It's taken me a while to get to this, but at the risk of another protracted debate with someone who already owes me $100, here goes:

"According to McCain, all the doctrinally and politically disparate Islamic terrorist groups, non-violent Islamism, the Iraqi insurgency, Iran, conventional middle Eastern autocracies, and even Russia and the confederation of states allied with it, are alternative representations of a single foreign policy problem. That problem, which McCain dubs "the transcendent challenge of our time," amounts to a contest of sheer will between the US and its loyal allies on one side, its enemies, the rest of the world, on the other. McCain recognizes neither distinctions among distinct individuals and groups with distinct histories and agendas, nor does he pay the slightest heed to weighing the goals and potential benefits of any foreign policy against its political and economic costs. The right policy is simply the one jibes best with McCain's sense of honor, which, in practice, always turns out to be war. McCain's alternative to Realpolitik is Bushido."

I suspect what happened was this: Daniel came up with the term "Bushido" first. He thought it was very clever, which it is -- worthy of David Axelrod himself. But in looking to apply it relevantly to McCain, he has either willfully or unintentionally misread an important foreign policy speech and rendered it lower than a caricature, which at least bears some resemblance to the filigreed original.

The claim that McCain looks beyond the borders of the United States and sees only a single, amorphous entity with the same history and "agenda" is patently absurd. He talks of eradicating malaria and HIV in Africa, adopting free trade agreements with countries in South America, fostering market development in Asia, and disciplining "pariah states" such as Sudan, Zimbabwe and Burma. Such diversity of aims, albeit only limned in the context of a campaign speech, cannot be boiled down to Daniel's imaginative paraphrase.

Above we're told that McCain's "transcendent challenge of our time" is a single foreign policy problem represented by "Islamic terrorist groups, non-violent Islamism, the Iraqi insurgency, Iran, conventional middle Eastern autocracies, and even Russia and the confederation of states allied with it."

Curious, then, that Russia is mentioned only with respect to the G-8 and McCain's proposed League of Democracies as a "revanchist" nation (which it is) that poses a challenge (not the "transcendent" one) that both the U.S. and Europe must once again face united. Vladimir Putin has more or less said the same thing, except he draws comparisons to the Third Reich in coloring the behavior of Russia's erstwhile ally during World War II (I mean the one before the Third Reich itself.) Nowhere is Moscow's bad behavior tethered to a clash of civilizations thesis; it is treated separately and distinctly as a foreign policy problem in itself. As for conventional Middle Eastern autocracies, McCain mentions these in light of failed strategies of the past (propping up the Shah, Saddam) and observes that such former client states served as insufficient stop-gaps on Islamic terrorism. They could no more provide lasting stability to the region than a renascent caliphate would do: "The oppression of the autocrats blended with the radical Islamists' dogmatic theology to produce a perfect storm of intolerance and hatred." This is one way to define the post-9/11 conventional wisdom, which everyone from Juan Cole to Paul Wolfowitz shares. One seeks in vain here for the encoded call for permanent regime change:

"We must not act rashly or demand change overnight. But neither can we pretend the status quo is sustainable, stable, or in our interests. Change is occurring whether we want it or not. The only question for us is whether we shape this change in ways that benefit humanity or let our enemies seize it for their hateful purposes. We must help expand the power and reach of freedom, using all our many strengths as a free people. This is not just idealism. It is the truest kind of realism. It is the democracies of the world that will provide the pillars upon which we can and must build an enduring peace."

Daniel also elides McCain's specific and clear definition of the "transcendent" challenge:

"Radical Islamic terrorism," McCain argues, presents a "transcendent" challenge because it is "unique." But this is silly. No one problem in foreign policy is exactly alike any other. They are all unique. The uniqueness of Islamic terrorists, according to McCain, consists in their desire to acquire nuclear weapons and use them against the US and its allies. That's hardly a transcendent quality of terrorists."

Here is what McCain actually says:

"[The assembly of a global coalition of peace and freedom] will strengthen us to confront the threat of radical Islamic terrorism. This challenge is transcendent not because it is the only one we face. There are many dangers in today's world, and our foreign policy must be agile and effective at dealing with all of them. But the threat posed by the terrorists is unique. They alone devote all their energies and indeed their very lives to murdering innocent men, women, and children. They alone seek nuclear weapons and other tools of mass destruction not to defend themselves or to enhance their prestige or to give them a stronger hand in world affairs but to use against us wherever and whenever they can."

