Here’s a great catch from Ilan Goldenberg highlighting something I’d missed from HRC’s Foreign Affairs article:

As we redeploy our troops from Iraq, we must not let down our guard against terrorism. I will order specialized units to engage in targeted operations against al Qaeda in Iraq and other terrorist organizations in the region.

Other terrorist organizations in the region? Ilan generously suggests that Clinton may mean the PKK. On the other hand, in light of her vote on the Lieberman-Kyl resolution, maybe she means the IRGC. Or maybe Hezbollah. Certainly some clarification seems to be in order.

Spencer Ackerman finds himself unimpressed with Ricardo Sanchez:

The current crop of right-wingers is too close to the Iraq war to accept Sanchez’s vituperation, since it contains an attack on Bush. But as the war recedes and the need for scapegoating expands — particularly if conservatives lose the White House next year — Sanchez’s speech reads like a foundational text for an aggrieved conservative worldview that the war was too virtuous for the country that fought it. And it makes a lot of sense that it’s Sanchez, the most disgraced general of the entire war, who issued this j’accuse.

This is something that I think liberals, especially ones like me who work in the ideas business, are going to need to be vigilant about for years to come. It took quite a while for the Rambo theory of Vietnam to go mainstream and I’m sure at the time it didn’t strike people as necessarily a big deal if Ronald Reagan wanted to perpetuate a mythical account of the past while, in his actual role as president, being quite cautious about putting American boots on the ground. Today, though, we’ve all lived to see the damage done by unlearning too many of those lessons. I can only hope it doesn’t wind up all happening again.

Married Man Ross Douthat questions the relevance of Jonah Goldberg’s view that we should emphasize that the Cold War was bad even though there was no real alternative to containment. Well, I can conceive of one possible use to which to put this insight, though I think not one Jonah would approve of, namely that insofar as possible we ought to try really hard to avoid getting into a New Cold War dynamic with China.

Oftentimes, I see people look at China’s poor human rights record and its even worse record of diplomatic support for regimes with appalling human rights records. Then they look at China’s veto on the UN Security Council. And then they conclude that it’s an imperative — in humanitarian terms — not to bind ourselves to follow the UN.

One thing missing from this is how it’s going to look from the perspective of Beijing if the US decides that it has the right to invade any country, anywhere, at any time because we’ve decided we don’t approve of its government’s internal policies. The answer is: not good. Expanding the ambit of decision-makers to something like a “Global NATO” or a “League of Democracies” — groups that would exclude China — doesn’t change the basic dynamic. What you’d have is a situation where the United States was proposing a set of rules to govern the international road that the primary rising power couldn’t possibly agree to. In short: Sino-American conflict and tensions. Even if that didn’t erupt into something disastrous like an actual Sino-American war, it very well could mean a return to Cold War-style proxy wars and constant paralysis of global institutions and people need to understand that that would be an utter humanitarian catastrophe.

As horrible as Rwanda or Bosnia were or Darfur may be, one ought to recognize that on the whole the post-Cold War world has been much more peaceful than were comparable-duration periods of the Cold War (see the Human Security Report for a bunch of data on this) thanks to the existence of fewer proxy conflicts and the tendency for conflicts to be conducted with less money and weapons. Basically, one of the very most important things we can do in humanitarian terms in try to preserve a generally peaceful big-picture international environment, even though this may, indeed, mean exercising restraint vis-à-vis some specific humanitarian emergencies. This becomes even more true when we start to think about issues like climate change where there’s obviously no hope of a solution unless the US, India, China, Europe, Russia, Japan, Brazil, and Indonesia can all work together.

Vladimir Putin’s warnings against military action against Iran deserve to be taken very seriously. Since we’re not contemplating actually conquering Iran and trying to occupy its territory, people need to understand that the post-strike diplomatic environment is going to be much more important to the future of the Iranian nuclear program than is any damage that bombing Iran with our on-the-table options might or might not do. If Russia decides to just send some scientists with schematics and materiel over to Iran and show them how to build a nuclear bomb, then — bam — nuclear bomb.

Conversely, at the moment not only is Iran under some diplomatic pressure to stop short of weaponizing, many countries around the world are taking direct measures to prevent the Iranians from just easily going and buying the stuff they need. Insofar as an unprovoked American military attack convinces other countries that the real dangerous lunatics live in DC rather than Teheran, countries around the world could cut back on their vigilance and make it much easier for an Iranian nuclear program to succeed.

