Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) introduced an amendment today to the National Defense Authorization act, or the defense budget, that would sanction Iran’s central bank. The amendment was designed by Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) to collapse Iran’s currency and, therefore, economy. Asked about the sanctions last month, he said in an interview that he thought it was “okay to take food from the mouths” of ordinary Iranians because of the actions of their government.

The Obama administration flirted with the idea of sanctioning the Iranian Central Bank, with Treasury Undersecretary David Cohen saying that they were “looking very actively” at imposing such measures. But officials have since warned against the broad sanctions.

Director of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control Adam Szubin said this week at a House of Representatives hearing that the Central Bank sanctions could actually benefit Iran and hurt the U.S. and global economies by causing oil prices to spike:

There are very real scenarios in which an oil spike might hit. [...]

If there is a hike in the price of oil, Iran gains. If there is a spike in the price of oil…there could be profound harm to the global economic recovery and a windfall to Iran.

The amendment also constricts the administration’s ability to conduct its foreign policy. In most matters, the president is afforded a foreign policy waiver to free his hand to make policy and maintain relations with other countries. But the Kirk amendment “require(s) the President to impose sanctions on foreign financial institutions that conduct transactions with the Central Bank of Iran.” The waiver, in this case, lasts only 60 days and must be renewed and certified to Congress, and only in the case that allowing the financial transactions is “necessary to the national security interest of the United States.”

The sanctions, however, could be difficult to implement. “[F]oreign financial institutions that conduct transactions with the Central Bank of Iran” might include entities such as European central banks that are conducting what, according to their own and international laws, are completely legal business in and with Iran that is routed through the central bank.

This summer, more than 90 senators signed onto a letter to Obama, led by Kirk and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) supporting the notion of sanctioning Iran’s central bank.

One of the remaining arguments the Pentagon threw out trying to prevent further military spending cuts was that DOD spending creates jobs. A Defense Department spokesman warned that cutting military spending by $1 trillion over the next decade would “result in job cuts that would add potentially 1 (percentage point) to the national unemployment rate.” One important point this claim omits is that diverting federal dollars to defense and other military spending at the expense of other domestic priorities actually results in a net job-loss.

The Aerospace Industries Association recently released a study hawking a similar tone, claiming that $1 trillion in cuts could lead to over 1 million job losses. While this study also ignores the fact that spending federal money elsewhere would create more jobs, CAP’s Larry Korb noted in a Politico op-ed today that “the number of jobs that could be lost is about 600,000 — not 1 million.” But Korb also adds that back in 2003, the AIA wasn’t all that interested in creating jobs here in the United States:

But to really understand how little the defense industry cares about its workers, we need to go back to 2003. In the fiscal year 2004 National Defense Authorization Act, Congress inserted a provision that would have increased the percentage of components that had to be made in America for Defense Department purchases to 65 percent of the product, rather than the current 50 percent.

This proposal, supported by many small manufacturing companies and unions because it would create jobs in the U.S., was vehemently opposed by AIA. Why? Because it would cut its members’ profits and make it harder to sell their wares around the world (The U.S. is the global leader in arms sales).

As a result of AIA’s efforts, the “buy American” provision, which would have increased employment in the U.S., was dropped.

“It is clear that the AIA study’s real purpose was to protect not U.S. workers but the group’s profits,” Korb adds. Indeed, AIA spent $213,684 lobbying Congress from July through September last year. This year however, the defense industry trade group spent $886,814 during the same period, a 76 percent increase.

Military, defense and security spending isn’t a jobs program, it’s meant to be focused toward protecting the United States and its allies, not lining the pockets of big American corporations.

Tennessee state Rep. Rick Womick (R-Murfreesboro) found few defenders after his comments — first reported by ThinkProgress — calling for the purge of Muslims from the U.S. military caused an uproar as Muslim groups in Tennessee and across the country demand an apology. But the Wilson County Tea Party, in a newsletter [PDF] emailed to supporters today, came to Womick’s defense and urged its members to support Womick.

It read:

ACTION ALERT!!!!
By now you may have heard the “news” about State Rep. Rick Womick’s statements at the Preserving Freedom Conference. He stated his opinion based on factual information. He is being blasted by the media and many Islamic organizations who are demanding an apology and impeachment by the Tennessee General Assembly.

His email address is: rep.rick.womick@capitol.tn.gov

Indeed, Womick’s remarks were based on “factual information.” Womick’s Veterans Day pronouncement that Muslims should be purged from the military was based on the “fact” that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, a Muslim, is charged with 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted murder for his role in the Fort Hood shooting.

But from this fact, Womick concludes that all Muslims should be purged from the military. A position that resulted in calls for the general assembly to condemn his comments and the Murfreesboro Daily Journal to write, “This is discrimination at its worst, no different than what America did to black Americans in treating them as second-class citizens.”

Womick found an ally in the Tea Party, but the group’s own extremist positions — their newsletter also claims that ACORN is behind Occupy Nashville and Obama is “buying the votes of college students” for “less than $8″ — provides little cover for Womick’s attacks on Muslim members of the military.

As Womick’s remarks continue to reverberate in Tennessee and across the country, the silence from Tennessee Republicans indicates their fear of openly condemning Womick and defending Muslim members of the military. While the Wilson County Tea Party has come to Womick’s defense, the Murfreesboro Republican’s lack of mainstream defenders should serve as an indication of the public’s discomfort with his discriminatory remarks about all Muslim service men and women.

On Oct. 6, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney announced an exhaustive list of foreign policy advisers. One adviser told Foreign Policy that Romney’s campaign set up the team so that it “mimics the National Security Council.” But one campaign adviser who specializes in foreign policy was left off the list or and omitted from any other campaign release — an adviser whose recent work, in an ironic twist, has focused on preserving the government’s ability to keep secrets from the public.

Gabriel Schoenfeld’s exact role with the Romney campaign remains unclear. He does not appear in campaign literature, and a search of Romney’s campaign website for Schoenfeld’s last name turns up nothing. Reached by phone at home in New York and asked by ThinkProgress what he did with Romney’s campaign, Schoenfeld replied: “I don’t think I want to speak with you. Thank you very much for your call.” The line then went dead. The Romney campaign did not return requests for information before press time.

Schoenfeld, who contributes to the Weekly Standard and the Wall Street Journal opinion page, was a senior editor at the neoconservative flagship magazine Commentary before moving to the Hudson Institute, a think tank associated with the movement. (Schoenfeld also held a fellowship with the conservative Witherspoon Institute.) At Hudson’s website, Schoenfeld is listed as a “Senior Fellow on Leave.” In response to an inquiry, the communications department at Hudson confirmed that Schoenfeld took leave on July 15 and “left to work full time for the Romney for President Campaign.”

A website formerly associated with George Washington University that tracks campaign information lists Schoenfeld as a “senior adviser” with the Romney campaign since July. A Federal Election Commission (FEC) October 2011 quarterly report lists Schoenfeld as having been paid $29,745.99 by Romney for President.

The full-time gig is not Schoenfeld’s first for Romney: FEC filings also show that Schoenfeld was paid a total of $27,625 over six disbursements by Romney’s Free and Strong America PAC during January, February and March of 2011 (about the same rate he is being paid per quarter now, as a full-time staffer who has left the non-partisan Hudson Institute). The FEC forms list Schoenfeld’s work as being for “communications consulting for PAC.”

His Hudson Institute biography records his areas of specialty as intelligence, national security, homeland security, terrorism and news media. Schoenfeld’s latest book, “Necessary Secrets: National Security, the Media, and the Rule of Law,” exemplifies a running theme in his work: that government secrecy is sacrosanct and all whistle-blowers and journalists who reveal them should be prosecuted. His frequent calls rest on the principle of “uphold(ing) the rule of law,” as when he called for a New York Times journalist to be jailed for revealing C.I.A. programs. But that notion of “rule of law” can be sacrificed when it comes to, say, launching covert wars against Iran. Schoenfeld wrote in 2009:

Such covert action is indeed illegal. But legality is beside the point. Espionage is by definition illegal and yet all countries engage in it….

Yet how much better off both Iran and the world would be if the CIA, operating covertly through local friendly forces, could have helped…

In another column, Schoenfeld accused scholars Steve Walt and John Mearsheimer and former President Jimmy Carter of being “yes-men” for the late terrorist mastermind Osama Bin Laden, labeling their advocacy for ending the Afghanistan war as “alarming overlap of some voices here at home and those of the very forces we’re fighting.”

