American Jews turn out to be the religious group most opposed to the Iraq War (77 percent say it was a mistake) unless you count “black Protestants” as a separate group (which maybe you should) in which case we come out as only the second most opposed, since 78 percent of black Protestants say it was a mistake. By contrast, even the dread “no religion” group only musters 66 percent in opposition (Mormons, incidentally, love war).

Among Jewish Democrats, a whopping 89 percent say the war was a mistake. The rest are on Joe Lieberman’s staff and will probably be switching parties soon.

It seems to me that a lot of former Iraq War supporters haven’t even seriously attempted to learn any kind of lessons from their/our errors. Peter Beinart is different. Here’s what he has to say:

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Andrew Sullivan highlights General William Odom making the mistake of agreeing to appear on the Hugh Hewitt show and wrestling with one of the media most intellectually dishonest fixtures. I note that one thing Hewitt tries to do is a move I’ve seen more and more recently; attempt to pin the blame for the Cambodian genocide on the anti-war movement of the 1970s. Nothing, really, could be further from the truth. Benedict Kiernan is director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale. He “is the author of How Pol Pot Came to Power: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Communism in Cambodia, 1930-1975 (1985, 2004), Cambodia: The Eastern Zone Massacres (1986), The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979 (1996, 2002), and Le Génocide au Cambodge, 1975-1979: Race, idéologie, et pouvoir (1998). He is the co-author of Khmers Rouges ! Matériaux pour l’histoire du communisme au Cambodge (1981), Peasants and Politics in Kampuchea, 1942-1981 (1982), and Cambodge: Histoire et enjeux (1986), and has published numerous articles on Southeast Asia and the history of genocide.”

What’s more, “He was founding Director of the Cambodian Genocide Program (1994-99) and Convenor of the Yale East Timor Project (2000-02). Kiernan’s edited collection Conflict and Change in Cambodia won the Critical Asian Studies Prize for 2002. He is also the editor of Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia: The Khmer Rouge, the United Nations, and the International Community (1993), and Burchett: Reporting the Other Side of the World, 1939-1983 (1986), and co-editor of Revolution and Its Aftermath in Kampuchea (1983), Pol Pot Plans the Future: Confidential Leadership Documents from Democratic Kampuchea, 1976-1977 (1988), and The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective (2003).” In short, the guy knows a thing or two about Cambodia. Read this article he wrote:

The still-incomplete database (it has several “dark” periods) reveals that from October 4, 1965, to August 15, 1973, the United States dropped far more ordnance on Cambodia than was previously believed: 2,756,941 tons’ worth, dropped in 230,516 sorties on 113,716 sites. Just over 10 percent of this bombing was indiscriminate, with 3,580 of the sites listed as having “unknown” targets and another 8,238 sites having no target listed at all. The database also shows that the bombing began four years earlier than is widely believed—not under Nixon, but under Lyndon Johnson. The impact of this bombing, the subject of much debate for the past three decades, is now clearer than ever. Civilian casualties in Cambodia drove an enraged populace into the arms of an insurgency that had enjoyed relatively little support until the bombing began, setting in motion the expansion of the Vietnam War deeper into Cambodia, a coup d’état in 1970, the rapid rise of the Khmer Rouge, and ultimately the Cambodian genocide. The data demonstrates that the way a country chooses to exit a conflict can have disastrous consequences. It therefore speaks to contempor­ary warfare as well, including US operations in Iraq. Despite many differences, a critical similarity links the war in Iraq with the Cambodian conflict: an increasing reliance on air power to battle a heterogeneous, volatile insurgency.

So in short, no, neither the American bombing of Cambodia nor the Vietnam War in general were humanitarian operations well-suited to protecting Cambodian civilians from the Khmer Rouge. But, then again, you knew that already, didn’t you? Hewitt’s busting this out more in the spirit of “no talking point left behind” than as part of some kind of good-faith effort to understand the origins of political mass killing.

Ezra’s right, Tom Friedman’s got the mother of all incompetence dodges here:

The irony of Iraq is that it’s the one place where Mr. Bush decisively chose regime change, but he then executed it so poorly, with insufficient troops, that Iraq never stood a chance. If Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney had spent as much time plotting the toppling of Saddam Hussein as they did the toppling of Colin Powell, Iraq today would be Switzerland.

