Neoconservatives have consistently portrayed bombing Iran as the solution to the problem of its nuclear program. While this was always fantasy, the inanity of such an attack has become even clearer. In an extensive piece today, the New York Times details the Iranian regime’s construction of a vast network of tunnels that can be used to shield their nuclear facilities from a potential air strike.

There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of big tunnels in Iran, according to American government and private experts, and the lines separating their uses can be fuzzy. Companies owned by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps of Iran, for example, build civilian as well as military tunnels.

The Times story has lots of interesting tidbits, noting that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a tunnel expert from his previous work as a transportation engineer. He even helped found the “Iranian Tunneling Association” in 1998. But the rub of the story is that any attempted military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities is basically futile. The New York Times explains:

American war planners see Iran’s tunnels — whatever their exact number and contents — as a serious test of military abilities. Most say there is no easy way to wipe out a nuclear program that has been well hidden, widely dispersed and deeply buried. Among the difficulties, military experts say, are decoy tunnels and false entrances, the identification of which requires good intelligence. The experts add that Iran’s announcement about new enrichment plants may simply produce a blur of activity meant to confuse Western war planners.

Not only is it highly uncertain whether a military strike could penetrate these facilities, but with the lack of intelligence it is impossible to know what entry points to target. Furthermore, if a strike were conducted we would have no idea if any attack was even successful. Any bombing effort would essentially be throwing a punch in the dark.

Additionally, calls from neoconservatives encouraging Israel to go ahead with an attack are even more pointless, since the Israelis have even fewer capabilities than we do. The Times notes:

Even the Israelis concede that solid rock can render bombs useless. Late last month, the Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, told Parliament that the Qum plant was “located in bunkers that cannot be destroyed through a conventional attack.” … Some analysts say that Israel, which has taken the hardest line on Iran, may be especially hampered, given its less formidable military and intelligence abilities.

So to be clear neoconservatives are advocating a military strike that won’t work, and will have dire consequences for the reform movement within Iran and for our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. The only thing an attack would seemingly achieve is fulfilling – in the words of the President – “the satisfying purity of indignation” that so aptly characterizes the neoconservative movement.

US officials will never really take the military option “off the table” but it seems pretty clear that an effort to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites would be pretty futile.

Upon entering office, President Obama made resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict a top priority for his administration, saying the issue is “interrelated” with “what’s happening” throughout the region. Part of the administration’s strategy has been to get Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conservative government to endorse a two-state solution and a full settlement freeze in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

After many months of balking and intransigence, Netanyahu finally announced that he would accept a Palestinian state (although a highly “circumscribed” one at best). And last November, the Israeli government announced a settlement freeze in the West Bank. Yet the move would only be temporary, exclude so-called “natural growth” construction already started and exclude East Jerusalem, where just yesterday, Israel’s Jerusalem municipality approved construction of new apartments for Jewish settlers.

In a recent meeting with Yaki Dayan, Israel’s Consul in Los Angeles, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel reportedly expressed his frustration with the situation, saying the U.S. is “fed up” with the Israelis who “adopt the right ideas too late“:

Emanuel’s complaint was made with regard to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s “belated recognition” of the principle of “two states for two peoples,” as well as the Jewish construction freeze in the communities of Judea and Samaria, which was only announced “many months” after the United States asked, or instructed, Israel to carry it out.

Emanuel also lashed out at the Palestinians, who he said “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity” for peace. According to Dayan, Emanuel said “if there is no progress in the diplomatic process, we will reduce our involvement and effort in the conflict, because we have other matters to deal with.”

By contrast, in an interview with Middle East Progress just last month, Special Envoy for Middle East Peace former Sen. George Mitchell said the administration is “determined” to get a deal, but that it will take time:

With time, with patience, and with courageous leadership, however, such compromises can be reached for one overriding reason: It is in the best interest of the region’s people — Israelis, Palestinians, and other Arabs. The next generation should not have to live through what the present leadership has endured, and we are determined that peace can be achieved.

Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “have been clear about our commitment both to Israel’s security and to the two-state solution based on the establishment of an independent and viable Palestinian state with contiguous territory,” Mitchell said. “This commitment is unwavering and in the national security interests of the United States.”

