According to a poll of American attitudes released today by the Brookings Institution (PDF), conservatives, Republicans, and Fox News viewers are more likely than other Americans to hold views widely considered to be Islamophobic. The study, “What It Means To Be American: Attitudes In An Increasingly Diverse America Ten Years After 9/11,” tracks views of Muslims and disaggregates them by political affiliations and views.

Overall, the survey of nearly 2,500 respondents found that 47 percent of respondents think Islam is out of step with American values, while 48 percent disagreed. Adherents of conservative political parties, movements, and media were more likely than the general populace to have negative views of Muslims and their place in American society. The report’s introduction explains:

Approximately two-thirds of Republicans, Americans who identify with the Tea Party movement, and Americans who most trust Fox News agree that the values of Islam are at odds with American values. A majority of Democrats, Independents, and those who most trust CNN or public television disagree.

The report also notes that incorrect views of Muslims’ beliefs are also on the rise. CAP recently released a report called “Fear, Inc.” that traced and documented the rise of an anti-Muslim movement spear-headed by American bloggers and self-proclaimed “experts.” While, according to the Brookings report, more than 60 percent of Americans don’t believe Muslims are trying to institute Muslim religious law — known as Sharia — across the U.S., there are an increasing number who do:

Over the last 8 months agreement with this question has increased by 7 points, from 23 percent in February 2011 to 30 percent today.

One thing that hasn’t changed is that many of Americans’ unfounded and Islamophobic views were most prevalent among those who trusted Fox News more than any other source of news. On the Sharia question, the report noted:

Nearly 6-in-10 Republicans who most trust Fox News believe that American Muslims are trying to establish Shari’a law in the U.S. The attitudes of Republicans who most trust other news sources look similar to the general population.

This chart from the report shows how Fox viewers, more so than viewers affiliated with any other news outlet, are more likely to hold incorrect and Islamophobic views:

Fox News is reporting that the Obama administration plans to withdraw all but about 3,000 of the more than 40,000 U.S. troops currently in Iraq, a move that is consistent with President Barack Obama’s repeated promises to end the war in Iraq. Sources told Fox that the number of troops begrudgingly approved by the military — 10,000 troops — would be cut even further, likely allowing the U.S. to carry out mostly training missions.

The reported decision comes after months of fruitless back-and-forth with the Iraqi government on an agreement to allow American troops to stay. A Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) negotiated by the outgoing Bush administration in 2008 pledged to the Iraqis that the U.S. would withdraw all of its troops by the end of 2011. Without a new SOFA, all U.S. troops might still have to exit Iraq, potentially rendering the U.S. decision moot.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki’s most recent public statement on the issue — that the U.S. troop pullout would be “on schedule” — didn’t mention the possibility that U.S. trainers could stay behind. But Maliki has mentioned the notion before. Some Iraqi lawmakers said U.S. diplomatic cables recently revealed by Wikileaks describing U.S. involvement in the shooting deaths of Iraqi civilians made negotiations to keep troops there more difficult.

While Iraqi groups like the firebrand Shia cleric Moqtada Al Sadr’s followers want the U.S. out, others, like some Kurdish groups, want the security assurances that come with a robust U.S. presence.

The Fox report comes on the heels of a Wall Street Journal article this morning highlighting American attempts to covertly counter growing Iranian influence in Iraq, where Shia links run deep. U.S. officials have repeatedly linked Iranian arms to attacks on U.S. troops. The Journal report said the impending drawdown “compound(ed) the urgency” of covert programs. Using U.S. troops to counter Iranian influence, though, could be a never-ending mission.

While no Americans died in Iraq last month, a first since the start of the war, the U.S. faced a steep rise in casualties in recent months, with some analysts suggesting the attacks could be a result of the public pressure the U.S. was exerting for a new SOFA.

Obama, though, remained undeterred by various conservative criticisms that the U.S. should stay in Iraq to support Maliki against Sadr, or that withdrawing could open the door to a re-invigorated insurgency and Iraq “could go to hell.”

Those fears are not shared by U.S. diplomatic and military spokespersons. In July, a State Department spokesman in Baghdad said the U.S. was “confident that Iraqi security forces’ capacity will continue to grow.” Last month, Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan said that Iraqi security forces could handle the insurgency when the U.S. withdraws.

Jeffrey Goldberg’s report on a meeting of National Security Council Principals Committee (NSC/PC), in which Secretary of Defense Robert Gates expressed frustration with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s intransigence on the peace process and the fact that “the U.S. has received nothing in return” for its security guarantees, might raise more questions than it answers.

What Goldberg didn’t mention is the historical and conceptual context for Gates’ remarks. Indeed, Gates is not the first senior American official to express concern that the protraction of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — and the perception of U.S. favoritism toward Israel on this issue — was offering few, if any, dividends for U.S. security or its own regional interests.

