Following the devastating earthquake in Haiti, Mark Krikorian, director of the predictably anti-immigrant Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) surprisingly acknowledged that undocumented Haitians in the U.S. should be given Temporary Protected Status (TPS) which would allow them to work in the U.S. until conditions in Haiti improve. However, despite taking an unusual position, the rest of what CIS has had to say about Haiti over the past week fits right in line with the group’s ethnocentric nativist dogma.

CIS Fellow David North has attacked the idea of waiving TPS fees for Haitian “illegals” who are probably struggling to send every extra penny they have back home right now. Last week North suggested that Haitian refugees would be best culturally absorbed by other Caribbean countries and any refugees accepted by the U.S. should be directed to Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, which according to North, “have never lifted a finger to help America to resettle refugees.”

Today, Krikorian is arguing against the U.S. taking in more refugees because “there are many countries poorer and more screwed-up than Haiti,” despite the fact that he is generally opposed to accepting any refugees from even the most “screwed-up” countries. However, Krikorian hit a new intellectual low yesterday when he suggested that the reason Haiti is “so screwed up” (though apparently not screwed up enough), is because it’s home to a “progress-resistant culture” that simply “wasn’t colonized long enough”:

My guess is that Haiti’s so screwed up because it wasn’t colonized long enough…But, unlike Jamaicans and Bajans and Guadeloupeans, et al., after experiencing the worst of tropical colonial slavery, the Haitians didn’t stick around long enough to benefit from it. (Haiti became independent in 1804.). And by benefit I mean develop a local culture significantly shaped by the more-advanced civilization of the colonizers.

In fact, Haiti’s comparatively short-lived colonial history might be the best thing the island had going for it. Haiti’s revolution inspired the fights for independence across Latin America and ushered in the end of slavery in the New World. Meanwhile, a never-ending sphere of Western influence and self-serving intervention probably offers a better explanation for why Haiti is as “screwed-up” as it is. Unlike the islands of Jamaica, Barbados, and Guadalupe, Haiti has long been the “poster case for the vicious circle of colonial and foreign intervention, poverty, violence and political instability.”

Ultimately, Krikorian’s assessment of what’s wrong with Haiti is based in the same perception of the relative cultural inferiority of non-Western nations that guides many of CIS’ immigration positions. In his book, Krikorian argues that modern-day immigration “weakens our common national identity, limits opportunities for upward mobility, threatens our security and sovereignty, strains resources for social programs, and disrupts middle-class norms of behavior.” Earlier this year, Krikorian admitted that he believes there isn’t enough pressure for “Anglo-conformity.”

On Wednesday, Transportation Security Administration head nominee Erroll Southers withdrew himself from the nomination. Southers withdrew due to fierce opposition from Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), who placed a hold on Southers over the nominee’s support for unionization rights.

Last night, Southers appeared on The Rachel Maddow Show to explain why he decided to withdraw. He explained that he “felt like he was on his heels constantly” during his confirmation battle and didn’t feel like he would be able to convince DeMint to lift his hold. Maddow asked him if he would consider re-submitting himself for the nomination if President Obama decided to appoint him with a recess appointment, which would allow Obama to get around congressional obstructionism. Southers responded that he would:

MADDOW: There are a lot of people in the country who look at the politics of your nomination and want this administration to have fought for you, to have made an example of Jim DeMint for dismissing national security in favor of this no-win dog-and- pony show about unions, to have recess-appointed you if need be, to have made a fist-pounding speech about it to ward off any other obstructionist shenanigans like that. that. If the administration hypothetically had second thoughts and decided to renominate you and handle it like that, would you do it? Would you try it again? [...]

SOUTHERS: Yes, I would do it. I’m committed to the mission. I tried to convince Senator DeMint it was about the mission.

Watch it:

Reflecting on his confirmation fight, Southers told Maddow, “We need to address the threat that’s facing this country. The politics need to be aside. And as you mentioned earlier, I am apolitical. This is about terrorism and not about politics.”

The President’s new budget, due out shortly after the State of the Union address, will likely sweep the knee of one the main conservative arguments against the START treaty and efforts to cut nuclear weapons in general.

One of the central arguments of conservatives opposed to arms control is the bogus notion that the US shouldn’t cut its nuclear forces because the existing nuclear arsenal is “deteriorating” and is increasingly unreliable. In a December letter to the President, all 40 Republican Senators plus Senator Joe Lieberman told the President that they could not support a START treaty unless the reliability of the US nuclear weapons could be assured. These arguments conveniently overlook the recent independent scientific study from the JASON advisory group – this is essentially the gold standard of nuclear studies. The study found that the nuclear arsenal was in fine shape and would continue to be, as long as current modernization programs were adequately funded. JASON essentially killed conservative rationale for a new warhead.

However, the study did point out some areas for improvement in maintaining reliability. An op-ed yesterday by George Schultz, Bill Perry, Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn argued similarly that some additional measures should be taken to ensure the continued efficacy of our nuclear labs and nuclear stockpile. Conservatives might have tried to hang their hat on these points – using them as reasons to block arms-reduction efforts like the START treaty. But it appears now that the Administration’s new budget will take dramatic steps to address the concerns of the JASON study and of the four horsemen, thereby assuring the reliability of the US nuclear arsenal and the irrelevance of any new nuclear warhead. In what looked like a certain degree of coordination, Vice President Biden issued a statement following the four horsemen op-ed saying:

These four statesmen have shown us the path to improved security by urging us to do all we can to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and to strengthen the nonproliferation regime, while maintaining a safe, secure and effective nuclear arsenal. Their vision has inspired our efforts and we will continue to be guided by their contributions. As we pursue the vision President Obama laid out in Prague last April, release our new budget in February… people will see the consensus we have sought translated into action.

