Commentary’s Abe Greenwald has thought up a cunning defense of the $448,000 that McCain-chaired International Republican Institute gave to Rashid Khalidi’s Center for Palestine Research and Studies:

McCain’s token gesture was a political quickie aimed at pacifying a noisy party that you’d never really want to get personally involved with… Groups like the CPRS are specifically designed to cloak radical players in the robes of academic respectability.

$440k is a token gesture? I don’t know what kind of sums Greenwald is used to playing around with, but where I come from, half a million dollars is a pretty fair indication of support. Greenwald refers to CPRS as “Khalidi’s front organization,” which implies that CPRS had some other nefarious purpose. What that was, I’m sure Greenwald will tell us very soon. Very, very soon.

If Greenwald’s right, though, about McCain thoughtlessly throwing money around, doesn’t this mean that there could have been all kinds of other dangerous “front organizations” receiving money from IRI when McCain was too busy to do background checks? Shouldn’t someone be looking into this? Because this raises serious questions.

Meanwhile, back in the sane world, this Washington Post editorial, in which they asked Khalidi “whether he wanted to respond to the [McCain] campaign charges against him.”

He answered, via e-mail, that “I will stick to my policy of letting this idiot wind blow over.” That’s good advice for anyone still listening to the McCain campaign’s increasingly reckless ad hominem attacks. Sadly, that wind is likely to keep blowing for four more days.

Indeed, in some quarters it never stops. I believe Ezra Klein has hit upon an appropriate response: Buy Khalidi’s excellent book The Iron Cage.

Yesterday, Jeff Gillan of NewsONE in Nevada asked Sen. John Ensign (R-NV), the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, if Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was “qualified to be President.” Ensign responded by saying that he didn’t think Palin was “experienced enough to be president“:

GILLAN: do you think she’s qualified to be President?

ENSIGN: well, I do not think that Barack Obama or her are experienced enough to be President of the United States – neither one of them, and Hillary Clinton was much more qualified to be President than Barack Obama was, but that who the nominee is. John McCain is much more qualified than Barack Obama and certainly Joe Biden is much more qualified than Sarah Palin is. I’d rather have the most qualified person at the top of the ticket, not number two.

Watch it:

Ensign is only the most recent conservative to challenge Palin’s qualifications for office. Just yesterday, former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, who is a top McCain supporter, said that Palin was not “prepared to take over the reins of the presidency.” Here are some conservatives who doubt Palin:

– In a recent New Yorker interview, Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) said, “I don’t believe she’s qualified to be President of the United States.” Palin “is arguably the thinnest-résumé candidate for Vice-President in the history of America,” added Hagel.

– On Meet the Press two weeks ago, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, said, “I don’t believe she’s ready to be president of the United States.”

– In an interview with CNN earlier this month, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney stuttered and hesitated when asked if Palin is “ready to be President.” “That’s something which I — I believe the American people will, uh, assess individually,” said Romney.

– Last week, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), who is one of McCain’s most ardent supporters, declared, “Thank God, she’s not gonna have to be president from day one.”

McCain, however, disagrees. He told Don Imus recently that Palin is “the most qualified of anyone recently who has run for vice president to tell you the truth.”

UPDATE: Secretary Eagleburger appeared on Fox News today to recant his statements from yesterday when he said “of course” Palin’s not ready to be Vice President. “I made a serious mistake yesterday,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking when I said it. … I was just plain stupid, and if I have given the flim flam artist Barack Obama some success with this, I am deeply apologetic. I did not intend it.” Watch it:

Last night, convicted felon Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) faced Anchorage mayor and Senate candidate Mark Begich in their last debate before Tuesday’s election. During the debate, Stevens twice insisted that he had “not been convicted of anything” — though, of course, he was found guilty of all seven counts of making false statements on his Senate disclosure forms.

Waving away his conviction wasn’t Stevens’ only bizarre moment in the debate. Discussing Iraq, Stevens insisted that Saddam Hussein had played a role in the 9/11 attacks:

MODERATOR: Knowing what you know now, do you think that the country of Iraq and Saddam Hussein played a role in the 9/11 attack on the United States?

STEVENS: I know more than you think I know, and I believe they did.

BEGICH: I don’t believe they did.

