Neocons and right-wing war hawks have been attacking their Republican colleagues recently for expressing doubts about carrying on the wars in Libya and particularly Afghanistan. The neocons have alleged that Republicans calling for withdrawal from Afghanistan are drifting toward “isolationism.”

That fight was on full display on CNN last night when neocon Wall Street Journal oped writer Bret Stephens took on Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) for questioning the U.S. presence in Afghanistan. “The grownups have left the field of the Republican Party,” Stephens said mockingly. Chaffetz fired back, saying the neocons are presenting a plan to stay in Afghanistan “forever”:

HOST CHRISTINE ROMANS: Congressman, a decade and a trillion dollars, there are those who say we risk throwing away great progress if we pull back too quickly and too soon for political reasons.

CHAFFETZ: Well, there’s always an argument to stay there forever. There are those of us that believe a good conservative position is to redefine the mission. In fact, one of the failings I think the Obama administration has is that it has not defined what success is. [...] I just don’t think we should be there with our men and women and I don’t want to pay for it.

Watch it:

Given that Chaffetz mentioned that he didn’t want to pay for the war in Afghanistan, it’s worth it to point out that the Pentagon said yesterday that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and homeland security operations have cost the United States $1 trillion so far, which, according to one analyst, “doesn’t tell you is how much money has been appropriated by Congress, which is $1.2 trillion.” Other estimates have concluded that by 2021, the total cost of the wars will have exceeded $2 trillion. Indeed, when President Obama was deliberating the Afghanistan troop surge in November, 2009, he reportedly “received a private budget memo estimating that an expanded presence [in Afghanistan] would cost $1 trillion over 10 years, roughly the same as his health care plan.”

After the bi-partisan effort to defund the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) over the winter failed — at least for the 2011 fiscal year — two Republicans are renewing attacks on the Congressionally-chartered and -funded organization with a new approach.

In late May, Reps. Chip Cravaack (R-MN) and Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) introduced an amendment to the Defense Authorization Act that would go beyond defunding — it would repeal the 1984 law that established USIP.

So far, the American Enterprise Institute’s resident moderate Norman Ornstein has issued the measure’s harshest denunciation, writing in Roll Call last week that the pair of Congressmen had won the “dubious distinction” of undertaking the “Most Head-in-the-Sand Neanderthal Effort of the Year”:

[T]his is not some collection of pointy-headed peaceniks — USIP has been engaged in serious and risky work, hand in hand with our military, in Iraq, Afghanistan and other trouble spots. It is engaged in mediation, nation building and other efforts to reduce conflict and save lives.

Defenders like Ornstein frame the debate over USIP’s existence in terms of national security. Indeed, as Rep. Mike Honda (D-CA) and USIP president Richard Solomon point out, USIP is active in conflict areas where the U.S. is fighting wars — and others where it is not — often doing jobs that direct work for the U.S. government won’t allow.

Chaffetz and Rep. Anthony Wiener (D-NY) led the effort to defund USIP last winter. Both lawmakers wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed in February calling for defunding, but labeled USIP a “fine think tank.” Chaffatz and Wiener went on:

The USIP has a role to play in our modern world, but the level of taxpayer support that this private organization receives is excessive…. Although there have been no oversight hearings on the USIP since 1985, the organization’s value is not in question — only its need for taxpayer funding is.

Since Chaffatz signed this op-ed too, he should explain what changed since the time of its writing. After all, as February’s defunding battle shows, USIP can have its taxpayer funding taken away while allowing it to retain its Congressional charter. This latest episode seems like a mere work-around for defunding after the bid failed through to make it through the final budget for the 2011 fiscal year.

In recent days, the right has worked themselves into hysteria over the TSA’s new, more invasive screening protocols, with right-wing media magnate Matt Drudge breathlessly hyping the latest video of an intrusive pat down, and Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips demanding the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. While the TSA has promised to revise the methods to make them less intrusive, many conservatives have turned to one of their favorite solutions to the national security threat de jour: ethnic profiling.

In separate interviews on the radio show of the far-right birther website World Net Daily, Reps. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) and Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) both called for profiling as a means to better address the threat to air travel. Chaffetz specifically advocated for ethnic and religious profiling, though he said those traits shouldn’t be “solely” considered:

HOST: Is [profiling] something that you would advocate?

