Michael Hirsch on Bush and Blackwater:

Imagine a universe where a man can gun down women and children anytime he pleases, knowing he will never be brought to justice. A place where morality is null and void, and arbitrary killing is the rule. A place that has been imagined hitherto only in nightmarish dystopian fiction, like “1984,” or in fevered passages from Dostoevsky—or which existed during the Holocaust and Stalinist purges and the Dark Ages. Well, that universe exists today. It is called Iraq. And the man who made it possible is George W. Bush.

Again, note the staggering fact that the allegedly sovereign government of Iraq has been allowing this state of affairs to persist for years and has already backed down from efforts to do otherwise. It’s a perfect encapsulation of the fundamentally imperial nature of the enterprise.

Marc Lynch appears on a Cato panel and comes away with a great post. First on the intellectual laziness and dishonesty pervading our culture:

I gave my usual argument about what happened in the Sunni areas, which I won’t recapitulate here. I concluded with my mind-boggling experience yesterday of watching an American neoconservative on al-Jazeera lecturing a Sunni Iraqi tribal shaykh – in English – about what is really going on in the Sunni tribal areas, and warned against believing our own propaganda about the Sunni areas.

But of course, Lynch is an Arabist, so you don’t want to trust him. Then, he channels James Dobbins:

He argued that no civil war can ever be resolved if the country’s neighbors don’t want it to be resolved; the US can either contain Iran or stabilize Iraq, but it can’t have both.

This seems important to me, and at least one reason to believe that withdrawing from Iraq might change things in that country for the better. Iran’s interests are better-served by a stable Iraq than by a chaotic, violent Iraq. But Iran’s interests are better-served by a chaotic, violent Iraq than by a stable Iraq that collaborates with American efforts to overthrow the Iranian government.

I would love to see a large-scale diplomatic rapprochement with Iran, but barring such an unlikely reversal of alliances (and as Dan Drezner and I agree on BHTV we probably don’t want to see someone as inept as Bush even try super-ambitious diplomacy), the best thing we could probably do for Iraq in this regard is to just make it not be a proxy ground for US-Iranian conflict. The idea that Iran would adopt an attitude of indifference to events in an adjacent country is ridiculous, as is this notion that they’ll adopt such an attitude if we complain loud enough. For the US, by contrast, not occupying Iraq is a very realistic option.

Israeli vice premiere Haim Ramon gets to Clinton’s left and admits the obvious point that the Arab parts of Jerusalem are going to need to be part of an independent Palestine.

What Drew Westen said:

The way to win the center on national security is not to try to craft centrist positions on national security. Particularly in the post-9/11 era, Americans want leaders who will decisively pull the trigger. But “pulling the trigger” today doesn’t mean rattling our sabers almost as loud as the GOP, or complaining that we don’t have the votes when we have the majority. Americans may not understand the subtleties of cloture, but they get the gist: that they handed the ball off to the party that’s now in the majority, who they expected to run with the ball instead of consistently playing defense. The way to project strength on national security and to win back the Reagan Democrats who voted for Bill Clinton (despite his draft record) and flirted with the Democratic Party again in 2006 is to exude strength, particularly in the face of aggression, whether that aggression is from al Qaeda or from a bully in his bully pulpit.

Yes, I agree. One doubts that voters have detailed views about the substance of foreign policy issues. They can, however, tell the difference between politicians who act like they have a plan in mind and are acting decisively to implement it, and politicians who appear paralyzed or obsessed with positioning.