An old photo of Cain sorting out the world's ills

Today at the National Press Club, Cain expanded on how he plans to go about making foreign policy, and it’s the same approach he used to making pizzas when he took over as CEO of Godfather’s Pizza in the 1980s. In fact, Cain compared his initial ignorance about pizza as he took the helm of the company to his ignorance about U.S. foreign policy as he plans to become Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. armed forces:

I don’t believe that you need to have extensive foreign policy experience if you know how to make sure you’re working on the right problems, establishing the right priorities, surrounding yourself with good people, which will allow you to put together the plans necessary to solve the problem.

When I went to Godfather’s Pizza in 1986, the company was supposed to go bankrupt. I had never made a pizza, but I learned. And the way we renewed Godfather’s Pizza as a company is the same approach I will use to renew America. And that is if you want to solve a problem, go to the source closest to the problem and ask the right questions.

I talked with customers. I talked with young people that worked in the restaurant. I talked with managers, assistant managers, the office staff, franchisees, suppliers. And I asked them why is Godfather’s failing?

And after listening and distilling the feedback, it turned out that the reason that Godfather’s had gone from the darling of the restaurant industry when it began in the 1970s — in the 1980s rather — until now it was on a failing trajectory was that Godfather’s was trying to do too much with too little too fast. It had lost its focus.

That is what I believe is America’s problem. We’ve lost our focus. And in order to renew that focus we must address its most pressing problems boldly.

Watch the video:

Presumably, President Cain will be going around to foreign countries where the U.S. has all manner of dealings — being briefed, one hopes, on the names of various heads-of-state before going — and asking the ordinary people there whether or not U.S. foreign policy tastes good.

It seems for now, though, that despite Cain’s new professed expertise, he’s still just offering up platitudes and not engaging in how his potential presidency would actually affect the U.S. around the globe.

Appearing on ABC’s This Week yesterday, GOP presidential hopeful Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) claimed that Iran had threatened the U.S. with a nuclear attack, a proposition so discordant with the facts that ABC host Christiane Amanpour told the candidate that the claim wasn’t possible because Iranian officialdom has never acknowledged a nuclear weapons program. Here’s the exchange:

BACHMANN: Iran has also stated they would be willing to use a nuclear weapon against the United States of America. I think if there’s anything that we have learned over the course of history, it is that when a madman speaks, we should listen. And I think in the case of Iran, that is certainly true.

AMANPOUR: Congresswoman, of course the United States is concerned about the nuclear program. Iran denies that it has one, so it hasn’t threatened to use them.

Watch the video:

After President Obama announced that he is ending the Iraq War, virtually all of the Republican presidential candidates piled on in criticizing the move, even though two-thirds of Americans oppose the war. Mitt Romney called the decision an “astonishing failure” driven either by “naked political calculation or sheer ineptitude.” Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) also called it a “complete failure,” while Rick Santorum said the U.S had “lost the war in Iraq.”

Today on Fox News Sunday, Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) told host Chris Wallace that Obama was flat-out “irresponsible” for bringing the troops home, because, he argued, it is “putting our kids’ lives in jeopardy”:

PERRY: The idea that a commander-in-chief would stand up and signal to the enemy a date certain of when we’re going to pull our troops out I think is irresponsible. You need to be talking to your commanders in the field. You need to be working with the experts who understand what is going on in those countries, for instance. We need to finish our mission in Iraq and Afghanistan. You better believe I want out kids home as soon as we can and safe. But to give that signal that we’re pulling them out is bad public policy and, more importantly, it’s putting our kids lives in jeopardy[...]

He has lost his standing from the standpoint of being a commander-in-chief who has any idea about what’s going on in those theaters. He’s making mistakes that are putting our kids that in theater and I think future issues dealing with whether it’s in the Middle East or the south China Sea with our allies, putting all of that in jeopardy because of this unwavering, or I should say this wavering or this aimless approach to foreign policy which he has.

Watch it:

Some senior military officials have been calling for a drawdown since 2009. It is hard to see how bringing soldiers home jeopardizes their safety. It’s also worth noting that if pulling out troops at the end of 2011 is a signal to the enemy, as Perry claims, it’s President George W. Bush who is the guilty party. Bush signed an agreement with Iraq to withdraw troops by the end of 2011, and Obama is just carrying that out.

