It looks quite clear that US-Russian negotiations over a new START treaty are proceeding smoothly. Yet while the START treaty reaches the finish line, conservative commentators have adopted the bizarre and hypocritical attack that not reaching an agreement before December 5th – the date at which the existing treaty expires – would represent a failure.

This line has been pushed by Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and was reiterated by Fred Barnes in the Weekly Standard this weekend. Kyl in a floor speech last week claimed that the Administration “spent the first half of the year negotiating a joint understanding that would allow it to show progress toward the president’s goal of a world without nuclear weapons” and have “only now have negotiators begun looking at the question of verification.” Barnes added in an oped titled “another Obama diplomatic failure,” that the Administration “is desperate to avoid the humiliation of having failed to finalize” the treaty.

Conservative complaints reek of hypocrisy. Not only did conservatives not lift a finger to advance START over the last eight years, but they have also shown almost no concern for verification measures in the past. But what is most galling about this attack is that the Administration has had effectively only 5 months to negotiate an incredibly complex treaty – not a full year.

The reason for this is that conservatives in the Senate put a number of holds and stalled numerous appointments crucial to the START negotiations. For instance, Senator Kyl quite openly put a hold on Ellen Tauscher’s appointment as Undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security. So if conservatives were so concerned about getting a new treaty in place before December 5th, why then did Kyl hold up someone of critical importance to the START talks?

Laura Rozen, then at The Cable, reported that Kyl was putting a hold on Tauscher because of START.

A Congressional source says that Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) put a hold on all State Department nominees earlier this week because he is not satisfied 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 is complete.”

But Kyl knew that the Nuclear Posture Review was not scheduled to be completed until next year – so demanding that the NPR be completed prior to conducting negotiations over a new START treaty, was simply an effort to torpedo the Administration’s ability to negotiate a treaty before the December 5th deadline. But instead of just being upfront about his opposition to controlling the Russian nuclear arsenal, Kyl is now trying to attack the administration from a pro-arms control position by proclaiming his support for verification measures – something he has consistently discounted in the past. This is all just bizarre and by trying to disguise his own position, Kyl is just demonstrating how weak and out of the mainstream his actual position on arms control really is. Instead of wanting a world without nuclear weapons, Kyl wants one with many more.

Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minuteman Project, was caught on video last week slamming “Ron Paul fanatics” in the anti-immigration movement along with tea-bagger wannabe William Gheen who organized poorly attended “copycat” anti-immigration tea party protests:

I used to support Ron Paul, until I had this falling out with these Ron Paul fanatics. They’re not all that way, just too many. The ones that I’ve met, who are very hateful people, have no business supporting Ron Paul. Jeff Schwilk and William Gheen have no business being in political activism because, in my blatant personal opinion, they are outright racists.

Watch it:

Gilchrist has long attempted to distinguish his “multi-ethnic” border vigilante group from more overtly racist organizations such as Gheen’s Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC). However, their public feud is more the product of personal infighting than ideological differences.

To begin with, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) lists both the Minuteman Project and ALIPAC as “nativist extremist” organizations. SPLC has extensively documented the Minuteman Project’s ties to the Council of Conservative Citizens, a “white supremacist hate group” which even co-hosted a “strategy session” with one of the Minuteman Project’s chapters. The Anti-Defamation League points out that the Minuteman Project is “highly publicized among right-wing extremists ranging from militia groups to white supremacist organizations,” including neo-Nazi National Alliance members. Harvard University recently canceled Gilchrist’s invitation to speak at the campus, explaining that his views were “not compatible with providing an environment for civil, educational, and productive discourse on immigration.”

Earlier in the interview, Gilchrist offers a more convincing explanation for the mutual contempt held amongst nativist groups: “personality disorders” or “just hate for the competition.” Gilchrist claims Gheen’s hatred for him started when he refused to hand over his email lists and that his group was later attacked by Gheen for endorsing Gov. Mike Huckabee (R-AR) for President over Ron Paul. Both candidates pandered to the right-wing anti-immigrant fringe during their 2008 presidential campaigns.

Newsweek editor John Meacham — the same guy who insisted that Barack Obama’s election as president proved that America was a “center-right” country — thinks that a Dick Cheney run for the presidency would be great for America. Meacham that an Obama-Cheney match-up would “give us an occasion that history denied us in 2008: an opportunity to adjudicate the George W. Bush years in a direct way. As John McCain pointed out in the fall of 2008, he is not Bush.”

It is true that John McCain is not, in fact, George W. Bush. But, as this blog spent a lot of time examining during the 2008 campaign, on national security McCain was virtually identical to Bush, except where McCain was more extreme. In that respect, the 2008 election were as clear an adjudication of the George W. Bush years as one could have hoped for. The American people delivered a pretty resounding verdict of “fail.” So now Meacham wants a do-over.

Given that the best case for George W. Bush’s stewardship of U.S national security boils down to: “Hey, we didn’t get attacked again!” it’s not hard to understand why Cheney has chosen to ignore American tradition and bash Bush’s successor at every opportunity, frantically trying to sway the public whose opinion he casually and disdainfully dismissed while in office.

If U.S. security were best served by talking smack on Meet the Press, or delivering pro-torture applause lines to sycophants at the American Enterprise Institute, Dick Cheney could be considered a success. In terms of actual measurable evidence, however, Cheney’s record, and that of the administration he served, is one of staggering incompetence and failure.

One of the worst, and most consequential, of those failures was letting Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden escape from the caves of Tora Bora where U.S. forces and Afghan allies had him cornered in late 2001. A new report from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee examines various aspects of that failure, the and concludes:

Removing the Al Qaeda leader from the battlefield eight years ago would not have eliminated the worldwide extremist threat. But the decisions that opened the door for his escape to Pakistan allowed bin Laden to emerge as a potent symbolic figure who continues to attract a steady flow of money and inspire fanatics worldwide. The failure to finish the job represents a lost opportunity that forever altered the course of the conflict in Afghanistan and the future of international terrorism, leaving the American people more vulnerable to terrorism, laying the foundation for today’s protracted Afghan insurgency and inflaming the internal strife now endangering Pakistan.

