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

On the new White House issues website on Iraq, President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden state that “Any SOFA [status of forces agreement] should be subject to Congressional review to ensure it has bipartisan support here at home.” We agree with the new administration’s general sentiment goals of consultation, but – as we’ve pointed out earlier – the SOFA contains passages that may contain a defense commitment and necessitate full-blown Congressional approval.

For instance, the SOFA text states:

In the event of any external or internal threat or aggression against Iraq that would violate its sovereignty, political independence, or territorial integrity, waters, airspace, its democratic system or its elected institutions, and upon request by the Government of Iraq, the Parties shall immediately initiate strategic deliberations and, as may be mutually agreed, the United States shall take appropriate measures, including diplomatic, economic, or military measures, or any other measure, to deter such a threat.

When determining whether this passage constitutes a commitment to defend Iraq, the Obama administration should consult a piece of unpassed legislation -– the Iraq Security Agreement Act of 2008 (S.3433) -– that Joe Biden introduced in the Senate last August prior to his selection as President Obama’s running mate. Introduced with the support Senators Bob Casey (D-PA), George Voinovich (R-OH), Jim Webb (D-VA), and the now-retired Chuck Hagel (R-NE), the goal of Biden’s bill was “to ensure that any agreement with Iraq containing a security commitment or arrangement is concluded as a treaty or is approved by Congress.”

Biden and his co-sponsors defined a security commitment as “an obligation, binding under international law, of the United States to act in the common defense in the event of an armed attack on that country.” Similarly, a security arrangement was defined as “a pledge by the United States to take some action in the event of a threat to that country’s security. Security arrangements typically oblige the United States to consult with a country in the event of a threat to its security.”

Biden and company’s definition of a security arrangement is eerily similar to the language contained in the SOFA, and should therefore, under the new vice president’s standards, be subject to some form of Congressional approval -– even if the SOFA doesn’t rise to the level of an official treaty between Iraq and the United States.

President Obama should follow his vice president’s earlier advice and seek Congressional approval for the SOFA. Doing so would help repair the institutional relationship on foreign policy between the executive and legislative branches that has been badly damaged over the last eight years. Sending the SOFA to Congress would send a message that President Obama takes this relationship seriously and means to make it work.

Equally important would be the message a Congressional SOFA approval would send to Iraqis. While the Iraqi parliament has already approved the SOFA, it remains subject to a popular referendum this July. With many Iraqis skeptical that the U.S. will fulfill its end of the SOFA bargain -– withdrawing troops from Iraqi cities by the end of June, and then from the country altogether by the end of 2011 -– Congressional approval of the SOFA may help send a signal that the United States is committed to following both the spirit and letter of the agreement.

Boeing and Lockheed Martin have been “pouring money into a publicity campaign” and stepping up congressional lobbying efforts to maintain funding for the Air Force’s F-22 Raptor.

Their efforts appear to be paying off. 200 members of the House and 44 members of the Senate have signed letters to President Obama urging him to extend the $62 billion F-22 Raptor program. Currently, the Air Force has funds to purchase 183 of the stealth aircraft, “but the letter says, ‘We are convinced that this number is insufficient to meet potential threats.’” The members write further that the jobs at stake make the program, as Matthew Yglesias recently paraphrased, “too big to fail”:

The F-22 program annually provides over $12 billion of economic activity to the national economy. … If this certification is not provided, layoffs will begin as this critical supplier base shuts down. … Over 25,000 Americans work for the 1,000+ suppliers in 44 states that manufacture the F-22. Moreover, it is estimated that another 70,000 additional Americans indirectly owe their jobs to this program.

Despite the Congressional appeals, continuing the F-22 program is not in the interest of U.S. national security. The Pentagon recently announced that they would need $8 billion to upgrade 100 F-22′s which are already in use. The aircraft is “proving very expensive to operate .. and it is complex to maintain,” the Pentagon explained. The aircraft’s readiness rate fell to 62 percent last year, which the Pentagon called “unsatisfactory.” Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Larry Korb summarized the arguments against the F-22 in a column in 2005:

The F/A-22 Raptor is the most unnecessary weapon system being built by the Pentagon. In fact, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld tried to do away with it in the summer of 2002 but backed off when his Air Force secretary threatened to resign over the issue. It was originally designed to achieve air superiority over Soviet fighter jets, which will never be built. … Over the last 20 years, the cost of the total program has continued to grow even as the number of planes to be purchased has declined.

