A new Senate GOP argument against the New START treaty is not really an argument at all — it is merely a call for delaying ratification. Sen. John Thune (R-SD) who heads the Senate Republican Policy Committee put out a document that pointed out that previous arms control treaties took a while to get ratified. Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) echoed these comments and attacked Senator John Kerry, who heads the Foreign Relations committee, for trying to “rush” the treaty through.

But yesterday in a Senate hearing on START, Republican Senator Bob Corker (R-TN) rebuffed Kyl’s claims of rushing, when he said that: “I appreciate so much that the chairman [Senator Kerry] continuing to have so many hearings.” Watch it:

The hearing yesterday was the sixth hearing Kerry has held. Only two Republican Senators bothered to show up — Senator Richard Lugar (who supports START) and Corker. None of the other Republican Senators on the committee showed up to question George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush’s National Security Advisers, Stephen Hadley and Brent Scowcroft. The hearing was over so fast that it lasted little more than an hour. If Republican Senators really felt that Kerry was rushing the treaty through the committee you would think they would actually show up to the hearings.

The fact is that nothing is being rushed and that by making the standard “slow down” argument the Senate GOP has only confirmed that they have no real leg to stand on in opposing this treaty. Kerry is holding extensive hearings featuring almost exclusively prominent Republican officials.

Claims that because other treaties took longer, the New START treaty should take longer is also bogus. What Thune and Kyl fail to note was that for the first START treaty a little thing happened called the collapse of the Soviet Union. That, as one would expect, significantly impacted the ratification of the treaty. The nine months it took to ratify the Moscow Treaty in 2002 was due to the incompetence of the GOP run Senate, not due diligence – the treaty was just three pages long.

But furthermore, this treaty needs to ratified as quickly as possible, since there currently is no legal basis for the continued verification and monitoring measures needed to watch over Russia’s nuclear arsenal. We are losing information on the Russian nuclear arsenal and this gradual erosion of intelligence, will result in an erosion in trust, which would result in a destabilizing nuclear situation.

In a new article on progressives and Afghanistan, Michael Cohen quotes my colleague Brian Katulis saying that progressives “were caught flat-footed in the face of the COIN public relations campaign” around the Iraq surge, “which came from the military, some civilians, and an echo chamber of think tank analysts and bloggers who played a cheerleading role rather than critically examining U.S. interests and policy options in Afghanistan.”

The Center for a New American Security’s Andrew Exum calls this “disingenuous“:

Brian and other analysts at CAP — the most influential think tank on the American Left, with many alumni in the Obama Administration and a fantastic public relations staff — have published extensively on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their 2007 report, “Strategic Reset,” was a major report which argued — contra the Surge — for a phased withdrawal to take place in Iraq within one year from the report’s publication date in June 2007. (Okay, in retrospect, that was a really bad idea.) But the problem with “Strategic Reset” and other papers is that not only did they fail to persuade anyone in Bush Administration, they also failed to persuade the Obama and Clinton campaigns. The Obama campaign’s ultimate stance on Iraq, for example, looked a lot more like products being produced by CFR, Brookings, CNAS, and other think tanks in the center and center-left than it did anything produced by the Left. By late 2008, the Obama campaign’s position on Iraq largely mirrored that of the Bush Administration!

Easy one first: The reason that Obama’s Iraq position “mirrored that of the Bush Administration” by late 2008 is, of course, because by late 2008 the Bush administration had been pressured into accepting a withdrawal agreement with a clear timetable that Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki himself acknowledged was modeled on Barack Obama’s campaign position. Disingenuous indeed.

In regard to “Strategic Reset,” as described by Michael Crowley in this New Republic piece from 2008, the Obama campaign eventually adopted a position somewhere in between CAP and CNAS, though one with a timeline — a very live issue at the time — which CAP supported and CNAS did not.

But, more importantly, let’s look at what policy the Obama administration adopted once in office: A withdrawal combat forces by August 2010, and of all remaining troops by December 2011, much closer to CAP’s position than CNAS’s proposed “Conditional Engagement” (which Katulis and Peter Juul critiqued in this series of posts.)

And it’s a very good thing, too. If Obama had adopted “Conditional Engagement,” instead of preparing to have U.S. combat troops out by this summer, we would have probably just pushed back the U.S. withdrawal yet another six months (to somewhere in 2015 by now) in response to the delay in Iraqi government formation, while spending a lot of time trying to develop a clever package of rewards and punishments to get the Iraqis to behave like adults around the table.

Earlier this week, the Colorlines blog reported that Louisiana St. Bernard Parish Sheriff Jack Stephens set up checkpoints and called federal agents to BP’s cleanup sites because “illegal aliens” are building “criminal enterprises”—just like they did after Katrina. It’s unclear exactly what sort of “criminal enterprises” Stephens is referring to, but what is known and widely documented is the fact that immigrants helped rebuild New Orleans from the ground up after Hurricane Katrina.

Almost 50 percent of the hurricane-repair workers in the New Orleans were Latinos and 54 percent of them undocumented. While immigration hawks were quick to accuse undocumented immigrants of stealing jobs from U.S. citizens, it didn’t square with the fact that more than half of New Orleans’ residents abandoned their decimated city after Hurricane Katrina hit and rebuilt their lives elsewhere. In their absence, undocumented laborers worked side-by-side legal immigrants and U.S. citizens to get the city back on its feet. Latino workers were directly responsible for making 86.9% of households habitable after Hurricane Katrina in six parishes surrounding New Orleans in 2008. By 2008, the purchasing power of Louisiana’s Latino buying power totaled $4.0 billion—an increase of 238.1% since 1990 A study found that that if all unauthorized immigrants were removed from Louisiana, the state would lose $947 million in expenditures, $421 million in economic output, and approximately 6,660 jobs.

