Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Max Boot is one of the most vocal supporters of a neocon foreign policy. He says those who favor withdrawal from Iraq engage in “wishful thinking” and claims “there is copious evidence” that Iran is training al Qaeda. He said former CENTCOM commander Adm. William Fallon’s hesitation to bomb Iran “embolden[ed] the mullahs,” and claimed that the recently-revealed Pentagon propaganda program is simply “part and parcel of the daily grind of Washington journalism.”

He has also been a vociferous defender of the Iraq troop surge. Today, in an online debate on the surge, Boot points to the overall decrease in troop deaths as evidence of its success:

I could cite statistics to show how the “surge”—not only an increase in the number of U.S. troops in Iraq but also a change in their strategy to emphasis classic counterinsurgency—has been paying off: Civilian deaths were down more than 80 percent and U.S. deaths down more than 60 percent between December 2006 and March 2008.

Just two days ago, however, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Boot argued that the recent increase in U.S. troop casualties showed the surge was working. Acknowledging that April was the deadliest month for U.S. troops in Iraq since August (Boot says 52 soldiers died; in fact 54 did), Boot says the U.S. is approaching “the enemy’s defeat“:

More important, casualties cannot be looked at in a vacuum. A spike in casualties could be a sign that the enemy is gaining strength. Or it could be a sign that tough combat is under way that will lead to the enemy’s defeat and the creation of a more peaceful environment in the future. The latter was certainly the case with the casualty spike during the summer of 2007. … Unfortunate as the latest deaths are, they are in all likelihood a sign of things getting worse before they get better.

The right wing won’t let anything — even dozens of troop deaths — stop them from cheerleading for the Iraq war. The New York Daily News’ Michael Yon picks up Boot’s talking points, answering the question whether the increase in deaths shows that the surge’s progress has been lost:

[H]ere’s my short answer: no. We are taking more casualties now, just as we did in the first part of 2007, because we have taken up the next crucial challenge of this war: confronting the Shia militias. … That means, for the next few months, expect more blood, casualties and grim images of war. This may lead to a shift in the political debate inside the United States and more calls for rapid withdrawal. But on the ground in Iraq, it’s a sign of progress.

In other words: Heads I win, tails you lose.

National Review’s Lisa Schiffren thinks the question of whether Barack Obama studied the Qur’an as a child is relevant to the American presidential campaign:

Barack Obama has emphatically denied that he was ever a Muslim, practicing or otherwise. Other people, including family members and teachers, remember things differently. Daniel Pipes collects the varying information here. Several elementary-school teachers in Indonesia have told reporters that he was enrolled as a Muslim — and thus studied Koran instead of the Catechism — at the Catholic school he attended. One of his various half sisters says it too, and several passages in his autobiography seem to indicated the same thing. Make of it what you will. Certainly that he may have been educated or raised Muslim is no disqualifier, but if he is lying about his upbringing for political acceptance, it speaks to character. We don’t know if he is, but we know Daniel Pipes is no crank.

I suppose it’s stating the obvious to note how transparently disingenuous it is for Schiffren to insist that Barack Obama come clean (and prove a negative) about not “having been raised Muslim,” while assuring us, of course, that this would be “no disqualifier,” after she and the gang at National Review have worked so assiduously to make it a disqualifier.

I have to agree with Schiffren about Daniel Pipes, though. I tend to regard cranks as mostly harmless eccentrics, like people who believe that our planet was seeded by aliens who will soon return to harvest us, or people who design and construct hugely complicated machines to perform odd combinations of simple household tasks, or Dr. Phil. There’s nothing harmless about Daniel Pipes, a right wing scholar-activist who, since 9/11, has made a career of trafficking in hoary old Orientalist stereotypes in order to stoke Americans’ prejudice against, and fear of, Islam.

Pipes runs the Middle East Forum, an organization which answers the question “What if the John Birch Society had its own think tank?” Pipes also oversees Campus Watch, a project that keeps tabs on scholars it deems to be insufficiently pro-Israel.

