Today’s Fox News Sunday panel looked at Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to hold terrorist trials in federal courts rather than military commissions. The discussion quickly shifted to Holder himself, and whether he should be fired. NPR’s Juan Williams argued that Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol and Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer were lobbing “unjustified” attacks on Holder since the Bush administration repeatedly tried terrorists in civilian courts.

Krauthammer then cited the case of the failed Christmas Day bombing by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, saying that the Obama administration should have assumed that he “has people who are working with him” because he’s Nigerian:

KRAUTHAMMER: You arrest a guy who’s got a bomb in his underpants. You know, it’s likely he didn’t do it at home in his kitchen. … The guy is Nigerian. You’ve got to assume — you have to assume that he has people who are working with him.

WILLIAMS: Because he’s a Nigerian?

KRAUTHAMMER: Why do you assume otherwise? It makes no sense at all. You capture a terrorist and in almost all of our plots there are groups of terrorists. [...]

WILLIAMS: We have made such progress in terms of breaking down al Qaeda and getting them in terms of the structure to malfunction that there are now more lone wolves now and it’s tougher to capture and know the extent of knowledge they have at any one moment. There was no evidence, on the face of it on that day, had come from an al Qaeda training camp.

When Williams asked whether Holder should be held “accountable for all intelligence failures, including intelligence failures by the British and everybody else who didn’t understand what Abdulmutallab was up to,” Kristol smirked and shrugged his shoulders. Watch it:

On Jan. 5, President Obama admitted that there were “human and systemic failures that almost cost nearly 300 lives” on Christmas Day. He added that it “was not a failure to collect intelligence; it was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had.” Unlike what Kristol was trying to argue, it was not solely the fault of “incompetence” by Holder.

Transcript: Read more

Our guest blogger is Brian Katulis, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

As indicated by a Washington Post story earlier in the week on the U.S. military’s clandestine involvement in operations in Yemen and the news that more special forces are headed there, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) has been playing an increasingly central role in U.S. national security in many corners of the globe.

The clandestine nature of JSOC’s activities mean public information on its work is scant. But if you carefully look into press accounts from the world’s conflict zones — Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Somalia — you will find JSOC there, among other places.

Conservatives who prattle on about President Obama’s being weak on terrorist groups fail to recognize that the Obama administration has used JSOC forces with increasing frequency around the world. The Obama administration may no longer use the phrase “global war on terror,” but one year into office, it’s clear that it hasn’t let up on aggressively pursuing terrorist networks around the world. Whether these efforts are making America safer in the overall is simply unknown — more than eight years after the 9/11 attacks, America still lacks empirical metrics to determine whether any of our global efforts are reducing these threats.

JSOC falls under the umbrella of the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), which has about 60,000 personnel. A Congressional Research Service report from last year offers a few useful facts about USSOCOM. The 2004 Unified Command Plan gave USSOCOM responsibility for synchronizing Pentagon plans against global terror networks and conducting global operations. It plays an important role in countering terrorist finance. In 2008, USSOCOM was assigned the role of synchronizing the Pentagon’s security force assistance programs around the world, and this is what David Ignatius was referring to in his column earlier this week. These security force assistance programs are a central national security policy tool, though one with real downsides if not managed properly. As my colleague Peter Juul noted in this post on Pakistan, if America’s bilateral military relationship is not handled properly, it could cancel out efforts to change the “transactional” nature of the U.S.-Pakistan relationship.

Relatively little public information is available on USSOCOM, but two recent speeches — one by Admiral Eric T. Olson, the USSOCOM’s top military commander last year and another in 2008 by Michael Vickers, assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict — present an informative picture of just how wide-ranging the activities of USSOCOM are, including things that fall into categories that civilian agencies are charged with, too.

JSOC is just one component of the Special Operations Command efforts. Given its increasingly central role, however, it deserves more oversight from Congress and more attention in our national security discussions.

Vice President Biden has an important op-ed today in the Wall Street Journal. In it, Biden firmly addresses one of the main arguments used by conservatives to oppose arms-control efforts, namely that the US nuclear stockpile is too unreliable to make further reductions. In response, Biden says the Administration is committed to reverse the previous decade of funding shortfalls in nuclear stockpile maintenance and will dramatically increase the budget for these programs:

Among the many challenges our administration inherited was the slow but steady decline in support for our nuclear stockpile and infrastructure, and for our highly trained nuclear work force. … For almost a decade, our laboratories and facilities have been underfunded and undervalued. … The budget we will submit to Congress on Monday both reverses this decline and enables us to implement the president’s nuclear-security agenda. To achieve these goals, our budget devotes $7 billion for maintaining our nuclear-weapons stockpile and complex, and for related efforts. This commitment is $600 million more than Congress approved last year. And over the next five years we intend to boost funding for these important activities by more than $5 billion.

This should address the stated concerns of conservative GOP Senators who wrote a letter last month worrying about the state of the nuclear stockpile in the face of future cuts in the nuclear arsenal. In other words, conservatives argue, reasonably enough, that if you have fewer nukes then we have to be sure that the remaining nuclear weapons are good to go. The problem however, is that instead of focusing on expanding resources to programs that maintain the reliability of our remaining nuclear weapons, prominent conservatives in the Senate stamp their feet demanding that we start building new nuclear weapons. This is like instead of taking your perfectly fine car to get a tune-up, you just decide to buy an entirely new one. It’s wasteful and unnecessary.

Numerous studies have pointed out that there is no need to build a new nuclear warhead or test nuclear weapons as long as there is adequate funding to maintain the nuclear stockpile. Biden’s increase in funding will ensure that, as the Arms Control Association notes, “the United States can continue maintain a reliable arsenal without resuming nuclear testing or building newly-designed nuclear warheads.”

Yet many conservatives prefer just to pretend these studies don’t exist. Senators like Jon Kyl (R-AZ), want to build new nuclear weapons and want to conduct new nuclear tests and pledge to fight tooth and nail against ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). Many are predicting that because of this opposition, CTBT will go nowhere in the Senate, as it needs 67 votes. But with still 59 Democrats, and with Republican non-proliferation advocates like Senator Dick Lugar, not to mention the Senators from Utah and Nevada that have a strong opposition to ever testing nukes again, there is a fighting chance that this treaty could get passed. Importantly, Biden didn’t walk away from it and included CTBT ratification as part of the Administration’s core nuclear security agenda in his op-ed:

Our budget request is just one of several closely related and equally important initiatives giving life to the president’s Prague agenda. Others include…and pursuing ratification and entry into force of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Instead of shirking from the fight, the Administration should plow forward and push the CTBT, because as former Republican Senator from Utah, Jake Garn, wrote today in the Deseret News, “Ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty will make our country safer.”