If members of Congress are truly concerned with preserving American jobs, they should look elsewhere. Indeed, committing further funds to the F-22 program would divert scarce government dollars away from more economically beneficial forms of government spending.

As the Center for Economic and Policy Research found in 2007, “increased levels of military spending leads to fewer jobs and slower economic growth.” CEPR’s Dean Baker explained, “most economic models show that military spending diverts resources from productive uses, such as consumption and investment, and ultimately slows economic growth and reduces employment.”

Today, President Barack Obama’s nominee for Treasury Secretary — president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Timothy Geithner — went before the Senate Finance committee for his confirmation hearing. Geithner “faces a grilling in Congress” after reports surfaced that he failed to pay self-employment taxes on his 2001-2004 returns while working at the International Monetary Fund.

At the hearing, Geithner wasted no time in addressing the controversy about his missed taxes. He said his mistakes were careless and avoidable but “completely unintentional.” He apologized to the committee, saying, “I should have been more careful.”

The right wing has been pushing Senate conservatives to block Geithner’s confirmation due to the tax mix-up:

Michelle Malkin: Will any GOP Senator stand up to failout bailout serial tax evader Tim Geithner, or will they all do the lemming dance now and whine about how nobody could see his shortcomings later?

Newt Gingrich: Senate Republicans should make it clear that they will not permit a tax evader to become the secretary of the Treasury.

But when it came to predicting the economic crisis, Geithner has been much more prescient than the man he has been tapped to succeed, Henry Paulson.

In June 2006, the Senate confirmed Paulson with a simple voice vote. Paulson was called “a very strong choice” and “the right man at the right time” by lawmakers.

Paulson’s tenure was a disaster, and throughout the current economic crisis, he consistently maintained that the financial system was “safe and sound.” Geithner, meanwhile, was warning that financial innovation and a weak housing market were threatening to topple the economy. The Wonk Room has assembled a timeline comparing Geithner’s cautionary statements with Paulson’s public insistence that everything was fine. Here is an example:

Geithner: Financial innovation is creating systemic risk.

There are aspects of the latest changes in financial innovation that could increase systemic risk…The complexity of many new instruments and the relative immaturity of the various approaches used to measure the risks in those exposures magnify the uncertainty involved. [Speech at the Global Association of Risk Professionals 7th Annual Risk Management Convention & Exhibition in New York City, 2/28/06]

Paulson: The world economy is stronger than I have ever seen it.

We are fortunate to face our long-term challenges from a position of strength. As a participant in financial markets for more than thirty years, I say with confidence that over the last couple of years, the world economy has been stronger than I have ever seen it. [Speech at CBI National Conference, 11/28/06]

Read the entire report here.

Cross-posted at The Wonk Room.

A few words about Peter Beinart’s latest argument for liberals adopting conservative national security talking points. Perhaps out of a charitable desire to grant the outgoing president a single victory, or in a cynical ploy to reestablish some of that good old liberal hawk “seriousness,” Peter Beinart exhorts Democrats to admit that “President Bush was right about the surge.”

Is the surge solely responsible for the turnaround? Of course not. Al-Qaeda alienated the Sunni tribes; Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army decided to stand down; the United States assassinated key insurgent and militia leaders, all of which mattered as much if not more than the increase in U.S. troops. And the decline in violence isn’t necessarily permanent. Iraq watchers warn that communal distrust remains high; if someone strikes a match, civil war could again rage out of control.

Moreover, even if the calm endures, that still doesn’t justify the Bush administration’s initial decision to go to war, which remains one of the great blunders in American foreign policy history. But if Iraq overall represents a massive stain on Bush’s record, his decision to increase America’s troop presence in late 2006 now looks like his finest hour. Given the mood in Washington and the country as a whole, it would have been far easier to do the opposite. Politically, Bush took the path of most resistance. He endured an avalanche of scorn, and now he has been vindicated. He was not only right; he was courageous.

