Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has long criticized those who are willing to meet with adversaries of the U.S., slamming Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) for willing to engage Raul Castro of Cuba and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela:

– “These steps would send the worst possible signal to Cuba’s dictators: There is no need to undertake fundamental reforms; they can simply wait for a unilateral change in U.S. policy.”

– “I know that his naivete and lack of experience is on display when he talks about sitting down opposite Hugo Chavez or Raul Castro or Ahmadinejad.”

But today, McCain supporter Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) broke with McCain and told reporters that he is planning personal meetings with Chavez and Raul Castro. Specter said he has met with Fidel Castro three times and boasted of pictures with Chavez:

I met [Fidel] Castro on three occasions, as I detail in my book, and I’d like to see Raul Castro. There’s a real opportunity to get Cuban cooperation on drug interdiction, which I talked to Fidel Castro about. I’d like to follow up on that. I also would like to see trade and tourism develop. [… ]

Then I also hope to see Chavez — that fellow right there, there are three of us in that picture. … I’m a firm believer in dialogue and I think that there’s potential to salvage the relationship with Chavez which would be very helpful in Latin America.

In fact, Specter said he had recently written a letter to Raul Castro. “I think he’ll see me,” he said. Specter recounted that his August 2005 meeting with Chavez had tangible, positive results for the U.S.:

I had a chance to meet with him. There’s a serious drug problem, and I was able to arrange a meeting between the US ambassador and the Venezuelan Minister of the Interior. They worked out a protocol for some cooperation on drugs. … I believe that the conversation that I had with Chavez was a serious conversation.

Does McCain find Specter, the 16th-most senior member of the Senate, to be “dangerously naive?” Is Specter advocating policies that are “dangerous to American national security?” We await the condemnation.

Our guest bloggers are Brian Katulis, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, and Peter Juul, a Research Associate at the Center.

The first problem highlighted in the previous post is that “conditional engagement” fails to outline the precise conditions when U.S. troops would depart –- it’s an exit strategy without an exit. Conditional engagement is a policy proposal that is unsure of what it wants to achieve, besides vague terms like “accommodation” and “sustainable security” – hardly much of an improvement on the amorphous goals defined by conservatives as “victory” or “success.”

The second main shortcoming is that it misreads Iraq’s interests and calculations, which have evolved and changed rapidly in the past few months alone:

2. Conditional engagement assumes that the carrots of continued military, economic, and political support are more appetizing then they are.

Conditional engagement falls into the same trap that the Bush administration has on Iraq for the past five years: overestimating how much leverage the United States has in Iraq and underestimating broader Iraqi opposition to a continued U.S. military presence.

Certainly, there is a lot of posturing going on among Iraq’s leaders these days, and a number of Iraqis who publicly state that they oppose the U.S. presence actually understand that they would not be in power if not for the security umbrella U.S. forces have provided.

But the core of the conditional engagement argument is based upon a presupposition of Iraqi dependency on the United States– a dependency that has visibly weakened in just the last eighteen months, and on several fronts:

- Growing financial independence – Stuart Bowen, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, noted in a recent report that Iraqi government revenues for the 2008 fiscal year will likely reach $70 billion, which is double what was originally projected at the start of the year. Barham Salih, Iraq’s deputy prime minister in charge of reconstruction, reportedly said earlier this month that Iraq didn’t need any additional foreign funding for reconstruction.

- Increasing size and capacity of the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF). Military operations in Basra, Baghdad, Amara, and Diyala this year have all gone much better than previous operations. The overall size of the ISF has reportedly increased by 50 percent from 323,000 at the start of 2007 to a current size of approximately 500,000, according to U.S. government figures. Of course, everyone knows that the Iraqi military lacks key capacities – logistical support, airlift, and basic management structures – and this of course abstracts from a more complex reality posed by multiple independent militias, which are as much of a political problem and a reflection of internal power dynamics as it is a capacity challenge.

This increasing Iraqi capacity demonstrates that perhaps “conditional engagement” is more of a descriptive analysis of the current Bush administration policy, rather than a prescriptive analysis that offers a viable policy for a new administration. The problem with the current policy, as with conditional engagement, is that it never actually describes how to bridge Iraq’s internal divisions. Read more

Former Secretary of State and all around foreign policy eminence Henry Kissinger argues in this morning’s Washington Post that previous calls for a timeline for US withdrawal from Iraq have been “overtaken by events.” In other words, things are going so much better, now we have to stay!

Almost all objective observers agree that major progress has been made on all three fronts of the Iraq war: Al-Qaeda, the Sunni jihadist force recruited largely from outside the country, seems on the run in Iraq; the indigenous Sunni insurrection attempting to restore Sunni predominance has largely died down; and the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad has, at least temporarily, mastered the Shiite militias that were challenging its authority. After years of disappointment, we face the need to shift gears mentally to consider emerging prospects of success.

