I didn’t think I had much to say about the recent inter-blog Obama/Clinton wars.  Not much to say about the “anti-Hillary” diaries on DKos and “anti-Barack” posts on blogs next door on the net.  Not a lot to say about the exchanged fire over claims of racism and sexism.  Hardly anything to say about the foul language.  Not much about the current calls for renewed unity and some of the brush-off responses to those calls.

And maybe I still don’t have anything much to say.  But I would like to take a moment to praise all of it, or very, very nearly all of it.  

Reading various news stories about an upcoming agreement on long-term military and economic commitments between the White House and the Maliki government in Iraq, details of which have not been made public, I think I am seeing the outlines a very clever trick.  I have not seen any news outlet put these story-lines together, so I will do so here.

(White House Photo of President Bush and Prime Minister Maliki signing the 2007 Declaration)

The New York Times and The Washington Post are both running stories for tomorrow about a report on Iran issued Monday by the International Atomic Energy Agency.  

The two articles read as if they were written on different planets.

The NYT article is written with a tone of alarm; suggesting or implying that the IAEA report — which has not been made public — claims that the Iranians are working dilligently towards making a nuclear weapon.

The tone of the WaPo article is exactly the opposite.

Is a Christian presidential candidate allowed to appeal to religion when on the campaign trail?  Is a pro-lifer allowed to appeal to his or or interpretation of the Bible?  Is an Atheist pro-choicer allowed to appeal to his or her conception of the universe — when making a political argument?

Meta-questions like these, questions about the nature of proper poltical debtate, swirl about in the poltical aptmosphere.  Sometimes they are brought up explicitly, more often implicitly, as when one person argues from firmly-held religious stance and another says, “Don’t make your beliefs my law.”

The underlying issue is about the nature of democracy itself — which is to say about poltical convesation in a pluralistic society itself.  We want to be pluralistic, and we want to be able to talk to each other.  So what is to be done?

This meta-issue can be articulated, and a view about it defended, explicitly.  By looking at one such stance, we can hopefully think more clearly about what our own views are: what we think ought to be allowed, and why, in political debate.

David Kilcullen  is a member of Gen. David Petraeus’ famous team of intellectuals.  He has served in Iraq as part of the general’s cadre and is currently working for the State Department as well as in the private sector.  Dr. Kilcullen has a Ph.D. in political science from the University of New South Wales and wrote his dissertation on counterinsurgency in traditional societies.

At the Department of State website devoted to collecting resources about counterinsurgency (“COIN” for short), there is a powerpoint presentation by Dr. Kilcullen titled “Counterinsurgency In Iraq: Theory and Practice, 2007 – by David Kilcullen.”  This is possibly the single most, shall we say “interesting,” powerpoint presentation I have ever seen.  

Paragraph 25 of an article in tomorrow’s NYT:

OPEC’s 13 members plan to spend $150 billion to expand their capacity by five million barrels a day by 2012. But OPEC will need to pump 60 million barrels a day by 2030, up from around 36 million barrels a day today, to meet the projected growth in demand. Analysts say that without Iran and Iraq – where nearly 30 years of wars and sanctions have crippled oil production – reaching that level will be impossible.

This is why we are not going to leave Iraq.  The country that controls the future of Iraq and Iran, controls the world for the next 40 or so years.