Cheney has accused President Obama of “dithering” over a new Afghanistan strategy — a strategy necessitated by Cheney’s and Bush’s failure to get bin Laden, and to commit the necessary resources to finish the job in Afghanistan. It’s enormously important to understand that that failure was not an accident, it was the direct result of a conservative national security ideology that puts more stock in talking “tough” than in actually having an effective policy. Cheney is a prime exponent of that ideology, and the George W. Bush presidency was the definitive demonstration of its intellectual vacuity — something Cheney and his supporters have been, and will continue to be, at great pains to conceal. Frankly, I really doubt Cheney would want to get into a situation where he would have to answer tough questions about his failures, or give the American people another chance to reject his approach to national security.

Part of the Obama administration’s plan to get the Israelis and the Palestinians to the negotiating table has been to call on the Israeli government to freeze all settlement building and expansion throughout the occupied West Bank.

Yet despite agreeing to freeze all settlement activity in the 2003 Road Map, the Israelis have continued expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. However, last week, Israeli government ministers approved a measure calling for a 10-month freeze on new building permits and construction of new residential buildings in the West Bank (but exempts East Jerusalem), a move top U.S. Middle East envoy George Mitchell said “falls short of a full settlement freeze, but it is more than any Israeli government has done before, and can help move toward agreement between the parties.”

This weekend, members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party attacked President Obama for the Israeli settlement decision:

[Member of the Knesset] Dani Danon organized the meeting after Culture and Sports Minister Limor Livnat (Likud) launched a verbal attack over the matter on U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration, which she branded “terrible.” [...]

While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately distanced himself from her comments, the activists at Saturday’s conference leveled further criticism at Obama over the moratorium, which Israel undertook to carry out in the wake of tremendous U.S. pressure.

“The Obama administration is an enemy of the Jews and the worst regime there ever was for the State of Israel,” said Yossi Naim, the head of the Beit Aryeh regional council, at the Ra’ana meeting. “I announce to Obama: You won’t be able to stop us.”

Ron Nahman, mayor of the West Bank settlement of Ariel, applauded Livnat’s comments. “You had the public courage to say what most of the public feels ever since Obama came to power,” he said, repeatedly referring to the U.S. President as “Hussein Obama.”

The New York Times argued in a recent editorial that, despite the settlement dispute and mishaps, Obama should continue to move forward:

The president has no choice but to keep trying. At some point extremists will try to provoke another war…and the absence of a dialogue will only make things worse. Advancing his own final-status plan for a two-state solution is one high-risk way forward that we think is worth the gamble. Stalemate is unsustainable.

The Wonk Room’s Matt Duss notes that Netanyahu’s refusal to comply with a full settlement freeze “is a huge part of the problem here” and that the Obama administration may have to “stop pretending that Netanyahu is a partner for peace.”

Last Tuesday, the United Kingdom began “the most thorough investigation yet into the decisions that led up to the war and governed Britain’s involvement” through a series of Iraq war hearings in which numerous high-level British officials — including key war supporter and Bush ally ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair — are expected to testify about their role in bringing their country to war.

The hearings, chaired by privy council member John Chilcot, have brought to light a number of explosive facts which unveil the level of chicanery practiced by the Blair government in taking the country to war over the opposition of the vast majority of British citizens:

– Blair was told prior to the war by his intelligence services that Iraq did not have access to weapons of mass destruction. Sir William Ehrman, the director-general of defense and intelligence at the Foreign Office at the time, told the inquiry that British intelligence services had concluded ten days prior to the beginning of the war that Saddam Hussein did not have access to weapons of mass destruction and that he also likely lacked warheads capable of delivering such weapons. The Blair government ignored the advice of their intelligence services and supported the war anyway. [11/25/09]

– The Blair government had decided to support the US-led war up to a year before the invasion. Sir Christopher Meyer, the ambassador to Washington at the time, told the inquiry that the Blair government had decided that it was “a complete waste of time” to resist Bush’s efforts to go to war and had instead opted to offer advice about how to invade. Meyer also told the inquiry that former US national security adviser Condoleeza Rice had called the Meyer on the day of the 9/11 attacks and told him, “We are just looking to see whether there could possibly be a connection with Saddam Hussein.” Meyer also reiterated that both the American and British government were constantly looking for a “smoking gun” to justify the upcoming war. [11/26/09, 11/26/09]

– Blair was told the Iraq War would be illegal under international law by his attorney general. In a July 2002 letter, former British attorney general Lord Goldsmith warned Blair that the UN charter only permits military intervention “on the basis of self-defence” or for “humanitarian intervention” and that neither case applied to Iraq. Blair responded by banning Goldsmith from future cabinet meetings and ignoring his verdict on the legality of the war. [11/29/09]

The Iraq war Inquiry will continue through 2010 and is expected to release its conclusions in a formal report at the end of that year. Although few expect there to ever be prosecutions as a result of the deception or illegality of the invasion of Iraq — despite the fact, as one of the last surviving judges of the Nuremburg Tribunal has said, the leaders who launched the invasion should be held accountable — there are other important reasons to investigate the drive to war. As Chilcot said at the opening of the hearings Tuesday, the inquiry was set up not only to “identify the lessons that should be learned from the UK’s involvement in Iraq,” but also to “help future governments who may face future situations.”

In testimony before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, retired Vice Admiral Dennis McGinn articulated a national security argument for passing clean energy legislation. “Continued over reliance on fossil fuels, or small, incremental steps, simply will not create the kind of future security and prosperity that the American people and our great Nation deserve,” McGinn warned.

