Uh oh. Here’s a frightening post from Kevin Drum in which he suggests that both Barack Obama and HIllary Clinton spent the national security session of the debate unduly fixated on the “meta” issue of who could best make arguments about national security without either of them actually making an argument. There does seem to be some truth to that. Here’s Barack Obama, for example:

The question is: Can we make an argument that this was a conceptually flawed mission, from the start?

And we need better judgment when we decide to send our young men and women into war, that we are making absolutely certain that it is because there is an imminent threat, that American interests are going to be protected, that we have a plan to succeed and to exit, that we are going to train our troops properly and equip them properly and put them on proper rotations and treat them properly when they come home.

And that is an argument that I think we are going to have an easer time making if they can’t turn around and say: But hold on a second; you supported this.

And that’s part of the reason why I think that I would be the strongest nominee on this argument of national security.

Now I agree with what Obama is saying here. I think it’s important to make the argument that this was conceptually flawed from the start, and I do think Obama’s better-positioned to make that argument. But he’s not actually making the argument here. He’s talking about the possibility of making the argument. He’s got an advantage in pressing this argument against Clinton because Clinton, in this context, doesn’t want to really portray herself as a war supporter so given the inherently awkward position she’s in, any extended discussion of this issue winds up cutting in Obama’s favor. But McCain is really going to stand there and say that he said at the time we needed to send more troops to Iraq, that the problems were caused by George W. Bush’s unwillingness to listen to him, and that once more troops were sent the situation got better. Obama’s going to need to defend the proposition that McCain’s wrong about all this.

I took a stab at making the argument a while back with Sam Rosenfeld. For now, I think what Obama’s saying is serving is present purposes fairly well. But in the future, something deeper and more first-order is going to have to come into play from either candidate.

Via Adam Blickstein, Richard Clarke (who was worrying about al-Qaeda long before George W. Bush) has a great op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer eviscerating the president’s arguments on FISA:

For this president, fear is an easier political tactic than compromise. With FISA, he is attempting to rattle Congress into hastily expanding his own executive powers at the expense of civil liberties and constitutional protections. [...]

In order to defeat the violent Islamist extremists who do not believe in human rights, we need not give up the civil liberties, constitutional rights and protections that generations of Americans fought to achieve. We do not need to create Big Brother. With the administration’s attempts to erode FISA’s legal standing as the exclusive means by which our government can conduct electronic surveillance of U.S. persons on U.S. soil, this is unfortunately the path the president is taking us down.

It’s striking that at the same time Bush thinks we need to ditch the constitution and basic principles of good government in order to fight al-Qaeda, he remains totally uninterested in orienting our foreign policy toward this goal. Instead today, just as it’s been throughout his administration, the bulk of our policies reflects an unwillingness and inability to set priorities. We need to be mired in Iraq indefinitely, says Bush. We need to pick new fights with Iran, says Bush. We need missile defense and Virginia Class submarines and F-22. Nothing shall be compromised in order to better position ourselves against al-Qaeda. Nothing but the rule of law and our civil liberties.

This Washington Post editorial on Michael Mukasey’s “tortured testimony” would sit a whole lot better with me if the Post had taken the same line back during Mukasey’s confirmation hearings. After all, all this was perfectly clear back then — asked directly whether he would condemn torture as torture, he declined to do so. So why are we surprised when, as AG, he refuses to do it?

There’s some kind of weird sense in which to maintain your respectable Village ID card you need to both resolutely oppose torture and oppose all the political steps that might actually put a stop to it. Instead, you’re supposed to have childlike faith that Bush and his henchmen are going to stop it themselves because, after all, they’re sweet and wonderful people. Or something.

Ilan Goldenberg notes this crucial sentence from Tom Ricks: “Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and top military officers have said they would like to see continued withdrawals throughout this year, but Bush has indicated he is likely to be guided by Petraeus’s views.”

I hope we can keep this in mind in the future. It’s clearly within Bush’s right as President to decide that he doesn’t agree with his key advisors on military policy and instead wants to give David Petraeus extra resources that Petraeus’ superiors think could be better used elsewhere. But that’s what Bush is doing. He’s not being guided by “military advice” as opposed to political logic inside the Beltway. Just as he decided upon the surge in the first place and then set about firing the already-in-place generals who disagreed with it, he’s again siding with a minority viewpoint.

In this particular case, though, it’s worth asking what probative value Petraeus’ opinions are supposed to have. It seems to me that any officer in Petraeus’ position would probably feel that more resources should go to his mission and fewer resources should go to someone else’s mission. If he were in charge of Afghanistan wouldn’t he want more troops there, too? That’s not to say anything against the guy. But it’s just common sense that you need to discount these kind of claims. The people in charge of the Navy want the Navy’s budget to go up, and every member of congress things his district deserves more highway spending.

It looks as if, as was widely expected in dovish quarters, Iraq’s new de-Baathification law is proving unacceptable to Sunni Arabs, and Iraq’s Sunni Vice President is saying he’ll veto it. Meanwhile, if I’ve said it once I’ve said it a thousand times — the states purpose of the surge was to lay the groundwork for political reconciliation, reconciliation looks further away than ever and the surge is about to run out of time. That’s a failed policy.