Since Osama bin Laden’s death, news reports have pointed to various analyses showing that the United States has spent trillions of dollars fighting wars and swelling the nation’s security apparatus because of the former al Qaeda leader. And on top of that, Bloomberg reported yesterday that the American taxpayer will be footing the bill for some time to come. Last night on CNN, psychiatrist Dr. Gail Saltz, whom host Eliot Spitzer called “our resident expert in all matters psychological,” identified a contributing factor to this enormous debt:

SALTZ: I would also say that we have to turn this around and think about how fear, which — I mean, they are afraid and that’s causing them to do some irrational things, but fear has also caused us to do some irrational things. So we were made very afraid about the terrorists, but if you think about the number people who died in 9/11, it is much smaller, say, than the number of people all the time in car accidents, in heart disease, in cancer. But we have spent $5 trillion in the past decade because of our fear about 9/11. Now that’s not a very rational thing to do.

Saltz also addressed the common proclivity for Americans to portray the struggle against al Qaeda as a “war” along with using the accompanying rhetoric. “Loud statements of, ‘We’re going to come get you and we’re going to humiliate you’ essentially only serve to form group dynamics to be tighter,” she said, adding that by disallowing al Qaida terrorists to engage in a “war” doesn’t leave them with a whole lot to do:

SALTZ: Essentially sitting in your safe house drinking tea and not having adventures is very boring. And that seems to be what makes terrorists disperse. To be honest, that is what makes them leave the group.

Watch it:

An article in today’s Wall Street Journal looks at the considerable support that the exiled Iranian Islamist-Marxist cult Mujahideen-e Khalq — which is designated by the U.S. State Department as as foreign terrorist organization — has been able to cultivate, both in European capitals and in DC, getting people like Rudy Giuliani and Howard Dean to speak at their events.

The article notes that these speakers “wouldn’t disclose their speaking fees, but many of them charge between $25,000 and $40,000 per appearance.” Dean also said that “he has made both paid and unpaid speeches for MeK.”

As I noted back in December, such activities skirt very close to violating U.S. law in regard to “material support” for terrorism. Responding to this charge when it was raised by attorney David Cole, Giuliani and his colleagues quoted the relevant law: “Individuals who act entirely independently of the [FTO] to advance its goals or objectives shall not be considered to be working under the [FTO]’s direction and control.”

“As a result,” Giuliani et al concluded, “we felt quite secure, thank you, in relying on the protection Congress placed in the statute, backed up by the First Amendment.”

But can Giuliani and others really be said to be “acting entirely independently” of the MEK if they’re getting paid explicitly to advocate on their behalf?

That question aside, the MEK is clearly ramping up its lobbying effort here in DC. Yesterday, the Washington Post ran a full page ad calling on State Department ed-list the MEK. The ad claims that the MEK is “Iran’s principal opposition movement,” which would surely come as a surprise to Iran’s actual opposition movement.

Green movement spokesmen Mohsen Kadivar and Ahmad Sadri wrote in March that de-listing the MEK “promises to spell disaster for the pro-democracy movement in Iran, and will be a devastating setback in the country’s attempts to move forward.” As I noted at the time, members of the Green movement rarely comment on specific aspects of U.S. policy on Iran. The fact that Kadivar and Sadri chose to do so should indicate how serious an issue MEK is for Iran’s democratic opposition.

The Washington Post ad was paid for by the National Association of Iranian Scholars in Britain, which is listed as one of a number of MEK aliases by the Iran Interlink website, run by former MEK members.

Also yesterday, the Washington Times ran a pro-MEK ad of a different sort, in the form of a ridiculously misleading op-ed by Daniel Pipes. “The MeK issue reveals Iraqi subservience to Iran with special clarity,” wrote Pipes, suggesting that that the Iraqi army’s recent violent entry into Camp Ashraf north of Baghdad — where MEK members have lived since 1986, protected first by Saddam, then by the U.S. — was done on Iran’s orders.

