Edward Luttwak -- a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and author of many best-selling high concept treatments of war, strategy, and the international economy -- is a turbo-charged intellect wrapped in the garb of a John Le Carre-esque spy. I always feel like I'm learning secrets from him.

I run into him in the most unusual places -- whether it is an Okinawa kenjinkai culture and sake-tasting evening or hanging out with Cuban, German, French, Israeli, and Polish intelligence officials -- along with Richard Perle -- in Caen, France -- where Eddie Luttwak was there not for the company but to get his itch for Caen's shellfish scratched. He is a brilliant conceptualizer who sees through problems and twists and flips the component pieces in ways that reveal important realities. His "process" often makes his listeners squirm.

I think Luttwak has quite important insights into our mess in the Middle East, and I'm inviting TWN readers to a meeting I'm chairing with him tomorrow, Thursday, in Washington, DC at the New America Foundation -- 1630 Connecticut Avenue, NW, 7th Floor -- from noon til 2:00 p.m. If you would like to attend, just zap me an email at steve@thewashingtonnote.com.

His topic is "What to Do About I-rak and I-ran? How New Divisions in the Middle East offer the U.S. an Opportunity to Regain Influence in the Region."

Just for fun, here are the first two paragraphs and last two paragraphs of two articles that Luttwak has recently published -- one on Iraq and one on Iran:

To Help Iraq, Let it Fend for Itself

New York Times, 6 February 2007

The sooner President Bush can get his extra troops for a "surge" in Iraq, the sooner he will be able to announce that all American troops are coming home because of the inevitable failure of the Iraqi government to "live up to its side of the bargain." In fact, in the run-up to the surge proposal, it is unlikely that there was any real two-sided bargaining before Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki was induced to issue promises -- particularly in terms of government troops taking on Shiite militias -- that he cannot possibly fulfill. Mr. Maliki, it seems, simply agreed to whatever was asked of him, to humor the White House and retain American support for a little while longer.

For the Iraqi Army and police to disarm the Shiite militias, the prime minister would have to be a veritable Stalin or at least a Saddam Hussein, able to terrorize Iraqi soldiers and policemen into obedience. Mr. Maliki, of course, has no such authority over Iraqi soldiers or police officers; indeed he has little authority over his own 39-person cabinet, whose members mostly represent sectarian parties with militias of their own. . .

. . .Were the United States to disenage, both Arab Sunnis and Shiites would have to take responsiblity for their own security (as the Kurds have been doing all along). Where these three groups are not naturally separated by geography, they would be forced to find ways to stabilize relations with each other. That would most likely involve violence as well as talks, and some forcing of civilians from their homes. But all this is happening already, and there is no saying which ethno-religious group would be most favored by a reduction of the United States footprint.

One reason for optimism on that score is that the violence itself has been separating previously mixed populations, reducing motives and opportunities for further attacks. That is how civil wars can burn themselves out. In any case, it is time for the Iraqis to make their own history.

And another piece this week that focuses on Iran:

Persian Shrug

Wall Street Journal, 27 February 2007

Almost everyone in Washington agrees that Iran is the big winner in the Middle East power competition, and the U.S. the big loser. Instead of the irremediably hostile Taliban, Iran now has a friendly Afghan government on its eastern border. Rather than having to face Saddam Hussein's regime, Iran has nothing to fear from an Iraqi government dominated by friends and obedient clients, many of whom lived as protected exiles in Iran for 20 years or more.

Having crushed Tehran's enemies, the U.S. finds itself under attack by Iran's rulers, who no longer have to worry about defending their own borders and can instead challenge American interests all over the Middle East, and as far away as Venezuela. At the same time, Iran continues to build facilities to process, gasify and enrich uranium, in spite of the International Atomic Energy Agency and solemn resolutions by the U.N. Security Council. . .

. . .Viewed from the inside, Iran is hardly the formidable power that some see on the outside. The natural outcome of increasing popular opposition to extremist rulers, of widening ethnic divisions and bitter Sunni resentment of Shia oppression is a breakup. Certainly there is no reason why Iran should be the only multinational state to resist the nationalist separatism that destroyed the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, divided Belgium in all but name and decentralized Spain and even the United Kingdom, along with other states large and small.

Once again, there is a better alternative to detente with a repulsive regime, and that is to be true to the Wilsonian tradition of American foreign policy by encouraging the forces of national liberation within Iran.

Should be an interesting session tomorrow.

-- Steve Clemons

(Former Secretary of State Warren Christopher, Washington Moroccan Club President Hassan Samrhouni, and Former Secretary of State James A. Baker III)

The University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs -- of which Philip Zelikow used to serve as Director before becoming Condi Rice's Counselor -- has announced the creation of a bipartisan commission that "will examine how the Constitution allocates the powers of beginning, conducting, and ending war."

Former Secretaries of State James A. Baker III and Warren Christopher will co-chair this enterprise.

Regarding non-traditional wars, the Miller Center announcement states:

When armed conflict is looming, debates about separation of powers and the uncertainty they often generate can impair relations among the branches of government, cast doubt on the legitimacy of government action, and prevent focused attention on policy. Armed conflicts with non-state actors and other non-traditional "wars," as well as the courts' involvement in war powers questions, make the Commission's work relevant.

It will be important for the Commission to deal squarely and up-front with non-traditional wars as well as the ability of the President to issue "findings" ordering covert military action, military actions that are not officially called wars but often seem worse, and conflict conducted through proxies armed, funded, and virtually commanded by the White House and Pentagon. This group, it it is to be taken seriously, needs to consider the "privatization of war" and the many players -- not just on the other side of conflict but on our own side -- that are mercenaries hired to perform military and security functions.

Traditional war is not something about which there should be much concern on the Constitutional front. What is worrisome in 21st century conflict and Constitutional legitimacy are all the gray areas that have emerged and which power centers are exploiting.

On the Commission will be:

Former Secretary of State James A. Baker III co-chair

Former Secretary of State Warren Christopher co-chair

Former U.S. Senator Slade Gorton

Former Member of Congress Lee Hamilton

Former US Trade Representative Carla Hills

Former Secretary of the Army John O. Marsh Jr.

Former US Attorney General Edwin Meese III

Former Chief Judge of the US Court of Appeals Abner Mikva

Former Commander-in-Chief of the US Atlantic Fleet J. Paul Reason

Former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft

Woodrow Wilson School/Princeton University Dean Anne-Marie Slaughter

Brookings Institution President Strobe Talbott

Doris Kearns Goodwin will serve as "historical adviser" to the Baker-Christopher Commission, and Andrew Dubill, Juliana Bush, and W. Taylor Reveley IV will staff the project.

I had the pleasure of participating in a small dinner hosted by the Stanley Foundation on Monday evening with featured speaker Philip Zelikow, who offered a fascinating talk about the limits and opportunities of deployed force and power in today's world. I get the sense from his speech, which I may write about another time, that Zelikow is crafting a major article informed by his experience as one of the key players in the Bush administration's national security bureaucracy on what works and what doesn't when it comes to state-building, wars, and transnational institution building.

As a friendly nudge to the project, i think that the Baker-Christopher Commission is making a mistake by not inviting Zelikow to serve as one of its members. While I don't agree with all of his views, Zelikow is one of the few power players in this G.W. Bush era who has thought deeply about America's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and how these have seriously shaken and, in some cases, confused and bewildered legal experts whose frames were guided by experience with more normal, classic wars than we are engaged in today.

Two other good resources for the Commission would be the incumbent Legal Adviser to Condi Rice, John B. Bellinger III, and the previous occupant of his job, William Howard Taft IV, who have both had to struggle with the legal mess of these wars -- and who both did battle with Cheney's staff on everything from authorizations for war and the treatment (and potential torture) of prisoners.

-- Steve Clemons

I'm getting a lot of "official statements" from U.S. Senators in my in-box all of a sudden commenting on the Bush administration's change of heart regarding attending official meetings with representatives from the governments of Iran and Syria.

This could be a pre-meeting for a true regional conference that draws together all of the key stakeholders in and around Iraq, and that is a key pillar of the Iraq Study Group Report's "New Diplomatic Offensive" proposal.

Time will tell whether this is meaningless flirtation -- or whether this is a carefully crafted "confidence building measure" that could lead to more meaningful engagement between the US and Iran over outstanding issues -- and between the US and Syria.

This has the markings of European and Saudi stage direction.

This writer has reasons to suspect that European Union High Commissioner for Common Foreign and Security Policy Javier Solana and National Security Advisor to the Saudi King Prince Bandar bin Sultan have been moving chess pieces in consultation with departing US Ambassador to Iraq and incoming US Ambassador to the United Nations Zalmay Khalilzad to make this "neighbors meeting" work.

This is a necessary but not sufficient first step in re-establishing a new and more stable equilibrium of interests in the Middle East.

Here is what Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE) says about the "deal" to possibly deal:

"This is an important diplomatic initiative taken by the Iraqi government. We will not achieve peace and stability in Iraq without a regional framework that includes Iran and Syria. This conference can be an important first step towards creating that framework," Hagel said.

Here is presidential candidate and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joe Biden's statement on the White House's reverse course:

"The Administration is right to reverse itself and engage Iran and Syria on Iraq. Right now, they're a big part of the problem, but they have an interest in becoming part of the solution to prevent chaos in Iraq.

I hope this means that clearer heads in the Administration are beginning to prevail. If the conference is to have any impact on the sectarian violence in Iraq, it must enlist the support of Iraq's neighbors for a political settlement that would decentralize Iraq and give Kurds, Shi'ites and Sunnis control over their daily lives. We don't need a meeting for the sake of meeting -- there has to be a clear plan and purpose."

I have not been able to find statements as yet from Christopher Dodd, Bill Richardson, Dennis Kucinich, Mitt Romney, John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Sam Brownback, or other presidential hopefuls.

In lieu of a statement from New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson though is a sensible op-ed that appeared today in the Washington Post promoting diplomatic engagement with Iran over "chest-beating and dangerous brinkmanship."

Stay tuned. This just might be a beginning of a new, promising trend. But don't over-invest yet.

Not to be too snarky, it does seem remarkable that these kind of breakthroughs tend to happen when the Vice President is sidelined or flying off somewhere.

-- Steve Clemons

This short International Herald Tribune piece by the Nixon Center's Alexis Debat and Ghassan Schbley got me thinking about the simultaneously turbulent centrifugal and centripetal forces between transnational Islamist movements and state structures in the Middle East

It's a very short, clever article -- but here is the part with which I partly disagree and yet still find intriguing:

Nasrallah's recent turnaround has given away important clues about Hezbollah's ultimate hierarchy of allegiances. Confronted with a crucial decision between relevance and identity, the movement chose to amend what it wants, and sacrifice its sectarian credentials or international allegiances to reclaim the nationalist high ground.

Hezbollah is already reaching out to other constituencies, and getting in increasingly frequent arm twisting with both Iran and Syria.

The Saudis were key in defusing the crisis in Lebanon. The Saudis are also hard at work in Iraq and, as we have seen recently, in Palestine. In this process, the Bush administration should be careful to remain safely in King Abdullah's back seat.

First of all, despite patronage from Iran and Syria, Hezbollah has always been a political movement focused on the liberation of its constituents from Israeli control. It's core grievances are over land and self-determination.

This is not dissimilar to nationalist movements in revolutionary China and Vietnam that were to a significant degree misdiagnosed by the U.S. as primarily problems of transnational Communism.

It doesn't seem to me that Nasrallah made any stunning turnaround.

He simply exploited state-based regional stakeholders as well as the transnational Islamist movement in this crisis and extracted resources from them. If he had to flirt with transnational movements and identity, then that's a small gesture compared to his own desire to embed Hezbollah in the very fabric of Lebanese society and to one day have a hand in working the machinery of state.

The depiction of Saudi foreign policy activism seems spot on with me. The Saudis are filling a void that a faltering America has left open in the Middle East.

To say, however, that America ought to "remain safely in King Abdullah's back seat" overstates the degree of mutual coordination and collaboration between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia on the Middle East project. It is because of Saudi dissatisfaction with American policy and American results that the Saudis have heightened their engagement with Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, and elsewhere.

If anything the Saudis left America off on the curb -- and it's not defined yet whether they will be back to pick us up.

Nice piece nonetheless.

-- Steve Clemons

Vice President Cheney sure is active on the international travel circuit all of a sudden.

First, there was a trip to Japan -- allegedly to thank Japan for its support of America's war on terror -- though he did all he could to avoid actually meeting Japan's Minister of Defense because of Defense Minister Kyuma's candid comments that the war was wrong-headed.

Now, Cheney has made a surprise trip to Pakistan. I'm sure that Cheney's presence in Islamabad is a huge help bolstering President Musharraf and helping shore up support for the Pakistani government and its president against growing influence of the Taliban and al Qaeda in the mountainous regions of Pakistan. Not.

And what is happening at home while Cheney is traveling?

The jury in the Scooter Libby trial continues to deliberate.

Connection? Of course.

-- Steve Clemons

Craig Gilbert of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel has a good short summary out today on the differences in the main Democratic presidential hopefuls on how to proceed in the Iraq War.

This blogger is quoted in the piece, but the interesting thing is that while every major candidate is now "tilting" towards a position that contender Dennis Kucinich and former Presidential possibilities Russ Feingold and Tom Vilsack advocated -- getting out of Iraq immediately -- none of the others think that the US should begin withdrawing forces right away.

The article does a good job parsing the nuanced differences between Iraq related proposals from Richardson, Kucinich, Obama, Biden, Clinton, Edwards, and Dodd.

-- Steve Clemons

I met former New York Mayor Rudy Giuiliani on Friday at a pre-fundraising mixer and got to size him up a bit.

Rudy Giuliani is coming out on top in numerous polls -- and surprising a it may seem, he is shown in some of these surveys as the only Republican able to beat either Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards -- if the election was held today.

Polls this early are deceptive, but this enthusiasm for Mayor Rudy may indicate another political reality that could hamper the many in the Senate who hope to move into the White House.

Americans don't seem to like to elevate Senators or Congressmen directly to the White House. They seem to need to show other executive abilities -- being in charge of something rather than just voting on legislative proposals.

Warren Harding and John F. Kennedy are the only two presidents in American history that moved from the United States Senate directly to the White House. Nearly every other President was Vice President or a Governor or a General when running for the presidency -- anything it seems but a U.S. Senator or U.S. Representative.

This proclivity to promote "executive types" to the White House over "legislative types" is more nuance than definitive but does give some extra sizzle to the candidacies of wannabe White House occupants like New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, and New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Mayor Giuliani ran a city and has been inducted into a virtual American Hall-of-Fame in the minds and memories of many citizens for the decisive and brave leadership he showed when New York was hit hard by Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda acolytes on September 11, 2001.

But what does he think about things?

My colleagues Peter Bergen, who moonlights at CNN's terrorism analyst and is a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, and Paul Cruickshank, a Research Fellow at NYU's Center on Law and Security and frequent collaborator with New America foreign policy projects, have a great Mother Jones cover story piece out measuring the impact that the invasion of Iraq had on globlal terrorism as well as terrrorist incidents in Afghanistan and Iraq.

To see what Iraq has helped bring to the bottom line of the terrorism trend, read the "Iraq Effect."

More soon.

-- Steve Clemons

After a week of some too chilly days and uncooperative ice flows (though things are now warming) in Washington, Tucson is paradise. Tonight I saw the stars -- all of them, well, lots of them -- and a great sunset on a 70 degree evening from the Skyline Country Club where I enjoyed a very interesting evening with about 110 members of the Tucson Committee on Foreign Relations.

These committees which are in many cities of the United States -- all networked together in an organization called the American Committees on Foreign Relations -- are packed with retired military, foreign service officers and ambassadors, and academics as well as folks just interested in the world. The political orientation, while representing every complexion of the political establishment, is mostly fixed on just being engaged, interested, and hoping for debate.

