After goading Barack Obama into taking a trip abroad, John McCain’s spent all day mocking Obama for being abroad and in the course of it he’s gotten into an awful lot of nonsense:

“I would rather speak at a rally or a political gathering any place outside of the country after I am president of the United States,” McCain told O’Donnell. “But that’s a judgment that Sen. Obama and the American people will make.”

However, on June 20, McCain himself gave a speech in Canada — to the Economic Club of Canada — in which he applauded NAFTA’s successes. An implicit message behind that speech was that Obama had been critical of the trade accord. Also, McCain’s trip to Canada was paid for by the campaign.

Meanwhile, the right is now slamming Obama for trying to get Europeans more engaged in the fight against al-Qaeda. In a world where The Washington Post things fighting al-Qaeda is less important than backstopping western oil companies in Iraq I suppose that’s not so surprising.

New VoteVets ad takes on John McCain’s new line that we don’t need to listen to the Iraqi government when deciding whether or not our troops will be in Iraq:

The thing missing here is that the necessity of leaving if asked used to be totally uncontroversial. McCain and everyone else you can care to name have been on the record for years about this.

When I found out that the Center for a New American Security had a project under way called the “Phoenix Initiative” I was naturally concerned. Is the Democratic Party foreign policy establishment really so crazy as to call for the destruction of the star D’Bari despite the inevitable conflict that will cause with the Shi’ar Empire? Call me an appeaser if you must, but that doesn’t sound like a very good idea to me.

The good news is that based on their report, “Strategic Leadership: Framework for a 21st Century National Security Strategy”, I don’t think they’re actually going to go in that direction. The documents authors are listed as Anne-Marie Slaughter, Bruce W. Jentleson, Ivo H. Daalder, Antony J. Blinken, Lael Brainard, Kurt M. Campbell, Michael A. McFaul, James C. O’Brien, Gayle E. Smith and James B. Steinberg but my understanding is that Susan Rice was also involved at one point before dropping out because she’s so closely involved with the Obama campaign. Thus, it probably gives you a rough sense of what kinds of things an Obama administration foreign policy team will call for.

This is, naturally, not a wildly different document from other things you’ve heard from the big names of the foreign policy center-left but it does include a few noteworthy (and welcome) points, like:

The Iraq war is failing not just because it has been poorly executed. Even in the case of Saddam’s heinous regime, the core objective of overthrowing one government and forcibly creating a new one in its place was fundamentally and fatally flawed.

It’s music to my ears to see the thesis of “The Incompetence Dodge” adopted as quasi-official doctrine by the Democratic establishment. Similarly, “enunciating or embracing a doctrine of preventive war is unnecessary and counterproductive.”

… John McCain’s big criticism of Barack Obama was that he didn’t take enough foreign trips — especially to Iraq — and how he hadn’t been adequately tested on this big stage of CODELing. What happened to that? Now the critique is that too many Germans are interested in hearing him talk since, I guess, all else being equal we’d rather have a president foreigners find repugnant. But seriously, what’s next?

John McCain swore up and down that if Obama went to Iraq he’d find that the facts on the ground contradicted his Iraq position. Instead we found that in the modern day it’s possible to form opinions about countries you haven’t visited recently and that Iraqi leaders are broadly supportive of his approach to Iraq while universally condemning McCain’s vision of a perpetual American military presence there. Meanwhile, meetings with leaders in other countries in the region seem to have gone fine and we’re about to find out that Obama’s the kind of president who’d start off with enough initial popularity amidst our key allies that he’d be in a position to reinvigorate the transatlantic partnership. All-in-all, a pretty successful trip but especially successful when you consider that pressuring Obama into taking it was the McCain campaign’s big plan. Meanwhile, the polls keep showing an Obama win and at some point I think the notion that he “should” be winning by more has to stop giving conservatives much comfort.

So John McCain said the surge led to the Anbar Awakening even though the Awakening, in fact, happened before the surge began. So he’s ignorant. Or maybe dishonest. But now we learn he’s also rather stubborn:

McCain asserted he knew that and didn’t commit a gaffe. “A surge is really a counterinsurgency made up of a number of components. … I’m not sure people understand that ‘surge’ is part of a counterinsurgency.”

Shawn Brimley tries to bring common sense to bear on this: “The word “surge” has always been used to as shorthand referring to President Bush’s decision to deploy about 30,000 additional U.S. troops to Iraq in early 2007, the first of which did not arrive in Iraq until later in the spring.” McCain is arguing, I guess, that “the surge” doesn’t refer to the manpower boost more formally termed the “surge of forces” by the military. Instead, “surge” is, perhaps, short for “counterinsurgency.”

The main problems here would be that nobody uses “surge” that way (indeed, John McCain has a long history of using the term “surge” the same way as everyone else) and also that the short form of counterinsurgency the abbreviation-mad military uses is “COIN.” But of course maybe McCain will say that he has a private language in which “surge” means “counterinsurgency” and it’s therefore wrong to bother him about this. In which case, I suppose it’s hard for anyone to ever prove that he’s wrong. But on the other hand if that’s what he means, then it’s hard to make sense of the claim that McCain was “right about the surge” whereas Obama was “wrong” since if “the surge” is just a generic term for the use of counterinsurgency tactics the I don’t think McCain and Obama ever really disagreed.

Satyam Khanna finds Fred Kagan arguing that “Well, there’s nothing we can do short of an attack to force Iran to give up its nuclear program. … At the end of the day, the only way that you can make for sure that doesn’t happen is with an attack.”

It can’t be emphasized enough that this is dead wrong. If we bomb Iran we will, presumably, destroy some stuff. But we’ll have know way of knowing exactly how much we destroyed or what we left undestroyed. Most likely we’ll do no damage whatsoever to Iranian know-how. We may delay the Iranian program by some extent. But if Iran responds by boosting funding for their nuclear program, or if third-party countries respond by decreasing their level of cooperation with the United States we may speed their nuclear program. It’s hard to say in advance except you can say for certain that bombing won’t “make sure” of anything. The only way to make sure that a nuclear arms race in the Middle East is avoided is to give other countries (Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, etc.) certainty about where Iran stands.

That means verifiable disarmament. That means inspections, etc. And that means Iran needs to agree to verifiable disarmament. That’s not to say that we can’t wield sticks along with carrots in seeking an agreement with Iran, but still an agreement is absolutely vital. A bombing raid won’t accomplish anything, and anyone who says otherwise is being ignorant.