Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty came out of the gates swinging on foreign policy, emphasizing it as an area where he had an advantage over other candidates. He described his vision through the prism of playground antics. “[What's] always true is [when] you’re dealing with thugs and bullies they understand strength, they don’t respect weakness,” he said. Compared to Herman Cain, he might have been right. But having a better grasp than the rest of the GOP field does not exactly qualify the former Minnesota governor as one of the nation’s top foreign policy minds.

Just four days after announcing his bid for the Republican nod, Pawlenty confused Iran and Iraq on the campaign trail:

PAWLENTY: You’re talking about Iran?

REPORTER: Exactly.

PAWLENTY: Yea, well I think the situation now in Iran is such that Secretary Gates is negotiating with whether the United States Military will be there beyond the end of this year. And they’re looking to the Iranians to see if they invite the Americans to stay, invite us to stay. And if they do invite us to stay at some very reduced level I think the United States will be wise, until we make sure that they get to the next level of stability, to accept that invitation. So if Iran makes that invitation by the end of the year, leaving a residual force, a greatly reduced force, but a residual force that would be there for a temporary amount of time. Until they could establish much better air security, until they can develop their intelligence –

REPORTER: You mean Iraq not Iran, because Iran-

PAWLENTY: I’m sorry, Iraq, yes, yes. You said-, did you say Iran or Iraq?

Ben Smith highlights the video:

One might be tempted to excuse the mistake due to all the background noise, but Pawlenty clearly confirms with the questioner that U.S. policy toward Iran is in question, and the questioner confirms. Pawlenty then goes into a spiel about Iraq, noting the issue of U.S. troops remaining there.

Pawlenty focused early on foreign policy. In September 2009 at a religious right conference, he labeled Obama’s policies toward missile defense and attempted negotiations with Iran as “appeasement” — a stance conservative blogger Daniel Larison called “hawkish ignorance” at the time. Since then, he’s been making strident foreign policy attacks against the Obama administration.

Neoconservative Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin seems clear that Pawlenty is her top pick in terms of foreign policy, declaring him “forceful and precise on national security” and, more recently, giving him credit for “bashed the president on his Middle East speech.” Commentary Magazine recently said, “Pawlenty has a chance to step to the fore” of the establishment candidates on foreign policy.

His latest gaffe on the trail will not kill his campaign, of course. But that a candidate for a presidential nomination who is given plaudits by the right for his foreign policy confuses two very different, albeit similar sounding, countries should be a little disconcerting.

This afternoon, the House of Representatives has been debating — and voting on — a set of amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act of Fiscal Year 2012 (NDAA). One particularly important bipartisan amendment offered by Reps. Barbara Lee (D-CA) and Justin Amash (R-MI) would have struck Section 1034 from the language of the bill.

What is Section 1034? It’s a section that was inserted by Rep. Buck McKeon (R-CA) and others that would update the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) that was passed after the 9/11 attacks. It would vastly expand the power of the President to engage in war. As the ACLU explains, the provision would go much further than the AUMF, “allowing war wherever there are terrorism suspects in any country around the world without an expiration date, geographical boundaries or connection to the 9/11 attacks or any other specific harm or threat to the United States. There have been no hearings on the provision, nor has its necessity been explained by Rep. McKeon or anyone else in Congress.” The section also strikes a blow against civil liberties by expanding detainment powers.

This provision is so expansive that even the Obama administration — the very executive branch whose power would be greatly enhanced — has issued a veto threat should it survive Congress. This afternoon, the Lee-Amash amendment was defeated. As The Nation’s George Zornick notes, the amendment was defeated along a 234-187 vote, with 20 Democrats voting against and 21 Republicans voting for it:

On a near-party line vote of 234-187, the House has voted down an amendment by Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) and Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) that would have stripped the so-called “endless war” provision from the defense authorization bill. [...] Twenty-one Republicans broke with their party to support the Amash-Lee amendment; unfortunately, 20 Democrats also crossed over and opposed it.

Yet there was a silver lining to today’s NDAA votes. Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) introduced an amendment to require the President to submit a timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan. While it failed, it only lost by 11 votes and netted the votes of even 26 Republicans. Recall, last year, when Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) introduced legislation to require an exit from Afghanistan, it failed 18-80, with most Democrats voting against it.

Today, in a 5-3 vote, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Legal Arizona Workers Act, a law passed by Arizona in 2007 that requires employers to use a controversial electronic employment verification program, E-verify, and establishes a regime of state-level sanctions for employing undocumented workers.

The case, Chamber of Commerce of the United States v. Whiting, has often been pointed to as a predictor of how the Supreme Court might rule on a challenge to the draconian immigration law Arizona infamously passed last year, SB-1070. While many critics of SB-1070 hoped that the Supreme Court would set an important legal precedent in Whiting that would boost the case against state and local immigration laws, the decision itself doesn’t expressly appear to either advance nor significantly hinder the case against Arizona’s latest sweeping immigration law.