Last night the U.S. Senate showed that, as opposed to the gridlock that prevents the passing of needed reforms that would actually benefit the American people, when it comes to ill-conceived, poorly designed measures that provide legislators an easy way feel like they’re “getting tough” on something or other, it can move with a quickness.

In a voice vote, the Senate passed a new sanctions passage targeting “gasoline imports in a bid to force Tehran to bow to global pressure to freeze its suspect nuclear program.”

The sweeping measure, which passed by voice vote, must now be blended with a similar bill in the House of Representatives to forge a compromise measure for both sides to approve and send to President Barack Obama.

The Senate bill aims to punish non-Iranian firms that do business in Iran’s energy sector or help the Islamic republic produce or import refined petroleum products like gasoline by blocking them from doing business in the US market.

Indicating that they intend to keep up the pressure on the administration to immediately adopt these sanctions once passed, on Wednesday a group of senators — Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IL), Ben Cardin (D-MD), Johnny Isakson (R-GA), David Vitter (R-LA), John McCain (R-AZ), Sen. Robert Casey (D-PA), and Sen, Chuck Schumer (D-NY) — sent President Obama a letter “urging” him “to make full use of them.” This despite clear past signals from the administration that the indiscriminate sanctions in the bill actually works against the goal of targeted sanctions and tightening pre-existing sanctions. (Gregg Carlstrom notes that administration figures have recently stepped up their talk of sanctions, but I don’t think qualifies as an “endorsement” of this package as much as an acceptance that it was going through, and of the need to work with Congress over its implementation.)

As I have noted in previous posts, there’s not a single analyst in Washington — or anywhere — who has credibly described how these particular sanctions stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon — let alone advance “the human rights and peaceful aspirations of the Iranian people,” as the senators’ letter claims.

Recently, two leading Iran experts, Patrick Clawson of the conservative-leaning Washington Institute for Near East Policy and Ray Takeyh of the Council on Foreign Relations, came out against new sanctions. Speaking at an event at the Washington Institute, Takeyh called sanctions “a fallback policy for the United States often when the situation becomes complicated,” and that he was “not comfortable with the idea of sanctions as a solution to the Iran problem, whether it’s the domestic problem, or the nuclear problem.”

Clawson reminded the audience that there are a number of sanctions on the books that have effectively slowed Iran’s nuclear program, and said that he was interested in “more vigorous enforcement of tough dual-use sanctions than I am necessarily about extending the list of sanctions.”

The United Nations sanctions are often dismissed as being “token.” That seems to me to be a profound misreading. It is very important to have dual-use sanctions, it is very important to have sanctions targeted at the nuclear and missile programs, because anything we can do to slow down their programs helps us. There are two clocks ticking — that’s an old cliche, but it’s true, the democracy clock seems to be ticking a lot faster than it used to be at the moment. So anything we can do to slow down the nuclear clock is, therefore, in fact, an accomplishment. Iran has been at this nuclear business for twenty years. Twenty years and they’re still not there, and the reason is, in no small part, because we have forced them to reinvent the wheel repeatedly. And recently some of the things they’ve been able to acquire from abroad don’t seem to work quite as designed, and malfunction on a remarkably consistent basis. That is good, and there’s much more that we can do.

On the specific question of gasoline sanctions such as those contained in the package just passed, Clawson warned “There are a lot of implementation challenges to gasoline sanctions, and I don’t like adopting a sanction which, in fact, we’re not prepared to implement.”

So I would not adopt a sanction on gasoline imports into Iran unless we are prepared to sink Venezuelan ships carrying that gasoline. Now, if we are prepared to do that, then let’s talk. But if you’re not prepared to sink those Venezuelan ships carrying that gasoline to Iran, don’t adopt the measures just to make you feel good, because it’s going to make you look impotent.

This gets at the inherently escalatory nature of sanctions. When the first round doesn’t work well enough, there’s the impulse to add more and more, and eventually you need to do dumb things like sink oil tankers to show you “mean business.” Casting a vote for more Iran sanctions may give legislators a warm feeling, but they will do little to solve the problem of the Iranian nuclear program, and make the U.S. look impotent in the process.

Yesterday, ThinkProgress joined a handful of journalists for a wide-ranging discussion with David Axelrod, Senior Adviser to President Obama. In his State of the Union address on Wednesday night, Obama announced a discretionary spending freeze that excluded the massive budgets of the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security.

“Can you tell the American people that there aren’t any savings to be found in the Defense and Homeland Security budgets?” ThinkProgress asked Axelrod. The President’s Senior Adviser acknowledged, no, “I can’t tell you that” there aren’t savings which can be found there.

Axelrod highlighted prior efforts by the administration to rein in defense spending and insisted that further cuts could still be made. Yet the Pentagon budget — which is expected to exceed $700 billion when Obama unveils his budget on Feb. 1st — remains inexplicably exempt from the spending freeze.

“We live in a dangerous world,” Axelrod said in trying to justify the special exclusion for the defense budget. “What we can’t do at a time when we’re in two wars and we have a very determined enemy in Al Qaeda, we can’t stand down,” he added in an interview with Fox News. Yet, rather than carve out an exclusion to fund troops in the field, the administration opted for a more expansive exclusion. And while cuts might indeed be made to certain programs, the overall Pentagon budget will be allowed to increase without having to face the difficult tradeoffs that other departments will.

Asked whether politics played any part in the decision to carve out a special exclusion for national security-related budgets, Axelrod denied that it did. “There weren’t any meetings that I was in where that was talked about,” he told us.

As Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Lawrence Korb has argued, “If President Obama is serious about controlling spending, he can’t exempt the Pentagon.” And House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) concurs, telling reporters yesterday that the entire defense budget “should not be exempted” from the freeze.

Peter Feaver has a piece at Shadow Government where he attacks the President for not focusing his State of the Union on foreign policy. This is a weak attack. Feaver, a former Bush administration official and currently a professor at Duke, writes:

The foreign policy headline of the State of the Union speech is how far the president went to avoid generating a national security headline. In one of the longest of recent SOTU’s, the president’s speechwriters devoted some of the shortest space and least consequential language to national security… This will be a very consequential year for U.S. foreign policy, but little of that is foreshadowed in this speech.

