Let me introduce you to the new meme:

Judging whether the Iraq war and occupation was a good idea or the right thing to do based on the principle that things are, or seem like they soon will be, better there than they were before treats war as merely a neutral policy tool. The question preceding any decision to go to war shouldnt be as simple as: Might some long-term good occur out of this? (especially when any attempt to wonder whether or not things might or could have been better in Iraq in 2012 than they were in 2002 even if we never invaded will be dismissed as childish sci-fi thinking, and the costs of likely more than a couple of trillion by 2017 thought of as all in a days good work, and for our kids to pay off anyway). The real question before a war needs to be: is this absolutely necessary given a fair consideration of the horrors and unpredictability of war and the purpose of the U.S. military? Which is not: make the world a better place, somewhere down the line, killing lots of people on the way. For America’s future, this kind of victory in Iraq could really mean defeat.

[See above for my reasons not to favor The Nation with a link.]

Remove the petulance, the breezy assumption that Doherty’s opinion on root causes are settled truths, and the reflexive loathing of the neoconservatives, and you have - well, about three or so paragraphs, but somewhere in there is the signal that portions of the antiwar movement would really like to stop talking about concrete interventions and instead return to having abstract discussions on the need for intervention.

This is welcome for two reasons. First, this is a discussion that we should actually be having anyway. It looks increasingly like Iran will be a foreign policy headache that could potentially stretch into the next few Presidential administrations, and now indeed would be a good time to discuss what we need to do about it (and before somebody starts shouting: yes, that does include discussing whether anything needs to be done about it at all). Contrary to the antiwar movement’s belief, we are not actively conspiring to invade Iran - this President wouldn’t be shy about saying so if he was - but we may have to. Or the next President may have to. It’d be nice to work it all out ahead of time, particularly since we were given that rude surprise by all of those “progressives” who suddenly realized that their commentary about supporting freedom and democracy didn’t count if a Republican could take credit for it.

And there’s the second reason. If various people and groups are falling back from “We can’t win this fight” to “Fine, we won, but should we have fought?” or “Just because we won there doesn’t mean that we should get into the bad habit of fighting,” then it’s going to get very, very lonely out there for the people who won’t retreat. Personally, I hope that the antiwar movement sticks it out to the bitter end.

It’s a shame that I picked an infantry military metaphor for this post, because All the way to the ground would have been a great way to end it. Ach, well.

HUMAN EVENTS also asked participants to “Rank the following issues (value, healthcare, education, media bias, illegal immigration, taxes, right to life, War in Iraq, size of government, competence in government, and homeland security) with 1 being the most important and 10 least important.”

Of the 977 responses to that question, Illegal Immigration came in as the most important issue for conservatives (as it did in a similar HE poll in May) with 284 votes — indicating where conservatives’ principal problem with Sen. McCain apparently lies.

Competence in government came in as the second most important issue with 170 votes and then Homeland Security with 163. The War in Iraq came in as the fourth most important issue with 147 votes.

HUMAN EVENTS survey participants said that the least important issue among conservatives is healthcare with more than half of the responses (478) ranking it at number 10.

The University of Iowa poll released Monday gives McCain only 6% in the 2008 GOP presidential field placing him in fifth place among his contenders and a New Hampshire Rasmussen poll released Friday places McCain in third with 16%. That same Iowa poll placed Huckabee in third and the New Hampshire poll placed him in fourth, six percentage points behind McCain. Judging by these polling results it would seem that Huckabee – among conservatives — has replaced McCain as a top tier candidate.

Romney holds a comfortable lead among all GOP candidates in both Iowa and New Hampshire polls.

HUMAN EVENTS’ presidential poll is, we believe, the first of its kind: isolating and measuring conservatives’ views of the presidential candidates.

The high numbers achieved by Sen. Fred Thompson may not hold up in states such as Iowa and New Hampshire where both Romney and Giuliani poll well. However, because of its sampling only among conservatives, the HUMAN EVENTS poll may measure potential in the Thompson candidacy more than its current strength. Perhaps Thompson should take this as a sign that his campaign in Iowa and New Hampshire should have kicked off earlier and be much more vigorous. (Thompson’s first and only public appearance in Iowa was a speech just this past Saturday. Thompson told AP reporters “I do things my own way, at my own pace.”)

