Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty doesn’t want you to think he’s a neoconservative. But neoconservatives themselves — not exactly known for diverse views — roundly approved of his foreign policy speech this week. One line of Pawlenty’s talk dovetailed quite nicely with neoconservative platitudes about regime change pretty much anywhere there is a regime that neoconservatives find unpalatable (in line with Pawlenty’s loose definitions of vital national security interests).

During the question and answer period after his speech, Pawlenty said the U.S. should “try to effectuate change within Syria.” Asked about what would happen after Syrian dictator Basher al Assad fell, Pawlenty responded: “People didn’t ask, ‘What comes after Hitler?’ Hitler was awful and needed to go.”

The statement is utterly and completely wrong — of course people were concerned about what came after Hitler — but it does comport with how noecons tend to think of things (consider how much thought was given to Iraq and Afghanistan post-U.S. invasion). Writing about Syria in the neocon flagship Commentary magazine, Jonathan Tobin zoomed out a little and hysterically declared:

Obama is still too obsessed with engaging with Islamists rather than confronting them to act decisively as did his predecessor.

But regarding Syria, there isn’t actually that much the United States can do. At a conference yesterday hosted by the New America Foundation and the Muslim Public Affairs Committee, Syrian-American human rights activists and U.S. experts agreed that the military option is not an option at all — so scrap euphemistic ‘decisive action’ — and that pushing regional allies international institutions is the best path forward.

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, bluntly stated as much:

For a number of reasons, not least of which that we would probably muck it up, the best thing the U.S. can do right now is be hands off. We should give as much diplomatic support, perhaps some financial support, realizing that it’s probably not going to do that much. To ask for any more adamant position by the U.S. is probably not helpful.

Military historian and analyst Mark Perry made a similar point in his remarks:

For those criticizing the Obama administration for not doing enough: We’ve got the 10th Mountain Division in Afghanistan, we’ve got the 101st Airborne on its fourth deployment. There’s nothing we can do.

Indeed, their assessments track closely with those of CAP analysts Matt Duss and Michael Werz, who wrote recently that the Obama administration should push Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan to lean harder on Assad. “It can only do so,” they write, “by joining the multilateral efforts to end the violence in Syria and by continuing to rebuild the U.S.-Turkish relationship that has been neglected for almost a decade.”

Yesterday at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser John Brennan formally laid out the Obama administration’s broad approach to combatting terrorism. In his speech, Brennen acknowledged that the administration’s goals “track closely with the goals of the previous administration” and that the new strategy “neither represents a wholesale overhaul — nor a wholesale retention — of previous policies.”

However, Brennan stressed one key difference in approach from the Bush administration, saying that “our best offense won’t always be deploying large armies abroad but delivering targeted, surgical pressure to the groups that threaten us.” But what reporting on the new strategy has widely overlooked, is that the the United States will no longer treat al Qaeda as an existential threat or as a force that is capable of taking over countries or regions of the world and instituting totalitarian rule:

Our strategy is also shaped by a deeper understanding of al-Qa’ida’s goals, strategy, and tactics. I’m not talking about al-Qa’ida’s grandiose vision of global domination through a violent Islamic caliphate. That vision is absurd, and we are not going to organize our counterterrorism policies against a feckless delusion that is never going to happen. We are not going to elevate these thugs and their murderous aspirations into something larger than they are.

This point of view, as basis for dealing with al Qaeda, is a significant departure from the Bush administration’s counterterrorism strategy. In its 2006 “National Strategy for Combating Terrorism,” the Bush White House described the terror threat as such:

What unites the movement is a common vision, a common set of ideas about the nature and destiny of the world, and a common goal of ushering in totalitarian rule. What unites the movement is the ideology of oppression, violence, and hate.

Indeed, in his speech announcing the strategy, President Bush justified this policy, saying that Osama bin Laden wanted to make Baghdad the “capital of the Caliphate“:

They hope to establish a violent political utopia across the Middle East, which they call a “Caliphate” — where all would be ruled according to their hateful ideology. Osama bin Laden has called the 9/11 attacks — in his words — “a great step towards the unity of Muslims and establishing the Righteous… [Caliphate].” This caliphate would be a totalitarian Islamic empire encompassing all current and former Muslim lands, stretching from Europe to North Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.