Perhaps Stevens is taking a cue from Cheney in doubling down on insisting a link existed between Iraq and 9/11. He wants Alaskans to believe he knows something they don’t, but it’s Stevens whose facts are wrong:

– The Sept. 11 commission found no “collaborative relationship” between Iraq and al Qaeda and said there was “no cooperation” between the two. [6/17/04]

– A Senate Intelligence Committee report found that Saddam Hussein issued a general order that Iraq should not deal with al Qaeda, and found that the Iraqi regime never attempted to facilitate a relationship with bin Ladin. [9/10/06]

– A Pentagon report looking into ties between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and al Qaeda showed no connection between the two, after reviewing 600,000 Iraqi documents. [3/13/08]

What’s more, the White House knew that its repeated claims of collaboration between Iraq and al Qaeda were unfounded. A recent book by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind claimed that, after the Iraq war began, the White House ordered the CIA to forge a “backdated, handwritten letter” from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein, in an attempt to tie Hussein to the 9/11 attacks.

UPDATE: Watch video of Stevens’ comments here:

In one of the more shameful episodes in the recent history of campaign flackery, Team McCain sent its blogger/spokesperson Mike Goldfarb out to shovel dirt at Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi. After casually conceding that Khalidi received almost half a million dollars from the International Republican Institute back when it was headed by John McCain, Goldfarb proceeds to smear Khalidi as “unsavory” and an “anti-Semite” based on the fact that Khalidi happens to be an American of Palestinian descent and a critic of Israel’s policy of occupation and settlement in the West Bank.

Watch it:

New York University professor Barnett Rubin comes to Khalidi’s defense:

I actually find it demeaning, insulting, and depressing to have to defend Rashid. I could say, I know him, he has been a guest in my home in New York and in my rented house in Provence, he bears absolutely no resemblance to the image these despicable people are trying to project of him, and lot’s more. I could point out that I am Jewish and have VISIBLE JEWISH ARTIFACTS IN MY HOME, which did not appear to alarm Rashid, if he even noticed them, but it is all just so ridiculous I don’t know what to say.

I don’t want to treat these charges with the respect of a refutation. I just want to express my disgust with those who uttered them and my solidarity with my friend, Rashid Khalidi.

Scott Horton also speaks up for Khalidi:

Rashid Khalidi is an American academic of extraordinary ability and sharp insights. He is also deeply committed to stemming violence in the Middle East, promoting a culture that embraces human rights as a fundamental notion, and building democratic societies… He sees education and civic activism as the path to success, and he argues that pervasive military interventionism has historically undermined the Middle East and will continue to do so. Khalidi has also been one of the most articulate critics of the PLO and the Palestinian Authority—calling them repeatedly on their anti-democratic tendencies and their betrayals of their own principles.

A few years ago, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz “offered a large monetary award (payable to the PLO) for anyone who could actually come up with a quote by a prominent pro-Israeli writer who equated mere criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.” Given that Goldfarb is a former writer-editor for a prominent conservative magazine, I think Dershowitz owes the PLO some money.

Our guest blogger is David Sullivan, a research associate at the ENOUGH project.

What distinguishes the recent coordinated car-bombings across northern Somalia from the steady stream of bad news to which we have become accustomed coming out of this part of the world? Is this any worse than the civil war, occupation, rendition, targeted assassinations, mass displacement, and epidemic of piracy that have occurred since the United States supported Ethiopia’s intervention in Somalia in December 2006?

Unfortunately, it is. The location, targets, and tactics employed in yesterday’s tragedy suggest a dramatic turn for the worse in Somalia. Diplomats, humanitarians, and security professionals must urgently reexamine the policy missteps behind this crisis.

Some important details to consider:

Location – The attacks took place in Somaliland and Puntland, autonomous regions that have functioning civil administrations and have largely been spared from the worsening insecurity and violence in Mogadishu and south-central Somalia. The self-declared independent state of Somaliland had until now provided refuge both to refugees fleeing the effects of the insurgency in the south and international aid workers for whom the rest of the country had become too insecure. This expansion of the battlefield may rapidly destabilize the rest of the Horn of Africa.

Targets – The bombings targeted government officials, the Ethiopian mission in Hargeisa, and the headquarters of the United Nations Development Program in Somaliland. This effectively paints these diverse actors with one brush as elements of an occupation approved by the United States and implemented by Ethiopia. The attack on UNDP threatens to cut off international access to 3.5 million Somalis in need of humanitarian assistance. The targeting of aid workers, an alarming trend that has picked up alarming pace lately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Sudan, continues.

