In an apparent outbreak of good news for John Edwards, the Obama-Clinton spat seems to be escalating today rather than declining, with the Senator saying “First of all, what is irresponsible and naïve is to have authorized a war without asking how we were going to get out. And I think Senator Clinton still hasn’t fully answered that issue. The general principle is one that, I think, Senator Clinton is wrong on. And that is, if we are laying out preconditions that prevent us from speaking frankly to these folks, then we are continuing Bush-Cheney policies, and I am not interested in continuing that.”

One thing I’d note here is that the thing Clinton actually said during the debate struck me as fairly reasonable. Then again, so did what Obama said. Her campaign’s behavior since then — trying to make big political hay out of Obama’s alleged weakness, seeming to reverse her previous position on the direct talks issue, etc. — has been pretty problematic. And it’s worth saying that she actually did this before, attacking Obama after an earlier debate for having said that he would respond to a terrorist attack by first organizing emergency relief, and then second assessing intelligence to see who was responsible. According to Clinton’s campaign, the “correct” answer was to immediately call for war (against whom?)

What this says about Clinton’s actual foreign policy beliefs, I couldn’t it. It does, however, obviously reflect a certain set of beliefs about politics — specifically that more militarism is always better — which happen to be the exact same set of beliefs that helped drive so many Democratic elected officials to duck and cover during the initial drive for war. To get the foreign policy right, you need on some level to have someone willing to challenge the hawkish political box. Clinton isn’t just failing to do that, she’s going way out of her way to re-enforce it.

An awful lot of liberals I know seem unduly confident that when their favored candidate is elected President of the United States, he or she will withdraw American troops from Iraq. I think people should pay attention to Progressive Policy Institute chief Will Marshall when he notes that the major candidates at least sometimes seem to more-or-less agree with his case for indefinitely extending the US military occupation of Iraq. Marshall is also to be congratulated for, unlike the candidates themselves, speaking reasonably plainly about what it is he’s proposing and trying to defend the idea on the merits. He endorses the CNAS plan favored by the more hawkish elements of the Democratic establishment and specifically endorses the idea that the goal of our Iraq policy should be not ending the war, not ending the occupation, not bringing the troops home, but rather:

Specifically, we should redefine our military mission in Iraq as enforcing three “noes” that are essential to protecting America’s strategic interests — no safe havens for al Qaeda, no genocide, and no wider regional war.

I have a long counterargument below the fold:

Read more

I keep meaning to write this post, and then keep not doing it. But the point is to whine that the primary candidates aren’t dealing with the questions that I want answers to. In particular, they talk a lot about Iraq, and to some extent about Darfur, but very little about slightly more abstract foreign policy issues. Some things I’m curious about (with parentheticals to note partial exceptions) that I haven’t seen the contenders deal with:

• Do you think it might help US non-proliferation policy if the US did a better job of living up to its NPT obligations (Obama mentioned this once, in the affirmative, briefly, in a speech)?
• Should unilateral preventive military force play a role in our non-proliferation policy question?
• Is turning Arab countries into democracies necessary (or sufficient) to reducing terrorism? Is it counterproductive?
• Is it more important to check Chinese influence or to maintain friendly relations with China?
• Has the Bush administration been too focused on the Greater Middle East at the expense of other regions?
• Is US defense spending too low, too high, or about right?
• Should we rethink our relationship with our Arab client regimes?

I agree with Mark Schmitt that “detailed plans” can be overrated, but at the same time I envy the ability of domestic policy pressure groups to make the candidates try to address their concerns.

I attended the conference that this RAND report is based on and found it very interesting. There were a bunch of different speakers, so it didn’t reflect a single point of view, but most of the participants were extremely sensible. At the end of the day, you probably don’t want to read a whole bunch of transcripts of a months-old RAND conference on Iran, but if you find yourself wanting to know more about Iran policy this would be a good thing to check out.

People don’t like to make the monetary cost of a war the centerpiece of an argument against it. Nevertheless, it’s striking how if you want to talk about early childhood development or public transportation or even “hard” things like monitoring parolees or hiring cops in this country, you immediately run into cost issues. Expanding SCHIP may be cheap and popular, but you’d better make it cheap enough to finance through gimmicks like cigarette taxes and so forth, because you just can’t unleash the spigots of general revenue on something as trivial as making children not die when they fall ill.

For war, it’s a different story. Mark Kleiman, for example, points out that at $200 billion a year, the war in Iraq costs $7,000 per Iraqi per year, which is more than double the country’s per capita GDP. Now, obviously, it wouldn’t have been literally feasible to give each Iraqi $4,000 in March 2003, then again in March 2004, then again in March 2005, then again in March 2006, then again in March 2007, and then start drawing our commitment down to $3,000 in March 2008, $2,000 in March 2009, etc. But if you could have pulled it off, it would have been enormously cheaper than what we actually did. It’s this sort of thing that ultimately makes the humanitarian arguments around Iraq so fatuous — this is just a ridiculously costly way to try to help people and when one talks about extending the deployment two or three more years in the hopes that the trend line will magically reverse, one is contemplating a truly massive expenditure of resources that could be more effectively deployed doing almost anything else.

UPDATE: PS note that annual expenditures in Iraq are way higher than the annual value of Iraqi oil exports. I do think that the large US military footprint in the Persian Gulf region is motivated by a sense that this is economically necessary to secure the area’s precious underground fluids, but the numbers don’t add up right.

Johann Hari, a former left-wing Iraq hawk like myself, turns a review of a book by Nick Cohen, current left-wing Iraq hawk, into the opportunity for a great essay on the phenomenon. My main disagreement is that I think Hari overemphasizes the idea that democracy, freedom, etc. aren’t important subjective aims of Bush, Cheney, neoconservatism etc.

I spent a lot of time puzzling over Bush’s sincerity or lack thereof with regard to his idealistic rhetoric before the war, and in retrospect it was all wasted time. It’s interesting to wonder how it’s possible — or if it’s possible — for a man to speak grand words about liberty in the morning and defending systematic torture in the afternoon, but it’s not actually relevant. The main point was that there was simply never any good reason to believe the more idealistic aspiration sometimes associated with the war had any decent prospects of success. It was fundamentally dumb to think that invading and conquering Iraq could turn it into a stable liberal democracy if only we wanted it badly enough and that the main issue was whether or not Bush “really” wanted it. It was just fundamentally a dumb idea, and that‘s what I should have seen at the time. It still seems to me that Bush may well have been dumb enough to sincerely believe in it on some level, but it was still dumb — that’s what matters.

Defense Department photo courtesy of Ping News.