Feaver is right that foreign policy was not the focus of the speech, but the implication that the President is desperate to avoid a foreign policy “headline” is just bizarre and the idea that he needed to devote more time to foreign policy speech is wrong for a few reasons.

First, the President has very recently given many many prominent speeches about foreign policy. It is simply absurd to accuse the President of not focusing on, or talking enough about, foreign policy. Did Feaver not see last month when the President was in Oslo giving a lengthy speech solely on his vision of foreign affairs and national security when he received the Nobel Prize? And did he not see a month before when the President went to West Point to give a prime time address on his Afghanistan strategy. And finally, in the first few weeks of January the President talked at length about the failed underpants bomber and responding to terrorism. He hasn’t given a major domestic policy address, since his September speech to Congress.

Second, the country is going through a tremendous economic crisis. This is what the country really really cares about. This also happens to be what the political debate is focused on. Should the President have flipped the speech and talked for 2/3rds of the time about foreign policy, it would have been seen as politically tone-deaf for not addressing the concerns of the country.

Third, it is not like he didn’t talk about foreign policy. He hit on Afghanistan, terrorism, and Haiti. The President reconfirmed his commitment to withdraw troops from Iraq and indicated a new START treaty with Russia is imminent. He also highlighted the upcoming April Nuclear Security Summit that will seek to control loose nuclear materials. Finally, he expressed a commitment to human rights in Iran and warned Iran that they were facing sanctions. The President was no doubt checking the boxes in the foreign policy section, but that is to a large degree what the State of the Union is about – informing the public about what is going on.

As a foreign policy person, I would always like the President and the political class to focus more on my issue areas, but the fact is the President has spoken prominently and at length about foreign policy to the country. Feaver really seems to be complaining just to complain.

As the United States prepares to withdraw its combat troops from Iraq this summer and the diplomatic confrontation with Iran over its nuclear program continues, it’s important to think about what the security structure of the Persian Gulf region will look like in the near future. By the end of 2011, the United States will have no military presence in Iraq for the first time in eight and half years. Even if the U.S. and Iraqi governments negotiate a new arrangement for some U.S. troops to stay and provide technical support and training, the number of American troops remaining will not be very large.

In the Gulf, the United States will probably maintain a significant naval presence. Right now, the U.S. Navy maintains one aircraft carrier strike group and one expeditionary strike group in the Gulf and Arabian Sea area. This naval posture has been relatively constant since the First Gulf War in 1991, and is unlikely to change after U.S. troops withdraw from Iraq in 2011. In addition, there will likely be about 140,000 U.S. and NATO troops still in Afghanistan that a carrier strike group could support. With the war in Afghanistan likely to continue, long-range U.S. Air Force strike and support aircraft will probably remain based at undisclosed locations in the Gulf region.

As a result of the withdrawal of its land forces from the region, security assistance to Gulf states will become a major component of U.S. strategy for the Gulf. President Bush laid the first groundwork for this evolution when his administration announced a $20 billion arms package for Gulf allies like Saudi Arabia in July 2007. Since that time, the Defense Security Cooperation Agency has notified Congress of some $35.5 billion in potential arms sales to Gulf Arab states.

Among the items requested by these states, primarily Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates, are attack and utility helicopters, antitank missiles, and precision-guided bombs. But the most expensive possible purchases were those of anti-aircraft and anti-missile missile systems such as the Patriot PAC-3 and THAAD missile systems.

These potential sales go through the Foreign Military Sales program, a process by which the United States contracts for weapons systems on behalf of a foreign government and that foreign government then pays the United States for the weapons in question. However, the Defense Department has not awarded contracts for many of the major arms sales since the Bush administration’s July 2007 announcement. Only the UAE’s orders for 14 UH-60M Black Hawk utility helicopters and Patriot PAC-3 missile systems have been awarded, and these awards only came over the last month.

So far the Obama administration hasn’t promulgated an idea of what it expects Gulf security to look like once U.S. troops leave Iraq. Though the Bush administration originally had no intention of leaving Iraq, their solution to the problem of a rising Iran — empowered by the removal of its rival Saddam Hussein — was to dump weapons on friendly local states, while leaving the process by which these states obtained weapons largely dormant, apart from official notifications of possible arms sales.

As the Obama administration thinks about how the United States should manage the security transition in the Gulf, they should move beyond the Bush administration’s arms bazaar policy and toward an integrated security system for the Gulf. Rather than, say, selling as many anti-missile systems like THAAD or the Patriot PAC-3 to as many local states as possible, the goal should be to establish a cooperative anti-missile system that links friendly Gulf states together in a collective security arrangement.

Time is running out for the Obama administration to set forth its vision of the Gulf’s future security architecture. Withdrawing from Iraq and leaving the future security of the region up to a group of disorganized and competitive states is the worst option it can pursue.

Although President Obama spent a significant amount of his State of the Union speech last night talking about domestic issues, he also addressed several national security issues. The Joint Chiefs sat quietly when Obama talked about a timeline to begin the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and committed to working with the military to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell:

And in the last year, hundreds of al Qaeda’s fighters and affiliates, including many senior leaders, have been captured or killed — far more than in 2008. And in Afghanistan, we’re increasing our troops and training Afghan security forces so they can begin to take the lead in July of 2011, and our troops can begin to come home. [...]

This year, I will work with Congress and our military to finally repeal the law that denies gay Americans the right to serve the country they love because of who they are. It’s the right thing to do.

However, as Joe. My. God. points out, the Joint Chiefs didn’t sit passively during the entire speech, as the Supreme Court justices are supposed to do, although they traditionally applaud “rarely.” The Joint Chiefs stood and applauded when the President talked about supporting veterans or pledging to secure nuclear materials:

And at April’s Nuclear Security Summit, we will bring 44 nations together here in Washington, D.C. behind a clear goal: securing all vulnerable nuclear materials around the world in four years, so that they never fall into the hands of terrorists.

Watch a compilation:

A new study by UCLA’s Williams Institute estimates that there are an “estimated 66,000 lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals are serving in the US military, accounting for approximately 2.2% of military personnel.” Additionally, repealing DADT “could attract an estimated 36,700 men and women to active duty service and 12,000 more individuals to the guard and reserve.” The Pentagon has reportedly been “stepping up internal discussions on how gay men and lesbians might be able to serve openly in the armed services,” in anticipation that Congress and the President will move forward on repeal.