Conservatives are the most hopeful and skeptical people among the electorate. HUMAN EVENTS will poll them again, closer to the first primary election, to see how the candidates have progressed.

However, despite their use of underhanded tactics, their attempts to pull Republicans to the Democrat side by threatening to otherwise paint them as being evilly against children, their refusal to compromise, and their shutting the minority party out of the writing of the legislation, Congressional Democrats have been both surprised and dismayed to see support for their position decline, rather than increase, over the course of the debate. The vote on the second-try SCHIP bill saw only one Representative, Vern Ehlers (R-MI), defect from the position taken on the first SCHIP vote and he crossed over to the nays, rejoining his party on the side of realism and fiscal restraint.

The fight will continue past this week. Federal funding for SCHIP in its current form ends on November 15, so at the very least an extension of the current program will have to be agreed upon and passed. However, the Democrats have made the massive expansion of government-controlled healthcare too large a priority in their 2007 legislative agenda, and have spent too much money and political capital on it, to let it go at that. The issue will almost certainly come up again in the not-too-distant future, though likely not as a stand-alone. According to a source on Capitol Hill, the Democrats most likely course of action would be to bury SCHIP into a bill that Republicans would ordinarily overwhelmingly support, like a military quality-of-life bill or another piece of legislation that addresses a GOP staple issue, thereby forcing Republicans to appear to be voting against and President Bush to be vetoing (if he maintains a firm commitment) both the military and children, an apparent lose-lose situation.

That, though, is a bridge that must be crossed when it is reached. For now, the GOP has once again scored a legislative victory, as Minority Whip Roy Blunt and Chief Deputy Whip Eric Cantor again produced the necessary number of Republican voters to limit this latest attempt at government health care expansion to a total well-short of a veto-proof majority. This gives the President the flexibility to continue doing the right thing on this matter, as well. The war on this issue is far from over, but as long as each battle is won, the GOP remains far closer to overall victory than to defeat.

DODD ON MTP. On NBC, Meet the Press host Tim Russert decided to communicate with fringe candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination, Chris Dodd. The Connecticut Senator explained that there were two versions of the resolution declaring the Iranian Revolutionary Guard to be a terrorist outfit, allowing the United States to take actions against their finances and business operations. Republican Senator Gordon Smith introduced the Democrat version, which, Dodd said, relied on diplomacy; while Senators Kyl and Lieberman plugged their own version, which ultimately passed, which Dodd called a recipe for military action by the Bush Administration.

Dodd asked: “What didn’t we learn from October, 2002?” Dodd said that no one thought that President Bush would actually invade Iraq after Congress told him that he could. They was snookered, dammit!

He boasted that Jim Webb favored the Smith bill, and he said that the Kyl-Lieberman version would be used by President Bush as justification to invade Iran; he added that we were “precariously close” to invading Iran.

He said that Bush has done well with North Korea “in the past few months” and urged him now to do the same with Iran.

On the matter of Iraq, Dodd intimated that he has “come to the conclusion that this is not going well.” He stated that “we’re more vulnerable and isolated than at any time in recent memory,” what with the civil war thaang we’re doing. “We’re a bouncer in a bar brawl.”

Dodd said that he met with soldiers last year who told him that it wasn’t working in Iraq and that “we have to change policy.” It’s been done, Dodd.

Russert, looking at the great quagmire, asked Dodd: “What did our soldiers die for?” Dodd hemmed, hawed, and said that we might have bought the Iraqis more space to try to make this work. Russert pulled out a vid clip explaining last April that this war “is about oil.” Russert asked why it took Dodd so long to say this when it should have been obvious all along, but Dodd wouldn’t bite. He would not make the assertion that he thought American troops in Iraq had died for oil, which would have put him in a special category of the tin foil brigade, with Mike Gravel and Ron Paul.

Dodd said that he did not think we are safer, and Russert quoted Dodd from December of 2003, saying that we were safer. Dodd explained that circumstances change, which really means that he changed his tune when it became clear that he’d need political contributions from the unstable set.

