Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will make her first visit to Israel next week. “The centerpiece of the secretary of state’s tour, announced Thursday by the State Department, will be a March 2 fund-raising conference for the Palestinians in Egypt.” The United States is expected to pledge $900 million to rebuild the Gaza Strip after the recent devastation to the area caused by Israeli aerial attacks.

The Obama administration is pushing hard to convince Israel to allow more humanitarian aid trucks through the Gaza crossings. Haaretz reports, “Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has relayed messages to Israel in the past week expressing anger at obstacles Israel is placing to the delivery of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip.” Senior U.S. officials told Israeli counterparts last week that “Israel is not making enough effort to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza,” a sentiment likely to be echoed by Middle East Envoy George Mitchell ahead of Clinton’s visit.

Right-wing Jewish leaders are reacting with outrage here in the United States. CBS News reports that Mort Zuckerman, who was a prominent cheerleader for the Iraq war, is leading the charge against Clinton:

“I am very surprised, frankly, at this statement from the United States government and from the secretary of state,” said Mortimer Zuckerman, publisher of the New York Daily News and member of the NYC Jewish Community Relations Council. … “I don’t believe that we should be in a position at this point to do anything to strengthen Hamas,” Zuckerman said. “We surely know what Hamas stands for as I say they are the forward battalions of Iran.”

New York Assemblyman Dov Hikind, who opposed Israel’s disengagement from Gaza, added, “I liked her a lot more as a senator from New York. … Now, I wonder as I used to wonder who the real Hillary Clinton is.”

The reality in Israel and Palestine is that economic damages are piling up on both sides of the border as goods have been unable to pass through. As former congressman Lee Hamilton told Middle East Progress recently, “The immediate challenge of course with regards to the Palestinians requires a massive aid effort.” The Obama administration is stepping up to meet the challenge, and the fact that right-wing is so opposed to it surely indicates we are finally correcting course in the Middle East.

Today at CPAC, after declaring that “for those who felt the Obama administration would be friendly to Israel, it’s wake up time,” former Ambassador John Bolton was asked if, “when the Arab nations attack Israel,” which the questioner expected to occur “within six months to a year,” Bolton thinks the Obama administration will act to defend Israel.

Bolton responded to this question as if it were reasonable, saying “I don’t know what the Obama administration will do in response” to an attack by the Arab nations against Israel:

BOLTON: I would certainly hope they would come to Israel’s assistance, but I think there’s no guarantee of it. I think the more likely response is to appoint a special envoy and try to negotiate an end the hostilities.

Q: Your short answer then would be “no”.

BOLTON: I very much fear that’s right.

Watch it:

As should be obvious, the scenario presented is ridiculous. There is no analyst on the right or the left who seriously thinks that the Arab states are preparing to attack Israel. (Right now these states are much more concerned about Iran, and the extent to which Iranian power and influence in the region was greatly increased as a result of the Iraq war, which Bolton still insists was awesome.) But, if this never-going-to-happen scenario did actually come to pass, I think there is little doubt that the United States would come to Israel’s aid. (Though, as it has in the past, this aid would probably come mainly in the form of replenishing the arsenal of Israel’s military, the conventional dominance of which is a main reason why the scenario is nonsensical.) But Bolton doesn’t allow any of this to get in the way of trashing the Obama administration with shameless fearmongering about Israel.

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

Today, the New York Times reports that President Obama plans to withdraw only two combat brigades from Iraq prior to that country’s next national elections, scheduled for late this year. While all “combat forces” would be withdrawn by August 2010, as many as 50,000 “advisors” would remain to train Iraqi forces and conduct counterterrorism missions. For some combat units, this shift to advisor role would amount to nothing more than a name change. According to the Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq, this “transition force” would have to leave Iraq by the end of 2011.

President Obama’s emerging plan for U.S. withdrawal fits in between his 16-month campaign pledge and the SOFA. Still, the president must be prepared to conduct a quicker withdrawal, whatever the situation on the ground in Iraq. Why? In order to pass the SOFA through the Iraqi parliament, a provision for a popular referendum by July 2009 was included alongside the agreement. If the referendum rejects the SOFA, the United States will have one year to completely withdraw from Iraq. But Obama’s plan doesn’t make a sufficient “down payment” on withdrawal prior to the referendum in order to convince skeptical Iraqis that the United States really does plan to leave Iraq on the timetable specified in the SOFA. So it’s not outside the realm of possibility that the United States could be forced to make a complete withdrawal from Iraq by July 2010.

Nevertheless, the Iraq debate in Washington continues to ignore the political realities in Iraq. As fellow Iraq blogger Eric Martin noted, many observers – including Tom Ricks – continue to make this same fundamental error. Even the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, General Raymond Odierno, has intimated the possibility of U.S. troops in Iraq beyond the SOFA withdrawal deadline while officially hewing to the SOFA. And today, Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, the Keystone Cops of Iraq policy, argue that the Obama administration should be willing to slow down withdrawals and in effect ignore the SOFA and the referendum. So once again the Beltway debate is being waged in favor of ignoring Iraqi realities in order to keep the U.S. military in Iraq while even John McCain admits the situation in Afghanistan keeps getting worse.

So what should Obama do? Read more

A recent ABC/BBC/ARD poll released earlier this month found that Afghans’ support of U.S. and NATO forces’ efforts in that nation is tumbling. Just 47 percent said they had a favorable view of the United States, down from 83 percent in 2005. Only 37 percent said that most people in their area support NATO and the International Security Assistance Force; 67 percent supported ISAF in 2006.

