Talking About Talking About Talking About Foreign Policy

Ezra Klein criticizes the Democrats for their (real or perceived) reluctance to discuss foreign policy:

When Democrats appear reluctant to even discuss the issue, voters conclude, rightly, that they either don't know what they think, don't know what they'd do, or are too scared to verbalize their agenda (a dynamic the Republican Party suffers from on domestic policy)....it doesn't take a genius to realize that refusing to address it isn't going to cut your opponent's advantage very much. In any case, Iraq is important. Terror is important. Foreign policy is important. And Democrats want to control the government. Discussing these issues during the election isn't out of bounds, it's a prerequisite.

Meanwhile, Kevin Drum posts a quote from George Packer:

I think what [the Bush administration] have done is [turned] what should be very difficult strategic policy questions into, essentially, part of a permanent campaign at home to win a political argument. I think they’ve taken that more seriously, they’ve given it more energy, and they consider it more important, in a way, than they do the actual conflict outside of our borders.

Drum adds:

This is, by a long measure, the most underreported aspect of the Bush administration's war on terror. Not that they're pursuing the wrong strategy — though they are — but that in the end they don't really care that much one way or the other. Winning the war has always been secondary to winning elections.

Exactly. Ezra is right that we won't win by running away from foreign policy...but the response to this point is a little more complicated than just articulating a solid foreign policy strategy. We can make foreign policy work for us, but not if we try to engage on a purely substantive level. To do so would implicitly acknowledge that there is substance there--at which point we've already lost. As I wrote in April (in reference to Iran, but the point applies more broadly):

[I]f it becomes a choice between their 'plan' and ours, we lose.

Problem number one: the playing field isn't level. On matters of national security, especially in times of crisis (real or manufactured), a sitting administration gets the presumption of correctness; the opposition has to clear a very high bar in order to overcome that presumption....

Problem number two: they have all the intel, they can choose what to release, and we know from experience that they will release it selectively to make themselves look good. So a substantive debate would be conducted on their turf with the facts they choose....

Problem number three: they won't offer a plan. What they will give us, besides the cherrypicked intel, is a bunch of fatuous platitudes about keeping us Safe! from Danger! and did we mention Terror! That gives us an Eddie Gaedel-sized strike zone. If we have a full-on plan, conversely, it will be child's play for them to pick it apart.

We can grab the advantage, though, if we make it all about Kevin's point. We make it about the abuse of foreign policy for political ends, and about the consequences of that abuse. We make it about the misuse of intelligence that got us into Iraq, about the ideological blinders that prevented them from having a plan for the occupation, about the see-no-evil party line that guarantees a continued stalemate. We need to make the point, over and over, that they have no policy, that their 'policy' is a bunch of meaningless rhetoric combined with a willingness to risk American lives for the goal of electoral advantage. We need to make the point repeatedly, aggressively, and (more importantly) pre-emptively, before they start bludgeoning us with the 'weak on terror' stick.

And yes, we will probably need to have a foreign policy ourselves, or at least the appearance of one. It could be 'Free puppies for the Iraqis' for all the practical effect it'll have, but yeah, we ought to at least look like we have something. That's still secondary to the main point: that we can't trust the Republicans to run foreign policy, and we can't believe anything they tell us to convince us we can trust them.

There are already signs that Republican candidates are running away from Iraq; if we're smart about it, that should give us the opportunity to define the other guys' foreign policy for a change.

[That's all, folks]