Republican presidential hopeful Jon Huntsman flirted with the notion of preventative war against Iran last month in his foreign policy speech. But in an interview with CNN’s Pierce Morgan last night, Huntsman argued that sanctions “aren’t going to have much of an impact” and suggested that military action might be the only way to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

Huntsman’s comment, which comes as the U.S. faces difficulty in gaining U.N. Security Council support for another round of even more punitive sanctions, is perhaps the most hawkish position taken by a GOP presidential candidate. His position removes the crucial caveat, which most Iran-hawks embrace, that military action should only be taken if sanctions fail.

His dismissal of sanctions as an effective tool for deterring or slowing Iran’s alleged nuclear weapon’s program disregards a May U.N. report confirming that sanctions have slowed Iran’s nuclear program. More importantly, his statements would seem to suggest that a Huntsman Presidency would commit itself to preemptive military action against Iran.

Read the transcript:

MORGAN: What is the right way to deal with Iran if they are going to flagrantly ignore any form of international community opinion on this?

HUNTSMAN: Well I think that’s exactly what’s going on. You can layer sanction upon sanction and I think in the end the sanctions aren’t going to have much of an impact. Sanctions have already been taken to the U.N. Security Council. You can go for another round of sanctions and that probably should be tried. You can go after their state bank. You can sanction the elite. You can sanction those travelling in and out. You can tighten the noose in ways that will make life a lot more difficult from an economic standpoint. But my sense is that their ultimate aspiration is to become a nuclear power, in which case sanctions probably aren’t going to get you there. And that means [it's] likely we’re going to have a conversation with Israel at some point. As we approach that point it’s important for the United States to remind the world what it means to be a friend and ally of the United States. [...]

Watch it:

The conclusion that a “conversation with Israel” is inevitable, would appear to be a reference to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent saber-rattling against Iran and the belief held by many Iran-hawks that if the U.S. doesn’t act militarily against Iran, Israel will attack unilaterally.

Huntsman came under fire this summer when Politico reported on his family’s business dealings in Iran and his brother’s opposition to sanctions. Peter Huntsman said, “By not doing trade with Iran, are we hurting people that are reaching out for western business?” Having all but declared the failure of sanctions and described war with Iran as a virtual inevitability, Huntsman may have successfully beaten back the accusations that he is too moderate on Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.

Last month the United States cut off funding to UNESCO after the United Nations cultural body voted to admit Palestine as a member. U.S. law requires that funding be eliminated to any U.N. agency allows Palestinian membership, whether it’s UNESCO or the International Atomic Energy Agency. Indeed, as U.N. Dispatch’s Mark Leon Goldberg noted, “As long as these laws remain on the books, Congress is setting the stage for America’s waning influence over international affairs.”

But also, as the New York Times reports, cutting funding to UNESCO has immediate affects in Iraq and Afghanistan, just as the U.S. is ending the war in the former and coming close to withdrawing from the latter. “The programs include projects to train the Iraqi judiciary and news media, to analyze Iraq’s fresh water resources better and to provide literacy training to Afghans,” the Times reports. A former American UNESCO official based in Baghdad said the move hurts American interests in Iraq:

George Papagiannis, an American, was until a month ago in charge of the Unesco office for Iraq, based in Baghdad. “The ramifications are serious,” he said in a telephone interview. “The larger issue is how a law has undermined our capacity to deliver in a place very critical to American interests. We’ve invested gazillions of dollars in Iraq, and we can’t put a price on the lives of the Americans and Iraqis who died, and we promised to help build a new Iraq, something fresh and new in the Middle East, and then we hamstring ourselves.”

Unesco, as a United Nations agency, “has a positive image, certainly in Iraq,” said Mr. Papagiannis, who now works at Unesco headquarters. The United States, by contrast, was “an invading force in Iraq, with some negative connotations, even if it gave Iraqis something they hankered for. Unesco doesn’t come with that negative imagery.”

Casey Walther, another UNESCO official working in Iraq, said the clean water project there is a vital part of Iraq’s future stability. “That funding is now not coming through, so I’m in a very awkward situation with Iraqis,” he said, “I had access to, and credibility with, Iraqis and now that’s in peril. And to be frank, I don’t know if I can replace that funding or get around it.”