I duly note Damir’s concerns about McCain-Palin’s scary Georgia statements.

And yet I note that Palin studiously avoided mentioning a military response or a military presence, unless one were to read “vigilance” and “support” as codewords for boots on the ground. I agree it makes Palin’s bit about NATO—shall we say—less than coherent. But Obama and his foreign policy advisers apparently agree almost point by point with this policy that Damir calls scary.

I think what this points to is the fact that certain elements of American foreign policy these days are idées fixes that cross party lines. And until someone comes along once again to smash these ideas with a hammer, Nietzsche-like, then we will find that foreign policy folly is a bipartisan issue.

UPDATE: I dumbly did not click through to read the original source comments on that Palin interview, where she spells out more explicitly that, yes, NATO membership means the possibility of a war. But I stand by the fact that Obama has unfortunately matched the McCain-Palin position.

Over at Slate, David Haglund attempts to make the case that the Big Lebowski works as an anticipation of the perfidy of the neocons:

Watching The Big Lebowski in 2008, it becomes clear that appreciating Walter is essential to understanding what the Coen brothers are up to in this movie, which is slyer, more political, and more prescient than many of its fans have recognized. Perhaps that’s because Walter, with his bellowing, Old Testament righteousness and his deeply entrenched militarism, is an American type that barely registered on the pop-culture landscape 10 years ago. He’s a neocon. If that seems like a stretch, consider the traits Walter exhibits over the course of the film: faith in American military might (the Gulf War, he says, “is gonna be a piece of cake”; in the original script, he calls it “a fucking cakewalk”); nostalgia for the Cold War (“Charlie,” he says, referring to the Viet Cong, was a “worthy fuckin’ adversary”); strong support for the state of Israel (to judge from his reverent paraphrase of Theodor Herzl: “If you will it, Dude, it is no dream”); and even, perhaps, past affiliation with the left (he refers knowingly to Lenin’s given name and admits to having “dabbled in pacifism”). Goodman, who has called the role his all-time favorite, seems also to have sensed Walter’s imperialist side. “Dude has a rather, let’s say, Eastern approach to bowling,” he said in an interview. “Walter is strictly Manifest Destiny.”

So, yeah, all the points of comparison do line up kind of conveniently, like Haglund says. But if we’re going to be interpreting the movie this way, why stop with Walter? The entire cast of characters, one could say, represents a skewering of the entire American political landscape. When you start to make pat interpretations, it’s hard to stop: There’s the dude (Sixties radicalism as a spent force), Maude Lebowski (Europhilic coastal elites), Jeffrey Lebowski…the other Jeffrey Lebowski (a straigh-from-central casting, cigar-chomping GOP corporate welfare case), and Donny (the “silent majority” in America’s flyover country, who can’t get a word in edgewise over all the partisan bickering). Indeed you can make a good case for these and many more readings, but by doing so, don’t we lose a little of the magic of the original?

As The Dude himself might put it, “No, you’re not wrong, Haglund. You’re just an asshole.”

A post-euphoric New York Times tells it like it is:

While administration officials maintain that the intelligence estimate does not mean that the United States and its allies should ease the pressure, the practical consequence of the report has been to embolden Iran. It has also made it more likely that China and Russia, two of the countries with perhaps the smallest appetite for sanctions against Iran, will not agree to a new round of tough sanctions by the United Nations Security Council.

A de-fanged Cheney means the world goes about its business. The world’s business is not to lie down prostrate, but rather to counterbalance U.S. global dominance.

Yay?

Hank in the Post, a voice of reason?

I have long argued that America owes it to itself to explore fully the possibility of normalizing relations with Iran. We do not need to tranquilize ourselves to the danger in order to pursue a more peaceful world. What is required is a specific vision linking assurances for Iran’s security and respect for its identity with an Iranian foreign policy compatible with the existing order in the Middle East. But it must also generate an analysis of the strategy to be pursued should Iran, in the end, choose ideology over reconciliation.

Kissinger’s not been treated kindly by history for his Vietnam policy, and his rumored advice over Iraq to Bush Jr. doesn’t sound like it was too sagacious either. Nevertheless, this op-ed is right on: Iran policy does not end with the NIE. (And the politicization of intelligence has been disastrous for this country.)

Brad DeLong shits a brick over the Washington Post’s editorial page this morning. Citing Kevin Drum’s take on it, his headline screams “Shut Down the Washington Post Today!”

Having read the WaPo page, I have to say I disagree with Drum’s and DeLong’s strident readings of it. Here’s what the page actually says:

President Bush yesterday vowed to continue pushing for international sanctions. But Democrats and some Republicans are arguing that now is the time for the Bush administration to begin a broad dialogue with Iran—and drop a precondition that the regime first suspend uranium enrichment. It’s an odd time to recommend such a concession: The latest European Union talks with Iran last week were a disaster, in which a new hard-line envoy of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad withdrew the previous, inadequate Iranian compromise proposals. Were the Bush administration to abandon its insistence on a suspension of enrichment, Mr. Ahmadinejad would declare victory over the relative moderates in Iran who have recently criticized his uncompromising stance.

While one hopes that American strikes are off the table, it doesn’t sound like a bad idea to further ratchet up the pressure on Iran. The NIE doesn’t exactly transform Ahmadinejad into an interlocuteur valable. Negotiations are the art of extracting maximum advantage from your adversary without using actual physical force. One gets the sense that people are forgetting this amid the euphoria.