In other words, the White House heard the recommendations of the four statesmen and is going to follow through on their recommendations. After all the Vice President’s office wouldn’t highlight the op-ed if it was going to ignore its recommendations. Furthermore, the Albuquerque Journal reported this past weekend that:

The Obama administration is preparing to ask Congress for a 10 percent increase in the U.S. nuclear weapons budget, according to an internal memo. The National Nuclear Security Administration’s budget for nuclear weapons research, development, maintenance and manufacturing would rise to 7 billion in 2010, up from $6.38 billion this year, according to a Dec. 22 memo from Energy Secretary Steven Chu to the Office of Management and Budget.

By increasing spending on nuclear maintenance efforts, the President’s budget insures the US nuclear arsenal will remain reliable well into the future. Hence, conservative arguments that we can’t cut nuclear weapons because our arsenal is not reliable just have no basis in reality.

One of the most tragic legacies of the Bush administration was its authorization of brutal and ineffective harsh interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects that were tantamount to torture. One technique that President Bush admitted that he personally authorized was waterboarding, which involves the simulated drowning of a suspect.

Yesterday, former Bush speechwriter and conservative author Marc Thiessen appeared on CNN’s Amanpour and defended the previous administration’s interrogation policies. During one point during their exchange, Thiessen attacked host Christiane Amanpour for a segment she did in 2008 noting the parallels between Bush’s use of waterboarding and waterboarding techniques used during the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia and during the Spanish Inquisition:

THIESSEN: There have been so many misstatements told about the enhanced interrogation techniques, comparing them to the Spanish Inquisition, to the Khmer Rouge. And I have to tell you, Christiane, you’re one of the people who have spread these mistruths.

AMANPOUR: Excuse me?

THIESSEN: I’m sorry. You went to S-21, the Khmer Rouge prison [...]

AMANPOUR: Yes, and we saw the waterboarding there that they used as a torture technique. That’s called spreading the truth! [...]

THIESSEN: We did not submerge people in a box full of water. [...]

AMANPOUR: That is called waterboarding, you can say in whichever way you want! [...] You’re trying to obfuscate the debate here. [...]

THIESSEN: It’s nothing like what the CIA used.

Watch it:

As David Corn notes, there wasn’t “much difference between the Bush administration’s interrogation policy and the techniques used by the Khmer Rouge.” In 2006, a journalist e-mailed Corn a photograph of a painting done by a former Khmer Rouge prisoner depicting the torture he was subjected to, which shows interrogators pouring water on the suspect’s face — exactly what was authorized by President Bush:

In the past year, former Bush administration speechwriter Marc Thiessen has made a name for himself as the most visible and forceful defender of the Bush administration’s adoption of torture as a tool of interrogation of alleged Al Qaeda detainees. The main part of his strategy for defending torture has been to deny that the methods used don’t actually amount to torture, and to insist on the term “enhanced interrogation” for techniques such as waterboarding that were specifically developed by torturers as a method of torture.

Appearing on Christiane Ahmanpour’s program on CNN International, Thiessen shows how his argument has simply devolved into farce:

AHMANPOUR: Do you support torture?

THIESSEN: It’s not torture.

AHMANPOUR: I know you don’t call it torture –

THIESSEN: It isn’t torture.

AHMANPOUR: — the extreme pain, the “enhanced interrogation” techniques –

THIESSEN: There’s no extreme pain. There have been so many so misstatements told about the enhanced interrogation techniques, comparing them to the Spanish Inquisition and the Khmer Rouge, and I have to tell you Christiane, you are one of the people who have spread these mistruths.

AHMANPOUR: Excuse me?

THIESSEN: I’m sorry. You went to S-21, the Khmer Rouge prison, with Van Nath, who’s one of the survivors —

AHMANPOUR: Yes, and we saw the waterboarding there, which they used as a torture technique. That’s called spreading the truth.

THIESSEN: No, no, no, let me read to you what you said. It’s from CNN’s website: “I stared blankly at another of Van Nath’s paintings. This time a prisoner is submerged in a life-size box full of water, handcuffed to the side so he cannot escape or raise his head to breathe. His interrogators, arrayed around him, are demanding information. I asked Vann Nath whether he had heard this was once used on America’s terrorist suspected. He nodded his head. ‘It’s not right.’” That is completely false.

AHMANPOUR: That’s false?

THIESSEN: We did not submerge people in a box of water.

AHMANPOUR: Excuse me a second, that is called waterboarding.

THIESSEN: No it’s not!

AHMANPOUR: You can say it in whichever way you want.

Watch it:

Interestingly, Thiessen insists that “there’s no extreme pain” in waterboarding only moments after reiterating his “real Muslims require torture” argument, which is the idea that jihadist prisoners require a certain level of pain in order to fulfill their obligation to Allah before they can spill the beans about all of their plans. So Thiessen has revealed either that the level of required jihadist pain is not extreme, or that he’s misstating the facts.

If you watch the video, you’ll notice that while Thiessen is making what he apparently believes is a devastatingly clever point about how the CIA never used the “life-size box full of water” method of water torture, the camera pans over this picture — also painted by Vann Nath, and also hangs in in Cambodia’s Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum — which is more like the version of water torture used by the CIA:

But (as far as we know right now) Thiessen is right: The CIA did not submerge people in a box of water. Point scored! The CIA did, however, use a different method of water torture also used by the Khmer Rouge. What was Thiessen’s point again? Oh yeah, to waste people’s time arguing over whether a technique developed by torturers as a method of torture should really be called torture when employed by the United States. And, to the extent that people continue to be willing to have him on their programs to have this nonsense argument, he’s having a lot of success with that.

Following the election of Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown to the U.S. Senate, many progressives are wondering what his victory means for the progressive agenda. Immigration reform is being identified as an issue that will attract bipartisan support and give lawmakers a chance to show the country that they can work together on an issue and achieve results.

Today, at noon, Wonk Room’s Andrea Nill will be discussing the policy, politics, and prospects of progressive immigration reform in 2010 on a panel being led by Nico Pitney, National Editor of The Huffington Post with introductions by Think Progress’ Faiz Shakir. The event, which is being co-sponsored by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, America’s Voice, and Netroots Nation, will also feature panelists Markos Moulitsas Zúñiga (Kos), Founder and Editor of Daily Kos, and María Elena Durazo, Executive Secretary-Treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO. Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) will kick off the event with opening remarks.

