Sonny has an interesting, suggestive post about the surge and public opinion — “that’s why we don’t vote on military strategy,” he says: because “the public is fickle, not to mentioned underinformed and stupid.” And then he shows us this chart:

But look closely. There’s a hard core of surge ‘opponents’, around 15% of respondents, that [...]

Daniel responds to my take on McEmpire:
aside from being another occasion to say that popular opinion is no guide to making good policy I would add that the frequent comparisons made between a long-term presence in Iraq and other long-term presences in Korea, Germany and elsewhere makes for an exceptionally good reason to leave Iraq immediately.  It [...]

McCain would love to see US troops stationed peacefully in Iraq for the foreseeable future. To him it does not matter when they come home. What matters is that the casualty rate get low enough to persuade Americans they shouldn’t care about another expansion of American empire. In fact, the entire debate about bringing them [...]

A while ago I went back and forth with John Schwenkler on torture. Our positions are pretty close together, but an element of the ‘torture problem’ we seem to be experiencing seemed to me to have received too little attention given how central it is to the controversy. That element is the blurring, in time [...]

That hard-to-describe tingly sensation experienced when your policy options short of force aren’t working. We all feel it. But reactions to Restless Bombs Syndrome may vary, both person-by-person and case-by-case. Striking a collegial contrast with my own stated symptoms, Sonny lays his out as follows:
James admits that Iranians are killing Americans (albeit in Iraq) and [...]

I’d like to endorse my American Scene colleague Noah Millman’s incisive comments on diplomacy and benign American power:
our unipolar moment makes diplomacy look rather different than historical models. And for that reason, non-coercive “win-win” bargains may be genuinely elusive, howsoever disposed the next President may be to seek them.
As Noah goes on to explain, some [...]

Phil Klein reports at AmSpecBlog:
When I was in Pennsylvania a few weeks ago covering the primary there, I spoke to a man who could be described as a classic swing voter. While he was leaning toward Hillary Clinton in the primary, he said he’d reevaluate his choices in a general election. When I asked him [...]