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I’m sure that the Lieberman turn-of-events has excited the dKos branch of the liberal blogosphere, what has become synonymous with the “netroots” label, but what’s interested me (naturally) is the way the Lamont victory - and the boneheaded commentary and rhetoric that’s tut-tutted at it - has reenergized the far less rootsy center-leftish blogosphere and pushed them, almost dialectically, into an articulate opposition to the playing out of foreign policy in the political realm.

To wit, Josh Marshall on Lieberman’s “toward the mainstream” comment:

But more to the point. This isn’t just inaccurate, it’s pathetic. I’ts a like a mini-version of the Iraq War or the War on Terror. You’re either with Joe or you’re with the extremists. Apparently half of Connecticut Democrats are outside the mainstream. This is really the attitude that got poor Joe into this bind. The mainstream is Joe Lieberman, along with possibly Sean Hannity and Bill Kristol. If you disagree with Joe Lieberman, a disagreement about policy is the least of it. It’s a major existential crisis for the Democratic party which risks conquest by unreconstructed leftists, extremists and miscellaneous other freaks.

Or Matt Yglesias’s sage words:

A Democrat who wants to win is going to need to make the argument that the invasion of Iraq has dramatically increased the risk of terrorist attacks on the United States. That it distracted our attention from a much more necessary stabilization and pacification mission in Afghanistan, ruined counterterrorism cooperation with several countries, turned Muslim opinion around the world against us, wasted huge sums of money that could have been spent killing actual terrorists and guarding against the same, that it’s been a huge strategic coup for Iran, etc., etc., etc., etc. It’s a good argument; one that can, should, and must be made. But it’s not an argument you can make consistent with the idea that Joe Lieberman’s mistaken views on Iraq are just some random thing on a par with a person’s position on the research and development tax credit. If stopping terrorism is very important, and if the Iraq War was seriously counterproductive to counterterrorism efforts, then being badly wrong on Iraq means you’re badly wrong on terrorism and that this matters.

Or, more basically, Charles Pierce:

More than anything else, the DLC created a generation of gun-shy Democrats, and that was fine, as long as we could be reasonably confident that the other side would not throw the entire United States government into the monkeyhouse.

… and Timothy Burke:

Opposing the war in Iraq is not the same as endorsing terrorism. It is not the same as refusing to engage in a protracted military and political struggle against terrorist movements. The war in Iraq is not the war on terror.

Uncritical, slavish support for the war in Iraq is sabotaging the struggle against terrorism. Uncritical endorsement of the Bush Administration’s attempt to claim unlimited executive authority in a definitionally endless state of war is undermining the defense of liberty and democracy here and abroad.

Bipartisanship is not endorsement of the entirety of the current Republican Party political agenda.

… and Kevin Drum:

This nonsense needs to be fought at every turn. Democrats have to make it absolutely clear, every single time somebody spouts this rubbish, that supporting the Iraq war doesn’t mean you’re “on offense against terrorism.” Nor does opposing the war also mean you oppose fighting jihadism. The truth is closer to the exact opposite, and chapter and verse should follow if necessary.

This needs to happen Every. Single. Time. We can’t allow the Rudy Giulianis and Dick Cheneys of the world to get away with this. They’ve dug us into too deep a hole already, and we can’t afford to let them dig it any deeper.

It’s a stretch to say that the Lieberman-Lamont contest has radicalized this quarter, who have protested the US’s direction in foreign policy for some time, often well, but it has given them (and me) a renewed sense that now’s the time to strike in a counterattack against everything that the Great-War-of-Terror mentality came to mean, that History has entered some pregnant Hegelian moment.

It’s more than the matter of administration incompetence in fighting the Iraq war, it’s the matter of a conservative foreign policy that mistakes nation-state geopolitics for nonstate terrorists; that’s obstusely unable to understand nationalist battles other than as projections for its own preferred Manichaen dramas; that takes one part of the Middle East (Iraq) for the whole; that trades in obfuscation that’s partly intentional, partly ideological, and yes, partly racist. Democrats are divided on foreign policy more than on most anything else, but observers don’t give them enough credit for actually having an answer: 1) drop the categorical opposition to traditional diplomacy and negotiation; 2) be aware that nationalist dynamics can work either for or against your cause, but aren’t themselves ‘the enemy’; and 3) whatever foreign policy instrument used, peaceful or bellicose, its application should be centered toward the primary objective (defense and anti-terrorism), not toward some grand geopolitical experiment with empirically problematic assumptions like the Flypaper Theory or the Domino Effect of Democracy. That’s hard to put on a yard sign, but it has the advantage of not spawning counterproductive wars.