Tactics – The use of highly coordinated large scale suicide attacks against high profile international targets illustrates the spread of Al Qaeda inspired technology and tactics from Iraq and Afghanistan to east Africa. This follows the pattern set by improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and suicide attacks, all of which used to be quite rare in Somalia.

The blowback from the Bush Administration’s narrow fixation on certain counterterrorism priorities in Somalia continues. In March 2008 the United States designated the Somali Islamist militant group the Shabab as a terrorist organization, a designation that offered little advantage to U.S. goals in the region but did inflame anti-American views in Somalia. That designation, and the subsequent killing of a Shabab leader with a Tomahawk missile strike, precipitated the Shabab’s decision to widen its targets to include anyone associated with the West. Yesterday’s bombings demonstrate the consequences of this decision are actively worsening.

A wholesale reexamination of U.S. policy could change these dynamics, and create a fresh opportunity to align U.S. interests with those of the Somali people. Unfortunately, time is not on our side.

Partly as a result of the U.S. raid into Syria last weekend, the Iraqi government has decided to reopen negotiations on the U.S.-Iraqi status of forces agreement:

The call for changes in the proposed accord came as the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki criticized an attack by Iraq-based U.S. forces on alleged al-Qaeda operatives inside Syria last weekend. The cabinet now wants the agreement to include language to “confirm that Iraqi land would not be the center for aggression” against its neighbors, said Planning Minister Ali Baban, who attended Tuesday’s meeting.

Ministers also want the pact to grant Iraq more legal authority over U.S. soldiers accused of crimes, to harden a tentative 2011 departure date for U.S. troops and to allow Iraqi inspection of U.S. military shipments. The inspection demand, along with an explicit ban on attacks on neighboring countries, reflects concerns that the United States might launch an attack on Iran from Iraqi territory.

Bush administration officials have said repeatedly that the current text of the document, concluded just weeks ago after nearly eight months of difficult negotiations, reflects the limit of U.S. concessions.

Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh “said the Iraqis want the right to declare the agreement null and void if the U.S. unilaterally attacks one of Iraq’s neighbors.”

Iraq’s Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani that he has also indicated fresh concerns with the agreement:

A statement issued by al-Sistani’s office said the Iranian-born cleric wants to ensure that “Iraq’s sovereignty not be breached” by the accord and that he was monitoring the situation “until the final content of the security agreement becomes clear.”

It’s unclear whether Sistani’s displeasure with a pact that he had previously signed off on is the result of the U.S. action in Syria, but it doesn’t seem unlikely.

Praising the Syria strike, Eli Lake declares that “we have entered a new phase in the war on terror.” Read more

Michael Rubin snipes at Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi from the Corner:

Since Rashid Khalidi has, by his close friendship to Senator Obama, returned to prominence, it may be worth revisiting the quality of Khalidi’s scholarship and how he subordinates scholarly integrity to polemic.[...]

Khalidi’s influence upon Obama might subordinate basic human rights to the virulent form of Arab nationalism that led to the Anfal.

First, Khalidi hasn’t “returned to prominence,” he is prominent by virtue of being one of the leading Middle East scholars in the United States.

Second, the idea that Rubin would accuse anyone of “subordinat[ing] scholarly integrity to polemic” is pretty funny, given that Rubin himself formerly worked in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, helping Doug Feith shape dubiously-sourced intelligence into dishonest arguments for a disastrous war, and now edits the Middle East Quarterly, helping right-wing polemicist Daniel Pipes warn Americans about the Islamic terrorists lurking underneath their beds.

Third, Rubin’s lazy and baseless slander of Khalidi — suggesting that Khalidi somehow espouses an ideology sympathetic to Saddam Hussein’s 1986-89 genocide against the Kurds — is really contemptible, degenerate stuff. (Those kinds of unsubstantiated insinuations might have flown in Feith’s shop, pal, but not out here in the world.) In reality, Khalidi is a big supporter of human rights. The real problem, at least as Rubin and assorted Corner nuts are concerned, is that Khalidi is also a supporter of human rights for Palestinians.