The point is that when people talking about the Iranians being such-and-such time period away, or some bombing effort taking them back x number of years, they’re talking as if progress toward a nuclear weapon proceeds at a constant pace. In practice, one of the factors that determines how quickly you can proceed is the international context. Right now, things are pretty tricky for Iranian nuclear scientists. Military action that doesn’t reflect a firm, UN-backed consensus grounded in some reasonable interpretation of international law (military action that does reflect such a consensus seems very, very unlikely but in principle it could happen) could dramatically alter that.

Now that he’s secured the support of retired major general James “Spider” Marks, I think Mitt Romney can add “best surrogate nickname” to good poll numbers in the early states and a Mormon fundraising network in terms of key campaign strengths. Any other contenders in the cool surrogate nickname field?

Brian Beutler: “Thanks to a bunch of meddling, anti-American leftist politicians, India may not draw the United States into violation of domestic and international law after all.”

Strange but true. For more on the disaster that is this nuclear deal, see this from the Center for American Progress.

One thing I’m wrestling with is finding a way to convey how terrified I am of the prospect of a Rudy Giuliani presidency in terms of its impact on our foreign policy. The Bush administration has been so bad, and characters like Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson so absurd, that I think it’s hard for a lot of people to seriously credit the notion that Giuliani would represent a quantum leap of lunacy and just the time when the country desperately needs a clean break and a lurch in the other direction. Josh Marshall tries to get at some of this here:

But the danger of phoniness, aesthetic or otherwise, cannot hold a candle to the truly catastrophic foreign policy Giuliani would likely pursue if he got anywhere near the Oval Office. Watching him campaign it’s pretty clear that the guy has no real sense that posturing and pandering to ethnic paranoia in New York City simply isn’t the same as running a national foreign policy. The people he’s coalescing around himself as his foreign policy advisors are the ones who are going to help him learn as he goes. And they are simply the most dangerous, deranged and deluded folks you can find in American political and foreign policy circles today.

That’s right. And, of course, there’s a nexus here as a disproportionately large quantity of Giuliani’s advisors spent years before 9/11 toiling away in semi-obscurity with their stock-in-trade being precisely fostering a climate of ethnic paranoia and then exploiting it — offering up lurid tales of the perfidy of the Arab and of Muslim infiltration of American society. Another way of thinking about it is that the “a squad” of neoconservative foreign policymaking has basically been discredited by their conduct inside the Bush administration, so Giuliani, in reaching for the non-discredited, has wound up just reaching into the deep bench rather than trying to find anyone with sounder views. It seems to me that he almost certainly won’t win, but if he does I think we may all wind up nostalgic for the Doug Feith Era.

UPDATE: Check out the latest TPM TV epsidode that runs down Giuliani’s advisory team. The part where Daniel Pipes calls on Israel to raize more Palestinian villages is especially sweet.

David Shorr has more on the simple point that one wants to discern and exploit disagreements among hostile forces, not brush past and ignore them:

In a speech last year, Zbigniew Brzezinski came up with one of the great summaries of our predicament: that instead of uniting our friends and dividing our enemies, we have been uniting our enemies and dividing our friends. One of the many problems with pumping up Jihadism as the contemporary equivalent of the East Bloc is that it defines our adversaries as monolithic. Matt’s absolutely right that infighting among our adversaries could be very significant, and useful. But don’t take my word for it, West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center has done a serious study of disputes among terrorists over tactics and strategy. [Hat tip to Lorelei for highlighting this work last year.]

During the Cold War, almost all of the big American wins came in part from a recognition of differences. We embraced democratic socialist parties in post-war Germany and France, the better to divide them from the Communists. Nixon made a deft opening toward China. And in our better moments, we sought to embrace third world aspirations for nationhood and independence. When we did the reverse and conflated everything together we got fiascos like Vietnam or the pathetic failure of our past fifty years’ worth of Cuba policy.

Twelve more phony soldiers, former Captains who served in Iraq, write in The Washington Post that we have two viable options in Iraq, either “abandon our volunteer military for compulsory service” which will put us in a position where “we might be able to succeed in Iraq.” Alternatively, and in the option they clearly favor, “our best option is to leave Iraq immediately.”

Their point is that while plans to withdraw very, very slowly may help politicians who don’t want to admit defeat, that such protracted phase-downs do nothing to actually help Iraq and a great deal to endanger the troops left behind. These are schemes that amount to asking soldiers to risk their lives not to achieve any strategic objectives of national importance, but for the vainglory of politicians whose egos are salved by anything that lets them avoid admitting error or the need for dramatic change.