In a bid to lend a patina of “bipartisanship” to its ideas, the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) has made former Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) the co-chair of its newest foreign policy initiative. The move has been met with raised eyebrows, as progressives have not considered Joe Lieberman an authentic representative of their foreign policy positions for quite some time, if they ever did in the first place.

Lieberman will co-chair the new “American Internationalism Project” with former Senator John Kyl (R-AZ). As the project is intended to “rebuild and reshape a bipartisan consensus around American global leadership and engagement,” Lieberman’s participation is aimed at blunting the perception that anything coming out of AEI is a dogmatically Republican plan. AEI generally hews to a hardline neoconservative standard on foreign policy; its staff in the area includes former Bush Administration officials John Bolton, Richard Perle, and Marc Thiessen.

Lieberman’s dogged support for George W. Bush’s foreign policy played a critical role in his in 2006 Democratic primary defeat (he subsequently won as an independent). endorsed arch-hawk John McCain over Barack Obama for President in 2008 on grounds that McCain was “the strongest candidate on security of all the candidates running.” Indeed, Lieberman’s views are far closer to AEI’s than they are to the progressive mainstream, as a quick survey of his particular positions will show:

1. Iraq. Lieberman himself credits his vociferous support for the Iraq War for making him “persona non grata with the Democrats.” As recently as 2011, Lieberman defended his vote to invade Iraq, saying “I believe that the evidence is very clear that [Saddam] was developing weapons of mass destruction.” During the height of the war debate in 2007, Lieberman accused war critics of committing “a kind of harassment” and being “invested in a narrative of retreat and defeat.”

2. Torture. Lieberman voted against legislation banning waterboarding in 2008 on grounds that it wasn’t torture. Because the torture technique “has a mostly psychological impact on people,” Lieberman argued, “we ought to be able to use [it],” adding that President Obama’s decision to release the Bush torture memos “help[ed] our enemies.” Though he once signed a letter that included a clause condemning waterboarding, it is unclear how he reconciled that with his long record of support for the practice.

3. Iran. When asked point-blank if he was endorsing an attack on Iran during a 2007 interview, Lieberman said “I am… We’ve got to use our force and to me that would include taking military action.” More recently, he has said a strike on Iran is highly likely, and that, in its aftermath, we should “hope and pray that there will be a regime change.”

4. Israel. Though Israeli leaders have praised Obama’s policy towards their country (even awarding him a prestigious medal), Lieberman has been persistent critic of the President’s policy — from the right. Lieberman denied that settlements were “a major impediment to peace” and suggested that Obama’s foreign policy “has encouraged Israel’s enemies.”

And it’s not just national security policy – Lieberman has tacked to the right on a variety of domestic policy issues as well, ranging from tax cuts to health care to energy.

This is the second of a two-part report on the American Enterprise Institute’s growing involvement with Islamophobic ideologues. Part one is here.

As a sitting president in 2003, George W. Bush showered the American Enterprise Institute with praise at gala dinner and, more recently, Mitt Romney enlisted the über-hawkish former Bush administration diplomat — and AEI scholar — John Bolton as an adviser.

Lately, though, AEI’s influential and often respectable scholarship is becoming involved with a fringe undercurrent of right-wing anti-Muslim bigotry. This month, anti-Muslim AEI scholar Ayaan Hirsi Ali delivered a speech airing Norwegian anti-Muslm terrorist Anders Breivik’s grievance that censorship of his views drove him to violence (see part one of this report). Now, ThinkProgress has learned The David Horowitz Freedom Center, named for right-wing activist David Horowitz, is organizing a trip to Turkey featuring AEI’s Michael Rubin and Robert Spencer, an Islamophobic blogger featured in the Center For American Progress report “Fear, Inc..”

According to a flier for the trip [PDF], participants can pay $4,650 (not including airfare) to spend ten days in Turkey with Rubin, Spencer, and journalist Claire Berlinksi. The flier reads:

Where Turkey goes in the next decade may well determine the future of the Middle East and the future of Europe. [...] Today, in 2011, it stands athwart history once again, as Turkey decides whether or not to throw off the secularism that has been its hallmark since the 1920’s and return to the rule of Islamic law.

Rubin is widely considered a mainstream pundit. Before his work at AEI, Rubin served in government during the George W. Bush administration, both in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans and the Coalition Provisional Authority, the American-ruled governing authority in occupied Iraq.

Rubin has long maintained relationships with Islamophobes. For five years, Rubin edited the Middle East Quarterly, a journal put out by Daniel Pipes‘ Middle East Forum. And Rubin appears to have contributed to Horowitz’s Frontpage web magazine several times between 2004 and 2006. Over the past year, he has appeared five times on far-right Islamophobe Frank Gaffney’s radio show.

As for Robert Spencer, his record of frequent rantings and collaborations with notorious Islamophobe Pamela Geller speaks for itself (Spencer and his blog were cited 162 times in Anders Breivik’s manifesto). Spencer has previously questioned the loyalty of a top C.I.A. counter-terror official due to his Muslim faith and once declared that “traditional Islam is not moderate or peaceful.”