Today, ThinkProgress interviewed Afghanistan’s foreign minister, Dr. Rangin Dadfar Spanta. We asked him about the poll’s grim findings and how NATO and the Afghan government “can win back the hearts and minds of the Afghan civilians.” Spanta disputed the poll’s results, claiming that a majority of Afghans still support the U.S.-led international coalition:

SPANTA: Now, this is the opinion to places that you ask the people, the ordinary Afghans, the majority of all the Afghans still support the presence of the international community because they believe that the international community came to Afghanistan after two and a half decades of tyranny in my country…and the international community brought us liberation. This is still the perception of the people of Afghanistan

Watch it:

Spanta later said that Afghan Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak and Gen. David McKiernan, top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, have agreed that Afghan forces will be more “involved” in the “preparation [and] implantation of military action on operations,” including “arresting Afghans in house searching” to ensure more respect for the culture of Afghans.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has suggested recently that the U.S. lower expectations for its mission in Afghanistan by “setting standards far below the sweeping desires of regional democratization that were a foundation of Bush administration national security policy.” Spencer Ackerman notes that, during a later event hosted by the Center for American Progress, Spanta criticized this new approach, calling it “reductionist” and warning that “any reductionist policy is bound to fail.”

Yesterday, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) delivered a speech on Afghanistan at the neoconservative think tank American Enterprise Institute. TP Wonk Room’s Matt Duss attended the event and asked McCain this question:

In November 2003, in discussing Afghanistan, you said that given everything else that was going on, we’d probably just “muddle through” in Afghanistan. Now given the rather ambitious set of goals that you’ve set out for us today, it seems that you’ve come to a conclusion that muddling through is not an acceptable outcome. Could you just briefly describe the kind of process in your thinking by which you arrived at this conclusion?

McCain disputed the premise of the question, claiming: “Well, obviously you are taking that statement out of context.” Watch it:

Duss responds on The Wonk Room with the video of McCain’s original statement in 2003:

MCCAIN: I am concerned about it, but I’m not as concerned as I am about Iraq today — obviously, or I’d be talking about Afghanistan — but I believe that if Karzai can make the progress that he is making, that in the long term we may muddle through in Afghanistan.

Watch it:

McCain’s new position is that the Afghanistan war is necessary. “I know Americans are weary of war,” he said yesterday. “I’m weary of it. But we must win the war in Afghanistan.”

The larger issue, of course, is that McCain — like the Bush administration — was so feverishly eager to go to war with Iraq after 9/11 that he largely neglected the issue of Afghanistan. Indeed, ABC News reported last year that, as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, McCain missed every single hearing on Afghanistan over the past two years.

Asked about Afghanistan back in November 2003, McCain stressed that Iraq was the more important effort, but that he thought that we would be able to “muddle through” in Afghanistan.

Watch it:

MCCAIN: I am concerned about it, but I’m not as concerned as I am about Iraq today — obviously, or I’d be talking about Afghanistan — but I believe that if Karzai can make the progress that he is making, that in the long term we may muddle through in Afghanistan.

Today, after he delivered a speech to the American Enterprise Institute on Afghanistan, I had an opportunity to ask Sen. McCain about this quote. Specifically, given the dire situation and very ambitious goals for Afghanistan which he had just described, how had his thinking changed? Why was “muddling through” no longer sufficient? In response, McCain accused me of taking his words out of context. You can decide for yourself.

In his remarks, Sen. McCain warned that “the scale of resources required to succeed will be enormous,” but that “we must win the war in Afghanistan.”

In McCain’s telling, “for a brief but critical window between late 2003 and early 2005, we were moving on the right path in Afghanistan,” but that “rather than building on these gains, we squandered them.”

Beginning in 2005, our integrated civil-military command structure was disassembled and replaced by a balkanized and dysfunctional arrangement. The integrated counterinsurgency strategy was replaced by a patchwork of different strategies, depending on the location and on which country’s troops were doing the fighting. And at a moment when many in Afghanistan and Pakistan continued to nurse doubts about America’s commitment in South Asia, the Pentagon announced its intention to withdraw 2,500 American combat troops from the theatre.

These decisions laid the groundwork for the situation we see in Afghanistan today. They also underscore why “lowering our goals” — both rhetorically and in practice — is precisely the wrong move today.

Much like his AEI hosts last week, McCain seemed unaware that the new Iraq strategy implemented by Gen. David Petraeus did, in fact, represent “lowering our goals” — in practice, if not rhetorically. As I noted in my review of Tom Ricks’ The Gamble, while President Bush and McCain continued to make grand claims about “victory” in Iraq, the military understood that the surge strategy represented a radical redefinition of the war’s aims. Rather than the creation of a “democratic ally in the heart of the Middle East,” the new goal was simply to avoid the complete collapse of Iraq. General Petraeus’ decision to ally with Sunni tribal elements — essentially putting large parts of the insurgency on the U.S. payroll — signified a recognition of this reality.

More importantly, however, McCain continues to ignore one of the most consequential decisions that laid the groundwork for the situation we see in Afghanistan today: The decision to invade Iraq. The redirection of U.S. attention and resources from Afghanistan to Iraq was probably the single most crucial factor in enabling the reconstitution of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and McCain himself was one of the most prominent advocates of that decision.

Throughout the presidential campaign, and continuing today, McCain has been quite pleased to take a big share of the credit for the Iraq surge, but none of the blame for his role in helping create the situation which required it. So it is with Afghanistan.

Leaving aside former McCain spokesblogger Mike Goldfarb’s yawn-inducing insinuation that criticizing neoconservatives qualifies as Jew-baiting, I think his interpretation of President Obama’s response to Russia is interesting:

There were very few times in last year’s campaign when McCain completely outmaneuvered Obama, but one of those instances came during the invasion of Georgia, when McCain’s deep suspicion of all things Russian led him to condemn Russia’s aggression quickly and forcefully. Obama, on the other hand, allowed his staff to put out a pathetic statement calling on both sides to show restraint. The invasion of Georgia provided no opportunities for this country, it was a moment that brought into sharp relief the dangers posed by a resurgent and more confident Russia. Even as a decline in energy prices and a global recession threaten the collapse of the Russian economy, that country continues to assert itself by pressuring the Kyrgyz to shut down a critical U.S. supply line. [...]

