During a recent interview with the Washington Post, CIA Director Michael Hayden said that al Qaeda is “essentially defeated in Iraq and Saudi Arabia and on the defensive throughout much of the rest of the world” including the areas along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. “On balance, we’re doing pretty well,” Hayden said. The Post even described Hayden’s view as a “strikingly upbeat assessment.”

But Sen. John Rockefeller (D-WV), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a letter to Hayden that he is “surprised and troubled” by his comments to the Post, adding that his assessment of al Qaeda’s worldwide strength is at odds with intelligence briefings to Captiol Hill:

The positions attributed to you are not consistent with assessments that have been provided to the Senate Intelligence Committee over the past year. If the Intelligence Community’s assessment of al-Qa’ida has changed, I would expect the Committee to be made aware of these changes immediately. If the assessment has not changed, then I ask that you explain why you would portray the terrorist movement as “on the defensive throughout much of the rest of the world, including in its presumed haven along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.” In fact, I have seen nothing, including classified intelligence reporting, that would lead me to this conclusion.

Moreover, in a speech delivered last Thursday, “posited as a presidential intelligence briefing delivered on Jan. 21, 2009,” Principal Director of National Intelligence Donald Kerr’s assessment of al-Qaeda “seemed at odds” with Hayden’s, the Post reports:

Pakistan’s “inward” political focus and failure to control the tribal territories where al-Qaeda maintains a haven, he said, is “the number one thing we worry about” … in response to a question, he said that “we don’t know enough” about what is happening in Pakistan.

“One of the concerns we have is that as Pakistan looks inward,” the western tribal areas “will be more hospitable to those who would strike us and less hospitable to us in trying to root out that problem,” Kerr said.

The Post added that Kerr’s speech “contrasted with more optimistic administration forecasts of rapprochement among Iraq’s political forces and a possible Middle East peace agreement in the next eight months.”

Jeffrey Goldberg’s interview of John McCain is very worth reading, as it gives a pretty good view into the coloring book version of the Middle East that McCain offers to the American people. For all of the Middle East leaders that McCain has met with — and he really, really wants you to know how many he has met with — McCain’s knowledge of the region persists at the level of a twenty minute briefing. It’s nice that he can name-check Barak, Olmert, and Abbas; It would be really nice if he demonstrated any knowledge of the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, or offered any good idea on how to move the peace process forward, which he does not.

What’s really troubling is McCain’s cluelessness about the disastrous effects of the Iraq war on American security. Asked by Goldberg whether he thinks Iran’s intention “is the actual destruction of America,” McCain answers that…the United States should stay in Iraq:

It’s hard for me to say what their intentions are, but the effect -– If they were able to drive us out of Iraq, and al Qaeda established a base there, and the Shiite militias erupted and the Iranian influence was expanded, which to my mind is what would happen, then the consequences for American national security would be profound. I don’t know if their intention is to destroy America and what we stand for, but I think the consequences of them succeeding in the destruction of the state of Israel and their continued support for terrorist organizations – all of these would have profound national security consequences.

You know what’s also had profound negative consequences for American national security? Invading and occupying Iraq. McCain has offered this justification before, and continues to completely miss the point.

Iran has been the single biggest beneficiary of the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. Former diplomat Peter Galbraith wrote last September that Iraq was a “mission accomplished–for Iran“:

Of all the unintended consequences of the Iraq war, Iran’s strategic victory is the most far-reaching…For eight years of brutal warfare in the 1980s, Iran tried to breach that line but could not. (At the time, the Reagan administration supported Saddam Hussein precisely because it feared the strategic consequences of an Iraq dominated by Iran’s allies.) The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq accomplished what Khomeini’s army could not.

Journalist Robert Dreyfuss wrote in March that “the United States has spent most of the past five years in a de facto alliance with Iran in support of the Shiite-led (and US-installed) regime in Baghdad….Washington’s decision to topple Saddam’s government has put in place a ruling elite that is far closer to Iran than it is to the United States.”

Rather than weakening Iranian hard-liners, as the Iraq war’s advocates insisted it would, the American invasion only strengthened them.

