Yesterday, Wonk Room reported that Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Michael Steele met with immigration advocates and, according to several groups that attended the meeting, pledged to enlist another Republican senator’s support for comprehensive immigration reform. However, the RNC is now saying Steele “made no such commitment.” The New York Times reports:

Doug Heye, a spokesman for Mr. Steele, dismissed that [advocates'] account as “100 per cent inaccurate.”

Mr. Steele “makes it a priority to meet with different grassroots activists who are concerned with the direction of our country,” Mr. Heye wrote in an e-mail. “Today’s meeting was meant as an opportunity to listen to concerns and discuss the Republican Party’s strong support of legal immigration.

The Wall Street Journal contains an interesting anecdote from Joshua Hoyt, executive director of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR). According to Hoyt, Steele listed a series of Republicans who might sign on to immigration reform and agreed with the April 30 deadline that advocates have set for the introduction of an immigration bill. However, Hoyt claims that midway through the meeting, an RNC staffer signaled that Steele should “walk back what he had said.” From there, Steele simply emphasized that he could not “get ahead” of Republican Senate leaders.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), one of the two lawmakers working on immigration reform, has accused the Obama administration of “paying lip service to immigration reform” and has stated that the White House should put together a proposal for immigration reform and “see if they can sell it” to skittish lawmakers. However, Graham has also insisted he won’t back immigration reform without another Republican co-sponsor. The fact that the RNC won’t even commit to helping him find one certainly signals that there’s a lot more delaying a bill than just a lack of presidential leadership.

So far, Graham has got away with with placing all the blame on the White House while diminishing the role his own party has to play in seeing a bill through. The recent controversy surrounding the RNC’s meeting with advocates not only challenges Graham’s messaging, it also puts the “party of no” in the spotlight for immigrant and Latino voters who have, for the most part, been focusing much of their energy on putting the pressure on the White House and Democrats.

Ultimately, the Obama administration seems interested and sympathetic, but it boils down to politics. Particularly after the grueling health care debate, the White House needs to be convinced that immigration reform is achievable before it puts more political capital behind it. As a co-sponsor, it’s up to Graham and his Democratic counterpart on the bill, Sen. Chuck Schumer (NY), to make the pitch. While most, but not all, Democratic lawmakers are supportive, Republicans must share a portion of the responsibility to get a bill on the floor, past cloture, and to the finish line. If Graham is really committed, he’ll stop the blame game and help make sure that Republicans carry their weight — with or without the RNC.

Mark Bowden’s Vanity Fair profile of General David Petraeus is every bit as worshipful as one would expect from the author of a classic love poem to the F-22, but that’s not to say it’s not worth reading. Among other things, Bowden elicits a very succinct description from Petraeus of the role of American values in counter-insurgency:

“One of our doctrines is: Live your values,” Petraeus says. “And there are two arguments for living your values. One is you have the moral obligation to do it. It is the right thing to do. If you don’t buy that, you have a practical reason to do it, because every time you violate it, you pay for it.” The damage done by Abu Ghraib, for instance, is permanent; he has called it a “nonbiodegradable” event. It undercuts the core objective, the trust and respect of the indigenous population. Petraeus says, “The human terrain is the decisive terrain.”

Petraeus used very similar language when voicing support for closing Guantanamo Bay, abandoning torture, and trying terrorists like Khalid Sheikh Muhammad in U.S. courts:

I don’t think we should be afraid to live our values. That is what we’re fighting for and it’s what we stand for. So indeed, we need to embrace them and we need to operationalize them in how we carry out what it is we’re doing on the battlefield and everywhere else. So one has to have some faith I think, in the legal system. One has to have a degree of confidence that individuals that have conducted such extremist activity would indeed be found guilty in courts of law.[...]

Gitmo has caused us problems, there’s no question about it. I oversee a region in which the existence of Gitmo has indeed been used by the enemy against us. We have not been without missteps or mistakes in our activities since 9/11. And again, Gitmo is a lingering reminder for the use of some in that regard.

Like Abu Ghraib, the use of indefinite detention and torture, and the use of military commissions that lack international legal credibility, undercut core U.S. national security objectives, one of which is the trust and respect of populations whose cooperation is essential to weaken and defeat Al Qaeda and other extremists. It’s amazing that so many who hailed Petraeus as a hero of the Iraq surge now either fail to grasp or simply dismiss these views because they challenge their conception of what a “war on terror” should look like.

Bowden also writes that Petraeus “has brought an expansive vision to his new job, just as he has done in the past, pushing the Obama administration to rethink its approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the broader context of the region. [Petraeus ] relies on the cooperation of Arab nations, and so must cope with their unhappiness over America’s inability to make progress in peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.” While this might be unfair to Obama, who I think clearly already had an understanding of the significance of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the region, it does further strengthen the “linkage” argument that neoconservative pundits have been so anxious to downplay in the wake of Petraeus’s recent Senate testimony.