Barack Obama has a good question:

Obama, an Illinois Democrat, also wants a quick end to the war. On Friday, he said: “”We still don’t have a good answer to the question posed by Sen. (John) Warner the last time Gen. Petraeus appeared: How has this effort in Iraq made us safer and how do we expect it will make us safer in the long run?”

Matt Stoller observes, however, that Democrats are hardly on the same page over this and many are moving with worse framing. At the end of the day, however, though the tactical ins-and-outs of the surge are interesting in an academic sense, they’re only really relevant if you agree to ignore the strategic issues that Obama is raising.

John McCain’s latest big foreign policy speech was, bizarrely, reported as him positioning himself as more moderate than George W. Bush. Talking to rightwing radio, though, McCain is singing a different tune, emphasizing that “no one has supported President Bush on Iraq more than I have.” He goes on to explain that “there are many national security issues that I have strongly supported the president and steadfastly so.”

In some respects, though, McCain has been a less-than-steadfast supporter of Bush. He, for example, spent most of 1999 and 2000 criticizing Bush for being unwilling to adopt a doctrine of rogue state rollback. Back in 2002 while Bush was unwilling to publicly argue for invading Iraq, McCain was doing it. And while Bush was full of talk about disarmament, McCain was clear from the start that he would settle only for regime change. McCain spent a lot of time criticizing Bush for not sending enough Americans over to Iraq to be killed, and has also been known to criticize Bush for insufficient saber-rattling directed at such countries as Iran, Syria, and Russia. So, really, it’s not fair to say that McCain is just like Bush — he’s been a much more consistent proponent of the worst policies associated with the Bush administration.

The situation in Zimbabwe seems to be stuck in neutral, with ZANU-PF leadership seemingly stalling and looking for a way to hold on to power. One would hope that, at this point, some good might come of the controversial “engagement” approach taken by South Africa and others where African heads of state might indicate to Mugabe that a further crackdown at this point would be unacceptable.