Frank Gaffney stands out as one of the leading original card-carrying Scoop Jackson Democrats who joined up with Ronald Reagan in tackling to its inglorious end the former Soviet Union -- or at least that is the narrative that many Scoop Jackson-employed neoconservatives like to tell.

Gaffney is an indefatigable advocate of Israel's Likudist aspirations. In my view, his anti-Muslim attacks and work on behalf of Israel is actually hurtful to the security of the Israeli state -- but that is a matter of fair debate. But there is no doubt that he opposes the creation of a Palestinian State and sees much of the Arab world as an enemy in the making.

How odd it is then to have learned today that Frank Gaffney is possibly a paid adviser to the Boeing Company -- yes, the same Boeing Company that sells lots and lots of planes to the Middle East -- places like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Oman, and the like.

At least, Boeing was selling planes there until Gaffney admitted today during a Q&A session that he was on the Boeing payroll, or at least it sounded that way.

A question came in to the group asking if any of the speakers "took money from Boeing." Frank Gaffney responded, "I do."

It is quite possible that Gaffney's Center for Security Policy actually receives the funds from Boeing -- and not Gaffney personally. But his response was not "we do" or "my organization does" but "I do". At least that is the report from the event.

Whether or not Gaffney receives personal or institutional support from Boeing, it is an odd alliance.

That was a shocker when Gaffney acknowledged he (or his outfit) was getting checks from the airplane maker -- not that one shouldn't consult with private firms or take contributions from Boeing for a non-profit operation, but more that Boeing has no sense of what consequences a financial relationship with Frank Gaffney might have on its Arab nation customers.

Gaffney joined the heads of other conservative, national security-concerned organizations to protest the Department of Defense award of a $35 billion refueling tanker contract to EADS/Airbus rather than Boeing. In addition to Gaffney's Center for Security Policy, other organizations attending the press conference were Citizens United, Frontiers of Freedom, Let Freedom Ring, the American Cause, 60 Plus, Free America, and the Institute for Liberty.

I asked one of Boeing's top DC-based officials a few days ago whether he knew if Frank Gaffney was a consultant or adviser to the firm, and his response was: "I don't know -- but I can't possibly believe that that would be the case. That just can't be true. No way. I'll check it out right away."

I didn't hear back from him, but Gaffney admitted a relationship when a question was posed at the press conference today. Good on Gaffney though for his honesty.

Hmmmm. . .I wonder which Arab state leaders and Ambassadors will be on CEO James McNerney's call list tomorrow?

-- Steve Clemons

Ouch!

Barack Obama's spokesman Bill Burton just sent out a release of his own reaction to John McCain's war-mongering criticism of Senator Obama that the latter has no experience in national security and warfare.

Well, frankly, I'm impressed with Burton on this one.

Here is Bill Burton's statement:

Barack Obama doesn't need any lectures from John McCain, who has consistently misunderstood American national security and the history of the Middle East in arguing for an invasion and 100-year occupation of a country that had nothing to do with 9/11.

Instead of spending trillions of dollars on permanent bases that the Iraqis don't want and that won't keep the American people safe, Barack Obama will end the war in Iraq and finally press Iraq's leaders to take responsibility for their future.

What a powerful and true line: John McCain is "arguing for an invasion and 100-year occupation of a country that had nothing to do with 9/11."

I do have concerns about Senator Obama's experience -- but completely agree that the arrogance about experience that both McCain and Clinton have shown and the resulting bad decisions is a really serious problem.

What we need from these camps is a bit of humility about the times and situation America finds itself in -- and a discussion about how experience is going to be requisitioned and deployed to deal with tomorrow's very real problems.

Burton is exactly right in pointing out over and over again that this strident war-mongering is focused on a nation that had nothing to do with 9/11.

-- Steve Clemons

Joseph Loconte offers a spirited defense of John McCain's foreign policy and national security positioning in a piece that ran today in the Weekly Standard.

I liked his essay because Loconte articulates the fault line that runs through conservative circles on foreign policy. It happens to be a fault line that runs through a significant segment of the liberal/progressive establishment as well, and that is that there are those like McCain who are committed to the militant export of American-style democracy and those who are motivated by other objectives that depend less on the Pentagon.

I sometimes wonder whether those who aspire to be President of the United States -- and then once achieving that post becoming a "great" President -- are drawn to crises and to wars as a way of defining their presidencies. I realize that FDR was more than a war-time president, and Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and even Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton had key domestic policy goals and occasional achievements that could stand on their own independently from from the cold or hot conflicts stirring in the international arena. But wars and conflicts are remembered more on average than the domestic challenges.

When John McCain lost the Republican primary in 2000 to George W. Bush, he planned a 2004 comeback -- and his attack line was going to follow the course of Bush's closeness to Enron and the many Enron-related and similar-type corporate cronies in Bush's government. McCain's team saw Bush's closest allies as "crooks" who had no real concern for the public interest. They had hoped to dig up what scandals they could on Bush and his team and feed it to Senator Joseph Lieberman who could help highlight this material in his role as Chairman of the then-titled Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs.

Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton struggling against each other for every superdelegate, every pending state primary, every vote is the best thing America has had going for it in some time on the "global public diplomacy" front.

John McCain's subtle flirtation with vice presidential possibilities ranging from his former rival Mitt Romney to Mike Huckabee to Michael Bloomberg to Condoleezza Rice -- among others -- has caught the attention of people in Mumbai, Jakarta, Rio, Riyadh, Beijing, Damascus, and far more.

The world is seeing Americans struggle about who U.S. citizens want in the White House. There is no stacked deck, no automatic succession, no heir apparent -- and this political experience of dramatic uncertainty and the pairing of an elder pro-Iraq War POW torture-victim turned leading Senator vs. either the first African-American or female candidate has the feel of a presidential election of a life-time -- the kind that won't be forgotten for a century.

Anyone remember Mondale-Reagan? I didn't think so. . .

Neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama can win the Democratic primary through pledged delegates. Now, superdelegates and the candidate's nuanced strengths and weaknesses in the eyes of party elders could show those around the world another dimension of America's electoral system that few -- even in America -- get to see.

The race should go all the way to the Convention.

Dem leaders like Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Howard Dean should stop trying to end the process. Let it go to its conclusion -- and let's turn the process into something really magnificent to see in its fullest. . . kind of like a total solar eclipse. Totality.

Do the entire thing.

The world is watching, learning. And American popularity in the eyes of global citizens watching us is surging because of the excitement and uncertainty of this fascinating election.

-- Steve Clemons

I have been completely off-line since Friday afternoon -- taking some time to visit a rental property I have in the Allegheny Mountains at Deep Creek Lake. I needed to get the place ready for spring and summer rentals. The house has killer views of the Lake here at the most Western part of the Maryland panhandle, and as of this weekend, there was still skiing and snowboarding going on at Wisp Ski Resort.

I've been enjoying the jacuzzi on the deck with no news and no tug-of-war between my friends between Hillary, Obama, and McCain -- yes, I have McCain-fans in my club as well.

I wanted to give a shout out to the new Deep Creek Blog which I stumbled across through a flyer at Trader's Coffee Shop (which has free wifi up here for those traveling through). For those who come up here a lot, The "Deep Creek Blog" seems to be up on the interesting stuff up here and in the Allegheny Mountain area.

I'm back to DC today. From April 6-13, I will be in Saudi Arabia in case any TWN readers want to meet up in Riyadh or Jeddah.

-- Steve Clemons

(This was cross-posted at www.YoungAtlanticist.org. Sameer will be blogging live from Bucharest from April 2-4 during the NATO Summit.)

In response to criticism of European limitations on Afghanistan commitments and caveats on their deployed forces, Robert Kaplan offers a compelling argument for embracing a two-tiered NATO, one that offers the nation building/development expertise and resources, the other that ponies up military assets. However, if we were ready to embrace asymmetric burden-sharing for strategic ends, one could conceivably conclude that we should proactively seek some more non-Western, perhaps Middle Eastern or Islamic countries, to join a regional alliance rather than solely depending on NATO. Such deployments, much like those called for in Darfur, would at least provide an added political lift critical to winning over the Afghan population (considered to be 80% of the counterinsurgency equation).

As for NATO expansion, the Adriatic three seem to be nearly a forgone conclusion, but I can't see the real strategic benefits they bring to the alliance, nor the countries suggested for the following round. Despite Donald Rumsfeld's assurances, Georgia and Ukraine clearly seem to be landmines in the path of an expansion agenda.

Suspending all the imprecise and misleading talk of color revolutions for a moment, Ukraine and Georgia are too politically unstable --the former divided in their Western and Russian leanings and the later with parts of the country on the brink of declaring Kosovor-style independence -- to be of much use to the alliance in the near term. And such a move would provoke real Russian anger far more than the phantom punches over the missile shield.

The Economist and the Eurasia Monitor both point out that Russia might likely move to open land and air supply routes to Afghanistan through Russia for NATO operations, a significant move both for tactical and symbolic reasons. And recent discussions with Russia on the missile shield in Eastern Europe have finally begun to show signs of progress. Foreclosing on these two potential strategic gains for a couple of ambivalent NATO members who bring few military assets to the table seems like a poor trade.

Rumsfeld laments the uneven commitment levels of various NATO countries in Afghanistan (which I concede to Kaplan is inevitable given that Europe is not immediately threatened like it was during the Cold War), but never makes an effective case for how expansion would actually bridge these gaps. I find it highly unlikely Ukraine and Georgia would be able to make greater and firmer commitments without further political upheaval.

