I should add a couple of things to Ramesh’s excellent points in response to my article last week. First, as Ramesh notes, McCain does get a wide variety of advice. Some informed readers, although they concede the Powell/Armitage influence on the Senator, maintain that I put too much emphasis on it. I think that’s a colorable criticism, but I’m underwhelmed. McCain has pointedly sought to put some distance between himself and the neocons on Iraq, suggesting (as, for example, Josh Gerstein points out in this New York Sun report) that they exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam prior to our invasion—which sure makes it sound as if, had a President McCain studied the non-”exaggerated” intelligence, he would not have invaded. I think McCain sometimes echoes the neocons’ aspirational rhetoric, especially when it comes to democracy-promotion and an ambitious American role in the world. But that doesn’t mean he’ll walk the walk when decision time arrives because a lot of his influential advisers reject neocon theories. (To be sure, the Senator’s push for ground troops in Kosovo cuts against that surmise.)

Second, a more forceful criticism is that I gave short-shrift to McCain’s Iraq rhetoric in the 1990s, which was aggressive. McCain was a co-sponsor of the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998, which was key to making regime change official U.S. policy. He was also deeply critical of the Clinton administration’s Desert Fox operation in December 1998: quite rightly, he didn’t think it went far enough. He contended that Clinton’s bombing campaign was grossly insufficient, and that Clinton failed thereafter to pursue the kind of assertive diplomacy required to make a containment strategy work. For most of 1999 to early 2003, however, he was content to pursue containment and push for the degradation of Saddam’s military and proliferation capacity; I’m not finding a drumbeat from him for forcible regime change. It is undeniably clear, though, that, by the eve of the Iraq invasion (at which point invasion was a matter of when, not if), McCain was convinced Saddam had to go. That is elucidated well by this forceful February 2003 speech about the failure of the containment strategy, in which the Senator alternatively argued that said failure was (a) caused by Clinton’s failure to pursue containment aggressively, or (b) inevitable since 1991.

Again, my argument is an effort to account for how circumstances in March 2003 might have been different had there been a McCain administration, rather than a Bush administration, in the 18 preceding months. I am more swayed by the fact that a McCain administration would have featured very different players. But it’s surely fair to counter—taking McCain’s 1999-2003 rhetoric in conjunction with his effort to push Clinton into a ground war in Kosovo—that there had been a fundamental shift in McCain’s thinking by 2000: favoring American military interventions with the lofty aim of imposing democracy. If that is true, and it may be, it would tend strongly in favor of a President McCain ordering the Iraq invasion in 2003. I’m not convinced for the reasons stated in last week’s article, but it’s a good argument.

Finally, I’m not moved by the two years McCain spent advocating the lifting of the arms embargo on Bosnia. The point of that position was to avoid the use of American military power, which was the Clinton policy—or, at least, the announced policy. As we learned in 1996, while Clinton was fighting Senators McCain and Dole out of one side of his mouth, he was allowing the Iranians to arm the Bosnian Muslims out of the other. (Query why no one ever asks Sen. Clinton if that was one of those decisions she weighed in on as First Lady and which forms part of her assertedly vast foreign policy experience.)