When you start hearing angry cries from the opposition you know you’re 
beginning to draw some blood. That’s been the case with TPM’s recent postings on the Korea matter. One of the most amusing lines of argument I’ve seen is one attacking me or characterizing me as a foreign policy dove. Anyone who’s even casually familiar with my writing on the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Democratic party’s continuing deficit on serious national security thinking, and in TPM generally would know this is false.
But the misapprehension raises a more important issue: criticizing the president’s management of foreign and defense policy is almost automatically seen on the right — and often on the left too — as dovish.
Not so.
Part of the issue here is that the Democrats’ persistent lack of seriousness about national security policy — which I discussed here in the New York Post — has made conservatives frightfully lazy on the same subject. Sad to say, but true. They’re in the habit of thinking that talking tough gets you credit for being tough. Only it doesn’t. Certainly, it doesn’t get you credit for being tough and smart in your management of national security matters. Talking tough simply doesn’t give the Bush administration a free pass to smooth over or cover up its policy screw-ups in Northeast Asia. I can understand their wanting it to. But it doesn’t.
If it weren’t so serious it would be hilarious the way you hear Asia hands describing the current situation. Yes, they say, talking to some administration appointee. Yes, you caught them cheating. But what are you going to do about it? What’s your plan? And the reply comes back, but we caught them. Yes, you caught them. You caught them with the uranium program and now they’ve put the far more serious plutonium program back up and running. What do we … But we caught them!!! This one goes to eleven!
You get the idea. More on this soon …