Obama projected weakness and indecision when Russia first invaded Georgia last summer. Now the Russians are trying to choke off U.S. forces in Afghanistan and the Obama administration has offered no discernible response — though, presumably, hopefully, a serious behind-the-scenes effort to determine a strong response is underway.

It’s true that the Georgia crisis temporarily boosted McCain’s campaign, but this probably had less to do with McCain’s “maneuvers” than with the way that international crises of this sort generally redound to Republicans’ benefit. Something similar could be said in regard to the economic crisis and Democrats.

But while it’s less than surprising that members of McCain’s own staff were deeply impressed by his response to the Russian invasion — bellicosity, after all, qualifies as good policy in conservativeland — I actually think it probably did more in the long run to hurt him by highlighting his tendency to perpetually careen from crisis to crisis, an image that was finally and forever cast in granite when, in a matter of days, he went from barely noticing the economic collapse to frantically suspending his campaign to deal with it.

Meanwhile, the fact that Obama undertook a serious behind-the-scenes effort to determine an appropriate response, rather than simply popping off at the mic in an attempt to appear “strong,” was interpreted by the American people as evidence that he was prepared to govern.

Certainly, Russia’s recent behavior is troubling, but it’s worth pointing out that none of the dire predictions being floated by McCain or his brain trust during the Georgia crisis — Bill Kristol and Bob Kagan, for example, couldn’t agree on whether Putin was more like Hitler or Stalin — have come to pass. In retrospect, it almost seems like these guys were milking the crisis for maximum political benefit, but I know that can’t be true.

Last week, Laura Rozen reported (and Politico today confirmed) that President Obama has appointed Middle East Policy Council President Chas W. Freeman to become chairman of the National Intelligence Council — which is responsible for producing national intelligence estimates.

Freeman — a former Ambassador to Saudi Arabia who once served as President Nixon’s chief translator in China in 1972 — not only opposed the Iraq war, but has demonstrated a commitment to a well-rounded understanding of key U.S. national security issues and the importance of an even-handed U.S. role in the Israel-Palestine dispute:

“We abandoned the role of Middle East peacemaker to back Israel’s efforts to pacify its captive and increasingly ghettoized Arab populations. We wring our hands while sitting on them as the Jewish state continues to seize ever more Arab land for its colonists. This has convinced most Palestinians that Israel cannot be appeased and is persuading increasing numbers of them that a two-state solution is infeasible.”

However, Freeman’s views have the right wing outraged (yet some are afraid to go on record) and have “provoked a fierce behind-the-scenes lobbying campaign to torpedo the appointment.” Some examples:

– Frank Gaffney: “This is a really serious error. …[Freeman] has compromised the objectivity that one would want in the person whose job it is to oversee the production of National Intelligence Estimates.”

– Steve Rosen: “This is a profoundly disturbing appointment. …Freeman is a strident critic of Israel… His views of the region are what you would expect in the Saudi foreign ministry.”

Gaffney and Rosen echo the right’s discomfort at George Mitchell’s appointment as President Obama’s Israeli-Palestinian envoy. The Wonk Room’s Matt Duss notes, “One of the reasons conservative pro-Israel zealots have been displeased” with Mitchell is because he “has in the past shown that, not only does he recognize how provocative and harmful the [Jewish] settlements [in the West Bank] are, he’s actually been willing to say so in public.”

But some have called Obama’s move an “amazing appointment.” Center for American Progress Action Fund Senior Fellow Larry Korb said Freeman “is one of the most well-rounded, knowledgeable and fiercely independent people I’ve ever dealt with in or out of government” and that “it’s completely unfair” to question his objectivity. “He’s going to tell it like it is and he doesn’t have any bias. This is a man who interpreted for Richard Nixon in China. I can’t think of a better background,” Korb said.

Responding to the news that the Air Force will request an additional 60 F-22 Raptors, for a total of 243 — significantly less than the previous goal of 381 — the Weekly Standard’s John Noonan calls this “respectable — but inadequate.”

The Air Force’s previous desired fleet projection of 381 airframes was, in and of itself, an enormous compromise (planners originally banked on over 600). The Obama administration would nonetheless be making the right choice by choosing to invest in America’s continued air superiority, if they go ahead and order the additional jets. Here’s another humble suggestion: less money for DoD green initiatives, more for war-winning weapon platforms.

As is often the case in defense procurement, the USAF’s original request for 600 Raptors was basically a bargaining tactic. They knew they’d never get 600, but could get a number closer to what they really wanted when they finally “sacrificed” a few hundred planes and scaled back the request to something moderately less utterly unrealistic and staggeringly expensive.

As for the F-22 as a “war-winning weapon platform,” while there is an air superiority argument for the F-22, it’s worth pointing out here that, not only has the F-22 not helped the United States win the the two wars that it’s currently fighting, the F-22 hasn’t flown a single combat mission in either of them.

DoD green initiatives, on the other hand, actually have applications to the wars we’re in now. They make installations less dependent on supply convoys, offering fewer opportunities for ambushes of those convoys. On the downside, green initiatives don’t go fast, shoot missiles, or look nearly as cool when set to heavy metal music.

Moving on to other bad arguments for the F-22, via Rob Farley, David Axe confronts the claim that “more than 95,000 American jobs” depend on the Raptor. Axe points out that this number “counts indirect employment at firms for whom the F-22 program is just one of many clients.”

