Drum, Sullivan, and Stoller were all enraged by this:

“It is not clear yet exactly what this administration is or isn’t doing. We’re getting all kinds of mixed messages,” Clinton said. “I don’t think we’ll know the truth until we have a new president. I think [until] you can get in there and actually bore into what’s been going on, you’re not going to know.”

Greg Sargent rides to the rescue with the full context:

Well I think I’ve been very clear about that too, we should not conduct or condone torture and it is not clear yet exactly what this administration is or isn’t doing, we’re getting all kinds of mixed messages. I don’t think we’ll know the truth until we have a new President. I think once you can get in there and actually bore into what’s been going on, you’re not going to know. I was very touched by the story you guys had on the front page the other day about the WWII interrogators. I mean it’s not the same situation but it was a very clear rejection of what we think we know about what is going on right now but I want to know everything, and so I think we have to draw a bright line and say ‘No torture – abide by the Geneva conventions, abide by the laws we have passed,’ and then try to make sure we implement that.

As Mark Kleiman says, this doesn’t really wash and seems to indicate that she accepts the view that, for example, waterboarding which we definitely do know is happening maybe doesn’t count as torture.

At any rate, Clinton has long distinguished herself as unusually friendly to executive power for an opposition party legislator, so there’s little reason to believe that if she becomes president she’ll be eagerly rolling the boundaries back from where Bush pushed them. I wonder if conservatives will be happy about the idea of HRC-administered torture, on the grounds that they just really love torture, or, maybe, once it’s being done by a politician they don’t admire they’ll start to see that there’s a problem here.

On the anniversary of the vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq, John Edwards releases a statement laying out some of what he thinks he’s learned from his mistake and going after Hillary Clinton on Iraq and Iran on someone who hasn’t learned the right things. Statement below the fold:

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Paul Schroeder’s article on why we need to leave Iraq takes an annoying detrour through Habsburg policy in Italy in the mid-nineteenth century before returning to its extremely valuable point:

Why should retreat, indirection, and self-restraint help the U.S. concretely in the Middle East now? First, basic conditions favor it. It is clear that the potential dangers from the spread of war, ethnic-religious conflict, and terrorism beyond Iraq menace its neighbors and adjacent regions more directly and dangerously than they do the United States. While Iran now enjoys more security from and influence in Iraq than before, thanks to the American invasion, it would be seriously endangered by all-out civil war in Iraq, with the Shi’ites appealing to Iran for help and the Sunnis calling on other Sunni states and the U.S. to help stop them. Turkey has a similar problem with regard to the Kurds, shared to a degree by Iran and Syria. The immediate dangers of wider unrest and Islamic radicalism for Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the U.A.E., Lebanon, and Jordan need no discussion. Even Israel and Egypt are menaced, along with the wider Arab and Muslim worlds and Europe. The very dangers that Bush and Co. claim require the U.S. to stay in Iraq could, if used wisely, pave the way for getting out and inducing others to help fight them.

Why should one suppose that they will? Because it is in their interest to do so and because, unlike Americans, they possess both the cultural links, ties, and skills to be effective at it and legitimate standing and authorization for intervening. A major reason that America’s appeals to other states in the region to do more to help fight terrorism and pacify Iraq have been ineffective is that the overwhelmingly unpopular American military presence in Iraq negates them. Any actions taken under U.S. control automatically become illegitimate in the eyes of the Arab street and many governments.

Right. As you can see from the fact that the United States invaded Iraq, it’s certainly possible for countries to decide to act in an utterly atavistic way that’s completely contrary to their national interests. Nevertheless, it’s noteworthy that the more dire gloom-and-doom scenarios for an American departure from Iraq seem to assume that this is what will happen — even though every single one of Iraq’s neighbors has an interest in Iraq being stable and, failing that, has an interest in containing the chaos, we’re supposed to believe that they would all act incredibly irresponsibly and disaster would strike. But while that could happen (anything’s possible) there’s no reason to regard it as likely.

For a lot of the proponents (and yes this includes Democrats, too) of perpetual military engagement in Iraq, I think the real risk isn’t that there will be a regional conflagration but that there won’t be one, and that this will damage their notions of America as the “indispensable nation.” Meanwhile, neither Syria nor Iran can very well afford to play a constructive role in Iraq as long as US policy continues to be to try to use Iraq as a lever for toppling the regimes in Damascus and Iran.

According to The Nation:

According to the Institute for Policy Studies and financial reporter Michael Brush, CEOs at top defense contractors have seen annual pay raises of 200 to 688 percent since 9/11. The average annual salary for a CEO at a top defense contracting firm is now more than $12 million.