The main issue in Whiting was whether Arizona can enact a law that allows the state to either suspend or revoke the business licenses of state employers who knowingly or intentionally employ undocumented immigrants. Under federal immigration law, states are preempted from “imposing civil or criminal sanctions (other than through licensing and similar laws) upon those who employ…unauthorized aliens [emphasis added].”

In the majority opinion issued today, Chief Justice John Roberts upheld the Arizona law, arguing that “Arizona’s licensing law falls well within the confines of the authority Congress chose to leave to the States and therefore is not expressly preempted.” “The Chamber’s reliance on IRCA’s legislative history to bolster its textual and structural arguments is unavailing given the Court’s conclusion that Arizona’s law falls within the plain text of the savings clause,” reasoned Roberts. (In simpler terms, it falls within the parameter of the bracketed exception italicized above).

Today’s opinion affirms the decision delivered by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in Whiting — the same court which upheld an injunction against SB-1070 on the basis that several of its provisions are unconstitutional. Why did the 9th Circuit rule against federal preemption in Whiting and in favor of it in U.S. v. Arizona last month?

First of all, SB-1070 is a much broader law that contains several provisions that raise far more legal issues than the one the Supreme Court addressed today. Had the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Chamber of Commerce’s arguments in Whiting, it almost certainly would have doomed Arizona’s new sweeping immigration law. But it doesn’t work the other way around. SB-1070 is significantly more aggressive in its scope and substance, touching on the role of state and local law enforcement, Fourth Amendment rights, and federal supremacy in foreign relations.
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Last month, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen said the U.S. military would stay in Iraq if the Iraqi government asked it to. (President Obama has yet to publicly weigh in on this issue.) This news naturally got the neocons excited, who have since crawled out of the woodwork to rally for a continued U.S. presence. While Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has stated repeatedly that he opposes any plan for U.S. forces to stay past the Dec. 31, 2011 withdrawal deadline, he recently has softened his tone.

But the main question is what Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr will do. Sadr has been adamant that the U.S. leave on time, warning for months that he will unleash his Mahdi Army on American forces if they stay. But Sadr himself recently signaled he has softened his stance as well. “Luckily,” war hawk Max Boot wrote yesterday, “momentum seems to be building to keep U.S. forces in Iraq past 2011.” Yet news that tens of thousands of Sadr loyalists marched in Baghdad today to voice opposition to U.S. forces staying in Iraq appears to have halted that momentum. And Sadr’s followers don’t seem to be messing around:

– “I applied to the call of Sadr to participate against American occupiers,” said Salah Emarah, 35, who traveled from his home in Basra to march in the parade. “This is a peaceful demonstration against American occupiers. Sadr asked us to remain peaceful. At the end of the year, according to Iraq, the occupiers will leave. If they don’t, we will wait for orders.”

– “All the people in Sadr City are waiting for orders from Muqtada Sadr,” said Muhammad Fuad, a 28-year-old carpenter watching the parade. “And we have people all over Iraq — northern, southern.”

– “I came here on the orders of Moqtada al-Sadr to help kick out the occupiers from our country,” said Alaa Hussein, 21, a student taking part. “If the government keeps American troops here we will consider them an illegitimate government.”

– “We will not accept even one American soldier staying,” said Adnan al-Mussawi, one of the demonstrators. “Occupation has not benefited us at all, it is our religious duty to kick out every American soldier.”

Even though Sadr may have “hinted” that he would accept U.S. troops past 2011, he recently told BBC Arabic, “As long as they stay in Iraq, we will resist them.”

Referring to the fact that Sadr’s block in Parliament wants the U.S. to leave, this week Gates said it’s debatable “how much of that is the Sadrists and how much of that is the Iranians behind the Sadrists.” The New York Times noted that Gates “had never before cited Iran as a factor in the Obama administration’s thinking.” It’s important to point out however, that, as CAP’s Matt Duss previously noted, one shouldn’t confuse “backing” with “control” when talking about Iran’s relationship to Sadr: “A number of analysts have made the mistake of treating Sadr simply as an instrument of Iran, when in fact his movement is deeply nationalistic.”

Moreover, if countering Iranian influence is now the standard for consideration of the U.S. military staying in Iraq past 2011, then American forces would probably stay in Iraq forever. Iran’s clout in Iraq is extensive; it’s not just with Sadr’s group, and the Americans are largely responsible for it. CAP’s Larry Korb recently wrote, “Iran does not have to invade Iraq to have influence there. It was the Iranians who got Al-Sadr to support Maliki. And Maliki has repaid them by supporting their positions on Bahrain, Lebanon, and Hamas.” And as one Iraqi told Duss, “America has baked Iraq like a cake,” he said. “And given it to Iran to eat.”

Photo credit: The Washington Post