I enjoyed an interview tonight on KUAT-Channel 6 PBS tonight on a show called Arizona Illustrated with host Bill Buckmaster. We talked politics, and you can watch the clip here if you like. I liked the exchange quite a bit.

Bill referred to my blog as one of the top ten in the country -- when it is really on Congressional Quarterly's top ten in Washington political circles, but who's counting.

And following are a couple of television clips from encounters I had earlier in the week about politics, the internet and blogging on France 24 -- sort of France's answer to CNN.

I really enjoyed this too -- though my co-panelists -- Derek Thomson, editor-in-chief at France 24.com, Guillaume Payre, and Jerome Guillet -- earned my envy as they got to walk off the stage into Paris, and I was in Washington. Here is the segment on "Politics and the Internet."

And then here is a second segment that ran on France 24 more specifically on "Blogs and Politics."

Just submitted for your interest.

I really apologize to the Tucson students and bloggers who contacted me wanting a coffee session. Regrettably I have to catch a 6 am flight back to DC, but I really wish I could hang out and see the big rodeo festival and talk Tucson blogs with some of you. The annual rodeo here combined with a golf extravaganza including Tiger Woods and some other golf stars has taken every available room in the city tomorrow and through the weekend.

I fly back to Washington tomorrow -- and will try to report more on the Chuck Hagel dinner I helped organize the other night and more on what I have learned about Iran's May 2003 offer to the U.S. suggesting comprehensive negotiations.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE) today is giving an important speech on US-Iran relations at the University of Nebraska at Kearney's James E. Smith Conference on World Affairs.

Hagel suggests that we can't leave the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to turn even more ulcerous and not be resolved. He posits that diplomacy, UN mandates and engagement, regional deal-making, new regional security frameworks and credible economic incentives are in a tool kit that can be used to offer something between the bleak, binary, "false choice" between appeasing a nuclear-armed Iran or bombing Iran.

Here is a section of Hagel's diagnosis and prescription on Iran:

Today, the Middle East is more combustible and dangerous than any time in modern history. It is experiencing political upheaval driven by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, religious and ethnic differences, radical Islamic fundamentalism, terrorism, despair and the war in Iraq.

Forces and events in the Middle East cannot be neatly categorized. The swirl of Middle East history creates layers upon layers of complexity. There is little transparency in the Middle East. That is a reality that is inescapable and cannot be assumed away. To ignore this reality is to risk being trapped by false choices. . .false choices such as the question, "which is worse -- Iran with nuclear weapons or war with Iran?"

These are not our only choices in dealing with the Middle East and Iran. Diplomatic initiatives, UN mandates, regional cooperation, security frameworks, and economic incentives are part of the mix of international possibilities that must be employed to comprehensively address the challenges of the Middle East.

We will fail to protect and advance America's interests -- in the Middle East and around the world -- if we allow ourselves to be trapped in a self-constructed world based not on reality but on flawed assumptions and flawed judgment leading to flawed policy and dangerous miscalculations.

The United States must approach the Middle East with a clear understanding of the complexities of the region. Our strategic policies must be regional in scope. . .integrating Iran, Iraq, Syria, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, violent Islamic extremism, access to energy supplies, and political reform into a comprehensive policy equation.

This should be developed through consultation, cooperation, and coordination with our regional allies Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Israel. This will require a new regional diplomatic and economic framework to work within. . .a new Middle East frame of reference.

This makes so much sense and is exactly the sort of regional concert that Under Secretary of State Nick Burns mentioned last night during Q&A at his Atlantic Council speech. Burns noted that Iran has some choices -- and can move a normalization agenda forward and that Condi Rice will directly meet Iran's foreign minister if it meets some key conditions. While I think we should meet without those conditions, Burns made it sound as if we were ready to deal.

Burns noted that Iran's friends in the world today were Syria, Cuba, Venezuela, and North Korea. He may have tossed another nation or two in there -- but he failed to mention Iraq. He also noted that it is remarkable to see Egypt and India voting against Iran on the IAEA Board of Governors. So, an integrated approach to foreign policy is possible -- though this seems not to be something that the Vice President or President seem to want to talk much about.

Hagel also has called for the President to appoint a special Presidential Envoy to represent the "day-to-day bolting together of a Middle East peace process." I think that the person to play that role for the President is former Secretary of State Colin Powell.

While emissaries like John Bolton are now doing all they can to undermine the President's emerging foreign policy in cases like North Korea -- Powell has been studiously loyal to Bush. He won't write or say anything of import that will undermine the President he served -- at least not until after the next President of the United States is sworn in.

Bush should take advantage of Powell's loyalty and the respect that Powell still commands globally and make him the Middle East arm-twister. Elliot Abrams, who is not a productive player when it comes to moving a new stable equilibrium forward in the Middle East, would be trumped by Powell's status and engagement.

Yesterday evening, I posed a question to Under Secretary of State and former US Ambassador to NATO R. Nicholas Burns at an event hosted by the Atlantic Council of the United States. I think the meeting will appear today and during the coming week on C-Span.

I suggested that:

While former Ambassador Bolton is saying highly critical things of America's recent deal with North Korea -- and I admit that there may still be some difficulty in the implementation of that deal -- there was an "equilibrium of interests" among the key stakeholders around the North Korea problem that snapped into place.

It seems to me that that "template" which may prove successful is not a new one. It's the same kind of template that we applied to Afghanistan in 2002 when Ambassador James Dobbins, Zalmay Khalilzad, Ryan Crocker and others worked with Iran and other regional stakeholders to pull off the "Bonn Conference" stabilizing Afghanistan at that time and punctuating President Karzai's launch.

If we could negotiate and interact with Iran in 2002 -- which we clearly did under this Bush administration -- why can't we attempt such a regional approach, or regional template, with Iraq? Not to do so seems to me to be very "un-Nick Burns like."

Burns was terrific. He did not address the John Bolton complaints about North Korea and said that a problematic history of US-North Korea relations requires us to watch carefully how this deal is implemented. He said that China's commitment to a deal became the new ingredient for success in this case. He didn't take my bait on Iraq -- but suggested that the multi-party framework that worked with Afghanistan (then) and recently in North Korea -- was what we needed to deploy in dealing with Iran.

He said that the equilibrium of interests around Iran among major stakeholders was beginning to click and that he sensed important and noticeable new flexibility seeming to appear on Iran's side.

Burns skill at answering my and other questions in the room last night was pretty mesmerizing. He's an outrageously good diplomat, sort of like the antithesis, as I see it, of Ambassador Bolton.

But John Bolton is going to give the world some insight into his diplomacy. Was the bluster really just diplomatic tactic? What was behind his public call that Cuba was developing biological weapons of mass destruction -- which turned out to be false? Or his view in 2001 and 2002, we should be bombing North Korea rather than reaching out diplomatically? Who was he checking up on in those famous National Security Agency Intercepts that arguably became the item most important in ultimately blocking his confirmation as US Ambassador to the United Nations in the U.S. Senate? Did he see his boss and immediate supervisory authority to be the President and/or Vice President, skipping past Colin Powell -- or did he mostly behave under the supervision of Powell and Richard Armitage?

There are a ton of questions John Bolton might delve into in a perhaps "tell-all" or "tell-some" book, to use Al Kamen's phrasing, that Bolton may publish before year's end.

Here's a snippet from the Washington Post "In the Loop" column:

Speaking of authors, John Bolton's tell-all book on his days at the State Department and as ambassador to the United Nations could be coming out as early as the end of this year.

All right, maybe not a classic "tell-all" -- perhaps just a "tell-some" -- but top folks in Foggy Bottom and at the United Nations are most surely not going to be happy when this one comes out. The buzz is that it's going to focus mostly on Bolton's work at the United Nations, where he's said to be still upset at his inability to lop off 10 of the building's 38 floors that he had said were expendable. The book is likely to rank the floors in order of those most expendable.

Unclear how Bolton will treat his most recent bosses, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. His view of Rice may have altered a bit after last week's agreement with North Korea on its nuclear program, an agreement Bolton and other conservatives have criticized as "a bad deal." There are others at State sure to come in for their share of abuse.

No working title yet and no publisher, although several have expressed interest. But if this is to come out before Christmas, he'd better get typing.

A friend of mine who is very close to John Bolton told me that The Washington Note will probably not make it into any serious Bolton expose on his style of diplomacy and his vision of American national security interests. I was told that Bolton wouldn't want to give this blog such pleasure or recognition. That's fine -- and that 's a quite honest answer.

But whether one appreciates John Bolton's "applied Jesse Helmsianism" to global affairs or not, the book should be fascinating.

It will be interesting to see whether Bolton will thank Nick Burns, Condi Rice and Colin Powell for their professional and personal guidance and counsel during his years of work with them. Stay tuned.

-- Steve Clemons

Tomorrow night, Thursday, I will be speaking at the Tucson Committee on Foreign Relations. Regrettably, I show up at about 4 pm, do a television interview, and then the dinner and return to Washington the next day at 6 am -- so no coffee house gatherings this round.

On Friday, I am going to participate in a roundtable discussion with former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and then participate in a dinner with Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs R. Nicholas Burns, who I saw tonight as well at the Atlantic Council. I'll have something posted on Nick Burns' speech tomorrow.

Last night, I organized a salon dinner for Senator Chuck Hagel on the topic of getting America's national security portfolio back in shape. It was a fantastic evening -- and need to get that material posted as well, probably tomorrow during the air flight.

Sorry I'm dragging on a few of these interesting sessions -- including more commentary on the Iran conference last week, but I'll get the key parts up soon.

-- Steve Clemons

I received an email yesterday evening from Leigh Ann Ambrosi, Director of Marketing for Sterling Publications, announcing that Sterling's new imprint, Union Square Press, had signed Alan Weisman -- "a veteran producer with CBS News, 60 Minutes and Charlie Rose -- to write Prince of Darkness -- Richard Perle: The Kingdom, the Power, and the End of Empire in America.

Weisman authored Lone Star: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Dan Rather. The release refers to Richard Perle as a "hugely influential foreign policy thinker" and "a fixture of the Washington establishment for more than three decades."

Strobe Talbott actually dubbed Perle "the prince of darkness" in his important Reagan era arms control book, Deadly Gambits: The Reagan Administration and the Stalemate in Nuclear Arms Control in which Talbott chronicled the near constant dueling between then Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle and then State Department Director of Politico-Military Affairs Richard Burt.

But what caught my eye in this otherwise OK press announcement of a book not out until Thanksgiving this year was this bit:

While not an authorized book, Perle has granted the author extraordinary access, with multiple one-on-one interviews.

Maybe I'm just too skeptical of Perle's willingness to cooperate. While Sterling may be a good publishing house, this is not a Seymour Hersh expose on him. Perle is probably cooperating because he thinks he can trade his stories in a quid pro quo deal for kind treatment in the book.

The publisher and writer must be aware of what animates Perle's interest to cooperate. In such a release announcing a biography of not only a hugely influential foreign policy thinker but a hugely controversial personality who was part of the bandwagon that duped America into a reckless war against Iraq, it would be useful to know what the writer is doing beforehand to make sure that he is not in fact seriously manipulated by Perle -- who I admit is one of the most effectively shrewd, compelling, and frequently disturbing policy personalities in Washington.

I still want to know what Richard Perle knew and when he knew it when he told me in October 2002 that we would not find WMDs in Iraq.

-- Steve Clemons

The New York Times ran a lead editorial today suggesting that to keep its ranks full, the US military is digging more deeply into the available American labor pool than it perhaps should and has already issued more than 125,000 "moral waivers" to new enlistees.

The article suggests that in some cases, the military is putting weapons into the hands of serious criminals.

The editorial, in part, reads:

To keep filling the ranks, the Army has had to keep lowering its expectations. Diluting educational, aptitude and medical standards has not been enough. Nor have larger enlistment bonuses plugged the gap. So the Army has found itself recklessly expanding the granting of "moral waivers," which let people convicted of serious misdemeanors and even some felonies enlist in its ranks.

Last year, such waivers were granted to 8,129 men and women -- or more than one out of every 10 new Army recruits. That number is up 65 percent since 2003, the year President Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq. In the last three years, more than 125,000 moral waivers have been granted by America's four military services.

Most of last year's Army waivers were for serious misdemeanors, like aggravated assault, robbery, burglary and vehicular homicide. But around 900 -- double the number in 2003 -- were for felonies. Worse, the Army does no systematic tracking of recruits with waivers once it signs them up, and it does not always pay enough attention to any adjustment problems.

Without adequate monitoring and counseling, handing out guns to people who have already committed crimes poses a danger to the other soldiers they serve with and to the innocent civilians they are supposed to protect.

But the Pentagon is discharging more than 700 people a year who are determined to be homosexuals -- who in nearly every case have performed their service honorably on behalf of their country and uniformed service.

But it goes beyond troops on the front line. The military apparently has little problem putting major weapons systems into the hands of criminals while at the same time discharging Arabic-speaking linguists.

Representative Gary Ackerman (D-NY) recently made a colorful comment to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on the disturbing trend of discharging smart, gay language experts. Ackerman actually suggests that the U.S. military seems so fearful of homosexuals that the terrorists might figure this out and recruit "a platoon of lesbians to run us out of Baghdad."

A report on Ackerman's comment:

Congressman Gary Ackerman (D-NY) today urged Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to consider hiring military linguists discharged under the federal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" ban on lesbian, gay and bisexual service members. During hearings on the 2008 State Department budget, Ackerman pressed Secretary Rice to address the government's foreign language deficit by employing discharged lesbian and gay linguists with training in Arabic and Farsi.

"Considering the critical shortage of linguists in the armed forces, a platoon of Arabic-speaking lesbians may be just what the military needs."

Secretary Rice responded that she "certainly will look at what we are doing right now," when asked by Ackerman if the proposal was realistic.

"(I)t seems that the military has gone around and fired a whole bunch of people who speak foreign languages -- Farsi and Arabic, etc.," Ackerman said. "For some reason, the military seems more afraid of gay people than they are (of) terrorists, but they're very brave with the terrorists," he continued. "If the terrorists ever got hold of this information, they'd get a platoon of lesbians to chase us out of Baghdad," Ackerman said.

"Considering the critical shortage of linguists in the armed forces, a platoon of Arabic-speaking lesbians may be just what the military needs," said Sharon Alexander, deputy director of policy for Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (SLDN). "In fact, faced with the shortage of language experts, the military would do well to consider Congressman Ackerman's point. We cannot afford to lose critical personnel because of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell.' There are many brave gay men and lesbians who report for duty every day, and their contributions are immeasurably important to our national security."

Changing the culture of any major institution is difficult -- and the Pentagon is an institution strongly hardened in more ways than one -- but it should concern military leaders and our political representatives that military culture can so easily adapt to a proliferation of "moral waivers" permitting criminals into the ranks -- rather than permitting homosexual men and women to perform military service.

-- Steve Clemons

Update: Freedom to Serve has nice follow up post that links to other good material on this subject.

-- Steve Clemons

Annie posing as a "puppy wrap"

On a good ziggy romp. . .

Over the hill and through the woods and under the log. . .

The Dynamic Duo in action -- DC bad guys watch out!

Hey -- Oakley. . .Annie. . . .Wait for me!!

-- Steve Clemons

This is an intriguing story that hit Newsweek on the role and influence of a relatively unknown super lobbyist and former staffer to Richard Lugar, Richard Hohlt.

Hohlt is one of the major heavyweights in Republican party fundraising. Check out how he has spread the wealth. He's not well-known across America, but all the elite folks running the country will take Hohlt's calls.

Apparently, before Robert Novak wrote his column outing Valerie Plame, he sent a pre-publication copy to Richard Hohlt. Hohlt then sent the Novak story to Karl Rove to give him a "head's up."

Fascinating. That is the way Washington works. Circles within circles.