When asked what would be the first thing he did after taking the Presidential oath of office, Dodd answered: “Restore the Constitution.”

JOHN MCCAIN ON TW. On ABC, This Week host George Stephanopoulos’s headliner was Republican Presidential candidate John McCain. He led with a clip of Joe Biden telling Stephanopoulos last week that invading Iran would serve only make them mad at us. McCain agreed that you had to be careful when you make threats, because you have to make them up. He cited the Israeli attack on the nuke site in Syria and said that we cannot sit around and wait for Iran to get the bomb. Steph countered that experts tell him that the Iranians have learned the lessons of the Osirak Attack, when the Israeli’s attacked one of Saddam’s nuke sites in 1981, and perhaps this latest attack in Syria. Iran, Steph posited, has spread its nuke facilities around the country. McCain said he’s not going to discuss tactics but that you need not remove all sites. He added that Joe Biden did not discuss this, but nukes would proliferate throughout the region if Iran required a bomb.

McCain said that we cannot allow Iran to acquire a weapon, but that it was not smart to discuss attacking and bombing this or that.

Steph asked him about Putin calling the United States “a madman with a knife.” McCain said that he’s seen through Putin since the beginning. He would not invite him to be in the G8. He would treat Putin for what he is: “a totalitarian dictator” who wants to consolidate his power and create another Russian empire. He accused Putin of “aberrational behavior” and of making the United Nations Security Council a “toothless” institution. (Erstwhile Paris Mayor Jacques Chirac helped to accomplish this years ago.)

McCain said that “before we continue to talk about the military option” with Iran, we ought to get other countries to help out with the sanctions. He said that Iran’s “economy is not great, because they’ve got a lousy government.”

Steph quoted from that Rick Davis memo which argued that nominating Rudy Giuliani would put at risk the coalition of Fiscal and Social conservatives at the base of the GOP. (”His nomination would have devastating results for our party.”) McCain said that he doesn’t believe that the GOP would nominate someone who has “fundamental disagreements” with the party. He said that he imagines he’ll support whomever is the nominee, but he still finds it difficult that Republicans would nominate someone who disagreed with them.

McCain argued that national polls show that he is the GOP nominee who would be “most likely to defeat” Hillary in a head-to-head matchup.

Steph mentioned that Barack Obama called Hillary a liar in today’s New York Post. Does McCain think he’s right. McCain said that he didn’t know, but that he respects Senator Clinton and they will have a debate only about the fact that she’s a liberal Democrat while his is a conservative Republican. He faulted wasteful government spending, saying that the American people are “sick of” it.

Steph asked him about attorney general nominee Michael Mukasey, who had told the Senate that he did not know if waterboarding were torture, a “similar answer” to Rudy’s. McCain answered that anyone who doesn’t know that waterboarding is torture has no experience in the conduct of warfare or in national security. This is about America, not about an interrogation technique. He said that because waterboarding was used by Pol Pot in Cambodia and against the Buddhist monks in Burma, it is torture. (”Waterboarding is torture” is no longer debatable, it seems; it is now a KNOWN FACT.)

Steph asked him if he has enough cash to compete against in Iowa and New Hampshire, and if accepting public financing will smash him in that period between February and “the conventions in August. (The GOP convention will be in September of next year.) McCain said they’ve looked at it, and they won’t have the same problem as hampered Bob Dole in ‘96, because there will be a more active party involvement at the various levels. He said that retail politics are the way to campaign in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, which is not only good for the party but also for his campaign. He reports seeing enthusiasm. He plans to do well: “I think we’ll have enough money to be competitive.”

LAURA BUSH ON FNS. Appearing live on the set with FOX News Sunday host Chris Wallace, first lady Laura Bush talked about Breast Cancer Awareness in the Moslem world. He explained that because of the stigma attached to anything having to do with a woman’s body in these countries, the detection and diagnoses often came late, leading to a greater mortality rate.

On Burma, Mrs. Bush explained that 90% of its citizens make less than $1.00.week. Wallace asked her if she advises the President on these matters. She said that they talk about it, but these policies are his own.