Watch it live here:

This morning, Politico published a story aptly pointing out that “all is not lost” for Democrats following the election of Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown to the U.S. Senate. However, one issue which Politico did identify as “toxic” is immigration reform. According to Politico, the issue’s death is signaled by the fact that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) “isn’t playing ball” which means there are “fewer Republican crossover votes.” Yet, not only is Politico’s reasoning unrelated to the election of Brown, it’s also based on a superficial and inaccurate analysis.

To begin with, last night’s election results don’t represent a referendum on President Obama’s legislative agenda, which includes immigration. Exit polls show that only 38% of Massachusetts voters indicated that their vote was grounded in opposition to Obama’s policies. In fact, independent voters largely accounted for Brown’s victory. Those voters also support comprehensive immigration reform by a wide margin and overwhelmingly voted for Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) — an avid champion of immigrant rights — year after year. If anything, Scott’s win represents a frustration with partisan-driven inaction. It also encompasses a collective sense of impatience with the lack of economic recovery. Immigration reform could speak to both.

Immigration reform and the economy are not mutually exclusive. Furthermore, the prospects for immigration reform have always been tied to its capacity to attract bipartisan support. McCain “isn’t playing ball” because the ball isn’t in his court this time around. While McCain co-sponsored the failed immigration reform bill of 2006, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is taking the lead in partnering with Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) in crafting a bill that will have to avoid the major pitfalls of past failed pieces of legislation. Rather than drawing a line in the sand between Republicans and Democrats, immigration reform signals an opportunity for both parties to show voters they can work together to get something done in Congress.

Ultimately, it’s both in McCain’s and Brown’s interest to support comprehensive immigration reform. Almost 30% of Arizona’s immigrants (or 294,541 people) were naturalized U.S. citizens as of 2007 — meaning they are eligible voters with a close connection to the immigrant experience. Meanwhile, the Massachusetts foreign born population represents over 14 percent of state’s total population and 17 percent of the state’s workforce. They also make up about 12.7 percent (403,915) of registered voters. Neither Martha Coakley nor Brown campaigned heavily in Latino and immigrant communities. However, during a press call today, president of the National Council of La Raza Janet Murguía noted that ignoring the Latino community and the immigration issue could have devastating consequences:

Promises have been made on both sides on this issue…inaction means there will be consequences. That’s true not just for Latinos, but for swing voters…Campaigns need to engage the Latino community pro-actively if they want their support. We certainly didn’t see the outreach [from the Coakley campaign] to the Latino community that you would’ve expected in order to generate the support needed to make a difference…

SEIU Executive Vice President Eliseo Medina further pointed out that “we lost one vote that will make our job more difficult — but not impossible.” While the viability of reforming U.S. immigration laws doesn’t ride on Brown’s seat, Brown might find himself in a position in which he needs immigration reform more than it needs him.

I actually agree with the approach to Iran that Robert Kaplan advocates in this article, it’s just a real shame that, in order to get to it, one has to wander through a farrago of bad history, question-begging and bald assertion of the benefits of regime change:

It would have a positive, pivotal influence on both the political and the security situation in Iraq — pushing Syria towards authentic moderation, and helping undermine Hezbollah and ease the path toward an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord. More broadly, it would unleash democratic tendencies throughout the Middle East, from North Africa to the Indus, forcing regimes and populations to focus more on their internal problems, thereby undermining radicalism.

An Iran that is both democratic and Shiite would tip the balance against the Sunni Wahabi extremism emanating from Saudi Arabia. And, in a globally networked world, where news of such regime change could not easily be suppressed, leaders in similarly autocratic countries like Venezuela and China would have cause for concern.

If this litany of promises of many colorful ponies to come sounds familiar, it should, as all of this (minus the Venezuela angle, which is new) is exactly what was supposed to result from regime change in Iraq. Indeed, here’s Kaplan himself in November 2002 explaining how “dismantling the Iraqi regime would concentrate the minds of Iran’s leaders as little else could.” And so it did! Just not in the way he or any of the war’s advocates predicted.

As I’ve written before, I think an Iranian Green movement victory would be good thing. There are still, however, a lot of important questions to be asked. How much better would it be than the current Iranian government? I’m not sure. How would such a government consolidate its power after achieving “victory”? I’m not sure. How much more amenable would such a government be toward the international community’s demands on Iran’s nuclear program? I’m not sure. What I am sure of is that it’s deeply irresponsible to confidently predict the benefits of Iranian regime change, especially when one’s previous confident predictions about the benefits of regime change in neighboring Iraq have been drowned in a sea of blood.

Having said that, I think that what Kaplan calls a “Reaganite approach” is correct:

[B]e open to far-reaching talks, as President Ronald Reagan was with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, but do nothing to legitimize the Iranian system. And, throughout any discussions, adopt the rhetoric of democracy. Make it clear that Washington is on the same side of history as the demonstrators, but also make it clear that the door is open to negotiations with those in power. And to avoid the risk of undermining the demonstrators by overt American support of them (thus catering to regime’s basest conspiracy theories), Obama should talk about democracy only in general, albeit pointed, terms, without directly referring to Iran. That is, he should get the language of universal values out over Iranian air waves as much as possible: encouraging the demonstrators without specifically backing them.

This is an approach that more Iranian dissidents have been calling for, and, according to recent reporting, is also the approach that the Obama administration has been moving toward.

It’s interesting, though, that Kaplan terms this a “Reaganite” approach. It’s important to remember that when Reagan adopted a strategy of engagement with the Soviets, he was excoriated as a “traitor to anti-Communism” by conservative hardliners. A 1988 New York Times article on conservative opposition to Reagan’s Soviet “appeasement” quoted Howard Phillips, chairman of the Conservative Caucus, charging Reagan with “fronting as a useful idiot for Soviet propaganda.” The fact that most conservatives now prefer to remember Reagan’s negotiations with the Soviets as a brilliant display of diplomatic jiu-jitsu probably won’t stop them from condemning every Obama administration meeting with the Iranians as another Munich.