And it also counts Lockheed assembly workers who are in high demand for other aviation projects. In fact, ending Raptor production today might not result in a single unemployed aerospace worker. [...]

A year ago the industry was worried about huge labor shortages. Shutting down the Raptor line would see thousands of workers snapped up for active production lines churning out F-16s, F-35s, C-130s and modernized C-5s for Lockheed, not to mention the prospect that industry rivals Boeing and Northrop might lure Lockheed workers for their own active production lines for the F-15, F/A-18 and others.

Even in the New Depression, the U.S. has the world’s biggest and most diverse aerospace industry. Trimming a few dozen aircraft from one production line, and shuttering that line a few years early, will not put nearly 100,000 people out of work.

James Fallows also provides a reading list on the F-22, a good corrective to his colleague Mark Bowden’s love letter to the aircraft.

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

Last Wednesday, the Egyptian government released Ayman Nour, one of Egypt’s most prominent dissidents and a former presidential candidate, after more than three years in prison. Nour’s surprise release has been interpreted by the U.S. press and bloggers like Marc Lynch and the Arabist as an effort by the Mubarak regime to create a more positive U.S.-Egyptian relationship by removing a severe symbolic irritant — the continued imprisonment of Nour –- from the picture. The dissident had become a cause celebre for the Bush administration and Congress, with then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice postponing a trip to Egypt in protest and Congress symbolically slashing $100 million the annual aid budget for Egypt.

But Nour’s case also illustrates the difficulty the United States faces in promoting democratic governance and human rights in the Middle East -– the tradeoff between pressuring friendly but autocratic regimes to improve and needing their help to resolve continuing conflicts. The same Egyptian government that imprisoned Ayman Nour for three years has been vital in trying to arrange a long-term ceasefire in the Gaza Strip. President Bush’s “freedom agenda” wasn’t able to square the circle between idealism and realism in the Middle East, and has left the Obama administration an even greater strategic quagmire.

CAP Senior Fellow Brian Katulis recently laid out a new strategy for democracy promotion in the Middle East for the Century Foundation. He recommends six steps:

1. Restore U.S. credibility by disconnecting democracy and human rights promotion from U.S. security goals and reforming our own human rights and civil liberties practices. The Obama administration has already taken big step in this direction by directing the closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp by next January.

2. Use diplomacy to promote national consensus in key countries and address conflicts in the region. Internal conflicts in countries throughout the region – form Lebanon and the Palestinian Territories to Iraq and Yemen — are driven by the lack of a national political consensus on basic structures of governance. Moreover, resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict will create an environment in the region more conducive to democratic reform.

3. Integrate U.S. approaches to supporting democracy and governance reform in the region. All U.S. government assistance – from USAID to the State Department to military aid — should be coordinated to better encourage better governance by recipients of American funding and assistance.

4. Increase positive incentives for democratic reform. The model of the Millennium Challenge Corporation, which provided incentives to promote economic development and improved governance, is one the new administration can encourage reforms.

5. Diversify funding for democracy promotion in the region. Private philanthropy, endowments, partnerships and the like in the Middle East should be encouraged to take on political reform, building a stronger organic base for democracy and human rights.

6. Recognize the political power of Islamist forces. Like it or not, Islamist groups are potent political forces in many countries in the Middle East. Reform efforts that ignore them are at best incomplete, and the United States needs to take non-violent religious-political movements into account.

The United States should endeavor to create a glide path to human rights-respecting democracy in the region through a series of practical policies. Unlike President Bush’s freedom agenda, which assumed that democracy emerges spontaneously after the removal of restraints, President Obama’s Middle East policy should undertake the hard work that is necessary to make democracy work in the long-term. Doing so also allows the United States to pragmatically work with friendly autocratic regimes toward common security objectives. At the same time, the United States needs to deliver tangible results to the people of these regimes. It’s a difficult needle to thread, but a long-term approach to democracy and human rights promotion in the Middle East is likely to deliver better short-term and long-term results for the United States and the people of the region.

During the Bush administration, conservatives heralded Ronald Reagan’s own struggle against terrorism as the ideal model for George W. Bush. Frank Gaffney hoped Bush “not only memorializes Ronald Reagan’s moral compass and strategic vision but emulates them,” while Rich Lowry cited Reagan to boost Bush’s 2004 relection chances: “History does move, especially when determined men give it a push.”

ThinkProgress sat down with Will Bunch, author of “Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future” (and renowned blogger), to ask him whether he, too, saw a straight line from the Gipper to Bush’s war on terror. Bunch asserted that “Reagan’s words have been totally bastardized” by conservatives, and said that Reagan never would have condoned some of Bush’s techniques, especially torture:

BUNCH: I do think that some of the swaggering rhetoric that Reagan used…have been I think misinterpreted by Republicans that this was his actual policy, when actually his policies didn’t have the same kind of cowboy attitude that some of his rhetoric did. I can’t imagine, particularly torture, I just doubt that would have been something that would have been condoned during the Reagan administration.

He actually was kind of a — in fact this was used in a headline in the Washington Post — he was actually kind of a pussycat so to speak when it came to the job of killing people through various acts of war.

Watch it:

Indeed, in 1988 Reagan signed the U.N. convention against torture — which the Bush administration later called “quaint.” Bush’s departure from Reagan wasn’t confined to torture. According to Lou Cannon of the Washington Post, Reagan said that any retaliation that killed innocent civilians is “itself a terrorist act.” Bunch observed at TPM Cafe this week, “As relates to Iraq, Reagan would have been appalled at the military strategy underpinning the March 2003 assault, the heavy bombing tactic known as ‘shock and awe.’”

