With Secretary of State Clinton in Moscow today pushing to wrap up a new START treaty, three Senators – Robert Casey, Al Franken, and Ted Kaufman – took to the floor of the Senate last night to lend support to the treaty effort. The Senators sent a clear signal that, despite some reported chatter about START being DOA, taking up the START treaty will be a major legislative priority.

But since the final text of the treaty has not been finalized, these three Senators also explained what the treaty had to include for them to support ratification. Senator Kaufman laid out his four “red lines” for supporting a new treaty, saying a treaty must include “an intrusive verification system” and allow for “modernization of our existing nuclear capabilities,” while not including “any other weapons systems, including antiballistic missile systems provide no limits on missile defense.”

What is interesting about these red lines is that they are virtually identical to the red lines offered by arms-control skeptic Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ), as well as Senators McCain (R-AZ) and Lieberman (I-CT). This means that Senate Democrats and Republicans are on the same page when it comes to whether they will or will not support a new START treaty.

Therefore, assuming the treaty meets these clearly defined standards – which by all accounts it will – there should be overwhelming bipartisan support for the treaty. Senator Casey said forcefully that past treaties of kind received overwhelming bipartisan support, “There is no reason–no reason at all–why this START agreement should be different…I am confident that at the end of the process, we will have a strong agreement that in the proud tradition of the Senate will garner bipartisan support.” Watch Casey and Kaufman:

Nevertheless, while a new START treaty will have met all of the stated red lines of Kyl, McCain, Lieberman, and others, the crucial question is whether they squirm out of their original positions and find some new argument to oppose the treaty. In other words, will Kyl and others betray the Senate’s bipartisan arms-control tradition, as there is overwhelming bipartisan support for a new START treaty and Obama’s nuclear agenda from high ranking national security officials.

However, thus far bipartisanship in the Senate has been a mirage on almost every issue, as an obstructionist GOP has sought to oppose the President and Senate Democrats at every step of the turn. In order to ratify this treaty, bipartisanship is required, since 67 votes are needed to ratify all treaties. We will therefore soon find out if the Senate GOP is capable of putting the security of the country ahead of their crass obstructionist political strategy.

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In the coverage of Iraq’s recent parliamentary election, former interim prime minister Iyad Allawi and his Iraqiya bloc has been characterized as, in the words of reporter Anthony Shadid, “a default leader for Sunnis” and, in the words of fellow reporter Leila Fadel, “the candidate of choice for Sunni Arabs.” Fadel and Shadid are excellent journalists and are reflecting the reality that provinces with heavily Sunni Arab populations are voting for Iraqiya, but casting Allawi and his coalition as a “Sunni bloc” further perpetuates the false notion of an underlying sectarian and communitarian basis for Iraqi politics that has driven much of the discourse in the United States about Iraqi politics.

First, while Iraqiya includes several Sunni Arab politicians like Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi and al-Hadbaa leader Osama al-Nujaifi, it is, unlike other prominent vote-getters, an explicitly secular list. Allawi himself is a secular Iraqi of Shi’a religious background — and a former Baathist who left the party as Saddam Hussein rose to power in the late 1970s, nearly paying for it with his life.

Calling Allawi a “candidate from a Sunni electorate,” as a rival from current Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s bloc did, is misleading. While it may be true that many Sunni Arabs voted for Iraqiya, it remains possible that they see their lots better off under secular, non-sectarian government than under a government run by Shi’a sectarian parties like Maliki’s Dawa, the Iranian-backed Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, or the Sadrist movement. In other words, even if Sunni Arabs strongly define themselves as such they may conclude that their interests lay with secular and not religiously-based politics.

It’s not difficult to see why Sunnis and other Iraqi religious minorities might find Allawi’s secular message appealing. As he told al-Jazeera in the days before the election, “… the trend in Iraq is moving away from sectarianism, towards secularism. And we believe very strongly that… we [must] create a real partnership in Iraq, and we respect all the sects, we respect all religions. But the way forward for Iraq is definitely secular-rooted.”

Ultimately, the main problem with writing off Allawi’s Iraqiya coalition as basically a Sunni Arab-only party is that it marginalizes an invisible secular nationalist constituency in Iraq. This constituency has been ignored, especially by policymakers in Washington, largely thanks to preconceived notions of Iraq as an uneasy confederation of three main ethno-religious sects and the superior organization of sectarian political parties. But Iraqiya’s ability to run neck-and-neck with Prime Minister Maliki’s State of Law coalition for a plurality both in overall vote totals and parliamentary seats suggests that secular nationalism still has a strong political pull for many Iraqis — not necessarily just those of Sunni Arab background.

While we should recognize that Iraqiya has tapped into a considerable secular nationalist constituency, we shouldn’t go too far and hail the end of sectarian politics in Iraq. As mentioned, Iraqiya is running strongly and Allawi could very well wind up Iraq’s next prime minister. But Iraqi politics remain extremely fragmented and sectarian parties — mainly Shi’a Islamist parties like Dawa, ISCI, and Sadrists, but also the Kurdish parties — still managed to win the majority of the vote.

