Perhaps the strangest element of the Iran debate has been the tendency for it to prompt people to call for war without quite calling for war. We can see, for example, The New Republic‘s successive exhortations for the United States to “move ruthlessly” against Iran and “get ruthlessly serious” about Iran back in July 2006. Now, National Review is editorializing that “Israel was placed in this dilemma last summer, when Iranian agents — the Hezbollah of Lebanon — crossed the border, killed some soldiers, and took two others hostage. Israel treated this aggression as a declaration of war, and its repeat in the Gulf waters has to be met with the same firmness.”

As Andrew Sullivan remarks that appears to be a recommendation that we go to war with Iran, but somehow the editorialists can’t quite bring themselves to write the words. But Israel, you know, bombed and invaded Lebanon in response to the events in question. It seems to me that if National Review wants us to bomb and invade Iran, they should say so. It’s not a small question.

In today’s TAP Online column I praise Condoleezza Rice for her late-breaking realization that working toward an Israel-Palestine peace agreement would be a good thing. Meanwhile, The New York Sun reports that “Israeli officials have spoken to a top White House official in recent days, using friendly Washington contacts to go ‘over Condi’s head’ to describe several of her new ideas as unrealistic, a Jerusalem source, who declined to be identified, told The New York Sun.”

Stanley Kurtz unleashes a very serious, thoughtful, argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care: “Iran no doubt remembers how it sent the hostages home at the start of Ronald Reagan’s new presidency. It greatly feared Reagan’s combination of toughness and fresh political capital. That’s part of why Iran is racing so hard right now to get the bomb.” Alternatively, Iran released the hostages in exchange for a series of concessions by the United States, including a relaxation of sanctions, the unfreezing of financial assets, an America pledge of non-interference in Iranian affairs, etc.

I’d thought that Ronald Reagan freed the hostages through an illegal arms for hostages swap, but that was actually a different batch of hostages. In fact, the original hostages were freed in exchange for concessions through Algeria-sponsored negotiations conducted by Warren Christopher on behalf of Jimmy Carter’s outgoing administration.

If George W. Bush vetos the Iraq supplemental the Democrats passed, isn’t that him cutting off funding for the troops in the field? I mean, here’s congress, appropriating some funds for the troops, and instead of letting the troops get the funds Bush is saying, no, he’ll hold their well-being hostage to advance his own perogatives and ego.

This article by Patrick Healy nicely demonstrates the political dynamics that make Hillary Clinton so unappealing to me. She has such a strong and not-especially-deserved reputation for liberalism, that her primary political task must always be trying to run away from progressive politics in order to broaden her appeal rather than using her personal qualities to broaden the appeal of progressive politics. It’s also, however, an infuriating example of journalism that simply equates the concepts of support for the military, knowledge of military affairs, and right-wing positions about the use of force.

There’s no indication, however, that the war clowns at the Victory Caucus have any actual knowledge whereof they speak. Nor is it “anti-military” to suggest it’s not a good idea to stick the United States Army with the task of performing an impossible job in Iraq.

Matt Stoller rages against Hillary Clinton’s plan to end the war in Iraq while maintaining American military forces in Iraq. Ed Kilgore remarks that “There’s one big problem with Matt’s anathema: it would also apply to Barack Obama, John Edwards, and quite a few other Democrats generally considered to be unimpeachably anti-war.”

Obama’s Iraq withdrawal plan explicity calls for a “residual force” to stay in the country to fight terrorists and deter foreign intervention. John Edwards, who has emphasized the need for immediately withdrawing half the current troop deployment, has also talked about a continuing if limited military commitment. And even such withdrawal hardliners as John Kerry, Russ Feingold and Jack Murtha have supported the same kind of commitment through an “over the horizon” force prepared to re-intervene at a moment’s notice, and even a “minimal” force, presumably special ops counter-terrorism units, operating within Iraq.

I think it’s a mistake to elide the difference between an over-the-horizon force (meaning you want it to be logistically possible to re-re-deploy into Iraq if circumstances warrant) and an in-country force (meaning you’ve prejudged that there should be a continuing presence in Iraq) but that this is largely correct. Now, in a big picture sense, what this emphasizes is the extent to which it would be good to have a president you trusted. A provision that allows for some troops to continue being in Iraq even as combat forces are withdrawn could be prudence or it could be a loophole. To me, what separates Clinton from Obama and Edwards on this front is that Clinton appeared to be saying that one mission of her proposed continuing presence in Iraq would be trying to intimidate Iran which sounds more like loophole territory than prudence territory to me.

