Recently, many within the conservative movement have been struggling to bridge the divide on immigration which exists among them. While many right-wingers continue to pound on immigrants, conservative strategists have warned against alienating the powerful Latino vote and have started advising the Republican Party to tone down its rhetoric. Tea party darling and Fox News host Glenn Beck seems torn on the issue as well.

Beck has long joined media personalities like Bill O’Reilly and Lou Dobbs in perpetuating anti-immigrant myths and fear-mongering. However, last night, Beck announced on his show that he wholeheartedly supports immigrants who come through the “front door” and admitted that he likes them more than “most Americans”:

I have no problem with immigrants. In fact, I like immigrants much more than I like most Americans quite frankly because they respect our country, they understand our country, they are still excited about our country. These people — I would go in boat loads to Ellis Island and be like “come on in!’ We need an Ellis Island, but you come through the front door. Bring us your energy, your enthusiasm, you ideas, the richness of your culture — as long as you’re excited about ours. [...]

People from all over the world come here for freedom and opportunity. And If we don’t have immigrants who love this country, we’re gonna run out of people who love this country…We need people who understand us and have seen our glory from the distance. And from their own corrupt government. Why do you think so many people from South America and from Mexico are coming from across the border?…Our government cannot resemble those governments in South America and Mexico. We must remain different and those people coming from the front door will help us do that.

Watch it:

Perhaps for the sake of sense of consistency, Beck has essentially drawn a line in the sand between immigrants who emigrate to the U.S. legally, and those who do not. Yet, what Beck either ignores or doesn’t realize is that the “front door” is slammed in the face of most people who would like to live and work in the U.S. Though working in the U.S. without authorization is, for most immigrants, an option of last resort, it’s often their only option. Numerical limits on green cards are outdated by over 20 years and are grossly insufficient. Diversity visas are only available to persons from countries with low rates of immigration to the U.S. — anyone from Mexico, China, the Philippines, India, and other countries with high levels of immigration is almost immediately disqualified. Most immigrants do not have the necessary family relationships to apply for legal entry through family sponsored immigration and fail to meet the strict refugee and asylum status criteria.

The kind of immigration reform the White House has endorsed seeks to fix many of those injustices and inefficiencies. However, according to Beck, progressives are simply trying to “dupe” immigrants with poor English skills who don’t understand their “radical” language. Beck also states that progressives would be “happy to welcome” immigrants with Marxist ideologies and “make them part of the fundamental transformation that they’re trying to bring about.”

President Obama is having a good week. Reports now indicate that the US and Russia have reached an agreement on a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) that will replace the old treaty that expired last December. Thus, after signing into law his chief domestic priority, the President will soon sign a new START treaty (likely in Prague), thereby advancing his chief foreign policy priority and providing some justification to his awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize. The New York Times concludes:

The new treaty represents perhaps the most concrete foreign policy achievement for Mr. Obama since he took office 14 months ago and the most significant result of his effort to ‘reset’ the troubled relationship with Russia.

The new START treaty will reduce the number of nuclear weapons pointed at US cities and will enable the US to continue to be able to monitor Russia’s nuclear stockpiles. It will cut deployed strategic nuclear warheads from 2200 to about 1550 and will cut the total number of launchers from 1600 to 800. It will also ensure that the framework of the previous START treaty – a treaty that was the brain-child of Ronald Reagan and was advanced by President George H.W. Bush – is maintained.

In other words, this new START follow-on agreement will maintain the status quo and preserve nuclear stability, while making modest advances in reducing nuclear weapons. The significance of this treaty is that it lays the groundwork for more far-reaching talks between the US and Russia and will lay the groundwork for strengthening the nuclear non-proliferation regime, as this new agreement will allow both countries to show that they are keeping their end of the decades old nuclear bargain.

Despite this treaty having extensive bi-partisan support among senior foreign policy officials – such as George Schultz, Henry Kissinger, Richard Lugar (R-IN), Colin Powell –ratification is far from assured. There are real questions over whether the Senate GOP will seek to obstruct the ratification of the treaty. Treaties require a two-thirds majority, therefore eight or nine Republican votes are needed to ratify this treaty. If the Senate GOP wants to kill it they can. Therefore if ratification becomes a fight – it will not be a fight between Republicans and Obama, it will be a fight within the Republican caucus – between moderates and the far right.

In a sign of how extreme the GOP Senate leadership has become, Bloomberg reported, following word the treaty was done, that “Senate Republicans would object to linkages similar to the one in the 1991 treaty.” In other words, what was acceptable to Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, would not be acceptable to Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ).

