Jeffrey Goldberg has a big new article in which he reports that, having “interviewed roughly 40 current and past Israeli decision makers about a military strike, as well as many American and Arab officials,” “a consensus emerged that there is a better than 50 percent chance that Israel will launch a strike by next July.”

In the article, Goldberg lists the likely consequences that would follow an Israeli strike, writing that such an attack stand[s] a good chance of changing the Middle East forever”:

- sparking lethal reprisals, and even a full-blown regional war that could lead to the deaths of thousands of Israelis and Iranians, and possibly Arabs and Americans as well;

- creating a crisis for Barack Obama that will dwarf Afghanistan in significance and complexity;

- rupturing relations between Jerusalem and Washington, which is Israel’s only meaningful ally;

- inadvertently solidifying the somewhat tenuous rule of the mullahs in Tehran;

- causing the price of oil to spike to cataclysmic highs, launching the world economy into a period of turbulence not experienced since the autumn of 2008, or possibly since the oil shock of 1973;

- placing communities across the Jewish diaspora in mortal danger, by making them targets of Iranian-sponsored terror attacks, as they have been in the past, in a limited though already lethal way;

- and accelerating Israel’s conversion from a once-admired refuge for a persecuted people into a leper among nations.

All of this, Goldberg writes, “regardless of whether Israel succeeds.” So those are the downsides. (Actually, Goldberg forgot an important one: As Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen and former IAEA chief Hans Blix have both pointed out, “if Iran were not determined before to go for nuclear weapons, any attack from the outside would lead them to such a determination.”)

On the upside, Goldberg writes, “If a strike does succeed in crippling the Iranian nuclear program… Israel, in addition to possibly generating some combination of the various catastrophes outlined above, will have removed from its list of existential worries the immediate specter of nuclear-weaponized, theologically driven, eliminationist anti-Semitism.”

There’s quite a lot that’s wrong with this calculus. Numerous analysts doubt that Israel is capable of carrying out a successful strike. As Brookings’ Ken Pollack wrote in his 2004 book The Persian Puzzle, “Given the size of the various Iranian nuclear facilities, it would not be possible for Israel to destroy all of them in a single raid as it did Osiraq. Nor would it be politically, militarily, or logistically possible for Israel to sustain multiple such strikes over the many days, if not weeks, it would take for all its F-151s to accomplish the job.”

Likewise, a March 2009 study by Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that, while an Israeli strike was possible, “the number of aircraft required, refueling along the way and getting to the targets without being detected or intercepted would be complex and high risk and would lack any assurances that the overall mission will have a high success rate.

Almost as troubling as considering the low likelihood of success/high likelihood of disaster of such a strike, however, is the manner in which Goldberg — in what seems like an effort to justify the strategic calculation — uncritically transmits a number of questionable claims about actual Iranian intentions toward Israel. Such as:

“You don’t want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs,” [Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu] said. “When the wide-eyed believer gets hold of the reins of power and the weapons of mass death, then the world should start worrying, and that’s what is happening in Iran.”

As I’ve written before, the idea that Iran is “a messianic apocalyptic cult” is simply unsupported by any serious examination of Iran’s past behavior. I would hope Netanyahu is smart enough to know this, (as I know for a fact a number of close advisers are). And while I’m not at all interested in parsing the numerous offensive, threatening statements about both Israel and Jews from Iran’s leaders over the years, I don’t see how the continuing existence of a 3000 year old Iranian Jewish community demonstrates the “eliminationist anti-Semitism” of the Iranian government.

It’s quite true that a nuclear weapons-capable Iran opens up a whole complex of problems, but the likelihood of an Iranian first strike, or of their handing off weapons (to which they’ve committed a huge amount of resources and endured considerable international opprobrium to develop) to terrorist proxies, is not high among them. Iran is not irrational, nor is it suicidal. So it’s disturbing to see Netanyahu peddling this stuff, and irresponsible for Goldberg to pass it along without scrutiny.

As a side note, given what Goldberg reports Israel is willing to endure — and, more importantly, willing to cause the U.S. to endure — compared to what Israel can realistically hope to achieve with a strike on Iran, it’s worth asking who is actually the more “irrational” actor here.

To state what should be pretty obvious, the article represents a new stage in an ongoing attempt to pressure President Obama into a more belligerent posture toward Iran, with the stated reasoning (no alternative view is entertained by Goldberg) that only by threatening war can Obama convince the Iranians that he’s “serious” about stopping their nuclear program and chill the Israelis out. It’s worth pointing out, though, that this approach clearly failed during the Bush administration — belligerence only seems to have convinced the Iranians that they needed to accelerate their program.