Finally, a high level NATO official privately expressed that France's much-anticipated declaration of rejoining NATO's integrated command system and deploying approximately one thousand troops to NATO will not only free US troops to join and revitalize Canadian troops in the South (hopefully keeping them in the ISAF awhile longer) but also motivate some other European countries to follow suit and provide more boots and hardware on the ground, particularly the Germans and perhaps the Dutch to follow. But Germany is adamantly opposed to expansion to Georgia and Ukraine, likely due to its fear of Russian energy retribution. Privileging German concerns above the empty gains of NATO expansion is an easy choice -- one that can maintain the existing alliance and perhaps secure its future with further commitments for long-term projects like Afghanistan.

-- Sameer Lalwani

A chunk of TWN readers live in the Northeast corridor and enjoy the events I help organize and chair at the New America Foundation, but they complain that I don't give enough notice some times.

As Ben Katcher has written below, I am hosting Adam Clymer -- the former New York Times political correspondent about whom President George W. Bush once said to Cheney:

"There's Adam Clymer, major league asshole from the New York Times."

Cheney replied:

"Yeah, big time."

Clymer will be at the New America Foundation today in Washington from noon until 2 pm for a brownbag lunch if you want to stop in. No charge and no need to RSVP for this one. Clymer will be discussing how the Democrats began to be perceived as softies on national security and his new book, Drawing the Line at the Big Ditch: The Panama Canal Treaties and the Rise of the Right.

Then, for a book from the radical center, I will be hosting Senator Chuck Hagel from noon until 2 pm at the New America Foundation for a discussion of his really interesting new book, America -- Our Next Chapter: Tough Questions, Straight Answers. The date for this event is April 30th -- and RSVPs are required at communications@newamerica.net.

Finally, on the right, I'll be hosting Grover Norquist -- who broke news yesterday with his invitation to Condoleezza Rice to address the Wednesday Meeting.

Norquist will be speaking from noon until 2 pm at a brownbag New America Foundation lunch meeting on May 15. His new book is titled: Leave Us Alone: Getting the Government's Hands Off Our Money, Our Guns, Our Lives. Again, RSVPs are required at communications@newamerica.net.

I will be chairing all three events. Hope to see some of you today and at these others down the road.

-- Steve Clemons

Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, has challenged Nation contributors Jeremy Scahill and Naomi Klein with misreading the tenor of the magazine's endorsement of Obama.

Her main point is that despite suggesting editorially that he is the best candidate, The Nation's endorsement is not full-throttled and highlights serious concerns about him.

I particularly liked this clip from vanden Heuvel's piece:

It is true that The Nation has endorsed Barack Obama. But as we have explained, that does not mean that The Nation endorses every one of his Iraq-related policies. Obama's plan to end the war falls short in some important respects. We have been critical of the size of the embassy he plans to maintain, his ambiguous stance on private contractors and his plans for a sizable "follow-on force" (concerns raised in Scahill's March 17, 2008 Nation piece, "Obama's Mercenary Position".

In the remainder of this presidential campaign, and no matter who wins the Democratic nomination, the very definition of withdrawal will be repeatedly contested. We will continue to publish articles and editorials like Scahill's that strive to sharpen and clarify the terms of that debate. Moreover, we will continue to oppose the commitment of both Clinton and Obama to increasing the size of the military and to spending more on our military than the rest of the world combined. We believe, as Klein and Scahill do, that progressives must use the continuing primary race to challenge these policies.

Katrina vanden Heuvel echoes an issue that I mentioned on Rachel Maddow's show on Air America Radio last night: Obama and Clinton are both "Pentagon-huggers."

Neither one is saying something that is strangely absent from political discourse today.

America's economic and national security portfolios are in a shambles today -- and both pretty much want to add programs (which have high costs) and bolster the size and responsibilities of the American military. Even any financial benefits from withdrawing from Iraq will not be available for domestic infrastructure spending or other health, education, or social programs -- because the military will have "rebuilding needs" in addition to building out the size of its manpower.

America spends more on national security when including Iraq and Afghanistan supplemental spending bills than all other nations in the world combined -- and yet we still don't feel like a safe nation. This is a classic "management problem."

We are misdeploying resources and frankly, overspending on the Pentagon by a vast degree. Neither Obama nor Clinton is saying this.

While Katrina vanden Heuvel's editors have endorsed Obama, I like that she has qualified the publication's support and not offered the kind of full-throttled endorsement that overlooks serious issues.

-- Steve Clemons

Ben Katcher is a Research Associate at the New America Foundation.

In a post on Monday, Steve Clemons referred to Anatol Leiven's critique of John McCain in the Financial Times. The piece demonstrates that McCain's propensity to make rash statements, such as singing "Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran," must be understood in the context of his neo-conservative foreign policy views, including his advocacy of what he calls 'rogue state rollback.' In addition to being unbecoming of an American president, comments like these are troublesome because they underlie McCain's political strategy.

