I have neglected to draw attention to Michael’s excellent profile of Gov. Mark Sanford, but Reihan’s discussion of the profile here reminds me to recommend it and say a few words. As a longtime critic of McCain, I was not exactly enthused when I found that Sanford had endorsed McCain in 2000, and I am aware of some of the legitimate complaints against him on the right, but a few things have caused me to take a very favorable view of the South Carolina governor. This is almost certainly bad news for Gov. Sanford if he has any higher ambitions, as the politicians I find interesting and compelling tend to be the ones who have no chance of winning on a national level. One of the things that interested me was the discovery in Michael’s profile that Sanford, then a member of the House, had voted against the Iraq Liberation Act and the war in Kosovo. I promise you that there are not very many people who were right on both issues, and Sanford is one of them. More important, he came to these conclusions for the right moral and constitutional reasons:

In Congress, he opposed Clinton’s intervention in Kosovo. And he was one of only two Republicans to vote against the 1998 resolution to make regime change in Iraq the official policy of the United States. He says that it was a “protest vote” in which he tried to reassert the legislature’s war-declaring powers. When asked about the invasion of Iraq, he extends his critique beyond the constitutional niceties. “I don’t believe in preemptive war,” he says flatly. “For us to hold the moral high ground in the world, our default position must be defensive.”

As I have mentioned before, Sanford distinguished himself by penning an anti-bailout op-ed, which makes him one of the few well-known governors to have taken an early stand on this question and had the right answer. Finally, Sanford’s much-maligned, and perhaps rather impolitic, remark about Zimbabwe as an example of the wealth-destroying power of inflation tells me that he is one of only a very few elected Republicans who has a clue on monetary and economic policy. The mostly symbolic fight over 1% of the stimulus money coming to South Carolina seems like a losing battle, and I don’t quite understand why he is fighting it, but the other things are so much more important that it doesn’t concern me very much.

I would take issue with Reihan’s description of Sanford’s foreign policy views as “dovishness.” The hawk-dove terminology has never been very useful, poisoned at it is by its origins in another unnecessary, illegal war, because it gives the impression that if one is not supportive of aggressive and unnecessary wars that one is “dovish” and therefore some kind of pacifist. There is something very wrong when we are defining opposition to starting wars in this way. As far as electoral politics go, Reihan is probably right that anything that could be portrayed as “dovish” will not get Sanford very far with Republican voters in the event that he pursued a bid in the next election, but it reminds me that we need to develop a better vocabulary for describing these debates.

That said, all indications regarding the Afghanistan debate is that most of the skepticism about escalation is coming from the left or center-left, and the people backing even larger deployments are the same people who always back larger deployments regardless of circumstances. Assuming Obama pursues his limited withdrawal plans in Iraq and increases troop levels in Afghanistan, the natural reaction in the GOP will be to pillory the administration for “abandoning” Iraq and “mismanaging” the other war. It will become almost a mirror-image of Democratic leadership critiques of Bush, c. 2003-04, and the main difference will be that the wars will have switched roles. Unlike most Republicans on Iraq, who refused to change their mind on the war there regardless of what happened, Democrats are probably going to be much more inclined to cut losses in Afghanistan if things do not improve on both sides of the border, which will create an opening for a “hawk” on the right to claim that he will salvage the situation. Barring some remarkable shift in public mood because of ongoing economic woes and a recognition that the empire is unsustainable and an enormous drain of resources, a generally non-interventionist candidate on the right will probably have even less room to maneuver and fewer votes to pick up than was the case in ’08.