I speculated maybe a week or two ago that soon enough we were regularly going to start hearing liberal hawk types excoriating Joe Lieberman as the new Zell Miller for saying exactly the kind of things they themselves said during the Years of Hubris. Take, for example, this Jon Chait post:

The Zell Miller-ization of Joe Lieberman Continues
See Larry Kudlow rave.

Kudlow and Lieberman are arguing that Bush is the true heir to the Truman/Kennedy liberal tradition in American foreign policy. As you know, I think this is wrong. But before Lieberman was giving speeches about this, it was the thesis of Lawrence Kaplan’s article “Regime Change: Bush, closet liberal” in the March 3, 2003 issue of The New Republic. Indeed, Chait himself defined Bush/McCain/Lieberman-style warmongering as the correct interpretation of the Wilson/Truman legacy while dismissing Lieberman’s intra-party critics as “old cranks”:

And the most prominent feature of Democratic foreign policy since September 11 is that there isn’t much of one. Yes, a couple Democrats–mostly old cranks like Robert Byrd and Hollings–have worried about an open-ended conflict; but others–such as Lieberman–have staked out terrain to Bush’s right. The general mood among Democrats in Washington is to lay low on foreign affairs and to confront Bush in the domestic arena. Not only does this mean that McCain’s hawkishness would pose little barrier to his nomination; it also presents him with an opportunity to determine what kind of Democratic foreign policy will emerge in the wake of the war on terror. And here McCain has a chance to shape the future of American politics–which, like all things histori cal, can be highly contingent. After all, if Franklin Roosevelt hadn’t replaced Henry Wallace with Harry Truman as his vice president, the Democratic Party would not have built its policy of containment in the two decades after World War II. In the post-post Vietnam era now beginning, McCain could redefine the Democratic Party once again as the champion of Wilsonian interventionism.

Now needless to say, I think Lieberman’s interpretation of all of this is wrong and a substantial portion of Heads in the Sand is dedicated to laying out why it’s wrong and how people came to have this wrongheaded interpretation. But in Lieberman’s defense, he’s not really “Zellifying” at all — the things he’s saying today were conventional wisdom among center-left elites five years ago and as recently as three years ago Peter Beinart could be found getting a respectful hearing for the idea that MoveOn members should be analogized to Communist Fifth Columnists and purged from progressive politics. It’s just that most people who used to hold those views have abandoned them, often sotto voce, leaving Lieberman as an unexpected outlier.

An interesting point from Michael Cohen yesterday: John McCain wants us to simultaneously believe that expressing a willingness to negotiate with Iranian leaders will “reinforce their confidence” but also to run around the country warning that people need to become much more alarmed about the threat posed by Iran, and stop dismissing them as some sort of medium-sized, middle-income country that’s far away and has a barely functioning military. It’s a bit of a tension.

More broadly, it’s worth noting how hollow McCain’s account of the Iranian threat winds up being:

But that does not mean that the threat posed by Iran is insignificant. On the contrary, right now Iran provides some of the deadliest explosive devices used in Iraq to kill our soldiers. They are the chief sponsor of Shia extremists in Iraq, and terrorist organizations in the Middle East. And their President, who has called Israel a “stinking corpse,” has repeatedly made clear his government’s commitment to Israel’s destruction. Most worrying, Iran is intent on acquiring nuclear weapons. The biggest national security challenge the United States currently faces is keeping nuclear material out of the hands of terrorists. Should Iran acquire nuclear weapons, that danger would become very dire, indeed.

All the work here is being done by the ludicrous hypothetical that were Iran to attempt to build a nuclear weapon (which the most recent NIE says they’re not doing) and they were to succeed (which they might or might not) and then give the weapon to a terrorist (!) who wanted to launch an unprovoked nuclear attack (!) on the United States, that that would be very dire, indeed. And indeed it would, much as if Russia decided to launch a full-scale nuclear strike on U.S. targets that would be an even more dire threat. But we don’t normally spend our time worrying about crazy not-gonna-happen scenarios.

Similarly, the Iranian government’s tough talk against Israel would be a lot more threatening to Israel were it backed up by some kind of actual capacity to destroy Israel. But in the real world, Israel has a vastly superior military establishment and a substantial nuclear deterrent.

Now we get to Iraq, where the hawks’ logic becomes circular. Iran is evil because they’re (allegedly) backing people who are fighting us in Iraq so we (a) need to stay in Iraq, and (b) need to fight the Iranians. We need to do (a) in order to stick it to the Iranians, and we need to do (b) in order to make (a) more viable. But that’s nonsense. This is precisely one of the things we should be negotiating over — a mutually acceptable outcome in Iraq. For Iran, that probably means an Iraq that’s not used by the United States as a base of operations for regime change. For the United States, it means a scenario where our soldiers aren’t being killed. Certainly the fact that we’re engaged in proxy exchanges with Iran isn’t a reason to avoid talking to the Iranians and trying to lower, rather than raise, the temperature.

