John “The Israel Lobby” Mearsheimer isn’t shying away from controversy. He says he sees four options for Israel/Palestine — A two-state solution, a binational solution, the expulsion of the Arab population from a Greater Israel, and the construction of a Greater Israel governed along apartheid lines — and that he thinks the apartheid outcome is the most likely one. He says Israeli leaders, despite agreeing to the UN partition plan, have never been interested in seeing the creation of a viable Palestinian state and he includes Yitzhak Rabin (though he says the Palestinians got “tantalizingly close” to a viable state at Camp David and Taba) in that category.

To Mearsheimer, the key point is that the mainstream Israeli view would create a Palestinian state that doesn’t control its own airspace, its own borders, or its own water supply — conditions that he says don’t create the basis for a viable state. I don’t imagine you’ll see any of the Democratic politicians stopping by the conference tomorrow endorsing these views or anything like it.

Speaking of corrupt cartels, I think it’s nice to see Barack Obama’s campaign taking on the conventional wisdom more directly:

For years, Washington€™s conventional wisdom has held that candidates for President are judged not by their wisdom, but rather by their adherence to hackneyed rhetoric that make little sense beyond the Beltway. When asked whether he would use nuclear weapons to take out terrorist targets in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Barack Obama gave the sensible answer that nuclear force was not necessary, and would kill too many civilians. Conventional wisdom held this up as a sign of inexperience. But if experience leads you to make gratuitous threats about nuclear use €“ inflaming fears at home and abroad, and signaling nuclear powers and nuclear aspirants that using nuclear weapons is acceptable behavior, it is experience that should not be relied upon.

Barack Obama€™s judgment is right. Conventional wisdom is wrong. It is wrong to propose that we would drop nuclear bombs on terrorist training camps in Pakistan, potentially killing tens of thousands of people and sending America€™s prestige in the world to a level that not even George Bush could take it. We should judge presidential candidates on their judgment and their plans, not on their ability to recite platitudes.

Now, obviously, the next step would be to develop some clearer actual policy differentiation. Silly as it was for Hillary Clinton’s campaign to criticize Obama for being unwilling to launch a nuclear attack on Pakistan, I’m pretty sure President Clinton won’t use nuclear weapons in South Asia either. But since both campaigns seem to think that public disagreements about foreign policy serve their interests, maybe I can hold hope open that they’ll move on to some broader issues.

Atrios, or as we call him in real life, “Duncan,” has been wandering around wondering why there’s such a thing as a foreign policy community. It’s a good question. The consequences of its existence don’t seem to be particularly beneficial. Steve Clemons is talking at a panel on foreign policy, blogging, and activism and gives voice to something that I think a lot of us tend to suspect, saying he was one of the few members of said community to go on television and speak against the Iraq War not because he was the only one to think it was a bad idea, but “because everyone else was a coward.”

“People like me,” he says, “were being fed quite a bit of inside information from people who were every bit as horrified” but very few people said anything. And it’s true — alongside the famously pro-war elements of the establishment, there’s a shockingly large number of people at places like Brookings, CSIS, the CFR, etc. where if you try to look up what they said about Iraq it turns out that they said . . . nothing at all.

His perspective, he says, is that Washington is “a corrupt town.” From that perspective, he says that “the political-intellectual arenas is essentially a cartel” — a cartel that’s become extremely timid and risk-averse in the face of a neoconservative onslaught — and “blogs allow smart people to break the cartel.” That all seems very true to me, and I’m not sure what I have to add.

There’s a great article in today’s Washington Post that goes beyond merely noting how dysfunctional the government of Nouri al-Maliki and his party is in Iraq, but tries to help explain why:

At times consumed by conspiracy theories, Maliki and his Dawa party elite operate much as they did when they plotted to overthrow Saddam Hussein — covertly and concerned more about their community’s survival than with building consensus among Iraq’s warring groups, say Iraqi politicians and analysts and Western diplomats. [...]