The consequences of Iraq for Israel’s security have also been negative. Brian Katulis writes that “in the summer of 2006, when Israel was fighting a live war with the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah, it was clear whose side most Iraqi leaders were on — and it was not Israel.”

Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki condemned Israel’s “aggression,” and that same summer, the Iraqi speaker of parliament Mahmoud Al-Mashhadani accused “Jews” of being behind the violence and murders in Iraq. Are these the type of allies that the United States wants? Is the current policy in Iraq undermining U.S. and Israeli security interests by giving Iran some breathing room to expand its influence further around the region? These are tough questions to answer, but U.S. leaders need to address this fundamental contradiction at the heart of U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Rather than consider these questions, however, McCain prefers to engage in empty sloganeering and fear-mongering as he plans the next war.

Despite the fact that defense attorneys for five suspected al Qaeda members being held at Guantanamo Bay have not yet received security clearances from the Pentagon that would allow them to participate in hearings, the Bush administration is aggressively pushing ahead with the prosecutions. The lawyers also claim that so far, they have had only a few hours to meet with their clients and have not had time to sufficiently “prepare a defense” in the death penalty cases.

A newly released e-mail, dated May 27, shows a civilian member of the prosecution team suggesting a trial date of Sept. 15:

As the attorneys write in their brief asking the military judge to dismiss the charges against the detainees, “Not coincidentally, the Prosecution has now proposed a trial schedule that would force the trial of this case in mid-September, some seven weeks before the general election.” The Miami Herald notes the additional political significance of Sept. 15:

The date, in fact, is 10 days after Sen. John McCain, an architect of Military Commissions law, is expected to be officially nominated as the Republican presidential candidate at the GOP national convention in St. Paul, Minn.

In October, Air Force Col. Morris Davis, formerly the lead prosecutor for terrorism trials at Guantanamo Bay, also revealed that he was pressured to pursue “sexy” cases, instead of ones that were the most solid. “There was a big concern that the election of 2008 is coming up,” Davis said. “People wanted to get the cases going.”

Earlier this month, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) sought to distance himself from President Bush by calling for a mandatory limit on U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. “I will not shirk the mantle of leadership that the United States bears,” McCain said in a speech at a wind power company.

On his campaign website, McCain (R-AZ) calls himself “a leader on the issue of global warming,” which he says is “an issue we can no longer afford to ignore“:

John McCain has a proud record of common sense stewardship. Along with his commitment to clean air and water, and to conserving open space, he has been a leader on the issue of global warming with the courage to call the nation to action on an issue we can no longer afford to ignore.

But apparently McCain’s idea of leadership goes only so far. In a press conference yesterday, McCain said he would skip an upcoming vote in the Senate on “a landmark bill imposing mandatory limits on greenhouse gases”:

In a press conference late Wednesday afternoon, McCain said he did not support the bill sponsored by two of his closest allies, Sens. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) and John Warner (R-Va.) because it doesn’t offer enough aid to the nuclear industry, and he would not come to the floor to vote on it.

“I have not been there for a number of votes. The same thing happened in the campaign of 2000,” he said. “The people of Arizona understand I’m running for president.”

Earlier this month, McCain said that he hoped the bill, which was introduced by Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and John Warner (R-VA), “will be passed” and that “the entire Congress will join in supporting it.”

Responding to McCain’s decision to skip the vote, Lexi Shultz, deputy director of the climate program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told the Washington Post that “If you don’t come back to vote on the bill, you can’t say that you’re all that serious about taking action on climate change.”

In an otherwise very good analysis of Muqtada al-Sadr in yesterday’s Washington Post, Amit Paley glossed over what I think is a very significant point about the Iraqi Shia political scene:

Sadr, the third of four sons, was born in Najaf into one of the most revered clerical families in Shiite Islam. His father’s cousin, Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr al-Sadr, was an adored religious figure who founded a school of thought that became the Sadrist movement, which argued that the clergy should actively engage in politics to aid the downtrodden Shiite masses. When he was tortured and killed in 1980 by Saddam Hussein’s government, Moqtada’s father, Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, also a grand ayatollah, took his place as the head of the movement and became a chief opponent of Hussein’s rule.