In an interview with the New York Times Magazine, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), the ranking member of the Senate environment committee, argued that McGinn and other generals who are advocating for clean energy reform (like Wesley Clark, Stephen Cheney, Brent Scowcroft, etc) are simply doing so because they crave “the limelight”:

NYT: Senator Boxer is chairwoman of the Environment and Public Works Committee,on which you are the ranking Republican. She and her fellow Democrats have lately suggested that global warming could be a threat to national security by destabilizing developing countries.

INHOFE: That’s the most ludicrous thing. They looked around and they found, I think, five generals to testify before the committee. Well, that’s 5 generals out of 4,000 retired generals that say that. There are a lot of generals who don’t like to be out of the limelight. They’d like to get back in.

Despite Inhofe’s desire to trash the motivations of military generals who have a different view than he does about the impending climate crisis, the national security implications of climate change cannot be so easily dismissed. For at least the past two years, “military and intelligence experts have been issuing studies warning that climate change could put American military personnel and national security at risk. Increasingly violent storms, pandemics, drought and large-scale refugee problems, they say, will destabilize regions and encourage terrorism. And American dependence on foreign energy sources will only exacerbate the threats and increase the likelihood of military action.”

It’s not just military generals who are making this argument. Inhofe’s former colleague, John Warner (who Inhofe acknowledged has had “a long and distinguished career in the military”), also understands the security implications of global warming:

WARNER: Leading military, intelligence, and security experts have publically spoken out that if left unchecked, global warming could increase instability and lead to conflict in already fragile regions of the world. If we ignore these facts, we do so at the peril of our national security and increase the risk to those in uniform who serve our nation. It is for this reason that I firmly believe the U.S. must take a leadership role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Of course, Inhofe probably believes Warner is craving the limelight too. Apparently, everyone needs to take lessons from Inhofe about how to unassumingly fly below the radar.

Last night Fox News, host Greta van Susteren asked former GOP presidential candidate Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) what he thought of reports that President Obama plans announce his intention to send 34,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan. McCain said he’s not concerned about how many troops Obama is sending, he just wants to succeed — regardless of whether we have an exit strategy or not:

VAN SUSTEREN: What do you think about that? Is that a decision that — that you think is a wise one or do you want the full 40,000 that was originally requested?

MCCAIN: Well, I’m not so much concerned about the number because I understand that it may be additional allied troops to help out, too. I’d like to look at the overall strategy. I would like to see the emphasis on succeeding, not on an exit strategy.

Greta, the exit strategy takes care of itself once you succeed just as it did in Iraq. But I’d like to hear the whole thing. I hope the president will make the right decision here. And I would like to support him if he does.

Watch it:

At least McCain is consistent; an exit strategy for the war in Iraq has been of little concern to him as well. When running for president, the Arizona senator and fervent Iraq war supporter said he would “be fine with” the U.S. military staying in Iraq for “a hundred years” and later “excitedly declar[ed] that U.S. troops could be in Iraq for ‘a thousand years’ or ‘a million years,’ as far as he was concerned.”

Indeed, as the Wonk Room’s Matt Duss has noted, McCain’s knee-jerk reactions to the crises in Iran last June and in Georgia last October, and now with his “no exit strategy necessary” policy, reminds the U.S. of the bullet it dodged last November by not electing him president.

Obama reportedly plans to announce an exit strategy in the coming days.

Former-Bush-spokesperson/forever-Bush-flack Dana Perino made a pretty startling claim last night on Hannity in the course of questioning the Obama administration’s avoidance of the term “terrorism” in reference to the Fort Hood murders:

PERINO: There is one thing that I would say about Fort Hood that I feel very strongly about, which is — and I don’t say this to be political — I think it matters a lot what we call it. And we had a terrorist attack on our country. And we should call it what it is because we need to face up to it so that we can prevent it from happening again.

HANNITY: I agree with you. And you know, why won’t they [the Obama administration] say what you just so simply said?

PERINO: It’s — they want to do all of their investigations, I don’t know all of their thinking that goes into it, but, you know, we did not have a terrorist attack on our country during president Bush’s term. I hope they’re not looking at this politically. I do think that we owe it to the American people to call it what it is.

The decision whether or not to call an act of violence “terrorism” — which is, after all, defined as the use of violence against civilians in the pursuit of a political goal — is inextricably bound up with politics. Though I tend to lean toward “yes,” I think there are real questions as to whether Nidal Hassan’s shooting spree qualifies as terrorism. Those who think there aren’t tend to be die-hard “war on terror” types interested in marketing a particular (and politically advantageous to conservatives) conception of an undifferentiated Islamic threat.

Obviously, a former Bush official waxing sanctimonious about the politicization of national security is, to say the least, bold. It’s a matter of public record that the Bush administration was exploring ways to exploit 9/11 for political ends literally before the fires had been doused at Ground Zero.

As to Perino’s claim of “no terrorist attacks under Bush,” one of the main Bush legacy talking points handed out to administration officials as Bush was leaving office was “No terrorist attacks… since 2001!” Maybe Perino just forgot to mention that last part. Or perhaps Perino has gotten so used to insisting that the administration she served actually had an effective strategy for fighting terrorism that she’s simply come to believe that the attacks took place before Bush’s presidency began.

Another side of this, though involves effort, thus far unsuccessful, by some conservatives to cast Fort Hood if not exactly as “Obama’s 9/11,” (which would be ridiculous on its face) then at least as a “terrorist attack” sufficient for their purposes of attacking Obama’s response to the shooting as insufficient, and his broader counter-terrorism approach as ineffective. A Google search of “Fort Hood, Obama, Pet Goat” turns up quite a bit, none of it making much sense, but revealing nonetheless the continuing conservative shame at President Bush’s response to the September 11 attacks, and a deep desire to believe that President Obama’s response to tragedy was just as bad, if not worse, than Bush’s.

Conservatives have been telegraphing this tactic for while. As far back as January 2009, Robert Robb complained in the Arizona Republic that “Bush has been given remarkably little credit or appreciation for the fact that there has not been a domestic terrorist attack since 9/11,” but went on: “If, however, there were to be a terrorist attack during Barack Obama’s watch, the public’s view of Bush would spin on a dime.” It should be pretty obvious that Perino and others are trying to use Fort Hood to change the public’s view.

