In various recent interviews over the past week, President Obama has slammed Republicans for refusing to cooperate with Democrats on passing either the DREAM Act or comprehensive immigration reform. “Under the pressures of partisanship and election year politics, most of the 11 Republican senators who voted for that [immigration] reform just four years ago have backed far away from that vote today,” said Obama during a speech to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. “Without the kind of bipartisan effort we had just a few short years ago, we can’t get these reforms across the finish line.”

If the GOP’s “Pledge to America” is any indication, it doesn’t appear a bipartisan effort is going to happen any time soon. The 48-page pre-election document styled after 1994′s Contract with America ambiguously discusses immigration in its section on national security. Yet, despite being a hot-button issue this election season, none of the vaguely worded immigration bullet points reference immigration reform itself. In fact, during today’s press conference, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) evaded a question regarding the absence of an immigration reform platform:

REPORTER: What is the proposal on what to do about the 12 million, 12.5 million undocumented immigrants in this country?

BOEHNER: You’re asking about something that’s not in the document?

REPORTER: Yes, I think that a lot of Americans are debating comprehensive immigration reform and I’m wondering what the position is and frankly why it’s not in the document.

BOEHNER: Well I think it’s pretty clear in the document that the first steps for real immigration reform are to secure our borders and enforce our laws — two things that are in our Pledge to America.

Watch it:

The reporter tried to ask a follow-up question but was immediately cut off by Boehner who wanted to move on to the next question.

The “Pledge” does propose an enforcement-only approach to immigration and appears to endorse and promote Arizona-like immigration policies:

Work with State and Local Officials to Enforce Our Immigration Laws
The problem of illegal immigration and Mexican drug cartels engaged in an increasingly violent conflict means we need all hands on deck to address this challenge. We will reaffirm the authority of state and local law enforcement to assist in the enforcement of all federal immigration laws.

Lumped in with proposals on Iran sanctions, missile defense, and terrorism, the “Pledge” also vows to “take actions to secure our borders, and that action starts with enforcing our laws.” The GOP apparently thinks it will accomplish this goal by simply giving border patrol the tools they need and prohibiting the Secretaries of the Interior and Agriculture “from interfering with Border Patrol enforcement activities on federal lands.”

The document also indirectly references the defense reauthorization bill which Republicans blocked this week in part because it included the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act as an amendment. Republicans argued that adding a provision that would have the potential effect of boosting U.S. military ranks to a defense bill was “extraneous.” The “Pledge” reaffirms the GOP’s commitment to blocking similar legislative action in the future by calling for “no more troop funding bills held up by unrelated policy changes, or extraneous domestic spending and pork-barrel projects.”

Given that 54% of all Americans regard the immigration issue as “very important” and that a majority of voters — across party lines — support immigration reform it’s surprising the GOP didn’t provide more details. It’s an especially big hole considering that Republicans have not hesitated to politicize the issue this election season.

This isn’t a national security election. But the United States still has more than 100,000 troops engaged in combat in two different countries. You would think that if you were the opposition party laying out your plan for American that would be worth a mention, no?

In the 45 page “Pledge to America,” subtitled “a new governing agenda built on the priorities of our nation,” the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq apparently don’t amount to a GOP priority worth mentioning.

The words Iraq and Afghanistan are mentioned once each in the entire document and the one mention is in reference to sanctions about Iran. What makes this stranger is that an entire section of the “pledge” is devoted to the GOP’s plan for national security.

There are platitudes of course. It notes “we are a nation at war” and there is one bullet on pledging to “pass clean troop funding bills” (something Republicans never did during the last decade). But there is no plan for Iraq or Afghanistan. There is no mention of how Republicans plan to deal with either war, no notion that things could be done differently, and no acknowledgement that this year was the deadliest year in Afghanistan. One would think that the opposition party in the United States would have something to say about the war in Afghanistan — a war that appears to be floundering.

The lack of any serious mention of the wars is a telling sign that war has been taken as a given by the House GOP. There is no sense of urgency or need to challenge or question the existing war plans. In other words, it is no longer on their radar, war is simply a fact of life. As a result, war in perpetuity is simply a given under the GOP. This also demonstrates a real callousness. American men and women are fighting and dying in Iraq and Afghanistan and the GOP doesn’t even see this sacrifice as something worth mentioning.

More broadly, however, the national security component shows that the GOP has no actual vision for how they think the world’s leading superpower should operate in the world. Of the eight points in the plan devoted to national security three are devoted to immigration and border control, two to Guantanamo and detention policy, one to missile defense (of course), one to tough enforcement of Iran sanctions, and one to the above mentioned clean funding bills. The fact that more than half the points are devoted to keeping people out of America, indicates that the GOP House leadership simply doesn’t know how it wants to engage the world.

All the “pledge” tells us therefore, is that the House GOP will support war in perpetuity and that it has no concrete ideas about what America’s foreign policy should be.

