This weekend, former Speaker of the House and conservative leader Newt Gingrich (R-GA) spoke at a gathering at the Southern New Hampshire University sponsored by STEWARD of Prosperity (Stimulating The Economy Without Accumulating Record Debt). During his appearance, Gingrich took a leading question from an audience member who suggested that the nation’s Founding Fathers would be opposed to the “illegal” immigration situation that the U.S. faces today. Gingrich resisted appealing to the right’s worse instincts and instead provided a sensible, pro-immigrant answer:

If somebody is zero threat to the United States and wants to come here as a student, or as a business-person, or as a tourist, it ought to be easy, not hard to get a visa. We currently have a system where it’s pretty easy to sneak into the country illegally, but fairly hard to get here legally. Now that doesn’t make much sense to me. I don’t understand the model we’re currently using, and that needs to be fixed.

Watch it:

Gingrich aptly points out that the nation is currently operating under an inefficient, out-dated, and ineffective visa system. While many immigration hawks demand that undocumented immigrants go “to the back of the line,” Gingrich speaks to fact that there isn’t really a line for them to get in. The number of green cards available for low-skilled workers is capped at an inflexible number that doesn’t respond to fluctuations in demand and supply. Meanwhile, the numerical limits on family immigration have generated a visa back-log that has resulted in several family members having to wait decades to be reunited with their loved ones. Few potential immigrants meet the requirements necessary to be granted refugee status and the annual Diversity Visa program affords visas to a small number of persons from countries with low rates of immigration to the U.S.

Gingrich has undoubtedly started promoting a gentler alternative to the fear-mongering approach to immigration that many of his Republican colleagues have adopted. Nonetheless, not all of his positions are entirely sensible. This past summer, he told Univision’s Jorge Ramos that his solution to the nation’s broken immigration system would involve requiring undocumented immigrants to leave their homes, jobs, and U.S.-born children and go back to their home countries for a couple years until they receive a temporary worker permit to return to the U.S. During his speech in New Hampshire Gingrich further suggested “outsourcing” the temporary worker program to Visa, Mastercard, or American Express because the federal government wouldn’t be able to implement it. He also warned against becoming a “multi-lingual” country, despite the fact that he personally runs a political bilingual news and op-ed website called The Americano.

Whenever the Quadrennial Defense Review – or any big government document is released – there is a search to read the tea leaves of what the new report means for US policy. These government strategy reports are often more important for what they do or do not mention – ie what will or won’t be a funding priority – than for laying out a new groundbreaking strategic doctrine.

This QDR contains some useful changes. For instance, Robert Farley has a great take on the shift away from the “long war” or GWOT formulation toward a more sensible strategic outlook and the elevation in priority of disaster response is definitely overdue. There are also a couple of interesting tidbits from the QDR related to nuclear policy.

First, this Administration is really concerned with stopping nuclear terrorism and proliferation. This isn’t really news, but the new QDR confirms the priority the Administration has given to these issues and lays out some very important tangible steps, such as investing in nuclear forensics. This is of key importance to deterring proliferation, since ensuring that the US can identify the source of nuclear materials that were used in a bomb, provides an added disincentive to countries contemplating proliferate to third party groups. As Travis Sharp notes, “There is a big, big role for the nuclear weapons laboratories in the new QDR. In order to prevent WMD terrorism.”

Second, the new QDR gives a cold shoulder to a favorite program of the neocon right – the potentially highly dangerous and destabilizing program called “Prompt Global Strike.” Prompt Global Strike is a program that calls for replacing some of our nuclear tipped Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) with conventional warheads, in order to be able to strike at “fleeting targets” of opportunity across the globe. While that may sound like an important tool, the fact is that it provides few advantages over existing capabilities and has some major downsides.

The primary problem is one of “nuclear ambiguity.” Russia and China for instance would have no idea whether an ICBM had a conventional or nuclear warhead. The launching of such a missile would also be inherently destabilizing. Remember that the Russians believed that a launch of a Norwegian weather rocket in the mid-90s was actually the West launching a nuclear weapon at them. A nuclear war was only averted because Yeltsin, a man who loved to drink, had the wits about him to contradict his military advisers’ itchy trigger fingers and halted a nuclear response – yes we were that close. Thus a policy that calls for speculatively firing ICBMs, would have significant blow back in our relations with, Russia and China, could escalate the proliferation and development of ballistic missiles, upset the nuclear balance, and in a worst case result in an accidental or mistaken nuclear launch in response. Finally, there is that whole problem of having perfect actionable intelligence.