While I appreciate the fact that neocons like Pipes have awakened to the fact of Iranian influence in Iraq (enabled, of course, by the U.S. intervention), the idea that Iraqis should need special Iranian encouragement against the MEK is amusing. The MEK fought alongside Hussein’s forces after the 1991 Gulf War to put down the Shia uprising in Iraq’s south and the Kurdish uprising in the north, driven by MEK leader Maryam Rajavi’s infamous command to “Take the Kurds under your tanks, and save your bullets for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.” Given the significant Shia and Kurdish presence in the new Iraqi government, it should come as no surprise that that government is not positively disposed toward the MEK.

The question of what to do with the residents of Camp Ashraf — which includes a number of children — is a tough one, but it should be separated out from whether they should be taken off the terrorism list. Barbara Slavin had a very good piece in March, looking at the delusion of some high-profile MEK supporters that the U.S. could support them as a credible Iranian political opposition force. It’s clear that some would like to treat the MEK as an Iranian version of Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. Responding to that comparison yesterday, Kombiz Lavasany wrote via Twitter, “In Chalabi’s defense, not sure Iraqis knew or cared about him. Everyone in Iran just hates the MEK.”

The Israeli public and perhaps even its politicians may not be big fans of President Obama, but it seems that the Jewish state’s security elites’ views line up closely with the U.S. administration’s Middle East policies.

At the Jewish Daily Forward newspaper, columnist J.J. Goldberg notes the trend of former chiefs of Israeli security institutions opposing the hard-line policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on issues ranging from attacking Iran to the peace process.

Israel is a young country with few living ex-heads of security agencies — between the Israel Defense Forces, the Shin Bet internal security service and Mossad intelligence agency, there are only 18 living ex-chiefs. Twelve of them are either actively opposing Netanyahu’s stances or have spoken out against them. “Two of them have openly called Netanyahu’s policies and leadership a threat to Israel’s future — just in the past few weeks,” writes Goldberg. “What do the critics want?”

Some want to dial back the rhetoric on Iran and stop the Netanyahu-led talk of military action. Some are pushing for a two-state agreement with the Palestinian Authority based on the 1967 borders and the 2002 Arab peace initiative. Some favor both.

It just so happens that, before they were overtaken by the still-unfolding events of the Arab Spring, Obama’s top two Middle East priorities were a two state-solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and avoiding the prospect of an Iranian nuclear weapon without going to war.

Scaling back the aggressive rhetoric against Iran has been key to Obama’s successes — notably absent under the George W. Bush administration — to build an international consensus around putting pressure on Iran to end its nuclear standoff with the West without resorting to a military attack.

A strike would carry enormous costs potentially ranging from Iran blocking oil shipment from the Persian Gulf to regional retaliation against the U.S. and its allies. This came to the fore in the episode that set off the recent public Israeli admonitions of Netanyahu’s policies.

Former Mossad chief Meir Dagan, a “legendary spymaster” and a “hawks’ hawk”, in Goldberg’s words, said that for Israel to attack Iran was “the stupidest thing I have ever heard.” The Israeli daily Haaretz reported:

When asked about what would happen in the aftermath of an Israeli attack Dagan said that: “It will be followed by a war with Iran. It is the kind of thing where we know how it starts, but not how it will end.”

That tracks closely with what many U.S. analysts say, including some former Iraq hawks like the Brookings Institution’s Ken Pollack, and demonstrates why Obama rightly eschews belligerent rhetoric in favor of working with the international community to put pressure on Iran. That pressure, contrary to the proclamations of many Iran hawks, is working.

That effectiveness underscores why even former officials from Netanyahu’s own country seem to be siding with Obama’s approach to Iran. The peace process, meanwhile, remains stalled. But perhaps the opposition to Netanyahu from Israel’s security elite indicates that the Israeli prime minister, whose intransigence was on display during the settlement row with the U.S., deserves a large portion of the blame.