Kimberley Strassel is hearing things:

Cup a hand to your ear. That faint, yet growing, noise out there is one we haven’t heard on the election trail in quite some time. It’s the sound of a real foreign-policy debate.

Would that this were so. Unfortunately, what we’re hearing on the campaign trail is mostly a combination of dreary, mindless consensus and a heavy dose of ignorant fear-mongering. The only “debate” between the parties right now is over who wants to make the most aggressive noises about ISIS without having to back up those words by voting on the new war. The NRSC is running campaign ads in several states targeting Democratic incumbents by exaggerating the ISIS threat to the U.S. Greg Sargent describes how this attack is being used in the Colorado Senate race:

Udall supports Obama’s plan to arm and train the Syrian rebels. As it happens, so does his opponent, Rep. Cory Gardner. As the AP put it, on ISIS, the two “found themselves on the same side of the issue.” But Republicans are nonetheless attacking Udall for failing to appreciate the true nature of the threat.

And yet Udall is correct when he says that ISIS doesn’t pose an imminent threat to the United States. The government has repeatedly admitted as much. Strassel also thinks that Udall somehow blundered by saying this (“Oops,” she wrote), but that just reminds us that a proper debate on the facts is exactly what she and other hard-liners don’t want. Udall happened to say something unpopular but true, and his opponents are demagoguing what he said by appealing to the voters’ worst fears and their misunderstanding about the extent of the threat from ISIS. As so often happens in these cases, the people that are happy to fling the accusation of “failing to appreciate the true nature of the threat” are the ones that have the poorest grasp on the subject.

It’s true that candidates are talking about the war, but there is very little of substance that is being debated. Candidates in competitive races from both parties are taking more or less the same positions on this issue, so that even many of the Democrats that were elected in part for their opposition to the Iraq war six years ago are now falling all over themselves to profess their enthusiasm for the new war. Pathetically, the North Carolina Democratic incumbent Kay Hagan is trying to out-hawk her opponent:

Locked in a tough reelection battle, the first-term senator boasts that she’s more strongly supportive of airstrikes against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant militants than her Republican challenger, Thom Tillis, and says she’s been pressing the Obama administration to arm Syrian rebels since early last year.

This is nothing to boast about, and in a sane political culture this would be held against Hagan as proof that she shouldn’t be re-elected. The problem here isn’t just that Hagan’s position happens to be wrong on the substance, but that the public’s clear and consistent opposition to providing arms to Syrian rebels are completely unrepresented in this race and in virtually all other competitive races around the country. That’s not a “real” debate. It isn’t even pretending to be one. It’s a pitiful display of candidates’ craven uniformity on one of the most important issues of the year. This sort of spineless conformism didn’t serve the country well twelve years ago during the last Iraq war debate, and it won’t be any better for the country this time.