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, two, three, and four in this series.)

We’ve already identified four substantive shortcomings with the Center for a New American Security’s ‘conditional engagement’ strategy for Iraq. Conditional engagement fails to define conditions for its own success, misreads internal Iraqi politics, fails to explain how its means would achieve its vague ends, and offers little more than a ‘checked box’ on regional diplomacy. Moreover, conditional engagement presents itself as the ‘alternative’ to the Bush-McCain Iraq strategy, when in reality it has much in common with that strategy.

CNAS attempts to present its paper as a ‘moderate’ strategy, conveniently situated between the clearly unsustainable conservative policy and supposedly ‘irresponsible’ plans for a clear redeployment. The phrase ‘sustainable stability,’ an apparent substitute for laying out a concrete end-state for a conditional engagement strategy, appears no fewer than seventeen times in the paper.

But the bulk of the effort to convince readers that conditional engagement is the only responsible way forward in Iraq rests largely on the shoulders of straw men. It pigeonholes competing Iraq strategies into an overly simple conceptual framework – namely whether or not ‘engagement’ or ‘disengagement’ is ‘conditional’ or ‘unconditional.’ This move allows the report to split hairs between the Bush-McCain strategy and its own, while ignoring a fundamental strategic choice in Iraq: whether or not U.S. troops should ultimately leave Iraq in a specific time horizon, as an increasing number of Iraqi leaders — and a substantial majority of Iraqis themselves — would like. 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.

The Department of Homeland Security has offered a new, unconvincing argument for why they can conduct border searches, and take travelers’ laptops and other electronic devices without needing any reasonable suspicion or probable cause. The public needs to help Homeland Security understand why they’re wrong.

The background: Senator Russ Feingold held the first Congressional hearing on border laptop searches on June 25, and I testified about the many reasons such searches should only be done when the government has reasonable suspicion about a traveler. Homeland Security did not provide a witness, but issued guidelines for border laptop searches on July 16. These guidelines hit the front page of the Washington Post last week, with new focus on the issue in the traditional media and leading online sources such as DailyKos and Salon. Meanwhile, the Center for American Progress Action Fund began its “Hands off My Laptop” campaign, calling for Homeland Security to put privacy safeguards in place for these searches.

On August 5, Jayson Ahern, the Deputy Commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, responded to this growing public concern. His basic argument is there’s nothing new here at all — border searches have been conducted since the birth of the Republic:

Making full use of our search authorities with respect to items like notebooks and backpacks, while failing to do so with respect to laptops and other devices, would ensure that terrorists and criminals receive less scrutiny at our borders just as their use of technology is becoming more sophisticated.

Homeland Security seems to need help in understanding why searching a backpack for drugs is different from taking a laptop and copying everything on it. Here are three reasons why laptop searches are more intrusive:

1. Laptop searches last far longer. The backpack search is complete when the traveler leaves the border. For a typical laptop, the government can make a copy and then search every file at its leisure.

2. It’s like searching your home. Our laptops contain family photos, medical records, finances, personal diaries, and all the other detailed records of our most personal lives. Having the government rummage through all these files is like searching your home, and that requires a probable cause warrant.

3. Confidential and privileged information. Many kinds of confidential information are in laptops, including journalists’ notes about an investigative story, trade secrets and other key business information, and many more. Lawyers’ laptops contain attorney-client privileged information, as reinforced by a recent case that says the privilege is lost once the government sees a file during a search.

The Homeland Security blog lets you post your own reasons why searching a laptop is more intrusive than searching a backpack. Let them know your reasons, and participate in the online campaigns of “Hands Off My Laptop” and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Digg It!

Bloviating on this Wall Street Journal report that Muqtada al-Sadr plans to disband the Mahdi Army and “focus his group’s efforts on politics and social work,” Rush Limbaugh reiterates once again conservatism’s long-standing and movement-defining opposition to civil rights:

So now Mookie and his boys are going to become community organizers. And, of course, that’s what Obama did. And who better to advise Mookie than Obama? Seriously, that’s what he’s going to do. They’re going to — social services, education, social justice. I guess Mookie’s thrown his hands in with the left over there. He’s going to throw down the weapons and start disrupting the society much like the civil rights organizations here in this country have tried to do.

While it’s always nice when conservatives let the mask slip, and let fly with the racism — oops, I mean “principled opposition to civil rights” — that forms the irreducible core of their ideology, in point of fact Sadr’s movement has always been based upon a social services model. As was reported a few months ago, it is estimated to be the single biggest such organization in Iraq.

As for Limbaugh’s comparison of Sadr to Obama, consider: Muqtada al-Sadr is a chubby, ultra-conservative loudmouth who rose to power by stoking the resentments of his country’s majority against it’s various minorities. Who does this remind you of?