I think it’s clear, and been pretty widely recognized, that the addition of 30,000 troops and the implementation of a new counterinsurgency strategy — part of which involved paying former insurgents to point their guns elsewhere — did help to reduce violence in Iraq. Just how much is something that analysts and historians will continue to debate. But I’m not at all convinced that Bush’s choice of this strategy was an act of courage, and not only because it would have been the first such act of his presidency.

A unilateral U.S. military escalation was not the only option on the table in late 2006. The Iraq Study Group had produced a number of recommendations for dealing with Iraq’s civil war. We can never know what the result of the ISG recommendations would have been. We do know, however, that the credible threat of U.S. withdrawal triggered Sunni tribal leaders’ strategic decision to turn against Al Qaeda. We also know that the first months of 2007 — after the surge had begun — were some of the most violent of the war, as the sectarian cleansing of Baghdad went into overdrive, utterly changing the demographic character of one of the region’s most storied capitals. The completion of this process, the separation of large portions of the city’s population into secure sectarian enclaves, contributed significantly to the decline in violence.

We also know that the surge failed to bring about the political progress that was its goal, and, as Marc Lynch, Brian Katulis and Peter Juul explored in Iraq’s Political Transition After the Surge, has actually frozen into place many of Iraq’s political divisions, making the goal of accommodation more difficult to reach.

The surge was therefore not the only conceivable way to “save” Iraq. It was, however, the only conceivable way to save America’s War in Iraq. Recognizing the views of his bipartisan critics and accepting the ISG recommendations would have been, for Bush, the same as accepting defeat. Faced with a number of options, Bush gambled on the one that could most plausibly result in his being able to claim “victory.” But even if one does accept this claim, hitting blackjack does not mean that it was smart — let alone courageous — to bet the kids’ college fund in the first place, especially after you just lost the house and car at poker.

What’s particularly odd about Beinart’s argument is that he even recognizes that his claim about the surge is different that the one being made by the surge’s conservative celebrants. It’s fine for Beinart to insist that the surge “doesn’t justify the Bush administration’s initial decision to go to war,” but this is precisely what conservatives mean when they say the surge worked. The veneration of the surge is nested within a broader belief system which ignores or denies the war’s negative effects — massive displacement, Iranian entrenchment in Iraq, the promotion and spread of radical Salafist ideology and tactics — in favor of an emotionally satisfying resurrection story, one which also contains a neat explanatory mechanism for blaming Democrats for any and all future problems in Iraq. You can almost write the Charles Krauthammer column yourself in which — after fighting erupts in Kirkuk, or over any of the other issues that the surge failed to resolve — he laments how President Obama squandered Bush’s hard-won gains.

It’s unclear to me why Beinart should want to help write that column. But, reheated liberal hawkery aside, the divide between the majority of Americans who consider the Iraq war a tragic mistake, and the small minority who continue to insist — even knowing what we know — that it was a wise policy choice, is real and enduring. It will shape and inform our foreign policy debates — especially in regard to military intervention — for the foreseeable future, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. Nor should progressives indulge the war party’s myth-making simply in an attempt to appear reasonable.

Also see Marc Lynch’s take on Beinart’s piece, in which Lynch suggests that Bush’s real act of courage was signing the SOFA:

When the Iraqis insisted on an Obama-style timeline for U.S. withdrawal instead of a Bush/McCain- style conditions-based aspirational time frame for U.S. withdrawal, he could have insisted on the latter. This would have fit with his administration’s often-repeated preferences. He could have continued to push for this conception closer to the December 31 deadline, playing high-stakes chicken at the expense of American military planning for the coming year and at the risk of the Iraqi political system not having adequate time to ratify the deal.

But he didn’t. To his credit, Bush agreed to the Obama-style timeline for U.S. withdrawal. Granted, he hedged — he didn’t authorize Ambassador Ryan Crocker to sign off on the deal until after the Presidential election (on November 18). But at that point he bowed to the political realities in the U.S. and Iraq and agreed to a SOFA which far more closely matched Obama’s avowed vision for Iraq — withdrawal of U.S. forces in three years, no permanent bases — than his own.

I think this is a good point, but also that it says an enormous amount about what we’ve come to know and expect of George W. Bush that a pragmatic decision not to play chicken with America’s national security should be deserving of praise.