Hohlt did not know that Rove had already dumped what he knew about Valerie Plame Wilson to Novak -- but still the way the web is woven is important for outsiders to see.

He has for many years run an elite dinner group called "Off the Record." Top tier DC pols regularly attend. I have never had the opportunity.

I had heard of Hohlt but don't think I have met him before.

This is part of the political machine in Washington. An important journalist needs sources, lobbyists need access, the presidential adviser needs to know what is going on, and they all trade in information.

-- Steve Clemons

This morning on The Chris Matthews Show, NBC Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Andrea Mitchell stated that she thought that discussion of the alleged May 2003 Iran proposal to the US would become more prominent in the main stream media.

Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post, Guy Dinmore of the Financial Times, Michael Hirsh of Newsweek, and Barbara Slavin of USA Today have been doing good digging on the story -- but I agree with Andrea Mitchell that there will be broader coverage soon, particularly now since the cast of characters now includes Karl Rove. (more here)

More soon.

-- Steve Clemons

Senators Chuck Hagel (R-RI) and Jack Reed (D-NH) just acquitted themselves very well on Tim Russert's Meet the Press.

Hagel made an articulate, compelling call for a new American comprehensive strategy in the Middle East that includes robust diplomacy, coordination with moderate Sunni regimes in the Middle East and new forms of economic engagement.

Hagel said that the White House keeps focusing on a "military approach" to Iraq. But he stated quite firmly, "the US military will not determine the future of Iraq."

Reed was impressive too -- until he began to focus on his and Hagel's early call for increasing the overall size of the US army. He probably meant "military forces in total" rather than just the "army". Hagel said nothing about this, but Reid made it sound like the key to solving the problem of an over-extended military apparatus is just making it larger.

I think -- and I believe that Hagel believes at some level -- that the first step in solving the "military over-reach" problem is getting better management and figuring out why despite more dollars and resources being thrown at the Pentagon that perceived "security deliverables" are declining.

Hagel said that he would make a statement about his intentions to run for the presidency or not in a few weeks. He reminded listeners that despite Vice President Cheney's recent criticism of Hagel that Congressionaly Quarterly found in a recent survey of 30 key votes that Hagel votes with the Bush administration more than any other U.S. Senator.

Hagel is a classic conservative -- but apparently not the kind of Republican that Dick Cheney likes.

Cheney recently stated:

Let's say I believe firmly in Ronald Reagan's 11th commandment: Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican. But it's very hard sometimes to adhere to that where Chuck Hagel is involved."

This opposition by Cheney is exactly what makes Hagel such an interesting proposition in a Republican primary presidential race. He might take the Republican party to a "sensible conservatism." That could be healthy for the Republican Party, for both parties actually -- and for the nation as a whole.

Hagel says he has not made up his mind on running. Some indicators though are bubbling forth, and this writer has been privy to some informed gossip.

First, Hagel has a book deal underway to get his thoughts on America's future out during the 2008 primary season.

Second, Hagel has told a number of people close to him that if he does run for the presidency, that he won't keep his Senate seat. He reportedly does not want to be in John Kerry's position. That makes sense to me.

There have been some rumors -- strong rumors -- that Hagel was on the verge of quitting the Senate and not running for the presidency. That seems to be curbed somewhat -- both after a call by many in the grassroots asking that Hagel not quit the Senate and also because he has seen the value and felt national support for standing strong in his opposition to the Iraq troop surge.

But the biggest thing that has happened is that Hagel had decided not to run previously because he thought that he and John McCain occupied the same political space. That is no longer true -- and his profile is rather unique on the Republican side. His Sandhills PAC is also clearly picking up steam and is reaching out.

My hunch is that Hagel will announce an exploratory committee in a few weeks. Could be wrong -- I don't know anything from the deep inside about what Hagel is really likely to do. But I think he will announce this exploratory committee step in such a way that he is not making a full-fledged commitment to running.

Others tell me that Hagel is waiting for the American public to sour on those first out of the gate. He feels that it would be a mistake to be chasing favor this quickly in a presidential race, when there is all sorts of opportunity for frontrunners to stumble and go stale.

One downside of this strategy is that it reinforces in the minds of some that Hagel is not serious or does not at the end of the day have the appetite for the kinds of things he'd have to do to to get moved into the White House. One top tier national security voice of Republican ilk told me the other day that he wishes "Hagel would just make up his mind." This former government icon said "I like Chuck Hagel, a lot. I am not sure that Chuck Hagel really wants it bad enough and that he will do what it takes to win. But if he does and he's solid and committed to that decision, it would be healthy for the country."

Another top tier national security voice -- of Democratic ilk -- wrote this to me recently regarding a meeting with Senator Hagel that he knew I would be attending:

. . .Give my best to Chuck -- I hope he runs. . . You can tell him that.

Hagel is clearly cautious and is taking his time to make up his mind on this important investment of time and political capital. Mitt Romney may be a big challenge to him, but the two have very different takes on the war and on what it takes to get America's national security portfolio back in shape.

Frankly, I think his entry into the race could be helpful as far as serious discussions of America's foreign policy missteps -- as I believe that his national security and foreign policy views are exactly what any successful Republican or Democrat candidate should be expressing. No one on the Democratic side has really stolen his brand of sensible, enlightened realism in foreign policy.

That gives Hagel a chance to continue to own the space he is in. But when he enters, watch quite a few of the Dems and Republicans try to begin mimicking him. Nothing wrong in that.

-- Steve Clemons

I have just discovered that former National Security Advisor to George H.W. Bush, General Brent Scowcroft, is on the board of directors of Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection. Cool.

Enough have persuasively argued that systemic planetary climate change is underway and represents an existential threat to our political and social systems -- as well as to humankind -- that I don't need to repeat all this.

But there haven't been many -- that I know of -- who have really begun to seriously think through the national security and political dimensions of climate change. The analyses I have seen tend to speak to audiences that are already climate change policy advocates.

One very good piece written by a top tier national security commentator and colleague of mine, Anatol Lieven, pondered climate change's social and political impact in his oped, "The End of the West as We Know It?"

Here is a bit of the Lieven article that ran December 28th last year:

Every political, social and economic system ever created has sooner or later encountered a challenge that its very nature has made it incapable of meeting.

The Confucian ruling system of imperial China, which lasted for more than 2,000 years, has some claim still to be the most successful in history, but because it was founded on values of stability and continuity, rather than dynamism and inventiveness, it eventually proved unable to survive in the face of Western imperial capitalism.

For market economies, and the Western model of democracy with which they have been associated, the existential challenge for the foreseeable future will be global warming. Other threats like terrorism may well be damaging, but no other conceivable threat or combination of threats can possibly destroy our entire system. As the recent British official commission chaired by Sir Nicholas Stern correctly stated, climate change "is the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen."

The question now facing us is whether global capitalism and Western democracy can follow the Stern report's recommendations, and make the limited economic adjustments necessary to keep global warming within bounds that will allow us to preserve our system in a recognizable form; or whether our system is so dependent on unlimited consumption that it is by its nature incapable of demanding even small sacrifices from its present elites and populations.

If the latter proves the case, and the world suffers radically destructive climate change, then we must recognize that everything that the West now stands for will be rejected by future generations. The entire democratic capitalist system will be seen to have failed utterly as a model for humanity and as a custodian of essential human interests.

The Lieven article is important in that he doesn't write much about climate change.

(Brent Scowcroft -- a West Point graduate, Air Force General, and National Security Advisor -- now focusing on challenge of climate change)

Brent Scowcroft is a shrewd, no-nonsense military and geopolitical strategist. He is no climate change expert, but he knows the subject is a vital one for great nations to collectively wrestle down.

It's important to get generals, strategists, national security types in general thinking about climate change in their roster of threats facing the nation -- and to consider comprehensive national and international strategies to diminish that threat.

Shanghai has just announced that it will host one of Al Gore's global climate change cncerts called the "Save our Selves Concerts." It will be interesting to see if China get a good chunk of its big miltary types to attend -- and whether the American city that is eventually announced can also attract some military and national security bureaucrats to attend -- even for the symbolic value.

Proceeds from these concerts will go to The Alliance for Climate Protection, which Brent Scowcroft helps provide some direction to. It is very good to see someone like Scowcroft in the mix.

It will also be interesting to see how Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth does next weekend at the Academy Awards.

-- Steve Clemons

The Motion to Adjourn for Recess Passes 47-33. Shame on the Senate.

Senate Majority Leader Reid thought that pushing through a cloture motion to debate the House-passed resolution against the President's Iraq troop surge plans would balance out a principled call by Senators Hagel and Snowe to oppose any Senate recess until a debate on the troop surge takes place.

Reid's effort to get cloture just failed -- and now Dems are voting in mass against Hagel and Snowe and in favor of Presidents' Day shopping excursions.

Hagel, Snowe and others have been writing a "pox on both your houses" letters several times over now -- and there are numerous Democratic Senators who are getting as irritated with their own leadership as with the Republican leadership of Mitch McConnell and Trent Lott.

Adjournment is a serious mistake for Dems while this matter is unresolved -- and the Hagel/Snowe letter is something Reid and others should embrace, forcing the recalcitrant Republicans to stay and give up their fundraisers and family excursions.

It was not enough to have a simple cloture vote today -- Reid should have gone further and become a stakeholder in what Hagel is doing -- and that is assuring that the Iraq troop surge resolution be our single highest priority right now.

-- Steve Clemons

Update:: Matt Stoller of MyDD.com agrees.

Cloture Vote to move to consideration of Iraq Surge Resolution fails in 56-34 vote, in which 60 votes were needed.

The Senate vote on cloture to move to consideration of the House Resolution opposing the President's escalation of troop deployments in Iraq is taking place now just took place.

Of note, Senators Chuck Hagel, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, and Norm Coleman have voted in favor of cloture.

Senator Lieberman has voted to oppose.

-- Steve Clemons

Updates: Senators John Warner, Gordon Smith and Arlen Specter have also voted in favor of cloture.

Senator George Voinovich has voted against cloture (I think) -- a bit of a disappointment since he signed the rebel letter with Hagel and Snowe and others.

Seven Republicans are reported to have voted in favor of cloture so as to move to the Iraq Surge Resolution.

The resolution failed to get the needed 60 votes -- and secured 56 in favor and 34 opposed.

Now the Senate is voting on the motion to adjourn for recess, which Senators Hagel and Snowe oppose.

-- Steve Clemons

IPS Correspondent Gareth Porter has an important article out today, "Rove Said to Have Received 2003 Iranian Proposal."

Porter writes:

Karl Rove, then White House deputy chief of staff for President George W. Bush, received a copy of the secret Iranian proposal for negotiations with the United States from former Republican Congressman Bob Ney in early May 2003, according to an Iranian-American scholar who was then on his Congressional staff.

Ney, who pleaded guilty last year and was sentenced to prison in January for his role in the Jack Abramov lobbying scandal, was named by former aide Trita Parsi as an intermediary who took a copy of the Iranian proposal to the White House.

Parsi is now a specialist on Iranian national security policy and president of the National Iranian-American Council (NIAC), a non-partisan organization that supports a negotiated settlement of the conflict between Iran and the United States.

Parsi revealed that the document was delivered specifically to Rove, in an exclusive interview with IPS. Within two hours of the delivery of the document, according to Parsi, Ney received a phone call from Rove confirming his receipt of the document. Parsi said the proposal was delivered to Rove the same week that the State Department received it by fax, which was on or about May 4, 2003, according to the cover letter accompanying it.

Ney was chosen by Swiss Ambassador in Tehran Tim Guldimann to carry the Iranian proposal to the White House, according to Parsi, because he knew the Ohio Congressman to be the only Farsi-speaking member of Congress and particularly interested in Iran.

The revelation that Trita Parsi made about Congressman Ney's interaction with the White House on the Iran proposal was made at a conference co-sponsored by the New America Foundation and the National Iranian American Council titled US-Iran Relations: Collision, Stand-Off or Convergence?

The revelation that Rove is involved is huge -- because it further raises the stakes for exactly why then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said that she never "saw the fax" of the Guldimann-couriered Iran offer.

Foreign policy officials confirm to this writer that the fax did make it to National Security Council official Elliot Abrams, who has not admitted seeing the memos sent by Guldimann.

But if Rove also received the proposal through the separate channel of Congressman Bob Ney, it is hard to believe that Rove would have just hidden the matter in a pile of other faxes and not passed the material on to Rice directly -- or at least to White House Chief-of-Staff Andy Card.

As Trita Parsi told Gareth Porter and attendees at the US-Iran conference, noted above, he was the point person for Ney in helping to manage this issue.

There is a copy of the 2003 Iran offer that has been making its way around the internet and has been written about by such writers as the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler, the Financial Times' Guy Dinmore, and USA Today's Barbara Slavin.

Each of these journalists, and others, were given by Trita Parsi a copy of the Iran proposal -- which differs in slight ways from the proposal made public last week by Glenn Kessler which is the final draft sent by Guldimann to the US government.

Parsi has admitted to this writer that he was the source for the documents that have been floating around the internet over the last year. He had been saving these materials for publication in his forthcoming book, but decided that it was important to get them into the public because he was afraid that the pace towards a possible US-Iran war was picking up and needed to be informed by other parts of the real diplomatic history.

TWN will shortly be posting two documents that it has secured from Trita Parsi -- one that came in from Guldimann and the other that he acquired from a Senior Iranian diplomat.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

To tell the full story of the Spring 2003 dance that Iran, the U.S., and Europe briefly engaged in regarding a set of proposals -- allegedly from both sides that would have led to normalizing US-Iran relations -- one has to set the parameters of both stage and performers in this drama.

I plan to write this story in pieces, as there are parts of it that are still incomplete -- and some parts still unknown. I will then tie these pieces together.

As I offer these pieces on this interesting proposal, I look forward to any "privately sent" communications that can help me focus, retool, or amend the story, the stage and players as I see them coming together.

My email is steve@thewashingtonnote.com -- and all confidences will be completely maintained and protected.

Here are the relevant actors as I currently see them:

Tim Guldimann -- Former Swiss Ambassador to Iran and currently Professor of International Relations at the University of Frankfurt; Co-Author of the Report on the Nuclear Impasse in Iran (International Crisis Group)

Sadeq Kharrazi -- Former Iran Ambassador to France; Nephew of Former Iran Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi and brother-in-law to the son of Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei

Javad Zarif -- Ambassador of Iran to the United Nations

Kamal Kharrazi -- Former Foreign Minister of Iran; stepped down August 24, 2005

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei -- Supreme Leader of Iran

An Undisclosed U.S. Businessman -- a person in some accounts of this story who has not yet been revealed

Flynt Leverett -- Former Senior Director for Middle East Affairs at the National Security Council; Former Middle East specialst at the CIA and Department of State; currently Senior Fellow and Director, Geopolitics of Energy Initiative, New America Foundation

Lawrence Wilkerson -- Former Chief of Staff, Department of State; currently a visiting professor at the College of William & Mary

Colin Powell: Former Secretary of State of the United States

Richard Haass -- Former Director of Policy Planning, Department of State; currently President of the Council on Foreign Relations

Richard Armitage - Former Deputy Secretary of State

William J. Burns -- former Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs; currently US Ambassador to Russia

Bob Ney -- Former Congressman from Ohio's 18th District (R-OH); resigned in November 2006 and now serving prison sentence after being found guilty of corruption; was only Farsi-speaking member of Congress when he served

Trita Parsi -- Former aide to Congressman Bob Ney; now President of the National Iranian American Council and author of the forthcoming Treacherous Triangle: The Secret Dealings of Iran, Israel and the United States

Richard Cheney -- Vice President of the United States

George Bush -- President of the United States

Condoleezza Rice -- Former National Security Advisor to the President and now Secretary of State

Elliot Abrams -- Deputy National Security Advisor for Global Democracy Strategy

Karl Rove -- Former Senior Adviser to President George W. Bush and now Deputy Chief of Staff to the President

Stephen Hadley -- Former Deputy National Security Advisor to the President; now holds the office of National Security Advisor

Ryan Crocker -- Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs; then Ambassador of the US to Pakistan; now nominated to serve as US Ambassador to Iraq

James Dobbins -- Former Special Envoy for Afghanistan; Organizer of the Bonn Conference; now Director, International Security and Defense Policy Center, RAND Corporation

Zalmay Khalilzad -- Former Special Presidential Envoy to Afghanistan; Former US Ambassador to Iraq; nominated to serve as US Ambassador to the United Nations

Hillary Mann -- Former career foreign service officer in the State Department focusing on the Middle East and Persian Gulf regions

Jillian Burns -- Career foreign service officer previously working in the Department of State's Bureau of Near East Affairs; now serving in US Consulate in Dubai

Philo Dibble -- Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs; currently Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary, International Organization Affairs

John Bolton -- Former Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security; former US Ambassador to the United Nations; now Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute

If there are more who should be added to this list, let me know who -- and why.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

USA Today founder Al Neuharth once chastised Senator Hillary Clinton for stating that George W. Bush's presidency was one of American history's worst. Neuharth promptly made his own list of worse presidents.