If Mitt Romney becomes president, there are a lot of important foreign policy decisions that he’d leave up to others. Most notably, Romney often says that whatever the generals decide, that’s the course he’ll take in Afghanistan (although he backtracked on that stance when pressed recently).

Now it seems that a President Romney will allow the Israeli government to decide American policy toward that country. The free daily newspaper Israel Hayom — a media outlet closely associated with right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — asked Romney if, as president, he would ever consider moving the American Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. In his answer, Romney made some astonishing claims. First, that his policy toward Israel will be guided by Israeli leaders; second, on the Jerusalem issue, he’d do whatever Israel tells him to do; and third, he does not think the United States should take a leadership role in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

ROMNEY: The actions that I will take will be actions recommended and supported by Israeli leaders. I don’t seek to take actions independent of what our allies think is best, and if Israel’s leaders thought that a move of that nature would be helpful to their efforts, then that’s something I’ll be inclined to do. But again, that’s a decision which I would look to the Israeli leadership to help guide. I don’t think America should play the role of the leader of the peace process, instead we should stand by our ally. Again, my inclination is to follow the guidance of our ally Israel, as to where our facilities and embassies would exist.

The policy that the American Embassy reside in Tel Aviv and not Jerusalem pre-dates the current administration. In fact, as Lara Friedman notes at Americans for Peace Now, the U.S. “does not recognize the sovereignty of any party in any part of Jerusalem (East or West)” and it’s “a policy that dates back to pre-1948, and has been followed by every U.S. Administration since, regardless of the President or party in the White House.”

In 1995, Congress passed a law allowing funding for the relocation of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, but the law includes an executive waiver allowing the president to invoke national security interests to block such a move. Every U.S. president since the law passed, Clinton, Obama and Bush, has invoked that waiver.

In an email to ThinkProgress, Jerusalem expert Daniel Seidemann laid out the consequences should Romney follow through on his pledge:

Were an American President be actually so irresponsible as to move the US embassy to Jerusalem outside of the context of a comprehensive permanent status agreement, such a President would contribute nothing to legitimizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Instead he would be following Israel into abject isolation, and the United States into an weakened and marginal regional and global role.

Mitt Romney the candidate falls short of making that irresponsible undertaking, and one would hope that if elected President he would find less devastating ways of protecting the US interest and aiding Israel to arrive at a conflict-ending agreement.

But it might also come as a surprise to some that Romney not only wants Israel to dictate U.S. policy, but that he does not want the United States to lead the peace process. Out on the campaign trail, Romney regularly says Obama “has thrown Israel under the bus.” But perhaps now we know who Romney thinks should be driving it.

The Center for Security Policy’s Frank Gaffney and “lawfare” expert Andrew McCarthy offered their response to the Center for American Progress’ Islamophobia report, “Fear, Inc.“, in a 10-minute segment on Gaffney’s radio show this week.

Gaffney and McCarthy, who both are mentioned in CAP’s report as part of the influential “Islamophobia network,” make a series of unfounded allegations against CAP and the report.

McCarthy, the author of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America, has made no secret of his dislike for Muslims and progressives. His eagerness to create a grand-conspiracy between the two was on full display during the interview.

But Gaffney and McCarthy take a turn into uncharted, and wildly unsubstantiated, territory when they float the theory that the CAP report was, as Frank Gaffney declares, a product of “a red-green axis between George Soros’ friends and beneficiaries on the radical left like the Center for American Progress and the Islamists, the Muslim Brotherhood most notably.”

Listen here (Gaffney’s theory of a “red-green axis” starts at 3:45):

Gaffney, and his allies like Robert Spencer and David Horowitz, have been desperate to paint Fear, Inc. and CAP as a radical institution aligned with violent Islamists. But their attempts to make their fantasies a reality has resulted in some bizarre attempts at guilt-by-association.