This is obviously, as Brennen said, “absurd.” Al Qaeda isn’t taking over anything and it’s refreshing for United States counterterror policy to officially recognize that.

Republican presidential hopeful and Texas governor Rick Perry sent a letter Tuesday to the Justice Department urging the investigation and prosecution of U.S. citizens and organizations who are participating in the second flotilla to break the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip.

In the letter, Perry repeats unfounded allegations by Israeli government officials — debunked yesterday by the Israeli press — that the Gaza flotilla has violent intentions against Israel:

According to numerous recent media reports, American citizens and organizations, together with a coalition of violent anti-Israel organizations from other countries, have organized efforts to breach Israel’s maritime blockade of the Gaza Strip as early as this week. …

The acts of funding, support, organizing and engaging in these efforts appears to constitute participation in a naval expedition against against a people with whom the United States is at peace…; the furnishing of a vessel with the intent that it be employed to commit hostilities against a people with whom the United States is at peace…; and the provision of material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization.

There is no evidence that any participants in the flotilla plan “to commit hostilities” against anyone. In fact, an IDF spokesperson and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushed this canard before it was debunked by the Israeli and American press. Cabinet ministers insisted  the evidence given to the press was “the exact opposite of what we were given,” even calling the talking point “public relations hysteria” and “spin.” One of the boats of Americans bound for Gaza responded to the baseless accusation by opening up everything — crew, passengers, the boat and the cargo — for inspection by the media. And Mondoweiss posted a video of flotilla participants receiving training in non-violence.

The notion — echoing the call of two staunch Israel supporters in Congress — that flotilla participants can be prosecuted for material terror is flimsy at best and made in bad faith at worst. Richard Levy, a civil rights lawyer from New York who plans to sail for Gaza, told ThinkProgress by phone from Greece that participants from the U.S. boat have not coordinated at all with Hamas. Asked by ThinkProgress about contacts with groups listed by the U.S. as terrorists, he said:

The answer is no. The only contact we’ve had is with an arts group in Gaza and a civil society group there. We’ve been very careful to avoid contact that would create those kinds of problems.

Levy called Perry an “outrageous liar” and said his letter was clearly politically motivated to curry favor with Washington’s powerful right wing pro-Israel lobby as he builds his presidential candidacy. Levy said it was “the worst kind of pandering.”

At least one Republican from Perry’s home state agreed that the letter was political: “Is it political? Probably,” said State Senator Florence Shapiro, adding that she nonetheless thought Perry was sincere in his “commitment and his deep passion for the Israeli people, and for the country itself.”

Former House Speaker and current GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich was on Fox News Tuesday night attacking President Obama over “the magic of the dates” for his Afghanistan troop withdrawal plan. Gingrich argued that Obama should not be withdrawing troops faster than commanders there want:

GINGRICH: I think we are drifting to a very, very dangerous situation. None of the generals recommended the speed of the drawdown the president wants. We are beginning to lose in the region. [...]

And if you watch what is happening there’s a steady drift from the United States at a time when the president is signaling his desire to get out as fast as he can and potentially faster than the generals think is safe. [...]

You should go to the White House and ask the president why did he overrule all his generals? What is his rationale? What secret knowledge does he have that leads him to overrule his generals? He seems determined to have the drawdown finished by sometime next year. Why? What is the magic of the dates the president is picking? I don’t have an answer.

Watch it:

But this wasn’t what Gingrich was saying just a couple weeks ago. During the GOP primary debate on June 13, Gingrich took a different approach on the U.S. military presence in the region. Citing the dearth of intelligence the armed forces have in Libya and other conflicts in the region, he warned that the U.S. should realize “how much trouble we’re in” and pull U.S. troops out “as rapid as possible”:

I think that we need to think fundamentally about reassessing our entire strategy in the region. I think that we should say to the generals we would like to figure out how to get out as rapid as possible with the safety of the troops involved. And we had better find new and very different strategies because this is too big a problem for us to deal with the American ground forces in direct combat.