Notably, Defense Secretary Robert Gates did stand and clap for Obama’s call to repeal DADT. (HT: AMERICAblog)

Our guest blogger is Lawrence J. Korb, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress

If President Obama is serious about controlling spending, he can’t exempt the Pentagon. In announcing a three-year spending freeze, he exempted all security-related funding. This exemption applies to the budgets of the Pentagon, Department of Homeland Security, foreign aid and the Department of Veterans Affairs. Because the budgets of these agencies, particularly that of the Pentagon, are responsible for a large and increasing share of the discretionary portion of the federal budget, the president’s spending freeze will have a marginal effect.

Rather than exclude these accounts from the freeze for fear of appearing weak on defense, the president should mandate that the baseline defense budget also be frozen.

Indeed, freezing the base defense budget at its current level of about $532 billion would not hinder the Pentagon’s ability to conduct the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq because they will be funded separately through a $160 billion supplemental. Moreover, freezing defense spending would force the Pentagon to make the hard choices it has avoided over the past decade. In the last ten years, the baseline defense budget nearly doubled from $290 billion in FY2000 to $532 billion, an increase of $242 billion or 83 percent, or more than 8 percent a year. Even if one controls for inflation, the real growth amounts to nearly 50 percent, about 5 percent a year in real terms. By way of contrast, non-defense discretionary spending, which the administration proposes to freeze, has averaged only 5 percent annual growth, or 2 percent real growth during that same period.

Additionally, spending on future weapons systems has outpaced spending on our troops. The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments has pointed out (pdf) that the operations and support portion of the base defense budget – which includes costs for recruitment, training, military and civilian personnel pay, and operating and maintaining equipment – has increased. Yet it has risen less in real terms than the investment portion of the budget, which includes procurement, research and development, and construction. The operations and support part has increased by 3.5 percent a year in real terms over the past decade, while the growth in investment has exceeded 5 percent.

To keep the baseline budget level at $532 billion, the Pentagon could reduce the FY2011 projected budget level for weapons development and purchases from about $190 billion to $170 billion. This could be done through a number of reductions in baseline defense spending. In particular, the U.S. government could acquire $20 billion in savings by taking some of the following measures, which I recommended in my recent report, Paying for the Troop Escalation in Afghanistan (pdf):

-Cut missile defense, while maintaining funding for its continued research and development. Saves about $6 billion.
-Keep the Virginia-class attack submarine production steady at one per year instead of ramping up to two per year in FY 2011. Saves about $2 billion
-Cancel the Zumwalt-class DDG-1000 at two ships. Saves about $1 billion
-Cancel the MV-22 Osprey and substitute cheaper helicopters while continuing production of the CV-22. Saves about $2 billion
-Cancel the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle program. Saves about $294 million
-Cut the FY 2011 F-35 purchase to twenty, slow down production of the aircraft, cancel the alternate engine program, and replace the cut planes with drones. Saves about $4 billion
-Cut FY 2011 funding for the Army’s Future Combat Systems by one third. Saves about $763 million
-Continue offensive space-based weapons development at a low rate. Saves about $100 million
-Reduce the U.S. nuclear arsenal to 600 deployed warheads and 400 in reserve. Saves about $13 billion

This would still leave the FY 2011 baseline defense budget $15 billion higher in real terms than it was at the height of the Reagan buildup. And by using a unified approach to national security budgeting—which brings together national security spending from the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, State, and the U.S. Agency for International Development—additional funds could be transferred from DOD to the Department of Homeland Security so that its budget is not cut.

Yesterday, Jeff Stein reported that “John Kiriakou, the former CIA operative who affirmed claims that waterboarding quickly unloosed the tongues of hard-core terrorists, says he didn’t know what he was talking about.”

Kiriakou, a 15-year veteran of the agency’s intelligence analysis and operations directorates, electrified the hand-wringing national debate over torture in December 2007 when he told ABC’s Brian Ross and Richard Esposito in a much ballyhooed, exclusive interview that senior al Qaeda commando Abu Zubaydah cracked after only one application of the face cloth and water.[...]

Now comes John Kiriakou, again, with a wholly different story. On the next-to-last page of a new memoir, The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror (written with Michael Ruby), Kiriakou now rather off handedly admits that he basically made it all up. [...]

“I wasn’t there when the interrogation took place; instead, I relied on what I’d heard and read inside the agency at the time.”[...]

“Now we know,” Kiriakou goes on, “that Zubaydah was waterboarded eighty-three times in a single month, raising questions about how much useful information he actually supplied.”

Kiriakou also claims in his book “that the disinformation he helped spread was a CIA dirty trick: ‘In retrospect, it was a valuable lesson in how the CIA uses the fine arts of deception even among its own.’”

Kiriakou’s disavowal of his claims drew a frantic response from Bush administration speechwriter and leading torture apologist Marc Thiessen, who has cited the Abu Zubaydah stories repeatedly in his work. Thiessen insisted “I have spoken to the people who — unlike Kirakou — were in the room for the interrogations of Zubaydah, KSM and other terrorists held by the CIA.”

Thiessen admits, then, that he, like Kiriakou, wasn’t actually there for any of these interrogations, and that he, like Kiriakou, got all of his information second-hand. This raises the interesting question of whether Thiessen got played by his CIA sources, who saw Thiessen as a willing dupe in their effort to cover their behinds, as Kiriakou now claims to have been.

Meanwhile, Tom Ricks shares his account of a recent lecture given by intelligence and interrogation expert Army Col. Stuart Herrington. According to Ricks, “was one of the first people to blow the whistle on Abu Ghraib and on the broader abuse of prisoners that was occurring in many locations in Iraq back then.”

One of the most striking aspects of [Herrington's] talk is the cold professional contempt he has for Cheney, Rumsfeld and others who not only encouraged a brutal approach, but were amateurish in doing so.

Herrington began his talk by looking back to Vietnam, where he insisted on providing his prisoners(and intelligence targets) with “unconditional decent treatment-food, medical care and clothing.” He showed his Vietnamese colleagues, fond of using “water torture and electrocution,” that “One can employ legions of effective stratagems to achieve control over a potential recruit, but brutality, abuse and torture have no place.”

His bottom line:

“There was no room on our team for charlatans who believed in sleep deprivation, inducing hypothermia, stress positions, face slapping, forced nudity, water boarding, blaring heavy metal music, or other amateurish, ineffective and ethically flawed tricks.”