Switzerland, seriously? To be sure, I assume Friedman means this as some kind of deliberate hyperbole. But while I’m sure there are certain kinds of better management steps that would have either left Iraq less chaotic than it is today, or else left it equally chaotic at lower cost to the United States, there’s still a meaningful question here. Would thinking harder about the issues and the resources have given the United States an effective plan to create a peaceful, pluralistic democracy in Iraq or would they just have led to the conclusion that that was a deeply unrealistic goal? The latter, I think. It’s an important issue, since while the US doesn’t have the ground forces available to invade Syria today, we will have them someday,

In a reversal-of-stereotypes, I read via Kevin Drum the clearest expression yet of information that’s been hinted at previously the U.S. government is actively pressing Israel not to negotiate with Syria. That’s super-duper crazy.

See more, from M.J. Rosenberg. The episode serves as a reminder that unlike American Middle East hawks, Israelis actually have to live in the middle of the Arab world and are relatively ill-served by the sort of grandiose transformational schemes the administration likes to come up with the justify their increasingly rudderless approach to the region.

Dick Cheney is, to be sure, the Bush administration figure most likely to say something ridiculous in public. Nevertheless, statements like “Last month’s anti-satellite test, China’s continued fast-paced military buildup are less constructive and are not consistent with China’s stated goal of a peaceful rise,” are all-too-typical of the American defense establishment as a whole, an apparatus that seems to operate with virtually no self-awareness. The United States has, over the past few years, reiterated its refusal to strengthen the ban on space weapons and released a new national space strategy strengthening our commitment to retaining unilateral military supremacy in space. We’ve also engaged in an enormous military build-up that started from a position where we were already by far the biggest spending.

Then we turn around and say we view China’s efforts to enhance its military as threatening and inconsistent with the idea of a “peaceful rise.” What Cheney is doing is conflating two different ideas. One is that China’s rise could be peaceful, i.e. respectful of the core interests of other major powers (the US, Russia, Japan, India, the EU, etc.) and avoid a hot or cold war with any or all of them. The other would be the idea that China’s rise won’t be a rise at all; that the country will get richer but will just be content to be a middle-income country with no geopolitical profile that poses no challenge to American hegemony — like an enormous Estonia. Obviously, though, if you set that out as America’s “goal” for China, then China will fall short of the goal and then we’ll find ourselves in conflict. No country is in a practical position right now to in any meaningful way challenge American military supremacy, but increasingly the United States is demanding (you can also see this in reaction to Vladimir Putin’s recent speech) that countries actively embrace a vision of perpetual subordinate status. Patriotic Chinese (and Russian, and Indian, etc.) officials aren’t going to do that.

If I may say something nice about Hillary Clinton for a minute, I think things like this attack from Will Saletan are kind of unfair:

Five years ago, Hillary Clinton supported a Senate resolution authorizing President Bush to use force in Iraq. So did I. It took me four years to admit this was a mistake. I’ve been wondering when Clinton would admit it. Now, from campaign insiders quoted in the New York Times, comes the answer: never. As she told voters a few days ago: “If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from.”

This is an amazingly stupid and arrogant position. If she sticks to it, it will probably kill her candidacy. And it should.

From where I sit, the issue here isn’t that Clinton, unlike Saletan (or me) isn’t willing to “admit” that supporting the war resolution was a mistake. The issue is that she doesn’t think it was a mistake and she doesn’t want to pretend otherwise. Clinton’s executive power theory of why she votes the right way (“She believes in executive authority and Congressional deference, her advisers say, and is careful about suggesting that Congress can overrule a commander in chief”) seems very plausible to me. When liberals are trying to get conservatives to worry about executive power one line a lot of us use is you realize Hillary Clinton may be president some day, right? But from Clinton’s point of view, she may be president some day. What’s more, as someone who was First Lady for much longer than she’d been a Senator at the time of the vote, it’s natural that she would have a great deal of appreciation for the president’s-eye-view take on the matter.

This isn’t to say that voting for the war was the right thing to do. But there’s every reason to think she thinks it was the right thing to do. She’s not refusing to “admit” anything; she’s just saying what she thinks.

“Contrary to popular belief, international relations scholars are not doves,” according to a new survey of IR scholars (Foreign Policy article here; full results here; hat-tip Daniel Drezner), “most believe that military force is warranted under the right conditions.”

What do the others believe? That it’s warranted under the wrong conditions? Unwarranted even when the conditions are right?

As Dan remarks, the really interesting result has to do with this bit of realist convergence with liberal thinking: “we found realists to be much more supportive of military intervention with a U.N. imprimatur than they are of action without such backing. Among realists, in fact, the gap between support for multilateral and unilateral intervention in North Korea is identical to the gap among scholars of the liberal tradition, whose theories explicitly favor cooperation.” Dan Nexon comments, “I don’t believe this is because realists have suddenly turned into Wilsonsians; rather, I suspect the data reflects how a broad cross-section of realist scholars have come to the conclusion that international legitimacy greases the wheels of power and makes counterbalancing less likely.” I’m no professor, but it seems to me that reaching that conclusion substantially constitutes turning into a Wilsonian.

