It seems that The Washington Post story on al-Hurra that I linked to earlier this afternoon was following an investigation that Dafna Linzer, formerly of the Post and now of the exciting new investigative journalism venture Pro Publica, did as Pro Publica’s first story.

I’d missed this piece of demagoguery from John McCain about Barack Obama’s response to the Supreme Court’s ruling about enemy combatants:

“Senator Obama is obviously confused about what the United States Supreme Court decided and what he is calling for,” McCain said in a statement issued by his campaign. “After enthusiastically embracing the Supreme Court decision granting habeas in US civilian courts to dangerous terrorist detainees, he is now running away from the consequences of that decision and what it would mean if Osama bin Laden were captured. Senator Obama refuses to clarify whether he believes habeas should be granted to Osama bin Laden, and instead cites the precedent of the Nuremburg war trials. Unfortunately, it is clear Senator Obama does not understand what happened at the Nuremburg trials and what procedures were followed. There was no habeas at Nuremburg and there should be no habeas for Osama bin Laden. Senator Obama cannot have it both ways. In one breath he endorses habeas for terrorists like 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and in the next he denies its logical conclusion of habeas for Osama bin Laden. By citing a historical precedent that does not include habeas, he sends a signal of confusion and indecision to our allies and adversaries and the American people.”

I really think it’s McCain who’s confused here. If Osama bin Laden or anyone else were in the jurisdiction of a properly constituted international tribunal, the U.S. judicial system obviously wouldn’t have the authority to rule on his status one way or the other. The ruling had to do, in part, with the Bush administration’s silly effort to use the ambiguous status of Guantanmo Bay to hold people in American captivity while somehow also outside the reach of American law. A suspect who’s genuinely in someone else’s custody (rather than in the fake sense that the Gitmo detainees are in Cuba) is a whole other can of worms.

The other thing is that the right the Court gave the detainees is a pretty basic one — a legal right to challenge the basis for having classified them as enemy combatants. In the case of bin Laden, this would be child’s play — the man issued a declaration of war against the United States. It’s pretty clear that he’s an enemy combatant.

To get a persuasive critique of the Court, McCain needs to rely on the names of individuals who are clearly enemy combatants — guys like KSM and OBL. But in the case of those guys there’ll be no problem proving that they’re enemy combatants. To generate a good example of the decision creating a legal problem, McCain would need to name someone for whom there’s no good evidence of his enemy combatant status. But a guy like that doesn’t make for persuasive rhetoric. After all, if there’s no sound basis for believing that he’s an enemy combatant, why detain him?

Apparently congress created a kind of nuclear terrorism czar position in 2007 on the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission and the Bush administration has just decided not to fill it. This is about what you’d expect from an administration with a chillingly terrible record on nuclear proliferation, and also a reminder that this — rather than the vice presidency — is a job for which Sam Nunn would be an excellent choice.

Good Washington Post article takes a look at the failure of al-Hurra a U.S.-funded, Arabic-language television network that hasn’t managed to attract any viewers:

According to critics, the U.S. government miscalculated in assuming that al-Hurra could repeat the success of Radio Free Europe during the Cold War, when information-starved listeners behind the Iron Curtain tuned in on their shortwave radios.

By contrast, “About 200 other stations beam Arabic-language programming to satellite dishes reaching even the poorest neighborhoods in the Middle East and North Africa. The BBC launched an Arabic-language news channel this year, and more rivals loom.” Some of those channels are state-controlled and thus of limited value, but then again al-Hurra is state controlled as well, and the Arab dictatorships are generally not nearly as repressive as the Soviet Union was in terms of this kind of thing.

This is, however, indicative not only of the failure of one particular initiative, but of the Bush administration’s broad inability to “get it” with regard to the US and the Arab world, a problem in which they’ve been joined by many other actors and institutions. The upshot of it all is that though the Arab world has many problems, it’s just not a situation like Eastern Europe. Most Eastern Europeans regarded their governments as not only repressive, but as puppets of a Moscow-based Russian empire and many were willing to embrace the idea of US-assisted liberation. A lot of Americans would like Arabs to see the geopolitics of the Greater Middle east in that way, but relatively few actually do. Insofar as the analogy stands up at all (which isn’t very far), we’re closer to playing the Soviet Union role — acting as the guarantor of post-colonial successor regimes set up by the British Empire in the Gulf, and as the opponent of anti-imperialist regimes in Syria, Iran, and formerly Iraq.