Gaffney, McCarthy, and most critics of the report — Islamophobe Pamela Geller said the authors should “choke on their own vomit” — are eager to discredit CAP and the report’s authors using factually baseless attack and wildly speculative conspiracy theories. McCarthy responded to Gaffney’s “red-green axis” theory that, “the evidence [that radical Islamists and the Center for American Progress] cooperate is so strong, that the real question that the interesting quesiton is ‘why this happened’ not ‘whether it happened.’

Conveniently, neither McCarthy nor Gaffney provide any actual evidence of this bizarre theory. But the report does show plenty of evidence of their hostility toward American Muslims. In 2009, Gaffney announced there is “mounting evidence that the president not only identifies with Muslims but may actually be one himself” and, after the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) banned Gaffney for making baseless accusations against board members, he declared that the Muslim Brotherhood had “infiltrated” CPAC.

While Gaffney might be finding fewer friendly audiences for his anti-Muslim conspiracy theories, he and his friends still have a home on AM radio, every weeknight.

Cain at a Jewish holy site in Jerusalem

In an interview with the free Israeli daily newspaper Israel Hayom (or Israel Today), Cain, in attempt to show how President Obama’s “lack of a firm stand regarding Israel has emboldened Israel’s enemies,” made his most disparaging comments yet about Palestinians, verging on denying their existence as a people:

I think that the so-called Palestinian people have this urge for unilateral recognition because they see this president as weak.

In reality, the Palestinian national movement is decades old, if not more — and certainly older than Obama. But the most shocking part of Cain’s statement was his equivocation on the existence of the Palestinian people. As Center for American Progress analyst Matt Duss wrote last year:

Despite the fact that scholars such as Rashid Khalidi have established the emergence of a distinct Palestinian national consciousness in the 19th century, the offensive idea that the Palestinians don’t exist — or the equally offensive idea that they only exist as a negative reaction to the creation of Israel — is unfortunately still a fairly common belief among Israel hawks. [...]

As Peter Beinart noted in his recent piece in the New York Review of Books, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself made the claim in his 1993 book A Place Among the Nations.

With regard to Duss’s last point, it seems Israel Hayom is the perfect place for Cain to make his statement. In a 2008 New Yorker profile of the daily paper’s owner, American right-wing billionaire Sheldon Adelson, Connie Bruck wrote:

In the Israeli media world, Israel Hayom is referred to as Bibi-ton, because many believe that it serves as a mouthpiece for Netanyahu, whose nickname is Bibi, and who has long received extraordinarily negative press coverage in Israel.

Cain’s latest comments about the “so-called Palestinian people” and his bogus interpretation of their national movement should give us an idea of what kind of progress (or lack thereof) a Cain presidency would make in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Former pizza executive Herman Cain’s presidential campaign has been buffeted by a series of embarrassing foreign policy gaffes, from saying he would negotiate with terrorists to not knowing about the Palestinian right of return. He’s demonstrated such a lack of depth of knowledge in the area that fellow GOP candidate Newt Gingrich has suggested Cain is “not ready for primetime,” and veteran Republican strategist Karl Rove said Cain may not be “up to the task” of being commander in chief.

But appearing on Fox News host Sean Hannity’s show last night, Cain said he has now studied up and is ready to go toe-to-toe with the press on matters of national security:

CAIN: Do you think I’m dumb enough not to study up on those issues? I’ve been studying up on these issues for months. I can now explain right of return to any reporter better than they understand right of return. Because, you know, you get caught off guard, you go to school and you learn. So I challenge them to try to explain it to me. Secondly, I have been consulting with former ambassadors, former national security advisers, I’ve been consulting with a number of experts to get up to speed on some of the situations we have around the world. So I challenge anybody who says I wouldn’t know how to address foreign policy.

Watch it:

Among the things Cain is doing to study up on national security is read a “one-page briefing from his chief foreign policy adviser on news from around the world” every day, the Daily Caller reports, But, of course, it’s not the hypothetical reporter who is running for president, so perhaps Cain should take up his own challenge and explain the Palestinian right of return, since he flubbed it last time.

Walid Phares

How Romney and his campaign will respond to the newly publicized facts that one of their top foreign policy advisers — indeed a former associate of Phares’ told Serwer that Romney “promised Phares a high-ranking White House job helping craft U.S. policy in the Middle East” — used Christian-sectarian ideology to justify the mass slaughter during the Lebanese civil war.

