Late last year, Rep. Joe “You Lie” Wilson (R-SC) sparked a series of sweeping changes in the way immigrants are treated by proposed health care reform. Despite the fact that President Obama wasn’t really lying about the fact that health care reform benefits would not apply to undocumented immigrants, Democrats in the Senate responded by adding tightened verification requirements and banning undocumented immigrants from even purchasing full-price insurance with their own money on the exchange. Nonetheless, Wilson appeared on Fox & Friends this morning proclaiming that, as a former immigration attorney, he’s still not satisfied:

KILMEADE: We know that illegal immigration has slowed down because the economy has slowed down. If we give word out that we are going to be giving health care coverage, families — you wouldn’t be able to keep up with all this. But the argument is we ask for Social Security numbers, we’re going to ask for citizen verification. So Joe Wilson’s wrong.

WILSON: Well actually, by asking for the Social Security Number, it could be a fake number. Because there’s not verification in the bill. There are over 20 pages referencing citizen verification, but it has no teeth, it has no meaning. But additionally it has no enforcement. So it truly would cause people to come to our country. [...]

CARLSON: Is it true that you are or were an immigration attorney?

WILSON: Yes, I have done immigration work many years ago. We’ve got good laws in our country and they’re just so positive and we need to follow the laws we have.

CARLSON: I find that fascinating Congressman because that point was not brought up in that whole debate about what you yelled out that day is the fact that you have actually worked on some of those cases.

Watch it:

To begin with, undocumented immigrants can’t just provide fake SSN and expect government benefits to fall in their laps. Both the Senate and House health care bills require any citizens applying for benefits to be verified against Social Security Administration data and non-citizens to be verified using the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) Program. Rather than being a loophole that will allow undocumented immigrants to slip through the cracks, the tightened verification mechanisms will more likely block or delay coverage for a number of eligible citizens as they did in the case of Medicaid.

Secondly, justifying Wilson’s erroneous claims on the basis that he is an immigration attorney is disingenuous at best. Back in September, Zachary Roth of Talking Points Memo discovered that Wilson “has never been anything but a real-estate attorney.” The American Immigration Lawyers Association found no record of his name in its membership databases and Wilson’s old colleagues seemed baffled by the characterization. On Fox & Friends Wilson ambiguously explained that he helped some “dear friends” of his from Canada and India prepare for their immigration interviews thirty years ago. As Roth points out, “calling oneself an immigration attorney implies a body of technical knowledge and experience that Wilson, it appears, doesn’t possess.” If Wilson did in fact have any sort of serious experience with immigration law since it changed 24 years ago, he probably wouldn’t be saying that immigration laws are “just so positive.”

One of the key challenges for President Obama’s Iran engagement policy has been to calibrate an approach that addresses Iran’s nuclear program but that doesn’t serve to strengthen a regime that a significant number of Iranians clearly see as illegitimate. As others have noted, the administration is basically dealing with two competing clocks — one ticking down on Iran’s progress toward a nuclear weapons capability, and the other ticking down on the Green movement’s growing challenge to the regime. Two stories over the weekend indicate some positive movement on both, the former slowing and the latter quickening, at the same time.

The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday that, according to senior U.S. officials, “The Obama administration is increasingly questioning the long-term stability of Tehran’s government and moving to find ways to support Iran’s opposition ‘Green Movement.’”

American diplomats, meanwhile, have begun drawing comparisons in public between Iran’s current political turmoil and the events that led up to the 1979 overthrow of Shah Reza Pahlavi.

“In my opinion there are many similarities,” the State Department’s chief Iran specialist, John Limbert, told Iran-based listeners this week over U.S. government-run Radio Farda. “I think it’s very hard for the government to decide how to react to the legitimate and lawful demands of the people.” [...]

“The tone has changed in the conversation,” said one scholar who discussed Iran with senior U.S. officials. “There’s realization now that this unrest really matters.” [...]

“Do we expect the current government to be overthrown? I wouldn’t say that at the current time,” said a senior State Department official. “But a crack can certainly grow over time.”

While I think this is good news, we should understand that the administration has undertaken a much more difficult approach, not only in terms of creating space for that crack to grow, but also in managing regional partners who are skeptical of the possibility of Iranian reform and anxious for more belligerence:

One senior Arab official said he told State Department officials this week they were deluded if they though Iran was close to experiencing a revolution reminiscent of the Shah’s overthrow. “The IRGC has its hands on the Iranian people,” the official said.

Israel, which faces the greatest security threat from Iran, says only widespread sanctions will effectively upend Tehran’s current political leadership. “Many Israeli experts have concluded that expansive sanctions will widen the schisms between the Iranian government and its people,” said Israel’s ambassador to Washington, Michael Oren.

