The Iraq war made its way back in to the headlines this week after Fox News reported that the Obama administration has decided that the U.S. will keep only 3,000 troops in Iraq past 2011 (administration officials have denied that any decision has been made). The news reverberated when Iraq war cheerleaders then attacked President Obama for not pledging to keep more troops there (an effort that seemed to ignore what the Iraqis might want). “[The] U.S. troop presence in Iraq is last shred of justification for war boosters,” CAP’s Matt Duss observed on Twitter, “so of course they’ll fight for it.”

But despite the news this week, the Republican presidential candidates mentioned Iraq a grand total of once during last night’s debate, and the reference had nothing to do with the war itself. “We’re spending — believe it or not, this blew my mind when I read this — $20 billion a year for air conditioning in Afghanistan and Iraq in the tents over there and all the air conditioning,” Rep. Ron Paul said.

In fact, the GOP candidates spent just 9 minutes of last night’s one hour and 40 minute debate discussing foreign policy, a data point that establishes a trend in this election cycle’s Republican presidential debates:

Why are the Republicans — supposedly the party of national security — not talking about national security? A myriad of reasons, of course, one primarily being that jobs and the economy are the topics du jour. But also, it could be that Rick Perry, Mitt Romney and co. don’t really have much to criticize. Indeed both Perry and Romney praised Obama for nabbing Osama bin Laden and Michele Bachmann had an awkward moment last night when she continued to attack Obama on Libya even though Muammar Qaddafi is no longer its leader — thanks in part to Obama’s foreign policy. “If President Obama had taken the same view [as Bachmann],” debate co-moderator John Harris said, “Qaddafi would, in all likelihood, still be in power today.”

And as Washington Post columnist David Ignatius noted last weekend, Obama got elected in part because he pledged to change the course of President Bush’s disastrous foreign policy. “So what’s happened over the past 32 months?” Ignatius asks, “if you step back from the daily squawk box, some trends are clear: Alliances are stronger, the United States is (somewhat) less bogged down in foreign wars, Iran is weaker, the Arab world is less hostile and al-Qaeda is on the run.”

While last night’s Republican debate offered few surprises as the primary field wrapped themselves in the legacy of Ronald Reagan and roundly denounced the Obama administration’s fiscal, foreign, and social policies, Ron Paul stood out with his unique views on the border fence endorsed by Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann, and Herman Cain. Paul said:

I think this fence business is designed and may well be used against us and keep us in. In economic turmoil, the people want to leave with their capital. And there’s capital controls and there’s people control. So, every time you think of the fence keeping all those bad people out, think about those fences maybe being used against us, keeping us in.

Watch it:

Paul’s embrace of extreme right-wing conspiracy theories about a U.S. government which enslaves its citizens is even more visible in his disgust with FEMA and his answer to a question at the Ames Straw Poll about whether “HR 645 [The National Emergency Center Establishment Act] could lead to detainment camps for American citizens during martial law.” He responded:

Yeah, that’s their goal, they’re setting up the stage for violence in this country, no doubt about it.

The belief that FEMA, or various other government agencies, might be planning to restrict the movements of Americans or turn sections of the U.S., if not the entire country, into a detainment camp is traced back to the 1950s and, in the 1990s, the far-right “Patriot”/militia movement.

Chip Berlet, a senior researcher at Political Research Associates, told ThinkProgress:

The main font of this [FEMA roundup conspiracy theory] is in the John Birch society publications since the 1950s. The John Birch Society is where Glenn Beck and a lot of the right wing talk radio hosts gets their conspiracy theories. The conspiracy theory was picked up by the antisemitic Spotlight newspaper and the Christic Institute, a progressive, anti-CIA group. In the 1990s the militia movement takes the theory.

While the “American concentration camp” meme has been debunked numerous times as a conspiracy theory coming out of various extremist movements, the sinister anti-government rumors dating back as much as 60 years seem to have found a spot at the table at last night’s Republican debate. Berlet doesn’t see much hope for an end to the FEMA roundup conspiracy theory, telling ThinkProgress:

The conspiracy theory grooms you to be afraid of the government, makes you acept laissez-faire ideas of government involvement, and puts you in an apocalyptic mindset. You still have people to this day who take it so far they form militias and you have people in the John Birch society who say don’t take it so far but still promote the FEMA roundup conspiracy theory.

