One fascinating second term subplot that will likely linger into a new administration of either party has been the high levels of conflict between Secretary of Defense Bob Gates and the Air Force brass, something kicked into higher gear today as “Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley and Secretary Michael W. Wynne were forced to resign Thursday during hastily arranged meetings with their Pentagon bosses.” Moira Whelan has some useful commentary here and also see Robert Farley.

I suppose one can question his methods, but Gates is fundamentally right on the merits in his various disputes with the Air Force and nobody else has had much success in bringing the service to heel and getting them to focus on the realities of the post-Cold War world.

The headlines out of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s “phase two” report into the administration’s use (and abuse) of pre-war intelligence:

• Statements and implications by the President and Secretary of State suggesting that Iraq and al-Qa’ida had a partnership, or that Iraq had provided al-Qa’ida with weapons training, were not substantiated by the intelligence.
• Statements by the President and the Vice President indicating that Saddam Hussein was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups for attacks against the United States were contradicted by available intelligence information.
• Statements by President Bush and Vice President Cheney regarding the postwar situation in Iraq, in terms of the political, security, and economic, did not reflect the concerns and uncertainties expressed in the intelligence products.
• Statements by the President and Vice President prior to the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq’s chemical weapons production capability and activities did not reflect the intelligence community’s uncertainties as to whether such production was ongoing.
• The Secretary of Defense’s statement that the Iraqi government operated underground WMD facilities that were not vulnerable to conventional airstrikes because they were underground and deeply buried was not substantiated by available intelligence information.
• The Intelligence Community did not confirm that Muhammad Atta met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in 2001 as the Vice President repeatedly claimed.

Going forward, I merely urge people to recall that the administration didn’t make all this stuff up for fun. They did it because they know that the public is not, in fact, particularly jazzed about preventive war and unilateral militarism. It’s a lesson I wish more Democratic politicians would learn.

Ilan Goldenberg ably summarizes the current Catch-22 of Bush administration Iraq policy, which involves both pushing through a very unpopular (in Iraq) permanent basing agreement and pushing Iraq to hold parliamentary elections. In the face of the looming elections, however, it’s very hard to get ISCI and Dawa politicians to support the basing agreement lest they get creamed by the Sadrists.

It’s worth noting that the same basic dynamic could easily prove to be the Obama administration’s saving grace. A huge proportion of the people I talk to seem to feel that following through on promises to withdraw troops will prove incredibly politically problematic for Obama come January/February of 2009. It seems to me that this neglects Iraqi dynamics. All he needs to do is to take advantage of the fact that the American presence in Iraq is wildly unpopular to negotiate some kind of timetable for withdrawal with Iraqi political leaders that will then be jointly announced and celebrated in both countries. The Bush administration has not only consistently battled anti-war political forces in the United States, it’s also expended an enormous amount of energy in preventing anti-occupation sentiment in Iraq from coming to dominate Baghdad politics. But an American president who wants our troops to leave will be in line with both U.S. and Iraqi public opinion, and should have little difficulty finding Iraqi politicians willing to embrace his vision. Hawks, meanwhile, would be left looking incredibly foolish condemning a withdrawal schedule jointly approved by the American and Iraqi governments.

Bad on Obama, I didn’t notice that when scanning the text of his AIPAC speech. This is the kind of thing that makes American pretensions to global leadership look more than a little ridiculous. Nobody thinks this is a smart position for the U.S. government to take on the merits, and I suspect a healthy swathe of AIPAC knows it’s the wrong position too, but they’d like to see American politicians be willing to say it, and American politicians are very willing to do what AIPAC wants in this regard.

Meanwhile, 6 million Palestinians, plus hundreds of millions of other Arabs and Muslims around the world, are watching the candidate of “change” in American politics outline a patently unreasonable vision for the final status of the Israel-Palestine conflict. And all for what? Would it really have been so horrible from a “pro-Israel” point of view if Obama had proclaimed himself absolutely committed to Israel’s security and just not mentioned anything in particular about Jerusalem?

We’ve seen in earlier polling that the public has no problem with Barack Obama’s idea of high-level meetings with the leaders of “bad guy” nations. Now comes along this set of polling from Public Agenda (via David Shorr) that likewise shows specific support for a liberal approach to Iran — diplomacy aimed at improving relations between Washington and Teheran is by far the most popular option, and it’s popularity has only grown.

Lurking elsewhere in the polling, a strong 65 percent correctly say that it’s not realistic to expect the government to be able to deliver cheap oil. At the same time, this poll and every other poll I’ve seen shows that people view the high cost of energy as a major problem in their lives. It’s almost as if the public might be drawn to a serious proposal to develop alternatives to massive oil consumption.

Steve Clemons isn’t buying former Senator Sam Nunn’s efforts to tiptoe away from the anti-gay record of his time in the U.S. Senate. To me, the interesting thing is that he’s bothering at all. I’d heard Nunn’s name tossed around for a potential appointment in an Obama administration, but I’d seen that as mostly idle talk — Nunn seems to me to have reached that semi-retired eminence grise phase in his career where he co-chairs panels of various sorts and gets mentioned sometimes as an example of The Kind of Statesman We Don’t Have Any More.

Efforts to reposition his profile on gay rights, though, seems to indicate that he really would like to get a job. But I’m not even sure what kind of job that would be. He seems like one of several people (Chuck Hagel also comes to mind) who would be a good choice for a position as some kind of high-level nuclear proliferation stopping guy. Something like that, with a narrow-but-important portfolio would be a good post for a conservative Democrat or a moderate Republican who was smart on the relevant issues, the kind of thing that would be all about putting disagreements on various other issues aside to focus in on this one grave problem.

Here’s CBS’s poll on how long Americans would like to see our troops stay in Iraq. John McCain’s supporters can try to spin his 100 years remark any way they’d like, but it’s clear enough that McCain’s one of the thirty percent who think longer than two years is acceptable.