The “four horsemen” were back today. Former Secretaries of State George Schultz (Reagan) and Henry Kissinger (Nixon and Ford), former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry (Clinton), and former Senator Sam Nunn (Sen. D-GA) have an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal reaffirming their past calls to eliminate nuclear weapons. They write today:

The four of us have come together, now joined by many others, to support a global effort to reduce reliance on nuclear weapons, to prevent their spread into potentially dangerous hands, and ultimately to end them as a threat to the world.

These four national security leaders – two Republicans and two Democrats – have been four of the most prominent and vocal advocates of eliminating nuclear weapons and their efforts have significantly influenced President Obama and the global nuclear debate.

Their op-ed today importantly does not support one of the key arguments made by conservatives like Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ), that the US needs to build new nuclear warheads because existing ones are “deteriorating.” The four statesmen conclude that:

Our recommendations for maintaining a safe, secure and reliable nuclear arsenal are consistent with the findings of a recently completed technical study commissioned by the National Nuclear Security Administration in the Department of Energy. This study was performed by JASON, an independent defense advisory group of senior scientists who had full access to the pertinent classified information. The JASON study found that the “[l]ifetimes of today’s nuclear warheads could be extended for decades, with no anticipated loss in confidence, by using approaches similar to those employed in Life Extension Programs to date.”

By supporting the findings of the JASON study, Schultz, Perry, Kissinger, and Nunn are in no way supporting the construction of a new nuclear warhead, since the study found that as long as current maintenance programs are in place, building a new nuclear warhead is simply unnecessary. While the op-ed calls for maintaining the efficacy of nuclear labs and for ensuring proper funding for nuclear programs relevant to maintaining the nuclear force, this is something that the Administration and arms-control advocates support as well and in no way conflicts with the effort to work toward eliminating nuclear weapons.

The op-ed also notably rejects Senator Kyl’s clamoring for testing new nuclear weapons. Kyl wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in October titled “why we need to test nuclear weapons” that also opposed the effort to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The four statesmen pour cold water on Kyl’s desire to explode more nuclear weapons, noting that work at US nuclear labs have:

led to important advances in the scientific understanding of nuclear explosions and obviated the need for underground nuclear explosive tests.

The tea-partyization of the conservative movement has extended to foreign and security policy as well. In two recent Iran reports from the Heritage Foundation they argue that the US would be wise to both launch a preventive strike against Iran and to forward-deploy US nuclear weapons to the Persian Gulf. Steps that together could quite easily lead to nuclear war. Jim Phillips of Heritage argues in a recent report on the implications of an Israeli preventive attack on Iran:

Given that the United States is likely to be attacked by Iran in the aftermath of an Israeli strike anyway, it may be logical to consider joining Israel in a preven­tive war against Iran.

Ariel Cohen in a companion report released the same day also goes on to recommend that:

The U.S. should deploy a visible deterrent, deploying overwhelming nuclear forces near Iran, including on surface ships, aircraft, or permanent bases. These offensive forces should be designed to hold at risk the facilities that Iran would need to launch a strategic attack, thereby making any such attack by Iran likely to fail.

So Heritage is not only saying that the US would be smart to join a preventive attack with Israel – an attack they acknowledge would lead to an Iranian response against US forces and installations in the Middle East – but that the US should equip these bases with nuclear weapons – the very bases that they just acknowledged Iran would attack. Patrick Disney at NIAC notes:

He [Cohen] is suggesting that we wave these missiles in front of Iran’s face, knowing full well that Tehran and its proxy allies will not sit idly by as the US makes such a thoroughly provocative move. And he makes the ludicrous suggestion that the thing the Middle East needs more than anything else right now is more Weapons of Mass Destruction.

By the right’s own logic these steps would lead to nuclear war. The right has consistently argued that the Iranian regime is not rational and therefore cannot be deterred – hence the need in their minds for the US or Israel to strike at Iran before they develop and use a nuclear weapon. Dick Cheney when he was the sitting Vice President said that Iran could not be deterred: “mutual assured destruction in the hands of Ahmadinejad may just be an incentive.”

So, assuming that they agree with the Vice President, Heritage is advocating the forward-deployment of nuclear weapons and threatening to use them against an apparently suicidal and undeterrable regime. If you threaten a regime with nuclear war that you don’t believe is rational, doesn’t that mean that you are in fact expecting to use these weapons, since it is likely that the regime’s reaction won’t be capitulation, but defiance?

This would then put the US in a situation in which it threatened a country with nuclear war and was rebuffed. What would the right’s reaction be to that? Based on past history it is pretty obvious that Heritage would advocate following through on the threat to show America’s “resolve.” Once making the threat the US would look “weak” not following through, thereby undermining the credibility of the US nuclear deterrent by demonstrating an unwillingness to use nukes – or so the logic would go. Hence, the recommendations from Heritage – by conservatives’ own logic – put the US on a slippery slope to a nuclear war with Iran.

Now the chances are that there isn’t that much logic behind Heritage’s recommendations, but the logical conclusion of what they are advocating is really really scary.

Speaking on a panel at the Hudson Institute today, Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs Jeffrey Feltman defended the Obama administration’s Middle East policy, specifically its support for human rights and democracy. “Secretary Clinton has met with civil society and democracy activists on almost all of her trips,” Feltman said. “It is the foreign policy of the Obama administration to support, promote and defend democracy and civil participation” in the region and around the world.

Asked to explain how support for human rights was consistent with continuing U.S. support for authoritarian governments like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, Feltman admitted “It’s a tough question,” but it was the administration view that “All governments should have the respect of their people.” Feltman assured the audience that the administration was “trying to speak respectfully and, where appropriate, behind closed doors toward [the goal of] building participatory democracy.”

