Last week, Rep. Allen West (R-FL) said that President Obama didn’t consult with the military when formulating the new global strategy he announced last week. “I have heard some rumination” that Obama ignored military leaders, West said (of course this is not true).

The next day, talking with right-wing radio host Mark Levin, West went a bit further, saying that military commanders should consider whether or not they follow the president’s orders:

LEVIN: Seems to me if I’m one of the highest ranking generals or admiral in the Navy, and this was being done to my force structure – that is, to my men and women in uniform, I might think about stepping out. You know what I mean? Moving on to another career.

WEST: I absolutely understand what you’re saying. And you know I’ve had a lot of people ask me about that because the responsibility of our senior generals has to be to the men and women in uniform. They have to be very careful about blindly following a commander in chief that really does not have the best intent for our military. And I think that when you understand that President Obama said he was going to fundamentally transform the United States of America, you’re seeing him destroy our economy, and now you’re seeing him destroy our military capability.

Levin stepped in and tried to save West. “What we’re saying so you’re liberal haters don’t screw this up,” Levin said, “we’re saying is they should consider stepping down.” “Well yeah,” West responded, “What you’re saying and what I’m saying is that your silence is consent.” Check out the clip here:

Of course, military leaders are constitutionally bound to follow the president’s orders, unless they are illegal. Otherwise, failure to do so without resignation “shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.”

Minnesota-based Sunrise Community Banks, the largest U.S. bank that allows Somalis in the U.S. to send money back home, recently decided to halt money transfers back to the famine-stricken nation in an effort to comply with ambiguous U.S. laws on terrorist group financing. However, as CAP’s Sarah Margon noted on this blog last week, the decision means that a “vital lifeline” to Somalia “has vanished.”

In response, Somali-Americans held a rally at the St. Paul, Minnesota capitol building last Friday afternoon “calling on banks and the federal government to find a solution to a continuing crisis affecting their families.” “The money that we are transferring is for starving people,” one rally-goer said. “This is a lifeline,” another demonstrator said, adding, “If they don’t get the money, they are going to starve, which is already they are dying day by day.” Another local Somali said, “It brings tears to us. We can’t even sleep thinking about this.” Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) also spoke at the demonstration:

ELLISON: It’s important for all of us to know that as we stand here calling for simple justice that we don’t stand here alone. Our friends in the Christian community, other communities all over the state of Minnesota care about making sure that the lifeline stays in place for the people of Somalia.

Watch clips from the rally here:

In a letter to Secretary of State Clinton last month, Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) highlighted three major concerns he had in cutting off the remittances:

First, it would deprive many Somalis of a major source of sustenance. [...] Second, the lack of legitimate means for the transmission of funds to Somalia may end up driving people into more difficult-to-track channels for sending money, which heightens the risk of funds ending up in the hands of bad actors. Third, an end to the flow of remittances from the U.S. to Somalia would be a potential victory for al-Shabbab, which could then claim that America was preventing needed funds from getting to suffering Somalis.

Sunrise Community Banks said last week that it “has been and remains open to facilitating money transfers to Somalia.” In a statement on its website, they said they “reached out to multiple government agencies and officials, have made a specific proposal, and have told the agencies that we are seeking a constructive exchange with them in an effort to reach an accommodation that would satisfy the concerns of those sending funds, the government and the bank.”

During Saturday night’s ABC/Yahoo! Republican presidential debate, former U.S. ambassador to China Jon Huntsman rapped former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney on failing to recognize the chain-of-command of the U.S. military. By design, the military leadership is subservient to the president, a fact most GOP contenders have ignored throughout the campaign as they sought to portray Barack Obama as weak on national security.

Romney has, as on so many issues, flip-flopped on whether or not a president should defer to his generals in making decisions about war and peace. Initially, he said Obama should defer to military leaders, then walked his position back and said he would listen to the generals’ “input” and make his “own decision.” During Saturday’s debate, Romney didn’t quite return to his initial position, but he did punctuate his statement on a plan for Afghanistan by declaring that he would be “listening to the commanders on the ground.”

Asked to respond, Huntsman, who’s spoken out for a more speedy withdrawal from Afghanistan, lept at the opportunity:

MODERATOR: Governor Huntsman, you have a disagreement?

HUNTSMAN: Yes. I would have to tell Mitt that the president of the United States is the commander-in-chief. Of course you get input and — and advice from a lot of different corners of Washington, including the commanders on the ground.

But we also deferred to the commanders on the ground in about 1967, during the Vietnam War, and we didn’t get very good advice then.

Watch a video of the exchange:

The U.S.’s top military officer, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Martin Dempsey, and other top generals agree with Huntsman. “I find some of those articles about divergence or control of the generals to be kind of offensive to me,” Dempsey recently said. “(A)t the end of the day, our system is built on the fact that it will be our civilian leaders who make that decision and I don’t find that in any way to challenge my manhood, nor my position. In fact, if it were the opposite, I think we should all be concerned.”

Huntsman concluded his comments on Saturday by declaring that “civil war is around the corner in Afghanistan.” He said he doesn’t want to spend more money or lose more troops in that scenario and the U.S. should “move on.”

GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum has staked out ground as one of the most hawkish candidates in the Republican field. Over the past several months, Santorum has promised to order air strikes on Iran if they don’t immediately give in to his full list of demands, declared that the Iranians “will not and cannot be negotiated with,” and threatened to target Iranian nuclear scientists for assassination as “enemy combatants” like al Qaeda.

But in the following exchange from the New Hampshire Republican debate on Sunday, Santorum’s Iran policy appears to be framed, in no small part, by his extremist views on Islam and a belief that the Islamic Republic’s leadership is inherently irrational and suicidal:

DAVID GREGORY: I wonder why it is, if America has lived with a nuclear Soviet Union, we have come to live with a nuclear North Korea, why is it that we cannot live with a nuclear Iran?

And if we can’t, are you prepared to take the country to war to disarm that country?

RICK SANTORUM: They’re a — they’re a theocracy. They’re a theocracy that has deeply embedded beliefs that — that the afterlife is better than this life. President Ahmadinejad has repeatedly said the principle virtue of the Islamic Republic of Iran is martyrdom.

So when your principle virtue is to die for your — for Allah, then it’s not a deterrent to have a nuclear threat, if they would use a nuclear weapon. It is, in fact, an encouragement for them to use their nuclear weapon. And that’s why there’s a difference between the Soviet Union and China and others and Iran.

Watch it:

While legitimate concerns can be raised about the IAEA’s findings that Iran is conducting experiments “specific to nuclear weapons,” the assertion that Iran is inherently suicidal or irrational is a right-wing trope in regular rotation with those seeking to portray the Iranian leadership as incapable of engaging in diplomacy. Indeed, there is little to suggest that Iran is either suicidal or unmotivated by traditional political and security incentives.

Moreover, hawks in the United States during the Cold War didn’t share Santorum’s argument that the Soviet Union was a rational actor. Many claimed back then that the irrationality of Soviet leadership was one of the reasons why Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) would not work against the Kremlin’s elite.

Much as in the case of the Cold War, asserting the irrationality of one’s enemies is a useful meme for politicians pushing for military action. But both the history of the Cold War and scholarly examinations of Iranian leadership would all suggest that the “martyr state myth” is poorly grounded in the facts.