Now, he has recanted and offered a mea culpa:

I remember every president since Herbert Hoover, when I was a grade school kid. He was one of the worst. I've personally met every president since Dwight Eisenhower. He was one of the best.

A year ago I criticized Hillary Clinton for saying "this (Bush) administration will go down in history as one of the worst."

"She's wrong," I wrote. Then I rated these five presidents, in this order, as the worst: Andrew Jackson, James Buchanan, Ulysses Grant, Hoover and Richard Nixon. "It's very unlikely Bush can crack that list," I added.

I was wrong. This is my mea culpa. Not only has Bush cracked that list, but he is planted firmly at the top.

Josh Bolten and Karl Rove must be spending some time trying to figure out how to fix Bush's legacy problem with 22 months left and defy Hillary Clinton and Al Neuharth's prognostications.

How to do it?

Here's a start:

Read a lot more about what it took for Nixon to go to China

Work feverishly in helping to establish the State of Palestine

Invent the core institutional arrangements that might allow for collective security agreements between Israel and other moderate Sunni regimes in the Middle East

Help coax forward a Syria-Israel peace deal along the lines that got Libya out of the international dog house

Stabilize Afghanistan. . .fast

Call a Regional Conference on the Middle East and get all stakeholders there

Organize a global politial effort -- that is serious -- to engage, contain, and confront -- in ways more creative and effective than a military strike -- Iran's nuclear weapons appetite

Stop pursuing foreign policy/national security objectives on the cheap

Call for, authorize and fund a Manhattan Project on Energy alternatives

This is not a comprehensive list, and Bush's presidency has been politically chastened -- but some of these are doable and could help raise the long-term stock value of the Bush legacy.

But as John Negroponte once told me about waiting for new great ideas from the administration on how to deal with Iraq, "Don't hold your breath."

-- Steve Clemons

John McCain, today, has announced his new presidential campaign website, and I like it.

I'm a sucker for "gray" colors -- and this site has a lot of shades of gray in it, in real terms and metaphorically.

It's fascinating to see how quickly Barack Obama slicked up his campaign site after Hillary Clinton came roaring out with a super-slick site.

What I like best about McCain's new perch in webspace other than the colors are his "Undecided?" button and his outreach to bloggers.

Some will think McCain's site looks a bit like a fancy DaimlerChrysler ad -- after Chrysler's facelift -- but still, it's impressively done.

-- Steve Clemons

I had an interesting lunch meeting yesterday with German Bundestag Member Steffen Kampeter who chairs the Bundestag's CDU/CSU Parliamentary Budget Committee -- and among the many topics we discussed was the impact of blogs and blogging on American politics. Our discussion included the still nascent emergence of German blogs and bloggers.

But as I have been writing a lot about Iran, Saudi Arabia, and plan to do more on Cuba shortly -- the issue of online expression in politically repressed environments interests me. Blogging 'seems' to have a different vitality in an Iran or Afghanistan than it does in Japan, Canada or the US -- but could be wrong on this.

I ran across an interesting blog this morning written by an Iranian living in Toronto. It's called Editor: MYSELF.

The publisher, Hossein Derakhshan, had a strong piece, "Democracy's Double Standard in Iran," in the International Herald Tribune/New York Times last year and seems bent on demystifying Iran's politics and leaders. He's clearly a fan of Iran's former president Khatami -- but looks at Ahmadinejad as an inconsequential buffoon (my words, not his -- but I think I characterize his views about right).

But also on his site is a link to a roster of lots of other Iranian bloggers -- both inside and outside Iran. I don't have the time to run through more than a few. But it's interesting to browse through them if you have the time.

Here is an interesting Wikipedia entry on Iran's growing but government stifled blog sector and also a good entry on "Internet censorship in Iran."

-- Steve Clemons

Update: Some other bloggers are sending links to other Iran-related blogs. Here is one called Iran Information Agency.

American Prospect editor-at-large Michael Tomasky has written a brave critique on The Guardian's "Comment is Free" Blog of Hillary Clinton's reasons for not saying "sorry" after her supportive votes of President Bush's Middle East military adventure.

One aspect of this debate about Hillary and acknowledging past errors I had not read or considered before was the role of the "Foreign Policy Establishment" in Washington -- and how this establishment has been cutting increasingly towards the right.

I slightly disagree with Tomasky on this point as I think "Right" and "Left" don't get us very far in understanding the civil wars regarding foreign policy going on inside both parties. I think that the foreign policy establishment has been cutting increasingly towards a values-driven messianism that is dramatically at odds with traditional realism and with liberal internationalism.

Nonetheless, my difference is nuanced, and I like what he has written, including about the New America Foundation:

So why can't Clinton just say it [sorry]? Two explanations are generally proffered. The first is that she wants to play to centrist voters, who care far less about any sort of apology and who will be important not in the primaries but in the general election.

The second is that if she does offer a mea culpa, she opens herself to the charge of being a flip-flopper, a particularly resonant fear among Democrats after the workout the phrase got from the Republican National Committee to describe John Kerry in 2004.

Both of these are true enough. But I'd like to posit a much less-discussed third reason, and it's the most important one, because it tells us far more about how she might actually conduct foreign-policy as president. It has to do with what we know in Washington as the "Foreign-Policy Establishment".

The FPE consists of intellectuals, analysts, and scholars, many of them former government officials, collected at the various think-tanks in Washington DC (and to some extent New York, home base of the Council on Foreign Relations). If you lived here and worked in politics, you would note quickly their ubiquity and influence. They're forever holding panels and issuing papers, and the resident fellows and scholars advise many a candidate on both sides.

And the FPE, you see, is fairly conservative. There's one house, the New America Foundation, that has admirably made itself the center of the foreign-policy opposition in Washington. But outside of New America, the FPE is dominated by conservatives, neo and otherwise in redoubts like the American Enterprise Institute, and centrist Democrats. This last category is typified by Kenneth Pollack, of the nominally liberal Brookings Institution, whose 2002 book, The Threatening Storm, made a case for the Iraq war which many liberals endorsed. In fact, it's fair to say that most of the FPE was pro-war, and even today, many of its prominent members will admit only to botched execution on the administration's part, not to any broader problems with the whole idea from the start.

This is a bunch whose views are well to the right of the Democratic primary electorate. And it is a bunch in whose good graces Hillary Clinton, a cautious and establishment politician at her core, is fervent to stay. And as was once said of love in the movies, so it must be said today that staying in the FPE's good graces means never having to say you're sorry.

And this is where a potential Clinton presidency becomes a concern. If she is elected, she will likely draw most of her foreign-policy brain trust from this world -- not from the neoconservative wing, but from the pro-war neoliberal wing; in other words, from a group of people who got Iraq completely wrong.

Her secretary of state, for example, might be Richard Holbrooke, who was belligerently pro-war in the beginning. All this points in a certain direction, as to how she'd handle the Middle East, particularly (doubted by Jewish Israel hawks back in 2000, she has taken pains to become one of their darlings), but also for just about every major question the next president will face, including how she'd clean up the Iraq mess.

Interesting piece.

-- Steve Clemons

P.S. -- At the request of some of my readers, I have moved this picture below to the bottom of the post as they were able to find a good picture that expressed what I was trying to. Nonetheless, the picture of Hillary with Sharon also appealed to some who emailed me -- and this pic actually came from Senator Clinton's own website.

-- Steve Clemons

This post will no doubt stir the wrath of many friends in New Mexico, where I visit frequently.

I have never been a fan of eating chili peppers -- though I seemed to have to when I worked for Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico.

Folks in Alamagordo and Roswell and Farmington and Las Cruces, and lots of smaller places like Cuba, New Mexico or Truth or Consequences -- would take to me better if I downed some chili peppers. I still haven't figured out which of the red or green are less hot and easier on me as they both created "fear."

I do like them aesthetically. I like to see them hanging on porches of adobe homes and have a bunch of chili pepper shaped Christmas tree ornaments.

But I did eat them, and I figured I had to because folks have been eating those chili peppers since living in the cliffs in Mesa Verde.

So you might understand why I laughed when I saw this Washington Post piece today, "One Hot Archaeological Find," noting a discovery indicating that humans were using chili peppers to spice up their diet 6,100 years ago.

Was there any doubt?! I have really struggled to try and eat these things out of respect for ancient culture and my presumption that humans have been eating chili peppers for tens of thousands of years.

But I think I'm part of an evolved group of humans who thinks that chili peppers are more about the past -- and hopefully less a part of the future.

OK. I know the next thing that will happen is that I will get besieged with chili pepper offers and products, chili pepper advocating emails, chili peppers clandestinely slipped into my soup at restaurants around town, and visits from DC-bound chili pepper growers.

Evolution. I'm a fan. I'm waiting for the beyond chili pepper world.

-- Steve Clemons

(Jim Gibbons welcoming Vice President Cheney to Elko, Nevada)

Former House of Representatives Member and incumbent Nevada Governor Jim Gibbons is now under investigation for receiving illegal gifts from an executive at a defense contractor, eTreppid Technologies from Reno.

This is a snippet from a New York Times report on this new corruption probe:

The Justice Department declined formal comment, but some officials who had been briefed on the investigation said that a preliminary corruption inquiry had been opened. They cautioned that no charges had been filed, and said that such investigations took time and often concluded without any prosecution. The federal investigation was first reported, on Thursday, by The Wall Street Journal.

The Journal report said the newspaper had obtained previously unreported e-mail messages that had surfaced in a civil lawsuit in Reno. The paper cited one message in which Mr. Trepp appeared to discuss a payment to Mr. Gibbons.

"Please don't forget to bring the money you promised Jim and Dawn," Mr. Trepp's wife, Jale, wrote in the e-mail message to her husband on March 22, 2005, a few days before the Trepps left for a Caribbean cruise with Mr. Gibbons and his wife, Dawn, a former Nevada assemblywoman.

Minutes later, Mr. Trepp replied, according to The Journal: "Don't you ever send this kind of message to me! Erase this message from your computer right now!"

Mr. Gibbons, who was in Congress at the time, did not disclose the trip, which included travel aboard Mr. Trepp's leased private jet.

He said later that the trip had not violated ethics rules, but in November, he asked the House ethics committee for an opinion on whether he should have reported it. He left the House before any action was taken.

The lawyers and investigators will be wrestling over this one for a while.

But in the mean time, it would be good for Nevada's journalists -- and some of them are excellent -- to get Governor Gibbons on the record on what exactly he thinks would cross the line of ethics rules violations in the House if not accepting a free cruise and trips on private planes while rigging defense contracts.

We'd really like to know. What line would have to be crossed for him to be outraged?

-- Steve Clemons

Senators Chuck Hagel (R-NE) and Olympia Snowe (R-ME) upped the stakes last night in threatening to object to any motion to adjourn for a recess this next week after Presidents' Day.

Their objection could easily be overcome with a simple roll call vote and a majority voting against them -- but who wants to vote for vacation and shopping days in the malls of one's district and state over debating the fate of America's Iraq-based military units.

Here is the Snowe/Hagel letter pdf.

Hagel and Snowe wrote to "Harry and Mitch" (that's Majority Leader Reid (D-NV) and Republican Leader McConnell (R-KY):

February 14, 2007

Nearly one month ago, we joined two Democratic colleagues in introducing a resolution expressing the Senate's disapproval of the President's plan to increase the US troop presence in Iraq.

We subsequently joined forces with another bipartisan group of senators, led by Senator Warner, in introducing a second resolution disapproving of this "troop surge" strategy. In both instances we worked across the aisle, putting partisanship aside in the interest of the nation.

Our resolve stems both from our strong support for our troops in the field and our strong belief that deepening the U.S. military involvement in Iraq will not help solve the fundamental causes of the sectarian violence now engulfing Iraq. We believe the strategy is wrong, and that the Senate has a constitutional and moral obligation to make its views known.

Despite the fact that a clear majority of the Senate opposes this troop increase, senators have been unable to voice their opinions on this matter because Senate leadership has failed to bring the Warner resolution (S. Con. Res. 7) to a vote in a manner that satisfactorily accomodates both majority and minority viewpoints on the conduct of the war.

This runs counter to the traditions and practices of the Senate. Given that additional US troops have already deployed to Baghdad and have already begun security operations, we believe time is of the essence, and that it is unconscionable for the Senate to recess at the end of this week without an agreement to debate the war in Iraq.

We understand you have resumed discussions to reach a mutually agreeable solution to bring the Warner resolution to a vote. We sincerely hope you succeed in these efforts, and we stand ready to work with you and your staffs to bring this matter to a swift resolution.

Until such an agreement is reached, however, we hereby notify you of our intent to object to the adoption of any adjournment resolution for the Presidents' Day recess, and further request a roll call vote on any motion to adjourn that may be made.

Sincerely,

Olympia J. Snowe
United States Senator

Chuck Hagel
United States Senator

In response, Senate Majority Leader Reid has decided to escalate rather than accommodate these Senators and has threatened to call for a cloture vote on the House Resolution this Saturday -- which in this blogger's view is simply ineffective and a pale shadow of what the Warner Resolution calls for.

On this front -- Hagel, Snowe, and the others who have signed recent letters and who are co-sponsors of the Warner resolution are correct.

And whether it is giving up the weekend -- or staying in session all next week -- the issue of whether to throw more troops into a bad strategy is worth giving up shopping and fundraisers for.

-- Steve Clemons

I have been digging deeper and deeper into various aspects of the alleged Spring 2003 Iran proposal.

I may have just stumbled across some huge part of the story -- and it could be shocking to nearly every commentator who has thus far spoken or written about this initiative, including my colleague Flynt Leverett who has been engaged in a strong-worded exchange back and forth with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

My advice to all parties and all journalists in this debate is to pause. I hope to be able to shed some light on something I have heard from an important source tomorrow or early next week. I must protect sources -- but I strongly believe that there is far more to this scenario than Iran offering us a package of initiatives to consider normalizing relations.

But there may be a very big problem in the story as it is now being told.

More soon, I hope.

-- Steve Clemons

This afternoon at Brookings in a session moderated by former Ambassador and Brookings foreign policy division chief Carlos Pascual, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman and presidential contender Joseph Biden gave an impressive speech focused on U.S. options toward Iraq.

Here is the video link for the Biden speech, and here is the audio link.

I asked him at the meeting what he thought Iran's aspirations were in the region and how, if President, he would have responded to something like the May 2003 Iranian proposal for comprehensive negotiations aimed at normalizing US-Iran relations.

Biden responded by saying that he would talk to Iran. He said that we have "had the mute button pushed for six years." He said that our silence, our failure to engage Iran on any level, to try and connect with the citizens in Iran -- among whom American popularity has traditionally run very high -- has left the Iranian government fundamentally unchallenged. He suggested that we could be delegitimating the Iranian government simply by doing more to connect with the Iranian public and understanding and responding to the aspirations of Iran's citizens.