Is it not clear from this that by "unique" McCain was qualifying the challenge, not defining it? He does define it a moment later when he says that the enemy we face devotes itself to killing innocent men, women and children, and pursuing nuclear weapons not for the sake of deterrence or geopolitical brinkmanship but for nihilistic use against us. Not only does this not satisfy Daniel as being extraordinary from, say, gibbering to Hugo Chavez about oil prices, but it, too, is a fanciful construct cooked up in some feverish corner of the American Enterprise Institute:

"Presumably, ceteris paribus, any extreme armed faction would desire to have nuclear weapons. That doesn't mean an outfit like Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood, or even, yes, al Qaeda, is in any sort of position to divert their scarce resources to an astronomically expensive project like nuclearization. (How, incidentally, would a terrorist group use a nuclear weapon if they had one? The capacity to build and launch nuclear-armed missiles requires an infrastructure far beyond anything any non-state actor possesses.)"

A short time ago, there was a global panic over the political chaos in Pakistan and the very real possibility that Pervez Musharraf's successor would be a radical Islamist regime (my own cutesy formulation for this: "going from Islambad to worse"). Had that happened, we would now be confronting the spectacle of Daniel Pearl's beheaders being able to split the atom. Shall we inquire as to how they might use their newfound technology, or why? The Taliban came perilously close to obtaining the bomb, courtesy of its sympathizers in the Pakistan scientific community, one prominent member of which, A.Q. Khan, was caught smuggling lethal know-how to Libya (whose advanced program we were unaware of until Gaddafi announced and relinquished it), North Korea and Iran. Iran's Quds Brigade of its Revolutionary Guard has been designated by Congress a terrorist organization because it is suborning the insurgency in Iraq and killing Americans there: that makes one state actor in desire of nuclear weapons also a non-state actor by traditional standards. As for the prohibitive difficulties in building and detonating a nuke, since when must one be attached to an intercontinental missile? The "dirty bomb" scenario doesn't exist solely in Jack Bauer's mind.

It is disingenuous to accuse McCain of dividing the world into "two intractably opposed camps." The analogy to the Cold War here actually tells against this facile calculus, as during that fifty year conflict, there was a third camp of "non-aligned" or neutral players. There were also countries that took a little from Column A and a little from Column B, such as India. McCain allows plenty of wiggle room for nations that would, under the kind of Manicheanism Daniel envisions, be unthinkable.

For instance, we would all agree, I hope, that China is a handmaiden to radical Islam in the form of the janjaweed genocidaires of Sudan. Yet here is how McCain rattles his saber before that economic and military superpower and Olympic host everyone on the left and right is now calling to boycott: "China and the United States are not destined to be adversaries. We have numerous overlapping interests and hope to see our relationship evolve in a manner that benefits both countries and, in turn, the Asia-Pacific region and the world. But until China moves toward political liberalization, our relationship will be based on periodically shared interests rather than the bedrock of shared values."

Sounds almost like an Obama line, doesn't it?

I could go on. I will, in fact: "McCain's only concrete proposal for reincorporating the US into an international system is to circumvent the UN, the EU, the G-8, and NATO, by creating a "League of Democracies" consisting in the G-8 countries excluding Russia but including India and Brazil."

McCain explicitly endorses a "successor to the Kyoto Treaty, a cap-and-trade system that delivers the necessary environmental impact in an economically responsible manner," so he is self-evidently not that limited in "reincorporating the US into an international system." What strange Zen koans yield such green, multilateral wisdom from the paladin of Bushido.

And Daniel's description of the League of Democracies suffers from an interpretative fallacy; namely, that by advocating the creation of another supranational body McCain seeks to "circumvent" a host of pre-existing ones. I'll leave it up to others to determine how the United States each and every day circumvents the EU, or how that body's currency policies have anything at all to do with the UN, which didn't bat an eye at Russia and China's "strategic partnership." Suffice to say, in Article 1 of NATO's charter, it is established that members must "refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations." Why couldn't McCain's brainchild do the same, without the outmoded constraints of cold war enlistment procedures?