Richard Grennell, the Bush administration’s UN spokesperson, writes a love-struck op-ed claiming that his old boss John Bolton was right all along when he said negotiating with the Iranians was pointless:

Someone needs to say it now. John Bolton was right. When the Obama Administration proclaimed victory on October 1st by announcing that a break-through had been reached in Geneva and that Iran had committed to shipping 2,600 pounds of fuel to Russia, expert Iran watchers were appropriately cynical… Bolton, however, was the first to stand up and call the Iranian pronouncement a sham – and he did it within hours of the announcement.

This misses the point entirely and demonstrates a totally one-dimensional view of diplomacy that was endemic during the Bush administration. During the Bush years, figures like Bolton blustered endlessly about Iran, but despite all of this empty rhetoric, nothing came of it. Iran accelerated its nuclear program, leaving the Obama administration to deal with an Iran well on their nuclear way.

Furthermore, the Bush administration’s refusal to engage Iran prevented an international consensus from emerging. Our European allies, Russia and China weren’t willing to support stronger action against Iran as long as we refused to even try diplomacy. And the threats of war from figures like Bolton only served to make the United States look like a hyper-aggressive belligerent power, further undercutting any hopes of gaining a tough international consensus. In the end, Bush left office with a divided international community and with Iran closer to developing nuclear weapons.

The point of Obama’s decision to engage Iran was to put the onus on the Iranians and force them to decide whether they are with the international community or against it. Our willingness to engage in serious talks, and Iran’s willingness to reject them, has made Iran the bad guy and given us the credibility to establish a more robust international response.

Far from being wild-eyed optimists about talks, the Obama administration and progressive foreign policy experts thought it quite likely that Iran would reject talks. Sure, the best case scenario was that Iran would decide it was in their self interest to abandon the prospects of developing nuclear weapons in exchange for improved ties with the west, but this was always the best case scenario. So while Obama has been engaging Iran, he has also been working to significantly strengthen the international community’s stance on sanctions should the Iranians walk away. The US and Europe, which were frequently at odds during the Bush administration, are now largely in sync. This is crucial since any effective sanctions policy requires the Europeans, which have a lot more economic leverage over Iran than we do. Additionally, the improved relationship with Russia has increased the prospects that Russia will support tougher sanctions on Iran.

There is still a lot of uncertainty as to what will happen. But by engaging Iran diplomatically, the Obama administration has laid the groundwork for a much more robust international response to Iranian intransigence than would have ever been possible during the Bush years.

Christopher Hitchens apparently didn’t get the memo that it’s no longer verboten to recognize that certain U.S. policies have, in some cases, exacerbated the very problem of Islamic extremism that they were intended to address. Responding to Robert Wright’s Sunday New York Times op-ed, in which Wright suggested that Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan and Little Rock shooter Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad were driven to violence in part by images of U.S. forces killing Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan, Hitchens fumes:

For a start, did Hasan or Muhammad ever say what “killing” of which “Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan” they had in mind? There isn’t a day goes by without the brutal slaughter of Muslims in both countries by al-Qaida or the Taliban. And that’s not just because most (though not all) civilians in both countries happen to be of the Islamic faith. The terrorists do not pause before deliberately blowing up the mosques and religious processions of those whose Muslim beliefs they deem insufficiently devout. Most of those now being tortured and raped and executed by the Islamic Republic of Iran are Muslim. All the women being scarred with acid and threatened with murder for the crime of going to school in Pakistan are Muslim. Many of those killed in London, Madrid, and New York were Muslim, and almost all the victims callously destroyed in similar atrocities in Istanbul, Cairo, Casablanca, and Algiers in the recent past were Muslim, too. It takes a true intellectual to survey this appalling picture and to say, as Wright does, that we invite attacks on our off-duty soldiers because “the hawkish war-on-terrorism strategy—a global anti-jihad that creates nonstop imagery of Americans killing Muslims—is so dubious.” Dubious? The only thing dubious here is his command of language. When did the U.S. Army ever do what the jihadists do every day: deliberately murder Muslim civilians and brag on video about the fact? For shame. The slippery slope—actually the slimy slope—is the one down which Wright is skidding.

It’s probably important to point out here the yawning chasm between saying that “we invite attacks on our off-duty soldiers” through a “hawkish war-on-terrorism strategy” — which Wright did not do — and saying that a “hawkish war-on-terrorism strategy” and its attendant right-wing propaganda has generated resentment which in turn fed Hasan’s and Muhammad’s extremism, which is was Wright does say. As a general point about radical extremism, I think it’s so obvious as to no longer be controversial. In specific regard to Hasan and Muhammad, I think the jury’s still out.

I find it hard to believe, though, that Hitchens hasn’t yet moved beyond this idea that saying “the terrorists are very bad!” and then detailing some of the very bad things that “the terrorists” do constitutes an actual argument. This sort of petulant sanctimony went out of style years ago. For the record: Yes, “the terrorists” are very bad. So are some of the consequences of our poorly thought out policies for dealing with them. These two ideas are not mutually exclusive.

At the Middle East Institute yesterday, John Limbert, who was recently appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary for Iran in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, discussed his his new book Negotiating with Iran.

Limbert spent 33 years in the Foreign Service, serving in Algeria, Djibouti, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. From 2000-2003 he served as ambassador to Mauritania, and retired in 2006 with the rank of Minister-Counselor. In 1979, he was among those taken hostage by radical Iranian students at the American embassy in Tehran. As Politico reported, Limbert “is the recipient of the Department’s highest award, the Distinguished Service Award, as well as an Award for Valor for his more than a year as a hostage in Iran, months of it spent in solitary confinement.”

Though Limbert made clear that he was speaking yesterday as an author and not in his capacity as a State Department official, his comments do provide insight into the thinking of a key U.S. official dealing with Iran.

