The political scene in Iraq has been roiled over the past several weeks by the controversial decision by Iraq’s Accountability and Justice Commission to ban some 500 political candidates from competing in the March elections because of past ties to the Ba’athist Party. Sunnis have expressed fears that next month’s elections will leave them further disenfranchised, and many suspect Iran of a central role in the banning.

Today, my friend Eli Lake reports that Gen. Raymond Odierno, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, has “accused Ali Faisal al-Lami, the executive director of the Accountability and Justice Commission along with Ahmad Chalabi, the panel’s chairman, of being ‘clearly influenced by Iran.’”

Gen. Odierno said both men, according to intelligence reports, were in close contact with Abu-Mahdi al-Muhandis, the top Iraqi adviser to Iran’s Quds Force commander. The Quds Force comprises Iran’s unconventional military units, which have orchestrated anti-U.S. paramilitary and political operations in Iraq. [...]

Francis Brooke, the Washington adviser to Mr. al-Lami’s patron, Mr. Chalabi, said Gen. Odierno showed a “profound lack of understanding of Iraqi politics.”

Mr. Brooke added, “Every senior Iraqi politician, particularly the Kurdish and Shi’ite parties, has diplomatic relations with Iran and concerning Ali Faisal al-Lami, Gen. Odierno acknowledges that he had no evidence to demonstrate this charge. The Iraqi National Congress and the Iraqi parliament has complete confidence in Ali Faisal al-Lami’s management of the Accountability and Justice Commission.”

Yes, it’s true: Iran has a lot of influence in Iraq. This has been the case for a long time, but the people who got us into Iraq seem to have been the last to learn it. And while Gen. Odierno’s assertion of Chalabi’s Iran connections is noteworthy for its bluntness, it’s certainly not news that Ahmad Chalabi himself has close ties to Iran.

It’s important to remember here what a darling Chalabi used to be of the neoconservatives, and what a central role Chalabi played in providing false intelligence that fed the neoconservatives’ case for the invasion of Iraq, even after the CIA had determined Chalabi to be untrustworthy. Neocon operatives like Brooke (*) and Randy Scheunemann (who’s now serving as Sarah Palin’s foreign policy adviser) squired him from office to office on Capitol Hill as he told and retold his lies about nonexistent Iraqi WMDs and Saddam’s nonexistent alliance with Al Qaeda.

Even after the invasion, after it became clear that there were no WMD and no Saddam-Al Qaeda alliance, and that, despite his claims of a massive following, Chalabi had no genuine political base in Iraq, the neocons — such as Michael Rubin and Eli Lake himself — continued to promote him as Iraq’s savior. That became a lot harder after Chalabi’s party — which ran on the slogan “We Liberated Iraq!” — received a pathetic 0.36 percent of the vote in Iraq’s December 2005 elections, not even enough to secure a single seat for Chalabi himself.

Eventually, Chalabi was disavowed by the Bush administration, judged to be an “agent of influence” of Iran, suspected of having tipped off the Iranians that the U.S. had broken secret Iranian codes, as well as passing Iraqi government documents to Iranian agents. The Defense Intelligence Agency concluded — in 2004 — that “Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the United States through Chalabi.” Needless to say, none of this speaks very well of the judgment of Chalabi’s neoconservative fans. Read more

The release of Obama’s budget unveiled a major increase in funding for nuclear weapons labs and stewardship for the nuclear stockpile. This increase should effectively eliminate any claims that the US nuclear stockpile is deteriorating and should put conservatives like Senator Kyl on the defensive.

While Kyl’s arguments were hardly credible, this funding increase makes them even less so. In response to the funding increase all Jon Kyl could say is that the increase was “a definite improvement over previous years.” In a sane political climate involving negotiations, tradeoffs, and compromise, this increase in funding should be enough to secure ratification of a new START treaty (whenever that is finally wrapped up). However, as my boss told the Financial Times, our “politics suck” and as a result there is little evidence that this sort of bargaining will yield Republican support. Jeffrey Lewis explains:

This is the context in which to understand Senator Jon Kyl’s opposition to the various arms control treaties: He is Minority Whip and aspires to be the leading Republican voice on security issues. Perhaps, like another aspiring whip, he imagines even greater offices are within his grasp. His strategy to achieve these things is to make votes on arms control treaties a test of Senator’s Republican bona fides. If you give Republicans a choice between a well-funded nuclear weapons complex and a talking point to conflate the Prague agenda with unilateral disarmament — which is a favorite claim by Senator Kyl — most will understandably choose the latter. “Unilateral disarmament” is the “death panel” of the nuclear weapons debate.

Lewis, I think, nails the political logic driving Kyl’s opposition. However, in response the political strategy that Lewis advocates for START treaty ratification bizarrely contradicts his entire analysis by concluding that the only hopeful strategy ratification advocates are left with is one of:

attempting to depoliticize the treaties, recognizing that there will be some additional horse-trading at a later date. It might not always succeed, but it is probably the only strategy that will.

Attempting to “de-politicize” the treaty ratification process for START and CTBT in an effort to gain widespread bipartisan support would be great if possible, but there are clear signs that it is not. Kyl for instance, has already described the START negotiations as “malpractice.” In other words, the treaty ratification process has not even started and it already has become politicized.

The basic confines of the GOP’s political strategy in the Senate is to oppose and obstruct the Administration’s legislative priorities in order to further the sense of Democratic incompetence and the “throw the bums out” mentality pervading through the country. Additionally, it is clear to all that ratification of a new START treaty would be a hugely significant accomplishment for the White House, which as a result, makes supporting the treaty antithetical to the conservatives’ political strategy.

Therefore, it makes little sense to pursue a ratification strategy that seeks to “de-politicize” treaty ratification, when it is clear that treaty opponents will in fact aggressively politicize treaty ratification. The end result of this approach to ratification is a form of unilateral disarmament, in which conservatives make cheap but effective political shots – accusing progressives of endangering the country, etc – while treaty supporters in the Senate are stuck flat footed, abiding by a political strategy that seeks to avoid political sparring.

Treaty advocates should recognize that START only gets ratified by making sure there are political costs for those who oppose the treaty. This means not just making good coherent arguments about why the treaty will make us safer and reduce the risk of nuclear holocaust, but also putting conservatives like Kyl on the defensive and forcing them to defend their extremism, since they are after all opposing the extension of a Reagan-initiated treaty.