While McCain's policy positions differ from those of the Republican Party on issues like tax cuts, torture, and campaign finance, the theme underpinning his campaign is, in fact, remarkably similar to that of every Republican presidential candidate since Reagan. The strategy is to claim to be the "strong, confident" candidate while painting the Democrats as weak, defeatist, and full of guilt about American power.

Today, the New America Foundation is hosting a discussion of the origins of this strategy with former New York Times Washington Correspondent Adam Clymer. His new book, Drawing the Line at the Big Ditch: The Panama Canal Treaties and the Rise of the Right, describes how, in the aftermath of Vietnam, Republicans used the Panama Canal treaty debates to launch the modern conservative movement by making an emotional appeal to voters. The event is open to the public and will begin at 12:15 pm on the 7th floor of 1630 Connecticut Ave., NW.

-- Ben Katcher

. . .or so says Air Force Secretary Michael W. Wynn.

According to a report from the New York Times' The Lede, Wynne said:

In an organization as large as the DOD, the largest and most complex in the world, there will be mistakes," he said. "But they cannot be tolerated in the arena of strategic systems, whether they are nuclear or only associated equipment.

A year ago, four electrical fuses for ICBM's were shipped in error to Taiwan, and this follows an episode in which six nuclear warheads were mistakenly move to North Dakota from a depot in Louisiana. The Taiwan mistake was just discovered and reported.

This may seem like a small deal -- but it's not. As my colleague the much-followed ArmsControlWonk.com publisher Jeffrey Lewis has said, it's not enough to blame people at the bottom of the command chain. This may be an institutional "pathology" that needs immediate correction.

As Lewis says about the Department of Defense thus far on its nuclear hiccups:

These guys don't get it. This is not an isolated incident. The organization has a problem. This is dangerous.

We agree.

And this kind of management foul-up with WMD material and devices nullifies U.S. credibility when trying to counsel Russia, Pakistan, India, or any other nation on the management of its nuclear assets.

We have had two strikes now. We'll hope we don't go for a third.

-- Steve Clemons

The first question Condoleezza Rice received at the meeting was one about her "political future." She responded by saying that she was not interested in more government service at this point -- that she wanted to return to California and write a book that reflected on her time and work in the Bush administration. So, she is telegraphing a "no" about the possibility of a Vice Presidential possibility.

Others still argue that one does not talk serious foreign policy matters with the Wednesday Group Meeting without wanting to also telegraph that one might be interested in political futures. In other words, though saying she is not interested in the Vice Presidential slot on a McCain ticket, Condoleezza Rice might be convinced at some point to give up her near California dreams if "necessity" required it.

I won't go into more of what she said in the meeting -- but can say that she gave a tour de force discussion of America's global foreign policy and national security positions. She talked about everything from North Korea to China to Iran to Iraq to Israel/Palestine. She talked about military-sculpted policies and diplomatic-sculpted policies.

And by all accounts I have heard, her performance was stunningly good, very well received by one of the major bastions of American conservative power players, and that she "won them over," according to one source.

She spoke for 20 minutes and stayed there for 50. She took lots of questions -- and left no one with the impression that this was just about selling President Bush's next nine months in the foreign policy game.

-- Steve Clemons

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is speaking this morning to Grover Norquist's weekly powerhouse gathering at Americans for Tax Reform of conservative associations, think tanks, and political operations.

At the semi-secret gatherings which Republican political hopefuls migrate to to get the blessing of not only Norquist but the diverse parts of the nation's conservative money and political machinery, Norquist gives everyone in the room 3 minutes to pitch their cause or issue. I have attended before, but if one wants to attend again -- no one may write or speak about the internal discussion or who attended.

In this case, however, I am not attending -- but a source other than Norquist has leaked this information to The Washington Note and Huffington Post.

As one major Republican operative told me yesterday:

Someone like Condi Rice doesn't go to Grover Norquist's den to talk about the Annapolis Middle East peace process. She's going to secure her future in Republican politics and to position herself as a 'potential' VP candidate on the McCain ticket.

Grover Norquist is author of the new book, Leave Us Alone: Getting the Government's Hands Off Our Money, Our Guns, Our Lives. It would be interesting to know which pages of the book Condi has dog-eared.

-- Steve Clemons

The Center for a New American Security is taking a novel approach to thinking about climate change. CNAS -- and particularly its CEO Kurt Campbell -- are leading a consortium of think tanks and philanthropies in a planned simulated war game exercise on the consequences of climate change.

The group includes the Center for a New American Security, the Center for American Progress, the Heinrich Boell Foundation, the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and Brookings Global Economy and Development.

My hunch is that they are going to find new swaths of the world that become developmentally unsustainable and that resource-based civil wars within states, conflicts between states and ethnic cluster-driven clashes are likely to erupt globally.

The nodes of wealth and the power in the world in Europe, Russia, China, and the US will have to determine whether they attempt serious adaptation strategies in light of what is projected, or whether they develop policies of injecting their forces into the middle of civil wars (the path the US seems to be on now), whether they pull up their respective drawbridges and wall themselves off from the conflicts and eroding circumstances of "climate change have-nots", or some mix of these.