I understand Rubin’s hostility toward Khalidi, though. Rashid Khalidi is a highly regarded academic whose work is taken seriously, whereas Michael Rubin is a second-tier neocon hack known for having served as one of Doug Feith’s oompa-loompas. That’s got to sting a little.

Robert Kagan, a leading member of John McCain’s war cabinet, recently gave an interview to Der Spiegel in which he was asked about the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq:

SPIEGEL: Isn’t it true that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld took advantage of the outrage over the 9/11 terrorist attacks to strike Iraq? Is it even possible anymore to deny that the war was based on manipulation, exaggeration and flat-out lies?

Kagan: That’s absurd.

SPIEGEL: It’s a commonly held view…

Kagan: The Bush administration’s intelligence on Iraq was the same as the Clinton administration’s, the German government’s and the French government’s before the war. We now know that Saddam wanted the world to believe he had weapons of mass destruction — and the world did. [...]

In retrospect, we have to admit that Washington could have waited a while longer. That’s a different question. But I think it’s about time we moved beyond this silly conversation and these absurd conspiracy theories.

This is ridiculous. It is now simply no longer a matter of serious dispute that the Bush administration manipulated, exaggerated and lied about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s regime in order to build public support for an invasion. It’s fine to argue that the Bush administration’s intelligence on Iraq was the same as the Clinton administration’s, the German government’s and the French government’s, but the much more relevant point is that the Clinton administration, the German government and the French government didn’t spin that intelligence into a justification to attempt to reorder the Middle East.

As the decision to invade Iraq will continue to produce numerous unintended consequences that future American leaders will have to face, the manner in which that decision was taken and sold to the American people will continue to be relevant. We can “move beyond this silly conversation” when people like Robert Kagan cease pretending that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Feith, et al were arguing in good faith about the need to invade Iraq, and stop dismissing the overwhelming evidence of their dishonesty as “conspiracy theories.”

Recently, Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) said that if Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) is elected, there will be “an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.” He followed up his comment by saying that Obama will rise to the occasion, because he has “steel in his spine.” Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) quickly jumped on the first part of Biden’s comments, declaring that the fact that Obama may be tested is actually a sign of weakness:

“I’m gonna test them,” Republican John McCain said at a campaign rally in New Mexico this morning. “They’re not gonna test me.”

Increasingly, national security experts are disavowing McCain’s comments. They agree that an international crisis confronting the next president is not a sign of weakness, but rather a very likely occurrence no matter if Obama or McCain wins:

– “I think the enemy could well take advantage” of the transfer of power in Washington, said the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, who launched preparations for the transition months ago

– Veteran Pentagon consultant Michael Bayer, chairman of the Defense Business Board, told his fellow panelists that the new president’s inner circle should “set aside time in transition to identify the planning, gravitas and interagency process necessary to respond to a likely first-270-day crisis.”

– Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff says the federal government is monitoring “dozens” of potential terrorists in the U.S. … Chertoff says there is a risk that some would see opportunity during the transition between administrations.

– In its Administration Transition Task Force Report issued early this year, DHS’s Homeland Security Advisory Council placed the peak threat period from 30 days prior to the change in administrations, to six months after.

In June, even close McCain confidante Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) predicted that “our enemies will test the new president early.” As all these experts pointed out, preventing such an attack from being catastrophic requires extensive planning and preparation. So far, McCain has dismissed talk of transition planning, and it doesn’t appear that he has prepared anything except tough rhetoric.

Last week, two prominent Shia ayatollahs issued religious decrees (fatwas) regarding the proposed status of forces agreement between the U.S. and Iraq.

On October 21, Lebanon’s Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah criticized the security pact, saying “the Baghdad government has no right to ‘legitimize’ the presence of foreign troops,” and that any agreement should call for an unconditional withdrawal of U.S. forces:

Fadlallah’s edict came in response to questions by some Shiite members of Iraq’s parliament who asked the cleric to give his opinion about the proposed security pact. [...]

“No authority, establishment or an official or nonofficial organization has the legitimacy to impose occupation on its people, legitimize it or extend its stay in Iraq,” Fadlallah said in the edict released by his office.

Fadlallah was one of the founders of the Dawa Party in Najaf in 1957, along with his mentor Muhammad Baqr al-Sadr, a relative of Muqtada’s. Fadlallah also helped found Hizballah in Lebanon.

