Seeing that the Republicans don’t have much room to criticize President Obama on foreign policy this campaign season, one consistent attack line has been that Obama allegedly isn’t nice to America’s allies. “We have a president who pursued an agenda of saying we’re going to be friendly to our foes and we’re going to be disrespectful to our friends,” Mitt Romney says.

Part of that baseless GOP narrative is the claim that Obama doesn’t love Israel as much as they do. Even though Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak has said no one can question Obama’s “devotion” to Israel, the GOP candidates for president and other right-wing critics often claim that Obama is “not pro-Israel” or has “thrown Israel under the bus.” But Romney knows how he’s going to prove his love for Israel if he becomes president. “My first foreign trip will be to Israel, to show the world we care about that country and that region,” he said. And Herman Cain said he’d do the same, but added the caveat that he “might do a swing through Europe” as well.

Rick Perry picked up on this Obama-treats-America’s-friends-like-dirt theme today at a town hall in New Hampshire but replaced Israel with Taiwan:

PERRY: We stood back and did nothing [In Iran] and I think that was the first signal to me that we either have a naive president and administration from the standpoint of foreign policy, or he has a completely different outlook about America’s role in the world. And it may be both.

Then you see remarks that he made about Israel, going back to the 1967 borders, treating Benjamin Netanyahu as not with the appropriate respect for a world leader and ally. … One of my first trips as the President of the United States would be to go to Taiwan. Our ally in that region. They ask the United States to improve their armament with an F-16 purchase and this administration said, no we’re going to give you the old equipment, we’re not going to give you the newest equipment.

Watch it:

Since 1981, Canada has typically been the first foreign trip for the new American president. George W. Bush broke that streak in 2001 when he decided his first trip abroad would be to Mexico. Obama, however, stuck with recent tradition and visited Canada in February 2009, in his first international trip as president.

While the Obama administration decided not to include F-16 fighter jets in its arms sale to Taiwan, it did include Patriot missiles, Black Hawk helicopters, and communications equipment worth more than $6 billion. But also, even the Bush administration had deferred on the F-16 sale to Taiwan:

“The notion that is being bandied about that this a capitulation to China, given the unprecedented magnitude of sales in the first two and a half years of the administration, and that F-16’s were never authorized by the Bush administration, suggests that these attacks are partisan rather than security-based,” said Jeffrey A. Bader, a visiting scholar at the Brookings Institution.

So the Republican presidential candidates’ formula to attack Obama on foreign policy seems to be: Make a baseless claim that the president isn’t supporting ally “x,” then pledge make ally “x” among the first foreign trips as president.

The winner of the next presidential election will face a struggling world economy and a Middle East in the process of dramatic political transition, but GOP presidential hopefuls Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain appear intent on scaring the public about fanciful dangers of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack.

The threat of a rogue state or terrorist launching an EMP attack — the detonation of a nuclear warhead at a high altitude, shutting down electrical power across large portions of the U.S. — has become the nightmare scenario cited by defense hawks as justification for costly missile defense systems. But the likelihood of terrorists acquiring a nuclear weapon, which they would then affix to a ballistic missile, remains remarkably small.

EMP alarmism generally remains on the fringe circles of the Republican party — the Center for Security Policy‘s Frank Gaffney issued a dire warning that an EMP attack could kill “nine out of ten Americans” — but comments from Gingrich and Cain have brought the “pulsers” agenda into the Republican primary race.

Cain’s “Foreign Policy & National Security Pillars” [PDF] includes:

COUNTER URGENT THREATS
• Stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons
• Fix border security – for real
• Shield us against Cyber and
• Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP) attacks

And Gingrich, listing the greatest threats to the U.S. at the Nov. 22, CNN National Security Debate, said:

The greatest threat to the United States was the weapon of mass in an American city, probably from a terrorist… [is] one of the three great threats. The second is an electromagnetic pulse attack which would literally destroy the country’s capacity to function.

Gingrich and Cain’s outspoken concern about the threat of a terrorist or rogue state’s EMP attack might appear to be simple paranoia, but the EMP campaign has been a go-to argument for proponents of costly missile defense shields and preventive war against North Korea and Iran.