Echoing a line in President Obama’s Cairo speech that many believed was a nod toward Islamist parties like the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Feltman said that “people who are willing to use democratic means should have opportunity to participate” in elections. Ensuring fairness in upcoming Egyptian elections is, Feltman said, “a subject of much discussion between us and the Egyptians right now.”

Feltman also defended the administration’s approach to the Palestinian-Israeli peace process, reminding the audience that when the administration took office, “the Israelis and Palestinians had just come out of a war” in Gaza. Feltman knocked back a criticism from fellow panelist Elliot Abrams, who scoffed at the Obama administration’s call for a settlement freeze as something “no Israeli government could accept.” Feltman responded that “the United States has had the same policy on settlements for a very, very long time,” and reminded Abrams that the “call for a settlement freeze was consistent with the Quartet Road Map” promulgated by the Bush administration and agreed to by both the Israeli and Palestinian governments.

“Our goal is to achieve comprehensive peace in the Middle East,” Feltman said. “The two-state solution is key,” and “waiting on negotiations doesn’t serve anyone but extremists.”

Another story today underscores that argument. In the wake of its brutal crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations, the Iranian regime is trying to recoup some of its lost resistance credibility by returning to the Israel-Palestine well:

Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani on Tuesday criticized the West over its supports for Israel against Palestinians, the state-run satellite Press TV reported.

Larijani attacked the Western countries for giving Israel all the military support it needed to launch its deadly operation on the impoverished Palestinian Gaza Strip, the report said.

“Despite suffering heavy damages, Palestinians came out as the true winner of Israel’s war on Gaza,” Larijani was quoted as saying at a conference on “Gaza, Symbol of Resistance” in Tehran.

The three-week unprecedented Israeli military offensive on Gaza, which ended in January last year, left about 1,400 Palestinians killed and 5,500 others wounded.

The Iranian speaker also said that the conduct of the Israeli authorities and the West’s lack of regard for the basic rights of Palestinians have left them with no choice but to resist, according to Press TV.

Iran has expressed its concerns over the continuing economic blockade on the Gaza Strip and has never hesitated to pronounce its all-out support for Palestinian resistance against the Israeli occupation of their lands.

No one claims that resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict will make all the problems of the Middle East melt away, but it would deny extremists of all stripes one of their favorite, and most effective, propaganda tools.

This past weekend, approximately 10,000 to 20,000 people gathered on the streets of Phoenix, Arizona to protest Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s controversial immigration enforcement tactics. Though the protest was peaceful for the most part, violence briefly erupted after a small group “anarchist” protesters allegedly assaulted a Maricopa County police officer who responded by releasing pepper spray into the crowd. Stephen Lemons of the Phoenix New Times points out that most protesters in the area confirm that the pepper spray ended up injuring many innocent bystanders, including children:

Many of the witnesses agree on a few key facts: That a female officer on horseback walked her horse into the crowd at one point; that the horse became agitated; that the female officer sprayed pepper spray into the crowd; and that scores of people, including women and children were overtaken by the fumes…

“She pulled out a long can,” Sage [protester] said of the officer on horseback, “and sprayed out some dark fog stuff into the crowd near the people in black, I think the anarchists. Everyone started running back, and I saw a lot of little kids sprayed and sick and crying. Children and mothers who got sprayed.

Phoenix’s local Channel 12 news reports that an asthmatic six-year old was hit by the pepper spray. Phoenix police spokesman Sgt. Andy Hill has confirmed that a two-year old child was also hit and treated by paramedics. California activist and videographer Naui also captured video of a young boy crying from the effects of the pepper spray.

Watch it:

As Lemons points out, it’s probably inaccurate to claim that the officer intentionally pepper-sprayed small children. Yet, it’s unfortunate that the situation could not have been dealt with differently. Salvador Reza, one of the organizers of the protest, described the anarchists who allegedly created the disturbance as “an outside faction” and says that, overall, the march was a success in terms of “sending out a message against the tactics of Arpaio and the policies of immigration that divide families and communities.”

Yesterday, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez issued a condemnatory broadside against the Obama administration’s efforts to help Haiti recover from the recent devastating 7.0-magnitude earthquake:

I read that 3,000 soldiers are arriving, Marines armed as if they were going to war. There is not a shortage of guns there, my God. Doctors, medicine, fuel, field hospitals, that’s what the United States should send,” Chavez said on his weekly television show. “They are occupying Haiti undercover.”

“On top of that, you don’t see them in the streets. Are they picking up bodies? … Are they looking for the injured? You don’t see them. I haven’t seen them. Where are they?”

Chavez’s claims are wholly uninformed. While there are nearly 6,000 U.S. military personnel assisting in Haiti (with another 7,500 on the way), they are enabling the recovery effort to proceed. Thanks to efforts by the U.S. military to secure the airport, the pace of the air traffic into Port-au-Prince carrying food and supplies for victims “has increased from 60 flights to about a 100 a day.” U.S. forces are providing security at the request of the Haitian government.

Moreover, more than 250 personnel from the Department of Health and Human Services “are in the process of deploying to Haiti and over 12,000 personnel could possibly assist in the coming days.” Additionally, “2 planeloads of medicine, medical equipment and supplies from HHS have arrived in Haiti with a third” on the way. The Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort “has left its home port of Baltimore to support relief efforts in Haiti.”

Lastly, there are 26 international search and rescue teams in Haiti, including teams from Fairfax County Virginia, Los Angeles, Virginia Beach, two from Miami, and one from New York. U.S. teams have rescued at least 26 individuals already.

As for the U.S.’s intentions in Haiti, we are not there to occupy but rather “to save lives.” As President Obama said last week, “this is a time when we are reminded of the common humanity that we all share. With just a few hundred miles of ocean between us and a long history that binds us together, Haitians are neighbors of the Americas and here at home.  So we have to be there for them in their hour of need.” Denis McDonough, chief of staff for the National Security Council, added, “The one thing I don’t think any of us will apologize for is the hard work in support of relieving the suffering of the Haitian people.”