Though Kissinger identifies himself as a friend and occasional adviser to John McCain, I’ve argued previously that the foreign policies that McCain has outlined bear little resemblance to the realpolitik of Kissinger, but rather reveal McCain’s strong commitment to a neoconservative ideology and agenda. Kissinger’s op-ed, however, indicates that Kissinger and McCain share the same mistaken assumptions about effect of US withdrawal on Iraqi politics.

The main problem with Dr. K’s prescription for Iraq is that he doesn’t recognize the US presence itself as a provocation, or how the open-ended and condition-less US commitment to Iraq acts as roadblock to genuine political accommodation. Kissinger suggests some negative consequences of setting a deadline (“largely defeated internal groups to go underground”), but doesn’t acknowledge that these have come to pass in the absence of a deadline. Kissinger also bizarrely claims that a deadline “will give Iran an incentive to strengthen its supporters in the Shiite community for the period after the American withdrawal.” I don’t know where Kissinger’s been, but Iran has been doing this since March 2003, and continues to enjoy very good relations with the same Iraqi Shia political elites currently supported by the US.

As I wrote last week, no government which derives its authority from a foreign military occupation, or even appears to, will ever be seen as legitimate in the eyes of its own people, and thus the Iraqi government will not be able to truly stand on its own until there is a firm US commitment to withdraw. Acknowledging and honoring the strong Iraqi consensus in favor of a US withdrawal is an essential step toward breaking through the current impasse between Iraq’s political factions, which was, after all, the stated goal of the surge in the first place.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has approved a new National Defense Strategy arguing that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan should not be allowed to distract from the “implications of fighting a long-term, episodic, multi-front, and multi-dimensional conflict” against terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda. Gates’ new strategy “encourages current and future U.S. leaders to work with other countries to eliminate the conditions that foster extremism.”

The strategy concludes, “the most important military component of the struggle against violent extremists is not the fighting we do ourselves, but how well we help prepare our partners to defend and govern themselves.”

The Bush administration’s recognition that “even winning the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan will not end the ‘Long War’ against violent extremism” is surprising. In 2004, when Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) expressed the same view, Bush smeared Kerry in two ads, posing the question “How can Kerry protect us if he doesn’t even understand the threat?” Watch it:

Kerry said in 2004, “I think we can do a better job of cutting off financing, of exposing groups, of working cooperatively across the globe, of improving our intelligence capabilities nationally and internationally, of training our military and deploying them differently, of specializing in special forces and special ops, of working with allies.”

Bush mistakenly believed that using military force to bring about regime change and then occupy Iraq would disrupt terrorism throughout the region. In contrast, Kerry argued the U.S. should focus on countering “nonstate actors” whose “goal wasn’t to govern states but to destabilize them.”

Bush and Vice President Cheney smeared Kerry as “naive and dangerous.” Now, four years later, as they embrace Kerry’s approach to counterterrorism, the threats that they promised to protect the country against have only grown more dangerous.

Our guest blogger is Brian Katulis, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Earlier this spring, the Center for a New American Security issued an Iraq policy paper with an identity crisis, a paper that poses as an exit strategy but ultimately advocates a course of action that looks a lot like what the Bush administration and its conservative supporters have endorsed in Iraq.

Shaping the Iraq Inheritance builds upon the core prescriptions of an initial CNAS Iraq report (pdf) released in June 2007. At its core, the “conditional engagement” strategy, as described in the report, tries to carve out a “moderate middle” dependent on simplistic renderings of competing policy proposals on the left and the right. But it is important not to get distracted by the framing mechanism of the four options CNAS presents on Iraq (unconditional engagement, conditional engagement, conditional disengagement, and unconditional disengagement); the core arguments of the CNAS suffer from internal inconsistencies and disconnections from key realities in Iraq and the Middle East.

Although the conditional engagement strategy has thus far attracted little public attention in the Iraq debate, it is worth taking some time to offer constructive criticisms on the proposal in order to more realistically assess U.S. options in Iraq. In a series of posts over the next few days, we’ll offer commentary on the key shortcomings of the CNAS conditional engagement strategy:

1. Conditional engagement does not differ from the Bush administration’s current approach because it fails to define the conditions that would enable U.S. troops to depart Iraq.

The fundamental problem with the conditional engagement strategy is that it fails to clearly define — in precise terms — when the Iraq mission would be accomplished, and when U.S. troops could depart. In a telling chart on page 42, the report stakes out a position that places the strategy in the same space as the current Bush administration policy – supported by most conservatives – a “conditions based” drawdown of troops where the conditions are never really defined beyond vague terms like “accommodation” and “sustainable security.” Read more

Back when he was running for reelection in 2006 against anti-war candidate Ned Lamont, Joe Lieberman sought to blur his long-standing hard-line position on Iraq. Casting himself a a critic of the Bush administration, Lieberman insisted “No one wants to end the war in Iraq more than I do.”