That said, as readers know I have ex ante suspicion of Clinton’s national security instincts and I don’t actually think this gives me any new grounds for doubt — it just emphasizes that one wants a president whose instincts one trusts. The upshot is that none of the big three are offering ironclad get out of Iraq promises. I do think the Kerry/Feingold/Murtha plans are qualitatively different. If, however, you want the United States to more-or-less entirely abandon the project of projecting military power in the Middle East you really do need to back Kucinich (and I’m sort of surprised by Kucinich’s lack of netroots support; I don’t share his view, but a lot of people I read on the internet seem to and they may as well support him).

I believe this link to Michael Crowley’s article on Hillary Clinton’s national security views should work for non-subscribers and I encourage everyone to read it. It’s not some kind of hit-job on Clinton and, frankly, I have no real idea what Crowley thinks about foreign policy (TNR doesn’t seem deeply invested in the concept of attacking Democrats for being too hawkish as an editorial stance) and he certainly doesn’t say in the article.

Obviously, on some level I’m just jealous because Clinton came to Peter Beinart’s book party and I doubt I can get her for mine. Nor, I think, will Mark Penn be willing to play host.

J-Pod explains that it’s Seymore Hersh’s duty as a Jew to support the Bush administration’s Iran policies.

Speaking of John Edwards (of which I’ve done too little) and his views on national security (of which I think he’s done too little), does anyone know if John Edwards still favors creating a domestic intelligence agency? It was kind of his signature national security proposal just 3-4 years ago. I think this idea could have some merit to it. The absence of a domestic spying agencies doesn’t mean we don’t have domestic spying, it means that domestic spying is either done illegallly (as in the NSA wiretapping affair) or else ineptly by the FBI which, appropriately, is primarily focused on its core law enforcement mission. I don’t take the view that we should be dramatically expanding the quantiyt or scope of domestic intelligence activities in the United States, but I think it makes perfect sense to locate them in a designated agency.

That said, the org chart for intelligence and law enforcement in the United States is so messy that it may not make a difference. The whole thing, though, could really use an overhaul since it’s path dependence run amok. One way or another, the Edwards camp should address this subject since a lot of news has been broken about domestic intelligence abuses since he first made the proposal and things look different in that light.

It’s too bad Michael Crowley’s excellent article about Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy views (hawkish!) isn’t available to non-subscribers. Here‘s an excerpt telling you that of Bill Clinton’s top foreign policy aides, many of the less militaristic ones (Anthony Lake, Susan Rice) have signed up with Barack Obama, while Clinton is extremely close to the very hawkish Richard Holbrooke (see the brief Holbrooke section of Ari Berman’s old article about Dem advisors) and hired a former WINEP guy onto her Senate foreign policy staff. And then, of course, there’s Clinton himself:

[A]s the war drums grew louder, he grew increasingly supportive. While he stressed the importance of diplomacy and arms inspections, he seemed to value them more as a way to legitimate an invasion than to avoid one. On October 27, for instance, Clinton said in another speech that “I do think it would be better if we can go through the U.N. and try the inspections, even though if past is prologue, they’ll fail.” Though he regularly warned against acting without broad support, this, too, seemed less a critique of Bush administration aggressiveness than of U.N. timidity. In a mid-February speech, he told a Texas audience that Bush “deserves a lot of credit for saying we can’t just ignore [Iraq] forever; it’s time to deal with this again,” before going on to argue that the credibility of the United Nations was at stake and urging recalcitrant European countries to show that they were serious about Iraq.

More strikingly, Clinton even seemed to embrace the neocon notion that, by toppling Saddam, the United States might reshape the Middle East. “[I]t’s going to take years to rebuild Iraq,” he said. “If we do this, we want it to be a secular democracy. We want it to be a shared model for other Middle Eastern countries. We want to do what a lot of people in the administration honestly want, which is to have it shake the foundations of autocracy in the Middle East and promote more freedom and decency. You’ve got to spend money and work hard and send people there to work over a long period of time.” These could have been the words of Paul Wolfowitz. But, to Bill Clinton, this wasn’t a blinkered fantasy–it was a legitimate and realistic U.S. foreign policy objective.

This is what makes the Clinton camp’s continued efforts to dissemble about Barack Obama’s record unfortunate. As best one can tell, Clinton and Obama not only took a different view of the October 2002 Iraq authorizing resolution vote, but have different instincts and views about the larger questions in this area and have, for that reason, come to attract different groups of associates. For the record, in addition to whichever of the big name people Edwards talks to his primary national security associates (to the best of my knowledge) are Derek Chollet and Michael Signer. Signer, conveniently, has published a foreign policy manifesto that I’m not super-excited about. I know less about Chollet’s views (this seems right) though I can say that his book The Road to the Dayton Accords, a rare foreign policy book that eschews doctrine in favor of looking at how these decisions actually get made, is pretty fascinating.