Wallace asked Mrs. Bush if experience as first lady qualifies someone to be President, as that woman, Senator Clinton, has been telling anyone who will listen and might contribute. Laura explains that it prepares you for events which might occur, citing September 11.

Wallace asked Mrs. Bush if she were at all torn by Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy, and Laura said that she wasn’t. She hopes to one day soon vote for a female Republican to be the next President, but that will vote for the Republican nominee.

She said that there were still things she wanted to accomplish and complete in the remaining months of her husband’s term. The same is true of President Bush, she explained. He’d like for the Iraqi situation to come together and stabilize, and: “I think we are starting to get there.”

BOBBY JINDAL ON FNS.Louisiana’s Governor-elect Bobby Jindal was next up for Wallace. Jindal allowed that he wouldn’t mind being one of the most efficient and boring governors. Wallace told him that the largest job facing him will be the rebuilding of New Orleans. Jindal explained that he would free the allocated Federal funds from their accompanying red tape. He added that the storm had given them the opportunity to fix problems which there in New Orleans before Katrina, not rebuilding the failed schools, etc.

Jindal said that he would speak to President Bush about the Federal government encouraging the private sector to invest in south Louisiana. He argued that there should be federal money to “grow the private sector.” He added that though he is a fiscal conservative, he favors forcing the federal government to give away the taxpayers’ money they have committed to hand out.

His argument for why the GOP lost badly in the 2006 elections? “The party stopped being conservative.”

LEVIN AND GRAHAM ON FTN. Over on CBS, Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer talked to Senators Carl Levin and Lindsey Graham about war with Iran. Levin said he hope we’ll not go to war if the sanctions don’t work, as the sanctions are the way to work. And most countries won’t “stand by and watch” if Iran builds a nuclear weapon. He thinks “we ought to tone down the rhetoric,” as talk of war “plays into the hands” of the “fanatics” in Iran.

Schieffer pointed out that despite what Levin says, Vlad Putin is “standing by and watching,” with Vlad going so far as to say that Russia could live with a nuclear-armed Iran. Levin countered that he didn’t mean it, really, and that Iran would not stand by and watch. Honest.

Graham countered that Russia was “sending all the wrong signals” to Iran and that the U.N. was ineffective in dealing with “rogue regimes.”

Schieffer played a clip of President Bush saying that the Iranians might start World War II if they were to nuke Israel; Graham explained that the President had to wake up our allies.

Levin said that it is important to keep the military option on the table, but we cannot “play into the hands of the fanatics.” In attacking President Bush, Levin, however, said that he thinks it is okay if Iran were to “have the knowledge” to build a nuclear weapon, provided that they did actually build one.

Graham explained that “at the end of the day, the Iranians are their own problem.” He’s willing to help Iran to have nuclear power so long as someone else controlled the fuel cycle.

Schieffer asked about the price of oil if the President were to attack Iran. Graham explained that we need the EU, Russia, and China involved in the diplomatic sanctions process.

Schieffer asked Levin what is Iran’s capability right now. Schieffer explained that they could fire missiles with “heavy effect,” shut down the Strait of Hormuz, and release a massive Hezbollah response. Levin added that we must not attack Moslem countries, because it “plays into their hands.” Crazy Carl is scared!

Graham said that military action against Iran looks to be inevitable if the world does not come together on the sanctions against Iran.

Lindsey said that waterboarding is illegal torture, and that you don’t really have to know much to accept this. Levin agreed. Both said that attorney general nominee Michael Mukasey had better agree with them or he will be deemed unfit for office.

MOHAMED EL BARADEI ON CNN. Oh, it’s that IAEA guy, Mohamed El Baradei, and this time he was Wolf Blitzer’s first guest on CNN’s Late Edition. Wolf first wanted to talk about the “perceived threat, which the U.S. perceives” of Iran. El Baradei countered that Iran doesn’t have nuclear weapons and they’re not going to get one anytime soon. He’s talking about “risk assessment” of Iran getting the Bomb in the future, which calls for “creative diplomacy.”

El Baradei said that his IAEA team has seen no evidence of clandestine nuclear programs in Iran. He suspects that Iran “might have the intention,” but again he argued that Iran has no nuclear weapons program and the United States government has provided him with nothing.