The important question of his book, Limbert said, “is not ‘should we or shouldn’t we’” negotiate with Iran. “The important question is, when we finally end our thirty year estrangement, how do we do it?” It is important to acknowledge, Limbert said, that “hostility and suspicion still run very deep, and they run deep on both sides.” The Iranian view is typified, Limbert said, “in a famous rhetorical question from Ayatollah Khomeini. When asked about negotiations with the United States, he [Khomeini] replied: ‘What for? What does the wolf have to negotiate with the sheep?’”

On the American side, Limbert said, “you find something similar.” There is an idea “that one could never have successful negotiations with leaders who do and say what Iran’s leaders do and say… Because they are too fanatical, too xenophobic, too suspicious, and too untrustworthy to deal with.” This view is alive and well in Washington, Limbert said, “and I’ve encountered it as recently as last week.” Limbert suggested that this view was simply a reverse of Khomeini’s view, asking instead “what do the rational have to negotiate with the crazies?”

Knocking down some of the caricatures of Iran that tend to dominate U.S. media coverage, Limbert said “There’s much more to Iran — and much more to negotiating with Iran — than the absurdity of presidential statements coming out of Tehran and the nastiness of the current system.” Trained as an historian and fluent in Farsi, Limbert noted his great interest in Iran in the 14th century, a time in which he said “you had creative, vibrant artistic people living under rulers who, to put it bluntly, were thugs, fanatics, and bigots.” It was not incorrect, Limbert said, to notice “a similarity between conditions then and conditions now.”

Limbert was asked at what point the administration might say “enough is enough” and walk away from engagement. “I think you’re going to need a lot of patience,” he said. But “if it’s worth it — and I think from what I read and what I hear, this administration has decided that it is worth it, and knows that it will take a lot of patience. Thirty years of suspicion, thirty years of trading insults, thirty years of name-calling, and sometimes exchanges going beyond just rhetoric, that’s tough to overcome.”

Asked whether Iran’s current domestic politics would impact negotiations, Limbert replied “obviously it will,” and would likely make striking a deal more difficult. But, Limbert said, “if you wait for a good time” to try and change the relationship, “it will never come. It’s always going to be a bad time.”

Limbert said it was clear that “The system that’s been in place, where you have a ruling men’s club of about twenty five senior people” was passing away. “The core elite of the Islamic Republic… are getting old and departing the scene,” but more important, Limbert said, “the consensus which had existed among this group whose cohesion allowed the Islamic Republic to survive some horrific shocks…seems to be breaking down, and something different is coming out of it.” Limbert said that “the system to seems to be reverting to an earlier model of rule by the gun, and rule by force. Some of the features you see emerging now are reminiscent of what you saw under the Pahlavis.”

Asked whether human rights should be part of the negotiation, Limbert’s answer was direct: “Of course.” The Iranians deserve a far better government than they have, Limbert said. “Should it [human rights] be a matter for negotiation? Of course. Should it be the only matter for negotiation? I don’t think so. I would hope that we’re smart enough to deal with one issue at a time. And I think we are.”

Senate Republicans exposed their strategy to kill the new START treaty: procrastinate and then blame the other guys. The Cable reports that Senate Republicans, led by Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), are cynically preparing to unleash a wave of attacks that warn of the dangers that will occur when the original START treaty expires on December 5th.

Kyl claims to be shocked, shocked! – that the START treaty is about to expire. Kyl said in a floor statement this week (pdf):

Mr. President, I don’t say this lightly, but, this borders on malpractice.

Kyl goes on to argue that this will leave all the verification procedures up in the air and will allow the Russians to cheat on the treaty. But by making this argument Kyl has either miraculously seen the light on the value of arms control treaties or he is simply one of the biggest hypocrites in the Senate. After doing nothing for eight years to advance a new START treaty, it takes some real chutzpah for Kyl to attack the Administration for not getting a treaty done in eight months.

By warning of the dangers when the Treaty expires, Kyl is actually making an argument for ratifying a new START treaty right away. If the treaty expires and no new treaty is ratified in the Senate, the Russians will be able to do whatever they want with their nuclear arsenal. Yet, Kyl has not committed to supporting a new treaty and many conservatives like Kyl have consistently lambasted arms control treaties in general, arguing that they make us weaker by constraining our nuclear arsenal. So it is rather duplicitous that with START about to expire, Kyl suddenly finds enough religion on arms control to argue how unconscionable it will be if there is no treaty in place.

In fact, Kyl makes the amazing claim that:

only recently has verification gotten the attention it deserved all along.

This is pretty shocking coming from Kyl, since he never seemed to care much about verification before Obama was in the White House. During Bush administration negotiations over another arms control treaty – the 2002 SORT treaty – Senate Republicans expressed little concern that the treaty had few verification measures in place. Arms Control Today writing in 2005 explained that the Bush administration had a “casual” approach to verification and “did not negotiate any verification measures for the treaty because it claimed to have confidence that Moscow would limit its warheads by the treaty’s terms.” Kingston Rief added, “It’s telling that some of the same conservatives who supported the SORT approach are now accusing the Obama administration of being weak on verification.”

If the START treaty were to expire, it would allow the Russians to tinker and adjust their nuclear arsenal in violation of the spirit of the treaty. This is exactly why the Administration is in the midst of negotiating an interim bridging agreement.

A new memo from Steve Simon of the Council on Foreign Relations looks at the possibility of an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. “In assessing the likelihood of an attack,” Simon writes, “it is useful to look back on the origins of the Six Day War in 1967 and the raid on the Osirak reactor in Iraq.”

In each case, Israel attacked only after a long period of procrastination. In 1967, Washington’s hands-off posture tipped the balance in the cabinet in favor of preemption. In the case of Osirak, the Carter and Reagan administrations’ unwillingness or incapacity to intervene left Israel feeling cornered and compelled to act unilaterally. One lesson to be learned from this is that Israel is more likely to use force if it perceives Washington to be disengaged.

