I don’t think ordinary people can read Sydney Freedberg’s excellent cover story in the new National Journal but the teaser text explains the basic dilemma well:

Sometimes U.S. troops kill Iraqis in self-defense. Sometimes they kill them for other reasons. And sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.

The crux of the matter is that soldiers in ambiguous situations understandably tend to err on the side of their own personal safety and that of their fellow soldiers. Likewise, officers faced with ambiguous situations tend to err on the side of giving the soldiers under their command the benefit of the doubt. And courts-martial, likewise, err on the side of taking a favorable view of American soldiers.

All of which is fine. Unless you happen to be an Iraqi. Which is precisely why people tend not to enjoy being under foreign military occupation.

The reality of the matter is that to succeed, our troops would need to behave the way police officers do. But they’re not cops, they’re soldiers. And there’s a good reason that soldiers act the way soldiers do. There’s no way that it would be politically feasible — or even appropriate — for the US military to start treating Iraqi lives as more important than American lives. But that would be the only way to actually pull off what they’ve been asked to pull off. It’s an impossible situation, and not one we should be putting people in.

Matthew Duss notes that Giuliani foreign policy advisor Daniel Pipes is on the “presidium” of an outfit called the Jerusalem Summit that opposes the creation of a Palestinian state under any circumstances and instead proposes the transfer of Palestinians to elsewhere in the Arab world.

It seems to me that just as Giuliani ought to be asked whether or not he endorses Norman Podhoretz’s view that we need to bomb Iran ASAP he also ought to be asked whether he joins Daniel Pipes in endorsing this view. And if he doesn’t, then why does he have so many advisors he disagrees with on key issues?

People often note that there appears to be a more vigorous debate over Israel’s approach to the Israeli-Arab conflict in the mainstream Israeli press than there is in the mainstream American press. This is, however, the kind of judgment that it’s hard for a casual American observer to make with much confidence. Writing in International Security, however, Jerome Slater takes a more systematic comparison of coverage of the conflict in The New York Times and in Haaretz and concludes that, indeed, Israelis debate this matter more freely.

Robert Farley is sadly convincing on why the prospects for an arms control agreement related to submarines are very bad basically no matter what happens.

Ed Kilgore, in the course of a long discussion, refers rather derisively to the idea that “some Democrats sincerely believe that their party’s acceptance of, say, a private-sector role in health care or a legitimate U.S. national security role in the Middle East, leaves voters with no real choice and no real excitement over the outcome.” Since that somewhat resembles a straw man version of one thing I argue in my book, I thought I might as well put forward a non-straw version of it.

The argument I would make on this score is simply that your policies need to bear some relationship in scale to your message. If you want to go to the voters with the idea that George W. Bush’s plan for endless war in Iraq is a disaster, then your Iraq policy shouldn’t involve the war in Iraq continuing endlessly on a slightly smaller scale. That’s not to say that the parties need to articulate Big Differences on all the issues — the current iteration of Bush’s North Korea policy is pretty sound, and I saw Ed Schultz on TV the other day getting into trouble precisely because he wanted to pretend he had some big disagreement with it when really it would be smarter to just admit that Bush belatedly came around to the right idea and argue about something else.

But when you do want to articulate Big Differences, you need to spell that out. In particular, I take it that the Democratic nominee in 2008 is going to want to argue that she or he would rectify the disastrous state of America’s foreign policy whereas the Republican nominee would not. But given that George W. Bush won’t actually be running for office, to make that argument plausible you need to argue that there is some broad, systematic, ideological disagreement between the parties on foreign policy. The emphasis on incompetence made sense as a 2004 election message, but Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani both have much stronger claims to managerial expertise than do Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. If you want to argue for Clinton or Obama, you need to argue on the basis of their ideas and that means you need to articulate what the difference is in a reasonably clear way.

It remains one of the more pressing questions of our time. Daniel Drezner locates Richard Rose’s account of Bush’s take on this:

When the conversation became too academic, the President even began leafing through a book of mine that I had given him that ends with a chapter about America’s victory over Iraq in Kuwait, a victory that left his father riding the crest of a wave–after which there was only a one-way option down.

The President listened far more than he spoke and when he did it was to make simple points that many critics dodge, such as: We had to do something after 19 young people blew up 3,000 Americans.

One might have thought that stabilizing Afghanistan under non-Taliban leadership and capturing or killing Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar, and Ayman al-Zawahiri would have counted as “something.”