As of January 20, 2009, that’s America’s bottom line too.

General Colin Powell in an introduction to a new film called the Nuclear Tipping Point didn’t mince words. In a forceful and direct presentation, the former Cold Warrior talked about his experience in dealing with nuclear weapons throughout his military career. Powell discussed the nuclear planning that he conducted against the Soviets in Europe and the responsibility of having oversight of 28,000 nuclear weapons as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Through these experiences, Powell concluded that nuclear weapons are “useless” and ought to be eliminated.

POWELL: The more I got into nuclear weapons. The more I realized that these weapons must never be used. And then I became Chairman of the Joint chiefs of staff in 1989 and I had 28,000 nuclear weapons under my supervision. And every morning I looked to see where the Russian submarines were off the coast of Virginia and how far away those missions were from Washington. I kept track where the Russian missiles were in Europe and in the Soviet Union. The one thing that I convinced myself after all these years of exposure to the use of nuclear weapons is that they were useless. They could not be used. If you can have deterence with an even lower number of weapons, well then why stop there, why not continue on, why not get rid of them altogether…This is the moment when we have to move forward and all of us come together to reduce the number of nuclear weapons and eliminate them from the face of the earth.

Watch it:

Powell’s call for the elimination of nuclear weapons comes at a critical time. With President Obama in need of 67 votes in the Senate to ratify two treaties critical to the nuclear non-proliferation agenda, he must convince 8 GOP Senators to abandon the politics of obstruction and support these efforts that serve to enhance America’s security and reduce the likelihood for nuclear attack. Powell could certainly be a powerful force in that effort.

Furthermore, Powell’s statements just further expose a growing divide among the right. Nuclear Tipping Point was put together by the Nuclear Threat Initiative and is part of the robust efforts of former Secretaries George Schultz, Bill Perry, Henry Kissinger and Senator Sam Nunn to warn of the dangers of nuclear terrorism and to work for the elimination of nuclear weapons. While former senior Republican national security officials like Powell, Kissinger, Schultz, and Brent Scowcroft call for reductions in nuclear weapons, neoconservatives like Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) actually favor building new nuclear weapons.

Yesterday, Ohio Sheriff Richard K. Jones appeared in federal court facing charges that he violated the constitutional rights of an undocumented immigrant. The plaintiff, Luis Rodriguez, claims that Jones infringed on his 4th and 14th amendment rights. Cincinnati’s Local 12 channel reports:

[Officials [police] said they were at the site to talk to a supervisor about undocumented workers, but while there Rodriguez and others were interrogated and asked to provide identification, said Rodriguez’s attorney, Al Gerhardstein. Gerhardstein said his client, who had lived in Butler County for 11 years, was arrested and charged with providing a false identification and was deported to Mexico, though he was later acquitted of the charge.

Rodriguez is seeking damages and also trying to establish the principle that there aren’t any exceptions to the Fourth or 14th amendments.

The deputization of immigration law has become a growing trend and rampant allegations of racial profiling and civil rights violations have proliferated alongside it. Immigration hardliners often argue that Jones and other sheriffs who take a similar approach to the immigrant community have done no wrong because they are dealing with a population to whom the Bill of Rights doesn’t apply. However, the American Civil Liberties Union points out that both the language and intent with which it was written suggests otherwise:

The fundamental constitutional protections of due process and equal protection embodied in our Constitution and Bill of Rights apply to every “person” and are not limited to citizens. The framers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as well as the authors and ratifiers of post-Civil War amendments, all understood the essential importance of protecting non-citizens against governmental abuse and discrimination…Upholding the rights of immigrants is important to us all. When the government has the power to deny legal rights and due process to one vulnerable group, everyone’s rights are at risk.

Back in 2006, NPR reported that Jones was on a mission to “prod and shame the federal government into more action” on the immigration issue. Back then, Jones went as far to implement mass arrests of Latino workers and put a big yellow sign proclaiming “Illegal Aliens Here” in front of the county jail to “let people know that there are illegals here, and it is a problem, and we want some help.” Nonetheless, when Congress tried to address the problem in 2007, Jones was part of the “anti-immigrant minority” that was “dancing in the streets” over the bill’s failure.

Before getting to Robert Kagan’s call for President Obama to just go ahead already and roll the dice on Iranian regime change, a little background.

One of the most interesting articles written during the 2008 presidential campaign was Michael Scherer’s and Michael Weisskopf’s July 2008 analysis of Barack Obama and John McCain approach to gambling. “For both men,” Scherer and Weisskopf wrote, “games of chance have been not just a hobby but also a fundamental feature in their development as people and politicians“:

For Obama, weekly poker games with lobbyists and fellow state senators helped cement his position as a rising star in Illinois politics. For McCain, jaunts to the craps table helped burnish his image as a political hot dog who relished the thrill of a good fight, even if the risk of failure was high. [...]

In the past decade, [McCain] has played on Mississippi riverboats, on Indian land, in Caribbean craps pits and along the length of the Las Vegas Strip. Back in 2005 he joined a group of journalists at a magazine-industry conference in Puerto Rico, offering betting strategy on request. “Enjoying craps opens up a window on a central thread constant in John’s life,” says John Weaver, McCain’s former chief strategist, who followed him to many a casino. “Taking a chance, playing against the odds.”

When you look at candidates’ waged the rest of their campaigns, I think this turns out to have been impressively predictive. McCain the crazy craps player repeatedly went for broke with questionable risky moves, declaring himself a Georgian in response to the August 2008 Georgia-Russia conflict, selecting the unknown (and, as we now know, un-vetted) Sarah Palin as his vice-president, suspending his campaign and rushing back to Washington in an attempt to signal that he “got” the economic crisis, and trying to delay the candidates’ first debate, to which Obama the methodical poker player responded with a successful raise.

In addition to his status as a war-hero, this audacious approach to politics, particularly foreign policy, also speaks to why neoconservatives like Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan originally identified McCain in the late 1990′s as an ideal salesman for their “national greatness conservatism,” which John Judis described in his 2006 profile of McCain’s neocon conversion as “a philosophy that linked the development of American character to the exercise of power overseas” and an “emphasis on America’s responsibility to transform the world.”

What this approach essentially boils down to is enshrining the adage “history favors the bold” as a foreign policy imperative, while ignoring its somewhat lesser-known corollary, “history frowns upon the recklessly boneheaded.” (Which one are you? You’ll find out soon!)