While EMP rhetoric might be largely overlooked or ridiculed, EMP enthusiasts do little to hide the ulterior motives of pushing for dramatic increases in defense spending and leading the U.S. into preemptive wars with suspected nuclear proliferators.

Our guest bloggers are Jessica Arons, director of the Women’s Health and Rights Program at the Center for American Progress, and Lucy Panza, Women’s Health and Rights Program policy analyst at CAP.

The Senate is currently considering the fiscal year 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, which will authorize funding for the nation’s defense for the next year, and negotiations over which amendments will be included in the bill may be settled as soon as today. One of the amendments that deserves attention is Senate Amendment 1120, offered by Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH). The amendment would permanently remove the ban on military insurance coverage for abortions to end pregnancies that result from rape or incest.

The Shaheen Amendment currently has 12 cosponsors. It should have all 100. This amendment should be entirely non-controversial and should appeal even to those who generally oppose abortion but are sympathetic to its need in cases of rape or incest. Even the Hyde Amendment — the original ban on government coverage for abortion — allows for abortion in those circumstances. Thus, as it currently stands, civilian government-sponsored health insurance, such as Medicaid and the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, covers abortion in cases of life endangerment of a pregnant woman and when the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest. Yet military government-sponsored health insurance, known as Tricare, only covers abortion care in cases of life endangerment. This means a servicewoman — someone who has volunteered to serve our country and defend our rights in a time of war — is not entitled to the same government-sponsored health care coverage that her civilian counterpart receives. That is the unacceptable situation that the Shaheen Amendment would correct.

This is not just a theoretical problem. According to the Defense Department’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office’s FY 2010 Report, 3,158 sexual assaults were reported in the military last year, of which 27.7 percent, or approximately 875, were rape. However, underreporting is rampant — DoD estimates that 86 percent of military sexual assaults go unreported. That means there may have been closer to 6,250 rapes in 2010. About 5 percent of first-time unprotected sex results in pregnancy, but that number can rise in the context of repeated acts of sexual assault. Based on those factors, we estimate that upwards of 300 military rapes resulted in pregnancy last year. Furthermore, recent research suggests that junior enlisted women are much more likely to be raped and, at the same time, to have the fewest financial resources. DoD reports that more than half of military sexual assault victims are 20 to 24 years old, and the overwhelming majority earn less than $23,000 per year — barely above the federal poverty level for a family of four. Thus, the servicewomen least able to afford to pay out of pocket for an abortion following a rape are the most likely to need it.

Beyond the basic fairness rationale of treating our soldiers at least as well as civilians and meeting the needs of our most vulnerable soldiers, our national security demands the Shaheen Amendment. When politically-influenced policies interfere with a soldier’s access to care, they leave her unprepared to fight and thereby disrupt military readiness. The Shaheen Amendment would permit a servicewoman to receive safe, legal, and affordable abortion care on base or in the military’s health network in a seamless fashion along with the other services to which she is entitled after being sexually assaulted. In other words, it would allow her to get timely, compassionate care and to return to duty without unnecessary delay.

Ideally, servicewomen and military dependents would have coverage for abortion care whenever they needed it, but in the meantime, the Shaheen Amendment is a step in the right direction and the very least these brave women deserve.

Embattled Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain, after a series of embarrassing gaffes on foreign policy, insisted that “leaders” don’t need to actually know about world affairs, but merely provide “clarity” and have a competent staff. If that’s indeed the case, Cain (if he stays in the presidential race) ought to consider firing whoever put together his foreign policy website — a case where advisers and staff, if not the candidate himself, showed glaring incompetence.

Cain’s campaign website on “foreign policy and national security” leaves a little something to be desired in terms of basic geography: It lists Germany, Russia, and the United Kingdom as countries in “the Americas.” Take a look at a screen shot of the campaign website, with those countries highlighted:

While the downloadable version of the document does indeed have a subject heading for “Europe,” where part of Russia and the whole of Germany and the U.K. are located, the website version leaves it out. Cain’s team, it seems, has a problem with editorial oversight on even the most basic subjects.