But Romney has called for the firing of public officials for far less than participating in war atrocities.

Romney said he would fire Obama adviser David Plouffe for comments saying Americans won’t vote based based on the employment rate. Romney said:

If David Plouffe were working for me, I would fire him and then he could experience firsthand the pain of unemployment,”

Romney called upon his GOP rival, Gov. Rick Perry, to “repudiate” anti-Mormon comments made by Perry supporter Dr. Robert Jeffress.

And in a September GOP debate, Romney said that if president he would fire Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke for his failure to resuscitate the U.S. economy. Romney said:

I’d be looking for somebody new. I think Ben Bernanke has overinflated the amount of currency that he’s created. QE 2 did not work, it did not get Americans back to work, it did not get the economy going again … We’re growing now at 1 to 1 and a half percent.

Romney and his campaign have a precedent of considering disagreements over monetary policy and electoral policy to be fire-able offenses. And expressing intolerant sentiments about Mormonism is worthy of “repudiation.”

The Romney campaign appears to accept Phares’ public association with the Islamophobic Clarion Fund and anti-Muslim blogger Robert Spencer. But given Romney’s record of calling for the firing of individuals for far less than ties to a violent militia, will he apply the same standard to Walid Phares?

Responding to President Obama’s announcement of full withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2011, Fred and Kim Kagan, two of the leading analysts behind the 2007-8 U.S. troop surge, write, “Iran has just defeated the United States in Iraq.”

The American withdrawal, which comes after the administration’s failure to secure a new agreement that would have allowed troops to remain in Iraq, won’t be good for ordinary Iraqis or for the region. But it will unquestionably benefit Iran.

President Obama’s February 2009 speech at Camp Lejeune accurately defined the U.S. goal for Iraq as “an Iraq that is sovereign, stable and self-reliant.” He then outlined how the U.S. would achieve that goal by working “to promote an Iraqi government that is just, representative and accountable, and that provides neither support nor safe haven to terrorists.”

Despite recent administration claims to the contrary, Iraq today meets none of those conditions. Its sovereignty is hollow because of the continued activities of Iranian-backed militias in its territory. Its stability is fragile, since the fundamental disputes among ethnic and sectarian groups remain unresolved. And it is not in any way self-reliant. The Iraqi military cannot protect its borders, its airspace or its territorial waters without foreign assistance.

What the Kagans seem to be describing here is a scenario in which the surge didn’t really achieve its goals. And this is, in fact, the case. As a September 2008 Center for American Progress report noted, while the surge did facilitate a dramatic reduction in violence, this was “purchased through a number of choices that have worked against achieving meaningful political reconciliation. The reductions in violence in 2007 and 2008 have, in fact, made true political accommodation in Iraq more elusive, contrary to the central theory of the surge.”

But, of course, the Kagans can’t possibly recognize this, as that would be undermining their signal achievement, so they have to spin a tale in which everything was going basically fine until President Obama came along and ruined it by irresponsibly adhering to a withdrawal agreement that President Bush signed (which Fred Kagan hailed as a “great accomplishment” at the time).

As for the idea that the U.S. withdrawal will “unquestionably benefit Iran,” newsflash: The Iraq war unquestionably benefited Iran. As an Iraqi friend put it to me at a conference in 2008, “America has baked Iraq like a cake, and given it to Iran to eat.”

As the New York Times reported earlier this month, Iran’s influence in Iraq — which was always primarily political, not military — has actually declined over the past two years (as with al Qaeda in Iraq, the U.S. has benefited from our adversaries’ ability to alienate their own allies), but it’s worth noting that Iran’s influence was at its height when there were over 100,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. Does anyone seriously imagine that a few thousand extra U.S. troops would make the difference here?

It must be pointed out how deeply humorous it is to see the Kagans belatedly sounding the alarm like this over Iran’s influence in Iraq. In the past, they’ve tended to downplay or selectively represent that influence in a way that buttressed their preferred narrative of the war’s progress, something which my colleague Brian Katulis and I pointed out back in April 2008: Read more