Back in March, 2010, Gen. David Petraeus made waves when he told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had immediate implications for the U.S.’s ability to pursue its interests in the Middle East. He named some of these problems:

Insufficient progress toward a comprehensive Middle East peace. The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests in the AOR. Israeli-Palestinian tensions often flare into violence and large-scale armed confrontations. The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hizballah and Hamas.

Israel hawks quickly denounced Petraeus’ comments and have continued to attack a straw man argument that resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict wouldn’t solve all challenges facing the U.S. in the Middle East.

But Petraeus wasn’t the only senior U.S. official to endorse the concept of “linkage” between resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the longer-term strategic interests of the U.S. in the Middle East. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, CENTCOM commander Gen. James Mattis, and Adm. Michael Mullen — via a WikiLeaks cable — have voiced endorsements of this concept.

While Jeffrey Goldberg — who has a history of rejecting linkage — carefully reports on Gates’ anger with Netanyahu for delivering “nothing in return” for security guarantees, access to weapons, and intelligence sharing, he is careful to sidestep the obvious next question. Why does Gates feel strongly about Netanyahu refusing to “grapple with Israel’s growing isolation and with the demographic challenges it faces if it keeps control of the West Bank”?

Goldberg doesn’t engage that topic. It might be because Gates shares the emerging consensus of the U.S.’s top military and political leadership that Israel’s continued settlement expansion and intransigence at the negotiating table is doing real damage to the Obama administration’s attempts to pursue a wide range of military and political interests in the Middle East.

For months, chairman of the House Armed Services committee Buck McKeon (R-CA) has been speaking out against any cuts to military spending, using the same baseless fearmongering Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has been employing in his recent campaign to save the military industrial complex. McKeon was at it again on Friday during an interview with Bloomberg news about further spending cuts as the so-called super committee debates deficit and debt reduction measures:

Bloomberg: Should the U.S. change its strategy of global engagement in light of budget constraints? If so, what should a new strategy focus on?

McKeon: The special role the United States plays in world affairs should not be taken for granted. We abdicate our global leadership at our own peril, and the peril of free nations everywhere. It’s a position worth preserving. Our military has already absorbed several rounds of budget cuts, so we need to start looking at the main drivers of our deficit — entitlements — to fix this problem.

By “entitlements,” McKeon is presumably referring to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security (even though the latter is actually a self-sustaining program). But McKeon’s claim is entirely untrue. The “main drivers” of America’s deficit are the Bush tax cuts, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the recession. ThinkProgress assembled this short animation on the 10th anniversary of the first of President Bush’s two tax cuts illustrating their role in ballooning U.S. debt and deficit:

Of course what McKeon doesn’t mention is that U.S. military spending has nearly doubled in the last 10 years, is higher than at any point since World War II, and the cuts he claims will result in a “hollowed-out military” will actually just bring DOD back to 2007 spending levels.

It appears that the go-to strategy for those fighting cuts to America’s bloated military budget is to use arguments predicated on false, misleading, or baseless information.

In a column for Bloomberg that was published last night, author Jeffrey Goldberg reports that a well-placed source informed him of a meeting with the National Security Council Principals Committee (NSC/PC) that took place earlier this year where former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates lamented that Israel was failing to take steps towards peace and was ungrateful for all of the support the United States provided it.

Goldberg says Gates told NSC/PC that the United States was providing a wide array of aid and intelligence sharing with Israel and that it was giving “nothing in return” to the United States, particularly with respect to the peace process. Gates also argued that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was endangering his own country by obstructing peace. Goldberg says his sources say that no one at the meeting challenged Gates’s view:

But it was Robert M. Gates, the now-retired secretary of defense, who seemed most upset with Netanyahu. In a meeting of the National Security Council Principals Committee held not long before his retirement this summer, Gates coldly laid out the many steps the administration has taken to guarantee Israel’s security — access to top- quality weapons, assistance developing missile-defense systems, high-level intelligence sharing — and then stated bluntly that the U.S. has received nothing in return, particularly with regard to the peace process.

Senior administration officials told me that Gates argued to the president directly that Netanyahu is not only ungrateful, but also endangering his country by refusing to grapple with Israel’s growing isolation and with the demographic challenges it faces if it keeps control of the West Bank. According to these sources, Gates’s analysis met with no resistance from other members of the committee.

Gates’s reported lamentations seem to match those of former CENTCOM commander General David Petraeus. Last year, Petraeus reportedly warned that Israeli foreign policy behavior was unbecoming and threatening American security.

Netanyahu aides responded to Goldberg’s report today, saying, “we have wide support in Congress.”