Fadlallah is the marja al-taqlid (source of emulation) for many in the Dawa — including Maliki — which means that they have chosen Fadlallah as a spiritual guide and committed to following his guidance in regard to correct religious practice. This, in and of itself, makes the SOFA in its current form basically a dead letter. Read more

Our guest blogger is Natalie Ondiak, a Research Associate at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

The humanitarian situation for Iraqis is dire. Since 2003, about 5 million Iraqis have been displaced: more than 2 million of these Iraqis are refugees, the majority of whom are in the region and 2.8 million are internally displaced persons. This number of displaced Iraqis represents nearly one-fifth of the entire Iraqi population. This past weekend, 13,000 Iraqis Christians in Mosul fled their homes after several weeks of violence and intimidation and were forced to seek sanctuary in neighboring areas and, in some cases, Syria.

On September 30th, the State Department announced that 13, 823 Iraqi refugees had been resettled in the US in fiscal year 2008, exceeding their 12,000 person goal. While this suggests a concerted effort by policy makers to take action to help Iraqis, the 13,823 number is not sufficient. The US has been shirking its responsibility in the face of a displacement crisis in Iraq. The number of Iraqi refugees offered US resettlement has been woefully low. Between March 2003 and 2007, the US resettled fewer than 8000 Iraqi refugees. The State Department missed its resettlement figure targets in both 2006 and 2007. In 2007, the modest Iraqi resettlement target was 5000 people, but the US resettled only 1,608 Iraqis.

The February 2006 bombing of the al-Askari Mosque in Samarra marked the beginning of an increase in sectarian violence. As the conflict has devolved into a civil war, displacement has rapidly increased. In addition to violence and insecurity, the economic situation in Iraq has continued to deteriorate. Indeed, standards of living are below what they were prior to the war and unemployment is rampant.

The majority of displaced Iraqis since 2003 have ended up in nearby countries in the region. Syria and Jordan host the most Iraq refugees — about 1.5 million between them. However, many Middle Eastern countries are also hosting large numbers of Iraqis: Read more

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

In a statement reminiscent of the “first art critic” scene in Mel Brooks’ History of the World, Part 1, the civilian head of the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command Michael Vickers today soundly rejected a core idea put forth by John McCain for meeting the threats posed by global terrorist groups.

John McCain has called for the creation of a new espionage agency patterned on the Office of Strategic Services, a World War II-era agency that conducted operations behind enemy lines.

Speaking at an event (pdf) at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Assistant Secretary of Defense Vickers, one of the most important figures in the Bush administration’s efforts to address global terrorism, criticized McCain’s proposal, essentially saying it would be a big waste of time while “we’re at war.” Vickers stated his view clearly: “We have the institutions we need.”

McCain has advocated for his new OSS in speeches, and in his Foreign Affairs essay last year. He insists such a new agency “could take risks that our bureaucracies today are afraid to take.”

A cadre of such undercover operatives would allow us to gain the intelligence on terrorist activities that we don’t get today from our high-tech surveillance systems and from a CIA clandestine service that works almost entirely out of our embassies abroad.

McCain national security advisor Randy Scheunemann reiterated McCain’s support of the idea, telling the Washington Times that “while there may be some that think the status quo is just fine, John McCain has seen past failures of the intelligence community firsthand.”

But just as McCain’s half-baked League of Democracies idea is criticized by democracy promotion experts, intelligence and counter-terrorism experts have rejected McCain’s OSS idea as a structural solution. Robert Grenier, a former CIA official, criticized the idea, saying “as so many have before him, Senator McCain is trying to use a structural fix to solve what is fundamentally a leadership problem… To suggest that we could eliminate that by creating a new organization to pull all those elements together is completely unrealistic and in the short term would be enormously destructive.”

This flat-out rejection of a core McCain idea by a top defense and counter-terrorism official in the Bush administration exposes the emptiness of McCain’s national security proposals, something that frankly hasn’t gotten enough scrutiny from the media. John McCain might bluster that he would “follow Bin Laden to the gates of hell,” but his main idea on terrorism is simply to move some bureaucratic boxes around unnecessarily.

Transcript below: Read more

Former Bush administration official Peter Wehner’s latest paean to the Iraq surge contains a lot of what we’ve seen before, but then steps seriously wrong.

