What Ross and Daniel Larison say about Robert Kagan’s observations on the alleged “resilience” of autocracy in Venezuela and Russia. That leaves the case of China, where both important elements of the neoconservative right (à la Kagan) and of the labor-liberal left (à la several of my old editors at The American Prospect) would like us to believe that the links between globalization, the market economy, political liberalization, and human freedom have all been broken.

The trouble here is that I’ve rarely if ever heard from a Chinese person or a person who lives in China anything other than that China is, in fact, freer than it was twenty years ago. Is that in large part a reflection of how bad things used to be? Sure. Does that make China a liberal democracy? Of course not. But are things moving in a positive direction? Yes.

The unfortunate reality for those like Kagan who’d like to believe that an incredibly aggressive, violent, coercion-oriented US foreign policy is the height of moral probity is that living conditions around the world are, in general, improving for the better without us. There are major exceptions in Sub-Saharan Africa and North Korea but there’s nothing about a glance at those places — Iraq, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories — that have benefitted from American “democracy promotion” policy that would make any sane person think we need to Kaganize our approach to Russia or China.

It’s Norman Podhoretz versus someone who knows what he’s talking about (i.e., Fareed Zakaria) on a New Hour debate on Iran policy.

That’s via Justin Logan.

Via Brian Beutler, yet another Washington Post column on the “war is peace” theme, this time from Richard Cohen:

But the true realism is that Iran is a menace — potentially a great one — and that its Revolutionary Guard is engaged in the dirty business of killing Americans and others. The fact that the Bush administration says so does not make it otherwise.

Uh huh. Meanwhile, Cohen offers us yet another example of an annoying rhetorical trope, namely the fact that the Iraq War has turned out to be such a disaster is deemed to discredit anti-war voices, because opposition to an escalation of hostilities with Iran can now be written off via cheap psychoanalysis as war fatigue or anti-Bush sentiment. Basically, if Bush were popular, it would be irrational to oppose him since he’s so awesome, but now that Bush is unpopular, it’s irrational to allow warranted dislike of Bush to cast aspersions on his policy agenda.

Michael Klare, whose work I find consistently puzzling, has a piece out in The Nation called “Beyond the Age of Petroleum” warning in dire terms of “a fundamental, near epochal shift in US and indeed world history: we are nearing the end of the Petroleum Age and have entered the Age of Insufficiency.” Like Joseph Romm arguing with James Kunstler, I don’t really get this. Hybrid cars are already available on the market, are much more fuel efficient than conventional autos, and with the “hybrid premium” standing at a few thousand dollars and falling, it seems obvious that if drastically higher fuel prices emerge, middle class suburbanites are going to respond with slightly altered consumption habits (more expensive cars, fewer plasma TVs and granite countertops) rather than radical lifestyle alterations:

Suppose oil hits $160 a barrel and gasoline goes to $5 dollars a gallon in, say, 2015. That price would still be lower than many Europeans pay today. You could just go out and buy the best hybrid and cut your fuel bill in half, back to current levels. Hardly the end of suburbia.

And suppose oil hit $280 a barrel and gasoline rose to $8 dollars a gallon in 2025. You would replace your hybrid with a plug-in hybrid, and those trips less than 30 miles that have made suburbia what it is today would actually cut your fuel bill by a factor of more than 10 — even if all the electricity were from zero-carbon sources like wind power — to far below what you are paying today. The extra cost of the vehicle would be paid for in fuel savings in well under five years.

Obviously, this would result in some economic hardship for many families, but it’s hardly an “epochal shift.” Indeed, even current gasoline prices are actually quite low as a share of household income by historical standards so even if plug-in technology doesn’t materialize (which is hard to believe) we’re not on the precipice of such never-before-seen apocalypse.

I sometimes forget that the aggregate audience for blog commentary is enormously larger than it was a few years ago, so it’s quite possible that there are people reading this blog right now who have never heard of Daniel Davies’ spring 2004 classic The D-Squared Digest One Minute MBA – Avoiding Projects Pursued By Morons 101, nominated today by Jim Henley for the august title of Best Blog Post Ever.

At any rate, give it a read. It’s about Iraq — the pre-war debate specifically — but it’s also about Iran. For that matter, it’s also about forward-looking Iraq policy. Specifically, I know a lot of progressives who are still disinclined to fully endorse complete withdrawal from Iraq who ought to give some consideration to the principle that good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance. Then they might ask themselves why it is that George W. Bush and the large team of professional political operatives he employs believe that sustaining the American military presence in Iraq requires the mission to be draped in a lot of lies about fighting them over there so we don’t need to fight them over here, etc., etc.

I’ll be going to the New America Foundation’s event “The View from a Divided Palestine” with Mustafa Barghouti from the Palestinian Legislative Council, Rita Hauser from the International Peace Academy and the International Crisis Group, and Daniel Levy from New America and elsewhere. Steve Clemons is promising that the event will be record and posted here.

For background, after years of pursuing a mix of disengagement and sporadic counterproductive interventions, Condoleezza Rice decided to call for a peace conference that’ll be happening in Annapolis in November. It’s a little unclear why exactly she’s done this, since in many respects the US government doesn’t seem to have done anything to clear the ground for success and the consequences of failure could be dire. But call it she did, so people of good will may as well try to seize the opportunity to accomplish something constructive — or, at a minimum, stave off some kind of disaster where poor planning leads to failure which leads to years of renewed bitterness and violence.