-- Steve Clemons

For those interested and nearby, the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs' "Policy Innovations Group" will be hosting a panel discussion on blogger ethics on April 3rd in New York over lunch.

They are calling it "Cyberethics: The Emerging Codes of Online Conduct" but I like the title "Blogger Ethics" better. There is a fee for the meeting -- but it is waived for academics, students, journalists and non-profit folks. I'll be there from noon til 2 pm for those who want to hang out and chat about blogs, politics, discourse, and the ethical dimensions of all this.

-- Steve Clemons

Barack Obama has said that "Washington is the place where good ideas go to die."

I have to agree with him in part that the ideas industry in Washington and the public policy field in general tends to be risk-averse and more comfortable with policy-retreading than policy-innovation. I think that Obama overstates the case as some of his best advisors -- Karen Kornbluh in particular who serves as his Senate staff policy director -- are knighted members of the ideas industry in Washington. Kornbluh is a close chum and was a colleague at the New America Foundation.

She is now no doubt going to get razzed by others on the campaign as to why I don't "behave." Note to Obama campaign -- my praise for Kornbluh and many others in your camp is entirely driven by my own calculations and ego -- not hers or theirs.

But seriously, the New America Foundation works hard at being an institution that takes a pragmatic, innovative, creative look at policy problems. Sometimes we at New America succeed -- and like any truly risk-taking institution, sometimes we flamboyantly belly-flop.

There is a new fund now announced today to help trigger policy entrepreneurship -- and I strongly applaud this effort.

George Soros has just announced the creation of a $2 million war chest at the Open Society Institute to help trigger some risk-taking and entrepreneurship among scholars, journalists, and activists working on "national security; citizenship, membership and marginalization; authoritarianism; and new strategies and tools for advocacy."

Part of being an ideas entrepreneur is differentiating one's work in an extremely crowded marketplace. The "noise" in the field sometimes makes it difficult to separate the great ideas from the mundane. And many have vested interests in perpetuating old frameworks, old power relationships, old bargains -- but ideas entrepreneurs, the best ones, simply walk through the walls, at least intellectually if not politically.

I believe we are at a discontinuous moment in American and world history and what we do tomorrow is less and less determined by what we did yesterday.

Creativity funds -- money to help smart people take risks, even for a year -- are vital to our times, and I think that this kind of investment in tomorrow's ideas and policy infrastructure is vital today.

-- Steve Clemons

I don't have a crush on Barack Obama -- though a slug of my friends do. Here's the latest on the political crush front from Obama Girl:

I only wish I had met Amber Lee Ettinger last year and had gotten her to try out "Hagel Girl" first.

History might be different today. Hagel might have been at the top of the ticket -- and Obama in as VP. Wow.

By the way, Chuck Hagel's new book is officially out TODAY and is actually really good. No kidding. It's very well written and packed with insights into the political turmoil surrounding post-9/11 politics. Hagel makes very clear that he regrets his vote in favor of the Iraq War resolution.

I'm 3/4 through it now -- it's a quick read, and full of all the reasons why Hagel (and Joe Biden actually) ought to be in the next President's cabinet.

I will offer more serious commentary on Hagel's book when I get time to think and write -- but it's well worth the read. . .and I typically hate the majority of these kind of political memoirs.

-- Steve Clemons

"Radical centrists" and dead armadillos have a lot in common. They are sometimes whacked in the middle of the road. In fact, my friend and New America Foundation co-founder Michael Lind originally proposed that New America choose a mascot of an "armadillo with a yellow stripe across it."

But there are a few others in DC who cling to the principled middle on occasion, but the perks for doing so are few. We need a new award for such non-ideological bravery.

My friend Adam Posen, Deputy Director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, wins The Washington Note's new "Dead Armadillo Award" for alienating people on both sides of the Atlantic simultaneously with remarks he offered to the Financial Times.

Posen riffs on America's systemic economic health while at the same time snarling at Europe's economic stewardship.

The first edicts that late-in-the-day Hillary Clinton Campaign director Maggie Williams issued to her staff as Patti Solis Doyle was heading out the door were:

1. Be respectful of your fellow staff members -- generous in spirit, positive, constructive.

2. Return all phone calls -- even if you have to return them at night when you know the other person won't be in. Return every single one.

3. Feel empowered to share your ideas for the campaign. Send them to [me], Howard Wolfson, anyone. We want your ideas and want to hear from you.

Patti Solis Doyle allegedly bred a lot of ill will inside the campaign among staffers. Many Clinton aides talked about how she had a wall erected between herself and the rest of the campaign staff in Iowa. Others who had been around for Hillary Clinton's Senate campaign talked about how Patti Solis Doyle had shut down the campaign office for two full days in order to watch the collected DVD set of "Grey's Anatomy." I'm not kidding.

