One of the most successful Bush administration talking points in rousing public opinion to go to war with Iraq drew on exaggerated claims of Iraqi involvement with Al Qaeda — pulling at the emotional heartstrings that naturally go hand in hand with the memory of the tragic attack of 9/11. Again today, hawks pushing for harsher measures against Iran exaggerate ties between Iran and Al Qaeda. For example, Thomas Joscelyn of the Weekly Standard, whose editor has called for war with Iran, composed three articles in the past two months about Iran-Al Qaeda links.

But a batch of documents seized from Osama Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and analysis of them released today by West Point’s Combatting Terrorism Center (CTC) show a tense relationship between Iran and Al Qaeda — a far cry from breathless hawks’ pronouncements of “cooperation” and “affiliation” that is unencumbered by theological and ideological differences. Instead, the documents refer to Iranians as “Al Rafidah,” which CTC translators render in English as “the rejecters,” meaning the Shia Muslims whose sect dominates Iran. The documents, according to the CTC report (PDF) describe “an antagonistic relationship, largely based on indirect and unpleasant negotiations over the release of detained jihadis and their families.”

The declassified collection and analysis show that, at least from Al Qaeda’s perspective, some of the cooperation was accomplished through threats and coercion. One of the documents, a letter by close Bin Laden confidant Abu Abd al-Rahman Atiyyat Allah (who is known as Attiya and died in a U.S. drone strike last year), clearly lays out that Al Qaeda’s understanding of Iran’s compliance with demands — like freeing Al Qaeda operatives kept under house arrest in Iran — was accomplished not due to mutual ideological considerations (as some neoconservatives have proposed), but because of Al Qaeda’s direct affronts against Iran:

If `Atiyya’s explanation is credible, then the Iranians were not releasing jihadi prisoners to forge a bond or strengthen an existing one with al-Qa`ida. Rather, `Atiyya was of the view that “we believe that our efforts, which included escalating a political and media campaign, the threats we made, the kidnapping of their friend the commercial counselor in the Iranian Consulate in Peshawar, and other reasons that scared them based on what they saw [we are capable of], to be among the reasons that led them to expedite [the release of these prisoners].”

To be sure, Al Qaeda and Iran do have some interaction. The top U.S. intelligence official Director of National Intelligence James Clapper recently said Iran and Al Qaeda have a “marriage of convenience” because of mutual enmity for the U.S. Clapper even hypothesized that Iran could foreseeably be willing to use Al Qaeda as a proxy group against U.S. interests. But that description doesn’t jibe with a CTC description that calls for tossing out the old clichés:

Al-Qa`ida did not appear to have looked to Iran from the perspective that “the enemy of my (American) enemy is my friend,” but the group might have hoped that “the enemy of my (American) enemy would leave me alone.”

The documents must, we can reasonably conclude, constitute only a sliver of what the government must have on Al Qaeda; the releases today were 175 of 6,000 pages found in Abbottabad. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t valuable lessons in this small declassified batch. But don’t expect the Weekly Standard’s Thomas Joscelyn to address the lessons about Al Qaeda’s relationship with Iran: His piece on the released documents today didn’t even mention Iran.

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.

The charges against two people in an alleged Iranian plot to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the U.S. has given neoconservative think tanks — such as the America Enterprise Institute, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and the Heritage Foundation — yet another reason to promote military action against Iran. Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol even went so far as to gloat that “we have an engraved invitation” for war against Iran.

But not everyone is buying into the neoconservative push for yet another U.S. military operation in the Middle East. Rep. Presidential contender Ron Paul (R-TX) pushed back against the calls for war in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer yesterday:

BLITZER: But why do you think — because various Republicans and Democrats, Mike Rogers, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee — you know him — he believes that the evidence is strong [against the Iranians].

PAUL: I think it’s mostly war propaganda. They’ve been itching to go to war against Iran for a long, long time. This is exactly what they did leading up to the war in Iraq, and the danger was not there.

I don’t think the Iranians are that stupid. And yet, the people here right now are getting pretty excited about it.

[...]

People are suggesting we go to war over this. That is such a careless attitude.

Watch it:

Indeed, the drive for war has come from some of the same voices who had pushed for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein since the 1990s. And, much as in Iraq, inconvenient intelligence reports are overlooked by these hawks.