Befitting the legacy of Commentary magazine’s longtime editor Norman Podhoretz, Wehner is less concerned with actually considering the practical implications of the moralistic national security policies he champions than he is with wielding that moralism as a bludgeon against his political enemies. Consequently, you will find no mention in Wehner’s article of the tens of thousands of Iraqis who have been killed and maimed as a result of the glorious war that Wehner supported and shilled for. No reference to the cleansing and displacement of more than 4 million Iraqis as a result of the invasion and occupation that he continues to insist, in stone defiance of overwhelming, if not conclusive evidence to the contrary, is a foreign policy success. And certainly nothing of the jihadists who are now returning home — better trained, and more deeply indoctrinated — from the front that Wehner would have us believe represents a victory against global jihadism.

Wehner’s purpose is not to consider the Iraq war’s effects on America’s overall national security, but to hail the surge. But even here he stumbles. His assertion that violence in Iraq has returned to almost “normal” levels is accompanied by an unintentionally ironic footnote, which informs us that “‘security incidents’ in Iraq are at levels not seen since early 2004.” Speaking at the Heritage Foundation earlier this month, General David Petraeus noted that attacks had decreased from a high of 180 per day in 2007 to 25 per day. 25 is better than 180, certainly, and our commanders and soldiers deserve recognition for that. But 25 terrorist attacks a day is not normalcy.

Obscuring that point is all in a day’s work for a partisan propagandist like Wehner. It’s part of his job to spin the winning of twenty dollars after the loss of a thousand as proof of George W. Bush’s poker acumen.

But Wehner also writes something that I think requires special attention. Read more

Debating the Israeli-Palestinian peace process — or lack of one — with Daniel Levy, David Frum makes a pretty interesting assertion, referring to the West Bank as “the Palestinian areas of Israel.”

Watch it:

The West Bank is considered occupied territory under international law. Levy rightly challenges Frum on this point, suggesting that if these are “the Palestinian areas of Israel” then the simple answer is to “just give the Palestinians the vote.” Frum says simply “no, they can’t have that.” Frum’s stammering response to Levy’s point that denying Palestinians equal rights within Israel would resemble apartheid is pretty typical of neocons when asked to consider the practical implications of the Israeli policies which they support. That is, they won’t.

It feels silly even to have to point this out, but setting up a series of loosely connected Palestinian “zones” within the context of a consolidated and permanentized Israeli military occupation, surrounded by constantly expanding Israeli settlements — which is actually the plan of current front runner for Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu — is neither a sustainable nor remotely just solution to this conflict.

But such is the nature of the debate in the U.S. that prominent conservatives can radically contravene decades of settled international law and U.S. policy, can publicly advocate corralling an ethnic population within a series of cantons — or, in the case of Mike Huckabee, transferring them out of their homeland — and people only get upset when someone compares this to apartheid.

Read more

Today on Fox News, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) denied that the America’s standing in the world has fallen under President Bush. He insisted that world opinion of the United States is as strong as ever, though he admitted that other countries “naturally” experience “jealousy” of America:

HATCH: There’s a lot of jealousy of the United States, especially in Europe, and France in particular and some of the other nations as well. So naturally they’re constantly poking holes at the United States. … Yeah there’s some irritation with the United States but mainly it’s because we’re so powerful and strong militarily and economically and otherwise.

Watch it:

Other countries aren’t jealous; they’re fed up with the cowboy presidency of George Bush. A 2007 Pew study found that “[d]istrust of the United States has intensified across the world,” with anti-Americanism deepening since 2002, especially “among America’s European allies.” In a 2008 Readers Digest poll of residents of 16 countries, only five reported higher percentages of those calling themselves “pro-American government” than those “anti-American government.”

Just five days ago, European newspapers and researchers published a study clearly documenting how damaging the Bush presidency has been to the world’s opinion of the United States:

Hatch seems oblivious to how Bush’s policies have dramatically weakened the U.S. military and helped cause the financial collapse of America’s economy.

Listening to Team McCain’s press call reacting to today’s Washington Post’s story about a pro-McCain posting on an Al Qaeda-affiliated website, I think Attackerman is right. Panicked is an understatement.

The Post reported:

Al-Qaeda is watching the U.S. stock market’s downward slide with something akin to jubilation, with its leaders hailing the financial crisis as a vindication of its strategy of crippling America’s economy through endless, costly foreign wars against Islamist insurgents.