CHAFFETZ: Absolutely. Well, now that it’s become an outrage and people say, well we still need to secure an airline, how do we do that? Two things need to happen. One is profiling. Not based solely on someone’s religion or based solely on someone’s race.

In an interview today, Hoekstra — who is the ranking Republican member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence — also gave an passionate endorsement of profiling:

HOEKSTRA: The words profiling are toxic from a political standpoint. But the bottom-line is there are certain parameters that you can use in profiling that would narrow the scope of who you really target. … But it only makes sense to do some type of profiling so that you can focus the resources where they need to be focused. So we should consider it. … Sure, profiling is okay. You know, you do it everywhere in life — it only makes sense. You just need to make sure you do it right.

Listen to a compilation of Chaffetz and Hoekstra:

While these GOP lawmakers provide legitimacy, as Media Matters notes, conservative media figures have led the effort to use “the public backlash against airport security screenings as an opportunity to renew their calls for racial profiling.” Conservative Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer lamented, “The only reason we continue to do [pat downs] is that people are too cowed to even question the absurd taboo against profiling.” On Fox and Freinds last week, in his typically simple fashion, host Steve Doocy commented, “I like the idea of the profiling.” Meanwhile, right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh said, “There’s a simple way to stop this stuff; it’s called profiling.” And in an editorial, the conservative Washington Times complained, the “TSA believes an 80-year-old grandmother deserves the same level of scrutiny at an airport terminal checkpoint as a 19-year-old male exchange student from Yemen.”

As is the case with Chaffetz and Hoekstra, the conservative argument is predicated on the notion that profiling is “enormously successful,” as Fox News host Sean Hannity put it. But in reality, this is not the case. Aside from the obvious civil rights concerns with ethnic or religious profiling, the practice is actually “probably worse than random screening in the real world” at defeating terrorists, a mathematical analysis published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science last year found.

Indeed, recent terror suspects undermine the notion that terrorists “all look alike.” Shoe bomber Richard Reid was a white, Jamaican-born British citizen; underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutalla was Nigerian; and “Jihad Jane” Colleen Renee LaRose, who was arrested in March on charges that she wanted to “wage violent jihad,” was a “petite” blond-haired, blue-eyed 46-year-old American woman.

Because of the problems in creating a mold, profiling “diverts precious law enforcement resources away from investigations of individuals…who have been linked to terrorist activity by specific and credible evidence…[and] ignores the possibility that someone who does not fit the profile may be engaged in terrorism.”

If conservatives don’t believe the data, they need only ask former Bush Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who has called profiling “misleading and, arguably, dangerous.”

This afternoon, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), a member of the House Government Oversight Committee, appeared on MSNBC’s The Dylan Ratigan Show to talk about what he feels should be the GOP’s legislative agenda.

At one point, Chaffetz started to list off a number of investigations — like probing the Countrywide “Friends Of Angelo” scandal — he wanted to conduct in the House of Representatives now that Republicans are in control of that body. Ratigan asked the congressman how “far back” he thinks is “appropriate” for these investigations. He noted that Chaffetz had not listed a “torture investigation.” Chaffetz responded by saying that that “may be on the list as well. I’m not afraid of going after the Bush administration”:

RATIGAN: How far back do you think is appropriate? Because the one thing that’s not on this list is for instance a torture investigation.

CHAFFETZ: Well, it may be on the list as well. I’m not afraid of going after the Bush administration. I wasn’t brought here by the establishment. When I ran for congressman in 2008, I’m just a freshman year, George W. Bush, Orrin Hatch, and Bob Bennett, three Republicans, they campaigned against me. So I don’t mind going back and looking at ‘em. So I don’t have any hestitation whatsoever.

Watch it:

In endorsing investigations of the Bush Administration’s use of torture, Chaffetz is advocating a position that the Obama administration has thus far refused to take. Just this week, the Justice Department announced that it will not pursue any sort of criminal charges against officials who ordered the destruction of CIA tapes depicting torture of terrorist suspects during the Bush Administration. In an interview with NBC’s Matt Lauer that aired last night, former President George W. Bush repeatedly admitted to authorizing waterboarding, a practice that is illegal.