It’s also important to understand that, if Obama does succumb to this pressure and escalates his anti-Iranian rhetoric, the very same people who are now insisting that it’s the only way to avoid war with Iran will later insist that the preservation of American credibility requires going to war with Iran.

A few weeks ago, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) told Fox Business News anchor Eric Bolling that about a “lady on the plane” who told him that her son-in-law was with Hamas and was planning on having a child in the U.S. that Gohmert thinks will likely come back to “blow us up.” Based on this conversation, Gohmert concluded that the U.S. should “clarify” the 14th amendment to prevent the children of immigrants from automatically becoming citizens upon birth in the U.S. Yesterday, Texas state Rep. Debbie Riddle (R) echoed Gohmert’s argument on CNN with Anderson Cooper. Apparently, Riddle told Cooper’s producer that some of the U.S. citizen children of undocumented immigrants are “little terrorists, who will then come back to the U.S. and do us harm.” However, she couldn’t produce a shed of evidence:

COOPER: Representative Riddle, you told my producer that pregnant women are coming here as tourists, having babies, and then going back home — quote — “with the nefarious purpose of turning them into little terrorists, who will then come back to the U.S. and do us harm.” You said it’s part of an organized terrorist element and could cost us lives. Where did you hear that?

RIDDLE: That is information that is coming to my office from former FBI officials.

COOPER: What former FBI officials — I mean, what evidence is there of some sort of long-term plot to have American babies born here and then become terrorists — raised as terrorists overseas and then come back here? [...]

RIDDLE: Well, actually, I — when your folks called me in the preliminary, that was part of the conversation. They did not tell me that you were going to grill me for this specific information that I was not ready to give to you tonight. They did not tell me that, sir.

Watch it:

Riddle’s colleague, Texas state Rep. Rafael Anchia (D) pointed out to Riddle that all the 9/11 bombers were all here legally and that the Times Square bomber was a naturalized citizen. Riddle also erroneously claimed that “There is not another country in the world where you or Representative Anchia or anyone else can go and be there illegally” — a statement which Anchia and Cooper both immediately dismissed.

Riddle also plans on introducing an Arizona copycat law in the Texas legislature, stating, “I am not put off by the threat of legal action against a bill here in Texas. If all attempts at the state level to protect our nation’s sovereignty are struck down by the courts, it will only serve to stoke the raging signal fire alerting Washington, D.C., to the fact that there is finally no one left to blame but themselves for the lack of law and order along our country’s borders.”

In the past few weeks, intense flooding in northern Pakistan has set off an enormous humanitarian disaster, killing thousands of people and displacing as many as 2 million more. The international community has responded by sending aid and humanitarian workers to the region, dispatching civilian and military staff to assist Pakistanis injured in and fleeing the floods.

The United States has played a major role in the response, delivering tens of millions of dollars in aid to beleagured refugees. However, the Washington Post reports that one key element of the U.S. response — Chinook transport helicopters — are in short supply to be sent to Pakistan, because they are assisting troops in combat in Afghanistan. One unnamed U.S. official tells the Post that sending additional helicopters would “require a political decision in Washington” because “it’s not like we have a great surplus of helicopters in theater that are not engaging“:

Pakistan wants the United States to supply immediately dozens more helicopters and significantly more money and supplies to help deal with the widespread flooding that has affected at least 14 million people there, senior Pakistani officials said Monday. The United States has already diverted six Chinook transport helicopters from the Afghanistan war to Pakistan over the past 10 days for rescue missions and aid delivery. [...]

A senior U.S. military official said transfer of additional helicopters, which are in short supply in Afghanistan, would require a political decision in Washington. “Do they exist in the region? Yes,” he said. “Are they available? No.”

“It’s a question of risk mitigation,” the official said. “Helicopter lift is critical to the mission” in Afghanistan, where road transport is difficult and dangerous, he said. “It’s not like we have a great surplus of helicopters in theater that are not engaging.”

The slowness in delivering aid to the Pakistani public also has many Pakistani officials worried that the flooding “could open the door to a Taliban resurgence as the government falters in its efforts to provide basic services.” The extremist group has warned against Pakistanis accepting foreign aid, looking to tap into its own financial resources to take advantage of the situation. Already, extremist political parties are stepping in to lead “the relief and rescue effort,” with Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan’s largest right-wing Islamist group, claiming it has up to 100,000 activists working in relief in the area.

