James Fallows linked to an old David Corn post showing some photos from Phnom Penh where you can see a waterboard in action as part of something the Cambodians use to illustrate the horrors of the Khmer Rouge. The attached email makes a point that I’ve made before but that can’t be made often enough:

As has been amply documented (“The New Yorker” had an excellent piece, and there have been others), many of the “enhanced techniques” came to the CIA and military interrogators via the SERE [Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape] schools, where US military personnel are trained to resist torture if they are captured by the enemy. The specific types of abuse they’re taught to withstand are those that were used by our Cold War adversaries. Why is this relevant to the current debate? Because the torture techniques of North Korea, North Vietnam, the Soviet Union and its proxies–the states where US military personnel might have faced torture–were NOT designed to elicit truthful information. These techniques were designed to elicit CONFESSIONS. That’s what the Khymer Rouge et al were after with their waterboarding, not truthful information.

Over and over again, you don’t see the world’s great geopolitical successes — the twentieth century USA, 19th century Britain, 18th century France — torturing their way to the top of the heap. Instead, you people who for whatever reason feel it’s important to generate some false confessions.

I’m a little confused at how it is that I’ve wound up in some kind of blog feud with Jewcy’s Michael Weiss but he seems to regard Daniel Lazare’s somewhat negative review of Walt & Mearsheimer’s The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy as some kind of knock-down refutation of my views. But I liked Lazare’s review! The only observation I would make is that since Lazare is writing for The Nation he’s simply taking the Nation line on the occupation of the Palestinian Territories (namely that it’s immoral and contrary to American interests and, contrary to what you often hear, by no means wholly the fault of Yasser Arafat) for granted.

That’s appropriate in context but it winds up obscuring the fact that Lazare (and I, and Daniel Levy, MJ Rosenberg etc.) are in agreement with Mearsheimer and Walt about a matter of substantial importance even though we all (like, I imagine, almost all liberals) don’t accept the broad Mearsheimer/Walt “realist” perspective or the entirety of its analysis. I believe I’ve said in the past that it’s treatment of the Syria issue, in particular, seems badly wrong.

That said, the point on which Lazare I agree with Walt and Measheimer — that the sort of policies the “Israel lobby” has pushed the United States to adopt vis-à-vis the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are neither morally correct nor conducive to America’s interests — is a very important one, and what I’ve repeatedly sought to do is defend them from critics from the right who prefer to evade that point with insinuations of anti-semitism. In this regard, it’s worth commending Martin Kramer, who’s made a real effort in this article and elsewhere to argue on the merits (unconvincingly, in my view, but it’s a real argument that I ought to engage substantively in the future) that the close US-Israel alliance does, in fact, serve American interests.

At any rate, I’m a bit confused about what Weiss’ beef with me is exactly, or why he doesn’t think Josh Marshall is Jewish, but I guess those are matters for another day.

Via Brian Beutler, Michael Rubin extolls the benefits of political reform in Iran for American national security: “An Islamic Republic accountable to its own citizenry would invest in better schools, hospitals, wages and infrastructure, and it would not divert billions for uranium enrichment and ballistic missiles.”

Of course one might think that a United States of America accountable to its citizenry would invest in better schools, hospitals, wagesm and infrastructure rather than diverting billions for defense but that’s not actually the case. And of course the opposition political party isn’t proposing to divert defense spending into domestic investments to any substantial degree either. The unified security budget project has toiled away for years arguing convincingly that if we refocused our security spending away from such a heavy reliance on the Pentagon we could both save money and enhance our national security, but it hasn’t been something that politicians are interested in.

What’s more, viewed realistically insofar as the Iranian nuclear program has a military rationale at all, the rationale is that a nuclear weapon is a good way of defending your country on the cheap. Pakistan couldn’t possibly afford to keep up with India in a conventional arms race, but a smallish nuclear weapon gives you a ton of deterrent power. The Iranian regime sees itself as beseiged by threats — located in a dangerous part of the world, subjected to unprovoked US-backed invasion by Iraq in the 1980s, and now with American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. They could try to build up a conventional military that could challenge the US, but it’s probably cheaper and easier to try to build a nuclear weapon.

Similarly, whether or not Iran’s interest in at least obtaining the capacity to build a nuclear weapon wanes is probably going to have less to do with the form of government in Iran than it will to do with perceptions of the security environment facing the country. Iran feels insecure, and also feels that the Pakistani and Israeli nuclear arsenals make the NPT regime a bit of a joke. To get the Iranians to verifiably disarm, something’s going to need to be done about one or both of those factors. Different people will have different perceptions, so changes in personnel at the top of government in Teheran would make some difference but it’s not automatic.

Photo by Flickr user Hamed Saber used under a Creative Commons license

Daniel Pipes, one of several frightening advisors Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign, has gotten some attention from this and other liberal blogs recently, mostly focused on his crude and appalling views on the Palestinians. That’s a crucially important issue, but it shouldn’t be allowed to overshadow a picture of Pipes’ broader views.

