraq haven’t been driven exclusively by a sincere and idealistic commitment to the well-being of the Iraqi people and the principles of liberty and democracy. Shocking, yes. But not to put too fine a point on it, it’s the imperialism, stupid.

Bush won’t adopt a bargaining strategy that involves walking away as an option, because he’s not willing to walk away. The objective is to retain Iraq as a platform for the projection of American military power in the region, to continue a larger regional struggle against Iran and Syria, to maintain physical control over Iraq’s oil resources, etc. That means Bush can’t walk away and can’t “let Iraqis sort this out on their own.” To accomplish his objectives, the United States needs to be intimately involved in Iraqi affairs to give us leverage and prevent the possibility of the dread “Iranian influence.” It’s unrealistic war aims that launched this war, it’s unrealistic aims that have made it last so long, and it’s unrealistic aims that prevent it from ending.

Defense Department photo by Specialist Elisha Dawkins, U.S. Army

I was channel surfing yesterday in the early evening and I saw something almost shocking on CNN. It was Candy Crowley explaining that yesterday’s National Intelligence Estimate on al-Qaeda was good news, politically, for the Democrats. For years now it’s been a staple of press analysis of politics that, in essence, all news — or at a minimum, all terrorism-related news — is good news for Republicans. Events or reports that make the threat seem less severe demonstrate how awesome Bush’s leadership has been. Events or reports that make the threat seem more severe demonstrate how badly we need Bush’s leadership. Now something seems to have snapped, because it’s not just Candy Crowley.

Check out this news analysis by Michael Abramowitz in The Washington Post that leads with the idea that the report is “fresh political peril” for the White House and that Bush’s key argument in favor of his approach to terrorism “seemed to unravel a bit” given the report. It’s a big change. Of course nothing in the world has changed, but now that Bush is unpopular already, this is the kind of coverage he gets.

Justin Logan watches Kay Bailey Hutcheson debate Iraq and is astounded: “If we let a caliphate take over the world, we are not going to live in freedom.” I see progress in the right direction. Unlike a lot of things defenders of the president say these days, it is, if vacuous and dumb, at least true.