I’m not sure what lesson this has for Obama. No one can say that he’s been “disengaged” in the Middle East. Clearly, Obama hasn’t been “engaged” in precisely the manner that Netanyahu would probably prefer — i.e. taking a harder line on Iran while ignoring Israel’s settlement building — but he has repeatedly stressed both the U.S. commitment to Israel’s security and that he recognizes Iran’s nuclear program as a threat to that security. So I suppose the question is whether, or at what point, Netanyahu will decide to interpret Obama’s pursuit of engagement with Iran as “disengagement” from Israel.

Simon concludes that, while Israel could carry out such a strike, the margin of error for a successful strike — that is, one that destroys or at least seriously incapacitates Iran’s known nuclear facilities — is razor thin.

And then there are the consequences of such a strike. Here’s a summary:

First, regardless of perceptions of U.S. complicity in the attack, the United States would probably become embroiled militarily in any Iranian retaliation against Israel or other countries in the region. [...]

Second, an Israeli strike would cause oil prices to spike and heighten concerns that energy supplies through the Persian Gulf may become disrupted. [...]

Third, since the United States would be viewed as having assisted Israel, U.S. efforts to foster better relations with the Muslim world would almost certainly suffer. [...]

Fourth, the United States has a strong interest in domestically generated regime change in Iran. Although some argue that the popular anger aroused in Iran by a strike would be turned against a discredited clerical regime that seemed to invite foreign attack after its bloody post-election repression of nonviolent opposition, it is more likely that Iranians of all stripes would rally around the flag. [...]

Fifth, an Israeli attack might guarantee an overtly nuclear weapons capable Iran in the medium term.

Sixth, although progress toward an Israeli-Palestinian final status accord remains elusive, an Israeli strike, especially one that overflew Jordan or Saudi Arabia, would delay fruitful renewed negotiation indefinitely. [...]

Finally, the United States has an abiding interest in the safety and security of Israel. Depending on the circumstances surrounding an Israeli attack, the political-military relationship between Jerusalem and Washington could fray, which could erode unity among Democrats and embolden Republicans, thereby complicating the administration’s political situation, and weaken Israel’s deterrent. Even if an Israeli move on Iran did not dislocate the bilateral relationship, it could instead produce diplomatic rifts between the United States and its European and regional allies, reminiscent of tensions over the Iraq war.

That’s a lot of downsides. One that I have yet to see discussed, however, is the potential effect on U.S. public support for Israel of attacks by Iran on American troops in retaliation for an Israeli strike. As retired General Anthony Zinni put it back in September, “Eventually, if you follow this [a strike on Iran] all the way down, eventually I’m putting boots on the ground somewhere. And like I tell my friends, if you like Iraq and Afghanistan, you’ll love Iran.” A solid majority of Americans support the U.S. Israel relationship, but I’m not sure Netanyahu really wants to test the depth of that support once America starts taking casualties as a direct result of precipitous Israeli military action. And no one wants Israel to be put into a position where he has to do that.

Washington Times national security editor Barbara Slavin has an article on Iranian filmmaker and dissident Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who has become a spokesperson for Iran’s Green Movement in the wake of the June 12 elections. Makhmalbaf called upon President Obama to more explicitly support Iran’s opposition movement and more strongly condemn Iranian human rights abuses. He also had some interesting things to say about the prospect of further sanctions:

“Inevitably, you are going to put [new] sanctions on Iran,” Mr. Makhmalbaf told a small group of Iran specialists and journalists in Washington. He said the U.S. should “let the Iranian people know why you are going to sanction and what the targets are so they can support you.”

He rejected proposed U.S. legislation that would target gasoline imports to Iran, saying that would hurt average people. He said it was better to focus on the Revolutionary Guards, who have been at the forefront of repressing demonstrations and who have taken control of considerable elements of the Iranian economy.

You know who also opposes U.S. legislation targeting gasoline imports to Iran? The Iranian regime. For some, this shared interest is quite enough to tar Makhmalbaf as a regime apologist. Those who are genuinely interested in supporting Iran’s opposition — and not just in smoothing the road toward a U.S.-Iran war — understand that this is silly, of course. The Iranian opposition — and its supporters outside the country — include a number of different factions and trends with various end goals and methods of reaching them.

Speaking of smoothing the road toward a U.S.-Iran war, the very same Washington Times also runs an editorial today telling Americans to Get Ready To Bomb Iran:

Force need not be used to be effective, but the threat of force must be credible to have any chance of influencing Iranian behavior. Right now, there is no credible threat emanating from the United States. The Obama administration unambiguously opposes military action against Iran, particularly by Israel. But it would help to have a little ambiguity on this issue. So long as Tehran thinks the United States will work actively to prevent Israel from taking action, it has one less reason to worry. It would be most helpful if the United States began to send signals to Tehran that the United States will assist Israel in its preparations for military action and maybe even participate when the attack ultimately is launched.

If the regime in Tehran is not made to fear serious consequences for its continued intransigence, it has no reason to abandon its nuclear ambitions.

Leaving aside that anyone who talks seriously about bombing Iran has revealed themselves to be no friend of Iran’s opposition — Abbas Milani represents the overwhelming consensus when he writes that “the forces now controlling Iran would be immeasurably strengthened by an American or (especially) Israeli attack” — this shows a pretty serious misapprehension of the situation in Iran right now.

It’s not at all clear that Iran’s ruling hardliners, who are currently weathering the most serious crisis of legitimacy in the Islamic Republic’s history, wouldn’t actually welcome a military strike by either Israel or the U.S. Such a strike, in addition to extinguishing the Green Movement, would effectively end the ongoing debate within the regime over whether to obtain a nuclear weapon in favor of those who have been arguing “yes,” in very much the same way that the preventive U.S. invasion of Iraq convinced Iran’s hardliners that they needed to keep open the option of having a strategic deterrent.