What Iraqiya’s strong showing should do, however, is disabuse observers and policymakers of ideas that Iraqi politics are to be conceived of in strictly sectarian terms. Allawi has shown that a previously unexploited secular nationalist constituency exists, and DC pundits ought to adjust their analysis accordingly.

Today, the Center for American Progress (CAP) released a report estimating that a strategy aimed at deporting the nation’s population of undocumented immigrants would total approximately $285 billion over five years. According to the report, a deportation-only policy would amount to $922 in new taxes for “every man, woman, and child in this country”:

The undeniable conclusion from these findings is that the federal price tag to deport all undocumented immigrants currently in the United States is prohibitive. The operational feasibility of such a massive effort is dubious at best. It would require an unprecedented deployment of resources, and the problems currently plaguing our detention system and immigration courts would be exacerbated in the extreme and would likely precipitate widespread human rights and due process violations. Moreover, a mass deportation strategy would have a crippling impact on economic growth. The exorbitant direct costs of such a strategy detailed in this report should be the final nail in the coffin of a moribund idea.

CAP breaks its numbers down to four separate categories: the cost of apprehending millions of undocumented immigrants ($153 billion), the cost of processing their deportations ($7 billion), the necessary cost of temporarily detaining undocumented immigrants before their deportations ($29 billion), and the cost of transporting undocumented immigrants to their home countries ($6 billion). CAP bases its figures on the assumption that there are 10.8 million undocumented immigrants and that 20 percent of them will self-deport before coming in contact with Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE). From there, CAP calculates that 8.64 million undocumented immigrants will require processing and detention by immigration authorities and that 6.22 million of them will require government transport.

Groups that support an enforcement-only approach to immigration insist that they do not advocate a policy of mass deportation, but rather support an “attrition through enforcement” strategy — a harsh strategy used to “wear down the will” of undocumented immigrants through increased deportations, detentions, and anti-immigrant ordinances. According to these groups, many immigrants will choose to deport themselves at minimal cost to the U.S. taxpayer. However, research has shown that ramped up enforcement doesn’t drive most immigrants back to their home countries, rather it only pushes them deeper into the shadows.

Even if the U.S. didn’t aim to deport every single undocumented immigrant, the costs associated with any large-scale deportation program like the anti-immigration groups propose are significant. CAP estimates that it costs $23,148 for each person to be apprehended, detained, legally processed, and finally transported
out of the country. ICE deported 349,041 immigrants during the 2008 fiscal year ending September 30. Using CAP’s estimates, that means that the government spent approximately $8,079,601,068 last year alone.

Ultimately, anti-immigration groups couldn’t even wish undocumented immigrants away for free. In a paper released in January, UCLA professor Raúl Hinojosa-Ojeda published research which found that if undocumented immigrants were removed from the economy, it would reduce U.S. GDP by $2.6 trillion over ten years. Hinojosa-Ojeda also affirmed that if undocumented immigrants were put on an earned path to legalization as part of a comprehensive immigration reform package, it would result in at least $1.5 trillion in added U.S. gross domestic product over 10 years.

Yesterday, the libertarian Cato Institute hosted a panel discussion on conservatism and the war in Afghanistan with Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA), Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) and Rep. John J. Duncan, Jr. (R-TN). When the conversation shifted to the war in Iraq, Rohrabacher said that “once President Bush decided to go into Iraq, I thought it was a mistake because we hadn’t finished the job in Afghanistan,” but that once Bush “decided to go in,” he “felt compelled” to “back him up.” He then added that “the decision to go in, in retrospect, almost all of us think that was a horrible mistake.”

Moderator Grover Norquist then asked Rohrabacher to provide a “guesstimate percentage of Republicans in Congress who would share that view — not that they opposed the President at the time, but today looking back.” Rohrabacher replied that “everybody I know thinks it was a mistake to go in now”:

ROHRABACHER: Well, now that we know that it cost a trillion dollars and all of these years and all of these lives and all of this blood, uh, I don’t know many…

NORQUIST: Looking for a number. Two-thirds? One-third?

ROHRABACHER: I, I can’t. All I can say is the people, everybody I know thinks it was a mistake to go in now.

NORQUIST: That’s 100 percent.

Norquist then turned to McClintock, asking “what percentage”:

NORQUIST: Of Republicans in Congress, who would agree with the general analysis here that it was a mistake and/or we should go in.

MCCLINTOCK: I think everyone would agree Iraq was a mistake.

NORQUIST: Two hundred percents. Ok, we’re going to average these.

MCCLINTOCK: And, you know, again, I think virtually everyone would agree going into Afghanistan the way we did was a mistake. How many share my, my cynicism over this idea of a resolution of force, which I can’t find anywhere in the Constitution. And how many believe that in those rare cases where we go in, we put all of our resources behind our soldiers, I would say certainly more than half of the Republican caucus probably believe that.

Asked for a number by Norquist, Duncan refused to say, but shared an anecdote of how unpopular the war is politically in his conservative military district. Watch it:

McClintock wasn’t in Congress when the Iraq war was authorized. Duncan voted against the authorization of military force while Rohrabacher voted for it.