Not surprisingly the Bush administration’s 2006 QDR was all about (pdf) Prompt Global Strike. Their QDR mentioned it six times, pledged to develop this capability, and called on Congress to grant the “broader authorities” to the executive that this capability would need. However, this 2010 QDR is much more circumspect about the system. It references “prompt global strike” just once, saying only that the “The Department also plans to experiment with conventional prompt global strike prototypes.” It seems clear that unlike the Bush administration, this is not going to be critical to the Obama administration’s defense posture.

Right-wing scholar-activist Daniel Pipes often functions as the conservative id, saying and writing things that many conservatives also believe but have the good sense not to say outright. A good example is when Pipes admitted before the Iranian presidential elections that, were he a registered voter in Iran, he would “vote for Ahmadinejad, [because] I would prefer to have an enemy who is forthright and blatant and obvious.” Given how much the neocons had invested in promoting Ahmadinejad as a symbol of Iranian menace, his replacement with the more moderate Mir Hossein Mousavi would have been disastrous for their strategy of getting America into more wars.

The latest example is Pipes’ new article in National Review Online, which he suggests that President Obama can “save” his presidency… by bombing Iran.

Writing that “Obama’s attempts to ‘reset’ his presidency will likely fail if he focuses on economics, where he is just one of many players,” Pipes claims that the president “needs a dramatic gesture to change the public perception of him… preferably in an arena where the stakes are high, where he can take charge, and where he can trump expectations”:

Such an opportunity does exist: Obama can give orders for the U.S. military to destroy the Iranian nuclear weapon capacity. [...]

Just as 9/11 caused voters to forget George W. Bush’s meandering early months, a strike on Iranian facilities would dispatch Obama’s feckless first year down the memory hole and transform the domestic political scene. It would sideline health care, prompt Republicans to work with Democrats, make netroots squeal, independents reconsider, and conservatives swoon.

Obviously Pipes has no real interest in Obama having a successful presidency. He’s simply trying to nudge the ball a few yards toward the war with Iran that many neoconservatives have been dreaming of for years. But it’s rare for one of them to be this explicit about their cynical view of foreign wars as an instrument of American domestic politics. Let’s remember, this is the man who George W. Bush nominated in 2003 to the board of the United States Institute of Peace, something which even born-again hawk Christopher Hitchens found to be a joke.

Pipes makes a number of other highly questionable claims in the piece. He insists that “No one (other than the Iranian rulers and their agents) denies that the regime is rushing headlong to build a large nuclear arsenal.” Apparently, this would include Lieutenant General Ronald Burgess, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), who said in a January 12 interview that “The bottom line assessments of the NIE still hold true,” that “we have not seen indication that the government has made the decision to move ahead with the program. But the fact still remains that we don’t know what we don’t know.”

In one of the funniest bits, Pipes claims that “the apocalyptic-minded leaders in Tehran” could eventually “launch an electro-magnetic pulse attack on the United States, utterly devastating the country.” There’s not an actual, credible Iran expert who believes that Iran’s leaders are interested in triggering the apocalypse. In a report for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Mehdi Khalaji, an Iran analyst who spent over a dozen years studying Shia theology in Qom, wrote that “Not one of [Khamenei's] speeches refers to any apocalyptic sign or reveals any special eagerness for the return of the Hidden Imam… The most significant task of the Supreme Leader is to safeguard the regime.” Combine this with the comical-even-for-Pipes EMP-alarmism and you’ve got the rhetorical equivalent of Pipes donning a bright red clown nose and big floppy shoes.

Assuring us that attacking Iran would be a cakewalk, Pipes claims that “were the U.S. strike limited to taking out the Iranian nuclear facilities, and not aspire to regime change, it would require few ‘boots on the ground’ and entail relatively few casualties, making an attack politically more palatable.” The definitive refutation of this delusion was delivered by Gen. Anthony Zinni back in September. “After you’ve dropped those bombs on those hardened facilities, what happens next?” Zinni asked. “Because, eventually, if you follow this all the way down, eventually I’m putting boots on the ground somewhere. And like I tell my friends, if you like Iraq and Afghanistan, you’ll love Iran.” Needless to say, I’m inclined to go with Gen. Zinni on this one, and not with the the guy insisting that we can do war clean and on the cheap.

It’s important to understand that, even as many on the right have attempted to embrace Iran’s Green movement as a means of attacking President Obama’s engagement policy, there’s no doubt that an attack on Iran of the sort that Pipes advocates is the surest way to snuff out that movement. As in the past, I’m sure I’ll receive private assurances that Pipes doesn’t speak for all conservatives. I’m also sure that, as in the past, no one on the right will have the decency to step forward and condemn him.