I think we need better pundits than Michael O’Hanlon:

“How could Democrats possibly hand McCain a better issue than to let him run on his record of advocating a robust U.S. presence in Iraq with all the positive battlefield news that is filtering out of that country?” asked Michael O’Hanlon, a national security adviser at the Brookings Institution who has been at the center of the Iraq debate since the war’s outset.”

Not having any real credentials myself, I don’t like to question the credentials of others, but it’s worth noting that O’Hanlon is a defense budget analyst and not some kind of Iraq expert or brilliant strategist in either the military or political sense. He is, in short, just a pundit like me but he’s a pundit who plays an expert on TV. If you think we could use a better class of foreign policy pundits, you might want to consider buying Heads in the Sand and making me a famous best-selling author just like Jonah Goldberg. Speaking of which, official blurbs are now up at the HITS Amazon page and one of them’s kinda funny.

On a more substantive note, look — there are a lot of things making George W. Bush unpopular right now. But the disaster of Iraq is at the very heart of what it is that’s brought the conservative movement into its current state of discredit. Democrats obviously want to keep that whole storyline front and center. The problem is that keeping it front and center is problematic for a certain number of people, O’Hanlon included, who were complicit in the selling and prolonging of the war. The interests of people like that just aren’t well-aligned with the interests of progressive politics in the United States.

I wrote a Current yesterday on Admiral Fallon’s resignation, mostly focused on Iran. Now, though, it looks more like Iraq was the main issue with David Petraeus wanting to do a small-scale “de-surge” and then pause indefinitely, while Fallon, his commanding officer, wanted to withdraw troops more aggressively. But Bush agreed with Petraeus and so that’s what you get.

This goes back to what I was saying yesterday about civilian control and double-standards. The military is a big organization and, of course, top officers disagree about stuff. Bush, because he’s a Republican and because he’s a hawk, has been able to get away with portraying “accepting the advice of officers who agree with Bush” as a form of letting policies be determined by commanders on the ground rather than politicians in Washington. A Democrat, by contrast, isn’t going to get any benefit of the doubt from the press, isn’t going to get any benefit of the doubt from the officers, and isn’t even going to be able to count on the support of his own party’s members of congress.

I can’t even describe how frustrating it is to read things like this from Sheryl Gay Stolberg in The New York Times:

But Mr. Bush, most experts agree, has taken the American freedom agenda to an entirely new level, by trying to foster democracy in nations that have not known it before, like Iraq and Afghanistan. Some historians have called it folly, and Mr. Bush conceded in an interview with conservative commentators last year that his critics believe he is “hopelessly idealistic.”

One point I really try hard to make in Heads in the Sand is that it’s incredibly foolish to view the Bush foreign policy primarily through this democracy lens. For one thing, Bush’s record as a democratizer doesn’t stand up to the most cursory scrutiny. There’s been no consistency of application (Egypt? Saudi Arabia?), and no record of successes — look it up and you’ll see much more democracy on the march during the 1990s.

But even criticizing Bush’s record on this score is almost besides the point — an emphasis on democracy simply isn’t what’s noteworthy about Bush’s policymaking. What’s noteworthy about Bush is his effort to completely cast aside notions of institutional, legal, or even practical restraint in American conduct abroad. He wants to reorder international relations around a highly asymmetrical bargain where we simultaneously flout all kinds of multilateral processes while also engaging in an unprecedentedly high level of meddling in other countries’ affairs. Iran can’t go anywhere near uranium enrichment, but we won’t sign the Comprehensive Test Ban and won’t stop building a new generation of nuclear weapons. Rather than anything resembling a practical approach to helping democratic political movements, we threaten to decapitate any regime we don’t like (while, yes, shouting “democracy!”) and then act baffled and outraged when other countries try to acquire weapons capable of deterring us.

This is what it’s all about and this is what it’s always been about. Fostering democracy in new places isn’t especially novel, and isn’t something Bush has particularly emphasized in actual policymaking. What’s more, at this point in time it’s just ludicrous — completely detached from what even the surge’s advocates say they’re doing — to see the mission in Iraq as having anything at all to do with democracy. What we’re doing over there is taking what was once known as “failure” (creating a new post-saddam despotism) and relabeling it “success.”

There’s no doubt that Israel faces substantial security challenges that are driven by something larger than a sincere desire to secure justice for the people of Palestine. That said, I’m constantly astounded by the lengths to which some commentators will go to deny the fact that the Palestinian issue has anything at all to do with the situation. According to Yossi Klein Halevi, for example, everything that’s happened in Israel since 2000 is all part of one vast Iranian conspiracy and everything else is just some kind of fig leaf or distraction. It’s as if Israeli occupation of Palestinian land has nothing to do with existence of Palestinian nationalist groups for Iran to support — like the Mullahs put all those Palestinians there in order to inconvenience the Israelis.