Ronald Reagan thought acting was great prep for the presidency. And recently, Ben Affleck told me that he saw some obvious similarities between DC and Hollywood while here shooting his next film, State of Play.

But Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are taking "staging" to a new level.

My colleague and friend Anatol Lieven published a no-punches pulled critique of John McCain's foreign policy and national security probabilities in the Financial Times today, titled "Why We Should Fear a McCain Presidency."

Lieven makes a point I did recently: McCain used to be considered "an old-style conservative realist." I suggested that McCain's Nixonian DNA had gone underground. But the kind of realism McCain used to demonstrate is not old-style. It's making a comeback in hybrid form, tempered somewhat by a less harsh calculation of state interests and leavened by concern about progressive goals and objectives. Lieven himself makes this point in his excellent book, Ethical Realism: A Vision for America's Role in the World.

I remain befuddled by McCain's policy positions. I have long admired McCain on many fronts and like the maverick in him. There are many parts of his profile that I am in complete sync with. However, on the biggest issue of the Iraq War, I differ from him as well as on his seemingly desired Iran War. I keep hoping that we will see evidence eventually that the McCain we have been seeing lately is more veneer than deep -- but even veneer can't be written off easily. This country can't afford more "wars of choice" and is badly prepared to deal with the type of war in which America has no choice.

House of Representatives buddies Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL)

Starting at 10 am today, a number of progressive blogs are going to encourage their readers to call the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to complain about the unwillingness of DCCC Red-to-Blue Program Debbie Wasserman Scultz's refusal to assist Democratic contenders challenging her pro-Cuba embargo Republican House of Representative pals Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Lincoln Diaz-Balart, and Mario Diaz-Balart.

As TWN readers know, I have been on a lot of international travel lately -- to Beijing, Mumbain, Tokyo, Berlin, London, Brussels, and Tel Aviv. In all of these places, I met angry and frustrated finance ministry bureaucrats, central bankers, retail bankers, investment bankers, and other fund managers.

All of them had a single message that rang a bit like the US accusing China of shipping out poisoned pet food and lead-paint covered toys. They said American regulators failed. "You exported poisoned financial products."

Most Americans have no idea how low American prestige had fallen in the world before the financial crisis -- but for the mother ship of modern day capitalism to fail so badly in managing the social contract between economic stakeholders and the finance industry is yet another enormous blow to America's ability to compel other nations to do as we do, or as we want.

Must be all the campaigning. . .

Or maybe this less age obvious pic is the way he wants the public to see him?

-- Steve Clemons

I had to laugh reading the news that Florida insurance regulators are zapping a major insurance firm because of the travel preferences of U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL-20).

Schultz apparently applied for an 'increased amount' of life insurance because she planned to travel internationally. I guess one needs more money if one dies in Tel Aviv rather than Tallahassee.

In any case, a representative of American General Life Insurance, a subsidiary of AIG, called about her travel plans and was told be Wasserman Schultz's husband that she planned to visit Israel.

The mere question of where Wasserman Schultz planned to go allegedly violates Florida's "Freedom to Travel" statute.

Before she was up and he was down and now he's back on top again.

According to Gallup's daily tracking polls, Obama now has a three point lead over Hillary Clinton.

What is clear to me -- but seems to be unclear to many Clinton supporters and Obama supporters is that the Democratic Party remains deeply, evenly divided. The strategy both sides seem to be using to reach the supporters of the other is to yell more loudly what they have already been saying.

-- Steve Clemons

Across my desk just came an interesting newspaper supplement packed with some thoughtful national security related interviews and commentary from the Munich Security Conference. The publication was jointly published by the Sueddeutsche Zeitung and the American Academy in Berlin.

There's a lot in this I wish I could link to but none of it seems to be on the web. So, I will highlight three quick pieces -- dealing with John McCain, Samantha Power, and outgoing Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs R. Nicholas Burns.

Wearing blue is sometimes just not enough.

I hug a lot of Republicans -- particularly today's "dissident Republicans in foreign and economic policy", and there are some Dems I won't go near -- and the flip is true. I hug a lot of Democrats, and there are a lot of Republicans I won't go near. That's part of the reason why I am a registered Independent today and won't unconditionally support either party.

But Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL-20), a Co-Chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) Red to Blue Program, has many up in arms because of the Republican-hugging she is doing in South Florida to the detriment of her own party and her own stature as a significant force in Democratic politics.

P.J. Simmons, formerly with the Sea Studios Foundation and now with Big Blue Advisors, just sent me this link to a high quality Sea Studios video titled "Ahead of the Curve: Business Responds to Climate Change."

It is 12 minutes long -- and I hope folks watch it, particularly those in the business community.

Last weekend at the Brussels Forum, i spent some time with Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers -- whose commitment to climate change remediation and his compelling succinctness were equally impressive. But while I like the video, I wonder if someone like a Jim Rogers would not prefer a faster-paced video exercise that closed the deal more quickly.