Today, the Washington Post’s Joby Warrick revealed that while Iran continues to stockpile enriched uranium, the nuclear program is “riddled with problems” as a combination of old equipment and inferior replacement machinery have resulted in a steady decline in enriched uranium output.

Warrick also reports that U.S. intelligence officials believe Iran is seeking the technical capability to produce a nuclear weapon but that there is little indication that the clerical leadership has firmly committed to making a bomb.

While much remains to be explained about both Iranian nuclear intentions and the alleged assassination plot against the Saudi ambassador, neoconservatives and their allies are using the latest diplomatic crisis with Tehran as yet another justification for preemptive military action.

The same day that news broke that — likey because of Iraq’s refusal to grant immunity to American forces and contractors — the U.S. scrapped plans to keep any troops in Iraq beyond the end of the year, Herman Cain once again put his foreign policy ignorance on full display.

In an exclusive interview with the Weekly Standard, ironically headlined “Cain Rips Obama’s ‘Dumb’ Foreign Policy,” the GOP presidential hopeful blamed President Obama for an Iraq policy resulting directly from decision made by by the George W. Bush administration. Cain first complained that Obama was telegraphing U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, then said he was “doing the same thing in Iraq“:

We’ve got 43,000 people still left over there. The Iraqis are making good progress with the help of those 43,000. So what does he do? He goes off and says we’re going to by the end of the year pull out 40,000 troops. I’m sorry if this is not politically correct, but that is a dumb thing to do.

Cain’s analysis here leaves out two crucial factors: that the deal to withdraw American troops from Iraq by the end of 2011 was made by the Bush administration in 2008, and that any change in that agreement would need to be acceded to by the government of Iraq.

The 2008 Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) (PDF) signed by the Bush administration and approved by Iraqi Prime Minsiter Nouri al-Maliki’s government says explicitly:

All the United States Forces shall withdraw from all Iraqi territory no later than December 31, 2011.

When the framework was signed, in fact, many critics wondered if Bush, in his last year in office, was tying the hands of a future administration to decide the course of the Iraq war on its own. But for all the American objections, the 2008 Bush-Maliki agreement did have something going for it that Cain also seems to ignore: that the Iraqi parliament agreed to it.

The sticking point in the decision to keep American troops in Iraq beyond 2012 or not was, again, something that a sovereign Iraq had a say in. Indeed, the New York Times reported this morning (as early hints had indicated) that the Obama administration’s decision to abandon plans to keep thousands of troops in Iraq was a result of the Iraqi government’s refusal to grant those troops immunity from Iraqi law — a operational condition the Pentagon said was unacceptable.

With the common GOP refrain that Obama needs to listen to his generals — Cain told the Standard he “would have asked the commanders on the ground” about Afghanistan — one wonders why, in the case of Iraq, Obama’s critics don’t recognize that he listened to the Pentagon about the necessity of immunity. Instead, they’re pinning Obama’s complete acquiescence to the Pentagon’s views, and restraints imposed by Bush’s SOFA and al-Maliki’s government, on the White House.

In the wake of charges against two people in an alleged Iranian plot to assassinate Saudia Arabia’s Ambassador to Washington, several neoconservative think-tankers both implicitly and explicitly called for the U.S. to engage in a war with Iran. Now, they’re being joined by neoconservative don Bill Kristol, the well-connected Weekly Standard editor behind innumerable hawkish neocon projects of the past 15 years.

In the October 24, 2011, issue of the Weekly Standard, Kristol writes:

It’s long since been time for the United States to speak to this regime in the language it understands—force.

And now we have an engraved invitation to do so. The plot to kill the Saudi ambassador was a lemon. Statesmanship involves turning lemons into lemonade.

So we can stop talking. Instead, we can follow the rat lines in Iraq and Afghanistan back to their sources, and destroy them. We can strike at the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and weaken them. And we can hit the regime’s nuclear weapons program, and set it back. Lest the administration hesitate to act out of fear of lack of support at home, Congress should consider authorizing the use of force against Iranian entities that facilitate attacks on our troops, against IRGC and other regime elements that sponsor terror, and against the regime’s nuclear weapons program.