And at least some of its supporters think Sen. John McCain is the presidential candidate best suited to continue that trend.

“Al-Qaeda will have to support McCain in the coming election,” said a commentary posted Monday on the extremist Web site al-Hesbah, which is closely linked to the terrorist group. It said the Arizona Republican would continue the “failing march of his predecessor,” President Bush.

Scheunemann responded that “while these jihadists are posting gleefully about the financial crisis, the Post barely found time to mention that it’s only Senator Obama [who has] said for financial reasons we need to withdraw from Iraq. John McCain will spend what it takes to win, in Afghanistan and in Iraq.”

Earth to Randy: Drawing the United States into interminable military conflicts in the Muslim world is part of bin Laden’s stated strategy.

Woolsey wasn’t having it, insisting that “it is ridiculous to believe that in its heart of hearts, Al Qaeda wants John McCain to be president. It’s ludicrous.”

If one takes one individual Islamist blogger from one terrorist Islamist blog who has come up with this statement, that it would be good to have McCain in the White House, I think one has to consider the motives. This individual knows that the endorsement of people like him is a kiss of death, figuratively and literally. So it seems to me pretty clear that by making this statement that it would be a good thing for John McCain to be president he is clearly trying to damage McCain, not speaking from his heart. So I must say the overall structure of the debate as one analyzes it this story taken at face value is quite remarkable.

It’s funny how this sort of reverse-psychological strategery applies only when extremists endorse conservatives.

Asked whether Al Qaeda was actually in Iraq before the invasion, Woolsey said that anyone “would be hard put to argue that there was no connection of any kind in a general way between Al Qaeda and the Ba’athist regime.” No, but of course it would be quite easy to argue that there was no substantive cooperative relationship between Al Qaeda and the Ba’athist regime.

As to the question of whether the invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped Al Qaeda, Woolsey only admitted — presumably with a straight face — that “as a result of the way the Bush administration fought the war certainly a lot of hostility has built up to the United States.” Because the manner which we bombed, invaded and occupied their country was just too intrusive, I suppose.

What was most striking to me is the way McCain advisers James Woolsey and Randy Scheunemann simply refused to accept or even seriously address the idea that policies supported by John McCain could have possibly benefited Al Qaeda. The press call was intended to beat back the idea that Al Qaeda might prefer the policies of John McCain, but I think Woolsey and Schuenemann only succeeded in reinforcing why that could be.

Yglesias, Eric Martin, and Democracy Arsenal have more.

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

Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani is now placing robocalls attacking Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) on the grounds that Obama “opposes mandatory minimum sentences.” If Giuliani took his own record in New York seriously, he would be attacking Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) for McCain’s record of fighting funding to put police officers on the street.

Giuliani has always taken credit for his leadership of New York City during a massive crime drop. And the truth is, he deserves some credit—but not for mandatory minimums. New York’s famous mandatory minimums, the Rockefeller drug laws, date back to 1973.

More important, it’s hard to credit those laws with causing a crime drop two decades later. Other cities, with laws just as tough, didn’t see the crime reductions of New York in the Nineties. Since Giuliani left office, crime has dropped even further, even though the Rockefeller laws were softened. That, by the way, was thanks to Republican George Pataki. These days, the willingness to cut back on mandatory minimums extends to still other softies, like Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT).

As discussed here, and developed in more detail here, two far more important reasons that crime dropped so fast under Giuliani were that (a) the police force in NYC grew twice as quickly as in other big cities, and (b) Giuliani deployed those cops in a smarter fashion. Unfortunately, McCain voted to kill the Clinton program that helped pay for Giuliani’s expansion of the police. And, while that program has since helped other departments to adopt New York’s smart policing tactics, McCain has opposed those efforts too.

Not that these calls are really about policy.

Today, the Washington Post published statements posted on al-Hesbah, an extremist website with ties to al Qaeda, which declared the terrorist group “will have to support McCain in the coming election.” The site said if al Qaeda wants to exhaust the United States militarily and economically, “impetuous” McCain is the better choice because he is more likely to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The McCain campaign swiftly disavowed the statements, arranging a conference call with top national security advisers Randy Scheunemann and James Woolsey. Woolsey declared that the post was not an endorsement but was in fact clearly intended to boost McCain’s opponent, by providing a “kiss of death” to McCain’s campaign:

WOOLSEY: This individual knows that the endorsement of people like him is a kiss of death, figuratively and literally. So it seems to me it’s pretty clear that, by making this statement, that he wants — it would be a good thing for McCain to be president, he’s clearly trying to damage John McCain, not speaking from his heart.