It’s true that the Sadrist movement is based upon the teachings and theories of Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr al-Sadr, who is generally regarded as the most significant and innovative Shia scholar of the 20th century. But even more than that, all of the major Shia parties in Iraq derive elements of their programs from his work, a deeply intellectual form of Islamic scholarship which engaged and critiqued the various political ideologies at work in the contemporary Middle East.

Prime minister Nuri al-Maliki’s Dawa Party was co-founded by Sadr in Najaf in 1957. The Dawa (“call to Islam”) was conceived by Iraq’s Shia clerics as an effort to combat the influence of secular ideologies such as socialism and Communism among Iraq’s poor and middle class. The Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) –formerly known as the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) — was founded in Iran in 1982 by the exiled cleric Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, himself a former Dawa colleague of Bakr al-Sadr. SCIRI was also grounded in Sadr’s theories of clerical activism, though it became more closely aligned with the extremist theory of vilayet e-faqih (rule of the religious scholars), as espoused by the group’s Iranian patron, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

In the brutal, sanctions-starved Iraq of the 1990s, Muqtada’s father, Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, developed his elder cousin’s ideas into the potent populist-nationalist message that defines the current Sadrist movement. Sadeq also established a network of activist clerics and social services in opposition to the perceived “quietism” of the Najaf establishment. The latter aspect has enabled Muqtada to establish a base of political power far out of proportion to his relatively meager scholarly credentials, as hundreds of thousands of Iraqis depend on services provided by his offices.

While Dawa and ISCI continue to appeal more to Iraq’s scholarly and commercial classes, the Sadrists find the vast majority of their support among Iraq’s poor. Given the size of their constituencies, it’s no secret why Dawa and ISCI are extremely nervous about the coming provincial elections, and are seeking to weaken the Sadrists in advance. Trying to isolate and marginalize this movement — which should not be confused with, or simply reduced to, the Mahdi Army, it’s militia wing — is not likely to achieve sustainable gains.

Muqtada al-Sadr doesn’t fit the simplistic mold of a radical firebrand cleric as he is sometimes portrayed to be in the media. He is a major nationalist figure who was born into what is perhaps the most important family for Shia politics in Iraq –- akin to the Bush family for Republicans or the Kennedy family for Democrats here in the U.S. Bakr al-Sadr’s influence has shaped the current generation of Shia leaders in Iraq, and Muqtada’s ability to personally draw upon that legacy has been of significant benefit to him.

The Politico reports that former White House press secretary Scott McCellan’s new memoir pretty much confirms what we already knew about the invasion of Iraq: It was sold to the American public with a sophisticated “political propaganda campaign” aimed at “manipulating sources of public opinion” :

In a chapter titled “Selling the War,” [McClellan] alleges that the administration repeatedly shaded the truth and that Bush “managed the crisis in a way that almost guaranteed that the use of force would become the only feasible option.”

“Over that summer of 2002,” he writes, “top Bush aides had outlined a strategy for carefully orchestrating the coming campaign to aggressively sell the war. . . . In the permanent campaign era, it was all about manipulating sources of public opinion to the president’s advantage.”

McClellan, once a staunch defender of the war from the podium, comes to a stark conclusion, writing, “What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary.”

So, McClellan now admits that, back when he was accusing the Bush administration’s critics of politicizing national security, he was fully aware that it was actually the Bush administration that was politicizing national security. No points for candor, Scott.

But McClellan obviously has not read Doug Feith’s book. If he had, he would know that there was no manipulation of intelligence, only “honest error,” and that the error wasn’t Doug Feith’s, it was the CIA’s.

Writing in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Feith lamented “the damage to the president’s credibility…caused by the CIA’s errors on Iraqi WMD.” Feith neglects to mention that it was he, and his Office of Special Plans operation, who reinterpreted the CIA’s data, removed important qualifiers relating to Iraqi WMD, and then passed the new machined intelligence on to the White House. So, if the CIA was wrong, and it was, Feith was even more wrong.

