In this week’s National Review, Rich Lowry writes about what he terms “To Hell With Them Hawks” Republicans. “These are conservatives,” he says, “who are comfortable using force abroad, but have little patience for a deep entanglement with the Muslim world, which they consider unredeemable, or at least not worth the strenuous effort of trying to redeem. To put their departure from Bush in terms associated with foreign-policy analyst Walter Russell Mead, they want to detach Bush’s Jacksonianism (the hardheaded, somewhat bloody-minded nationalism) from his Wilsonianism (the crusading democratic idealism). Democrats are headed in this direction too. But the tendency is problematic and, in its own way, as naïve and unrealistic as Bush at his dreamiest.”

Lowry doesn’t think much of this growing movement, and warns continuously that it’s the wrong direction for conservatives to turn in the “post-Bush” era. (As an aside, let us note that it can’t be a good sign when your own most ardent supporters are preceding your name with the word “post-” when you still have three years left in your term.) Lowry cautions that if conservatives fall for this new approach, “it won’t be long until we are complaining yet again about the lack of realism in U.S. foreign policy, and yearning for something less simplistic and naïve.”

While the Republicans might be in disarray over their foreign policy posture, let’s not forget our Democratic friends out there blowing in the political wind. In The Nation this week, Ari Berman takes on Democratic politicians for “ducking” the Iraq issue after the president’s State of the Union address and in the run-up to the 2006 congressional election campaigns. Berman complains that “Three years into the conflict most Democrats can finally offer a cogent critique of how the Bush Administration...

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