On one level, this is easy to understand. Defense contractors must have made a ton of money since 9/11 thanks to the massive hikes in defense spending. On another level, though, it’s baffling. Defense contractors are making more money because of the war in Iraq and the “war on terror” not because they have super-smart CEOs. Why does their pay need to be tripled or more? Meanwhile, if the political situation ever changes and military spending goes down, lots of workers in defense-related industries will get laid off, but the executives will doubtless evade the sting of the downside even as the cleaned up during the fat years.

I keep not blogging on Israel’s strike of what we’re supposed to believe were North Korean components for a Syrian nuclear weapons program, because the whole thing seemed murky and shrouded in mystery, but after today’s story in The New York Times by Mark Mazzetti and Helene Cooper, it looks a lot less murky.

Basically, there’s a “sharp debate is under way in the Bush administration about the significance of the Israeli intelligence that led to last month’s Israeli strike inside Syria” and it “has fractured along now-familiar fault lines, with Vice President Dick Cheney and conservative hawks in the administration portraying the Israeli intelligence as credible and arguing that it should cause the United States to reconsider its diplomatic overtures to Syria and North Korea.” As Eric Martin says it’s a no-brainer to conclude here that the crazy-and-always-wrong faction of the administration is wrong here.

Perhaps Barack Obama’s efforts to goad others into spelling out what his campaign is trying to say are paying off. Here’s Harold Meyerson:

Many of Hillary Clinton’s foreign and military policy advisers, such as Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution, supported the war at first, then criticized its conduct, then supported the surge. On the war, at least, they could as easily be providing advice to John McCain. The same cannot be said of the majority of foreign and military policy mavens aligned with her two chief rivals.

Recently, Clinton herself resurrected old doubts about her foreign policy judgment that she had managed to tamp down over the past half-year by favoring a timeline for the withdrawal of most U.S. forces. In voting for the Lieberman-Kyl legislation that deemed Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization, she opened the door for Bush and Vice President Cheney to charge into Iran, or its airspace, with what they would claim to be congressional permission.

And here’s Maureen Dowd:

When Hillary voted to let W. use force in Iraq, she didn’t even read the intelligence estimate. She wasn’t trying to do the right thing. She was trying to do the opportunistic thing. She felt she could not run for president, as a woman, if she played the peacenik.

By throwing in with Joe Lieberman and the conservative hawks on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard issue, she once more overcompensated in a cynical way. She’d like to paint Obama as the weak reed who wants to cozy up to dictators, while she’s the one who will play tough. It was odd, given her success in the debates conveying the sense that she is the manliest candidate among the Democrats, that she felt the need to man-up on Iran.

In some ways, it’s the point Dowd raises here — about political strategy — that worries me the most. I don’t think it’s really going to be possible for Democrats to address the big problems facing American foreign policy unless they’re willing to try to break out of the long post-9/11 defensive crouch they’ve been in for years. John Edwards, as has often been the case, led the way here with a bold move to repudiate the “war on terror” conceptual scheme. Barack Obama, having opposed the war from the beginning, wound up mostly attracting to his banner the substantive advisors who were less invested in the crouch and doesn’t seem to have those instincts personally, and wound up essentially forced out of the crouch for his position that we should be willing to conduct diplomatic talks without preconditions.

Clinton’s team isn’t all bad nor is her record, but she seems the least inclined to make a bold, self-confident big-picture challenge to the conservative conception of how we ought to conduct ourselves in the world.

A reader emails this International Herald Tribune account of the flipside of the bizarre scenario by which American Jewish groups found themselves denying that there was any Armenian Genocide during World War One. The point is to refocus the lines of causation back on the Turkish government which took it upon itself to lean very heavily on diaspora groups and, in effect, blackmail them with the idea that Israel would be made to bare the consequences of their failure to step into line.

Andrew Sullivan’s interested in the question of Sandy Berger’s role in the Clinton campaign and flags this bit from USA Today:

“He has no official role in my campaign. He’s been a friend for more than 30 years. But he doesn’t have any official role,” Clinton said.

But he’s an unofficial adviser, Susan asked?

“I have thousands of unofficial advisers,” said Clinton, “and, you know, I appreciate all of that. But he has no official role in my campaign.”

I have no idea whether or not this exhausts Berger’s informal role as part of Team Clinton, but what you hear if you talk to people in left-of-center national security circles in Washington is that one of Berger’s informal responsibilities is basically to get in touch with former Clinton administration foreign policy hands and warn them in no uncertain terms that if they back Barack Obama, Clinton will win anyway and those who supported her rivals will pay the price. My sense is that everyone, probably including Berger himself, understands that he can’t actually be given a job in a Clinton administration one way or another.