Transcript: Read more

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

Former UN ambassador and assistant secretary of state John Bolton has taken to the pages of the Los Angeles Times to publish a churlish missive denouncing the “naivete” of President Obama’s incipient North Korea policy. It’s ironic that one of the main advocates of the failed conservative approach to national security — epitomized by former Vice President Dick Cheney’s statement “We don’t negotiate with evil; we defeat it” — is blasting the Obama administration’s early efforts to clean up after conservatives’ international mess. Refusing to engage “evil” regimes in Tehran and Pyongyang over the last eight years hasn’t led to their defeat – it’s led to their empowerment. Bolton presided over a policy of appeasement — these regimes got what they wanted.

Consider:

– The Bush administration purposefully disparaged the Clinton administration’s efforts to engage North Korea on its nuclear program. President Bush embarrassed then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, forcing him to retract a statement to the effect that the new administration would pick up where Clinton left off. He then dissed South Korea’s then-President Kim Dae-Jung, repudiating the leader’s “sunshine policy” of détente with the North. Bush would not negotiate with Kim Jong-il, whom he personally “loathed,” and instead hoped the North would crumble due to isolation. What crumbled instead was the Agree Framework controlling North Korea’s plutonium, and in October 2006 Pyongyang conducted a crude nuclear test. Bush was then forced to enter serious negotiations that eventually led to a tenuous deal to shut down North Korea’s Yongbyon reactor in exchange for a normalization of relations with the United States, including removal from the state sponsors of terrorism list. Unfortunately, the deal is unstable and Bush’s policy has left Pyongyang with enough fissile material for at least six nuclear weapons.

– The Bush administration refused to engage with Iran on a number of issues, including direct talks over its nuclear program. Even when the United States appeared to be riding high in the region following the fall of Baghdad in 2003, the administration didn’t explore overtures made by the reformist president, Muhammad Khatami. When Iraq went south and Iran’s nuclear program became a more pressing issue, the United States refused to hold direct talks with Tehran and outsourced diplomacy to the European Union. Bush only reversed course last July, sending Undersecretary of State William Burns to talks in Geneva. The sum result of refusing to directly engage Iran: Tehran is currently led by a hardline president, ascendant in the region, and now has enough low-enriched uranium to further process into fissile material for a bomb.

The arrogant naivete of Bolton’s approach –- which assumes that the United States is powerful enough to go it alone and can make other nations bend through sheer willpower –- is breathtaking. This “Green Lantern theory” of foreign policy has little to no bearing on the realities the United States confronts in the 21st century. Simply expecting unfriendly regimes to do as we ask because we have “moral clarity” and declare them evil is delusional bordering on psychotic.

Negotiating with regimes that abuse human rights on a massive scale and engage in disruptive international behavior is certainly distasteful in the extreme. Talking with leaders with blood on their hands isn’t pleasant, and it’s not supposed to be. But a great power like the United States has to do it in order to achieve its overriding foreign policy priorities, such as nuclear nonproliferation. Waiting for regimes engaged in bad foreign policy behavior to change their ways or collapse is simply a strategy for failure. The United States has to drive hard bargains to make regimes like Pyongyang and Tehran change their destructive behavior.

As last Friday’s Progress Report noted, and today’s underlines, President Obama has inherited a crisis in Afghanistan. The problems identified in the Center for American Progress’s December 2007 report still exist, and have gotten worse. There is a serious and growing debate within the progressive community over the U.S. and international mission in that country, and how best to complete that mission. While there are no easy answers, I think a couple of recent items might help to focus this discussion.

Dana Milbank has a very entertaining account of a presentation yesterday by Richard Perle, in which Perle attempted to absolve neoconservatism of any blame for George W. Bush’s foreign policy. From the accompanying video, it seems like everyone had a good laugh about it except Perle.

While it’s deeply gratifying to see a neoconservative ideologue like Perle attempting to distance himself from the staggering costs incurred by his ideas, we shouldn’t kid ourselves that neconservatism is a spent force. No matter how disastrous neoconservatism has proved in its actual application in the real world, no ideology which necessitates as much defense spending as neoconservatism does is ever really going to be allowed to “fail.”

Indeed, the day before Perle denied the existence of neoconservatism, across town at the American Enterprise Institute a panel of neoconservatives was proposing its application to the war in Afghanistan. Insisting that “there’s no good reason to think that we can’t succeed in Afghanistan if we set our minds to it,” Fred Kagan noted one of the ways in which “Afghanistan is different from Iraq.”

To take this issue of civilian casualties, I’d like to make a note. If you compare the damage that is done in Afghan cities and villages and towns, and the number of civilians that are wounded or killed in coalition attacks to the sort of damage that was done in Iraqi cities and villages and towns, “order of magnitude” doesn’t begin to describe it. If anyone has seen pictures of Ramadi or Fallujah, they looked like Stalingrad. Not a single building standing. Streets filled with rubble. Cities absolutely crushed.

The interesting thing is that when we were fighting those battles and doing that damage, on the whole the Iraqis were not bitching about collateral damage. You had nothing like the degree of upset about how many civilians were being injured and how much damage was being done to the infrastructure in Iraq at a much higher level of destruction than you have in Afghanistan at a much lower level of destruction.

I think there’s a cultural reason for that: Afghans don’t fight in their cities. Iraqis do. For good or ill, Iraqis expect to fight in their cities. That’s where the insurgents dug in, Saddam Hussein planned to dig in to the cities or lure us into an urban fight. It’s sort of understood that the battlefield is going to be there, that doesn’t mean that they don’t complain about it, that doesn’t mean that it’s not a problem, but it does mean that when the insurgents dig in and we root them out, the Iraqis don’t on the whole say “darn it, you shouldn’t have blown up all of our houses.” They sort of accept that. Afghans do not.

Audio is here.

Given that Fred Kagan previously referred to widespread sectarian cleansing in Iraq as a “myth,” it’s not so surprising that he would dismiss complaints about the killing and maiming of civilians and the rubbling of entire neighborhoods as “bitching.” And it really doesn’t even need to be pointed out that what Kagan means by “setting our minds to it” is “have the will to kill huge amounts of people in order to achieve our goals.”

America, and Americans, are better than this. As we in the progressive community continue our debate over Afghanistan, and over national security more generally, it’s important for us to remember that. Neoconservatism is based in the idea that there’s no national security problem that can’t be overcome by the relentless application of the military force. Progressives understand that this is wrong, and that seeking international cooperation and consensus is a key force multiplier in the face of today’s challenges, of which Afghanistan is only one. Unlike conservatives, who only seem to locate a concern for human rights when they need an excuse to bomb someone, support for human rights is central to progressives’ worldview, which is why we support a conception of national security that encompasses real human security.

When the American people put Barack Obama in the White House, they rejected the base militarism and unilateralism of the last eight years, and they provided an opportunity for the emergence of a new consensus on national security. It’s important that progressives grasp this opportunity, and draw strength from our values as we develop ways to meet these challenges.

Today, President Obama arrived in Canada, his first foreign trip since taking office. Already, the trip is a stark departure from the Bush years. U.S. presidents have traditionally made their first trip abroad to Canada. President Bush, however, broke with tradition and headed south to Mexico.

Already, there’s been a noticeable difference in the way the Canadian public has received the two presidents. Bush was wildly unpopular in Canada. Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who supported the Iraq war (and later admitted it was a mistake), was lambasted by Canadians as supporting “Harper-Bush” policies. Not surprisingly, Bush’s visits to Canada spurred massive protests:

– “Thousands of protesters marched on Parliament Tuesday, rallying against President Bush’s visit and the U.S.-led war in Iraq. Twelve people were arrested after scuffling with police on the fringes of the peaceful demonstration.”

– “But with thousands of protesters expected to demonstrate against Mr. Bush, the White House decided to cut short his visit to Ottawa and travel to Halifax instead.”

“Early Crowds Await Obama,” the Toronto Star reads today. “American flags are being hung up around Ottawa in preparation” for Obama’s visit, reports the Ottawa Citizen. Some of the stories today:

– “Small groups of people gathered in the pre-dawn gloom on Parliament Hill in hopes of catching a glimpse of [Obama]. Not even a snowfall could deter diehard fans of the popular U.S. leader.”

– “With stars and stripes flapping in the wind, enamoured Canadians will line the streets of the capital today trying to catch a fleeting glimpse of U.S. President Barack Obama.”

– “Bus trips have been organized in Montreal, Kitchener and Toronto. Hotel rooms are booked, Facebook groups are buzzing and websites have sprung up to give visitors all the latest information. … All of this for U.S. President Barack Obama.”

Bush’s unpopularity endures well past the end of his tumultuous presidency. “When George W. Bush makes one of his first post White House speeches in Calgary, [he] will be greeted by a special welcoming committee — protesters determined to voice their displeasure with his eight-year reign and the subsequent fallout,” the Calgary Herald reported this week.

Our guest blogger is Colin Cookman, Special Assistant for National Security at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Last Thursday, Pakistan’s Interior Minister, Rehman Malik, became the first Pakistani official to publicly acknowledge that parts of the November 2007 Mumbai attacks had been planned in Pakistan, as he presented the preliminary findings of the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) report into the attacks. Over 170 died in the attacks, which have set back the tenuous rapprochement between India and Pakistan and pushed the subcontinent dangerously close to the edge, to the undeniable benefit of militant hardliners.

Malik said six of the eight people charged with “abetting, conspiracy and facilitation” of a terrorist attack were currently in Pakistani custody. At least one, he indicated, had recently been residing in Spain, a reflection of Pakistan’s status as a nexus for global terror networks. Although he didn’t identify them as members of banned Kashmiri militant outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), Malik did name two of that organization’s top commanders, Zaki ur Rehman Lakvi and Zarrar Shah, both reportedly detained late last year, as participants in the attack.

One anonymous U.S. official in the New York Times interpreted Malik’s announcement as an effort by the civilians to “poke a stick” at the intelligence and security services, which have long dominated national security and international policymaking, particularly in matters related to India. The cultivation of militant groups like LeT to foment low-level insurgency in Indian-controlled Kashmir has been the preferred strategy of the Pakistani military establishment since the late 1980s, and the weakness of the current civilian government, only a year old and faced with serious internal security threats, economic troubles, and political instability, limits their ability to get a firm hold of the instruments of security policy, no matter how brave a public face they may offer about a unified civil-military effort. For this reason, Pakistani press reports that Lakvi and Shah have been transferred from the custody of the intelligence services to the civilian FIA are particularly heartening, if confirmed, as a signal that the ISI is in fact deferring to civilian control rather than opting to protect its former militant assets from any international scrutiny. Malik’s remarks were particularly welcome given that a series of leaked reports had suggested that Pakistan’s report would instead focus on Bangladesh, Nepal, and Dubai as the sources of the attack, in a dubious effort to shift blame away from Pakistan.

Pakistan is now seeking to put the ball back in India’s court, sending New Dehli a thirty-question request for information, including DNA samples from the nine attackers and sole surviving militant, Mohammed Ajmal Kasab. On Friday, Pakistan called on India to “come clean” and “expose the names of persons and entities in India who were also responsible for acts of commission and omission in a transparent manner”; the police commissioner of Mumbai, Hasan Gafoor, has previously acknowledged that at least two of the sixteen people believed to have carried out the attack (ten assailants, four handlers in Pakistan, and two local facilitators) were Indian.

The Washington Post reported Monday that the CIA, FBI, and U.S. diplomats have been instrumental in managing the flow of Mumbai-related intelligence between India and Pakistan, acting as a critical bridge between two countries the U.S. needs to keep as allies if it hopes to stabilize this region and neighboring Afghanistan. Speaking in New Dehli on Monday, regional envoy Ambassador Richard Holbrooke warned Indian leaders that “for the first time in 60 years, your country, Pakistan and the US all face an enemy that poses direct threats to our leaderships, our capitals and our people”, sentiments that the Center for American Progress’ recent report on Pakistan, Partnership for Progress, echoes. While the demand on the part of Indian leaders for more action on Pakistan’s part is understandable, progress against that enemy will require working with the Pakistani government, through a process of enticements as well as concerted international pressure, to reduce tensions, reassert regional stability, and combat the internal sources of militancy that plague Pakistan and its neighbors.

For the first ThinkProgress book review, I’ve been reading Tom Ricks’ The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008. Ricks’ previous book, Fiasco, is considered one of the key accounts of the first years of the Iraq war, and The Gamble picks up where that left off. Ricks explores the origins and the implementation of the new counterinsurgency strategy, the various factors and events with which it contended and cooperated, and what all this could mean for the future of the U.S. in Iraq.

There’s no doubt that this book, which is based upon numerous visits to Iraq and extensive interviews with military leaders and civilian analysts, is another essential contribution to the literature of this war. Ricks knows a good anecdote when he hears one, but he also allows U.S. soldiers and marines to tell their own experiences in Iraq. Among the book’s most important contributions is that it makes clear how very much we have asked of the men and women of our military, and how hard they have worked to accomplish their mission.

But the broader effects of that mission on U.S. national security and the Middle East region are increasingly ominous. Ricks notes that while President Bush and conservative war supporters like John McCain continued to make grand claims about “victory” in Iraq, the military understood that the new surge strategy represented a radical redefinition of the war’s aims. Rather than the creation of a “democratic ally in the heart of the Middle East,” the new goal was simply to avoid the complete collapse of Iraq. General Petraeus’ decision to ally with Sunni tribal elements — essentially putting large parts of the insurgency on the U.S. payroll — signified a recognition of this reality. RAND counterinsurgency analyst Austin Long told Ricks that “the tribal strategy is a means to achieve one strategic end, fighting Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, but is antithetical to another, the creation of a unified, and democratic Iraq.” (p. 224) While recognizing that the strategy was “one more step toward the fragmentation of Iraq,” counterinsurgency adviser Carter Malkasian insisted that “Optimal is no longer a luxury the United States can afford…We must focus on avoiding the worst possible outcome.” (p. 215)

Defense Secretary Gates said that “the purpose of the surge was to create enough space that the process of reconciliation could go forward in Iraq.” Ricks’ grade for the surge, which he calls “the least wrong move in a misconceived war,” is “incomplete.” As he has reiterated in subsequent interviews, the Ricks’ view is that the surge worked militarily — bringing the violence down from its staggering 2005-6 heights to a level that would only be considered a national emergency in any other country — and failed politically, as many of the fundamental disagreements about the future of the Iraqi state remain unresolved. I would suggest, however, that the surge worked politically where it most mattered: Here in the United States. As Tom Donnelly — an American Enterprise Institute defense analyst who helped develop the initial plan for the surge — told Ricks, the goal of “making the Baghdad security situation better” was “establishing a rationale for keeping the United States in the war.” (p. 120)

To this end — not “winning the war,” but changing the terms of the U.S. political debate in order to keep the U.S. engaged in Iraq — it must be admitted that the surge has been a success. As a result, Americans now face the prospect of an indefinite presence in Iraq, perpetually justified by the need to prevent an outbreak of mass violence — that is, violence of the very sort that last occurred precisely when the U.S. military was there in its largest numbers. And the general consensus among those interviewed by Ricks is that more violence is just around the corner — if the U.S. does not remain to prevent it. As an unnamed “senior Pentagon official” told Ricks, “Now, the fundamental fact about Iraq is, we’re kind of stuck.” (p. 15)

Our guest bloggers are Winny Chen, Research Associate; Sarah Dreier, Fellows Assistant; and Shiyong Park, an intern with the National Security team at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Almost twenty years after the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) sent tanks into Tiananmen Square, a national Chinese human rights movement has taken shape again in the form of a statement called Charter 08. Released by a small group of Chinese intellectuals, lawyers, and dissidents on the 60th anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights last December, Charter 08 calls for greater freedoms, guarantees of basic human rights for the Chinese people, and an end to autocratic rule. Over 8,100 Chinese citizens, including students, businesspeople, and former party officials, have now signed the document, bravely adding their names, addresses, and occupations to the electronic petition despite the risk of government persecution. The document continues to circulate online throughout China, where 253 million internet users reside.

Whether the Charter 08 campaign — the longest sustained democracy and human rights campaign since Tiananmen — will catalyze a larger movement in China is unclear, but human rights activists and China watchers continue to track its progress, eager to find out how far the Party will let the effort go. Chinese authorities have already detained Liu Xiaobo, a famous literary critic, dissenter, and one of the authors of the document, and placed other suspected authors under surveillance.