The only objection that Kyl’s staff could come up with is that the treaty contains irrelevant and entirely symbolic line about missile defense in the preamble to the treaty. Ryan Patmintra, a spokesman for Arizona Senator Jon Kyl, went on the record, insisting that “unilateral declarations that the Russian Federation could use as leverage against you or your successors when U.S. missile defense decisions are made.”

But this is all a ludicrous smokescreen. Even if there was no line about missile defense, Russia could still use missile defense as a reason to withdraw from the treaty, since every treaty has an out-clause and either country can use whatever justification they want to justify a withdrawal. Richard Lugar, the foremost arms-control expert in the Senate, also poured cold water on these claims:

Missile defense will not be part of the treaty, but in the preamble both parties will state their positions and there will be a mention of offense and defense and the importance of those…they are in essence editorial opinions.

If Kyl and the GOP leadership in the Senate end up killing the treaty, they will be sending the world into nuclear chaos. If treaty ratification fails it is not as if the current status quo simply continues. The old START treaty has expired and should ratification fail the informal agreement in which both the US and Russia adhere to the treaty, despite it not being in force, will end. In other words, Jon Kyl and the Senate GOP could be sending us into an age of nuclear anarchy in regards to US and Russian nuclear relations. It will also essentially kill the nuclear non-proliferation regime by betraying its basic bargain. While the Senate GOP leadership maybe so politically craven or so ideologically extreme that they are willing to endanger US national security in exchange for scoring a political defeat against the President, such reckless extremism can only be stopped by other more moderate members of the Senate GOP.

Gen. David Petraeus caused quite a stir last week with his written statement (pdf) to the Senate Armed Services Committee, in which he included “insufficient progress toward a comprehensive Middle East peace” as the first among “a number of cross-cutting issues that serve as major drivers of instability, inter-state tensions, and conflict” that “can serve as root causes of instability or as obstacles to security.”

While none of this is really surprising to anyone who has spent much time studying the Middle East, it does run afoul of one of the most treasured articles of faith of the neocons, which is the idea that the U.S.-Israel relationship exists is a sort of hermetically sealed bubble, separated from the U.S.’s other challenges in the region, generating no negative externalities for U.S. interests. For many Israel hawks, the idea that there is “linkage” between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to other problems in the region is not only a myth, but espousing such ideas is quite enough to qualify one as “anti-Israel.”

In New Hampshire yesterday, Philip Klein of the American Spectator asked Gen. Petraeus to clarify his views. While Petraeus disapproved of the way that some of “the blogs” had presented his written statement, he ended up strongly re-affirming the substance of the linkage argument.

Saying that the written statement “describes the various factors that affect the strategic context in which we [CENTCOM] operate,” Petraeus told Klein that “the Middle East peace process — and whether there’s progress or is not progress — has a great deal to do with” that context. The lack of progress, Petraeus said, “is something that influences our area.”

Notably, Petraeus said that he thought that Secretary of State Clinton’s recent speech to AIPAC — in which Clinton strongly reiterated American support for Israel, but said that “new construction in East Jerusalem or the West Bank… undermines America’s unique ability to play a role in the peace process” — “articulately and clearly conveyed our policy.”

While denying both that he had requested, as Mark Perry originally reported, to have Israel-Palestine transferred into CENTCOM’s area of responsibility, and that he had made any specific reference to the stalled peace process endangering American lives, Petraeus affirmed that the lack of progress toward a resolution “does make situations more challenging, particularly for moderate leaders” in the Middle East:

If you go to moderate leaders in the Arab world, they will tell you that the lack of progress in the Middle East peace process causes them problems, because their concern is that those who promote violence in Gaza and the West Bank will claim that because there’s no progress diplomatically that the only way to get progress is through violence. And that’s their concern. And that was really what we were trying to convey.

That’s why we support Senator Mitchell so much. We have invited Senator Mitchell to every single conference that I have hosted — for ambassadors, for chiefs of defense staff, what have you, which we do about three times a year — because everyone is so keenly riveted on that issue even though, again, it is not in our area. And we keep an eye on it, because we need to know the atmospherics there because they do — there is a certain spillover effect.

“There is a certain spillover effect.” Ladies and gentlemen, the reality of linkage.

Petraeus also cited a blog post from Commentary’s Max Boot defending him from the charge of being “anti-Israel.” The irony, of course, is that the people who relentlessly caricature the linkage argument as “anti-Israel” are mainly the type of people who read and write for Commentary.