The Senate has yet to confirm a number of President Obama’s nominees to various State Department posts. One of those nominees, Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-CA) — a champion of repealing the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy — has had a hold placed on her nomination to become Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security. But the hold on her nomination is not anonymous, as Foreign Policy’s Laura Rozen reports:

A blanket hold placed late last week by Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) on all State Department nominees appears to have been lifted on Saturday, administration sources tell The Cable. Kyl’s only remaining hold, The Cable was told, is on Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-CA), President Obama’s nominee to be under secretary of state for arms control and international security.

Kyl’s office confirmed his remaining hold on Tauscher’s nomination. “He honestly has made no guise of his hold on her nomination,” spokesman Ryan Patmintra told The Cable Monday.

When asked why Kyl is placing a hold on Tauscher, a spokesperson said, “He expressed privately to the administration his concerns. He has chosen not to discuss them publicly.” Indeed, Kyl’s office did not respond to an inquiry from ThinkProgress.

But last week, Rozen reported that Capitol Hill sources said Kyl “is not satisified with the information he has been receiving from the administration on the progress of arms control negotiations with Russia”:

“Kyl’s beef and the general Republican argument now emerging against the Obama administration’s nuclear weapons policy is that they are rushing to conclude a new agreement with Russia on strategic arms levels before their Nuclear Posture Review [NPR] is complete,” a Democratic congressional source said.

However, the Obama administration has to move quickly because the arms control agreement with Russia — the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), a verification regime signed in 1991 — expires on Dec. 5. The Obama administration has made no secret of wanting warmer relations with Russia. In recent negotiations, both nations have expressed interest in “much deeper cuts in strategic arsenals than those achieved by START when it came into force.”

Nuclear non-proliferation expert Joseph Cirincione told ThinkProgress, “Senator Kyl wants to delay any arms reductions until the Nuclear Posture Review, then work the process so the NPR makes only minor changes to the existing nuclear arsenal.”

Indeed, if Obama makes a deal with Russian President Medvedev to drastically reduce nuclear stockpiles, Kyl — who is against reducing America’s nuclear weapons — won’t have much of an opportunity to challenge it. Kyl would rather play domestic politics with the NPR and have a chance at limiting nuclear reductions before any U.S.-Russia binding agreement. Thus, it appears Kyl is using the NPR as an excuse to block U.S. negotiations with Russia, and is holding up Tauscher’s nomination as blackmail.

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

The Center for a New American Security recently released a report entitled “After the Fire,” detailing what the authors think the U.S. relationship with Iraq should be after the withdrawal of U.S. troops in 2011. There is little controversial or bold in the report for reasonable readers to disagree with — the basic thrust is that the United States should remain diplomatically engaged in Iraq after 2011 as it would in any other important post-conflict country with which it has diplomatic relations. Beyond this banal main point, the report suggests that the United States might maybe keep a number of adviser troops in Iraq beyond 2011 -– which is something of a CNAS hobbyhorse -– but political realities in Iraq (which the authors themselves point out) make such a development exceedingly unlikely.

But the report does suffer from two main flaws, one specific to the topic and another afflicting DC policy reports in general. First, the report doesn’t mention Iraqi refugees or internally displaced persons (IDPs). These people will have to be dealt with one way or another, either by returning them to their homes or by resettling them elsewhere in Iraq or overseas. Either way, refugees and IDPs present a tremendous political problem for the Iraqi government –- one that could spark renewed violence if handled improperly. And if Iraqis choose or are forced to resettle overseas, the brain drain preventing Iraq’s economy from rebuilding itself will become permanent. This oversight is glaring given the relatively common-sensical main recommendations of the report.

More broadly, though, the CNAS report reflects a major problem with DC foreign policy reports -– assuming away strategic questions while focusing on operational and tactical issues. For instance, the report asserts that we have a “strategic imperative of establishing an enduring relationship with a key country in a region of vital importance to the United States” without establishing why this is so. It may be true, but no one actually argues why. Maybe we don’t have to have an “enduring relationship” with Iraq for it to be stable. Maybe we do, but DC discussions don’t really go beyond the assertion that this sort of relationship is necessary.

Moreover, the authors assert “the primary objective and guiding principle of U.S. Middle East policy must be to keep the region politically stable and secure in order to protect American allies in the region and avoid sudden disruptions in the supply of energy resources.” Which is well and good, but it really begs a broader US Middle East policy which isn’t really found beyond faint outlines in a report that, after all, focuses on Iraq. To my eyes, at least, it seems like the report’s goals for Iraq are informing the overall regional strategy (such as it is) rather than the other way around. This sort of thinking is all too common in various DC foreign policy reports -– there’s little questioning of overall U.S. strategy and too much focus on questions of technique.

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