He thought that Iranians wanted to be recognized as a significant and great power in the region. He did not comment on the May 2003 Iran proposal to the U.S.

But on another front, Biden made a powerful statement that the Iraq War Resolution that Congress issued to the President was essentially invalid as it no longer pertained to conditions regarding Saddam Hussein and WMDs that were specified as key features of the 2002 authorization.

Biden stated (Here is pdf of Biden speech):

The best next step is to revisit the authorization Congress granted the President in 2002 to use force in Iraq. That's exactly what I'm doing.

We gave the President that power to destroy Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and, if necessary, to depose Saddam Hussein.

The WMD were not there. Saddam Hussein is no longer there. The 2002 authorization is no longer relevant to the situation in Iraq.

I am working on legislation to repeal that authorization and replace it with a much narrower mission statement for our troops in Iraq.

Congress should make clear what the mission of our troops is: to responsibly draw down, while continuing to combat terrorists, train Iraqis and respond to emergencies. We should make equally clear what their mission is not: to stay in Iraq indefinitely and get mired in a savage civil war.

Coupled with the Biden-Gelb plan, I believe this is the most effective way to start bringing our troops home without leaving a mess behind.

Biden's staff reported that they hope to have this "new resolution" essentially de-authorizing earlier granted authorities out very soon, possibly in a couple of weeks.

-- Steve Clemons

This conference will proceed as scheduled today -- despite the weather.

The US Senate just informed us that they are open, caterers are there -- and I'll be there.

For those of you iced and snowed in, read Glenn Kessler's piece today -- and look for news from Flynt Leverett on this subject later today.

For others, here is the schedule:

(Iran Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi and former Swiss Ambassador to Iran Tim Guldimann)

Imagine dealing with Iran when few Americans had heard of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Imagine the kind of "Nixon Goes to China" move that would have 'possibly' taken America's engagement in the Middle East in a new, constructive direction rather than towards the precipitous decline in perceived power it's facing now.

It might have been a ruse by Iran -- or by Europeans carrying their message who wanted to nudge Iran and the U.S. closer together. . .

Or, it might have been real, and this blogger has reason to suspect that the initiative was not only quite authentic by Iran, but was actually a response to a previously undisclosed secret initiative by some State Department officials -- that was "cloaked in deniability."

There may have been a radically different future with Iran -- if there had been serious 'experimentation' with an Iranian proposal to change the contours of US-Iran relations -- on subjects ranging from Iran's support of terrorism to recognizing the State of Israel to America to America's de facto protection of the Iranian mullah-harassing MEK.

The Washington Post's Glenn Kessler has a very important article, "Memo Says Iran's Leaders Backed Talks," appearing in tomorrow's paper that provides valuable new information from the stakeholders in the 2003 Iranian initiative.

Wednesday morning in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, former National Security Council and CIA official Flynt Leverett and former State Department Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson will be addressing some of these same "provenance issues."

Glenn Kessler opens with:

The Swiss ambassador to Iran informed U.S. officials in 2003 that an Iranian proposal for comprehensive talks with the United States had been reviewed and approved by Iranian Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, then-President Mohammad Khatami and then-foreign minister Kamal Kharrazi, according to a copy of the cover letter to the Iranian document.

Kessler goes further into the details of the Iranian proposal which was carried by a Swiss emissary:

"I got the clear impression that there is a strong will of the (Iranian) regime to tackle the problem with the U.S. now and to try it with this initiative," wrote Tim Guldimann, the ambassador, in a cover letter that was faxed to the State Department in May 2003. Guldimann attached a one-page Iranian document labeled "Roadmap" that listed U.S. and Iranian aims for potential negotiations, putting on the table such issues as an end to Iran's support for anti-Israeli militants, action against terrorist groups on Iranian soil and acceptance of Israel's right to exist.

The cover letter, which had not previously been disclosed, was provided by a source who felt its contents were mischaracterized by State Department officials. Switzerland serves as a diplomatic channel for communications between Tehran and Washington because the two countries broke off relations after the 1979 seizure of U.S. embassy personnel.

Guldimann's two-page fax prompted a debate among foreign-policy professionals on whether the Bush administration missed an opportunity four years ago to strike a "grand bargain" with Iran at a time when Washington appeared at the height of its power after the invasion of Iraq and Iran had not mastered uranium enrichment. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was questioned about the document on Capitol Hill last week. She said she did not recall seeing it when she was national security adviser. "I just don't remember ever seeing any such thing," she said.

Here is a pdf of the actual "Roadmap" faxed by Guldimann.

There were a number of interactions between Swiss Ambassador to Iran Tim Guldimann and America's official foreign policy Iran-watchers, but what is intriguing is the date of the two-page fax that Guldimann faxed on May 4, 2003.

Look what Glenn Kessler wrote on May 7, 2003 in a seemingly unrelated Washington Post article, "Plan for North Korea Will Mix Diplomacy and Pressure":

The Bush administration plans to adjust its policy toward North Korea by adopting a two-track approach that would combine new talks with pressure on the communist state by targeting its illegal drug and counterfeiting trade and possibly its missile sales, U.S. and Asian officials said yesterday. The emerging consensus, which will be refined today at a meeting of President Bush's top foreign policy advisers, would bridge a gap that has emerged within the administration since North Korea declared it possesses nuclear weapons at talks last month between U.S., North Korean and Chinese representatives in China.

Administration officials have sought to resolve their policy differences, which pit those pushing for confrontation with the Pyongyang government against those advocating further talks, in advance of next week's visit to Washington by South Korea's new president, Roh Moo Hyun.

Adding to the sense of urgency, U.S. sources said yesterday, intelligence analysts within the past 48 hours have seen increasing signs that North Korea has begun reprocessing 8,000 spent fuel rods to provide plutonium for weapons. North Korea said it had begun the processing at the three-way talks in Beijing last month, but it had not been detected by U.S. intelligence until now. The spent fuel would provide North Korea with enough nuclear material to build two to three additional nuclear bombs within a few months.

In its developing posture toward North Korea, the administration plans to insist that any new talks include Japan and South Korea in addition to China, officials said. They also will hold out the prospect of a policy that, as two officials put it, would "tighten the screws" against North Korea's lucrative illicit trade practices.

The continued talks were sought by the State Department, while increasing pressure on Pyongyang was a key objective of the Defense Department and other administration advocates of a tougher approach.

The timing is uncanny between the Guldimann initiative and the revelation by Glenn Kessler of "Colin Powell's big inter-agency victory in the Korea wars."

Kessler's two essays also confirm independent information that this blogger has received from others close to the Iran-US diplomatic game suggesting that not only Cheney's office quashed a positive reaction to Iran's proposal but that Powell and his team did.

Powell essentially "traded" progress in North Korea for a regressive stance on Iran that Cheney's gang ws dominating.

Powell did not want to antagonize Cheney with negotiations initiatives at the same time with not just one "Axis of Evil" nation -- but TWO. That was the deal made nearly four years ago.

It is ironic that just yesterday, serious progress was logged in the US-North Korea nuclear standoff, while Cheney's team continues to dominate the rhetoric and approach to dealing with Iran.

We are not suggesting here that Powell's choice was the "wrong choice" given the political realities at the time -- but it is odd and frankly disturbing that serious strategists felt they had to make any choice at all.

-- Steve Clemons

(Hardball's Chris Matthews from the back departing a broken down train and traversing a bridge to another train parked alongside)

This may seem like a silly post -- but it isn't. Train breakdowns are big problems in the Northeast corridor.

I missed a meeting with Senators George Voinovich and Barbara Mikulski today on a visa policy project I have been working on so that I could get up to New York for a debate I am engaging in tonight on whether we should talk to Iran -- or bomb it -- with Hillel Fradkin of the Hudson Institute and Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute. The Cato Institute's Justin Logan will be participating as well and on the side of "talk" before "bomb."

With the snow and sleet hitting the Northeast, I thought it would be prudent to get up there early -- and it was. Lee Feinstein of the Council on Foreign Relations and Matthew Levitt of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy are coincidentally on the same train.

And so was Chris Matthews.

Our Acela train broke down somewhere short of Wilmington, Delaware -- and not too long after we were train-hopping across a little metal bridge between our train and one of AMTRAK's regionals.

High drama, kind of, on the Northeast corridor. Matthews, who was standing next to me, seemed sort of happy with the mess. Not quite Keanu Reeves in Speed but we did jump trains!

We are moving again. . .More later.

See those of you attending the debate at CUNY tonight -- and the rest of you weathering the storm at the Dirksen Senate Office Building for tomorrow's Iran conference in Washington.

-- Steve Clemons

This is a nice dose of good news for once. North Korea has agreed to begin permanently dismantling its main nuclear reactor in exchange for a pile of aid from the U.S., South Korea, China and Russia.

I have written about Asst. Secretary of State for East Asian Affairs Christopher Hill before and surmised that if he was given some running room to construct a deal with North Korea, he could walk the situation back from the brink.

This deal could still blow up. That would not be out of character for either the North Korean side -- nor the U.S.

However, somehow Hill has been able to successfully sideline and silence naysayers in Cheney's wing of the national security establishment and keep them from undermining his work.

The fact that Under Secretary of State for International Security and Arms Control Robert Joseph had resigned may have been a key "environmental positive" in getting this right with North Korea this round. The absence of Ambassador John Bolton's bluster at the U.N. also helped improve the negotiating environment.

There is one thing I fear in this success in Asia though -- when all other eyes have been turned towards Iran and Iraq.

It seems that one of the reasons why the U.S. ignored a serious Iran proposal for comprehensive negotiations leading to normalization in March/April 2003 was that Secretary of State Powell and his staff worried that moving forward on an Iran effort would so antagonize Cheney that they would not get agreement from the White House to push forward on the fragile deal-making getting the North Korea-focused Six Party Talks going.

In other words, Powell and Co. -- in addition to Cheney's team -- quashed the Iran possibilities to do North Korea.

One hopes today that Chris Hill has not succeeded in securing a positive arrangement in North Korea in some sort of quid pro quo that State will acquiesce to Cheney's desire for military action against Iran.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

I feel awkward posting a link to this special that ran on Fox News on the topic of "Radical Islam."

It is the single worst piece of television journalism engaging in hyperbolic fear-mongering that I have seen.

Sorry to be encouraging more to see this -- but for those of you who already disliked Fox, this will take you a step further away -- and for those moderates who think that the news media get some things right and some wrong, this is in the "outrageous category."

-- Steve Clemons

On the night of September 19, 2006, I was up in New York covering the Clinton Global Initiative as a journalist/blogger and extremely impressed with the vitality and relationships of Bill Clinton's global network.

Earlier that day, President Bush addressed the UN General Assembly and focused heavily on how to get US policy in the Middle East on a better course. In particular, he focused on establishing a State of Palestine.

Bush stated:

The world must also stand up for peace in the Holy Land. I'm committed to two democratic states -- Israel and Palestine -- living side-by-side in peace and security.

I'm committed to a Palestinian state that has territorial integrity and will live peacefully with the Jewish state of Israel. This is the vision set forth in the road map -- and helping the parties reach this goal is one of the great objectives of my presidency.

The Palestinian people have suffered from decades of corruption and violence and the daily humiliation of occupation. Israeli citizens have endured brutal acts of terrorism and constant fear of attack since the birth of their nation. Many brave men and women have made the commitment to peace. Yet extremists in the region are stirring up hatred and trying to prevent these moderate voices from prevailing.

This struggle is unfolding in the Palestinian territories. Earlier this year, the Palestinian people voted in a free election. The leaders of Hamas campaigned on a platform of ending corruption and improving the lives of the Palestinian people, and they prevailed.

The world is waiting to see whether the Hamas government will follow through on its promises, or pursue an extremist agenda. And the world has sent a clear message to the leaders of Hamas: Serve the interests of the Palestinian people. Abandon terror, recognize Israel's right to exist, honor agreements, and work for peace.

President Abbas is committed to peace, and to his people's aspirations for a state of their own. Prime Minister Olmert is committed to peace, and has said he intends to meet with President Abbas to make real progress on the outstanding issues between them.

I believe peace can be achieved, and that a democratic Palestinian state is possible. I hear from leaders in the region who want to help. I've directed Secretary of State Rice to lead a diplomatic effort to engage moderate leaders across the region, to help the Palestinians reform their security services, and support Israeli and Palestinian leaders in their efforts to come together to resolve their differences.

Prime Minister Blair has indicated that his country will work with partners in Europe to help strengthen the governing institutions of the Palestinian administration. We welcome his initiative. Countries like Saudi Arabia and Jordan and Egypt have made clear they're willing to contribute the diplomatic and financial assistance necessary to help these efforts succeed.

I'm optimistic that by supporting the forces of democracy and moderation, we can help Israelis and Palestinians build a more hopeful future and achieve the peace in a Holy Land we all want.

Freedom, by its nature, cannot be imposed -- it must be chosen. From Beirut to Baghdad, people are making the choice for freedom. And the nations gathered in this chamber must make a choice, as well: Will we support the moderates and reformers who are working for change across the Middle East -- or will we yield the future to the terrorists and extremists? America has made its choice: We will stand with the moderates and reformers.

I thought that this was a pretty hopeful speech. While I think that the President's insistence that Hamas engage in public pronouncements that would quickly undermine it with its supporters was not going to get very far, the fact that he was going to dispatch Condoleezza Rice last September to engage in a round of serious deal-making that would prop up Abbas seemed promising.

But that night -- drinking at the bar of the Sheraton where the Clinton Global Initiative -- I was hanging out with some of the real insiders in Palestinian-Israel-US affairs. The Palestinians were in the dumps and very depressed and distressed by the gap between President Bush's speech and what they were being told privately by National Security Council Senior Staff member Elliot Abrams and Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs David Welch.

Despite the "enlightened tone" of the Bush speech, the Palestinians were told that they had to break up the fragile effort to establish a "unity government" with Hamas.

While Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas sat alone for two years waiting to be taken seriously by the United States and Israel and got nowhere as America and Israel kept harping that "there was no partner" to negotiate with, Abbas had little choice but to try and build some form of unity government with Hamas -- and was on the verge of getting Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh to recognize key diplomatic instruments that "implied" recognition of Israel.

Abbas came so close to success that nearly everyone began to try and undermine him. Khaled Meshal began fighting with Haniyeh over where the real address of Hamas was -- and ordered the Hamas incursion into Israel which resulted in the deaths of Israeli soldiers and the kidnapping of Corporal Gilad Shalit.

But at the same time, the US instructed Abbas's representatives that he had to derail the unity government. The promise then was that America and Israel would get serious about putting real benefits on the table for him that he could take to the Palestinian people.

None of this happened -- well none of it except Abbas's statement that the unity government would recognize Israel which promptly broke apart the unity effort last year.

Abbas got nothing for his troubles from Israel or the United States.

In recent months, we have seen simmering tectonic tension between the rival political and military wings of Hamas and Fatah and both America and Israel did nothing. Abbas was left pretty much to fend for himself, though there is word that the U.S. was funneling some money and guns in to help Fatah.

But we were absent in deal-making because of our self-imposed restriction in talking to Hamas.

This time, Abbas was left no choice but to make a deal on a unity government that would stick -- and this time, the deal was with the real muscle of Hamas, Khaled Meshal.

Saudi Arabia, disturbed by the poor hand America is playing in Middle East affairs, brokered the kiss-and-make-up sessions between Abbas and Meshal and the unity government is coming together.

All of this has been in the news. We apparently talk to the Saudis frequently.

And yet -- quite unbelievably -- I have dependable sources inside the US government foreign policy bureaucracy who tell me that our decision makers were caught completely off-guard by the Saudi venture and its success.