As as been strongly hinted at elsewhere in recent months, Newsweek reports that U.S. intelligence agencies are “revising their widely disputed assertion that Iran has no active program to design or build a nuclear bomb.”

Three U.S. and two foreign counterproliferation officials tell NEWSWEEK that, as soon as next month, the intel agencies are expected to complete an “update” to their controversial 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, which concluded that Tehran “halted its nuclear weapons program” in 2003 and “had not restarted” it as of mid-2007. The officials, who asked for anonymity to discuss sensitive information, say the revised report will bring U.S. intel agencies more in line with other countries’ spy agencies (such as Britain’s MI6, Germany’s BND, and Israel’s Mossad), which have maintained that Iran has been pursuing a nuclear weapon.

Yet two of the U.S. sources caution the new assessment will likely be “Talmudic” in its parsing. They say U.S. analysts now believe that Iran may well have resumed “research” on nuclear weapons — theoretical work on how to design and construct a bomb — but that Tehran is not engaged in “development” — actually trying to build a weapon. “The intelligence community is always reluctant to make a total retreat because it makes them look bad,” says the third American.

It’s interesting to read this in light of an interview published Tuesday with the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Lieutenant General Ronald Burgess, in which Burgess stressed that there is still no evidence that Iran has made a final decision to build nuclear weapons:

Burgess says the key finding that Iran has not yet committed itself to nuclear weapons, contained in a controversial 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), is still valid.

“The bottom line assessments of the NIE still hold true,” he said. “We have not seen indication that the government has made the decision to move ahead with the program. But the fact still remains that we don’t know what we don’t know.”

General Burgess says it is difficult to ascertain the intentions of Iran’s leaders or the level of political infighting among the country’s leadership.

While clearly a walk-back of the 2007 NIE, Burgess’ point is still very significant. As MIT nonproliferation expert Jim Walsh has pointed out, the decision to move forward with nuclear weaponization is a serious one for any government, fraught with numerous political implications. It’s not simply a matter of Ayatollah Khamenei waking up one morning and saying “I think I’ll build a nuke today.”

Whether one terms them “Talmudic” or just “appropriately rigorous given the stakes,” these kinds of distinctions — research vs. development, design vs. build, nuclear weapon vs. weapons capability — will be really important to the debate going forward. As there was with Iraq, there is a highly organized movement afoot to pretend that none of this matters, that “the mullahs” have always intended to get their hands on a nuke, and that we should therefore prepare to bomb the hell out of Iran do what is necessary. We’ve already seen the beginning of an effort by some neocons to resurrect a “Team B” approach to hype the threat of Islamic extremism, ignoring the fact that such an approach, in all of its previous incarnations, generated nothing but staggeringly wrong conclusions about enemy capabilities, resulting is disastrously counterproductive policies.

I think Yglesias did a good job knocking back David Frum’s bizarre claim that the Team B hawks were right about the Soviet threat, but the fact that Frum thinks he can get away with such an assertion helps explain why some conservatives have been calling for a Team B revival, this time “to reassess the threat the U.S. faces from Islamic terrorist networks“:

“The Team B concept has been successful in previous administrations when fresh eyes were needed to provide the commander in chief with objective information to make informed policy decisions,” Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va. wrote in a letter to President Obama on Tuesday. “I believe it can work now, too.”

By June 1976, the middle rounds of the Cold War, the Soviet Union had exceeded the U.S. in several key weapons categories, leading an alarmed CIA director, George H.W. Bush, to create “Team B,” which included a number of future aides in the Reagan administration. Among them, a young arms control officer named Paul Wolfowitz and a former Pentagon official named William Van Cleave.

“We were all known as the so-called hawkish element of that time, but we let the conclusions stand on their own,” Van Cleave told Fox News. [...]

“Team B got it right,” said Frank Gaffney, founder and president of the Center for Security Policy and a Defense official in the Reagan administration

This is, to use a political science term, just plain nuts. As Fred Kaplan wrote in 2004, “In retrospect, the Team B report (which has since been declassified) turns out to have been wrong on nearly every point.” Or, as Larry Korb wrote, Team B was right about only one thing:

The CIA estimate was indeed flawed. In 1989, the agency published an internal review of the threat assessments from 1974 to 1986. The report concluded that the Soviet threat had been “substantially overestimated” every year. In 1978, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found that the selection of Team B members yielded a flawed composition of political views and biases. Consequently, the Team B analysis was deemed a gross exaggeration and completely inaccurate.

So the CIA had “substantially overestimated” the Soviet threat. The Team B assessment, on the other hand, was simply a work of science fiction. Or, to be more specific, a work of political advocacy, with the authors deriving conclusions of Soviet capabilities from their own apocalyptic beliefs about the Soviet ideology, and then using those deeply flawed conclusions to justify more defense spending and more foreign policy adventurism. Which is precisely what they would like to do again in regard to the threat of Islamic extremism.

I should also highlight this from Yglesias:

Incidentally, the whole [Team B] report is full of amusing accusations that the CIA has erred in its analysis of the Soviets by engaging in “mirror-imaging”—basically assuming that the Soviet state is prudent and risk-averse—by not recognizing the Russians’ inherent and insatiable thirst for conquest.

In December, I attended a screening of the pro-missile defense documentary “33 Minutes” (which warns of the nuclear missile threat of countries like Iran, which has neither nuclear weapons nor missiles capable of delivering them) hosted by the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies. During the post-film discussion, I suggested to FDD president Cliff May that the film had failed to demonstrate either that any nuclear weapons state would be inclined to give away to terrorists a weapon in which it had invested considerable resources and borne considerable international opprobrium to develop, or that a state like Iran would use a nuclear weapon itself, given the huge consequences to a regime that has placed the highest premium in self-preservation.