Indeed, many have pointed out that increasing U.S. aid to suffering Pakistanis could be a major tool to build trust and support for the United States and undercut support for the already unpopular Pakistani extremist groups. Karl Inderfurth, a former assistant secretary of State for South Asian affairs, notes that following the 2005 earthquake in the Kashmir region, American aid became a major symbol of goodwill in the region. “The Chinooks became known then as ‘angels of mercy,’” says Inderfurth. “We need to dispatch those angels again.” Unfortunately, international aid has not matched the robust response to the 2005 earthquake. Following that disaster, the international committee pledged $247 million in aid; following the flooding, only $91 million has been pledged.

In the first full war crimes tribunal of the Obama administration, a military judge held that a detainee who confessed to killing an American solider after he was threatened with being gang-raped to death if he did not cooperate may nonetheless have that confession used against him at trial:

In May hearings, a man identified as Interrogator 1 said in testimony that he threatened Mr. Khadr with being gang-raped to death if he did not co-operate. That interrogator was later identified as former U.S. Army Sergeant Joshua Claus. He has also been convicted of abusing a different detainee and has left the military.

Mr. Khadr’s military-appointed lawyer, Lieutenant-Colonel Jon Jackson, argued this instance, as well as other alleged instances of torture and coercion, are enough to render any future confessions – even those in so-called “clean” interrogations – inadmissible in court.

“The well was poisoned: The government can’t cleanse the well by saying, ‘Well, someone else came in and was nice to him,’ ” Col. Jackson said.

Not so, the prosecution countered: All the confessions and testimony it plans to bring forward were freely offered by Mr. Khadr to people who treated him well. [...]

Military judge Colonel Patrick Parrish sided with the prosecution

Khadr was only 15 years old at the time of his capture and confession, earning his tribunal a strong condemnation from the United Nations.  In the words of the UN, “Juvenile justice standards are clear. Children should not be tried before military tribunals.”

The military judge’s decision to admit a coerced confession raises even more troubling questions about whether this particular tribunal will reach accurate results.  As the Supreme Court recognized almost 75 years ago, confessions extracted by “brutality and violence” are akin to “deliberate deception” of the court because they reveal little about a suspect’s guilt or innocence and everything about their very human desire to avoid or end torture. This principle obviously applies to Khadr.  A prisoner who is convinced that they will be raped and murdered if they do not confess has nothing to lose — and what remains of their personal dignity to gain — by doing so.

A member of Khadr’s legal team called the judge’s decision a “disgrace,” and that lawyer is right.  Coerced confessions are not simply inhumane — and not simply un-American — they produce wholly unreliable evidence.  Mr. Khadr may actually be guilty, but a confession extracted by a rape threat does nothing to prove this point.

The Heritage Foundation has been arguing for a while that a lot of “experts” oppose the New START treaty. They noted that “one of the most egregious arguments peddled by New START proponents is that no reasonable arms control expert is opposed to New START. That is blatantly false.” After hearing testimony from countless GOP witnesses that New START is vital, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) demanded to the hear the testimony from the New START opponents promoted by Heritage.

But the bench of “experts” opposing the treaty is extraordinarily short. Ben Loehrke at the Prague Project put together a fantastic chart that shows how few opponents there are.

That’s right 70 to 6. Loehrke adds further:

Over Seventy former high-level government officials and senior military officers have come out in support of New START. In addition, every administration official supported the treaty, from Hillary Clinton, to Bob Gates, and, representing the entire uniformed military, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Michael Mullen. Heritage rounded up six – five George W. Bush appointees and a former Senator.

The claims of expert opposition to START are eerily similar to claims of expert scientific opposition to climate change. In fact, my colleague Brad Johnson produced a chart almost identical to the one above on climate change. Just as the weight of expert analysis is behind the scientific consensus that climate change is a fact, so too is there a vast bipartisan consensus among bipartisan national security experts that New START is vital to our national security.

Much of this explains why, when Heritage fellows write about the START treaty, they repeatedly site only other Heritage fellows when looking for back up. There isn’t really anyone else out there.

Frankly, the almost total lack of expert opposition to the treaty is one of the reasons why the GOP leadership in the Senate is not opposing the treaty on its merits. Direct opposition to the treaty would only expose the GOP in the Senate to legitimate attacks that they are extremists. This is why Sens. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Jon Kyl (R-AZ), as well as other GOP Senators, say they are hopeful the treaty can be passed.

These Senators however driven by a mix of nuclear neocon ideology and pure partisan politics are seeking to delay the treaty vote by tying their support to something that has nothing to do with the START treaty. As Walter Pincus noted today in the Washington Post, Republicans supported the arms control treaty negotiated under Bush and showed little concern for things they now claimed to be concerned about. While this shows Senate Republicans to be total hypocrites, it also shows that the arguments of true outright treaty opponents are so weak even the leadership of the Senate GOP won’t make them.