That’s the question I keep coming back to, because, judging from the blogospheric debate among serious-sounding liberals/leftists/progressives, they are utterly paralyzed when it comes to addressing the use of force.

I find this most perplexing, since many liberals I know are career warriors, for whom it is second nature to engage in personal warfare against professional competitors, but perhaps that’s beside the point. Or maybe not…but that’s not where I’m going today.

Kevin Drum alludes to the problem in his objections to both Peter Beinart’s book and With All Our Might, the volume produced by the Progressive Policy Institute, which I mentioned here, in a post called “People Who Get It.”

There isn’t a magic formula that tells us when it’s right to support military action and when it isn’t. And yet, in a 14-part book about the war on terror, shouldn’t at least one chapter be devoted to Iraq? Shouldn’t at least one chapter be devoted entirely to the Bush Doctrine and what we’d replace it with? Shouldn’t at least one chapter be devoted to explaining when we will support military force, not merely repeating the mantra that we won’t use it except as a “last resort”?

Maybe I’m asking the impossible. And God knows this discussion would do nothing except magnify liberal fissures, rather than finding common ground. And yet, if toughminded liberals are going to criticize their weak-kneed brethren, shouldn’t they be a little more forthcoming about exactly how tough they think we ought to be?

This is utterly juvenile. Unfortunately, it is also characteristic of the “debate” on the left. See Wretchard’s post today on the Beinart-Tomasky debate:

The Beinart-Tomasky debate falsely revolves around the issue of Iraq when in fact it should revolve around whether the liberals have a strategy for dealing with the growing chaos and dysfunction in the Third World of which radical Islamism is simply an instance. Iraq only seems central to the debate because it has precipitated a crisis within liberal internationalism that can no longer be ignored.

Foxy Hillary gets this.

The Hedgehog

Kerry demands US troop pullout

does not.