So what has changed for Gingrich between the debate on June 13 and his interview last night? Maybe the answer to that question isn’t based overseas, but instead related to the announcement Obama made on June 22 from the East Room of the White House. Indeed, the former Speaker made a similar flip-flop on Libya. Gingrich attacked Obama for not intervening in Libya before the U.N. authorization, saying he would “exercise a no-fly zone this evening,” then, after Obama ordered U.S. participation in the conflict, Gingrich said, “I would not have intervened.”

–Sarah Bufkin

Politico’s Ben Smith had a 1,700-word piece yesterday morning continuing along a line of what he himself once derided as “an evidence-free drumbeat that the Jewish community — and particularly Jewish donors — are abandoning [President] Obama” over Israel. The right wing of the pro-Israel community has gone completely bananas over the piece (in typically overstated terms).

But as ThinkProgress has extensively reported, the right-wing meme started with little evidence to back it up. And Smith’s story, which relies heavily on unnamed Jewish donors and Jewish institutional operatives, does little to advance the ball into the realm of hard evidence. In fact, other outlets have used the same modus operandi and come up with exactly the opposite conclusions that Smith did. To wit, the Jewish Daily Forward reported last night:

Based on their own internal polling and on lessons from the 2010 midterm elections, Democrats believe that the issue of Israel will not play out significantly with Jewish voters. And pointing to a glitzy pro-Israel Washington donor event with Obama held on June 20 that raised more than $1.5 million, supporters of the president believe that the important constituency of Jewish donors is safe.

Obama also held a million-dollar fundraiser for Jewish donors in Miami, and another “top-dollar event” is planned for June 30 in Philadelphia. So where’s the kosher beef?

Many observers note that Obama’s pro-Israel policies do not depart in any significant way from his predecessors. This suggests that whatever (apparently surmountable) tensions among some Jewish donors can easily be alleviated, as Smith points out when he quotes top Philadelphia  Jewish donor David Cohen:

“It takes me about five minutes of talking through the president’s position and the president’s speech, and the uniform reaction has been, ‘I guess you’re right, that’s not how I saw it covered.’”

So the rather false right-wing mischaracterizations of Obama’s Israel policies have perhaps taken some hold, but we can’t be sure. As Ron Kampeas of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency points out, the only one to make the wait-and-see point on Politico’s forum about Smith’s article was the head of a Palestinian organization — Yousef Munayyer of the Jerusalem fund — who wrote:

It’s hard to take seriously any article that talks about public opinion without citing polling data that uses a representative sample and not just “several dozen” chats Ben Smith had with Jewish-Americans who may not at all be representative of the rest of that community. This is especially necessary when historically Jews have voted overwhelmingly for Democrats for president and care about things other than Israel as well. In fact polls show American Jews rank six other issues before Israel as important to them.

Kampeas also noted that headline on Smith’s article was “Obama may be losing the faith of Jewish Democrats.” He suggests everyone “wait until the next [major reliable] survey, and then we can write headlines without ‘may.’”

Frank Gaffney‘s Center for Security Policy honored Rep. Allen West (R-FL) in New York this week, where West “made a presentation delineating some of our more pressing national security concerns.”

During the speech, West turned to the issue of the Gaza flotilla that has been making headlines in recent weeks. A group of pro-Palestinian activists, led by several Turkish groups, have said they plan to sail to Gaza on a humanitarian mission to break the Israeli blockade. Last year, Israeli commandos killed a number of activists on a similar mission, including one American citizen.

But West seems to think that because Turks are involved in the flotilla, it’s actually the Turkish government that is leading the charge. Thus, West said to Gaffney’s group, because Turkey is a NATO ally, the United States would have to attack Israel if Israeli defense forces again storm the flotilla:

WEST: And be very nervous about one simple thing. I know that we were talking about this flotilla. If Turkey establishes a flotilla, and supports a flotilla going down, and all of the sudden Israel attacks this flotilla, Turkey is a member of the EU and also a member of the NATO, can wave and say, “As a member of NATO, we have been attacked and therefore, part of the charter is all NATO countries must come to the aid of a NATO member that’s been attacked.”