What I gather McCain means by a League of Democracies is a variation on the "Anglosphere" idea, or a formal alliance of natural allies, bound to one another by a common law-and-liberty tradition, mutual economic and cultural interests, and, perhaps most important, a shared language. McCain is much less conservative and much more prescient in his willingness to expand this alternative compact to include non-English-speaking nations like Brazil; any, in fact, that would meet requirements I'm inclined to think are less prohibitive than those of Maastricht. The terms of the compact needn't violate any of the others currently on the books and to which we are a party (as Daniel points out, McCain is rather a stickler for the Geneva Conventions and other international accords). It would be premature to judge too harshly of McCain's proposition without his further exposition of it.

Daniel ends by depicting McCain as a warmongering triumphalist drunk on such antiquated concepts as "honor" and "piety." (Piety has gotten Barack Obama into more trouble of late, so I'll chalk that up to projection.)

Now it is true that the candidate hails from a Kiplinesque line of naval officers, and he can grow sentimental -- "soppy-stern" is Philip Larkin's unimprovable phrase -- in an unflattering, 19th century manner about the role of a powerful military in any great nation. (I've taken issue with McCain's worship of Teddy Roosevelt; see here. Though it's worth noting that the only presidents he cites in this speech are Democrats -- Truman and JFK.) However, the man who went up against the Clinton administration in 1993 and argued for a complete withdrawal of American forces from Somalia is hardly a "fight first, ask questions later" type jingoist. Daniel reduces all of McCain's reasons for opposing a troop withdrawal from Iraq to this closing peroration: "It would be an unconscionable act of betrayal, a stain on our character as a great nation, if we were to walk away from the Iraqi people and consign them to the horrendous violence, ethnic cleansing, and possibly genocide that would follow a reckless, irresponsible, and premature withdrawal."

Daniel's only reply to the serious question of a genocide is to say, well, we shouldn't have been there in the first place. Excellent. He's fashioned a cogent, partial case against John McCain's presidential candidacy -- in 2003. As for the reality of 2008, you can argue with the dire prognostications offered below, but you will admit there is nothing weepy or "lest we forget" about any of them:

"If we withdraw prematurely from Iraq, al Qaeda in Iraq will survive, proclaim victory and continue to provoke sectarian tensions that, while they have been subdued by the success of the surge, still exist, as various factions of Sunni and Shi'a have yet to move beyond their ancient hatreds, and are ripe for provocation by al Qaeda. Civil war in Iraq could easily descend into genocide, and destabilize the entire region as neighboring powers come to the aid of their favored factions. I believe a reckless and premature withdrawal would be a terrible defeat for our security interests and our values. Iran will also view our premature withdrawal as a victory, and the biggest state supporter of terrorists, a country with nuclear ambitions and a stated desire to destroy the State of Israel, will see its influence in the Middle East grow significantly. These consequences of our defeat would threaten us for years, and those who argue for it, as both Democratic candidates do, are arguing for a course that would eventually draw us into a wider and more difficult war that would entail far greater dangers and sacrifices than we have suffered to date."

Part and parcel of Barack Obama's "dignity doctrine," so nebulously yet exultantly captured by Spencer Ackerman in the American Prospect, is the complete annihilation of Al Qaeda. How is this to be done when Al Qaeda still persists in Iraq, but we do not?

Getting beyond the "Iraq War mindset" can be headache-inducing indeed. Obama fired Samantha Power not for calling Hillary Clinton a "monster" but for hinting at the likelihood that he might come to a similar determination as McCain has done and foreclose on the promise of immediate troop withdrawal. He has also chided McCain for being correct about the pragmatic, murderous collusion between Sunni and Shia sectarians. (See the Pentagon's latest disclosures about the promiscuous prewar activities of Saddam Hussein, or Amir Taheri's excellent precis of the "Sunni-Shiite Terror Network" in the Wall Street Journal.)

There is also the next question of how, exactly, to withdraw from Iraq so as to incur the lowest number of military and civilian losses. I've not heard either Democratic candidate address this. For a glimpse into what a horror show our getting out will look like, I direct you to this well-reported piece by Kim Nash. By adopting the most prudent measures of extracting personnel and materiel, an exit strategy, Nash concludes, will take two years. Contrast this against legislation Obama introduced in January 2007 that would have removed all combat troops by March 2008 -- last month. The politics of fear, meet the travel agency of hope.