It’s pretty broadly understood across the U.S. defense establishment that a strike on Iran — either by Israel or the U.S. — would very likely result in a number of disastrous consequences, consequences Iran knows that the U.S. would rather avoid. There’s really no credibility to be generated by pretending otherwise.

Recently, the Liz Cheney-founded right-wing advocacy group Keep America Safe released a mini-documentary that features several residents of Standish, Michigan, speaking out against a possible transfer of detainees from Guantanamo Bay to a prison in the city. The video ominously warns that the transfer would turn the town into “Guantanamo North” and claims that Standish residents are dead set against moving Guantanamo detainees to their city. Watch it:

Yet, as the Plum Line’s Greg Sargent reports, the video poorly represents the views of the residents of Standish. He interviewed Standish City Manager Michael Moran, who dismissed Liz Cheney’s “fearmongering” and said the documentary was “off base“:

Standish’s City Manager tells us that local leaders and residents want the facility, and dismissed Cheney’s efforts as “fearmongering.” Cheney is “certainly not representing the views of our community,” the City Manager, Michael Moran, told our reporter, Amanda Erickson.

While some local residents do appear to have expressed mixed feelings or opposition to the plan, Moran says that they’re an isolated minority that Ms. Cheney’s video elevates out of proportion in a way that’s “off base.”

The truth is, the residents of Standish — like the residents of Thomson, Illinois — aren’t afraid of housing terrorism suspects on U.S. soil. Last month, the Standish City Council voted 6-0 in support of a resolution asking the federal government to relocate Guantanamo prisoners to their city. Moving detainees to the city would help keep their prison facility open, which would guard against “the loss of the 350 jobs provided by the [jail].”

Yesterday, Republican members of the House Immigration Reform Caucus (HIRC) dedicated a three and a half hour long pseudo-hearing in a nearly empty room in the Rayburn building to spewing their “well-worn rhetoric about the hordes of illegal aliens destroying the American way of life.” During the event, “American Jobs in Peril: The Impact of Uncontrolled Immigration,” Rep. Steve King (R-IA) seemed to suggest that the U.S. should rid itself of its immigrant workers because, back in the good ‘ol days, high school “football stars” could get good-paying jobs not because they were qualified to work at them, but rather, because “they knew someone”:

Thirty years ago in the packing plants there in that town — which I do call my hometown — you had to know somebody to get a job. And I can remember looking at the football stars on our football team that graduated back in those years in the mid to late 60s and thinking:

“Those guys will get the best-paying jobs at the beef plant. They can just take their degree and go out and get a job — IF they know someone. If they don’t, they won’t get the job. Well I can’t do that because I’m not tall enough or strong enough.”

But today it’s entirely different.

Watch it:

King attributes the end of cronyism in the meatpacking industry and the deterioration of wages and working conditions to undocumented immigrants. The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW), which has represented meatpackers for almost a hundred years, has a different take about the sequence of events.

Back in March, Center for Immigration Studies Senior Fellow Jerry Kammer — who was also a panelist at the event — offered an interpretation of the industry’s history similar to King’s, minus the football players. The UFCW was quick to point out that Kammer’s misinterpreted and manipulated “data to reach a totally biased and flawed conclusion” and demonstrated a “complete lack of understanding about the history of the meatpacking industry.” They also provided their own account of what happened:

Immigrants worldwide have been essential in strengthening the U.S. meatpacking industry, by organizing around increased wages and improved industry standards. But during the ‘80’s, something happened. Consolidation, mergers, and company-induced strikes helped drive down wages for meatpackers. During the strikes, companies aggressively recruited strike breakers-not immigrants but individuals who came from the decimated farm industry-to cross the picket lines.

Many of these workers soon realized something: these jobs were tough. Too tough to perform at the wages companies were offering. So, they left. But the damage was done. And the UFCW has been fighting to rebuild wages and standards for these jobs ever since.

In direct reference to yesterday’s event, UFCW’s Director of Civil Rights and Community Action, Esther Lopez, commented, “Given their [King and his allies] terrible track record on worker issues, it really is the height of hypocrisy that they are now trying to portray themselves as champions of workers.”

The House Immigration Reform Caucus (HIRC) is a group of (mostly Republican) representatives founded by former Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) with the mission of stopping “the explosive growth in illegal immigration,” “reversing the growth in legal immigration,” and halting “amnesties.” The forum featured panelists from two of the three organization which “stand at the nexus of the American nativist movement,” and are often referred to as part of the “Nativist Lobby.”

Cross-posted at Think Progress.

Shortly after Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) agreed to drop his opposition to President Barack Obama’s nominee for Ambassador to Brazil, interim Sen. George LeMieux (R-FL) decided to pick up where DeMint left off. DeMint had been blocking Thomas Shannon’s nomination over the Obama’s policy on the coup in Honduras; LeMieux, on the other hand, is accusing the former Bush nominee of being soft on Cuba.

According to an anonymous Republican aide, LeMieux is delaying Shannon’s confirmation over the role he played in initiating talks with Cuba on migration and direct mail service when he was Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs under the Obama administration. Yet while many suggest that LeMieux is trying to “burnish his Cuba credentials to help Crist,” he may not realize that Shannon’s actions were largely motivated by an effort to “bridge the gap” between Cuban Americans and their relatives in Cuba. The Obama administration has allowed Cuban Americans to visit their family members and lifted limits on money transfers to Cuban relatives, all while keeping in place long-standing trade restrictions. While still in office, Martinez chose to describe the developments as “good news for Cuban families separated by the lack of freedom in Cuba.”

Curiously, a new report recently revealed that wealthy supporters of the U.S. embargo against Cuba have contributed almost $11 million to members of Congress since 2004 and have been largely successful in blocking efforts to weaken sanctions against Castro’s government. In the meantime, long-time Republican Cuban Americans “drift[ed] to Obama” during the 2008 elections.