I’m interested to read the work of these “many Israeli experts,” as there are few if any U.S. experts who actually believe that “expansive sanctions” — as opposed to sanctions targeted at specific regime-connected business interests — will do anything other than weaken the opposition while profiting the Revolutionary Guardsmen who control the Iranian black market.

The Journal story does, however, contradict Ambassador Oren’s recent statement to The Jerusalem Post that “there isn’t an Israeli view and an American view” on the Iranian question, but rather “one view.”

As it turns out, not only is there not “one view” between the U.S. and Israel on Iran, there isn’t even one view between Israelis on Iran. The London Times reported Sunday that an Israeli general who was once in charge of Israel’s nuclear weapons has said that Iran is a “very, very, very long way from building a nuclear capability”.

Brigadier-General Uzi Eilam, 75, a war hero and pillar of the [Israeli] defence establishment, believes it will probably take Iran seven years to make nuclear weapons.

The views expressed by the former director-general of Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission contradict the assessment of Israel’s defence establishment and put him at odds with political leaders.

Major-General Amos Yadlin, head of military intelligence, recently told the defence committee of the Knesset that Iran will probably be able to build a single nuclear device this year. [...]

Eilam, who is thought to be updated by former colleagues on developments in Iran, calls his country’s official view hysterical. “The intelligence community are spreading frightening voices about Iran,” he said.

“Those who say that Iran will obtain a bomb within a year’s time, on what basis did they say so?” he asked. “Where is the evidence?”

Excellent question! As Eric Martin noted last week, the New York Times was reporting — fifteen years ago — that Iran “could be less than five years away from having an atomic bomb” according to American and Israeli officials. While no one should be sanguine about either the possibility of Iranian nukes or the Green movement’s success, what all this says is that President Obama can and should, for the time being, continue to resist calls for more aggressive action on Iran, military or otherwise.

In a reported shift that has the nuclear bureaucracy in the Pentagon up in arms, the President wants the new Nuclear Posture Review – the document that lays out US nuclear strategy to actually focus on the gravest security threat to this country: nuclear terrorism. This would be quite a coup, as the New York Times reported:

The Obama administration’s classified review of nuclear weapons policy will for the first time make thwarting nuclear-armed terrorists a central aim of American strategic nuclear planning, according to senior Pentagon officials. When completed next year, the Nuclear Posture Review will order the entire government to focus on countering nuclear terrorists — whether armed with rudimentary bombs, stolen warheads or devices surreptitiously supplied by a hostile state — as a task equal to the traditional mission of deterring a strike by major powers or emerging nuclear adversaries.

This shift, along with attempting to reduce global nuclear stockpiles, is making many of the Pentagon’s nuclear bureaucrats squirm. See, reducing nuclear arsenals and shifting nuclear strategy away from the Cold War approaches of the past is bad for business. This is not just a strategic debate, it’s a resource debate. The New York Times explains that prioritizing nuclear terrorism in the posture review:

could mean, for example, devoting less money to modernizing bombers, missiles and submarines, and more to surveillance satellites, reconnaissance planes and undercover agents.… So the review is likely to recommend more vigorous intelligence aimed at tracking nuclear smugglers and anticipating terrorist attacks, and more robust actions within the nuclear laboratories to expand abilities to identify nuclear materials in other nations that might be passed surreptitiously to terrorists. All of these efforts could require additional money.

And there is the rub – this “additional money” could be shifted from traditional nuclear weapons programs, leading those entrenched in the nuclear bureaucracy within the Pentagon are pushing back. The Cable reported that the Pentagon’s approach to the NPR amounted to stonewalling, “the Pentagon is said to be against reducing the overall U.S. nuclear arsenal.” The Washington Times quoting a conservative Pentagon source:

The official said nuclear weapons opponents in the Obama administration are seeking to use the NPR to try to advance the president’s goal of making radical cuts in nuclear weapons. Defense and national security officials are advocating a review that will “defend the country,” the official said.

Only to someone so entrenched in a bureaucracy, would an effort to reduce nuclear arsenals and shift our focus to nuclear terrorism constitute “radical.” The only way this would be a “radical” shift is if the President was pushing for unilateral nuclear cuts (which he isn’t) or if it was 1980 and the Soviet Union was still at its zenith. But it is 2010 and the credible threats facing this country don’t involve a nuclear exchange with Russia, but a nuclear terror attack stemming from insecure nuclear stockpiles. 538’s Nate Silver writing in the Wall Street Journal concluded that the hysteria around the underpants bomber was severely misplaced, but that:

a more rational anti-terrorism policy would focus resources heavily, perhaps almost exclusively, on threats of nuclear and weapons of mass destruction terror. The good news is that, because it requires so much coordination to acquire fissile material, build a nuclear weapon, and successfully detonate it, the international community has many opportunities to stop such catastrophes before they occur—although Mr. [Graham] Allison and other experts contend that present efforts are inadequate.