AEI declined to comment on Rubin’s trip to Turkey with Spencer. But a public affairs official at AEI wrote seperately to ThinkProgress, “AEI does not take institutional positions on policy issues. When our scholars speak, they speak for themselves.”

When asked about the trip by ThinkProgress, Rubin said, “My lectures will discuss contemporary Turkish politics.” In a separate query, ThinkProgress asked Rubin if he felt comfortable participating in such a forum with someone who holds views like those of Robert Spencer. He responded:

I don’t know anyone with whom I do not have serious disagreements on one issue or another. I’ll defend my own writing and research. The best person to ask about Robert Spencer’s views would be Robert Spencer and the best person to talk about Claire Berlinski’s analysis would be Claire Berlinski.

Hirsi Ali’s remarks about Norwegian anti-Muslim terror attacks, Rubin’s jaunt to Turkey with Robert Spencer, and even Romney adviser John Bolton’s dalliances with Spencer and Geller, highlight AEI’s relationship with these extremist views and raises questions about whether bigoted anti-Muslim sentiment should hold even a tangential place in the Washington discourse.

This is part one of a two-part report on the American Enterprise Institute’s growing involvement with Islamophobic ideologues. Part two is here.

In a speech earlier this month, a scholar at an influential think tank and flagship of contemporary Washington conservatism, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), gave voice to one of the justifications for Norwegian anti-Muslim terrorist Anders Breivik‘s attacks, explaining that Breivik said “he had no other choice but to use violence” because his fringe views were “censored.” While accepting a prize this month from the German multimedia company Axel Springer, Somali-born Dutch AEI scholar Ayaan Hirsi Ali spoke on the “advocates of silence” — those she admonishes for purportedly stifling criticisms of radical Islamic extremism.

In the speech, flagged by the website Loonwatch, Hirsi Ali noted that she herself appeared in Breivik’s 1,500-word manifesto (Breivik reprinted a European right-wing article saying Hirsi Ali should win the Nobel Peace Prize). While she denounced Breivik’s views as an “abhorrant” form of “neo-fascism,” she then postulated that Breivik was driven to violence because his militant anti-multicultural views were not given a fair airing in the public discourse.

After speaking about how the “advocates of silence” repress discussion about radical Islamism, Hirsi Ali said:

Fourthly and finally, that one man who killed 77 people in Norway, because he fears that Europe will be overrun by Islam, may have cited the work of those who speak and write against political Islam in Europe and America – myself among them – but he does not say in his 1500 page manifesto that it was these people who inspired him to kill. He says very clearly that it was the advocates of silence. Because all outlets to express his views were censored, he says, he had no other choice but to use violence.

Watch a clip of the speech:

Hirsi Ali’s exclamation that the “advocates of silence” stifle discourse so effectively that Breivik was driven last July to kill 77 people — 69 slaughtered at a summer youth camp — is contradicted even by her own speech. In closing, Hirsi Ali said, “The good news is that recently the leaders of established conservative parties in Europe have broken the pact of silence,” citing comments against multiculturalism by the leaders of Germany, France and the United Kingdom. Furthermore, Hirsi Ali has herself been a Dutch parliamentarian, a frequent contributor to mainstream U.S. and international publications, and author of a New York Times best-selling autobiography. Dutch anti-Muslim politician Geert Wilders enjoys considerable success in Hirsi Ali’s own Netherlands. Views against multiculturalism don’t get censored, though some of the most bigoted ideologies are often driven to the margins in free societies.

Neither AEI nor Ayaan Hirsi Ali replied to requests for comments about her talk. But a public affairs official at AEI wrote to ThinkProgress, “AEI does not take institutional positions on policy issues. When our scholars speak, they speak for themselves.”

In her speech, Hirsi Ali said that “to speak out against radical Islamism is to be condemned as an Islamophobe.” But as detailed in the Center For American Progress’s report on Islamophobia, “Fear, Inc.,” the Islamophobe label applies not to those who rail against “radical Islam,” but rather against Islam as a whole. Not surprisingly, Hirsi Ali is herself in this latter category — yet another indication that Islamophobic views are not censored. In a 2007 interview with Reason Magazine, Hirsi Ali called for Islam to be “defeated.” The interviewer asked: “Don’t you mean defeating radical Islam?” Hirsi Ali replied bluntly: “No. Islam, period. Once it’s defeated, it can mutate into something peaceful. It’s very difficult to even talk about peace now. They’re not interested in peace.”

The American Enterprise Institute has a new report [PDF] outlining the challenges of containing and deterring a nuclear Iran. But while the report claims to be looking down the road to the imminent scenario of a nuclear weapons-possessing Iran, the neoconservative authors push an agenda of increased military spending justified by what they questionably claim will be a new and unparalleled containment challenge.