OOPs -- wait -- Jim Rogers is in the video. My bad.

But this kind of outreach on climate change to business titans (and just non-titan regular businesses) is extremely valuable -- and the outreach needs to be in many forms, like this.

Businesses that do not have the resources and the luxury to think broadly and comprehensively need templates for action -- and easy access to resources and methods to contribute constructively to carbon curtailment strategies. I think projects like this video help contribute to that culture of helping small and medium-sized firms get an on-ramp to the climate change discussion.

-- Steve Clemons

(photo credit: Will Bower)

Last night, I could not attend a happy hour gathering of friends of mine at the Mayflower Hotel's Town & Country Bar as I was participating in a Center for New America Security dinner with Iran specialist Vali Nasr and nuclear arms expert Ashton Carter.

But my friends had fun -- and one loyal Washington Note reader sent this pic in that he took of a mutual friend.

But everyone in DC is soon going to want his or her pic next to Room 871.

-- Steve Clemons

Have any of them been to Cuba? For a few hours, it seemed that only Barack Obama's passport files had been breached.

Now we know that both John McCain's and Hillary Clinton's passport information have also been breached.

Rumor is that they'll all get a courtesy call from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to let them all know that they were all equally violated -- so no chance of "breach envy."

-- Steve Clemons

Ed Note: No, I'm really not going to make a habit of competing with Andy Borowitz.

Zbigniew Brzezinski just engaged in a high-sizzle, must watch exchange on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" this morning with Joe Scarborough, Tucker Carlson and his daughter -- Mika Brzezinski.

He offers unadulterated praise for Barack Obama -- but as usual and beyond the issue of his endorsement, Brzezinski's incisive intellect, analysis and wit penetrate to the core many fundamental realities that DC pundits and news commentators and analysts rarely get to.

But before the serious, there was a shockingly humorous metaphor Brzezinski offered.

Bill Richardson has now endorsed Barack Obama's presidential bid.

I guess the evening with President Bill Clinton watching a hockey match didn't do enough to twin over the interest of the New Mexico governor. Of the presidential candidates, Senator Chris Dodd endorsed Obama first. Joe Biden and John Edwards remain uncommitted. And I have no idea whether Kucinich or Mike Gravel have endorsed Obama, or if he'd like to admit it if they did.

But this is turning into a slow motion replay of the second choice moves the night of the Iowa Caucuses -- in which none of the presidential campaigns agreed to a "deal" with Hillary Clinton's campaign.

But before Obama supporters get too intoxicated with that all against one metaphor -- the Clinton campaign franchise is still standing and competing vigorously. And has even since Iowa.

My point here is that the Clinton political operation is huge -- and as one well-known political pundit recently told me -- "I'm having to finally accept that Hillary Clinton has supporters who really, really want and like her." This was in a setting where a number of top tier journalists were admitting their sins of bias in the early season coverage of the campaigns.

Of course, the same is obviously true about Obama's political challenge. His supporters are crusaders are not want to compromise. However, to get to an end to this duel, one side is going to have to negotiate an outcome with the other.

Richardson's endorsement, Edwards' endorsement -- perhaps even an endorsement from Al Gore -- provides an edge here and there -- but not a definitive end.

-- Steve Clemons

Avaaz is essentially the global version of MoveOn.org -- and in the short year or so that its organizers and constituents have been kicking up the spotlight on international problems, they have accomplished much.

I'm particularly supportive of Avaaz's efforts on a Gaza ceasefire.

But while I find Avaaz's YouTube video "Stop the Clash of Civilizations" creative and compelling -- Obama Girl definitely deserved a category of her own in the 2nd Annual YouTube Video Awards.

Avaaz beat Amber Lee "Obama Girl" Ettinger in the political category.

Congrats to Avaaz. Keep making the videos -- but I hope Obama Girl keeps spoofing our political scene.

-- Steve Clemons

Doug Bandow has a hard-hitting critique of John McCain over at AntiWar.com. McCain opponents will find it one of the best compilations of tightly wound reasons to agitate against John McCain getting the keys to the White House and the codes to the "football."

But in the piece, Bandow also notes that McCain used to be a "reluctant warrior." This is absolutely true. I have known John McCain for years -- ever since he served on the Advisory Board of the Nixon Center of which I was the founding executive director. John McCain was not timid when it came to appropriate applications of force, but he also demonstrated a facility for strategic calculation which meant that there were usually never yes-no, bomb-don't bomb, binary decisions but gray zone and nuanced realities to any decision.

McCain used to be the kind of leader I thought would be Nixonian in his core -- and frankly, I'd feel better about Obama or Hillary Clinton if either demonstrated more of the foreign policy skill sets that a Richard Nixon had. But McCain seems to have rejected Nixonian approaches to enlightened American self-interest in the world and has become a crusader for a new phase of neoconservative-inspired interventionism.

Or alternatively, perhaps McCain's acts of belligerency are all an act?