Elliot Abrams is again winding up a spin and influence machine to try and send signals that America is not please with this move towards a unity government

It's a replay of what happened last year.

One of the things that really stood out about the Clinton Global Initiative is how nearly every major speaker at the plenary meetings underscored the vital importance of moving to final status Israel-Palestine negotiations and addressing Palestinian grievances was key to any progress in the Middle East.

Here is a link to video clips of speeches by former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and Jordan's King Abdullah who make this point strongly.

And yet, America dithers and replays the same game over and over. We pretend to engage in epic efforts to establish Palestine while all the efforts are ultimately designed to fail.

This has to stop. And that's what the real message behind the Saudi deal-brokering between Hamas and Fatah is all about.

-- Steve Clemons

This morning, I am out in Chestertown, Maryland blogging at the "Play it Again, Sam Coffee Shop" and catching up with thing. My email at my office is out again, so now I am catching up on reading -- stuff on paper rather than electronic bits.

One of the take-away gifts the Atlantic Monthly gave us after its excellent pre-party before the State of the Union address is a commemorative booklet of old Atlantic Monthly articles titled "Celebrating the American City."

Regrettably, the collection of essays does not appear to be available in any other form than a tangible booklet form and is not on the internet. I am hoping that staff at The Atlantic read this and figure out a way to share these interesting essays from the past with the many Americans who were not able to attend the pre-State of the Union reception hosted at the Library of Congress. (pretty please?)

If you are into cities, particularly many decades old essays about them, the collection is wonderful. They include:

The Genesis of Boston (October 1935) by S. Foster Damon

Washington: The City of Leisure (December 1900) by A. Maurice Low

Chicago (July 1892) by Edward G. Mason

Seven Weeks in the Great Yo-Semite (June 1864) by Fitz Hugh Ludlow

New York After Paris (October 1906) by Alvan F. Sanborn

Here is the final bit of the essay by A. Maurice Low on the city of Washington, written 101 years after George Washington's death and read 107 years after it was published.

It is clear how inspiring Washington was in 1900 in this snippet of Low's commentary on the monument to America's first president:

I look up once more at the monument to Washington.

It stands now veiled in a sea of silvery light, the Potomac, but a hand's breadth away, a ribbon of uncut velvet, shimmering in blue and silver, until it fines down and is lost in the green of the Virginia hills, -- the monument majestic in its size, colossal in its proportions, beautiful in its stern simplicity.

It stands there like a sentinel keeping watch over the city it so jealously loves; it stands there part of the genius of George Washington, a fragment of his creative force.

By day, warned by the sun, softened by the iridescence of the prismatic colors, it is the Washington of youth and faith and ambition.

By night, bathed in fantastic shadow, forbidding, cold, unapproachable, it is the Washington who has put ambition behind him; who has done his work; who, secure in the affections of his countrymen, can look with serene vision to the future.

Inseparably, it links the Washington of the past with the Washington of today.

It takes time to see the legacy of a president, but it's clear that Bush 43's eight year tenure ranks among the most botched presidencies in our history.

Even considering the attacks of 9/11, it is profoundly disturbing to see a great nation that had emerged in such good shape after the end of the Cold War fritter away its prestige, moral credibility and military competence -- it's very considerable mystique -- so recklessly.

It is easy to imagine that George Washington -- who George Bush reportedly reads about in various biographies -- would be 'pissed' about the state of America today.

-- Steve Clemons

P.S. -- Note to the publisher and editor of The Atlantic Monthly, you should consider posting these excellent essays on your website -- even for temporary access. SCC

In my capacity as head of foreign policy programs at the New America Foundation, I along with Trita Parsi, who is President of the National Iranian American Council, have produced a conference together that will take place in a Senate Foreign Relations Committee Hearing Room, Dirksen Senate Office Building Room 628, on Wednesday next week, 14 February.

The conference will feature several important discussions that are key parts of the current US-Iran debate.

First, former Bush administration National Security Council and CIA official Flynt Leverett and former State Department Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson will be sharing "more" on the question about the provenance of the March/April 2003 alleged Iranian negotiations proposal that was presented to the United States via Swiss diplomatic channels.

Recently, then National Security Advisor and present Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice disavowed direct knowledge of the proposal and claimed as reported in a recent Glenn Kessler authored article in the Washington Post that she had never seen the "fax" from the Iranians.

Flynt Leverett, in a conversation with TWN before flying to Rome where he was meeting with former Swiss Ambassador to Iran Tim Guldimann, questioned whether Condoleezza Rice was attempting to purposely deceive the American public about the realities of the 2003 Iranian proposal.

Rice, in the Glenn Kessler article, dismissed Flynt Leverett's recent commentary about the proposal:

"First of all, I don't know what Flynt Leverett's talking about, quite frankly," she said. "Maybe I should ask him when he came to me and said, 'We have a proposal from Iran and we really ought to take it.' "

It is clear from earlier interviews with Rice that she was familiar with the content of the Iran proposal and seemed not to raise doubts about its provenance. If it is true that she never actually saw a proposal as important as this one would have been given the level of US strategic concern about Iran, this exchange raises serious questions about her management of the National Security Council -- particularly that Elliott Abrams may never have showed Rice the proposal, and alternatively -- that she never asked to see it.

Leverett has reported to this blogger that about 90% of what is available on the internet and in the press about the "content" of the Iran proposal is correct -- but there is another 10% that has not been disclosed and that is critical to understanding the seriousness and consequential nature of what Iran put forward.

Leverett will respond on Wednesday in this conference to Rice's comments -- and will share more about the content of the Iran proposal. Lawrence Wilkerson and Trita Parsi will also share bits of the story that they know from their particular vantage points in 2003.

Also being reviewed in this conference will be the "technical dimensions" of Iran's nuclear effort -- what we know, what we don't. We will have nuclear experts from the IAEA and from Italy's Ministry of Foreign Affairs here who have been trying to generate "third option" proposals in the US-Iran standoff. Joseph Cirincione of the Center for American Progress will manage that discussion.

Intelligence expert and US House Representative Jane Harman will share her views on various policy options and scenarios facing policy makers regarding Iran, particularly given Iran's growing regional pretensions and disturbing senior level political pronouncements in Iran.

Harman was recently named Chair of the Intelligence Subcommittee of the House Committee on Homeland Security.

Public intellectual par excellence Francis Fukuyama, who teaches at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies and is the Executive Committee chair of The American Interest will share his perspective on how America should approach its policy options on Iran, most of which are various shades of "bleak."

Here is a recent oped by Fukuyama on this subject, "The Neocons Have Learned Nothing From Five Years of Catastrophe" -- and check out Fukuyama's blog.

Then we will have a general discussion regarding Iran's increasingly activist behavior amidst an already convulsive Middle East with perspectives ranging from "push back" to containment to engagement.

Should be very interesting. If you would like to attend, you can email me at Steve@TheWashingtonNote.com

There is no charge -- but don't RSVP if you are not sure that you will be able to make it.

Here is the conference info:

Raw Story has the just declassified "Review of Pre-Iraq War Activities of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy" up on its site.

While the Inspector General's review credits the "continuing collaboration between the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence" as an example that "circumstances prevalent in 2002 are no longer present today," thus warranting no recommendations for change -- the report really does slam Douglas Feith's independent intelligence generation activities as inappropriate on all counts.

It seems to clear Feith of acting illegally or without authorization -- which promulgates the reality that no one seems to be clearly accountable for the errors upon errors inside the Pentagon.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

Iran's Ambassador to the United Nations Javad Zarif far outclasses Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Ambassador Zarif is a savvy, friendly, intellectually acute diplomat -- considered by other diplomats as "one of the best" in the business, according to one former US Ambassador I spoke to earlier today.

Zarif has a powerfully logical op-ed in the New York Times today, "How Not to Inflame Iraq."

This article takes a shot at the logic of occupation, and I largely agree with Zarif's view. However, I do believe that there are occupations that have gone right and that while I totally opposed the invasion and occupation of Iraq, there was nonetheless still a path to getting things more right than they have gone.

But if Zarif reflects the approach of Iran's Supreme Leader, then there may be real opportunity for a convergence of some American and Iranian interests. But if Zarif, who is so obviously, framing policy in ways dissimilar from Iran's President is not indicative of the views of the state, then there seems little hope in avoiding a disastrous collision.

Here is Ambassador Zarif's call for "grand bargain-ing":

The Persian Gulf region is in dire need of a truly inclusive arrangement for security and cooperation. Only through such regional cooperation, with the necessary international support, can we contain the current crisis and prevent future ones.

I wrote in these pages almost four years ago that the removal of Saddam Hussein provided a unique opportunity to finally realize the long sought objective of regional confidence-building and cooperation, as well as to reverse the dangerous trend of confrontation, exclusion and rivalry.

We have lost many valuable opportunities to effect this arrangement, with hundreds of thousands of innocent lives shattered in the interim. The forthcoming meeting of Iraq's neighbors, to be held in Baghdad next month, will be a good place to begin this difficult but necessary journey toward regional security.

More later -- on a big conference I am helping to organize on Iran next Wednesday in the US Senate.

-- Steve Clemons

Seven Republican Senators -- seven renegade samurai, or ronin --- have essentially blasted in a letter just prepared in the last hour both the Democratic and Republican leadership for behind-the-scenes gamesmanship that undermined a floor debate about America's options in Iraq.

While American citizens saw a procedural motion to move to "debate" the Warner-Levin Iraq War Resolution lose a 49-47 vote, what they did not see was a snarling, nasty tug-of-war between Reid and Durbin on one side and McConnell and Lott on the other that ripped the guts out of any possible comity needed to get to that debate.

TWN has learned that Senators John Warner, Olympia Snowe, and Chuck Hagel -- and others -- were highly irritated, angry in fact, with both sides and elected to vote against the procedural motion until the party leaders on both sides of the aisle ceased their antics.

I was as confused as anyone by the votes cast by Warner, Snowe and Hagel who were real stakeholders in the resolution that was being fought over. But it is now clear that in the eyes of these Senators, the Republican Party leadership and the majority Democrats chose to slug each other silly in ways that preempted any ability to secure the votes needed to assure debate. In that circumstance, the Senators who have signed the letter below decided to vote against the resolution in that climate.

Essentially, these seven Senators have said to their own Republican leadership and the Democrats to "shape up" or a "pox on both your houses."

I think it's a brave move -- and explains a lot.

Here is the signed letter as a pdf.

Here is what the letter says:

February 7, 2007

The Honorable Harry Reid, Majority Leader

The Honorable Mitch McConnell, Republican Leader

The Honorable Richard Durbin, Assistant Majority Leader

The Honorable Trent Lott, Assistant Republican Leader

United States Senate -- Washington, D.C. 20510

Dear Leader Reid, Leader McConnell, Senator Durbin and Senator Lott:

The war in Iraq is the most pressing issue of our time. It urgently deserves the attention of the full Senate and a full debate on the Senate floor without delay.

We respectfully advise you, our leaders, that we intend to take S. Con. Res 7 and offer it, where possible under the Standing Rules of the Senate, to bills coming before the Senate.

On January 10,2007, the President stated, with respect to his Iraq strategy, "if Members have improvements that can be made, we will make them. If circumstances change we will adjust." In a conscientious, respectful way, we offered our resolution consistent with the President's statement.

We strongly believe the Senate should be allowed to work its will on our resolution as well as the concepts brought forward by other Senators. Monday's procedural vote should not be interpreted as any lessening of our resolve to go forward advocating the concepts of S. Con. Res. 7.

We will explore all of our options under the Senate procedures and practices to ensure a full and open debate on the Senate floor. The current stalemate is unacceptable to us and to the people of this country.

Sincerely,

Olympia Snowe

John Warner

Chuck Hagel

Susan Collins

Norm Coleman

Gordon Smith

George Voinovich

This letter is going to reopen the possibilities of what could happen regarding the much needed national debate on the Senate floor on America's course in Iraq.

The "huge get" of this letter is Senator GEORGE VOINOVICH. He was not on any of the previous resolutions.

So where are MURKOWSKI, SUNUNU, BROWNBACK, and SPECTER?

More soon.

-- Steve Clemons

(Anne Louise Bardach, author of The Prison Letters of Fidel Castro)

Yesterday was a frustrating day for me. I had the opportunity, thanks to another of the significant think tanks in town, to pose a question to one of the more important international diplomats of the moment.

I asked this diplomat to make clear something that the neocons have alleged was a fabrication by a European government. I asked the question very carefully and asked it in front of about 300 people. The meeting was "entirely off the record."

The diplomat who responded before people like Helene Cooper of the New York Times and Jim Hoagland and Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post in the audience said some extremely interesting things. I connected with the diplomat later and tried to lift the veil on the "off the record" commentary -- without success.

Now, I know something that is extremely important about the conduct of American foreign policy and cannot report it. Helene Cooper actually chased me out of the room to ask what I was going to do with the info -- and we were both flummoxed -- realizing we were stuck but fearing someone else might scoop us in reporting the info that came after a question I posed.

I understand the realities here, and I won't write this up unless I find independent confirmation of what I learned. I have thoughts on how that might be possible.

But all this stuff about journalistic propriety came up yesterday as well on a second front when I hosted a meeting for the Cuba-diva herself, Anne Louise Bardach, who spoke both about her new book, The Prison Letters of Fidel Castro, but who gave a talk at the New America Foundation I chaired and co-hosted with The Nation Institute titled "Cuba, Castro, and What Comes Next?"

Bardach was terrific -- but she's been trying to connect to an anonymous source of mine for some years -- and that source has not been cooperative. I've lived up to my commitment to this person, who happens to be a soldier, but it's clear that Bardach would be an excellent person to run further with some information related to Cuba than what I have written.

Blogging is different than journalism -- but there are norms and best practices that I think serious bloggers need to live up to. The blog has grown so much and is read so widely among Washington types that I consider this both my own sandbox for oped-style commentary, but it is also a place that breaks some news. So, I have to maintain an approximation of journalistic standards.

I realize that this is a disappointing post. Perhaps you'll get a sense, however, as to how I feel sitting on some of the most interesting foreign policy information out there and am completely unable to write about it. ARGHH!

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

A friend just leaked to me the teaser for an important article on more robust Saudi national security activism in the Middle East that will appear tomorrow.

Until now, Saudi Arabia has largely been quiet amidst the regional convulsions that are unfolding around it. Saudi "calm" has been a White House request.

That is over. In my view the "watershed" for changing Saudi behavior was the Israel-Lebanon conflict and erupting popularity of Hassan Nasrallah.

Here is the intro for a piece running in the New York Times tomorrow by Hassan Fattah and Michael Slackman:

SAUDI-DIPLO (Jiddah, Saudi Arabia) -- With the prospect of three civil wars looming over the Middle East -- and Iran poised to gain from them all -- Saudi Arabia has abandoned its behind-the-scenes checkbook diplomacy and taken on a central, aggressive role in reshaping the region's conflicts.

On Tuesday, the kingdom is playing host in Mecca to the leaders of Hamas and Fatah, the two feuding Palestinian factions, in what both sides claim could lead to a national unity government and reduced bloodshed.

The entire piece should be posted on the Times' site some time after midnight.

-- Steve Clemons

Update: Here is a bit more of this interesting article:

In recent months, Saudi Arabia has also increased its public involvement in Iraq and its support of the Sunni-led government in Lebanon. The process is shaping up as a counteroffensive to efforts by Iran to establish itself as the regional superpower, according to diplomats, analysts and officials here and throughout the region. Some even say that the recent Saudi commitment to temper the price of oil is aimed at undermining Iran's economy, although officials here deny that.

"We realized that we have to wake up," said a high-ranking Saudi diplomat who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media. "Someone rang the bell, 'Be careful, something is moving."'

The shift is occurring with encouragement from the Bush administration. Its goal is to see an American-backed alliance of Sunni Arab states including Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt, along with a Fatah-led Palestine and Israel, opposing Iran, Syria and the radical groups they support.