“We Marines,” writes Mackubin Thomas Owens on The Corner, “maintain that except for Lee Harvey Oswald, there is no such thing as an ‘ex-Marine.’ I believe that John Murtha has just joined that small club.”

It’s really striking how casual mainstream elements of the right have become about tossing off accusations of treason about Democratic Party members of congress with whom they have policy disagreements. How long before some Jack Ruby decides that Rep. Don Young’s musing about the desirability of killing congressional Democrats should be taken literally?

Stop Iran War.com, from Wesley Clark and Vote Vets.org, “a one-stop resource for all Americans to help stop the looming conflict with Iran.” Fellow monomaniacs should enjoy it.

Nicholas Kristof has more on Jimmy Carter’s efforts to combat parasitic infections in Africa, including campaigns against river blindness (caused by a different worm from the one responsible for Guinea Disease), elephantitis and malaria, intestinal worms, etc. Then comes the policy point:

Mr. Carter’s private campaign against the diseases of poverty, put together with pennies and duct tape, is a model of what our government could do. Imagine if the U.S. resolved that it would wipe out malaria and elephantiasis (both are spread by mosquitoes, so a combined campaign makes sense). What if we celebrated science not by trying to go to Mars but by extinguishing malaria? What if we tried to burnish America’s image abroad not only with press releases and propaganda broadcasts, but also with a bold campaign against disease?

So I wish that President Bush could visit villages like this and see what Mr. Carter has accomplished as a private individual. Mr. Bush, to his great credit, has financed a major campaign against AIDS that will save nine million lives, and he is also increasing spending against malaria — but not nearly as energetically as he is increasing the number of troops in Iraq. So I asked Mr. Carter whether President Bush should be pushing not for a possible war with Iran, but for a war on malaria.

I would hardly bother to criticize Bush on this point. Compared to other aspects of his administration, Bush’s “let’s try to cure diseases in Africa” policy has been pretty good (as Kristof said, involving some meaningful increases in some areas). Obviously, he should do more, but we’re talking about a really, really bad president so I don’t expect anything better from him. But for the next administration and peoples’ edification, these points are well worth considering. The marginal value of additional resources spent on these sorts of problems is pretty giant at this point, and it’s a lot clearer in a technical sense how you would go about helping people through public health measures than how you would go about building democracy or spurring economic development.

As we see the anti-Ethiopian Islamist insurgency in Somalia continue to pick up steam, even prompting Ethiopian troops to deploy the legendarily successful counterinsurgency tactic of “return[ing] fire with artillery and heavy machine-gun fire throughout the night,” can we ask once again what the United States policy in the Horn of Africa has accomplished. None of the terrorists allegedly being harbored by the Islamic Courts Movement have been captured. The Ethiopians cannot (of course) effectively control the country. It seems that hundreds of Somali civilians have died in various kinds of fighting. And we’ve effectively opened up another branch campus of Jihad University.

Condoleezza Rice fails to resolve Palestinian-Israel conflict within a single 24 hour period. I guess it’s time to return to six more years of giving up. Alternatively, read Daniel Levy from late last week.

I’ve been beating this drum for a long time, but let me recommend Jonathan Chait’s column on Rudy Giuliani’s alleged national security expertise, which apparently consists of his ability to act like a tough guy:

f having a macho swagger and talking tough about bad guys were enough to make a good commander in chief, we wouldn’t have the worst foreign policy disaster in U.S. history on our hands right now in Iraq. And, need I remind anybody, one of the reasons Giuliani hasn’t been able to fulfill his Bin Laden execution fantasy is that Bush allowed the Al Qaeda leader to escape at Tora Bora by using Afghan proxies instead of U.S. ground troops.

As I noted in this space last week, conservative foreign policy consists increasingly of abstract notions divorced from reality. In preparing for last week’s House debate over the Iraq troop surge, the Republican leadership instructed its members in a memo: “The debate should not be about the surge or its details. This debate should not even be about the Iraq war to date, mistakes that have been made or whether we can, or cannot, win militarily. If we let Democrats force us into a debate on the surge or the current situation in Iraq, we lose.”

Right. Republican national security policy looks great, except when they need to discuss their actual policies, the results of such policies, the likely consequences of continuing the policies, etc. Giuliani fits perfectly into the mold.