But Dawa members and other Shiites remained suspicious of the motives of the United States and the Sunnis, partly because of the Shiites’ history of being oppressed and betrayed, including what they viewed as an American failure to back a Shiite uprising after the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

On the one hand, this makes the leaders of the Shiite parties hesitant to compromise with Sunnis. It also, in a totally understandable way, makes them freak out about things like the U.S. military giving training and support to local armed Sunni groups that we’re partnering with to fight al-Qaeda. They have no trust in Iraq’s Sunni elites and no trust in the United States. At the same time, trying to work with Sunnis who are willing to cooperate with us against al-Qaeda is the right strategy for us. Except that the real right strategy for us is to recognize that things are far, far, far too screwed up for us to unscrew them at this point.

U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Eli J. Medellin

Peter Beinart says the essence of liberal foreign policy is to create a situation where the United States works through institutions and does “not need to choose between isolationism and imperialism.” I think that’s exactly right.

Peter Beinart was just talking about why he came to the view that we need to withdraw from Iraq, essentially without residual forces, and start working on damage control in other parts of the world including a rapprochement with Iran.. His basic argument is very similar to mine and should be familiar to readers, but he mentioned an important source of establishmentarian support for this view, Steven Biddle at the Council on Foreign Relations. Check out, for example, this bit of congressional testimony:

Public support for the President€™s surge policy in Iraq is at a very low ebb. Yet many Americans remain reluctant to withdraw from Iraq altogether. The result has been growing interest in a variety of compromise proposals that would reduce US troop levels but stop short of total withdrawal. Are these sound choices for US policy?

The answer is no.

Quite so. I hope the presidential candidates can be made to see this before January 2009. It’s depressing to think of the war lasting that long, but even more depressing to imagine it continuing, CNAS-style, for years and years after the election.

Number one on my list of “panels I’m bitter I wasn’t invited to speak on” is the one I’m attending right now: “The Next Progressive Foreign Policy” featuring Steve Clemons, Ken Baer, and Peter Beinart, which doesn’t seem like a particularly netrootsy crew. I’ll be interested in what Peter has to say though, because I haven’t actually read that much by him on foreign policy since his book, and the book, despite the criticism it took, entailed a substantial turn to the left.

UPDATE: See, for example, I agreed with something like 97 percent of what Beinart said in his opening presentation. The essential fact of the modern world is that the United States wants to worry about problems inside other countries (terrorists in failed states, epidemic disease in countries with bad public health systems, nuclear programs in Iran, etc.) but that to do anything about those problems in an effective way, we need to do it in a legitimate way, which means through rules and institutions that we are willing to obey.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Clemons then correctly adds a dimension that had been missing from what Beinart said about the need to move away from the super-militarized approach to the world where the US spends about half the world’s total defense dollars and seems to get less-and-less in terms of beneficial outcomes in exchange.

AND ANOTHER: To be clear, Ken isn’t just “on” the panel he’s moderating it because he was asked to organize it.

Gregory Djerejian (himself a right-leaning former war supporter!) has an excellent takedown of the O’Hanlon/Pollack op-ed that one might deem a “fisking” were the term not so gauche. Meanwhile, this morning I saw Fox News still hyping the op-ed and hyping the upcoming O’Hanlon/Pollack appearance on Fox News Sunday (Democrats who appear on GOP propganda outlets to attack fellow Democrats are everyone’s favorite kind of Democrats) with a heavy emphasis on the idea that the inconsistency between the tone of the op-ed and other recent analysis by the dynamic duo should add credibility to the analysis since they changed their minds after seeing firsthand what was really happening in Iraq.

The privileging of firsthand information is, in this case, totally unwarranted. Obviously, firsthand knowledge of conditions in Iraq would be a good thing to have. But as best as one can tell, the two Brookings fellows didn’t really get that. Instead, they took a week-long guided tour organized by official sources. And they did this not because they’re lazy but because it’s too dangerous for people to walk around Iraq without a military escort. Under those circumstances, assertions about troops’ morale need to be taken with a grain of salt (outside analysts are probably steered toward the peppiest troops) and assertions about an improved security situation need to be firmly located int eh context of it being too dangerous for people to walk around Iraq without a military escort.