It’s kind of a running joke in the blogosphere that Beltway pundits like to call warmongers ‘serious’ and those that oppose war ‘unserious’. ‘Serious’ foreign policy thinkers are grown-ups, the rest of us are idealistic children. That makes today’s Sebastian Mallaby column about Hillary Clinton, Foreign Policy Grown-Up , somewhat unintentionally ironic.

Mallaby starts with Iran.

All the Democratic presidential hopefuls know that a nuclear Iran is scary. They know that the Europeans have been patiently negotiating with Iran to secure a freeze of its program and that the Iranians have been stalling. But Clinton is the only Democratic candidate who unequivocally embraces the obvious next step: Push hard for the sanctions that might change Iran’s calculations. Unlike all her opponents, Clinton supported a pro-sanctions resolution in the Senate. Ever since that vote, Obama and the rest have attacked her mercilessly.

Mallaby here continues a fine Washington Post tradition in which their columnists do not read their own front-page. If Mallaby had read his own front-page he would have seen an article entitled Iran Adapts to Economic Pressure: Oil Market Could Help It Weather U.S. Sanctions, in which the following observations are made:

Confronted by mounting U.S. and U.N. pressure, Iran has been steadily shifting its trade from West to East and, with the benefit of record high oil prices, is likely to be able to withstand the new U.S. sanctions, according to U.S., European and Iranian analysts.

China, a permanent member of the Security Council that can veto any U.N. resolution, is expected to overtake Germany as Iran’s biggest trading partner this year…

Iran’s oil revenue this year will far exceed the government’s budget forecasts, which had assumed an average oil price of $60 a barrel. On Friday, oil settled above $90. The extra revenue will make it easier for the government to maintain social-services payments designed to bolster its popularity amid economic problems.

Mallaby says that a nuclear Iran is scary. That’s true. A nuclear armed Iran would be scary, but nowhere near as scary as Pakistan is today. The difference is that Pakistan has nuclear weapons while the UN and the IAEA can find no evidence that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program. So, what is the point of the sanctions? And, even if we posit that sanctions are a coercive alternative to war, our analysts (and other analysts) are saying that the likely result of sanctions will be to empower China. A ‘serious’ person might question whether sanctions are the best strategy. A ‘serious’ person also might note that the Kyl-Lieberman amendment that Ms. Clinton is being criticized for supporting has a lot more in it than support for sanctions. For example, the amendment first lists 15 examples of Iranian troublemaking (much of which is unsubstantiated or dubious). Then it lists the following in the ‘sense of the Senate’ portion:

(2) that it is a vital national interest of the United States to prevent the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran from turning Shi’a militia extremists in Iraq into a Hezbollah-like force that could serve its interests inside Iraq, including by overwhelming, subverting, or co-opting institutions of the legitimate Government of Iraq;

(3) that it should be the policy of the United States to combat, contain, and roll back the violent activities and destabilizing influence inside Iraq of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, its foreign facilitators such as Lebanese Hezbollah, and its indigenous Iraqi proxies;

(4) to support the prudent and calibrated use of all instruments of United States national power in Iraq, including diplomatic, economic, intelligence, and military instruments, in support of the policy described in paragraph (3) with respect to the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its proxies;

(5) that the United States should designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps as a foreign terrorist organization under section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act and place the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps on the list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists, as established under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and initiated under Executive Order 13224; and…

Only at the very end does it touch on sanctions.

(6) that the Department of the Treasury should act with all possible expediency to complete the listing of those entities targeted under United Nations Security Council Resolutions 1737 and 1747 adopted unanimously on December 23, 2006 and March 24, 2007, respectively.

So, Mallaby is misleading the reader. And that is why he can say the following:

It’s not that Clinton’s rivals believe sanctions are mistaken. It’s that they lack the courage to defy Bush-hating primary voters, who think that lining up with the president on any issue is like becoming a Death Eater. “I learned a clear lesson from the lead-up to the Iraq war in 2002,” says base-pleasing John Edwards, “if you give this president an inch, he will take a mile — and launch a war.” “This is a lesson that I think Senator Clinton and others should have learned,” Obama echoes. “You can’t give this president a blank check and then act surprised when he cashes it.”

…After the administration announced a new package of Iran sanctions on Thursday, Edwards declared that the president and his team had once again “rattled their sabers in their march toward military action.” Bush hatred has driven him to the point where he regards sanctions as a harbinger of war rather than an alternative.

Mallaby expressly dismisses the lesson that Edwards has learned.

Clinton’s rivals are contemplating history and deriving only a narrow lesson about Bush: Don’t trust him when he confronts a Muslim country. But the larger, more durable lesson from Iraq is that wars can be caused by a lack of confrontation.

According to Mallaby, the war with Iraq happened because of an erosion of international will to maintain the sanctions on Saddam Hussein. The lesson is that sanctions should be put in place and international will should be maintained for those sanctions, or else war will become necessary. This is the ‘serious’ reasoning whereby we act according to what should happen rather than what will happen. We cannot make the international community committed to sanctions…particularly unilateral U.S.-Iranian sanctions. That is the whole point of the front-page article that says our sanctions will be easily weathered and will redound to China’s benefit. A better lesson from the decade-plus long sanctions regime against Iraq is that they only served to entrench Saddam in power and create resentment that grew into a major terrorism threat. Sanctions occasionally work, as they did with South Africa. But, what reason do we have to believe that sanctions will work in Iran? The front-page of Mallaby’s paper says they will not work.

Yet, Mallaby argues:

Likewise on sanctions, Clinton is the only one to insist that sanctions are less a prelude to war than a means of forestalling it. They are more likely to work, moreover, if the military option is looming in the background, which is why bellicose comments from Bush or his vice president don’t prove that war is the preordained strategy. The idea that the threat of war can prevent actual war is the most basic lesson of nuclear doctrine, but it appears to escape the Bush haters.

A more honest assessment is that sanctions are the best way to steer the Bush administration away from making a disastrous decision to start a war with Iran. We can see this from Britain’s response to recent developments.

Bush’s decision to approve tough unilateral sanctions against Iran last week and to designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organisation and proliferator of weapons of mass destruction marks a further escalation of the war of words and deeds with Tehran.

After Miliband was briefed on the move during his visit to Washington, Gordon Brown batted for America in the House of Commons by promising Britain would lead the effort to secure a tough sanctions resolution against Iran at the United Nations security council.

The Bush administration has foreclosed any debate over whether or not sanctions are the correct strategy. Instead, they have given opponents of war only one avenue: advocate sanctions as an alternative to war. If Mallaby had argued that Hillary Clinton was a grown-up because she understood this stark choice and had made the right decision, he might have made less of a fool of himself. But he doesn’t address the likely futility of sanctions. He is not dealing in facts at all. He is arguing for permawar.

Obama, who promised to rise above partisanship, seems too fearful of his party’s Bush-hating base to offer that vision. It’s impressive and surprising that Clinton, who railed against a vast right-wing conspiracy not so long ago, has risen above Bush hatred in forming her worldview. She has come a long way in just one decade.

And, yet, he thinks he is a serious person.