And see, this is the kind of stuff that I sit down in my lonely little apartment in Washington, DC and I think about.

During the same speech, West also called Fatah, the political block ruling the Palestinian Authority, “a terrorist group,” adding that if the Palestinians go to the U.N. this summer to declare statehood, it will be “nothing more than a new terrorist state.” Watch it:

First, “Fatah is not currently regarded as a terrorist organization by any government.” But second, West’s understanding of NATO and the situation with the flotilla is way off. Turkish rights groups, not the Turkish government, are sponsoring the flotilla, thereby making NATO, and Article V of the Washington Treaty, completely irrelevant. Moreover, Haaretz reported this week that Turkish representation in the flotilla will be limited because the main flotilla sponsor, the Turkish Humanitarian Relief Foundation, announced that it will not participate in the mission.

But also, even if West’s imaginary scenario had some sort of basis in reality, he’d know that the United States never attacked Israel last year when Israeli commandos raided the flotilla. In fact, the U.S. government barely said anything about the Israelis killing an American during the operation.

It’s sort of ironic then, that West said in the same speech that the GOP’s presidential candidates don’t know anything about national security. Yet, these are the issues that, according to West, he sits down in his lonely apartment in DC and thinks about.

Former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty delivered a major foreign policy speech yesterday that was widely panned for its confusion and incoherence. One observer even went so far as to say, “It was actually a little painful to watch.”

But apparently, one of Pawlenty’s goals with his speech yesterday was to distance himself from the neocons. The Cable’s Josh Rogin noted yesterday that Pawlenty’s views mirror those of GOP hawks Sens. John McCain (R-AZ), Linsdey Graham (R-SC), and Joe Lieberman (I-CT), but he “doesn’t want to be identified as a neoconservative, and doesn’t want his views to be tied to those senators in particular.” Indeed, in a recent interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, Pawlenty specifically asked not to be associated with McCain’s neocon/hawkish wing of the GOP:

“I wish you could think of another way to describe this wing of the party, other than McCain and Lindsey Graham. I love John, but that’s like saying we’re embracing Nelson Rockefeller on economics.”

But despite Pawlenty’s wishes, it seems like the only people who had any sense of admiration for what he said in his speech were McCain and the neocons. “Strong foreign policy speech by @timpawlenty yesterday, worth reading in full,” McCain tweeted this afternoon. And to top it off, the war hawk oped writers in Washington signed on too:

THE WEEKLY STANDARD: “Tim Pawlenty strongly criticized President Obama’s ‘murky policy’ of ‘engagement.’

WASHINGTON POST RIGHT TURN: “Former Minnesota governor and 2012 Republican candidate Tim Pawlenty delivered a strong foreign policy speech at the Council on Foreign Relations yesterday.”

COMMENTARY: “I have been complaining that too many Republicans seem eager to run away from their party’s proud legacy of being strong on national security policy. But there are some notable exceptions, including presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty.”

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE: “This morning, former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty sought to claim the mantle of Ronald Reagan, delivering a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations that vigorously endorsed a freedom-centered foreign policy for the Republican Party.”

Seeming to recognize that the war mongering nature of neoconservatism has been discredited and is deeply unpopular, Pawlenty can try all he wants to say he’s not sympathetic to its credo. But neocons know they have their man in Pawlenty, and as the old saying goes, you can run but you can’t hide.

Our guest blogger is CAP Visiting Fellow Pratap Chatterjee.

The number of contractors in Afghanistan is likely to increase significantly in the next year as the Obama administration pulls back some of the extra 68,000 troops that it has dispatched there since January 2009.

Typically, the U.S. pays one contractor to support every soldier that has deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq. The ratio of contractors to troops increases dramatically during a military surge as well as during a drawdown, and often stays higher than troop levels when military numbers are low, i.e. down to 30,000-50,000.