LeMieux was nominated and confirmed as Assistant Secretary by a Republican president and Republican-dominated Congress in 2005. Up until Obama’s inauguration, Shannon was working under an administration that approached Cuba with a heavy iron fist and often referred to Castro’s government as part of the infamous “axis of evil.”

Holding up Shannon’s nomination means the U.S. has limited diplomatic relations with the largest and most economically robust country in Latin America. Brazil also ranks fifth among the world’s most populated countries.

A new congressionally commissioned report just stuck it to Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ). Kyl is the leading advocate in the Senate for testing nuclear weapons and has led the charge against the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) – a treaty that seeks to stop countries from testing nuclear weapons.

Obama has made ratifying the treaty a major priority and there are hopes that the Senate will bring it up next year, yet conservatives led by Kyl are looking to block it. One of Kyl’s main arguments against CTBT is that it would prevent the U.S. from physically exploding nuclear weapons, which he insists we need to do to ensure the effectiveness of the US nuclear arsenal. Writing an oped in the Wall Street Journal last month titled Why We Need To Test Nuclear Weapons, Kyl wrote that “a ban on testing nuclear weapons would jeopardize American national security.” He asserted that “concerns over aging and reliability have only grown” and insisted that “the reliability of U.S. nuclear weapons still cannot be guaranteed without testing them, despite more than a decade of investments in technological advancements.”

Unfortunately for Kyl, a new congressionally-commissioned study (pdf) conducted by a panel of independent scientists has proven him dead wrong. The study concluded that the current programs in place to maintain the effectiveness of the US nuclear arsenal – a program called the Life Extension Program (LEP) – have demonstrated that:

Lifetimes of today’s nuclear warheads could be extended for decades, with no anticipated loss in confidence, by using approaches similar to those employed in LEPs to date.

In other words, there really is no need to ever test a nuclear weapon – something the US hasn’t done in the last 17 years – or build new replacement warheads. This study effectively undercuts one of the main arguments of CTBT opponents and should strengthen the push to ratify the treaty next year. As Daryl Kimball of the Arms Control Association concluded: “There is no technical or military reason to resume U.S. nuclear weapons testing, and it is in the U.S. national security interest to prevent nuclear testing by others. A growing list of bipartisan leaders agree that by ratifying the CTBT, the U.S. stands to gain an important constraint on the ability of other states to build new and more deadly nuclear weapons that could pose a threat to American security.”

Republicans often use immigration as a wedge to kill initiatives and policies they don’t like, but Sen. John Cornyn’s (R-TX) most recent antics are quite a stretch. Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee put Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. in the hot seat over the decision to hold the trials of alleged 9/11 plotters on American soil.

Holder seemed baffled when Cornyn started drilling him on whether alleged 9/11 plotters will have an immigration status or be able to apply for asylum:

CORNYN: When the detainees come to the United States, will they have some immigration status?

HOLDER: I am not an immigration expert, I do not know what their status might be. I am confident however, given the fact that they would be here under the supervision of and as a result of being charged in a federal court that we would be able to detain them, that we would be able to hold them as we would do with anybody who has been charged with such serious crimes.

CORNYN: Are you aware of any more to their ability to claim asylum, or argued that they should not be able to be removed from the U.S. because of the convention against torture?

HOLDER: Again, I am not an immigration expert. One can be paroled in the United State solely for this purpose, but there’s no right to be here after[...]

CORNYN: Will you acknowledge that it’s possible — or let me ask you if you’d like into it — whether if a detainee claims an immigration status by virtue of their presence on U.S. soil it will allow them to immediately trigger tandem administrative and federal judicial immigration proceedings?

Watch it:

The National Immigration Law Center tells the Wonk Room that detainees will be brought to the U.S. but kept in custody on criminal charges — without an immigration status. In the unlikely event that they are acquitted, they could still be kept in custody and put in removal proceedings.

It’s unlikely that suspected 9/11 plotters would be granted asylum — let along a green card — even if they tried. Syracuse University points out that there’s a common misconception that the U.S. asylum system is abused by people who endanger national security. However, “asylum applications are subject to stringent review procedures by adjudicators in the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice and to rigorous background and security checks.” Terrorism concerns essentially lead to an automatic disqualification from asylum and immediate deportation.

In yesterday’s congressional testimony, Holder indicated that he was “confident justice would be delivered to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and other accused plotters of the 9/11 attacks.”

In April 2007, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said that the war in Iraq was “lost” and that the surge was “not accomplishing anything.” Conservatives and war hawks ripped into Reid for the comment, calling it “reckless,” “disturbing” and “playing to the worst elements of the antiwar left.”

One of the fiercest critics of Reid’s Iraq war stance was former senator Fred Thompson, who accused him of “encouraging our enemies”:

But Reid’s comments are not meant for logical analysis. He proclaimed the war lost some time ago, and the surge as a failure even before the additional troops were on the ground. The problem is that every one of Reid’s comments I’ve noted here has also been reported gleefully by Al Jazeera and other anti-American media. Whether he means to or not, he’s encouraging our enemies to believe that they are winning the critical war of will.

But now Thompson is singing a different tune on the appropriateness of declaring an American war “lost.” In a commentary on his radio show today, Thompson declared that the Afghanistan war “has been lost”:

“It really doesn’t matter how President Obama divides the Afghan baby, how he splits the difference between McChrystal and Biden. Because the war has been lost,” Thompson said on his radio show today. “I say this because of one sad and simple fact. The president does not have the will and determination to do what’s necessary to win it. His heart’s not in it, and never has been. The Taliban knows it. Al Qaeda knows it. Our allies know it. And the American people know it.

“Our enemies are now emboldened and our friends are discouraged. We cannot prevail if the American people are not willing to make the sacrifices necessary for an extended effort. The case has not been made to them to justify this effort. The case can only be made by the president. This president is unable or unwilling to make that case,” Thompson said.

Listen here:

According to Thompson’s own logic, his declaration of defeat today — “whether he means to or not” — is “encouraging our enemies to believe that they are winning the critical war of will.”