What Kristol is talking about here is an all out war with Iran: attacking the Islamic Republic’s military, regime elements, and of course Iran’s nuclear program (which is alleged to be aimed at nuclear weapons, but has yet to be proven so — though don’t look for Kristol to make the distinction).

Sometime Kristol ally and fellow Standard writer Reuel Marc Gerecht, a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, made a similar call in the Wall Street Journal last week: “The White House needs to respond militarily to this outrage. If we don’t, we are asking for it.”

Gerecht called for attacking Iran in 2010 and Kristol, for his part, indicates that the latest alleged Iranian plot is little more than a pretext to start a war he’s had on his mind for a while: He writes that “it’s long since been time” to start a war with Iran.

Kristol was a central node in the long-running campaign for war with Iraq. He founded the Project For a New American Century, which advocated for war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1998 and said, less than two weeks after 9/11, that “even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power.” Kristol was also an advisory board member to the short-lived pressure group the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a hawkish outfit that worked in 2002 and 2003 to push Congress and the public for war.

Neoconservative Hudson Institute pundit Lee Smith seems very upset with the Obama administration. Reacting to retired Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ comments, reported by Jeffrey Goldberg, that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is an ungrateful ally, Smith wrote in the Weekly Standard that the Obama administration is to blame for Israel’s growing isolation. Smith, reading deep into the Pentagon’s motives, explains:

Gates is upset because, while the White House has provided the Israelis with “access to top-quality weapons, assistance developing missile-defense systems, high-level intelligence sharing,” the administration hasn’t gotten what it really wants in exchange—movement on the peace process, according to Goldberg. Of course, the Israelis haven’t gotten what they really want either—action on Iran—and the Pentagon’s munificence is partly intended to deter the Israelis from taking matters into their own hands.

Smith seems to think “action on Iran” can only possibly mean a military attack, revealing both his designs and what he thinks the Israelis want. But his analysis is nonetheless off the mark. In fact, the Obama administration has taken many wide-ranging steps both to slow down the Iranian nuclear program and find a solution that averts military action.

For instance, the United Nations Security Council, shepherded by the U.S. in a renewed era of Obama multilateral diplomacy, passed sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program in 2010. This May, a U.N. Experts Panel said the sanctions “are constraining Iran’s procurement of items related to prohibited nuclear and ballistic missile activity and thus slowing development of these programs.”

There’s also, as Smith notes, been great military and intelligence cooperation on Iran between the Obama administration and Netanyahu’s government. Smith generally mentions the cooperation in passing, but fails to address perhaps its most dramatic facet: when Israel and the U.S. worked together on the Stuxnet computer virus that damaged Iran’s nuclear centrifuges. Exactly how much is uncertain, but no serious analysts challenge that it did slow the program. After the Stuxnet cyber-attack was widely reported, legendary Israeli spy chief Meir Dagan pushed back Israel’s estimate for when Iran would get a bomb to 2015 at the earliest.

President Obama also changed the tone of discourse with Iran from the hawkish Bush administration approach that spurned talking and rejected cooperation, which led to even more sour relations. Negotiations over the nuclear program and other subjects have yet to yield fruits, but, according to Iranian dissident journalist Akbar Ganji, the Obama approach has helped in other ways. In 2010, Ganji spoke with CAP analyst Matt Duss and told him Obama’s shift opened up the political space that made possible the rise of the Green opposition movement:

Asked about the impact of President Obama’s approach to Iran, Ganji praised the change in rhetoric, and suggested that it helped create a favorable environment for the Iranian democracy movement. “Obama offered a dialog with the Iran,” Ganji said, “and this change in discourse immediately gave rise to that outpouring of sentiment against the Islamic Republic last year.”

There can be little doubt that Israel wishes for regime change in Iran, yet giving breathing space to the most broad indigenous opposition movement to emerge in Iran since the fall of the Shah in 1979 doesn’t seem to be enough for Smith.

If by “action,” Smith is limiting himself to talking about bombing Iran, he ought to drop the euphemism and say so. And, indeed, the Obama administration has not gone that route, probably because analysts — even military analysts at pro-Israel think tanks — widely agree that such a course would be dangerous and potentially disastrous. Only neocons seem to disagree.