The reason is simple — the military needs extra workers to build new bases as well as to shut them down. Just like a hotel or restaurant, a military base also needs a minimum number of people to do the basics like janitorial or food service work. And as troops withdraw, U.S. diplomats are likely to hire extra security contractors as they are doing now in Iraq.

Using a range of 1.3 to 1.4 (based on what Afghanistan needed before the surge and Iraq needed after the drawdown), I would project that if the Obama administration draws down to 68,000 troops in Afghanistan by September 2012, they will need 88,400 contractors at the very least, but potentially as many as 95,880:

The majority of these workers do maintenance and other support tasks. But the one group that has seen demand explode since Obama became president is the number of private security contractors (men or women with guns), which spiked from a flat line of about 4,000 to almost 19,000 today. Given the attack on the Intercontinental in Kabul yesterday, that number seems very unlikely to drop:

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Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty delivered a major foreign policy address this morning at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. The former Minnesota governor, still the darling of Washington’s hawks, spoke out during the question and answer session about the U.S.’ vital national security interest in Libya:

In Libya, once the President of the United States says [Libyan president Muammar] Qaddafi must go, he has to go. You can’t let a third rate dictator thumb his nose at the President of the United States in the free world. Keeping him there indefinitely is not an option.

And now, some would argue whether we had a vital interests initially, we have one now, which is you can’t leave Qaddafi sitting there because if he were to survive and reestablish any capability at all, I would guess one of his main motivations is going to be retaliation and guess who it’s going to be against? And so Qaddafi must now go.

In other words, Pawlenty laid out two ways that a vital national security interest can be created out of thin air:

1. If the President says something must be done, and it does not get done, then getting it done becomes a vital national security interest because the President cannot be embarrassed in this way.
2. If the President attacks someone who is not a national security threat, then killing, capturing or removing that person from office becomes a vital national security interest because, like a bee hive you’ve swatted with a stick, that person might come after you for attacking them.

Pawlenty’s line is remarkably consistent — though perhaps a bit disconcerting from someone who can’t keep his Middle East countries straight.

Compared to the rest of the GOP field, Pawlenty seems much closer to the first term of the George W. Bush presidency by emulating Bush’s tough guy swagger. Pawlenty has criticized the Obama administration for not pulling an Osama bin Laden-style raid on Qaddafi and for going to the U.N. Security Council to create an international coalition for the war. But at least Bush (falsely) sold the Iraq war as a vital national security interest before going to war there.

Mega-defense contractor Boeing has been vastly overcharging the Army for basic spare parts, forcing taxpayers to pay more than twice the “fair and reasonable” price, according to an audit conducted by the Department of Defense’s Office of Inspector General and leaked to the Project on Government Oversight. The IG looked at spare parts sales to the Corpus Christi, Texas Army Depot for two helicopters systems and found some egregious price gouging, such as charging $71 for a metal pin that should cost just 4 cents:

$644.75 for a small gear smaller than a dime that sells for $12.51: more than a 5,100 percent increase in price. $1,678.61 for another tiny part, also smaller than a dime, that could have been bought within DoD for $7.71: a 21,000 percent increase. $71.01 for a straight, thin metal pin that DoD had on hand, unused by the tens of thousands, for 4 cents: an increase of over 177,000 percent.

While this case is cause for concern in its own right, it speaks to a bigger question of the Pentagon’s reliance on private contractors. Even without Boeing’s price gouging, the IG’s office expected Boehing to charge a “34 percent surcharge fee for overhead, general and administrative costs, and profit, according to the audit report.” And many of the parts studied in the report were available from the Pentagon’s internal procurement agencies at lower costs:

What is even more shocking is the difference in prices the Army would have paid if it procured many of these parts directly from the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) and from the Army’s own procurement offices, the audit shows. The largest percentage differences cited in the DoD OIG report—such as the 177,475 percent example (which is not among the 18 parts the report focuses on)—compare DLA unit prices to Boeing unit prices.

Boeing is currently the center of a national debate over labor laws after the company moved a production line from Washington to South Carolina to thwart labor unions, potentially violating rules established by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). In response to the NLRB’s attempt to enforce the law, a number of national Republican leaders, including much of the presidential field, have come to Boeing’s defense and attacked the labor board, even calling for it to be defunded or disbanded.