Last year, a new website entitled “Center for Immigration Truth” was launched with the goal of “present[ing] the truth behind the agenda and tactics of the radical open borders network.” The parody site, which is designed to look just like the National Council of La Raza’s (NCLR) We Can Stop The Hate website, seeks to trivialize and discredit the Latino advocacy group’s campaign against hate and misinformation in the immigration debate. Wonk Room recently discovered that GoDaddy’s domain directory reveals that the Center for Immigration Truth website is registered and run by the same man who founded and funds many of the anti-immigrant extremist groups that NCLR seeks to shed light on: John Tanton.

The Southern Poverty Law Center describes Tanton as the “puppeteer” of the organized anti-immigration “movement”:

It is not often that a single individual is largely responsible for creating an entire political movement. But John Tanton can claim without exaggeration that he is the founding father of America’s modern anti-immigration movement.

In addition to directly controlling four prominent immigration restriction groups, Tanton has been critical in establishing or helping fund several other anti-immigration groups…Tanton soon became fixated on population control, seeing environmental degradation as the inevitable result of overpopulation. When the indigenous birth rate fell below replacement level in the United States, his preoccupation turned to immigration. And this soon led him to race.

In the past, Tanton has dabbled in eugenics and one his groups, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, accepted $1.2 million from the Pioneer Fund, an outfit described as having “never wavered in its commitment to eugenics and ideas of human and racial inferiority and superiority.” Tanton also owns and runs the Social Contract Press which publishes the views of known white nationalists and includes pieces such as “Europhobia: The Hostility Toward European-Descended Americans.”

On the Center for Immigration Truth, Tanton sticks to degrading all of the groups which have ever challenged or criticized his network of organizations. It describes SPLC — a civil rights organization committed to the “struggle for tolerance and justice,” as a group that “shamelessly panders to peoples’ fears and profiteers from liberal White guilt in order to line its overflowing coffers.” NCLR, the nation’s largest Latino civil rights and advocacy organization, is identified as representing “the well-funded far-left anti-enforcement mob.” Tanton even goes after the Wonk Room for “regurgitating disinformation about dedicated environmentalists.” However, the brand of environmentalism that Tanton is referring to is the one that blames global climate change and other environmental woes on immigration to the U.S.

NCLR launched its “We Can Stop The Hate” campaign in an effort to “stem the surge of hate and violence” that is currently threatening the Latino and immigrant community.

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

This morning’s New York Times provides this update on a Pentagon effort to get qualified personnel for what’s been called the “Afghanistan-Pakistan Hands” program, which I look at in this post last November.

It seems that the effort, deemed by chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen as the “military’s number-one manpower priority,” is off to a slow start and is having some difficulties getting the right people to join.

The “Afghanistan-Pakistan” program aims to create a 912-member corps of mostly officers and enlisted service members to work on Afghanistan and Pakistan for up to five years. According to the New York Times, 172 people have signed up, but Admiral Mullen has raised questions about whether the right people with right skill sets are signing up in a memo last month. General Stanley McChrystal, America’s top military commander in Afghanistan and the brainchild for this effort, said through a spokesman that the effort is “understaffed.”

These challenges aren’t surprising -– in large bureaucracies with thousands of personnel, the rigid rules and incentives for advancement often deter people from signing up for new initiatives. But the slow start raises an important question often absent in debates about sending more troops, diplomats, and money to places like Afghanistan and Pakistan –- do the people who are being sent by the Pentagon and civilian agencies to work on Afghanistan have the right skill sets?

Quite frequently, leaders inside the Beltway or think tank analysts propose that the United State government do things that it is currently not equipped to do -– and the debates often ignore the serious capacity problems that exist inside the government. For example, training more security forces in Afghanistan is highlighted as central to the mission, but few look at whether the U.S. military has the number of qualified personnel to serve as trainers and advisors.

Given the Pentagon’s considerable resources, I suspect that it will eventually overcome the slow start in its Afghanistan-Pakistan Hands effort. The bigger challenge exists on the civilian side – the State Department is involved in an uphill battle to more than triple the civilian presence in Afghanistan as part of a “civilian surge,” something I wrote about in December. In November, I traveled to Indiana with Deputy Secretary of State Jack Lew to tour a facility that is training personnel heading out as part of the civilian surge – a much-needed innovation based on lessons learned from the Bush administration’s mistakes in sending 20-somethings with no experience to Iraq. Read more