Needless to say, when Lieberman returned to the Senate as an Independent, he re-dedicated himself to the task of supporting and enabling the Bush administration’s disastrous “global war on terror” framing, and furiously attacking any Democrats who pointed out how demonstrably flawed and counterproductive that framing has been for understanding genuine threats to U.S. national security. Lieberman has continued his attack dog role in the ’08 campaign, shedding whatever shred of “independent” credibility he had left by attacking the motives and principles of anyone who doesn’t share his and John McCain’s enthusiasm for endless war against an undifferentiated Islamofascist horde.

Interestingly, just as Lieberman tried to blur his pro-war image for his 2006 Senate reelection bid, John McCain has been experimenting with new, sane foreign policy looks, dressing up his militaristic hegemonism in multilateralist drag, and insisting that he “detests war,” while promising more wars to come. Unfortunately, a few journalists have responded positively to McCain’s liberal internationalist karaoke, ignoring McCain’s actual record, his advisers, and the majority of his past statements, highlighting a few notes of pragmatism in an attempt to buttress the tired “Maverick McCain” narrative.

McCain’s latest head-fake in the direction of the mainstream has been his grudging acknowledgment of a 16-month Iraq withdrawal timetable, which Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has indicated he supports. As McCain tries to blur his position to appear slightly less completely out of step with both the American and Iraqi political consensus, it’s become Lieberman’s job to hold the hard-line on Iraq.

It’s quite simple: Lieberman’s position is McCain’s. Both continue to be committed to the War on Terror, the war in Iraq, and coming soon, a war in Iran. Despite their presentation of themselves as men of principle, both are savvy politicians who understand the need to fudge their positions at various times to make them a bit more palatable to voters. But don’t be fooled. Just as Lieberman reverted to type once he won reelection, so a President McCain will cast off any pretense of international cooperation or consensus building as he pursues victory against the “transcendent challenge of our time.”

In the most recent issue of the Army War College’s quarterly journal “Parameters,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates wrote an article (pdf) titled “Reflections on Leadership,” in which he examines the “three principles of war for a democracy” espoused by General Fox Conner — “a tutor and mentor to both” General Dwight D. Eisenhower and General George Marshall.

Gates applied one of Conner’s principles — “never fight unless you have to” — to the current situation with Iran:

Conner’s axiom — never fight unless you have to — looms over policy discussions today regarding rogue nations like Iran that support terrorism; that is a destabilizing force throughout the Middle East and Southwest Asia and, in my judgment, is hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons. Another war in the Middle East is the last thing we need. In fact, I believe it would be disastrous on a number of levels.

Gates added that “the military option must be kept on the table” but his overall assessment echoes a recent statement by Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Admiral Michael Mullen. Last week on Fox News Sunday, Mullen said “I’m fighting two wars, and I don’t need a third one” in Iran. Watch it:

However, the right’s neoconservative hawks see the Iranian threat differently. Surge architect Fred Kagan said recently that “there’s nothing we can do short of an attack to force Iran to give up its nuclear program.” Ultra-conservative evangelical Pat Robertson wants an attack before November. John Bolton wanted bombs flying over Iran yesterday and Vice President Dick Cheney is reportedly on board.

But while Sen. John McCain is busy assessing the “nature of the threat” from Iran, President Bush recently authorized direct high level talks with the Iranians regarding their nuclear program — an indication he may be backing away from his “appeasement” rhetoric and siding with Gates and Mullen.

In February, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) voted against a bill banning the CIA from waterboarding and using other torture tactics in their interrogations. When the bill passed, McCain urged Bush to veto it, which he did.

In an interview with Newsweek published today, McCain defended his position, insisting that the CIA plays “a special role” in defending the U.S. and thus should be allowed to use harsh interrogation tactics such as waterboarding:

NEWSWEEK: On torture, why should the CIA be treated differently from the armed services regarding the use of harsh interrogation tactics?

MCCAIN: Because they play a special role in the United States of America and our ability to combat terrorists. But we have made it very clear that there is nothing they can do that would violate the Geneva Conventions, the Detainee Treatment Act, which prohibits torture. We could never torture anyone, but some people misconstrue that who don’t understand what the Detainee Treatment Act and the Geneva Conventions are all about.

McCain’s vote against the waterboarding ban did make one thing clear: that he condones torture. With Bush’s veto, waterboarding remains a distinct option for the CIA:

Still, waterboarding remains in the CIA’s tool kit. The technique can be used, but it requires the consent of the attorney general and president on a case-by-case basis. Bush wants to keep that option open.

“I cannot sign into law a bill that would prevent me, and future presidents, from authorizing the CIA to conduct a separate, lawful intelligence program, and from taking all lawful actions necessary to protect Americans from attack,” Bush said in a statement.

McCain is either clueless or ignorant about the fact that his vote allows the CIA to waterboard detainees. And as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), one of McCain’s chief surrogates, has said about waterboarding, “I don’t think you have to have a lot of knowledge about the law to understand this technique violates Geneva Convention common article three, the War Crimes statutes, and many other statutes that are in place.”

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