For a candidate who likes to complain that quoting him accurately constitutes out-of-context foul play, John McCain sure does love distorting things Barack Obama has said. For example, Obama says “Iran, Cuba, Venezuela – these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don’t pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us.” This, it seems to me, is indisputably true. But in the Land of Straight Talk where you lie constantly, McCain says “The threat the government of Iran poses is anything but tiny” and that Obama calling it tiny “betrays the depth of Senator Obama’s inexperience and reckless judgment.” But of course they’re only even disagreeing here at all if you leave out the part where Obama said Iran is tiny compared to the Soviet Union.

Similarly, it turns out that if you take a joke Barack Obama was making about duck hunting, and then change it around so that you have him saying that you hunt ducks with a six shooter, you can make a nice joke about how Obama thinks you hunt ducks with a six shooter. The one small problem in this narrative, of course, is that Obama never said you hunt ducks with a six shooter which makes a stump speech line about how he did say that pretty dishonest.

It’s increasingly clear that John McCain intends to use his special relationship with the press to run a campaign based on relentlessly lying about his opponent:

At a press conference here, I just asked John McCain about why he keeps talking about Obama’s alleged willingness to talk to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has no power over Iranian foreign policy, rather than Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who does. He said that Ahmadinejad is the guy who represents Iran in international forums like the United Nations, which is a fair point. When I followed with the observation that the Supreme Leader is, uh, the Supreme Leader, McCain responded that the “average American” thinks Ahmadinejad is the boss. Didn’t get a chance to follow up to that, but I would have asked, “But isn’t it your job to correct those sorts of mistaken impressions on the part of the American public?” Oh well.

But of course it’s not. McCain and McCain’s allies in the world of neoconservative punditry have deliberately created the entirely false notion that Ahmadenijad runs Iranian foreign policy. One point I’ve been making in my book-related appearances is that it’s not a coincidence that the preventive war crowd told a lot of whoppers about Iraq before the war and is telling a lot of whoppers about Iran now — the right knows that contrary to the prevailing conventional wisdom, there’s just no evidence that the American people are deep down yearning for senseless violence and imperial adventurism.

Ilan Goldenberg goes beyond the observation that for conservatives it’s always 1938 and notes the opposite lessons of World War I where various sides deemed themselves “forced” to fight a war nobody wanted and that served nobody’s interests.

My strong sense is that 1914 scenarios are more common than 1938 scenarios. Trade and tourism are positive-sum interactions between nations. War and coercive acts short of war are negative-sum interactions. This means you should try very hard to seek peaceful intercourse via trade and tourism and to avoid negative-sum conflict-based interactions. Sometimes, of course, one faces a foe so determinedly fanatical that it’s impossible to avoid the negative sum track where everyone invests vast resources in figuring out better ways to blow stuff up. But the kind of strong irrationality represented by a Hitler or perhaps a Pol Pot is very rare, normally people can’t acquire and maintain political power without being sensitive to their own interests.

Guess who agrees with John McCain and George W. Bush about the need to take a paranoid attitude toward Iran? That’s right, it’s Osama bin Laden in a new taped message:

Bin Laden singled out by name Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah, whose 2006 war against Israel boosted the group’s popularity among Shiites and Sunnis. Bin Laden said Nasrallah claimed he had enough resources, such as money and combatants, to fight Israel. “But the truth is the opposite,” he said. “If he was honest and has enough (resources), why then he did not support the fight to liberate Palestine.” He also attacked Nasrallah for allowing the deployment of U.N. peacekeepers in southern Lebanon “to protect the Jews.” Sunni al-Qaida has also stepped up its criticism of Shiite Iran, the main backer of Hezbollah, accusing it of trying to dominate the Middle East.

Again, the reasonable course for the United States is to attempt a rapprochement with Iran in order for us to deal with our common enemy, al-Qaeda. Alternatively, we can prattle on about “Islamofascism” in a desperate effort to find new allies for al-Qaeda while alienating potential friends.

Not that I’m incredibly surprised about any of this, but if Larry Kudlow’s account of a recent Joe Lieberman talk is even vaguely accurate, the man has some odd ideas about American history:

Mr. Lieberman talked at some length about how the Democratic party has completely departed from the strong national-security principles of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy. He said those leaders clearly understood the need to fight totalitarian dictators and regimes, and that they possessed the moral clarity that can separate friends from enemies in the long-run battle to promote freedom and democracy.

The the Lieberman/McCain/Bush/NRO line on current foreign policy issues, you would think from this description that FDR wisely saw that Hitler and Stalin were just two sides of the same totalitarian coin and determined to fight them both simultaneously. Or that Harry Truman recognized that the U.S.S.R. was a new kind of threat that could not be deterred and launched a preventive strike against Soviet positions. Or that John Kennedy recognized that there was no chance to strike a deal with a butcher like Khruschev over Cuba and we had no choice but to go to war.

It’s certainly true that Liebermanism has some affinities for the Kennedy administration’s screw-ups — its over-enthusiasm for getting the United States more deeply involved in Vietnam or its decision to greenlight the Bay of Pigs fiasco, but those hardly seem like comparisons one wants to draw.