Obama had some of the most interesting moments. He initially flubbed a "gotcha" question about America's "three top allies," and didn't mention Israel, but nicely handled the follow-up. He was more specific about health care than in past debates. And he did a solid job of answering questions about his position on Iraq.

Oh, my! A top three allies question. The UK and Canada are, I think, our numbers one and two allies. Apparently, the "right" answer is that Israel belongs in the top three as well. Seeing as how US troops have never fought alongside the IDF and we don't have a formal treaty commitment to the defense of Israel (we surely would have one were Israel to have defined borders, but it doesn't, so we don't) this strikes me as a difficult case to make. Australia is probably most aligned with us in foreign policy terms. But I think you'd have to say that the US-Japanese alliance has a hard-to-beat combination of closeness and strategic significance. The fact that NATO involves so many players, however, makes this a bit hard to answer, since that makes a whole big raft of countries very significant allies of ours.

Asked what she would do if two American cities were simultaneously attacked, Clinton let 'er rip. "Having been a senator during 9/11, I understand the extraordinary horror of that kind of attack," she said. "I think a president must move as swiftly as is prudent to retaliate. That doesn't mean we go looking for other fights. Let's focus on those who have attacked us and do everything we can to destroy them."

It was at least the second time in the debate that Clinton referenced her experience as a Senator during and after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks -- an effort to show she has been in the trenches fighting terrorism and its aftermath for years.

Edwards, who was asked that same question, emphasized the importance of diplomacy -- changing the way that the world looks at America. "We have more tools available to us than bombs," Edwards said.

Richardson went a step further, advocating an immediate military retaliation.

Can someone give me a better account of what the question was? I mean, military retaliation against whom? I mean, there was no military retaliation after the terrorist attacks in Madrid and London for the very good reason that there was nowhere to retaliate. Having deposed the Taliban from ruling Afghanistan, we can't respond to a new al-Qaeda attack -- even a big one -- by deposing the Taliban again. So what are we talking about here? Presumably not just lashing out at random.

And what, I have to wonder, is Broder's economic value to the Post? At the margin, how many readers would the Post lose if it didn't carry his column? I have a hard time imagining it's a large number. And yet, to harshly condemn Broder's enablers would simply reduce one's own chances of having op-eds appear in the Post and so forth. Unless, of course, one were a conservatives. Conservatives, after all, can regularly slander both "the media" as a whole and any number of specific media organizations without ill effect.

And when I first resigned and spoke out, you know, I was treated as the darling of the right-wing media especially, because it was the time of the Clinton administration. And I was basically Clinton-bashing, or at least that's how they chose to interpret it. When it turned out that I wasn't Clinton-bashing, I was bashing, you know, American policy objectives-- some of which were endorsed by the right wing, the conservative side, I no longer was the darling of the media.

Having been pushed into a corner as a Clinton basher, there are certain elements of the media now that, you know, the analysis put me in another corner, didn't know how to deal with me. So, you're not getting-- the message out. I wrote a book. I made a documentary film. I did everything I could to get the data out there to the public and it wasn't working.

What can you say?

This is something we've seen for months now and it really rankles. It's a weird way of turning civil-military relations on its head, and then kind of spinning it around. Petraeus is a general. He's supposed to follow orders from the country's civilian leadership. If Bush outlines a policy, Petraeus is supposed to carry it out. The fact that Petraeus is backing it, however, doesn't then become an additional reason for further elements of the national political leadership to also back it. "Look, the general I put in charge because he was willing to defend my policy publicly is defending my policy" isn't an independent basis for thinking the president's policy is sound. What's more, it's bizarre to see discredited figures like President of the United States George W. Bush, Vice President of the United States Dick Cheney, National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Senator Joe Lieberman, etc. all hiding behind the skirts of a subordinate to try to make it appear that this is something other than a policy that was outlined by them and that they are in charge of implementing.

At the end of the day, the Pentagon doesn't really "need" more troops. The US military, however, has the luxury of operating well beyond the margins of strict necessity. More troops would be useful. They could guard refugee camps in Chad, keep girls' schools open in rural Afghanistan, let National Guard soldiers stay home with their families ready to respond to natural disasters, help monitor cease-fire lines in Congo, etc., etc., etc. If you're worried that more troops would be used for occupation duty in Teheran I think that's a smart worry, but the solution is to elect a president who won't invade Iran. As we've seen in Iraq, an absence of logistical capabilities won't stop a bad president from launching an unwise invasion.

The problem with the proposal is that "useful" is a low bar to pass. We have way more conventional military firepower than we need and way, way, way more nukes than we need. Restraining that stuff to free up money for more soldiers is change int he right direction. But we have less health care, less education, less child care, less basic infrastructure, etc., etc., etc. than we need. Cutting back there to further incease the capabilities of what's already the most capable military on the planet by a long margin doesn't make sense.

In 2002, I stated my opposition to the war in Iraq, not only because it was an unnecessary diversion from the struggle against the terrorists who attacked us on September 11th, but also because it was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the threats that 9/11 brought to light. I believed then, and believe now, that it was based on old ideologies and outdated strategies – a determination to fight a 21st century struggle with a 20th century mindset.

As Ezra remarks, "What's telling, however, is what's absent. Obama doesn't say he opposed the war because of a nagging skepticism towards Hussein's WMD capabilities, nor because this administration wasn't competent enough to pull such a conflict off. Rather, he opposed it because it was the wrong war, focused on the wrong threats, and stemming from the wrong ideology." Contrast this with, say, John Edwards in his famous "I was wrong" op-ed:

Almost three years ago we went into Iraq to remove what we were told -- and what many of us believed and argued -- was a threat to America. But in fact we now know that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction when our forces invaded Iraq in 2003. The intelligence was deeply flawed and, in some cases, manipulated to fit a political agenda.

Obama didn't go on to draw any broader programmatic distinctions between himself and other Democrats, preferring to stay within the formal "positive vision" framework, but it'll be interesting to seee as we get some Democratic debates whether any larger doctrinal differences emerge, or if this is just a question of emphasizing different aspects of the same negative view of the Iraq War.