I think Yglesias did a good job knocking back David Frum’s bizarre claim that the Team B hawks were right about the Soviet threat, but the fact that Frum thinks he can get away with such an assertion helps explain why some conservatives have been calling for a Team B revival, this time “to reassess the threat the U.S. faces from Islamic terrorist networks“:

“The Team B concept has been successful in previous administrations when fresh eyes were needed to provide the commander in chief with objective information to make informed policy decisions,” Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va. wrote in a letter to President Obama on Tuesday. “I believe it can work now, too.”

By June 1976, the middle rounds of the Cold War, the Soviet Union had exceeded the U.S. in several key weapons categories, leading an alarmed CIA director, George H.W. Bush, to create “Team B,” which included a number of future aides in the Reagan administration. Among them, a young arms control officer named Paul Wolfowitz and a former Pentagon official named William Van Cleave.

“We were all known as the so-called hawkish element of that time, but we let the conclusions stand on their own,” Van Cleave told Fox News. [...]

“Team B got it right,” said Frank Gaffney, founder and president of the Center for Security Policy and a Defense official in the Reagan administration

This is, to use a political science term, just plain nuts. As Fred Kaplan wrote in 2004, “In retrospect, the Team B report (which has since been declassified) turns out to have been wrong on nearly every point.” Or, as Larry Korb wrote, Team B was right about only one thing:

The CIA estimate was indeed flawed. In 1989, the agency published an internal review of the threat assessments from 1974 to 1986. The report concluded that the Soviet threat had been “substantially overestimated” every year. In 1978, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found that the selection of Team B members yielded a flawed composition of political views and biases. Consequently, the Team B analysis was deemed a gross exaggeration and completely inaccurate.

So the CIA had “substantially overestimated” the Soviet threat. The Team B assessment, on the other hand, was simply a work of science fiction. Or, to be more specific, a work of political advocacy, with the authors deriving conclusions of Soviet capabilities from their own apocalyptic beliefs about the Soviet ideology, and then using those deeply flawed conclusions to justify more defense spending and more foreign policy adventurism. Which is precisely what they would like to do again in regard to the threat of Islamic extremism.

I should also highlight this from Yglesias:

Incidentally, the whole [Team B] report is full of amusing accusations that the CIA has erred in its analysis of the Soviets by engaging in “mirror-imaging”—basically assuming that the Soviet state is prudent and risk-averse—by not recognizing the Russians’ inherent and insatiable thirst for conquest.

In December, I attended a screening of the pro-missile defense documentary “33 Minutes” (which warns of the nuclear missile threat of countries like Iran, which has neither nuclear weapons nor missiles capable of delivering them) hosted by the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies. During the post-film discussion, I suggested to FDD president Cliff May that the film had failed to demonstrate either that any nuclear weapons state would be inclined to give away to terrorists a weapon in which it had invested considerable resources and borne considerable international opprobrium to develop, or that a state like Iran would use a nuclear weapon itself, given the huge consequences to a regime that has placed the highest premium in self-preservation.

May responded — I kid you not — that unlike during the Cold War, where we were dealing with a rational enemy that could be deterred, it’s unclear that the Iranians are likewise rational. Furthermore, May said, there was a real danger of “mirror-imaging,” of assuming that our Iranian enemies think like we do.

Just in case you wondered how deep the revisionism goes.

Following the devastating earthquake in Haiti this week, many activists and politicians have heightened the cry for granting undocumented Haitians in the U.S. Temporary Protected Status (TPS). TPS is a longstanding cornerstone of U.S. immigration policy that is afforded to undocumented immigrants from a small number of federally-designated countries suffering armed conflicts, natural disasters, or other extraordinary circumstances until conditions improve. Many claim Haitians should’ve received TPS after four consecutive tropical cyclones in 2008 left 800 people dead, hundreds missing, and made the Haitian city of Gonaives “uninhabitable.”

However, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) seems to think that not only were undocumented Haitians undeserving of TPS status then, undocumented Haitians living in the U.S. should now be deported back to their country to specifically serve as much-needed relief workers. ABCNews reports:

“This sounds to me like open borders advocates exercising the Rahm Emanuel axiom: ‘Never let a crisis go to waste,’” Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, said in an e-mail message to ABCNews. “Illegal immigrants from Haiti have no reason to fear deportation but if they are deported, Haiti is in great need of relief workers and many of them could be a big help to their fellow Haitians.”

Members of King’s own party disagree. Though none of three GOP lawmakers is a co-sponsor of Rep. Luis Gutierrez’s (D-IL) comprehensive immigration reform bill, Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-FL), Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL) and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) have called on President Obama to grant TPS to undocumented Haitian immigrants, “a virtual lifeline for such an impoverished country.” Even the not too immigrant-friendly Mark Krikorian claims that TPS “was invented precisely for cases like Haiti today.” Dan Stein, director of the designated hate group Federation for American Immigration Reform, suggests coupling TPS for Haitians with the termination of TPS and the deportation of other nationals who he believes no longer “merit” it — an unusually generous recommendation for someone like Stein.

King blatantly ignores the fact that Haitian immigrants could probably do a lot more to rebuild Haiti by staying in the U.S. than by returning to the little that’s left of their decimated country. Allowing undocumented Haitians who are already living in the U.S. to legally work would help them earn the honest wages they need to send back money to their families and get their country back on its feet. Relief workers are usually individuals who voluntarily donate their skills, time, and resources to help victims of conflict and natural disasters. In other words, undocumented Haitians who are permitted to stay in the U.S. can provide “relief.” If deported, they are essentially forced into a situation in which they’d become victims who need more relief.

The Obama administration has agreed to halt the deportation of undocumented Haitians, though those currently held in detention centers will remain jailed unless TPS is granted. Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) points out, that “it makes no sense to tell Haitians already here that they can stay in the U.S. in the wake of the earthquake, but cannot legally support themselves.”

As the world learns the toll of Tuesday’s earthquake in Haiti, the U.S. military is once again leading the American response to a devastating natural disaster. By Wednesday, U.S. Air Force special operations personnel had secured the airport at Port-au-Prince, and about 5,000 soldiers and Marines from the 82nd Airborne Division and 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit are on their way to Haiti to assist the UN force there in providing security and support for relief efforts.

At sea, the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson and the Bataan amphibious group are en route loaded with helicopters to assist the relief effort. Coast Guard cutters and aircraft are already on the scene. Air Force airlifters have brought in personnel and supplies to the island.

Military involvement in disaster relief is nothing new. U.S. Southern Command alone has been involved in 14 disaster relief missions since 2005. More prominent were the post-tsunami relief effort in 2004-05 and earthquake recovery efforts in Pakistan in 2005.

Over the last decade or so, disaster relief has become a core — if rarely acknowledged — mission of the U.S. military. Debates over the future of the military have concentrated on disputes over what sort of enemy the United States might fight in the future — a high-tech conventional adversary or unconventional insurgents. While important, this debate obscures an equally critical role the U.S. military plays as the provider of global public goods like disaster relief.

Americans constantly fret over whether or we are or should be a global policeman. But they haven’t noticed that we have become, largely by default, a global fire department and ambulance service. For massive disasters like the Haiti earthquake or the tsunami, the U.S. military is the only entity that can organize the necessary air- and sea-lift to get to disaster stricken areas with sufficient relief aid in a quick enough time period. There are no substitutes for the U.S. Navy’s aircraft carriers, and the U.S. Air Force’s airlift fleet outstrips what’s available for contract.

Military planners may think that this sort of disaster relief capacity is a “lesser included contingency” — a capability that is a beneficial side-effect of current military strategy. While this assumption is for the most part correct, U.S. policymakers should start explicitly including disaster relief as a core mission of the U.S. military and factor it into their resource allocation decisions.

Unlike the nature and behavior of future adversaries, we can be certain that horrendous natural disasters will happen in the foreseeable future. The U.S. military currently takes the lead in responding to these tragedies, and policymakers should institutionalize this capability and make it even more effective in the future.