A split within the conservative movement is becoming more and more apparent as the US and Russia come close to finalizing a new START treaty that will cut nuclear arsenals. The treaty has widespread and broad support from a long list of prominent Republican foreign policy figures (it is after all merely the extension of a treaty negotiated by Ronald Reagan). Yet its future in the Senate is highly uncertain, as neoconservatives are starting to mobilize against its ratification.

The neocon war on START has heated up. John Bolton has been on the war path as usual. The Washington Times has published three opinion pieces in the past week disparaging START. The Heritage Foundation has produced multiple pieces attacking the treaty. Finally, Keith Payne – “Donald Rumsfeld’s Dr. Strangelove” – essentially argued in the Pittsburgh Tribune that the Senate should only support a treaty if it doesn’t really cut nuclear weapons, which is sort of the entire point of the treaty.

But at the very same time that these forces have mobilized, so has the traditional and more established realist wing of the conservative foreign policy establishment – not just in support of START, but in support of the overall global effort to eliminate nuclear weapons. While the opponents of a START treaty have been on the fringes of past Republican administration’s, these figures contain many of the most prominent conservative foreign policy figures, including Secretaries of State and Defense Colin Powell, George Schultz, Henry Kissinger, Frank Carlucci, as well as Reagan National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane and Condoleezza Rice’s State Department consigliere Philip Zelikow.

At issue here are two competing world views. On the one hand, there are the neocons like Bolton, that insist that the US should actually begin engaging in a new nuclear arms race to stop countries from thinking we are weak, as well as out of a bizarre notion that the Cold War never ended. This warped and hyper-paranoid perspective is the very vision that pushed the US to invade Iraq over fears of that a Saddam-initiated mushroom cloud was imminent. On the other hand, there are the realist conservatives like Powell and Kissinger, that argue that nuclear weapons have become militarily useless and that if nothing is done to eliminate nuclear weapons, the world will move quickly in the opposite direction toward a nuclear tipping point, in which proliferation cascades and which the threat of nuclear terrorism becomes ever more likely.

Hence, the ratification fight over START is not really one between progressives and conservatives. Progressives are in agreement with Republicans like Powell, Kissinger, and Schultz. Instead, the ratification fight is between conservatives. The ratification debate will expose the extent to which conservative politicians have become “neoconized,” as it will clarify where Senate conservatives stand – are they with John Bolton or are they with Colin Powell?

Yesterday on Glenn Beck’s Wild-Eyed Hysteria Hour, the Tearful One managed to pack an unusually impressive amount of incoherent stupidity into one rant about Iran. “This week Iran successfully launched a rocket into space,” Beck informed us. “The media yawned. The only thing they found interesting about the launch was that the rocket had a rat, two turtles and a worm on board. But they don’t look any further than that“:

But technically, if Iran can send a missile up into space and have it explode, it could shut down our electronics; that would do more damage to us than any conventional bomb ever could. Imagine the chaos if an EMP [electro-magnetic pulse] bomb took all of our computers, phones, TVs, lights and flipped them off? America would be out of business.

“Imagining” the effects of an Iranian EMP attack is exactly what you’re going to have to do, because there’s not a credible national security expert alive who thinks that this sort of attack is even remotely feasible. You have to love how Beck throws “technically” in there, as if to indicate that he has some idea what he’s talking about, but there’s a rather enormous “technical” chasm between “send a missile up into space and have it explode” and “shut down our electronics.” It’s like saying “technically, if Iran has lasers, they can blow us up with their Iranian Death Star.” Well, yes, maybe, someday, theoretically. Not any time soon. Certainly not before Glenn Beck has scared himself into a stroke.

Turning to a video clip of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad praying to God to “hasten the arrival of Imam al-Mahdi,” Beck asks “‘Hasten the return of Imam al-Mahdi’ — what’s he talking about?” Glenn Beck is going to tell us!

He’s talking about the 12th Imam. He’s a “Twelver.” What is that? If journalists weren’t so busy trying to land jobs with the Obama administration (14 to be exact), they’d look into that.