Even once you understand the situation correctly, there’s still a lot of questions to be debated about what’s the best way to handle things. But the essential first step is to not let our picture of the situation be clouded by wishful thinking or a weird kind of nostalgia and al-Hurra reflects both.

I criticized Colin Kahl’s “Conditional Engagement” Foreign Affairs article for not really grappling with the regional dimensions of the Iraq situation, but but the longer report on Iraq he wrote with Michèle Flournoy and Shawn Brimley for CNAS does go into. I largely agree with what they have to say on that subject with the perhaps not-so-minor proviso that in other sections of the paper they define curbing Iranian influence as one of our objectives there.

To me the point of regional diplomacy would be to get beyond a situation where the US and Iran see each other as engaged in a zero-sum conflict over influence in Iraq. At the moment, both countries want to see Iraq stabilized. But Iran wants to curb US influence in Iraq. And the US wants to curb Iranian influence in Iraq. And as long as Iraq’s most important neighbor and the global hegemon are both contending for influence in Iraq, it’s hard to see how Iraq can be stable even if both the U.S. and Iran have a second-order desire to Iraq a stable Iraq.

In other thoughts inspired by the report, the fact that the security gains in Iraq have sustained themselves longer than I would have guessed several months ago had lulled me into a bit of complacency. But the checklist of things the CNAS trio wants to see happen in Iraq is a stark reminder that despite the improvement there are literally dozens of ways in which the situation might fall apart again with or without our involvement. The report also helped clarify my thinking on where I disagree with the authors. In particular, I’m much more inclined to what they call “conditional disengagement” — which would basically focus on heading for the exits but with the proviso that any responsible leader would have to be open to modifying that plan under certain conditions.

Conditional engagement as CNAS lays it out could work, and certainly seems preferable to the Bush/McCain stay forever policy, but to me it’s still unduly invested in the idea that the United States should be risking a lot of people’s lives (and spending a lot of money and killing people, etc.) in an effort to micromanage the politics of Iraq in a way where I think the prospects for success aren’t great and the American interest is hazy.

This seems like a problem: “Militants in Pakistan fired rockets at NATO bases across the border in Afghanistan, killing three children in a village and prompting the alliance to launch a pair of retaliatory artillery strikes, officials said Sunday.”

Working out some kind of better-than-this arrangement with the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan and local leaders in the border region is a very tall order, but also a vitally important task. And every minute the President and other top U.S. officials are thinking about Iraq is a minute they’re not spending on the part of the world where al-Qaeda’s leadership is and where nuclear weapons programs and terrorist safe havens aren’t hypothetical possibilities but actually existing conditions.

Apparently John Bolton thinks that if Israel (or, presumably, the United States) were to bomb Iran the retaliation wouldn’t be so bad because they would worry about “an even greater response” from Israel or from the United States. And indeed they might. Were I in the Iranian government and we were faced with this situation, I’d be sounding notes of caution. But then again, from my perch here in the West I’m sounding notes of caution and there’s also John Bolton on teevee talking about how the Iranians wouldn’t dare retaliate.

But somewhere in Iran will be the Iranian John Bolton, explaining that the West and Israel are too weak and frightened of Iranian retaliation to counter-attack, so they may as well come at us with all guns blazing. As I’ve said before our American hawks think and act exactly like the irrational madmen they imagine to be running the show in Teheran.

Countries can either interact with each other in cooperative ways, that make the population of both states better off, or else they can engage in negative-sum conflicts that make both populations worse off. Once you’re engaged in a cycle of negative-sum conflict, as the United States and Iran have been since the Revolution, it’s very hard to pull out of it. Something like a direct military attack on Iran would clearly be a substantial escalation of that cycle. The rational thing faced with that would be to pull back from the brink, but it’s been the case for decades that it would be better for both sides to pull back from the brink — it’s just a hard think to accomplish in the real world and it would become much more difficult in the context of an unprovoked military attack. But what’s needed aren’t speculations about the Iranian response to bombing, but a good-faith attempt to make a diplomatic breakthrough.