Donald Sensing has an interesting post looking at a Washington Times report that Israel may have deliberately attacked an American naval vessel collecting sigint for the NSA in 1967 during the Six Days War. Donald has some fodder for the conspiracy theorists (slightly Dowdified, since I didn’t want to blockquote all of the post):

In fact, why Israel would want to attack Liberty has been explained. Ariel Sharon, now Israel’s prime minister, commanded an Israeli armored division during the war. ... According to researcher and author James Bamford …, Sharon’s division slaughtered a large number of Egyptian soldiers it had captured as prisoners, clear war crimes. ... The killings were reported to Tel Aviv by radio. ... Bamford makes a very strong case that the Israeli government attacked Liberty in order to sink it, thus destroying the evidence of Sharon’s crime.

Definitely a must-read.

One of the sound-bites being paraded around is on whether particular Democratic candidates are “credible” on national security. The latest iteration of this theme was expressed by Joe Biden, who said:

[T]he candidates have to “demonstrate that they have a foreign policy, a security policy, that is coherent and is grown up, that we can handle the bad things out there in the world.”

But what is credibility? In this voter’s mind, it’s not strictly speaking about Iraq: by my standard, you could be credible but have opposed the war in Iraq. To me, I think credibility boils down to whether or not the candidate believes that other countries get to veto the use of American military power to achieve an objective that is in the national interest. Ultimately, this question—not the war question—is where many of the Democratic candidates lose their credibility with me.

This is not, mind you, a call for blanket unilateralism. When other countries share our objectives, and are willing to cooperate with us in achieving those objectives, we can and should work with them to do so. But when other countries clearly have different objectives than those of the United States—as was the case in the Iraq war, where a number of middle-power states wanted to pursue commercial ties with the Saddam regime and were plainly unwilling to commit their own resources to containing that regime’s ambitions for rearmament and obtaining non-conventional weapons—an American president would be deeply unwise to allow them to decide whether and how American military force should be used.

Lauren Landes, guesting at Patrick Carver’s Ole Miss Conservative blog, notes that Haley Barbour has picked up endorsements from 42 state Democrats, angering the state Democratic Party leadership. The list of Barbour endorsers is here. In general, it looks like a list of has-beens and small fry; notably, no current member of the state House or Senate appears on the list.

Meanwhile, Eric Stringfellow continues to blast Haley Barbour from the pages of the Clarion-Ledger.

Dan Drezner is mildly in favor of lifting the trade embargo on Cuba. While I think he slightly overestimates how totalitarian the Cuban regime is—I think it’s done a very effective job of brainwashing much of its populace, and it is almost as brutally oppressive toward political dissidents as the North Korean (DPRK) regime, but I don’t think it has as effective a repression apparatus as North Korea has or some of the old Soviet client states (most notably Romania) had, and by all accounts there’s a degree of economic freedom at the margins absent in the DPRK—I agree that simply removing the embargo won’t lead to miraculous political change. However, it will deprive Castro and his Hollywood apologists of their one legitimate grievance against the United States government—and, for that reason alone, the sanctions regime should be removed.

More thoughts on this are at YankeeBlog and OxBlog.