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.

As more information emerges about Mitt Romney’s foreign policy adviser Walid Phares, Romney’s campaign, no doubt, will face increasing scrutiny over their decision to hire the outspoken anti-Muslim advocate. But potentially even more concerning than Phares’ ties to the anti-Muslim far-right in the U.S. are the allegations — outlined in Adam Serwer’s profile of Phares — that the now-Romney adviser was one of the chief ideologists in the Lebanese Forces, a Lebanese Christian militia that committed atrocities during Lebanon’s civil war.

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

When GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney announced his foreign policy advisers earlier this month, one of the names raised some eyebrows among Middle East watchers in Washington: Walid Phares, a self-styled terror expert, who had made the rounds of the burgeoning U.S. anti-Muslim crowd. But an exposé from Mother Jones sheds new light on some of Phares’ older associations with an ideological Lebanese militia implicated in mass slaughter during that country’s civil war.

Phares’ links to the Islamophobic right are no secret. His associates litter the August CAP report “Fear, Inc.,” which described America’s Islamophobia network. Phares has written for David Horowitz‘s website; he sits on the advisory board of the Clarion Fund; and he’s flirted with vague conspiracy theories about Islam with anti-Muslim activist Brigitte Gabriel. The activist was even controversial enough to be removed, under pressure, from the witness list of Rep. Peter King’s (R-NY) Homeland Security Committee hearings on domestic radicalization.

But now, Mother Jones’ Adam Serwer has a richly detailed piece about Phares’ past with right-wing Lebanese Christian militias — a political association that goes hand-in-hand with his anti-Muslim sentiments. Phares has played down his long-rumored links to the Lebanese Forces, an umbrella group of sectarian militias, but former associates painted a different picture of Phares’ role as major ideological force in the group. Serwer reports:

According to former colleagues, Phares became one of the group’s chief ideologists, working closely with the Lebanese Forces’ Fifth Bureau, a unit that specialized in psychological warfare.

Régina Sneifer, who served in the Fifth Bureau in 1981 at the age of 18 [...and] now an author in France who wrote a 1995 book detailing her experiences in Lebanon’s civil war, recalls that in his speeches, Phares “justified our fighting against the Muslims by saying we should have our own country, our own state, our own entity, and we have to be separate.” [...]

“[Militia leader Samir Geagea] wanted to change them from a normal militia to a Christian army,” says [Toni] Nissi, Phares’ former associate. “Walid Phares was responsible for training the lead officers in the ideology of the Lebanese Forces.”

With Christian-sectarian ideology underpinning Phares’ opposition to Islam, he was well-suited to the U.S. anti-Muslim movement, and it led to gigs relating to counter-terrorism. He, for a time, ran the “Future of Terrorism” project at the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and has consulted for law enforcement groups. But one former U.S. counter-terror official questioned if Phares’ knowledge was appropriate for the industry: “He’s part of the same movement as Pamela Geller,” the official told Serwer. “He’s viewed as a mainstream scholar of jihadism, but he doesn’t know a lot about the actual movement.”

Phares’ ties to the Romney camp — which is hawkish in the Middle East, especially on Iraq and Iran (an area where another adviser has ties to a controversial, formerly-armed group) — are long standing. Nissi, the sometime associate of Phares’, told Serwer that during the 2008 presidential campaign, Romney “promised Phares a high-ranking White House job helping craft US policy in the Middle East.”

The combination of his ideological past and current anti-Muslim “counter-terror” bent, though, have led to questions about Phares’s motivations. Another Maronite Christian with Lebanese roots, Arab American Institute president James Zogby, wondered about Phares to Serwer: “Is he serving Mitt Romney, or is he serving the politics of a group in Lebanon that was fighting for their sectarian hegemony in a civil war that took over 100,000 lives?”

Yesterday during a House Homeland Security subcommittee hearing on “Iranian terror operations on American soil,” Rep. Peter King (R-NY) echoed Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen’s (R-FL) controversial call to — in violation of American law — expel Iran’s United Nations diplomats from the United States. “You dropped the bombshell today at your hearing,” CNN host Wolf Blizter told King later, asking, “Doesn’t the U.S. have…international legal responsibilities as the host country to the United Nations?”

King said it’s legal because the Iranian diplomats are plotting terror attacks inside the U.S. But when asked for evidence, King offered random and confusing examples and conveniently said he can’t discuss the evidence but he’s seen it and “it’s buttressed to all sides.” Blitzer then pressed King again for “hard evidence,” and the New York Republican dodged, citing “common sense and observation”:

BLITZER: Just to be precise, these Iranian diplomats are in New York and Washington. Do you have hard evidence they were actually plotting to undertake terrorist operations inside the United States?

KING: I’m saying they clearly have ties to those in Iran who do those things. We know this from common sense and observation, from talking to people in the community that these people, whether it’s actual terrorist activities or dealing with other countries or just facilitating activities with them or with Hezbollah, the fact is they are over here for an ulterior purpose, not diplomacy. It’s to advance Iran’s interest and, as I said, there have been instances in the past where we’ve actually caught them doing it, but from people I’ve spoken to, in the intelligence and law enforcement community.

Watch the clip:

So King has no evidence. He essentially thinks that the Iranian diplomats in the U.S. are plotting terror attacks here because they’re here to “advance Iran’s interest” and have ties to Iranians (of course they do, they’re Iranians too). Based on those parameters, King should start working on the deportation papers for every foreign diplomat residing in the United States.