by Maisie Allison
John Yoo gloats that GOP "isolationists" should be embarrassed by the collapse of Qaddafi's regime. His inevitable conclusion:
Republicans in both chambers, and on the campaign trail, should embrace Bush’s freedom agenda. It is in our interests to bring down the authoritarian dictatorships in the Middle East and hopefully replace them with democracies allied in some way with the United States — even if they don’t want to call it that. One can argue over the costs, or about the benefits of any individual intervention, but the spreading of democracy, freedom, and markets through persuasion, coercion, and sometimes force provides a principled foreign policy that is consistent with America’s greatness in the past and continues our exceptional role in the world in the future.
Ramesh Ponnuru pushes back:
For [Yoo], it appears that anyone who believes that presidents tend to have too expansive a view of their own powers under the Constitution qualifies as an “isolationist.” That seems like an idiosyncratic definition. But in any case, it’s hard to see how anything that has happened in Libya could possibly settle the constitutional question either way.
Andrew McCarthy piles on with a pretty thorough defense of the anti-interventionist position (of course, his support of congressional war powers in this case is heavily qualified). Yoo's response here. Ponnuru points to this compendium of wars that "may or may not have been fought between democracies."
The Dish 