Last summer Pipes spearheaded a campaign against the Khalil Gibran International Academy in New York, a public school focused on Arab culture and language. The campaign eventually caused the resignation of the school’s principal, Debbie Almontaser. Pipes based his hostility to the school on what he called “the basic problems implicit in an Arabic-language school: the tendency to Islamist and Arabist content and proselytizing.” Needless to say, Pipes offered no evidence for that claim.

In keeping with his stated belief that Arab- and Muslim-Americans deserve to be subjected to “special scrutiny,” Pipes apparently thinks the question of whether Barack Obama ever practiced Islam as a child is so important to the future of the American republic that, since December, he has penned three different articles on that subject, always making sure to apply a thin veneer of “scholarly rigor” over what is in fact nothing more than an attempt to smear by insinuation and innuendo. Despicable.

But no, Daniel Pipes is no crank. That would be an insult to cranks.

Only six posts into his new blog, and Jeffrey Goldberg is back up to his old tricks, pushing bad intel on Iraq:

The energetic Reihan Salam has an interesting, and sane, post about the widely-ignored Institute for Defense Analyses study on possible connections between Saddam’s regime and Islamist terror organizations. Among other things, the report disproves the orthodox CIA view that ideological and theological differences between Ba’athists and Islamists kept them from cooperating. You can read Eli Lake’s story about the report here.

Goldberg is referring to this study, “Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights From Captured Iraqi Documents,” which examined “more than 600,000 Iraqi documents, audio and video records” captured by U.S. forces after the 2003 invasion.

A more accurate rendering of the study’s findings is that, despite the many assertions to the contrary by the Bush administration and its media spear-carriers like Jeffrey Goldberg, an exhaustive review revealed no evidence of a meaningful relationship between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. The report’s abstract states that the “documents do not reveal direct coordination and assistance between the Saddam regime and the al Qaeda network,” though they did indicate some contacts between members of Saddam’s regime and groups affiliated with Al Qaeda.

A Google search reveals Goldberg’s contention that the IDA study “was widely ignored” to be nonsense. In fact, the study was widely discussed and interrogated both in the mainstream media and in the blogosphere, including on this blog. What has been ignored, and rightly, are the rather pathetic attempts by neoconservatives to spin the report into a vindication of their views, which is where Eli Lake’s article comes in.

Lake’s article in the NY Sun, which has been relentlessly and repeatedly referenced by the right-wing blogosphere (a phenomenon which, while certainly revealing of how low conservatives’ standards of evidence fall when they get desperate, neither lends the article credibility nor accuracy) provides a classic example of attempting to derive capabilities from intentions.

No one denied, then or now, that Saddam Hussein wanted to hurt America; what the IDA report confirmed, however, was that, as of 2003, Saddam Hussein had neither the competence nor the capability to do so. This was cause for vigilance, but certainly not for an American invasion and occupation which continues to this day. Goldberg’s continuing effort to carve out a small island of vindication on the point of “Baathist-Islamist cooperation” while deflecting blame for his own role in getting up the Iraq invasion by acting as a conduit for pro-war propaganda, indicates that he still doesn’t get this.

Yesterday morning, Fox News interviewed former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton to discuss whether America is close to striking Iranian targets, as new reports indicate the Bush administration is drawing up plans for a “surgical strike.” Bolton said that while there are “obviously risks associated” with a strike on Iran, the risks of not doing something are “far higher” at this point.

Fox anchor Jaime Colby asserted, “The Brits think we overestimate the threat of Iran in this particular case. Are they right or wrong?” Bolton — who has previously claimed that the “mullahs in Iran” want a Democratic president in 2008 — responded:

I think they’re dead wrong on this. I think this is a case where the use of military force against a training camp to show the Iranians we’re not going to tolerate this is really the most prudent thing to do. Then the ball would be in Iran’s court to draw the appropriate lesson to stop harming our troops.

Fox anchor Colby reacted to Bolton’s war cries by concluding — without sarcasm — “That’s a good message to end on. Thank you.” Watch it:

Bolton has asserted that preventive war against Iraq “did work” and “achieved our strategic objective.” Moreover, he has openly stated that the U.S. should have no interest in the well-being of Iraqis.

Bolton’s unquenchable appetite for a military conflict with Iran is easy to understand, given that he cares so little about the disastrous consequences that follow from war.

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