All of these tendencies are on display in Robert Kagan’s op-ed today, in which he gushes “President Obama has a once-in-a-generation opportunity over the next few months to help make the world a dramatically safer place… by helping the Iranian people achieve a new form of government.” Read more

Nuclear weapons huggers are tripping over themselves to claim that last week’s op-ed by the “four horsemen” – George Schultz, Bill Perry, Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn (all global zero advocates) – has struck a blow to the President’s effort to get a new START treaty. Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and Frank Gaffney both claim that the four leaders came out in support of building a new nuclear warhead. That would be a real problem for the President if those leaders had done that. But they did no such thing.

Despite the fact that there is nothing written in the op-ed that says anything about building a new warhead (in fact it actually rebuffs Kyl on a number of points), Kyl and Gaffney both infer that the four statesmen – by endorsing the congressionally mandated Strategic Posture Commission report that came out last May – are, by extension, endorsing the construction of new nuclear warheads. Kyl in a letter to the Wall Street Journal makes the logical leap, as he says the four statesmen:

deliver a clarion call for the “necessity to maintain the safety, security and reliability of our own [nuclear] weapons.” In so doing, they have associated themselves with…the experts on the bipartisan Perry-Schlesinger Commission, who have urged significant and immediate funding to develop a modern warhead and repair our decrepit Manhattan Project-era nuclear infrastructure.

There are two catastrophic problems with this claim.

First, the Perry-Schlesinger Commission NEVER advocated building a new warhead. It just didn’t. Kingston Rief at Nukes of Hazard, who happened to be on the staff of the Strategic Posture commission, corrects the record:

The Commission, simply does not say that the U.S. needs new warheads … Instead it notes that existing life extension programs and new warhead designs represent opposite ends of a spectrum of options. What we have learned about our nuclear weapons to date suggests that existing life extension programs, not new warhead designs, make the greatest technical and strategic sense.

Three possibilities arise from Kyl’s totally fraudulent claim that that the commission “urged significant and immediate funding” for a new warhead. Either Jon Kyl and his staff, along with the Wall Street Journal, and other conservatives have not read the Strategic Posture report; or they read it, but lacking proper reading comprehension skills they misunderstood it; or finally – and most likely – they are knowingly and deliberately lying about what it says.

Second, Kyl, Gaffney, et al. don’t seem to understand the meaning of the word “modernize.” They interpret the word modernize to only mean the replacement of something with something else. Therefore when reports call for the “modernizing” of US nuclear forces they assume that this can only mean the construction of new nuclear warheads. This is nonsense.

To modernize something does not have to entail replacing it, it can just as easily entail refurbishing, or renovating. Using the online Webster’s dictionary I discovered that modernize means, “to bring up to date in style, design, methods.” Modernizing a nuclear weapon therefore does not mean that one has to build an entirely new one. Thus, the Perry-Schlesinger commission, the Obama administration, and the four horsemen can all be for modernizing the US nuclear arsenal, while simultaneously being against a new nuclear warhead. Stephen Pifer of the Brookings Institution explained the distinction:

We [the US] take a missile frame and we modernize it, and we refurbish it, whereas the Russian practice is to take a missile, they use it for 15 years and then they replace it completely. So you’ll see new numbers coming up on the Russian side and you may think that, gosh, the Americans are still deploying these 1970s missiles. I suspect when they retire the last Minuteman III in 2030, it may have three of the original bolts on it from 1970 but it’s going to be a very different missile.

While conservatives can try to argue wrongly that this type of modernization is insufficient, it is simply a lie to argue that the Perry-Schlesinger commission report that calls for modernizing the nuclear arsenal is arguing to build a completely new nuclear warhead.

Looking over President Obama’s evolving Iran policy over the last year, I don’t think the president and his team have gotten nearly enough credit for how they’ve calibrated an approach, especially in the wake of the June 12 elections, designed to undercut both the Iranian regime’s international and domestic propaganda, by insisting on the possibility of a deal, and the effect that his has had of exacerbating divisions among Iran’s ruling elite.

In remarks last week at the Institute for the Study of War, Gen. David Petraeus commented on these divisions, saying that while the diplomacy has intensified with Iran, the international engagement “has been complicated probably a bit just because of the preoccupation of Iran with its internal affairs.”

I mean, there are literally organizations within Iran that just, frankly, haven’t met the way they used to, certain of the important Iranian security bodies and advisory bodies that help the Supreme Leader and so forth, because — in some cases because of internal divisions among the senior members of these different groups. So that has made things more difficult, I suspect, as well.

In a late December article on the state of the administration’s engagement approach, Glenn Kessler reported the view of administration that officials that “the apparent turmoil it generated within the Iranian leadership is a useful side benefit of engagement.

The effort to engage “has had an unsettling effect on people in the regime,” one official said. “It has made it more difficult to demonize the United States and say it has been the root of all evil.”

It’s important not to overplay the extent of U.S. influence on Iran, but it’s important not to underplay it, either. We shouldn’t imagine that saying or doing X pulls a corresponding X lever in Iranian policy, but given the central place the United States occupies in the Iranian regime’s strategic and ideological perspective, there’s no doubt that U.S. policy and rhetoric have an effect.

It almost certainly had an effect during the Bush administration — a very bad one. In 2007 article, Barbara Slavin, now the foreign affairs editor of the Washington Times, wrote that Bush’s hardline policy toward Iran had had the effect of “boosting Iranian hardliners who argue that the Bush administration has no interest in reconciling with Iran and that Tehran’s best course is to reach bomb capacity as soon as possible.”

It’s no surprise, then, that U.S.-Iran talks about Iraq finally began in May this year [2007] in an atmosphere so fraught with hostility over sanctions and the nuclear issue that little has come of them. Iran, meanwhile, has refused to suspend its uranium enrichment program as demanded by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as a precondition for broad negotiations. A top aide to Ahmadinejad recently told me that the Iranians think Rice is lying when she says she will meet with Iran “anywhere, anytime” if Iran suspends enrichment. The Bush administration, this official said, has no interest in serious negotiations with Iran. You can hardly blame him or other Iranians for thinking this way.

President Obama deserves credit for raising doubts in the minds of a number of Iranians who think this way. He also deserves credit for resisting calls to explicitly enlist the U.S. in the Iranian opposition, which would effectively restore the “foreign stooges” propaganda tool that Iran’s hardliners are clearly desperate to have back, but that Obama’s approach has denied them. It’s been a judicious use of American power, one that recognizes the limits of America’s ability to influence events inside Iran, but also that America’s posture does have an impact on Iran’s politics.