GOP presidential hopeful Tim Pawlenty has been one of President Obama’s most forceful foreign policy critics. Even though Pawlenty reportedly “doesn’t want to be identified as a neoconservative,” his attacks on the president, particularly on Libya, have had a neoconservative aura.

That pattern didn’t subside this morning in his foreign policy speech at the Council on Foreign Relations this morning. The former Minnesota governor “sought to claim the mantle as his party’s foreign policy hawk” by “accusing President Obama and his GOP rivals of being weak-kneed in their posture toward the Middle East.” Pawlenty wasted no time in attacking the Obama administration on Syria, saying the president has no “moral clarity” in dealing with Syrian President Bashir al-Assad:

PAWLENTY: By contrast, I called for Assad’s departure on March 29; I call for it again today. We should recall our ambassador from Damascus; and I call for that again today.

So Pawlenty wants to withdraw America’s top diplomat in Syria. Later in the speech, he returned to the issue. “We have a clear interest in seeing an end to Assad’s murderous regime,” he said. How should the U.S. accomplish this goal? Diplomacy:

PAWLENTY: To take advantage of this moment, we should press every diplomatic and economic channel to bring the Assad reign of terror to an end.

Perhaps Pawlenty would argue that recalling the U.S. ambassador to Syria is a diplomatic move. But at the same time, not having an ambassador in Syria means we aren’t using “every diplomatic” channel available. This is how White House spokesman Jay Carney recently explained it:

CARNEY: Having an ambassador in Syria has allowed us to be in Syria, basically in the presence of the government, to make our views known directly and not via long distance.  So, yes, it has been useful to have our ambassador there, precisely because we can communicate directly what our positions and views are. And so I think that has been a useful avenue for us to pursue in terms of communicating our points of view.

Later when taking questions after the speech, Pawlenty said the U.S. should “try to effectuate change within Syria.” So to recap: Pawlenty wants to press “every diplomatic channel,” including using assets “within Syria,” to bring about change. Yet, he also wants to recall America’s number one point of contact that is currently in Syria.

The campaign to discredit the Gaza Freedom Flotilla by the Israeli government and its staunch defenders appears to have hit a new low: Bloggers discredited a recent video made by an “activist” claiming an LGBT group he led was not allowed to participate in the flotilla to break the blockade of Gaza. What’s more, upon its creation, Israeli government officials and their allies promoted the video.

The hoax is only the latest of what is often called the “pinkwashing” of Israel — using the Jewish State’s general openness to its LGBT community as a public relations bludgeon to demonize Israel’s Arab and Muslim adversaries, where LGBT communities face oppression and discrimination.

“Marc,” the star of the high-production-value clip, said he became interested in broadening his activism beyond LGBT issues by working for the flotilla. He claims that, after he contacted organizers, he was told his participation was not in the “overall interests of the flotilla,” insinuating a homophobic strain among participants. The “activist” said he began to further explore the flotilla, and found photos of participants interacting with officials from the militant Hamas group that runs the blockaded Gaza Strip. Watch it:

The video’s authenticity started to unravel almost immediately. The New York Times’s Lede blog, declaring the video a “hoax,” reported there has been “no evidence of homophobia by the [flotilla organizers], and indeed some of the participants in the new flotilla are gay.”

Bloggers Max Blumenthal, Ali Abunimah, and Benjamin Doherty quickly showed a trail of promotion by employees of top Israeli government offices — including that of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — and the true identity of the “activist.” His name was not “Marc” at all, but rather Omer Gershon.

Gershon, who no reporter seems to be able to reach, appears to be an Israeli aspiring actor and entrepreneur who was running a night club in Tel Aviv in 2009. Netanyahu’s office gave an Israeli reporter a statement noting that they promote various online content when it “can serve Israel’s campaigns.”

To criticize parties around the world that take anti-LGBT stances is of course perfectly fine, but creating a hoax video to discredit the flotilla activists — for a conjured incident of homophobia — under the banner of an LGBT rights makes a mockery of that struggle.