For starters, the presumption that “sound American strategy thus requires assuming that Iran will have a weaponized nuclear capability when the next president takes office in January 2013″ manages to completely ignore most intelligence estimates about Iran’s nuclear program. AEI’s report offers no evidence of this claim. To construct a nuclear weapon by 2013 would require Iran to have already begun producing highly enriched uranium (HEU). Neither the IAEA nor any other reputable intelligence estimates have made this assertion. Moreover, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said in February that the U.S. government believes that it would take Iran a “few years” to acquire enough HEU for one nuclear weapon, “if it chooses to do so.”

Furthermore, the authors elide or downplay the existing efforts to slow Iran’s nuclear program. Five years after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad anounnced plans to deploy a new generation of indigenous centrifuges, Iran hasn’t brought a full cascade of the devices online. Various other technical problems, including the Stuxnet computer virus, have plagued the Iranian program. None of this could have happened without the multilateral sanctions regime engineered by the White House. But harsher measures — such as those targeting the central bank — could threaten the international coalition against Iran.

The rest of the report relies on repeated calls for increased defense spending — a topic near and dear to the defense hawks at AEI — and repeating the claim that Iran will be particularly difficult to contain because Iranian leadership is irrational or suicidal. Despite the factual weakness of the “martyr state” myth, the report argues:

It is likely that the Iranians value nuclear weapons not only for their deterrent purposes but also, if delivered by a suicide terrorist, for the intoxicating promise of devastating effect and potential deniability. [...]

Questions about the rationality or apocalyptic visions of the current clerical leadership or Ahmadinejad must be considered as a reimagining of the past.

There is little evidence that Iran’s leadership is suicidal or irrational but this myth is an important argument in the toolkit for hyping fears about a nuclear Iran. It should come as no surprise that two of the report’s authors — Danielle Pletka and Thomas Donnelly — were signatories on Project for The New American Century (PNAC) letters devoted to pushing for regime change in Iraq by force. The brain trust behind the invasion of Iraq is now warning of an “existential worry” (whatever that means) to the U.S. and its allies in the region. And much like in the buildup to war with Iraq, overstating the threat and misrepresenting facts on the ground is the first step in mobilizing support for incautious militaristic foreign policies.

At a time of continuing economic crisis in the U.S. and around the world, President Obama’s administration has amassed a record of successes in national security. Irrespective of controversies over some of the policies, Obama has pursued perceived threats in a broadened, borderless drone war; engaged in a NATO war to protect civilians in Libya; and is on the verge of ending one ground war and planning to wind down another even longer one. But this is just not good enough for some conservatives, who insist on portraying Obama as a stereotypical lily-livered liberal afraid to indefinitely continue large-scale U.S. military commitments abroad. The chosen line of attack relies on the now-commonplace trope that Obama doesn’t listen to his generals when formulating his security strategies.

The latest salvo in this assault comes from neoconservative legacy Fred Kagan, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Kagan concludes a Weekly Standard piece — “The President & the Generals” — by writing:

Under no circumstances should the president of the United States ever take an important military decision simply because a uniformed officer has recommended it. But, when the president does overrule his commanders, he had better have an extremely good reason not only to reject their advice but to prefer his own wisdom. And if he finds himself doing it repeatedly, he would do well to consider what the source of the problem really is.

Given most of the Republican presidential field’s shaky understanding of civilian control of the military, Kagan’s “under no circumstances” caveat is welcome. Nonetheless, Kagan’s implication here is obvious: the real “source of the problem” is Obama himself. Kagan, then, would do well consider for himself that there’s been another overarching problem affecting government decisions over the past three years: a financial crisis of epic proportions that has, is, and will likely continue to bear on decisions made by a commander-in-chief, though, crucially, not on commanders on the ground. And while military commanders are charged with making tactical recommendations and informing on military strategy, the president decides the country’s overall national security strategy, a concept Kagan seems to have overlooked.

Retired Gen. David Petraeus, who, in 2010, won AEI’s prestigious Kristol Award, hinted at such disparity between the purviews of a president and his generals when he explained the chain-of-command at a confirmation hearing to his current post atop the Central Intelligence Agency. Petraeus, at the time the top U.S. military officer for Afghanistan, said:

[A]t every level of the chain of command above me there are additional considerations, and each person above me, all the way up to and including the president has a broader purview and broader considerations that are brought to bear. The president alone [is] in the position of evaluating all those different considerations, including certainly those of the commander on the ground but also many others as well in reaching his decision.

Petraeus lamented that he wasn’t getting everything he wanted from a military standpoint, but acknowledged that he was “talking about small differences” and that the situation was “understandable in the sense that there are broader considerations beyond just those of a military commander.” He went on to say that no military commander gets everything they want:

The fact is that there has never been a military commander in history who has had all the forces he would like to have. Or all the time. Or all the money. Or all the authorities. Or, nowadays, all the bandwidth.

So, if Obama “finds himself [making different decisions than his generals] repeatedly,” that isn’t quite the extraordinary situation Kagan posits.