Yet Riyadh's goals may not always be in alignment with those of the White House, and could complicate American interests.

The Saudi effort has been taken in collaboration with its traditional Persian Gulf allies and Egypt and Jordan, but it also represents another significant shift in a region undergoing a profound reshuffling. The changes are linked to the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the transfer of power from Sunni Muslims to Shiites in Iraq, analysts said. They also reach back many years to the gradual decline in influence of Cairo and the collapse of a pan-Arab agenda, analysts and diplomats said.

"The Saudis felt that the Iranian role in the region has become influential, especially in Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon, and that the Iranian role was undermining their role in the region," said Muhammad al-Sakr, head of the foreign affairs committee in Kuwait's Parliament. "Usually the Saudis prefer to maneuver behind the scenes," he said. "Lately they've been noticeably active."

Saudi Arabia has taken public initiatives in the past, including one in 2002, when at an Arab League meeting it proposed a regional peace agreement with Israel in exchange for Israel's withdrawing to its 1967 boundaries. But it prefers to work quietly, and has not recently taken such a sustained public posture.

"This is not leadership by choice, it is leadership by necessity," said Gamal Abdel Gawad, an expert at the Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. "There is a leadership vacuum in the region and they have to step forward, or Iran will."

The United States, which is pushing the Saudis to take on this role, is alarmed at rising Iranian influence in Iraq and Lebanon, and with the Palestinian government of Hamas.

But the two countries, though sharing broad goals, have different views of the players in each conflict. For example, while the Bush administration sees the conflict in Iraq as one between allies and terrorists, the Saudis tend to see it as Sunnis versus Shiites -- and they favor the Sunnis, while the Americans back the Shiite-led government. And while Saudi Arabia wants to lure Hamas away from Iran's influence and back into the Arab fold, the United States views Hamas as a terrorist organization.

-- Steve Clemons

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Joe Biden called out Mitch McConnell, John McCain, Joe Lieberman and all those stopping debate and a vote on a pending Iraq War resolution.

Biden said to them, "Iraq dominates our national life. It is on the minds of tens of millions of Americans. It shapes the lives of hundreds of thousands of our men and women in uniform and their families."

Biden is right -- but it's going to be a close call securing the 60 votes needed to shut down an effort to preempt ANY debate (written before the vote).

From Biden's statement (click here to watch video clip):

This bill, like the Biden-Hagel-Levin-Snowe bill makes three things clear. First, Iraq needs a political settlement to end the sectarian violence. Second, the United States must work with other nations to develop a "regional, internationally-sponsored peace and reconciliation process for Iraq." Third, the mission of US armed forces should be confined to counter-terrorism, training, and maintaining the territorial integrity of Iraq. The mission should not include policing a sectarian civil war. That will require significantly fewer troops than we have in Iraq now.

As I said at the outset, this is a first step. But it can set the foundation for everything that follows. If the President does not listen to the majority of Congress and the majority of the American people, we will look at other ways to turn the surge around.

Even if we succeed in that effort, we still need to turn our overall Iraq policy around. We need a strategy that can produce a political settlement in Iraq. That's the only way to stop Shiites and Sunnis from killing each other and to allow our troops to leave Iraq without trading a dictator for chaos.

Watching C-Span now. The vote seems close.

Damn. . .not close at all. The effort to move to the Warner-Levin Iraq War Resolution was stopped 49 to 47.

This may hurt right now, but it's getting easier and easier to figure out which Members of Congress to support and which to purge.

-- Steve Clemons

Japan Foreign Minister Taro Aso has called America's military operation in Iraq "immature" and "not working very well."

Bureaucrats are scrambling to explain what he really meant -- that he wasn't against the use of force in Iraq and that there are other ways than using force "to build peace -- but the bottom line is that Japan has gone wobbly in its previous steadfast support of George W. Bush's crusade in Iraq.

Just a few weeks ago, Japan Defense Minister Fumio Kyuma declared his opposition to the Iraq War which he called "wrong."

These are remarkable, important, and hopeful statements (though we'll have to go through the charade of referring to them as gaffes for a while).

When Germany expressed its opposition to the war in Iraq, I feel (though many European friends of mine have taken strong exception to my view) that America's satellite of interests inside Europe finally reclaimed its soul in its entirety back from American control.

In Japan, Prime Minister Koizumi -- at one time believed to be a populist-leaning prime minister who would assert a new, more robust yet healthy nationalism based on Japanese interests rather than American designs -- actually went the other direction. When Bush set the US towards a new war against Iraq, Koizumi sacrificed Japanese sovereignty and re-fixed Japan as a lapdog of US interests.

The dog is out of the lap, apparently. And Taro Aso -- a grandson of the famed post-WWII bureaucrat turned prime minister Shigeru Yoshida -- is testing the waters of a less-tethered Japan.

I think that this new independence and candid talk can take either a good or bad course. But right now, Japan stepping forward and knocking out one of the few key pillars of global support Bush had is a very good thing.

To paraphrase John McCain, Foreign Minister Aso's comment about Bush's war constitutes "a vote of no confidence."

-- Steve Clemons

This is one of the more clever ditties on President Bush's latest maneuvers. Comedian and political satirist Andy Borowitz says just like in the days of declining ratings in Happy Days, George Bush is out like the Fonz trying to get popular by "jumping a shark."

Here is the opener:

President Bush's decision to send additional troops to Iraq has puzzled many pundits: is the President stubborn, isolated, out of touch with reality? While all three may be true, there is another explanation: George W. Bush has been on television for the past six years, and like many TV shows entering a seventh season, Bush has jumped the shark.

Wikipedia defines jumping the shark as "the tipping point at which a TV series is deemed to have passed its peak, or has introduced plot twists that are illogical in terms of everything that has preceded them."

(photo source: Wikipedia -- see fair use provisions)

Three telltale signs:

Same Character, Different Actor: For the first six seasons of the Bush administration, the character of the Secretary of Defense was played by Donald Rumsfeld. Then, without warning (unless you count his pre-election comment that Rumsfeld was doing a "fantastic job"), Bush replaced him with former CIA chief Robert Gates. Like the producers of "Bewitched," (two Darrins) or "Roseanne" (two Beckys), Bush may have thought that if he made the casting switch with no explanation, the viewers wouldn't notice.

Unfortunately for the president, the Rumsfeld-Gates switcheroo was the most jarring since "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" (two Aunt Vivs).

New Kid in Town: Long-of-tooth TV series often resort to adding younger characters in the hope of breathing much-needed life into a moribund enterprise. Although this ploy almost never works, and the new characters usually wind up being reviled (Cousin Oliver on "The Brady Bunch," Stephanie on "All in the Family"), the Decider-in-Chief has ignored the lessons of television history and proposed adding not one, but twenty-one thousand new characters.

Will "the surge" succeed where those other fresh faces didn't? I have just two words for you: Scrappy Doo.

Bush and his team are doing a fairly good job of distracting the public from the worsening quagmire in Iraq.

Bush is out every day talking about the economy -- and as he remains focused on the surge and on broadening the rhetoric to pound on Iran and Syria, the Senate is still floundering on a non-binding political resolution outlining opposition to the escalation.

But the shark may jump up and bite Bush yet. The American public doesn't like what it sees coming from the White House.

-- Steve Clemons

Here is a roster of information and "FY 2008 Budget Fact sheets" that the Executive Branch has assembled to support the President's Annual Budget Request:

Link to all Fact Sheets

please note that all of the following hyperlinks are to pdf files

Budget Overview

Budget Discipline

Management

The Economy

Defense

War on Terror

Homeland Security

State and International Programs

Education

Health Care

Justice

Compassion

Children

Space and Science

Agriculture

Environment

Commerce

Veterans

Housing

Labor

Transportation

I need to digest some of this material before commenting in depth, but I have spent a lot of time in the downtown coffee shop in Bartlesville, Oklahoma talking about basic check book realities with some of the Sooner State's old time conservatives.

They would tell you that you can't wage serious wars on the scale we are doing and then not either cut spending elsewhere or raise taxes.

These folks really dislike taxes -- but they understand the need for some government. However, they don't buy the combination of building a larger US military force which the President has called for; resupplying the troops with armor, supplies, and new weapons; possibly broadening the wars simultaneously underway in Iraq and Afghanistan to include Iran and Syria and then talk about "never raising taxes."

For some of these conservatives, their perception of the welfare state is anathema, but so too is out of control spending on the Pentagon -- spending that the Chinese government is financing by buying our debt.

-- Steve Clemons

Hisham Matar has an interesting piece in today's New York Times, "Seeing What We Want to See in Qaddafi."

The writer suggests that Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi continues to rule Libya as a tyrant, disappearing his critics, and cultivating a climate of fear -- particularly among those who might engage in public dissent.

But the writer also has real insight into what drove the Bush administration and Qaddafi to become partners:

Colonel Qaddafi deserves sole credit for Libya's foreign policy U-turn. He has never found it necessary to devote himself to a single political ideology; his only consistent policy has been to guard his personal political survival. The United States and Britain understand this, but have only exploited it for their own myopic objectives. . .

I want Libya to reform -- but that is not the highest priority in today's climate.

Turning Syria is.

Bashar al-Assad and the clique of nine who surround him and are the real decision-makers inside Syria are also self-preservationist/realists. Some in this clique are modernist reformers and others are nefarious thugs, but they are all ultra-rational.

James Baker said in Senate Foreign Relations Committee testimony a week ago that the single biggest failing of Bush's current foreign policy strategy is a failure to deal with Syria and to draw that country away from Iran.

Reform should always be on the table of American negotiators -- though NGOs are better at it than government administrators -- but there are things that we can offer al-Assad and his backers to move them on a Libya-like course.

We need to drop our counter-productive obsessions with regime change and do a deal that offers Syria's rationalists an arrangement that meets their needs and begins to turn our fortunes a more positive direction in the Middle East.

-- Steve Clemons

Former NY Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who demonstrated real rather than feigned leadership on the day of and weeks following September 11, 2001, has said that there is a "good chance" he will run for the Republican presidential nomination.

Giuliani does have impressive leadership skills, but he also has some "buddy old pal" problems that I can't find he has addressed adequately. If others know where he's talked about his political, personal, and business dealings with Bernard Kerik, please feel free to post the link in the comments section.

But if Rudy has a lot of Kerik-type pals, it's not off-base speculating that a "Lincoln Bedroom Scandal 2.0" might accompany his presidency.

-- Steve Clemons

The New York Times' William Broad and David Sanger have written a thoughtful piece questioning the Iran as 900 pound nuclear gorilla. It's a piece long overdue.

While I agree with Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs R. Nicholas Burns that virtually every serious nation -- including Russia, China, France, Germany, and others -- that has looked at the design and direction of Iran's declared nuclear energy interests sees a path towards weaponization, Iran may be trying to create an impression of greater technological sophistication than it has in order to satisfy domestic political appetite and ambitions.

Americans were sold a false WMD story to help build political support for a White House pre-committed to an Iraq War. There were political dynamics at play designed in part to give Republicans a monopoly on the political benefits of fear-mongering.

We need to imagine a similar situation in Iran in which Iranian President Ahmadinejad and Supreme Ruler Khameini have excited the national passions of Iran's citizens who largely support Iran's sovereign right and need to move towards nuclear energy, but appear not to support weaponization.

Iran's scientists and theocratic leaders may be lying to their public about their technological achievements much as Americans were lied to about Iraq's WMDs to stoke national passions and expectations.

If this is the case, it would be useful for some sophisticated and precise commentary at some point from inspectors or other nuclear experts familiar with Iran's nuclear program to define whether or not there is a gap between what Ahmadinejad and other top Iran officials are saying about Iran's nuke program, and what they have really achieved -- or said another way, what failures they want to cover-up from their citizens and the world.

Arms Control Wonk is a good source for serious discussion about reality and fantasy in the world of nuclear proliferation.

-- Steve Clemons

George Soros's words often kick up storms. And another storm has hit.

This time it's about comparing America today and Nazi Germany -- and how states deal with their not-so-pleasant pasts. Just for the record, Soros also included Turkey and Japan in his mix of history-denying countries that faced obstacles in approaching their futures in a healthy way.

Soros is sort of like a less careful Alan Greenspan whose wrinkled brow, or the length of pause before he spoke, or a small wink could generate political and economic tsunamis.

Soros is worth something around a couple or few tens of billions of dollars and donates through his charities half a billion dollars a year, most of this to help cultivate civil society development in former Soviet bloc countries. Recently, he has broadened his arena of concerns -- particularly in the area of global warming/climate change and doing something to help shore up global resistance to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. He has also invested a lot in trying to help us to get rid of or to get beyond the Bush presidency

But the right wing hates George Soros. And the NeoCons (on the right or the left) hate him more.

I just don't get it though because he has actually helped change societies successfully and is a hero in much of the world. The necons too have wanted to change the world -- albeit with guns, while Soros did it through education and political and civil institution buildng. One must surmise then that they are both jealous of his success and have a counterproductive obsession with military-driven social change, something that rarely if ever works.

If there was a person in the United States or the world who better reflected a "transformational diplomat," a person concerned with checks and balances inside governments and who telegraphed a concern for basic human rights in everything he funds and animates, I don't know who the person is.

So, what exactly did George Soros say. Here, is is a recap from the New York Post that adds to an original item written by Floyd Norris's "Davos Diary" for the New York Times:

After asserting that the United States is recognizing the error it made in Iraq, Soros said, "To what extent it recognizes the mistake will determine its future."

He went on to say that Turkey and Japan are still hurt by a reluctance to admit to dark parts of their history, and contrasted that reluctance to Germany's rejection of its Nazi-era past.

"America needs to follow the policies it has introduced in Germany," Soros said. "We have to go through a certain de-Nazification process."

Soros spokesman Michael Vachon told Page Six: "There is nothing unpatriotic about demanding accountability from the president. Those responsible for taking America into this needless war should do us all a favor and retire from public office."

Martin Peretz in The New Republic under a small header "The Madness of King George" (more aptly applied to the current occupant of the White House) and a subsequent title, "Tyran-a-Soros" has written the most vile depiction of the Soros commentary :

George Soros lunched with some reporters on Saturday at Davos. He talked about spending $600 million on civil society projects during the 1990s, then trying to cut back to $300 million, and how this year it will be between $450 and $500 million.

His new projects aim, in Floyd Norris's words, to promote a "common European foreign policy" (read: an anti-American foreign policy) and also to study the integration (or so he thinks) of Muslims in eleven European cities.

He included among his dicta a little slight at Bill and Melinda Gates, who "have chosen public health, which is like apple pie." And then, after saying the United States was now recognizing the errors it made in Iraq, he added this comment, as reported by Norris in The New York Times' online "Davos Diary": "To what extent it recognizes the mistake will determine its future."

Soros said Turkey and Japan were still hurt by a reluctance to admit to dark parts of their history and contrasted that reluctance to Germany's rejection of its Nazi-era past. "America needs to follow the policies it has introduced in Germany. We have to go through a certain deNazification process."

American arrogance is tough enough for the world to handle -- but arrogance after botching up a war that has resulted in the deaths many tens of thousands and displaced millions while U.S. citizens at home enjoy a comfy life of tax cuts and Desperate Housewives -- is even more over the top.

Martin Peretz is part of the crowd that pounded a drumbeat for the Iraq War and has been complicit with the other Chief Ideology Officers of the neocon movement -- folks such as Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen, Bill Kristol, and Charles Krauthammer -- in engaging in a broad denial of the idiocy of this military action and are today ignoring lessons that could be learned from our Iraq debacle as they encourage yet another disastrous clash -- this time with Iran.

Soros properly and appropriately referred to de-Nazification because that was a process that assured that there was accountability for the deadly, barbarous, and horrible actions taken by the government of Germany. Like in Japan, political and military leaders -- and some social, educational, and business leaders -- were purged from their offices in order for those of different political ilk to come into positions of power.