May responded — I kid you not — that unlike during the Cold War, where we were dealing with a rational enemy that could be deterred, it’s unclear that the Iranians are likewise rational. Furthermore, May said, there was a real danger of “mirror-imaging,” of assuming that our Iranian enemies think like we do.

Just in case you wondered how deep the revisionism goes.

Following the devastating earthquake in Haiti this week, many activists and politicians have heightened the cry for granting undocumented Haitians in the U.S. Temporary Protected Status (TPS). TPS is a longstanding cornerstone of U.S. immigration policy that is afforded to undocumented immigrants from a small number of federally-designated countries suffering armed conflicts, natural disasters, or other extraordinary circumstances until conditions improve. Many claim Haitians should’ve received TPS after four consecutive tropical cyclones in 2008 left 800 people dead, hundreds missing, and made the Haitian city of Gonaives “uninhabitable.”

However, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) seems to think that not only were undocumented Haitians undeserving of TPS status then, undocumented Haitians living in the U.S. should now be deported back to their country to specifically serve as much-needed relief workers. ABCNews reports:

“This sounds to me like open borders advocates exercising the Rahm Emanuel axiom: ‘Never let a crisis go to waste,’” Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, said in an e-mail message to ABCNews. “Illegal immigrants from Haiti have no reason to fear deportation but if they are deported, Haiti is in great need of relief workers and many of them could be a big help to their fellow Haitians.”

Members of King’s own party disagree. Though none of three GOP lawmakers is a co-sponsor of Rep. Luis Gutierrez’s (D-IL) comprehensive immigration reform bill, Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-FL), Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL) and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) have called on President Obama to grant TPS to undocumented Haitian immigrants, “a virtual lifeline for such an impoverished country.” Even the not too immigrant-friendly Mark Krikorian claims that TPS “was invented precisely for cases like Haiti today.” Dan Stein, director of the designated hate group Federation for American Immigration Reform, suggests coupling TPS for Haitians with the termination of TPS and the deportation of other nationals who he believes no longer “merit” it — an unusually generous recommendation for someone like Stein.

King blatantly ignores the fact that Haitian immigrants could probably do a lot more to rebuild Haiti by staying in the U.S. than by returning to the little that’s left of their decimated country. Allowing undocumented Haitians who are already living in the U.S. to legally work would help them earn the honest wages they need to send back money to their families and get their country back on its feet. Relief workers are usually individuals who voluntarily donate their skills, time, and resources to help victims of conflict and natural disasters. In other words, undocumented Haitians who are permitted to stay in the U.S. can provide “relief.” If deported, they are essentially forced into a situation in which they’d become victims who need more relief.

The Obama administration has agreed to halt the deportation of undocumented Haitians, though those currently held in detention centers will remain jailed unless TPS is granted. Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) points out, that “it makes no sense to tell Haitians already here that they can stay in the U.S. in the wake of the earthquake, but cannot legally support themselves.”

As the world learns the toll of Tuesday’s earthquake in Haiti, the U.S. military is once again leading the American response to a devastating natural disaster. By Wednesday, U.S. Air Force special operations personnel had secured the airport at Port-au-Prince, and about 5,000 soldiers and Marines from the 82nd Airborne Division and 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit are on their way to Haiti to assist the UN force there in providing security and support for relief efforts.

At sea, the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson and the Bataan amphibious group are en route loaded with helicopters to assist the relief effort. Coast Guard cutters and aircraft are already on the scene. Air Force airlifters have brought in personnel and supplies to the island.

Military involvement in disaster relief is nothing new. U.S. Southern Command alone has been involved in 14 disaster relief missions since 2005. More prominent were the post-tsunami relief effort in 2004-05 and earthquake recovery efforts in Pakistan in 2005.

Over the last decade or so, disaster relief has become a core — if rarely acknowledged — mission of the U.S. military. Debates over the future of the military have concentrated on disputes over what sort of enemy the United States might fight in the future — a high-tech conventional adversary or unconventional insurgents. While important, this debate obscures an equally critical role the U.S. military plays as the provider of global public goods like disaster relief.

Americans constantly fret over whether or we are or should be a global policeman. But they haven’t noticed that we have become, largely by default, a global fire department and ambulance service. For massive disasters like the Haiti earthquake or the tsunami, the U.S. military is the only entity that can organize the necessary air- and sea-lift to get to disaster stricken areas with sufficient relief aid in a quick enough time period. There are no substitutes for the U.S. Navy’s aircraft carriers, and the U.S. Air Force’s airlift fleet outstrips what’s available for contract.

Military planners may think that this sort of disaster relief capacity is a “lesser included contingency” — a capability that is a beneficial side-effect of current military strategy. While this assumption is for the most part correct, U.S. policymakers should start explicitly including disaster relief as a core mission of the U.S. military and factor it into their resource allocation decisions.

Unlike the nature and behavior of future adversaries, we can be certain that horrendous natural disasters will happen in the foreseeable future. The U.S. military currently takes the lead in responding to these tragedies, and policymakers should institutionalize this capability and make it even more effective in the future.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that it would push the doomsday clock back one minute, to six minutes to midnight, in recognition of President Obama’s efforts to combat nuclear proliferation and climate change. The clock was first introduced in 1947 by scientists concerned that the world was spiraling toward nuclear disaster. It has only been adjusted 18 times in the last 63 years and it is no doubt a useful device intended to indicate how close humanity is to annihilating itself. Reuters explains the Bulletin’s decision:

The group, which includes 19 Nobel laureates, said a key to the “new era of cooperation is a change in the U.S. government’s orientation toward international affairs brought about in part by the election of (U.S. President Barack) Obama.

Progress has definitely been made, but before we pat ourselves on the back it is worth noting that in 1947 the clock was set at 7 minutes to midnight, therefore, according to the clock, the times we live in now are more dangerous than they were 60 years ago. On the face of it this doesn’t make much sense. In 1947 nuclear weapons had been used just two years earlier, norms against their use did not exist, the Soviets were determined to develop nukes, the US was determined to build more, and tensions between the Soviet Union and the West were escalating. In other words, things were pretty scary.