Last week, continuing his life’s work of trying to repair his (justly) shattered reputation, Feith also insisted that “what we found in Iraq was a serious WMD threat,” by which he meant Saddam’s intention to someday reconstitute a WMD program. McClellan could have Feith in mind when he states that President Bush and his advisers “confused the propaganda campaign with the high level of candor and honesty so fundamentally needed to build and then sustain public support during a time of war.”

John McCain delivered a foreign policy address today on nuclear proliferation, in which he stressed the need to work with Russia in securing loose nuclear materials and preventing them from falling into the wrong hands:

While we have serious differences, with the end of the Cold War, Russia and the United States are no longer mortal enemies. As our two countries possess the overwhelming majority of the world’s nuclear weapons, we have a special responsibility to reduce their number. [...]

I would also redouble our common efforts to reduce the risk that nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons may fall into the hands of terrorists or unfriendly governments.

McCain did not say whether his surge in Russia diplomacy would occur before or after he gets Russia kicked out of the G8, as he has suggested he would try to do.

Given that a New York Times story on McCain’s speech quotes an expert praising McCain’s “references…to multilateralism,” we may be about to witness the same phenomenon as occurred after McCain’s earlier foreign policy speech in late March. After that speech, some analysts seriously surmised that McCain had forsworn American unilateralism, despite a clear past record of advocacy for American unilateralism, and despite having some of the foremost advocates of American unilateralism among his foreign policy advisers.

McCain’s foreign policy spokesman, Randy Scheunemann, has suggested in regard to Russian objections to U.S. missile defense in Eastern Europe, that “there will be no trade-offs,” which are “a relic of a bygone era of power politics.” This is the essence of McCain’s approach to foreign affairs. Like Bush, McCain defines “negotiation” as presenting our enemies with ultimata, and “diplomacy” as laying out for them the terms of their capitulation.

Max Bergmann at Democracy Arsenal isn’t fooled:

Since McCain is not willing to negotiate with Iran or North Korea – what non-military strategies does McCain have to ensure that North Korea and Iran end their nuclear programs? The fact is he has no non-military strategy. His sole approach is to say to them: we demand you to stop doing what you are doing or else we will attack you and destroy you.

The latter approach is what McCain advocated in a 1999 speech on the North Korean nuclear threat, in which he suggested that the U.S. should have taken a harder line much sooner. McCain asserted that “a firmer response to North Korea might have triggered a war, a war we would win, but not without paying a terrible price…North Korea is still inexorably nearing total collapse, and its leaders remain quite capable of launching in their country’s death throes one final, glorious war. But now, they are much, much better armed.”

I think we can safely predict that McCain would follow this advice in regard to Iran, with predictably disastrous results.

Our guest blogger is Adam Jentleson, the Communications and Outreach Director for the Hyde Park Project at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

John McCain’s new website, unveiled last week, features a significant policy change on the Iraq page.

Until Tuesday, this paragraph was the first point on the old Iraq page:

“A greater military commitment now is necessary if we are to achieve long-term success in Iraq. John McCain agrees with retired Army General Jack Keane that there are simply not enough American forces in Iraq. More troops are necessary to clear and hold insurgent strongholds; to provide security for rebuilding local institutions and economies; to halt sectarian violence in Baghdad and disarm Sunni and Shiite militias; to dismantle al Qaeda; to train the Iraqi Army; and to embed American personnel in Iraqi police units. Accomplishing each of these goals will require more troops and is a crucial prerequisite for needed economic and political development in the country.”

On the new page, that entire paragraph has been deleted. The new page does not call for more troops and makes no mention of the “critical prerequisite” of disarming Sunni and Shiite militias.

This change raises two questions.

First, does John McCain still think we need more troops in Iraq, as his website stated until earlier this week?

Second, since John McCain currently supports President Bush’s policy of arming certain Shiite and Sunni militias, has he changed his view that disarming Shiite and Sunni militias is a “critical prerequisite” for success, as his website stated as recently as Tuesday?