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To add to Glenn's point, what's naive in the opinion of McCain and other (non-liberal) warmongers is not so much that you give your putative enemies prior notice of your tactical intentions, but that you give the people who elected you -- your real enemies -- an opportunity to discuss the potential consequences of your policies.
That is something which you quite literally can't have, not if your freedom of action as an imperialist is to be preserved. The silence of the electorate is fundamental to the modern state, at least to one which aspires to any prominence in the world.
As Glenn has so often pointed out, this has little to do with the traditional left/right definitions of our current political mythology. What it does have to do with is what it's always had to do with -- the competition of elites for power, and their abhorrence of being inconvenienced in any way by a debilitating debate about their actions which prevents them from being carried out in a timely fashion. If it's clear to most rational observers that we'd be better off at this point with more Prince Hamlet in our politicians than Attila the Hun, it's equally clear that we'll never get it; not at least, until the Washington Post and New York Times do.
Unless, of course, we outflank them, which is what many of us, including Glenn, are trying our utmost to achieve.