I think it’s a little depressing on several levels that it requires a long and brilliant article to make the point, but as Michael Crowley notes in a long and brilliant article on the subject the reason Hillary Clinton voted for the Iraq authorizing resolution appears to be that she thought it was the right thing to do; it appears that she won’t apologize for it because she doesn’t think she was wrong; and, last, it appears that her views on both these things are connected to a larger worldview that’s more militaristic than your average liberal’s.

I say it’s depressing because it winds up simultaneously being unfair to her opponents. She’s so stuck with the “calculating” tag that even in the face of all the evidence, Clinton’s views on Iraq get read exclusively through the lense of political calculation (like any pol, of course, she does in fact do some calculating) without any consideration of the possibility that there are real views her. Conversely, her opponents deserve a chance at a real debate over what kind of foreign policy the voters want, and not one in which we pretend that everyone agrees and this is all just a game of gotcha and who said what when.

Carl Connetta notes that for the first time since 1993, we now have a poll indicating that a plurality of people think we spend too much on the military and the department of defense.

Team Bush’s once formidable message discipline seems to be breaking down. Watch and see as aides to Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates tell all about their bosses efforts to get the Gitmo detention facilities shut down, and the ways Alberto Gonzalez and Dick Cheney stymied those efforts. They even say explicitly that Gonzalez’ political weakness is a reason for raising the issue again.

As you see, the Chapter VII UN Sanctioning process can be made to work just fine as long as the United States continues drawing its evidence of Iranian misbehavior from credible international sources. That our diplomats have been working diligently to get foreigners to ratchet-up the pressure is all to the good. It’s crucial that we not do anything crazy — bombing, say — that would puncture this international consensus. And, of course, you’ve got to be able to take “yes” for an answer if the Iranians decide they’d rather rejoin the world than build a nuclear bomb.

Zbigniew Brzezinski attacks the phrase. Increasingly, I’m inclined to agree that it’s a problem. Peter Beinart, for example, has a very good column in the current Time that winds up striking a false note at one point. “While Nixon promised to end the war in Vietnam, McGovern promised to end the cold war itself,” he writes, “He called for cutting the defense budget 37% and withdrawing troops not only from South Vietnam but also from South Korea.” This is an important point, and Beinart is correct to note the contrast with contemporary political debates, but he winds up expressing it like this: “While many conservatives see anti-Iraq Democrats as McGovern’s spawn, they’re a very different breed. Pelosi and Reid aren’t against the war on terrorism.”

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The disappointing-but-still-worth-voting-for Iraq supplemental passed the house. Dems voting “no” from a left perspective are Michaud (ME), Woolsey, Lee, Lewis, Kucinich, Waters, Watson, and McNulty (NY). Dems votin “no” from a right perspective are Taylor (LA), Marshall (GA), Matheson (Utah), Boren (OK), Lincoln Davis (TN), Barrow (GA). Only two Republicans — Gilchrist (MD) and Jones (NC) — voted yes. This is the crux of the matter. Unless Congressional Republicans fear that continuing to vote for the war will cost them their seats and therefore turn against the White House, congress realistically can’t force Bush to end the war. If you happen to be represented by someone who voted “no,” you should really call or write in.

“The Iranian military seized 15 British naval personnel in the waters off Iraq early this morning, the British Ministry of Defence said today in a statement posted to its Web site.” Here‘s the Washington Post story. Here‘s the UK MOD’s statement. This sort of thing is why it’s so unnerving to live in a country where one gets the sense that substantial elements of the US government would welcome a war with Iran were appropriate circumstances to arise.

Michael Hirsh says he thinks the Bush administration is getting ready to take yes for an answer from Teheran:

On the latter point, the Bush administration does seem to be shifting in tone. With the departure of several key Bush hardliners in recent months, it feels as if the regime-change fever has broken in Washington. While still talking tough, chief Iran envoy Nicholas Burns sounded almost magnanimous toward Tehran on Wednesday as he detailed the “multiple points of pressure” being applied on Iran’s leaders. Speaking at a Rand Corp. conference on Capitol Hill, Burns said the Western allies are still very willing to offer Tehran a nearly simultaneous “suspension for suspension”—that is, the West will stop the U.N. resolution process if Iran ceases enriching—even though the Americans and Europeans are in a much stronger position than they were several months ago. Just as importantly, Burns said the United States was sensitive to Tehran’s need to save face after its leaders have spent months defiantly insisting that they would never give up their uranium-enrichment program. “We understand they have their domestic political arena” to think about, he said. “We have carefully given the Iranians ‘exit doors’” —ways to retain a civilian nuclear program while guaranteeing there would be no bomb.

I certainly hope that’s right. I was at the conference, though, and though all points of view were represented, there was an overall dovish tone (Iran’s ambassador to the UN even spoke via teleconference, but I unfortunately had to miss him) so this sort of sentiment is what the audience wanted to hear. That Burns was interested in showing up at all, however, was certainly a good sign. I would have more faith, though, if this sort of message were going to a different audience.