From Hillary Clinton’s office:

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton today announced that she is co-sponsoring legislation introduced by Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) that prohibits the use of funds for military operations against Iran without explicit Congressional authorization (S. 759).

The political instincts that led her to vote for Lieberman-Kyle remain troubling, but this is obviously a big step forward.

Ed Kilgore surveys a recent Washington Post/ABC poll with hard to interpret results and concludes:

Pollsters need to figure out ways to (a) test the Iraq issues actually facing Congress; (b) include in questions a few basic facts about troop withdrawals (i.e., that Bush is only talking about withdrawing “surged” troops) and funding levels (i.e., how much money buys what strategy); and (c) test some dynamic scenarios involding actions by Congress and reactions by Bush (i.e., a protracted funding fight).

Until that happens, new polls on Iraq will provide grist for spin, but not for any honest assessment of where the public is at present.

I don’t think that’s really right. Sometimes your measurements don’t produce clear results because the measurement method isn’t clear enough. Other times, though, they don’t produce clear results because there’s nothing to see clearly. Oftentimes in politics, I think politicians would like to believe that there’s an extremely clear-cut median voter view about some difficult issue, because then they can all go adopt that view, and come what may they’ll say they were doing what they had to do because of public opinion. But realistically if the public’s answers to ABC’s questions about Iraq are incoherent, that’s probably because the key “swing” group of people actually has fuzzy, somewhat incoherent thoughts about Iraq.

Under the circumstances, what politicians ought to do is:

1. Figure out what they think is the correct Iraq policy.
2. Figure out what they think is the most persuasive way to sell that policy to the public.
3. Pray it works.

At the end of the day, I think a lot of politicians actually underrate the considerable virtue of adopting a position that’s correct on the merits. If you think the merits through, then you’ll have a principled basis for answering a variety of different questions and responding to different sorts of attacks. And, of course, the election happens over a year from now so if you say something that’s correct, and time proves you correct, then you’ll look prescient and be able to say you took a bold stance and have the courage to lead. Polling data’s nice when there’s clear and convincing evidence of firm public conviction about something, but I just don’t see that on Iraq. The search for better polling mostly seems like an effort to evade the substantive responsibilities of political office.

US Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Dallas

It bears mentioning that things seem to have gone entirely to hell in Burma, with reports now coming out that the death toll in the crackdown has been higher than it initially appeared.

Okay, I can’t resist. Here’s a novel thought I had on the issue inspired by Jeffrey Goldberg’s piece on Walt and Mearsheimer. According to Goldberg, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy “represents the most sustained attack, the most mainstream attack, against the political enfranchisement of American Jews since the era of Father Coughlin.”

This is an interesting rhetorical move. Rather than defending specific policies, or the policy views of specific groups and individuals, Goldberg has positioned himself as the defender of “the political enfranchisement of American Jews” as such, thus capturing the high ground in, among other things, the intra-Jewish debate about Israel and American foreign policy. Lots of Jewish relatives of mine who probably wouldn’t approve of AIPAC’s efforts to remove legislative language constraining George W. Bush from attacking Iran certainly do approve of “the political enfranchisement of American Jews” so if we shift the debate to that issue, Goldberg wins.

The trouble, of course, is that Goldberg has no particular interest in the political enfranchisement of American Jews as such. He’s not talking about empowering Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein and Eric Alterman and Harold Meyerson and Josh Marshall and MJ Rosenberg and Daniel Levy. He’s talking about empowering Jeffrey Goldberg and Alan Dershowitz and Martin Peretz and Charles Krauthammer. Which is fine. Obviously, you’d expect Goldberg to want to see people who agree with him empowered vis-à-vis those who disagree with him, but this has nothing to do with empowering “the Jews” and everything to do with empowering some Jews whose ideas have not, over the years, served the United States or Israel very well.

Jeffrey Goldberg’s a colleague at The Atlantic so perhaps the less said about his TNR article on how John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt are anti-semites and it’s about time someone had the courage to say so the better. Readers will know, obviously, that I disagree and probably be familiar with my views on the situation.

… then Oliver Willis and Nick Beaudrot would be right that “[m]ilitary strikes against against Iran would quite clearly be an act of war; without Congressional authorization it would pribma facie be an impeachable offense.” In the real world, though, I didn’t see Bill Clinton getting impeached for bombing Serbia without congressional authorization even by a congress that was eager to impeach Bill Clinton so I wouldn’t get my hopes up on that one.

Congress’ de facto war powers have been reduced to the need to get congressional approval for war-related spending. What we just saw with Iraq, though, is that according to the media, if Democrats vote for a funded withdrawal of troops, and then Bush vetoes those funds and demands that Democrats give him a blank check, then it would be a failure to “support the troops” for Democrats to refuse to cave to this demand. We’ve also seen that many — if not most — congressional Democrats accept this framing. So if Bush decides he wants to bomb Iran, nobody in congress is going to stop him. Dana Priest, though, speaks for surprisingly many journalist when she says:

Frankly, I think the military would revolt and there would be no pilots to fly those missions. This is a little bit of hyperbole, but not much. Just look at what Gen. Casey, the Army chief, said yesterday. That the tempo of operations in Iraq would make it very hard for the military to respond to a major crisis elsewhere. Beside, it’s not the “war” or “bombing” part that’s difficult; it’s the morning after and all the days after that. Haven’t we learned that (again) from Iraq?

To me, though, it’s important to avoid overstating the degree of military opposition to a bomb Iran policy. As best I can tell, the Army is dead-set against it. But the Army wouldn’t be carrying the mission out anyway. It’d be shocking for the Air Force to suddenly come to appreciate the strategic limits of air power. In their minds, bombing Iran won’t compound the error of Iraq; rather, it’ll show the manifest benefits of doing things their way rather than getting bogged-down into an Army-style quagmire.

Rick Perlstein takes a look at some of the revisionist literature on Vietnam and comes away — unsurprisingly — unimpressed. For more on this general subject, and in particular the malign influence the right’s Vietnam revisionism has exercised, see Spencer Ackerman’s piece on the other Vietnam syndrome, one of the last things he did for TNR.