Hurricane Katrina isn’t the only natural disaster that immigrants have responded to. In 2008, Hurricane Ike once again highlighted the nation’s dependence on immigrant labor. As always, immigration hardliners were quick to criticize the role foreign labor was playing in rebuilding parts of Texas. However, despite the fact that the nation was quickly heading into a serious recession, honest employers pointed out that there simply weren’t enough workers to fill the jobs. “We don’t hire anyone who’s illegal…We want to keep it local. We want to use people here in Texas, but there’s so much work,” business owner Chase Duhon told the Houston Chronicle after he had trouble finding legal local workers to help with hurricane cleanup. Leigh Ganchan, a Houston immigration attorney pointed out to the paper, “Our nation is more vulnerable…meaning we need people to help us rebuild our infrastructure after major disasters like this.”

In 2008, New Orleans was named the most violent city. However, contrary to what Stephens may imply, the rise in violence was largely attributed to criminals preying on the undocumented immigrants themselves. A “spree” of armed robberies against immigrants was motivated by the fact that those without papers are less likely to receive adequate assistance by the police and even less likely to even report the crime in the first place. Stephens might be better off informing recent immigrant workers of their rights and working to gain the trust of and establish a productive relationship with the new immigrant community.

Workers who have been displaced by the BP oil fiasco should undeniably have the first shot at jobs. BP officials claim they are training more than 4,500 unemployed workers in three affected states, including Louisiana. So far, that’s not enough. In the end, as Tyler Falk of Grist points out, there’s something seriously wrong with the fact that “British Petroleum can legally come to the Gulf and devastate an entire ecosystem and the economy it supports, but when “illegal” immigrants come to clean up the mess, they are treated like criminals.” Immigration issues aside, it’s BP’s responsibility to provide restitution to the workers and families whose livelihood they have destroyed and to clean up the mess they created without inflicting any more harm or economic suffering than they already have.

This past Wednesday, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) delivered a wide-ranging speech at an Orthodox Union event in Washington, D.C. The senator’s lecture touched on areas such as Iran’s nuclear program, the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and several domestic policy issues.

During one point of his speech, Schumer turned his attention to the situation in Gaza. He told the audience that the “Palestinian people still don’t believe in the Jewish state, in a two-state solution,” and also that “they don’t believe in the Torah, in David.” He went on to say “you have to force them to say Israel is here to stay.”

New York’s senior senator explained that the current Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip — which is causing a humanitarian crisis there — is not only justified because it keeps weapons out of the Palestinian territory, but also because it shows the Palestinians living there that “when there’s some moderation and cooperation, they can have an economic advancement.” Summing up his feelings, Schumer emphasized the need to “to strangle them economically until they see that’s not the way to go”:

SCHUMER: The Palestinian people still don’t believe in the Jewish state, in a two-state solution. More do than before, but a majority still do not. Their fundamental view is, the Europeans treated the Jews badly and gave them our land — this is Palestinian thinking [...] They don’t believe in the Torah, in David [...] You have to force them to say Israel is here to stay. The boycott of Gaza to me has another purpose — obviously the first purpose is to prevent Hamas from getting weapons by which they will use to hurt Israel — but the second is actually to show the Palestinians that when there’s some moderation and cooperation, they can have an economic advancement. When there’s total war against Israel, which Hamas wages, they’re going to get nowhere. And to me, since the Palestinians in Gaza elected Hamas, while certainly there should be humanitarian aid and people not starving to death, to strangle them economically until they see that’s not the way to go, makes sense.

Watch it:

Schumer is simply factually incorrect that the “majority” of Palestinians refuse to accept a two-state solution. Recent polling has found that 74 percent of the Palestinian population wants to see a two-state solution with an Israeli and Palestinian state side by side. It is also the position of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, and there is evidence that Gaza’s Hamas rulers may be compelled to support such a solution as well.

As for the senator’s comments on economic strangulation making “sense” to produce better leadership in Gaza, they are as offensive as they are wrong. Schumer believes it is logical to economically harm the civilian population of Gaza — where 44 percent of the people under the age of 14 — for freely voting in an election the U.S. supported, then undermined, in order to change the territory’s government. The reality is that its leadership has only become further radicalized and entrenched as a result of the embargo. (HT: Mondoweiss)

In Wednesday’s post on the difficulties on removing settlers from the West Bank, I cited the New Republic’s Jonathan Chait as “pushing back on the idea that the settlements represented an obstacle to two-states.”

Chait protests that his stated view was actually that “the settlements are an obstacle, but not the primary obstacle.” That’s fair, and I recognize that I described his view imprecisely.

But it’s also very much beside the point I was getting at, which had to do with the tendency of Israel hawks to muffle the alarm over the settlement problem by insisting that they’re “reversible,” as Chait did. In addition to simply failing to understand how provocative the settlements are (precisely because of the fact that the settlements are designed to make a two-state peace impossible), it’s an extraordinarily cynical treatment of the prospect of transferring tens of thousands of people out of their homes and communities. And, regardless of whether one actually recognizes the settlements as an obstacle or not, it’s a problem made worse by the day in part because of the illusion that “reversing” them won’t be such a big deal.