El Baradei thinks sanctions alone will not lead to a solution.

He said that having the capability of building a nuke is a long way from actually having a nuke.

El Baradei says that there is distrust between the Western world and Iran.

He talked of use of force as a last resort but insisted that we are a “long way” from that point.

Wolf quoted Ahmadinejad as saying that all of Iran’s nuclear activities were peaceful and the case was now closed. El Baradei said that in no way was it closed. There was work to be done.

El Baradei is “very disturbed” that the Israelis bombed the site in Syria, because no one told him that Syria had a nuclear site based on a North Korean model so they must not. He said that Israel should have come to the IAEA first, had them look at it, as they are “the eyes and ears of the world.” He accused Israel of taking the law into its own hands. (All occasions of national self-defense must be approved by a U.N. outfit, El Baradei makes clear. They are not only impotent; they’re laughable.)

He said that North Korea was not proliferating its nukes, because he has seen no proof that they were. He said that they cannot just trust anyone without proof. He cited “President Reagan”: “Trust yet verify.”

Blitzer said that El Baradei had lots and lots of cred because he had told the United Nations that he had no proof that Iraq had nuclear weapons. Does he “feel vindicated”? El Baradei said that he did not feel vindicated; it wasn’t a game, and he was glad that Iraq did not have nuclear weapons.

BOXER AND LOTT ON LE. Next up, Wolf had Senators Trent Lott and Babs Boxer, Wolf asked Lott about El Baradei’s rejection of “ratcheting up the rhetoric,” and Lott said that El Baradei was thoughtful but the rhetoric is merely pressure. Boxer said that El Baradei had a lot of credibility and that we are talking about attacking Iran “when we haven’t gotten out of Iraq yet.” She explained that the tough talk only makes the enemy mad.

Lott explained that the “most heated rhetoric has been coming from the Iranian leadership.”

Boxer said this the first of four Administrations with which she’s worked which “hypes the rhetoric” to lead. She said that this just makes the jihadists want to attack us. She’s scared.

Boxer said that President should not have said that the missile shield would be useful if Iran were to send a nuke to Europe.
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Have at it, then.

The bill of particulars against Rod Blagojevich is numbingly familiar. His is a legacy of federal and state investigations of alleged cronyism and corruption in the steering of pension fund investments to political donors, in the subversion of state hiring laws, in the awarding of state contracts, in matters as personal as that mysterious $1,500 check made out to the governor’s then-7-year-old daughter by a friend whose wife had been awarded a state job.

Presented this year with an extraordinary opportunity — his Democratic Party controlling both houses of the Illinois General Assembly — Blagojevich has squandered what should have been a leadership moment: He is governor of a state in desperate need of more accountability in its public schools, of a new tax formula for funding those schools, of a meaningful attack on its swelling pension indebtedness. Today Illinois has … solutions to none of the above.

Instead, taxpayers are bankrolling an endless game of chicken between legislative leaders and a governor known to boast about his self-diagnosed “testicular virility.” Blagojevich has clumsily tried to recast himself as a prairie populist, bashing his state’s employers. He has borrowed from the future to cover costs of state government today. And in a fiasco that may have its own constitutional implications, he has redirected millions of taxpayers’ dollars to personal priorities that he can’t convince lawmakers to support.

Blagojevich is an intentionally divisive governor and a profoundly unhelpful influence. He is unwilling or unable to see the chaos all around him. This year, lawmakers failed to make progress on schools, on state pension reform, on any number of critical matters. Mass transit in the Chicago region is about to implode, largely because of the state government’s failure.

Yet Blagojevich said 10 days ago that “If you measure success on whether or not you are doing things for people, this is the most successful session in years.”

Do you see that success? Do you see Blagojevich forging compromises and solving problems? Or do you see the same distracted governor who, after House members crushed his 2007 tax scheme by a vote of 107-0, said: “Today, I think, was basically an up. … I feel good about it.”

He is the governor who cannot govern.

Read the whole thing, and ask yourself: shouldn’t the GOP be doing more to capitalize on the incompetence and corruption of its adversaries?