The “Twelvers” believe that the Mahdi, or 12th Imam, will soon return. This is end times, stuff. They are different than most Muslims because they believe that the return needs to be hastened. It’s not a good idea to hasten the return of the Chosen One, because to do that, the world has to be in chaos, carnage and even genocide — so the Messiah comes and brings peace.

“Twelvers” are so dangerous that at one point the Ayatollah Khomeini banned them.

While it’s true that Twelver eschatology describes the return of the Mahdi, most Twelvers (like most Christians who believe similar things about a returning Messiah and an End of Days) do not believe that it is their duty to trigger it. It’s also true that Ahmadinejad, a pious conservative Shia Muslim, lards his speeches with references to the return of the Hidden Imam, so much so that he was chastised by several Iranian clerics, who told him he “would be better off concentrating on Iran’s social problems…than indulging in such mystical rhetoric.” There is, of course, no evidence whatsoever that Iranian policy is guided by a strategy to hasten the Twelfth Imam’s return.

The idea that “Twelvers” are some sort of secretive, extreme apocalyptic sect is patent nonsense. If Beck, or anyone at Fox, would bother to Google “Twelvers,” they’d learn very quickly that Twelvers are, in fact, the largest sect of Shi’ism. The idea that “Ayatollah Khomeini banned them” is rather confounding, given that Ayatollah Khomeini was a Twelver, as are all the leading ayatollahs in the world, including those serving as religious guides for the Iranian pro-democracy movement.

This isn’t the first time Beck has authoritatively delivered these complete, and easily disprovable, non-facts about Twelver Shi’ism to his audience. The last time, to my knowledge, was last September. What this tells us, as if we didn’t know already, is that neither Beck nor anyone who works at Fox News really gives a damn whether it’s true or not. The point is it’s scary.

Skilled entertainer that his, Beck saves the very best for last:

By the way, do you know what “Iran” means in Farsi? Aryan.

Actually, the Farsi word for Iran is “Iran.” But still, it’s derived from “Aryan,” so… whoa dude. Now that I think about it, it’s actually pretty crazy how Ahmadinejad caused historians in the 1700′s to adapt the Sanskrit word arya to denote a subset of Indo-European languages and peoples, and then caused French racialist Arthur de Gobineau to steal the term in the 1850′s for his goofy theory of a master “white” race, and then caused the Nazis to weave that nonsense into their ideology, and then caused Reza Shah Pahlavi to decide as part of his modernization program that he wanted people to use the term “Iran” instead of “Persia” so that later, decades after the Pahlavi dynasty had been overthrown by the Islamic revolution, Ahmadinejad would get to run a country whose name really means “Hitlerland.”

This is what can happen when you treat Jonah Goldberg as a serious historian.

Yesterday, CongressDaily (sub. req.) reported that Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) had “placed a blanket hold on all executive nominations on the Senate calendar in an effort to win concessions from the Obama administration and Pentagon.” In a move that is “a far more aggressive use of the power than is normal,” Shelby is holding up more than 70 nominees.

Some of the nominees Shelby is blocking include “the top Intelligence officers at the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security as well as the number three civilian at the Pentagon.” Yesterday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) objected on behalf of Shelby when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) attempted to bring some of the national security nominees up for a vote:

We learned why Thursday when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid asked again to have votes on the nominees and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell objected, he said, on behalf of Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Al.

The reason? Shelby is concerned his state might lose some (very) lucrative defense contracts.

In other words – pork. Shelby calls them “unaddressed national security concerns.” McConnell called it “an issue with which I’m not terribly familiar.”

“He is not able to be here at the moment to state his position,” said McConnell of Shelby. McConnell implied that that he’d rather go ahead with the votes. “Maybe we can in discussions with him make some progress on these sooner rather than later. but for the moment I’m constrained to object on his behalf,” said McConnell.