Soros is referring to political accountability and political change after what many conservatives are calling a series of the worst political and military strategic mistakes in modern American history. He is referring to those in the White House and in American politics who turned a blind eye after Abu Ghraib, who did nothing when people were shut up -- some mistakenly -- without legal counsel in Guantanamo. He is referring to those who sat on information related to the Haditha horror until it was exposed.

Peretz is lambasting Soros because of the temerity of comparing anything that the United States might do in the world with the horrors of what Nazi Germany did -- and these were horrors. Peretz and others seem to think that they have some kind of monopoly in drawing on metaphors that related to German war crimes in the mid-part of last century, particularly when it comes to the Holocaust and to Jewish issues. (though he might not realize how utterly offensive and inappropriate the comparison of "King George" is to someone who has done more than anyone in history to finance the cultivation of systems of checks and balances around the world.)

Soros might have used Japan's case to make his point -- but he knows Japanese history less well and intimately than that of Europe and Germany's role. Soros is talking about those who place ideology over empirical rationality, those who have positions of power and did awful, terrible things in our own government -- and now need to be "purged" from our system.

I agree with Soros and understand the metaphor he was using. I have the sense of context and I think the maturity to know that Soros was not implying that America is on the same moral plain of a German state that exterminated six million Jews. Of course Soros is not saying that -- and Peretz and the other critics that have tried to ride this wave know it too.

They are manipulating Soros's comments to try and pin on him some notion of moral equivalence while missing the key issue that Soros is saying that we have gone through the worst erosion in the fundamentals of American democracy since the domestic internment camps of Japanese-Americans since World War II, and perhaps even before that.

Soros has a strong and compelling point -- and I think it should be heard for what it is, untarnished by the likes of Martin Peretz who have twisted from Soros's comment the important value it should have for our discussions in this country about the character of our future political course.

Martin Peretz, to my knowledge, has engaged in little to no self-scrutiny about the role that his own influential commentary had on the buildup to the Iraq War. He, to my knowledge, has not exposed his close personal relationship with Ahmed Chalabi -- whom I met at The New Republic at a meeting organized by Peretz for editors of the magazine. I emphasize to my knowledge.

Peretz helped sell Chalabi -- and helped sell the Iraqi National Congress -- to official Washington. Chalabi, whose intelligence chief later defected to Iran, and Chalabi who himself allegedly passed on information he was getting from his American contacts to Iranian sources.

There is a corruption and self-censorship that hit Washington and blinded many in responsible political positions and government roles and allowed the U.S. to launch a war that should not have been launched -- and to spend a great deal of time and resources punishing those who were speaking out against it.

The Europeans tried to intervene and stop us from invading Iraq -- and they were right -- but still we punish them for their "disloyalty."

The administration and its fans of the "war of choice against Iraq," as Zbigniew Brzezinski stated recently, have also spent a great deal of time trying to punish and ridicule Soros -- anything to cast attention away from their own complicity in this disaster and their own mistakes. . .and their own disloyalty to the national interests of the United States of America.

We do need a political purge in this country. We need accountability -- and we need to face up to the terrible mistakes and -- yes -- the horror in some cases that our actions have unleashed.

Soros is right.

-- Steve Clemons

Update: This thoughtful email came in from a knowledgeable TWN reader and should be added to the record:

The ugliest allegation in Peretz's screed is that George Soros was a Nazi collaborator.

This is simply untrue. Soros was a 13-year-old boy when the Nazis entered Budapest. His father hid him with an official from the Ministry of Agriculture (whose Jewish wife was also in hiding). Soros posed as his godson to avoid being murdered by the Germans.

Soros's father managed to hide his wife and other son as well, and helped many others escape. While Soros was in hiding with the official, a Mr. Baumbach, the official was assigned to inventory the estate a wealthy Jewish family that had fled to Lisbon -- leaving their property behind as the Nazis required. Baumbach spent three days inventorying the estate.

Rather than leave the child alone in Budapest, Baumbach brought Soros along. This is documented in Michael Kaufman's 1998 biography of Soros George Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire.

As for the 1998 60 Minutes interview, Pertez, like conservative Sinclair broadcasting before him, deceptively quotes Steve Kroft’s conversation with Soros. As is clear to any one watching the excerpt, Soros does not say he participated in confiscation.

In fact he states earlier in the piece: "I had no role in taking away property." The notion that Soros in any way collaborated with the Nazi is nothing more than a neocon canard. Any commentator with the least bit of integrity should recognize this.

Powerful material.

-- Steve Clemons

There's quite a lot of fascinating action over at the Washington Hilton. The smart state party chairs are working bloggers row -- as well as some of the candidates.

Dennis Kucinich's people look like they are having the most fun. Kucinich reminds me of Yossi Beilin, one of the most liberal and intimidatingly smart yet gracious members of the Israeli Knesset.

I'm glad Kucinich is running again and may try to interview him one of these days for the blog -- but his campaign seems to be the most heartfelt and refreshingly unpolished, perhaps because they know their chances are slim. So is Yossi Beilin's chance of becoming Prime Minister in Israel -- but that would be a good turn of events.

But the most interesting positioning at this DNC meeting came from an acolyte of a possible presidential candidate not in attendance.

Donna Brazile stopped by to talk a bit to Mike Rogers and me. I asked her if she had thrown her fortunes into any of the presidential camps -- each of which had tables lined up along a wall, sort of like a high school club sign up.

She said: "No, I'm here this time to say nice things about Al Gore."

Interesting.

-- Steve Clemons

Joe Biden, knowing everything he knows today, probably would not vote yes on that resolution make the same comments about his friend, colleague, and presidential primary competitor Barack Obama that he made the other day.

Language is important. Words are -- and Senator Biden knows he has some work to do if he wants to make it to the White House.

But this hyperventilation about what Biden said as opposed to what Biden meant is reaching a level of absurdity that is making Biden's critics look small and more concerned with veneer than substance.

Eugene Robinson's piece today, "An Inarticulate Kickoff," cynically piles on, when the article could have done much more.

Joe Biden's fumble here was that he was trying to compliment a competitor -- and should have said perhaps "He's Hot" or "He's Da Bomb."

There are lots of ways that Biden might have said that Barack Obama is a breakthrough kind of personality -- and yes, he's a breakthrough personality in the African-American community that surpasses other African-American political superstars (perhaps) Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice.

But as a friendly counter to Eugene Robinson, it's George Bush's "inarticulateness" that worries me, along with George Bush's lack of curiosity and intellectual laziness about important policy matters. Don't you think that when inarticulateness is measured that the real benchmark is the composite of intellectual engagement with the country's real problems.

Biden can talk a lot. He knows it. I like the unpackaged honesty of Biden's barrages -- but this guy is no racist and doesn't harbor the views that others have been alleging he does. Joe Biden wanted to say "Barack is hot."

But who knows what kind of press that would have generated. . . It might have gotten Biden a good cover story on the Washington Blade.

Biden has told us what he meant to say -- and he's apologized. Obama has reported back that he knows what Biden meant to say and appreciates Biden's sentiments.

I think we ought to now begin asking who has the intellectual capacity to wrestle down tomorrow's problems. On that scale -- just think of what lies ahead.

The uncurious George Bush could be replaced by Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Christopher Dodd, Wesley Clark, Chuck Hagel (I hope), Tom Vilsack, Mitt Romney, John Edwards, or Bill Richardson. I know there are others, but this is enough choices for today.

Nearly any one of these alternatives wrestle with ideas -- and believe me, they'll flop now and then. But America is also about screwing up, realizing the mistake and adjusting, and getting right back at things.

I still admire Biden's willingness to get out first on a real plan for dealing with Iraq. A lot of folks talked about the need for a new plan -- but no one was proposing one. You might not like what Biden-Gelb proposes, but it got folks into details, and that moved the debate forward.

Wesley Clark gets credit for the same sort of thing for being the first major political personality to bluntly say that America needed to engage in direct US-Iran negotiations. What Wes Clark did both in September 2005 and then January 2006 at New America Foundation conferences and then on Meet the Press was brave then and has become conventional wisdom today.

So, hat tip to Biden who survived The Daily Show in good spirits. To me, Biden seemed clean, articulate, . . .

-- Steve Clemons

Tomorrow at 12:15 p.m., I will chair a meeting that is open to the public with the Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Handelsblatt, Germany's largest business daily.

I've asked Backfish to not only address the Iraq Study Group Report findings but also how Germans, and Europeans more broadly, are perceiving Guantanamo, CIA flights and extraordinary rendition, and the recent subpoena action (attempted) of 13 CIA agents in the kidnapping case of a German citizen who was mistakenly kidnapped and shipped off to Afghanistan for "questioning."

The meeting will take place at the New America Foundation -- 1630 Connecticut Avenue, NW; Washington, DC. Email me at clemons@newamerica.net if you plan to join us. You can bring a sandwich -- we'll provide the cookies and sodas.

-- Steve Clemons

I helped organize a forum this morning for the distribution of a report Terrorism: A Brief for Americans by businessman Richard Vague at an early morning meeting in the Senate. Despite the ridiculousness of sending out the invite the evening before, we got a respectable audience there by 9 am.

(Photo Credit: The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer)

What is odd is that I then dropped in on the "Strategic Context of Iraq" hearings of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee featuring Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski and there was not a packed house.

If I organized a meeting with a few senators and Brzezinski and Scowcroft, I could probably draw over 1000 attendees on a day's notice. But at this meeting, the chairs for observers were only about half full, maybe less. Washingtonians can learn and see a lot by attending hearings of this type. And today was a useful and important meeting -- though I was able to get out the Brzezinski testimony yesterday.

I got there just as Scowcroft was finishing and after what I heard was a rather testy, hard-hitting exchange between Senator Chuck Hagel and Scowcroft.

My understanding is that Scowcroft was trying to resist calling the President's "surge" of forces deployed in Iraq a complete loser. Scowcroft finally yielded, I am told (as I was not yet there), and said:

I do not believe we need more American troops because I want to get out of this sectarian mess.

Folks should know that while they certainly pushed and shoved each other a bit in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing room, Scowcroft and Hagel are basically on the same page and both are deeply alarmed about the precipitous decline in American influence globally and severely mismanaged foreign policy and national security portfolios.

In the hearing, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joe Biden acquitted himself well -- as did Richard Lugar -- who both emphasized that many are just focusing on troops "staying or leaving;" "all in or all out" as Lugar said -- when Brzezinski emphasized that it is the deal-making with regional stakeholders that is important and which specifying a date for troop withdrawal would help precipitate.

Joe Biden will be speaking to the country and his supporters on a webcast tonight at 8 p.m. if you would like to check in with the latest.

On other resolute front, Senators Christopher Dodd and Russell Feingold have sent out word that they plan to oppose the newly crafted bipartisan Iraq War Resolution. They argue that though the resolution opposes a surge in troops, it doesn't go far enough to curtail the President's actions and to bring the war to a close.

Both Chuck Hagel and Joe Biden are supporting the resolution whose primary sponsors are Carl Levin and John Warner. Warner dropped language that would have made the resolution easier for the White House to ignore.

Hagel and Biden both think that they were able to navigate Warner over with a healthy compromise that has now resulted in the first bipartisan resolution from the Senate against the President's further escalation of the Iraq War. So, this is a win for Biden and Hagel -- but one sees why Chris Dodd and Russ Feingold are holding out for more.

Just fyi, this is Chris Dodd's presidential campaign website.

I may see Dodd tomorrow at the DNC retreat and am going to ask him to repeat (for audio recording) an anecdote that he once shared with me about when he first met Katherine Hepburn. It's better "heard" than read as his imitation of Hepburn's "Why??!!" is hilarious. But here's the quip from Chris Dodd:

There are a lot of people who are renowned who live in this state and not very far from here is Katherine Hepburn, who lives in Old Saybrook.

I'd never met Katherine Hepburn although I'd seen her on numerous occasions. I live in a town a couple of villages away from her, but never intruded upon her privacy. Her former brother-in-law is a wonderful. friend of mine, Ellsworth Graham.

He used to be the mayor of West Hartford, Connecticut. I've known Ellsworth for years, a delightful person, a great person, a great individual. He's probably Katherine's age.

"About two or three months ago," Dodd continues, "I stopped to see Ellsworth in Old Saybrook. As I was walking up the back steps of his home, the door opened and there's Ellsworth standing with Katherine Hepburn. We're standing about three feet away from each other.

And Ellsworth, in a very loud voice (he didn't have his listening device in) said 'Chris, would you like to meet Katherine Hepburn?'' Well, what am I going to say. . .she's standing right here, so I say, 'Of course I'd be delighted to meet Miss Hepburn.' He turned to Katherine in an equally loud voice end said "Would you like to meet Senator Dodd?" And Katherine, without looking at me at all, her little heed shaking said 'Why?'

"It'll show you how life in public office is these days. . ."

This was hilarious when I heard him recite the memory in person -- at a screening for his favorite film, A Man for All Seasons.

In the business policy world, Martin Walker who was once the Bureau Chief for The Guardian newspaper in Washington and was editor of UPI as well as a Senior Fellow at both the World Policy Institute and the Wilson Center, has become the Senior Director of AT Kearney's "Global Business Dialogue." Walker is one of Washington's best wordsmiths and essayists and has been unforgiving in his critique of the Bush foreign policy team on shows such as the McLaughlin Group.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

(op-ad that appeared in the New York Times before the invasion of Iraq; sponsored by the Florence Fund and TomPaine.com)

Richard Vague is one of the country's powerhouse CEOs. He is known for building First USA Bank, a firm he co-founded and then chaired as CEO, into the largest credit card operation in the United States. He is a conservative and now is CEO of Juniper Financial Corporation which is that huge building one sees from Amtrak when training by Wilmington, Delaware.

Vague, in my view, is an extraordinary guy, too extraordinary as I wish there were many more CEOs like him -- because he has invested a lot of his time and funds in trying to get fellow Americans to understand that the Iraq War and America's current vector in foreign policy is not only boneheaded but actually undermining the economic fundamentals of the country.

Vague is no liberal. He's a tough minded economic conservative who believes that America has a much better face and soul than it has been showing the world.

He thinks that we are creating conditions that are cultivating terrorism and terrorists and are doing little to actually help others in the world get ahead, particularly economically.

I like his material and his original approach to these problems -- and I have been engaged with him for some time in working with him to get his thoughts written not as a stiff policy wonk but as a CEO, down on paper and on the web -- in a way that folks like him in Rotary Clubs, Chambers of Commerce, folks looking for their second or third homes, or just scraping to get by -- could hopefully connect with a guy who came to oppose this war and to worry about its consequences without the policy elites in Washington framing it for him.

I hope you find this worth a read -- and it's going out to 50,000 people today and over the next week.

The best link to download the pdf of the report (please note that there will be some modifications to columns, etc. and minor adjustments over the next couple of days) and html links are here.

But I will post the sections as well:

Terrorism: A Brief for Americans

The Scope, Causes, and Means for Reducing Terrorism, Including Commentary on Iraq

by Richard Vague

Introduction

What is Terrorism? What Causes Others to be Influenced by Terrorists?

Why They Hate Us

How to Reduce Terrorism

What We have Wrought in Iraq

What We Should Do in Iraq

Thoughts on Palestine, Hizbollah, and Iran

How We Should Conduct Relations with Islamic Countries Going Forward

The Current Administration's Position on Iraq and Terrorism & Objections to Our Thesis

Conclusion

We are releasing this report this morning in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, Room 628 in the Senate on Capitol Hill. We will meeting at 9 a.m.

New America Foundation Fellow and American Way of Strategy author Michael Lind, former State Department Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson, and New America Foundation fellow and Soul of Iran author Afshin Molavi will be joining me to make a few comments about Richard Vague's paper and the broad subject of how to turn wrong-headed approaches into our responses to terrorism towards a different course.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons