Joshua Keating has a good post exploring the significance of Steven Colbert’s Iraq tour and his stint as guest/stunt editor of Newsweek. I don’t know if I’d go as far as Keating in calling Fareed Zakaria’s cover story on “victory” in Iraq “the kind of goalpost moving that Colbert has relished mocking for years,” but I do think the use of the term “victory” is troublesome — not least because it plays into the narrative of the war architects for whom the key goal of the surge was the salvaging of their reputations. We should note, however, that the word victory only appears in the article’s title (over which writers have notoriously little control, though I would suspect a star like Zakaria has quite a bit more), and that much of what Zakaria reports strongly challenges the idea that the word applies to what has been achieved. While U.S. and Iraqi forces may have admirably clawed Iraq back from the brink of total collapse, the costs of the war so staggeringly outweigh its benefits (most of which remain in the realm of the potential) that there is no moral or political calculus by which the decision to invade can reasonably be called the correct one.

Zakaria:

American influence is not what it was a few years ago. Yet America still has enormous leverage with a government that relies on U.S. forces for its basic security and well-being. The question is whether the Obama administration will use this leverage in a focused and purposeful way.

The reason to do so is simple. How Iraq evolves in the next few years will define America’s legacy there. After all, there were no weapons of mass destruction. The costs — in blood, treasure, anti-Americanism — have already been paid. All that is left to redeem the mission is the hope of a decent outcome — a democratic Iraq that represents a new model of Arab politics, one that does not force its citizens to choose between a repressive regime and an extreme opposition. But for that to happen, Iraq must become an inclusive democracy for all its people. Its potential as any kind of a model rests largely on this evolution.

On the contrary — while our forces remain in Iraq by the tens of thousands, while takfiri terrorists continue to employ and spread tactics and technologies developed in the Iraqi training ground we provided them, and while Iran continues to expand and strengthen its regional influence as a result of our removing their greatest enemy, we will continue to pay the costs of the war.

Zakaria writes that “Arab regimes paint a picture of Iraq that suggests that American-led democracy has led to chaos, collapse and, perhaps more crucially, to Shiite tyranny. This is a damning indictment because for the rest of the Arab world — which is overwhelmingly Sunni — it suggests that democracy is something to be feared.” I think this is right, but let’s be honest, it doesn’t take much of a propagandist to convince people that the limb-strewn and blood-spattered marketplaces that they see almost every day on Al Jazeera are not preferable, or that a political system that produces such outcomes is sub-optimal. The greatest portion of blame for the disrepute into which democracy has fallen in the Middle East belongs to the president who undertook to remake Iraq as a shining example of it.

I do agree with Zakaria, though, that the manner in which President Obama manages the U.S.-Iraq relationship is hugely important. Acknowledging that the invasion of Iraq was and remains a major U.S. foreign policy blunder shouldn’t blind us to the potential ways in which a genuinely democratic Iraq could positively influence the region. I only advise against using words like “victory” in the hope that it will help us avoid trying to reproduce this experiment, and this policy, elsewhere. Ever.

Last night, Vice President Cheney’s daughter Liz appeared on a mainstream American television news media outlet, this time on Campbell Brown’s CNN show. During a contentious “Great Debate” segment with Salon’s Joan Walsh, Liz Cheney was trying to argue that bringing Guantanamo Bay detainees to U.S. soil “makes us less safe” and that they should remain where they currently reside.

To make her argument, Cheney also continued her penchant for false claims. At one point in the debate, Walsh noted that military leaders want Gitmo closed and that even President Bush once said it should be closed and that some detainees should tried in the U.S. Cheney, however, disagreed:

WALSH: Liz, the top — the top military leaders of our country want Guantanamo closed. President Bush, in June 2009 [sic], gave a speech where he said he would close it, and he would bring people home and try them here.

CHENEY: No, I’m sorry.

WALSH: President Bush said that.

CHENEY: He did not say he would bring terrorists onto the homeland. Joan, no, he didn’t say that.

Watch it:

Walsh is right, Bush did say that. During a June 2006 press conference at a U.S.-EU summit, Bush called for Gitmo to be closed and to have some of the detainees tried in U.S. courts:

BUSH: I’d like to end Guantanamo. I’d like it to be over with. One of the things we will do is we’ll send people back to their home countries. [...] There are some who need to be tried in U.S. courts. They’re cold-blooded killers. They will murder somebody if they’re let out on the street. And yet, we believe there’s a — there ought to be a way forward in a court of law.

However, Cheney’s canards didn’t end there. She also offered the debunked claim that “14 percent” of Gitmo detainees have “returned to the battlefield,” a claim Walsh noted is “not true.” Indeed, last week the New York Times issued a correction to its story, saying that the number is closer to 5 percent.

Shortly after opening fire at the National Holocaust Museum today, James Wenneker von Brunn, the suspected shooter, was identified as a white supremacist with a “history of associations with prominent neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Brunn’s hateful rhetoric followed by today’s violent outburst chillingly echoes a controversial warning issued by the Department of Homeland Security concerning a rise in “rightwing extremist activity.”

In his book, “Kill the Best Gentiles,” Brunn wrote:

We are witnessing today on the world stage a tragedy of enormous proportions: the calculated destruction of the White Race and the incomparable culture it represents.

Brunn’s supremacist views weren’t limited to anti-semitism, he also condemned the “browning of America” in a public email:

Millions of low-IQ non-whites are encouraged to illegally invade the USA.  They are provided sanctuary, jobs, health-care schooling, by those intent upon destroying Western Civilization.

SPLC’s Heidi Beirich spoke with Fox New’s Shep Smith this afternoon about the shooting and the warning signs it poses for the U.S.:

SMITH: There’s these crazies out there. And we know it’s absolutely — there is no truth whatsoever — zero to any of those ideas. Yet, they live within the computer and they fester within people’s minds.

BEIRICH: Shepard, you’re hitting the nail on the head. We’re extremely concerned about these kinds of crazed conspiracies, whether they’re about the President, or the fact — we’re hearing things like FEMA setting up camps to round up Americans and put them in. I’m getting bad sort of deja vu from the 1990s, when anti-government militias were on the rise, when Tim McVeigh committed that violence in Oklahoma City. I’m really hoping we’re not going through a repeat of that.

Watch it:

A DHS report leaked earlier this year warned of “Rightwing extremist groups’ frustration over a perceived lack of government action on illegal immigration has the potential to incite individuals or small groups toward violence.” The DHS cited the rise in right-wing extremist ideology as “the most dangerous domestic terrorism threat.”

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

In a surprising outcome, Lebanon’s voters returned the pro-Western March 14 coalition to power in Sunday’s parliamentary elections. March 14 won 71 seats in the new parliament, while the Hezbollah-led March 8 coalition – which had been expected to emerge victorious in these elections – wound up with 57 seats. Outside observers have attributed March 14’s victory to Hezbollah’s willingness to use violence to settle internal political disputes and the implications a Hezbollah-led coalition victory would have for Lebanon’s international alignment vis-à-vis the United States and Iran. At the end of May, for instance, Vice President Joe Biden traveled to Beirut to warn that a Hezbollah victory would cause the United States to “evaluate the shape of our assistance programs based on the shape of the new government.”

These results clarify things quite a bit for U.S. policy. It removes from possibility (for the time being) that the United States would have to deal with Hezbollah members as legitimate representatives of the Lebanese state, as President Obama hinted at in a recent interview with NPR. They also mean that the current program of security assistance to the Lebanese armed forces will continue as planned.

But what clarifies for U.S. policy only manages to create problems in Lebanon’s dysfunctional confessional political system. These problems are compounded by the fact that Hezbollah maintains its own armed forces outside state structures and institutions, making it more powerful than its poll results indicate. The March 14 coalition will have to find a way to include Hezbollah’s coalition in its “national consensus” government without giving Hezbollah a veto. Failure to achieve some sort of consensus in the wake of the new political landscape could, as Lebanon expert Mona Yacoubian told Middle East Progress recently, “set Lebanon up for a period of dangerous political paralysis.”

March 14 faces a tricky road ahead of it: already Hezbollah has taken the question of its arms off the table, and issued threats that the political impasse will continue “unless the majority changes its attitude.” The fact that such threats are made and must be taken seriously indicates how far Lebanon still has to go before it evolves into a real democracy where internal political disputes are settled by legitimate, non-violent processes. In the face of such demands, the March 14 coalition will need the support of its external supporters, including the United States.

What the U.S. should do is encourage March 14 to create as broad and viable coalition as possible without giving the opposition a veto, and withhold criticism of deals struck to achieve that goal. In the long term, the United States should assist the Lebanese government in building non-confessional state institutions and structures – including and especially security institutions. Disarming Hezbollah is a long-term project that will require intense diplomacy with Syria and Israel in addition to internal development of the Lebanese state. Achieving stability in Lebanon will not be easy, but with dedication and diplomacy it can be done.