In particular, Shelby has laid down the nearly unprecedented blanket hold in order to gain leverage for his home state interests on two federal contracts:

– A $40 billion contract to build air-to-air refueling tankers. From CongressDaily: “Northrop/EADS team would build the planes in Mobile, Ala., but has threatened to pull out of the competition unless the Air Force makes changes to a draft request for proposals.” Federal Times offers more details on the tanker deal, and also confirms its connection to the hold.

– An improvised explosive device testing lab for the FBI. From CongressDaily: “[Shelby] is frustrated that the Obama administration won’t build” the center, which Shelby earmarked $45 million for in 2008. The center is due to be based “at the Army’s Redstone Arsenal.”

Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), the chairman of the Armed Forces Committee, expressed his “frustration” and “dismay” over “the road blocks which have been placed in the way of Senate nominations for key positions at the Department of Defense” on the Senate floor yesterday. “Nobody has informed me of any concern about the qualifications of anyone of these five nominees and yet there’s an objection here on the floor of the Senate,” said Levin. Watch it:

“We’ve got a huge backlog of folks who are unanimously viewed as well qualified — nobody has a specific objection to them — but end up having a hold on them because of some completely unrelated piece of business,” said President Obama on Wednesday. “That’s an example…of the kind of stuff that Americans just don’t understand.”

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

My tweet the other day in response to Michael Rubin’s article hailing Iraqi democracy — in which I wrote “Michael Rubin still defines democracy as ‘elections’” — has apparently made Rubin upset. He writes “Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, appears to believe that democracy can exist without elections.”

While I’ve always maintained that democracy is about more than elections, I will open a challenge to Mr. Katulis. Perhaps he will explain how democracy can exist without an opportunity for people both to select and, at regular times, oust their government peacefully? Perhaps he will explain why the Obama administration should not be more proactive to ensure that the Iraqi elections go smoothly and are not marred by fraud? I hope Mr. Katulis is not taking his animus toward the Bush administration out upon the Iraqi people.

Tweets are, obviously, a form of shorthand. Of course I don’t believe that “democracy can exist without elections” — nor do I think it would “appear” that way to any reasonable person. My point was simply that elections alone don’t make democracy. It’s pretty clear that Michael chose to wildly misinterpret my comment, impute a number of straw arguments to me, and then bravely issue me a “challenge” to defend those arguments. Since Michael doesn’t seem to have bothered to actually figure out what my views on Iraq’s elections and democracy are (easily found under my CAP bio) I don’t really feel the need to respond to his inventions.

This isn’t the first time Michael has responded in this way. As my colleague Matt Yglesias has noted, Michael is “extraordinarily thin-skinned” about criticism of his work — especially when that criticism hits close to the mark.

As Michael knows, I have worked on a number of democracy-building projects around the Middle East — including, like Michael, in post-invasion Iraq. Like Michael, I hope for the best for Iraq as it continues to grapple with the various consequences of the Bush administration’s incompetence. But unlike him, I’m not interested in putting the best possible face on what is still an incredibly violent and unstable reality.

We shouldn’t forget that Iraq still ranks poorly on democracy and human rights indicators provided by respected NGOs and the U.S. government. Freedom House, a democracy promotion NGO widely respected by both conservatives and progressives, continues to rank Iraq as “not free” in its latest annual survey of freedom around the globe. Human Rights Watch’s 2010 annual report characterized the human rights situation in Iraq as “extremely poor.” Even last year’s State Department Country Report on Human Rights contains a list of 23 “significant human rights problems” in Iraq.

These reports come prior to the recent de-Baathification shenanigans that threaten to cast a shadow over the upcoming March parliamentary election. Thankfully, an appeals court has overturned the blacklisting of over 500 Iraqi politicians and it seems like these candidates will be able to participate, though their ultimate status remains to be determined. What this episode has revealed, however, is that Iraqi democracy remains dysfunctional and is still very much in its infancy. It will take more than another election to change this.

As for my “animus” toward the Iraqi people, that’s just pathetic. I know Michael is better than that remark.

I respect Michael Rubin’s perspectives, although I may not always agree with them. He has solid experience in Iraq and knowledge of the complicated situation there. I welcome the opportunity to continue the conversation, just without the strawmen.