However, just minutes earlier in the call, Scheunemann went through a laundry list of “bad guys” who support Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL), cited dubious quotes from Hamas, Iranian President Ahmadinejad, and Muammar al-Gaddafi of Libya. In fact, the McCain campaign pounced on Hamas’s endorsement of Obama in March. “If Senator Obama is favored by Hamas, I think people can make judgments accordingly,” McCain declared ominously.

When a reporter pointed out the contradiction, Woolsey replied that the difference was that McCain’s endorsement came from “simply an individual blogger,” saying that this extremist’s true concern about a McCain presidency “seems very clear to me, frankly.” So when a terrorist supports McCain, it’s a head fake, but when one supports Obama it’s a legitimate issue voters should “make judgments” on?

Shortly after Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) chose Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) as his running mate, Palin said she is not one to attribute global warming to being man-made. Since then, she has walked that statement back slightly, saying that indeed, man’s activities have contributed to climate change but adding the caveat that “weather patterns are cyclical.”

When asked to name some specific man-made causes of global warming yesterday during an interview with a local NBC affiliate in Las Vegas, Palin couldn’t name one, and instead reverted back to her new talking point that it doesn’t really matter:

Q: I’ve also heard you hint that you do think there might be some man-made causes that are contributing to this. Can you describe what those are?

PALIN: Right, well what I have said about this is really the debate at some point, had better shift to, no matter the cause, whether it all be attributed to man’s activities or just the natural cycle of climate changes in our earth’s history. We have seen this before.

Watch it:

Seeing that conservatives are touting Palin as an “energy expert,” and McCain has said that she “knows more about energy than probably anyone else” in the country, Palin could have — at the very least — cited increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Of course, there is an overwhelming scientific consensus that global warming is made-made and that the main contributing factor is the burning of fossil fuels.

In fact, not only has Palin encouraged energy policies that focus on increased fossil fuel consumption, but the AP reported this week that “[f]aced with choosing between development and the environment” as governor of Alaska, she “has sided more often than not with business interests”:

She started a committee to address global warming. But with oil companies contributing the largest percentage of the state’s greenhouse gases, her committee set no goal for reducing emissions. Unlike other states, Alaska’s climate change priority is focused on ways to adapt to warmer temperatures.

Regardless, Palin’s cluelessness on global warming is perhaps what led Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) to observe that “[i]f you don’t understand what the cause is, it’s virtually impossible to come up with a solution.”

Transcript: Read more

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

It is ironic that, in their USA Today article entitled “How to Finish in Iraq,” authors Ann Gildroy and Michael O’Hanlon never actually tell us how to finish in Iraq.

The first and perhaps most glaring error in the op-ed is the authors’ assertion of equivalence between support for the Iraq invasion and support for the surge, when in fact the latter was simply an effort to ameliorate some of the worst consequences of the former -– making up for past mistakes and lost time.

The authors write:

War critics often claim that despite other progress, Sunni-Shiite reconciliation is unworkable, underscoring the failure of U.S. strategy. The actual situation is much more complicated and more promising, if also still fraught with danger.

This misses an important point. It’s not that reconciliation among Iraqis is unworkable, period.

Rather, it is unworkable so long as the US maintains a military presence that prevents competing Iraqi factions from testing the limits of their power and work out power-sharing deals on their own terms — as we argued in our September report, Iraq’s Political Transition After the Surge.

If we took Gildroy and O’Hanlon’s advice, the US would remain stuck in a balancing role in some of Iraq’s internal conflicts (I say some because conventional analysis on Iraq tends to overstate the impact of US troops — we are not meaningfully present in many parts of the country like Diyala or most of the key southern provinces).

So the authors really never tell us “how to finish,” they simply tell us how to continue what we have been doing for years now — treading water and deluding ourselves that a continued over-investment of national security resources is necessary to keep America safe and give Iraqis a chance to determine their own futures. The exact opposite is the case.

The real question is when our country will decide to let go of these delusions.