On top of whatever else has been said, Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Post op-ed seems to involve an odd definition of “partisan”

The true believers in the Bush revolution are furious. John R. Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, sounded the alarm in February with a broadside against the agreement that the State Department and its Asian negotiating partners had reached with North Korea, warning President Bush that it contradicted “fundamental premises” of his foreign policy. [...] Tony Smith published a blistering essay on Iraq in The Washington Post several months ago, attacking not neoconservative policymakers but liberal thinkers who had, he argued, become enablers for the neocons and thus were the real villains. [...] In the blogosphere, pillorying Hillary Clinton is a full-time sport. [...] Obama has come in for his share of abuse as well.

Say what you will about this stuff, but none of it is partisan. Bolton was, after all, perfectly correct to say that the deal Nick Burns struck with North Korea and that Bush agreed to contradicts the basic premises of the Bush foreign policy. The partisan thing for Bolton to have done would have been to keep his qualms quiet and let the Great Leader bask in praise. Similarly, for Democrats to attack Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama isn’t partisanship. What’s partisanship is when people refrain from criticizing their party’s leading figures.

Maybe if the Prime Minister of Iraq doesn’t like our commanding general in Iraq and wants us to stop arming Sunni groups, but the US government thinks our commanding general is a smart guy and we want to intensify the arming of Sunni groups that we ought to step back, take a deep breath, and decide to leave Iraq to the Iraqis.

It would be ridiculous, after all, to sack an American general because Nouri al-Maliki wants us to. But it would also be ridiculous for an American general to be running around Iraq implementing policies contrary to those of the Iraqi government we’re supposed to be supporting. The best solution is to shake hands and go our separate ways.

Something doesn’t add up here, eh? Just yesterday, Helen Cooper, Mark Mazzetti, and Jim Rutenberg reported for The New York Times on “Saudis’ Role in Iraq Frustrates U.S. Officials”. Specifically:

One senior administration official says he has seen evidence that Saudi Arabia is providing financial support to opponents of Mr. Maliki. He declined to say whether that support was going to Sunni insurgents because, he said, “That would get into disagreements over who is an insurgent and who is not.”

The officials speaking to The New York Times had to stay anonymous because “openly criticizing Saudi Arabia would further alienate the Saudi royal family at a time when the United States is still trying to enlist Saudi support for Mr. Maliki and the Iraqi government, and for other American foreign policy goals in the Middle East, including an Arab-Israeli peace plan.” Nevertheless, the sources were “clearly intent on sending a pointed signal to a top American ally” in part “because it appears that Saudi Arabia has stepped up efforts to undermine the Maliki government.”

Today, though, comes a different Times article, David Cloud’s “U.S. Set to Offer Huge Arms Deal to Saudi Arabia”. This $20 billion package had been getting held up by Israeli concerns, but “senior officials who described the package on Friday said they believed that the administration had resolved those concerns, in part by promising Israel $30.4 billion in military aid over the next decade, a significant increase over what Israel has received in the past 10 years.”

Putting this all together, we’re going to give Israel billions of dollars in bribes in order to get them to not object to our decision to sell huge quantities of advanced weaponry to a country that is arming the people we’re fighting in Iraq. Makes sense to me!

Photo by Flickr user al-Fassam used under a Creative Commons license

The essay is a little rambly since it’s structured as a review of a bunch of books, at least one of which seems to have been a bit off-topic, but Samantha Power sure is smart.

Don’t tell Mark Penn or the national press corps, but it seems (via Andrew Sullivan) that the public mostly backs Obama on the question of meetings.

As some people have pointed out, it’s a little bit unclear what, exactly, the policy disagreement here amounts to. The political disagreement, though, is pretty clear. Clinton is making the same kind of calculation that led people to think Democrats needed to authorize the war in 2002, or keep quiet about the NSA surveillance program in 2005, or posture as “tough” on Iran in 2006, etc., etc., etc. Those kind of political calculations, however, have implications for governing. First John Edwards by taking on the “war on terror” construct, and now Obama by challenging the Very Serious People on the subject of meetings are starting to edge toward a new Democratic approach — one that involves actually challenging the post-9/11 miasma into which the national conversation about foreign policy has landed — while Clinton is still fully inside the defensive crouch.