The Bush administration has long maintained they had not decided to invade Iraq until the days before it actually began and that they did “everything” they could to “avoid war in Iraq.” President Bush even claimed that the “American people can know that every measure has been taken to avoid war.”

Yet there is evidence that the Bush administration, from its very early days, was actively plotting to go to war with the Arab country. From a British memo that noted that “Bush made it clear the US intended to invade whether or not there was a second resolution and even if UN inspectors found no evidence of a banned Iraqi weapons programme” to memoirs by administration members Richard Clarke and Paul O’Neill, there have been numerous disclosures that strongly suggest that the Bush administration was plotting a war against Iraq while recognizing it was not a threat to the United States.

Now, with the help of a Freedom of Information Act request, the National Security Archive has obtained a newly declassified document that details talking points that emerged from a meeting between Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and CENTCOM Commander General Tommy Franks in November 2001.

The talking points mainly revolve around the logistical planning for a war in Iraq. They detail the “decapitation” of the Iraqi government by U.S. forces and make regime change the goal. Interestingly, they already mention U.S. forces “coming out of Afghanistan” to join the invasion of Iraq. Yet the most alarming part of the document is a bullet point titled, “How start?” (which is a discussion that actually appears after the planning of the entire war). The participants in the Rumsfeld-Frank meeting discussed possible ways to provoke a conflict with Iraq, including an attack by Saddam Hussein against the Kurdish north, the U.S. discovering a “Saddam connection” to 9/11 or the anthrax attacks, or a dispute over WMD inspections. It appears from the language of the talking points that the Bush administration had already decided to go to war with Iraq and was looking for an opportunity to invade:

Another document obtained by the National Security Archive shows that the Bush State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research created an assessment of international support for a war against Iraq in December 2001. It noted that the “UK’s Blair would publicly support a US decision to bomb Iraq but would face considerable criticism.” It worried that going to war in Iraq could “bring radicalization of British Muslims, the great majority whom opposed the September 11 attacks but are increasingly restive about what they see as an anti-Islamic campaign.” These fears appear to have been prescient, as in July 2005 British Muslim extremists apparently radicalized by the war in Iraq detonated bombs throughout London.

President Obama used his speech to the United Nations General Assembly today to issue a challenge to the international community to support the Israel-Palestinian peace process:

Many in this hall count themselves as friends of the Palestinians. But these pledges must now be supported by deeds. Those who have signed on to the Arab Peace Initiative should seize this opportunity to make it real by describing and demonstrating the normalization that it promises Israel. Those who speak out for Palestinian self-government should help the Palestinian Authority with political and financial support, and – in so doing – help the Palestinians build the institutions of their state. And those who long to see an independent Palestine rise must stop trying to tear Israel down.

After thousands of years, Jews and Arabs are not strangers in a strange land. And after sixty years in the community of nations, Israel’s existence must not be a subject for debate. Israel is a sovereign state, and the historic homeland of the Jewish people. It should be clear to all that efforts to chip away at Israel’s legitimacy will only be met by the unshakeable opposition of the United States. And efforts to threaten or kill Israelis will do nothing to help the Palestinian people — the slaughter of innocent Israelis is not resistance, it is injustice. Make no mistake: the courage of a man like President Abbas — who stands up for his people in front of the world — is far greater than those who fire rockets at innocent women and children.

It would have been nice to see some reference to Israel’s obligations here, at the very least a mention of the word “occupation,” in the speech, which, apart from reiterating the Quartet’s call for Israel to extend its settlement moratorium, focused exclusively on the responsibilities of Israel’s neighbors. I doubt the lack of such references will calm the president’s conservative critics, who will continue to label him “anti-Israel,” despite the fact that the Israeli Prime Minister, the Israeli Ambassador to the U.S., and AIPAC all disagree.

It’s worth noting President Obama’s reference to the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative — he stated that those who signed it “should seize this opportunity to make it real by describing and demonstrating the normalization that it promises Israel” — in light of Secretary of State Clinton’s hailing of it on Wednesday as a “groundbreaking initiative [that] provided a far-sighted vision for comprehensive regional peace.” Clinton called “the principles enshrined in the Arab Peace Initiative” — which offered full normalization of relations with Israel in exchange for withdrawal from the territories occupied in 1967 and the creation of a Palestinian state — “more important than ever.” Israel has yet to formally respond to that offer.

It’s easy — and, given the state of negotiations, on a knife’s edge over whether Israel will extend its settlement moratorium and amid some of the worst unrest in East Jerusalem in years, probably not entirely incorrect — to be cynical about the prospects for a peace deal in the near future. But it’s a testament to the centrality of the conflict to a number of other U.S. challenges in the region, and the strong U.S. national security consensus around the reality of those linkages, that the president has chosen to put his political and diplomatic capital, and America’s, behind this effort right now.