Health care and nuclear proliferation seem to have little to do with each other. But right now the President’s ambitious nuclear non-proliferation agenda – the issue for which he received the Nobel Prize – is hanging in the balance.

Should congress fall into a state of paralysis or drastically scale back its ambition; should the health care bill get broken up and therefore eat up more of the legislative calendar; should Republican Senators continue to utilize the politics of obstruction with no political cost; and should Democrats cower in the face of this opposition – the President’s nuclear agenda, along with many other progressive priorities, will be in deep trouble. Strobe Talbott, the President of the Brookings Institution, said at a panel yesterday:

You might say what could Massachusetts possibly have to do with the arms control agenda? I think actually quite a bit. In so far as there is a partisan square-off on a lot the issues of President Obama’s agenda … the defensiveness of the Administration with regard to say health care is likely to tie over into additional difficulty with regard to other pieces of legislation, including the ratification of treaties.

The treaties that Talbott is referring to are a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) with the Russians and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). Both of these treaties are critical to non-proliferation efforts not just on their merits, but also because these treaties demonstrate America’s seriousness about nuclear proliferation and arms reductions. 2010 is critical for the nuclear agenda, as there are two major international conferences in April and May at which the President will seek to convince other countries to do more to combat nuclear proliferation. But getting others to do more, requires the United States to actually take action and lead by example.

It is not just that the world won’t become safer if these conferences are unsuccessful, it is that the world could get a whole lot less safe. The great danger is that an unsuccessful NPT review conference, which happens every 5 years and will take place in May, could further erode states’ confidence in the non-proliferation regime, putting us closer to a cascade of nuclear proliferation. In other words, failing to act on these treaties could have really dangerous consequences.

It has long been clear that the CTBT would be particularly hard, since many GOP Senators remain bizarrely committed to the explosive testing of nuclear weapons (yes you read that write). Yet the expectation has been that ratifying a new START treaty would be relatively uncontroversial. A new START treaty has had significant bipartisan support, since it is after all an advancement of the original treaty negotiated under Ronald Reagan.

However, ratifying a new treaty would be the biggest tangible foreign policy accomplishment of President Obama’s tenure – a fact that may mobilize the Senate GOP to attempt to block any new agreement. Senate Republicans led by Jon Kyl have been making quite a bit of noise already and have been throwing out disingenuous arguments to undercut the Administration’s efforts. This seems to indicate that Senate ideologues like Kyl are looking for reasons to oppose a new deal. While there are Republican Senators, like Richard Lugar, that will in all likelihood support a START treaty, treaties need 67 votes.

Should Senate Republicans conclude that continuing to pursue a politics of obstruction and therefore blocking these critical treaties will have little if any political cost – and would alternatively offer some political gain by hurting the President – they will go nowhere and as a result so will the President’s nuclear agenda.

As you’ve probably heard, Osama bin Laden has a new release, in which the head propagandist of the glorious global Islamic revolt claims credit for an Al Qaeda intern setting fire to his own crotch. This is, of course, pathetic, but just how pathetic has unfortunately been somewhat obscured by the fact that conservatives have, for the last month, been hailing the attack as an Al Qaeda success. As far as I know, this marks the first time that bin Laden has claimed credit for an attack that failed, and I have to wonder if the conservative-stoked media freak-out has anything to do with that.

Commenting on the prominence of Palestine in the new bin Laden statement (whose actual provenance Juan Cole doubts here), Marc Lynch writes “A lot of ink has been spilled since 9/11 trying to argue that bin Laden doesn’t really care about Palestine. But that’s always been silly — nobody knows what he ‘really’ cares about, and it doesn’t especially matter since he talks about it a lot and presents it as a major part of his case against the United States.”

An Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement surely would not convince bin Laden or al-Qaeda and its affiliated movements to give up their jihad — but it would take away one of their most potent arguments, and one of the few that actually resonates with mass publics. [...]Like the failure to close Guantanamo, the issue isn’t that it will or won’t change the minds of al-Qaeda jihadists. It’s that the failure badly hurts U.S. credibility with the mainstream Arab and Muslim audiences that he most needs to reach, entrenching a twin narrative of Obama being no different from Bush and not matching his words with deeds, while giving extremists an argument against the U.S. that resonates widely.

Similar to the rote conservative denials that Guantanamo and torture have radicalizing effects, there is a long-standing effort among to deny that people in the Middle East actually care about the Palestinians, despite all the evidence to the contrary. As Lynch indicates, the fact that bin Laden and other propagandists always feel the need to include at least a few lines about Palestine in their various litanies should be evidence enough that it is a salient issue among the publics being appealed to.

This was brought home to me again at a meeting I attended last week of global internet democracy activists and bloggers. During a discussion of how various U.S. policies make their work easier and more difficult, Ceren Kenar of Turkey’s Young Civilians noted that, whatever else you’d heard, “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict drives anti-Americanism” in Turkey. Hanin Ghaddar of Now Lebanon said that “the more Israel builds settlements, the more Hezbollah and Hamas’ resistance is seen as legitimate” among the very people to whom pro-democracy forces are also trying to appeal. Whether or not one personally sympathizes with the plight of the Palestinians, the fact is that huge numbers of people in the Middle East do. Failure to move the parties toward a just resolution hurts U.S. credibility in the region, and constantly refills a propaganda well from which our enemies continue to draw.

Yesterday, The Los Angeles Daily News featured a video of Santa Clarita councilman Bob Kellar informing a group of cheering protesters rallying against immigration that he is a “proud racist” who considers being called a radical a “compliment”:

We have got to wake up America. I know you guys are engaged and you understand. But I’m telling you this is serious. And if I sound like a radical, thank you. I consider that a compliment…The only thing I heard back from a couple people was “Bob you sound like a racist.” I said, “That’s good. If that’s what you think I am because I happen to believe in America. I’m a proud racist. You’re darn right I am.”

Watch it:

Though Kellar insists his remarks weren’t intended to “express animosity towards non-whites,” local Democrats describe Kellar’s comments as “symbolic of the Republican Party’s attitudes toward immigration in general.” The rally was organized by several California anti-immigrant groups including the Santa Clarita Valley Independent Minutemen, the Santa Clarita Tea Party, and designated hate group Save Our State.