While today there is no superpower arms race (in fact the US and Russia are on the cusp of further nuclear cuts), tensions between superpowers are minimal by comparison, and strong norms have developed against the use of nuclear weapons, the depressing reality is that a nuclear incident is perhaps more likely today. As President Obama explained in Prague last spring:

Today, the Cold War has disappeared but thousands of those weapons have not. In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up.

Today we are confronted by new nuclear dangers, stemming from the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the dangers of illicit terrorist groups gaining access to nuclear materials. The congressionally mandated bipartisan Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism concluded in a report published two years ago that a nuclear terror attack was likely within the next five years if nothing was done:

Unless the world community acts decisively and with great urgency, it is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction will be used in a terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the end of 2013.

Combating proliferation and nuclear terrorism is a real and serious problem and has been set at the top of the Obama foreign policy agenda, which is largely why the clock has been moved back. However, to move the clock back further the coming six months will be crucial.

The nuclear calendar is jam-packed and Obama will encounter test after test of his commitment to the nuclear agenda – starting with the effort to focus the the Nuclear Posture Review on terrorism. This will likely be followed by an effort to ratify a START follow-on treaty in the Senate. Meanwhile, there are two global nuclear conferences coming up. In April a global Nuclear Security Summit will be held in Washington with the goal of preventing the spread of nuclear materials. This will be followed in May by the NPT Review Conference, which is the treaty that underpins all international non-proliferation efforts. If all goes well, the Senate will take up the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, as well – a treaty that bans countries from testing nuclear weapons. Oh and then there are those easy cases of North Korea and Iran.

Make progress on all of these fronts and the atomic scientists might have to get a new clock.

The Washington Monthly has an interesting article on what happens when a state, in this case Texas, brings in a bunch of social conservatives with no relevant scholarly historical expertise to weigh in on the content of public school textbooks. In addition to the usual creationism intelligent design nonsense, you get stuff like this:

On the global front, [David] Barton and company [on the textbook advisory board] want textbooks to play up clashes with Islamic cultures, particularly where Muslims were the aggressors, and to paint them as part of an ongoing battle between the West and Muslim extremists. Barton argues, for instance, that the Barbary wars, a string of skirmishes over piracy that pitted America against Ottoman vassal states in the 1800s, were the “original war against Islamic Terrorism.”

Before you laugh at that, as you obviously should, understand that this is the exact argument offered by neoconservative historian and current Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren in his 2007 book Power, Faith, and Fantasy, which is probably where Barton picked it up. Here’s how Oren put it in an interview with journalist Michael Totten:

[M]any of the same issues that Americans are facing today in the Middle East were confronted by America’s founding fathers — Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, George Washington. For example, they had to confront the issue of state-sponsored terrorism in the Middle East. They had to face a threat to the United States, and decide whether to generate military power and then project that power thousands of miles from the United States. They had to decide whether to involve the United States in an open-ended and rather expensive bloody war in the Middle East. This was, of course, the Barbary War, America’s first overseas military engagement and America’s longest overseas military engagement. It lasted from 1783 to 1815. During the course of this engagement, as my book shows, the United States was confronting a jihadist state-sponsored terrorist network that was taking Americans hostage in the Middle East. It’s very similar to what is going on today.

See, the Barbary Pirates were Muslims. Al Qaeda, Hamas, Iran — also Muslims! Ergo, it’s all the same war and we must stand with Israel against the Barbary Pirates.

Unfortunately, this isn’t just a joke. As the article notes, “when it comes to textbooks, what happens in Texas rarely stays in Texas.”

The reasons for this are economic: Texas is the nation’s second-largest textbook market and one of the few biggies where the state picks what books schools can buy rather than leaving it up to the whims of local districts, which means publishers that get their books approved can count on millions of dollars in sales. As a result, the Lone Star State has outsized influence over the reading material used in classrooms nationwide, since publishers craft their standard textbooks based on the specs of the biggest buyers. As one senior industry executive told me, “Publishers will do whatever it takes to get on the Texas list.”

It seems like a really bad idea to let the market determine the history we teach our children.

Yesterday, the anti-immigrant group Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC) announced its endorsement of Massachusetts state Senator and GOP Senate candidate Scott Brown. ALIPAC commends Brown for opposing “amnesty” and for denying undocumented immigrants drivers licenses as a state legislator and his opposition to granting undocumented youth in-state tuition:

“Americans for Legal Immigration Political Action Committee (ALIPAC) is endorsing Scott Brown for U.S. Senate today due to his campaign’s focus on the issue of the illegal immigration and his opponent Martha Coakley’s support for Amnesty for illegal aliens.

Scott Brown has publicly stated he opposes Amnesty for illegal aliens while Coakley has state she supports Amnesty,” said William Gheen, president of ALIPAC. “His vote in opposition to Amnesty will be needed in a few weeks as President Obama, with Democrats in the Senate and House, and a handful of misguided Republicans attempt to pass new Amnesty legislation.”

ALIPAC states that it is making a donation to Brown’s campaign and is urging its 30,000 members to donate, volunteer, and vote for him. Meanwhile, the Southern Poverty Law Center points out that the group “is supported by” the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a designated hate group. ALIPAC claims to only support “candidates who make illegal immigration reduction a top priority.”

Brown’s challenger, Martha Coakley, is attacked by the group for having “clearly stated she supports Comprehensive Immigration Reform Amnesty.” It’s true that Coakley has pledged to “reform our system to ensure illegal immigrants a path to citizenship.” Yet while amnesty is defined as an action that unconditionally pardons a group of people without imposing any penalties, a path to citizenship usually implies an earned process of legalization which would involve registering with the government, submitting to background checks, paying taxes, learning English, and paying a fine. Coakley and Brown are in a tight race for the Senate seat of the late Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) — a champion of immigrant rights and a tireless advocate for comprehensive immigration reform.