Other areas of Cain’s plan defy his simplistic foreign policy credo of “peace through strength and clarity” — namely, that he admits having no clarity at all on Libya. The intervention in Libya and its nascent transition to democracy have bedeviled the former pizza company C.E.O. Asked about it earlier this month, Cain gave a bizarre and rambling five-minute answer heavy on long, dramatic pauses. Months before that, though, he did have some clarity on the matter: opposing whatever President Obama was doing. Cain’s answer, which he blamed on a lack of sleep (promising to take a nap upon taking the White House), dovetails nicely with the declaration on his website that he “needs clarity” on Libya. That should come as no surprise from a man who thinks the Afghan Taliban insurgent group took over the North African country. (HT: UN Dispatch)

Back in 2009, when the public debate on torture ramped up after President Obama released the Bush-era memos authorizing torture techniques on terror suspects, a Fox News host asked Newt Gingrich if he thought waterboarding is torture. “I can’t tell you,” the former House Speaker said, “I honestly don’t know.”

Now that Gingrich has had some time to think about it (while being influenced by some of his fellow GOP presidential candidates), he seems to have made a decision. Today at a town hall event at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, an audience member asked Gingrich where he stood on waterboarding. “Waterboarding is, by every technical rule, not torture,” the former House Speaker said, to which the crowd applauded. Gingrich seemed to justify his position claiming that the technique is legal under international law:

GINGRICH: Waterboarding is by every technical rule not torture. [Applause] Waterboarding is actually something we’ve done with our own pilots in order to get them used to the idea to what interrogation is like. It’s not — I’m not saying it’s not bad, and it’s not difficult, it’s not frightening. I’m just saying that under the normal rules internationally it’s not torture.

I think the right balance is that a prisoner can only be waterboarded at the direction of the president in a circumstance which the information was of such great importance that we thought it was worth the risk of doing it and I do that frankly only out of concern for world opinion. But we do not want to be known as a country that capriciously mistreats human beings.

Watch the clip:

Not only is the so-called “ticking time bomb” scenario Gingrich refers to a red herring, waterboarding actually is illegal under international law because it is considered a torture technique. Last year, the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on Torture Juan Mendez said waterboarding is “immoral and illegal,” and his predecessor agrees.

The U.S. military doesn’t have much use for waterboarding either, considering the Army Field Manual bans it. And Gingrich, or any other of the Republicans running for president who support waterboarding and other torture techniques, might have a hard time getting it to happen as the CIA said it is unlikely to go down that road again. “When you have years-long investigations into past practices, it’s unlikely that you want to spend a minute engaged in them,” one CIA official said recently.

“Very disappointed by statements at SC GOP debate supporting waterboarding,” Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) tweeted earlier this month. “Waterboarding is torture.”

GOP presidential contender Herman Cain was on CNN today defending against another charge of an inappropriate relationship with a woman other than his wife, this time, an alleged 13-year affair with a woman whom Cain said “is an acquaintance who I thought was a friend.”

But also during the CNN interview, host Wolf Blitzer asked Cain about his infamous rambling and incoherent response to a question from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about where he stands on Libya. Cain claimed the Sentinel “pulled out 40 seconds” from his answer (actually it was five minutes) and conceded the incident was “embarrassing”:

CAIN: Was it embarrassing? Yes. Was I caught off guard? Yes. Because of a number of factors. That was a forty minute interview and they pulled out 40 seconds to embarrass me and they did. Yes I was embarrassed by that but that doesn’t mean that I did not know the answer. What I was doing was gathering my thoughts so I wouldn’t state anything incorrectly.

No one has said I said something wrong, they just questioned the pause and the fact that, yeah I was exhausted I was probably too tired to do that particular editorial board that particular day. And it ended up biting me and I ended up having a very embarrassing moment that went all over the place.

Watch the clip:

Cain has used the “I was probably too tired” defense with many of his embarrassing foreign policy gaffes throughout the campaign, raising suspicions as to whether he’d be ready for that “3 A.M phone call.” But if Cain wins, he says he’ll get a chance to sleep it off and start fresh. “The day after the Election Day, when I win the presidency, the day after, I’m gonna take a nap,” he said recently.