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.

(Parts one and two in this series)

In addition to failing define the conditions when U.S. troops would leave Iraq and misreading Iraqi views and calculations, the CNAS “conditional engagement” report on Iraq has a major gaping hole at the center of its argument:

3. Conditional engagement doesn’t describe how it would be implemented to achieve its stated ends, however vague those ends are.

As we previously noted, the report argues that continued U.S. military engagement in Iraq is a tempting enough carrot to get Iraqi leaders to resolve their political differences in order to keep it. But as we’ve also seen, many Iraqi political leaders don’t see it the same way, and even those who are more sympathetic to continued U.S. military assistance have to promise an end to the American military presence at some point.

Moreover, there is an illogic at the center of the conditional engagement argument — it implies that bad things might happen if U.S troops leave (genocide, terrorist safe havens, and regional war), so we should stay. But if Iraq’s leaders don’t move forward on accommodation, then we should leave anyways, despite those risks to U.S. national security. The report tries to have it both ways — it tries to say that U.S. troops cannot leave Iraq because of the risks of genocide, regional war, and terrorist safe havens, but if Iraqis don’t pass some laws, then maybe we should leave after all.

Conditional engagement is, in effect, a one-shot strategy dependent upon the Iraqi government not calling our bluff. Either we actually do disengage in the face of non-cooperation from the Iraqi government and lose, in the strategy’s own terms, any ability to affect the situation in Iraq, or we eventually reach the “boy-who-cried-wolf” threshold where our threats to leave are not taken credibly. It is not a strategy that can survive the multiple iterations necessary to resolve most or all of Iraq’s internal conflicts. Read more

Our guest blogger, Peter Swire, is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund and served as the Clinton administration’s Chief Counselor for Privacy, working on encryption policy and other issues.

Today the Washington Post ran a front-page story on a topic previously reported by ThinkProgress. Homeland Security is telling customs agents they can search, and take, travelers’ laptops and other electronic devices without needing any reasonable suspicion or probable cause.

The Post story highlights a new Customs and Border Patrol policy document that states:

In the course of a border search, and absent individualized suspicion, officers can review and analyze the information transported by any individual attempting to enter, reenter, depart, pass through, or reside in the United States.

The new policy says CPB can take away the laptop or analyze copies of its contents:

Officers may detain documents and electronic devices, or copies thereof, for a reasonable period of time to perform a thorough border search. The search may take place on-site or at an off-site location.

CBP says that the officers are supposed to return the laptop and destroy copies of the contents if nothing illegal is found (but be sure not to have any downloaded songs that you haven’t paid for).

That is far from comforting, even once you get your laptop back days or weeks later, because “nothing in this policy limits the authority of an officer to make written notes” about what was in the laptop.

In my Senate testimony in June, I highlighted many reasons for concern about suspicionless searches of laptops. The basic response from Homeland Security has been: “We can search everything in your suitcase at the border, so we can search everything in your laptop.” The new policy, though, highlights one intriguing protection at the border — the policy follows existing law and says “sealed letter class mail” can only be opened with probable cause.

In short, Congress has long recognized that searches of intellectual content at the border are intrusive. The government is forbidden from sniffing through your mail at the border without probable cause, and similar protections are due for laptops.

What to do next? The Post reports that Senator Russ Feingold, who called the recent hearing, intends to introduce legislation to require reasonable suspicion and bar racial profiling for laptop searches. In addition, join the “Hands Off My Laptop” online campaign, which has already sent over 20,000 messages to CBP about the need for privacy protections for laptops.

Digg It!

Our guest blogger is Peter Juul, research associate at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Speaking at the Center for American Progress Action Fund yesterday, Senator John Kerry (D-MA) laid out a new strategy for fighting terrorism by waging an information war” to politically isolate al Qaeda and other like-minded terrorist groups in the Muslim world. Key to success in this battle, Sen. Kerry noted, is drawing “the right lessons from the surge.” To do this, however, we need to get our facts straight first.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has claimed that the Anbar Awakening in some way, shape, or fashion was caused by the “surge” of 30,000-plus American troops into Iraq that began in January 2007. Indeed, McCain told CBS News anchor Katie Couric that “Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that [Anbar] sheik and others. And it began the Anbar Awakening. I mean, that’s just a matter of history.”

Today, Sen. Kerry set the record straight:

-Tensions between al Qaeda and local Sunnis existed for years before the surge: “…tensions between al Qaeda in Iraq and Sunni leaders in Anbar were already apparent nearly two years before the surge, culminating in the first reported battle between AQI and Sunni militias in the western town of Husaybah in May of 2005. The reason? Al Qaeda’s brutality, disrespect for local customs, insistence on marrying local women over the objections of tribal leaders, and disruption of local businesses.”

- U.S. troops in Anbar reached out to tribal leaders in late summer-fall 2006: “When Colonel Sean MacFarland and his Ready First brigade arrived in Ramadi in June of 2006, al Qaeda was still fully in control. The Ready First immediately saw the need for a change in tactics and—on their own—they launched an extensive outreach campaign to win over the local population—starting with local tribal leaders, to whom they assigned an Arabic-speaking former special forces officer who grew a moustache to gain the locals’ trust. They emphasized getting local Iraqi forces out into neighborhoods by deputizing tribal militias.

“These efforts culminated on September 9, 2006 – some four months before the surge was even announced — when a young local sheik, Sittar albu-Risha, created a new Awakening Council and officially declared the Anbar Awakening underway.”

- President Bush and Sen. McCain cited the Anbar Awakening to justify the surge in January 2007: “As security improved, a major campaign was launched to rebuild Ramadi, culminating in the Ramadi Reconstruction Conference in January 2007.

Sen. Kerry concluded “For those of you keeping score, this is the point in the story where the surge begins. President Bush announced the surge on January 10th, 2007. In fact, President Bush and Senator McCain both pointed to our success in flipping tribes in Ramadi against AQI as a reason to support the surge.”

In rewriting the history of the surge and the Anbar Awakening, John McCain is trying to present his support for the 2007 troop escalation as a sufficient cause of the drop in violence in Iraq. As Wonk Room has noted before, McCain has never evidenced much knowledge on the various factors — the Awakening, the Sadr freeze, and the completion of sectarian cleansing — that have contributed to the drop in violence, or the way that the surge worked to support, encourage, and consolidate these things.