In essence, Pipes think al-Qaeda isn’t that big a deal. They are significant only insofar as they are a manifestation of the much bigger and broader problem of “Islamists” writ large, a label that encompasses Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Council on America-Islam Relations and all sorts of other groups around the world. Not being a Muslim myself, I don’t find that any Islamist political movements — which is to say movements that attempt to ground their political agendas in Islam in some sense or another — to be personally appealing. On the other hand, I also recognize that it’s common for liberal democracies to feature at least one political party that in whole or part seeks to mobilize the locally dominant religion for political purposes. What’s more I also recognize that it’s possible for even an anti-democratic Islamist political movement to not necessarily be an enemy of the United States — for, for example, the authoritarian Islamist regime in Teheran to be one with whom we actually have certain interests in common (to wit: al-Qaeda, among other things) and with whom we ought to seek improved relations through diplomacy while simultaneously hoping that, at some point, the regime’s rule will come to an end.

To Pipes, though, all this is dangerous nonsense. All Islam-inflected political movements are essentially totalitarian, and the United States is remorselessly condemned to struggle with 10 to 15 percent of the world’s Muslim population. And, indeed, by Pipes’ definition of the Islamist threat, I think he’s probably undercounting. It’s the kind of mindset that leads to analysis like this:

Is Turkey going Islamist? Is it on the road to implementing Islamic law, known as the Shari’a?

I replied in the affirmative to these questions in a symposium at FrontPageMag.com a month ago. Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, I wrote, plans to undo the secular Atatürk revolution of 1923-34 and replace it with the Shari’a. I predicted the leadership of his Justice and Development Party (known by its Turkish initials, AKP) will use the democratic process only so long as this serves its purpose. It will circumscribe, or even terminate, political participation when the right moment comes. The end result, I predicted, could be an “Islamic Republic of Turkey.”

Left out of Pipes’ world is the possibility that Turkey — or any other Muslim country — might adopt neither the sort of illiberal secular Kemalism he admires nor the sort of anti-democratic Islamism he fears. But if, indeed, we try to force the world’s Muslims to choose between this form of secularism and war with the United States, the odds are that they’ll choose war, just as America’s Christian population would be infuriated by efforts to install Turkish-style secularism here at home. These aren’t cartoonish ideas that drive Pipes, but they’re badly wrong and incredibly dangerous; a significant step beyond Bush in unnuanced and extreme approaches to the Muslim world. The prospect of Pipes serving as an influential advisor in a Giuliani administration is very frightening.

Ilan Goldenberg reads Al From and Harold Ford on Iraq and comes away mighty displeased:

I gotta say that this is one of the most hollow and vapid Iraq articles I’ve read in a long time. It reads like a bunch of buzz words and standard lines taken out of various policy pieces with no real coherence or understanding of what it means. Is there a line in the entire article that is not an Iraq debate cliche at this point? One iota of creative thinking in all of this? Clearly the authors have no solid detailed concept of what is actually going on. And the fact that they use the term “immediate withdrawal” to describe the Democratic position is right out of the Republican play book.

I implore our readers. Do not mistake these two as member of the “very serious” foreign policy community. That’s not what they are.

Indeed, though you’ll find one of my favorite people listed on the staff bios page of the DLC’s think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute, I’m not sure that anyone who works there is really what you’d call a specialist in these issues. The Katulis/Korb “strategic reset” plan for the Center for American Progress (which, given that it’s run by John Podesta and its general Clintonite heritage, really ought to count as an adequately centrist demmy institution for anyone) remains the gold standard for Iraq plans in my view. The International Crisis Group’s “After Baker-Hamilton” plan and report is getting a bit outdated, but it’s still smart.

When his name first came down, Michael Mukasey seemed like an admirably non-terrible choice for the job of attorney general. But asMark Kleiman says the hearings process has revealed him to be completely unacceptable:

But if Mukasey won’t say that waterboarding is torture and claims that the President has some undefined power to violate statute law — even criminal laws, such as the ban on torture and other war crimes — under his “Article II powers,” then why should the Senate Judiciary Committee even bring his nomination to a vote? If he says he hasn’t read the latest torture memos or decided whether waterboarding is torture, Sen. Leahy ought to tell him to read the memos and observe a waterboarding session and come back when he’s done his homework.

Right. These hearings need to mean something. They shouldn’t merely be an opportunity for Senators to preen and ask question that maybe just maybe the nominee will screw up on and humiliate himself with. In particular, if the nominee avoids saying the abhorrent (“I endorse torture and believe the president can violate laws against torture and order others to do so without consequence”) primarily by refusing to answer questions, then you have to shut him down. The president is entitled to a degree of deference with his nominees, but certainly not a degree that extends to just not explaining what the nominee is saying when Senators question him on the most controversial issues facing his department.

Good for Chris Dodd for standing up on this FISA issue. I can’t believe “retroactive immunity” is even something the congress is allowed to grant.

This deadly bombing in Pakistan creates one of those awkward blogging situations where it’s clearly the most important story of the day, and it seems like it would be wrong to avoid mentioning the most important story of the day, and yet I don’t have anything in particular to say about it. Obviously, I’ll link if I see anything interesting someplace non-obvious.