During his speech, Kellar also stated that “if we would just deal with the illegals, we wouldn’t have a deficit in the state of California.” To a certain extent, Kellar’s analysis isn’t that far off the mark. A recent study by the University of Southern California found that passing immigration reform which includes the creation of a path to legalization for unauthorized immigrants already in the United States could yield up to $16 billion annually for the state of California.

Numerous conservatives have pointed to Israel’s preemptive strike in 1981 against Iraq’s Osirak nuclear facility as a model for what should be done vis-a-vis Iran. That attack is seen as basically crushing Iraq’s nuclear efforts and has led some neoconservatives to posit: why can’t we just do that in Iran?

I think the Israel Osirak attack is an illustrative example. There, Israel was able to crush Iraq’s nuclear program in one focused strike, but nearly 20 years later, the US still attacked Iraq on the grounds that it had to stop a nuclear program that didn’t exist.

This I think demonstrates the inanity of even thinking about listening to conservatives on Iran. Assuming that the right is correct and that Iran is completely determined to develop a nuclear weapon and that its nuclear program is as far along and is insidious as the right claim, then it is also safe to assume that Iran has taken actions to protect their program, such as burying the program in a vast network of hardened tunnels, as the New York Times confirmed recently. The right’s reaction to the New York Times report was instructive. Instead of it demonstrating the impracticality of bombing Iran’s nuclear program, John Bolton insisted that it was reason to launch an attack as soon as possible.

However, in launching an attack on Iran’s nuclear program there will be no way to tell if that attack has been successful, since we will have almost no idea if the buried nuclear facilities have been damaged. Furthermore, we won’t know if there are other facilities that we’ve missed, since we don’t know where all the facilities are. This is the known unknown problem, as Rumsfeld would say. There is a distinct possibility that in any attack we will not hit all the relevant nuclear targets – precisely because they are buried in a vast series of covert tunnels.

While the right often concedes these points, the nevertheless argue that an attack will at least “set Iran back” in its efforts to develop a nuclear program. While an attack might “set Iran back,” the problem though is that there is probably no way of knowing how much they are set back, if it all. In other words, even if an attack is completely successful in hitting and destroying Iran’s nuclear program – we won’t know it.

The day after any attack on Iran, there will be immediate calls for more military action, as Iran still might have a fully capable and operational nuclear program. The only way to be sure that Iran isn’t developing a nuclear program, it will be argued, is to launch an invasion that results in the change of regime.

So when the right talks about taking out Iran’s nuclear program, they in are really not talking about surgical strikes, they are talking about regime change. And that in effect would likely mean a full blown invasion involving thousands of American troops on the streets of Tehran.

The problems with Richard Haass’ latest op-ed start with the first sentence, in which he writes “Two schools of thought have traditionally competed to determine how America should approach the world.”

Realists believe we should care most about what states do beyond their borders — that influencing their foreign policy ought to be Washington’s priority. Neoconservatives often contend the opposite: they argue that what matters most is the nature of other countries, what happens inside their borders. The neocons believe this both for moral reasons and because democracies (at least mature ones) treat their neighbors better than do authoritarian regimes.

Given that neoconservatism didn’t exist before the 1960s, it’s odd to claim that it has “traditionally competed to determine” anything, let alone the direction of American foreign policy. (The prefix “neo-” is important here: It means “new”!) Neoconservatives themselves didn’t even really start being identified with foreign policy until the early 1970s, when people like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, having abandoned liberalism for what they saw as its insufficiently militaristic nationalism, began to mount a challenge within the conservative movement to what they saw as Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger’s insufficiently militaristic anti-Communism. It’s more accurate to say that realism and neoconservatism have, for the last forty or so years, competed for control of the Republican foreign policy apparatus (and at this point neoconservatives are in a more commanding position, which may have something to do with Haass’ chosen pitch.)

The definition Haass gives for neoconservatism actually more accurately describes liberal internationalism, which holds that the internal behavior of states determines, to a significant extent, their foreign policies, that democracies get along better with other democracies, and therefore it should be a goal of U.S. foreign policy to have more democracies in the world, and less oppressive, authoritarian states. What neoconservatism brought to the foreign policy conversation that was new was the idea that the maintenance of a robust American nationalism was an objective moral good (a function of their belief in the importance of culture), that a highly moralistic and militaristic approach to foreign policy was required to maintain that nationalism, and that those who questioned or criticized such an approach were, by weakening the American will, objectively on the side of America’s enemies. We saw all of this played out pretty explicitly with the war in Iraq.

It’s not unreasonable to expect the president of the Council on Foreign Relations to be familiar with all of this. But, having posited this false foreign policy choice between realism and neoconservatism, he spends the rest of the article telling us how he’s moved from one to the other. Haass now thinks it’s important for the administration to give more support to Iran’s opposition movement. Interestingly, as was reported almost two weeks ago, the administration thinks this too!

Haass cautions that “Iran’s opposition should be supported by Western governments, not led,” and that “outsiders should refrain from articulating specific political objectives other than support for democracy and an end to violence and unlawful detention.” This tracks with what we’ve heard from Iranian democracy activists, and it’s clear that Obama has been listening too. As the Iranian opposition’s calls for more Western solidarity have increased, so has the president’s rhetoric.

If this equals “neoconservatism,” no one told the neoconservatives, who, as from the very first, have continued to badger the president to take the hardest possible line, defiantly inconsiderate of what Iranians themselves were actually saying, and of the possible consequences for the protesters and their cause.

In contrast to the brutish grandstanding of the neocons, President Obama has shown that he understands that an invigorated Iranian opposition is currently in competition with the regime for the loyalty of the great mass of Iranians, many of whom are clearly deeply disenchanted with their government but not yet ready to embrace the jarring discontinuity of regime change. (The Declaration of Independence had something to say about this.) Given the history of U.S. interference in Iran, and the very recent record of neocon-inspired hostility, Obama’s explicitly enlisting the United States in the Iranian opposition would, at this point, not help the opposition make its case. This may change, and if it does, so should the policy.

At the same time, Obama has effectively put his administration on the side of freedom by waiving provisions of certain sanctions to put important internet tools into the hands of Iranians themselves. It’s true that such an approach lacks “the satisfying purity of indignation,” but, on the other hand, it does have the benefit of actually helping the Iranian people.

Whether Haass’ simplistic rendering of the situation should be taken anything more than his attempt to ingratiate himself with a particular political faction, I’m not sure, but it does a real injustice both to the president and to the Iranian reformers who he’s been meticulously trying, in various ways, to create space for.