There was a story in today’s Washington Post headlined “Unilateral Strike Called a Model For U.S. Operations in Pakistan”

In the predawn hours of Jan. 29, a CIA Predator aircraft flew in a slow arc above the Pakistani town of Mir Ali. The drone’s operator, relying on information secretly passed to the CIA by local informants, clicked a computer mouse and sent the first of two Hellfire missiles hurtling toward a cluster of mud-brick buildings a few miles from the town center.

The missiles killed Abu Laith al-Libi, a senior al-Qaeda commander and a man who had repeatedly eluded the CIA’s dragnet. It was the first successful strike against al-Qaeda’s core leadership in two years, and it involved, U.S. officials say, an unusual degree of autonomy by the CIA inside Pakistan.

That made it a pretty weird day for John McCain to attack Obama for being willing to order such strikes. Is McCain against the al-Libi operation?

Ah, Kurdistan, model of democracy, where Leila Fadel reports that a pass system has been put in place to restrict the movement of Arabs:

Every three months, Munawer Fayeq Rashid goes to the Asayech, an intelligence security agency in Irbil, and hands over his identification. The Shiite Muslim Arab never goes alone. He has to bring a Kurdish sponsor to vouch for him. [...] After a battery of questions and the testimony of a Kurd to vouch for them, would-be residents are issued special ID cards that allow them to live in the city. The card must be renewed every three months. If a person wants to visit another city in the Kurdish region, he or she must have a Kurdish sponsor in that city, too.

This seems to be about half “draconian measure necessary to keep Kurdistan relatively safe” and half “discrimination against Arabs for its own sake” but whichever way you look at it, it takes some of the sheen off Kurdistan-as-shining-model. Meanwhile, bloody fighting around a Kirkuk referendum remains just around the corner.

Ryan Lizza has an excellent article sketching out the lines of debate over the future of the Republican Party, and where John McCain fits into the whole thing — apparently, he sees himself as leading a struggle against resurgent forces of isolationism. Ross Douthat’s not too happy:

But, um, Senator McCain, you did notice that Ron Paul topped out at about 5-10 percent of the vote, didn’t you? And that every other candidate in the race (allowing for certain variations) took roughly the same foreign-policy line as you? Doesn’t that at the very least suggest that there might be more pressing battles awaiting a politician looking to reinvent the Republican Party than a crusade against the isolationist menace? Please?

Ross seems a bit confused. As anyone familiar with George W. Bush’s 2006 State of the Union Address knows, “isolationist” means “anyone who doesn’t favor repeating the enormous blunders of the past six years.” In that sense, the forces of isolationism really are growing, and one could even have imagined a President Romney or a President Huckabee turning out to be a closet “isolationist” once in office. But John McCain wanted a pointless and counterproductive policy of rogue state rollback before it was cool.

Obama says:

If the Cuban leadership begins opening Cuba to meaningful democratic change, the United States must be prepared to begin taking steps to normalize relations and to ease the embargo of the last five decades. The freedom of the Cuban people is a cause that should bring the Americans together.

You would think that this formula would be the very height of cautious, go-it-slowism with regard to Cuba. If the Cuban leadership begins opening Cuba to meaningful democratic change the United States must be prepared to begin taking steps to normalize relations and to ease the embargo? And yet, our policies are so screwed up that this counts as a progressive measure. Our stated, exil-driven policy regards getting back the property exiles and US corporations lost decades ago as an “essential condition for the full resumption of economic and diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba.”