Politico reports this morning that lobbyists are converging on Capitol Hill this week in an effort to convince the debt reduction super committee against budget cuts effecting their clients. Indeed, right-wing hawks are hosting an event on the Hill this afternoon projecting the view that further cuts in military spending will “change the military as we know it” (or as we knew it in 2007, anyway).

Rep. Buck McKeon (R-CA) is leading the charge in the House. The House Armed Services Committee chairman said he “has a group of about 30 lawmakers, mostly Republicans, ready to fend off any ambitious supercommittee cuts.” And in a move Politico called “the opening argument in a campaign to lobby the panel against further defense cuts,” McKeon’s committee yesterday released a video yesterday using 9/11 imagery to promote the U.S. military. Watch it:

Given that McKeon and his allies are employing a campaign of misinformation in an effort to protect the Pentagon’s coffers, it’s not entirely surprising that he and his committee would turn to 9/11 exploitation to ensure the military industrial complex remains in place.

But if that effort fails, there is a Plan B. “The unofficial fallback plan: The Defense Department, lawmakers that oversee the Pentagon and wealthy defense contractors might well be able to get Congress to block the automatic cuts, which wouldn’t take place until 2013.”

The fact that Palestinians are currently seeking U.N. membership has set off Tea Party freshman Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL). Convinced that “American Jews aren’t as Pro-Israel as they should be,” Walsh is taking it upon himself to “protect” Israel and will introduce a new measure “expressing congressional support for Israel’s right to annex Jewish settlements in the West Bank.” The U.S. considers the settlements to be “illegitimate.”

Walsh modeled his bill after one by the Israeli Knesset’s right-wing member Danny Danon. Danon’s bill seeks to annex “Area C” — a part of the West Bank containing all the Israeli settlements and a sizable Palestinian population where Israel exerts direct military control. The U.N. criticized Israel this month for a “restrictive planning regime in Area C” that “makes it virtually impossible” for Palestinians to build and exacerbates displacement. Danon is leading a campaign to pressure Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to unilaterally annex “Area C.”

After speaking with Danon, Walsh decided the House must make a strong statement against the “outrageous” Palestinian proposal and express unadulterated support for “Israel’s right to annex Judea and Samaria” — the name for the West Bank used by Israel’s ideological settler movement:

“We’ve got what I consider to be a potential slap in the face coming up with the vote in the U.N., which is absolutely outrageous,” Walsh told POLITICO. “It’s clear that the United States needs to make a very strong statement. I would argue that the president should make this statement, but he’s not capable of making it. So, the House needs to make this statement, if the [Palestinian Authority] continues down this road of trying to get recognition of statehood, the U.S. will not stand for it. And we will respect Israel’s right to annex Judea and Samaria.”

Recognizing Israel’s annexation of “Area C” in the West Bank would not only place Congress in support of an action considered by nearly every government and inter-governmental body on earth to be illegal, it would also likely deliver another crippling blow to any remaining hope for a two state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In addition to proposing Congress contravene international law and long-standing U.S. policy, Walsh is wrong that Obama isn’t capable of making a “very strong statement.” Despite its allies’ stances, the Obama administration stood alone in its veto of a U.N. Security Council draft resolution — based on U.S. policies — that would have declared settlements illegal. The Obama administration has also been pressuring the Palestinians to drop their current U.N. bid for recognition and, yesterday, a top U.S. official pledged a U.S. veto if the matter comes before the Security Council.

Walsh’s inspiration — Danon — is an opponent of the two-state solution: He thinks it was a “mistake” for Israel to not annex the entire West Bank in 1967. It’s difficult not to see Walsh’s move in a similar vein. As analyst and writer Tony Karon posited in Time, unflinching U.S. support helps allow Israel to isolate itself from a clear international consensus on the creation of a Palestinian state. With a looming U.N. veto, a resolution that would effectively pave the way for Israel to codify the end of a two-state solution would only deepen this isolation — for both Israel and the U.S.