In a way, though, Charter 08 has already made its point. Questioning many assumptions about governance in China and directly challenging the legitimacy of the country’s one-party rule, the statement asserts that “the time is arriving everywhere for citizens to be masters of states. For China, the path that leads out of our current predicament is to divest ourselves of the authoritarian notion of reliance on an ‘enlightened overlord’ or an ‘honest official’ and to turn instead toward a system of liberties, democracy, and the rule of law, and toward fostering the consciousness of modern citizens who see rights as fundamental and participation as a duty.” Read more

Despite the fact that Mark Bowden actually quotes an Air Force officer saying “This is not a paid advertisement for the F‑22″ in it, there’s really no way to describe Bowden’s new article for the Atlantic as anything other than a commercial for the program:

American air superiority has been so complete for so long that we take it for granted. For more than half a century, we’ve made only rare use of the aerial-combat skills of a man like Cesar Rodriguez, who retired two years ago with more air-to-air kills than any other active-duty fighter pilot. But our technological edge is eroding—Russia, China, India, North Korea, and Pakistan all now fly fighter jets with capabilities equal or superior to those of the F-15, the backbone of American air power since the Carter era. Now we have a choice. We can stock the Air Force with the expensive, cutting-edge F‑22—maintaining our technological superiority at great expense to our Treasury. Or we can go back to a time when the cost of air supremacy was paid in the blood of men like Rodriguez.

This is accompanied by a video that, like the above quote, is about as subtle as a red, white and blue tuxedo.

Both the article and video cite the Cope India 2004 exercises — in which Indian pilots flying Russian-built Su‑30s, MiG-21s and -29s performed surprisingly well against U.S. pilots in F-15s and -16s — as evidence in favor of the F-22. As Noah Shachtman noted at the time, USAF pilots participated in Cope India under self-imposed handicaps — it was in no sense a straight fight, let alone an actual representation of how U.S. pilots and equipment would perform in a plausible combat scenario. It was, however, trumpeted throughout the media as a “wake-up call” demonstrating the need to spend huge quantities of money on the F-22 — precisely as it’s deployed in Bowden’s article. Echoing comments that I’ve heard from a number of others, Shachtman quoted a contributor to the National Security roundtable who snarked “What better way to keep an aerial boondoggle like the F-22 program healthy and sucking up funds” than to rig and promote an exercise just like that?

Maybe all that money that Boeing and Lockheed Martin have been pouring into publicity for the F-22 is showing results. Or maybe they just got this one for free.

Assaf Moghadam has an interesting article in January’s CTC Sentinel (pdf), tracking shifting trends in suicide attacks worldwide. Dating the inception of modern suicide terrorism to the early 1980s and its use by Lebanese Hizballah, the “tactic was soon copied, first by other militant Lebanese groups, and subsequently by Sri Lanka’s Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), and several Palestinian groups, including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.”

In contrast to the final two decades of the 20th century, however, most suicide attacks in the first decade of the 21st century have been employed by al Qa’ida and associated movements that have adopted a Salafi-jihadi ideology.

Moghadam also presents a pretty shocking statistic:

Iraq accounts for 1,067 suicide attacks in the period under review — “a number that accounts for more than half (54.8%) of all suicide attacks since 1981. The sheer volume in which this tactic has struck Iraq is even more impressive since no suicide attacks were recorded in Iraq prior to the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.

Understand, this is what George W. Bush’s strategy of “fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here” entails. Luring terrorists to Iraq to blow themselves up in markets and mosques wasn’t some tragic side-effect of Bush’s plan, it was in fact a component of Bush’s plan. Let’s not pretend to be confused when Iraqis fail to show appropriate gratitude.

A number of conservative bloggers have seized on a sensationalistic LA Times’ story from yesterday which stated that “the Obama administration has made it clear that it believes there is no question that Tehran is seeking the bomb.”

In his news conference this week, President Obama went so far as to describe Iran’s “development of a nuclear weapon” before correcting himself to refer to its “pursuit” of weapons capability.

Obama’s nominee to serve as CIA director, Leon E. Panetta, left little doubt about his view last week when he testified on Capitol Hill. “From all the information I’ve seen,” Panetta said, “I think there is no question that they are seeking that capability.”

The language reflects the extent to which senior U.S. officials now discount a National Intelligence Estimate issued in November 2007 that was instrumental in derailing U.S. and European efforts to pressure Iran to shut down its nuclear program.

Not so much, actually. Delivering the intelligence community’s annual threat assessment (pdf) yesterday, director of national intelligence Dennis Blair “said US intelligence assesses that Iran has not restarted nuclear weapons design and weaponization work that it halted in late 2003.”

“Although we do not know whether Iran currently intends to develop nuclear weapons, we assess Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop them,” he said in an annual threat assessment to Congress.

The assessment essentially reaffirmed a 2007 intelligence report that at the time was widely seen as a setback to international efforts to put pressure on Iran to abandon its nuclear program.

The 2007 NIE (pdf) has been the source of much controversy, but here’s what it actually said:

We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program (1); we also assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons. We judge with high confidence that the halt, and Tehran’s announcement of its decision to suspend its declared uranium enrichment program and sign an Additional Protocol to its Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty Safeguards Agreement, was directed primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure resulting from exposure of Iran’s previously undeclared nuclear work.

1. For the purposes of this Estimate, by “nuclear weapons program” we mean Iran’s nuclear weapon design and weaponization work and covert uranium conversion-related and uranium enrichment-related work; we do not mean Iran’s declared civil work related to uranium conversion and enrichment.

While it’s important not to underplay Iran’s problematic behavior here — the step from “civil work related to uranium conversion and enrichment” to weaponization is a relatively small one — the distinction between “nuclear weapon” and “nuclear weapons capability” is not trivial. It’s clear that Iran would like the capability, but it’s also clear by looking at Iran’s behavior that the regime understands that actually building a weapon would trigger a number of highly undesirable consequences.

We should also remember that the main reason that the 2007 NIE made such a splash was because President Bush and other administration officials had, in the previous months, been engaged in a troublingly familiar threat-hyping exercise. Just as he had done in the lead-up to the Iraq war, President Bush represented “no doubt” about Iran’s intention to possess a nuclear weapon. The 2007 NIE showed that there was, in fact, some doubt, an assessment which remains operative today — the LA Times’ attempt to generate traffic notwithstanding.