(Richard Vague and blogger/historian Juan Cole)

This is a guest post by Richard Vague, a moderate Republican who served as co-Founder and CEO of First USA Bank. Vague is the author of Terrorism: A Brief for Americans. He is also the chairman of American Respect, a non profit organization committed to enlightened, constructive American engagement in global problems.

The U.S. economy will not start truly getting better until we stop spending on this war. That should be page one and line one on any national agenda. Yet while congress enacts programs and candidates make promises that will at best have marginal economic impact, we continue to squander a quarter of a trillion dollars or more each year in Iraq.

The Democrats, whose job it should be to bring this war's end, are instead lulled by polls that show that the economy has surpassed the war as voters' greatest concern--thus missing the fact that our current woes stem directly from the $3 trillion being spent in total on Iraq.

This war is one of few, if any, that have been prosecuted without tax support, and it instead has proceeded in the wake of a tax cut. (Full disclosure--I loathe tax increases and instead wish the war had never been fought.) Rather, this war has been financed by a massive increase in debt and by printing reams of new money, thus bringing inflation--which Reagan rightly called the cruelest tax.

The rapid rise in energy and food prices and decline of the dollar against the world's other currencies are in part evidence of this. Any market economy is subject to intermittent economic shocks--in my lifetime there have been the S&L crisis, the oil embargo crisis, the internet bubble, and now the subprime crisis, to name just a few. The difference this time is that the war has depleted our capacity to respond, and will therefore double the financial anguish. We are now re-entering the unpleasant world of Jimmy Carter's stagflation.

This cost might be worth bearing if it had truly reduced terrorism. But all intelligence--and any reasonable theory of the causes of terrorism--point strongly to the opposite. A misplaced belief that the surge is working has lowered the war's profile. (The perceived success of the surge is largely due to the fact that, among other things, we are now paying off Sunni warriors that we were previously attacking.)

However, if the surge is genuinely working--great, let's start leaving now.

If not, let's implement the Biden-Gelb plan, which will allow departure without chaos, and then start leaving. The U.S. economy will not start truly getting better until we stop spending on this war.

-- Richard Vague

A 20-year old gay Iranian, Mehdi Kazemi, who had been studying in the UK suffered the loss of a boyfriend who was hanged in Iran for his homosexuality. He asked for asylum in the UK and was denied. He then fled to the Netherlands, and Dutch courts also rejected his plea.

However, the European Union has actually stepped up and has done what its member states could seemingly not and provided Kazemi with a human rights waiver from the deportation order he was facing in the UK.

The Human Rights group, Every One, played an enormous role in this effort -- and what I hope is done at this point is that Mehdi's case becomes a template for managing persons in similar kinds of distress.

Does anyone think that either the Dutch government or the British government would have survived the pubic protests had Kazemi been deported to Iran and immediately executed?

This is time to revisit the EU member state's practice of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and Deport. But bravo from this side of the Atlantic to the increasingly impressive European Parliament.

-- Steve Clemons

I recently enjoyed a BloggingHeads discussion, or what Non Zero author and BloggingHeads creator Robert Wright calls a "diavlog", with Juan Cole.

This morning's New York Times oped page picked up a five minute clip of my discussion with Juan Cole. This section features our chat after I asked him which American presidential candidate would radical Muslims hope to see in the White House.

I think we both agreed that al Qaeda would prefer John McCain.

Here is the entire discussion:

-- Steve Clemons

I just saw No Country for Old Men. Perhaps Hillary and Obama should flip a coin?

She now leads him in a new Gallup poll -- and McCain polls at the moment beating either Clinton or Obama, though the lead McCain has over Clinton is statistically insignificant.

-- Steve Clemons

There won't be a squeaky clean ending to the Democratic battle for the 2008 presidential nomination. The knife fight has begun already -- and I only hope that maturity in the end prevails so that the side that edges out victory has the magnanimity to deal well with the almost-winners from the other side.

There is simply no chance that one side will completely vanquish the other. A negotiated outcome needs to be achieved -- and that means give and take on both sides. The stridency and overconfidence of the Clinton camp needs to be softened. And the pretense of moral high ground that the Obama camp thinks it can sport in this race needs to be shelved. Both sides have to figure out how to accommodate the other as much as possible.

Clinton and Obama are both mixed bags. She has the health care plan I prefer. Obama has the tone in foreign policy I like. They both are carving out economic positions skeptical of the "Washington Consensus" -- but the depth of their opposition to neoliberal economics is unclear as the recent debate about an Obama policy adviser's trade views make clear.

(Daniel Yergin, Richard Vague, and Senator Chuck Hagel at New America Foundation salon dinner, 20 February 2007)

Richard Vague, a businessman who became distressed by the course the U.S. was on and its misapplication of power and resources in the inaptly named war on terror, wrote a set of New America Foundation essays titled Terrorism: A Brief for Americans. (pdf version here)

This brief was designed for those casually interested in the affairs of Washington -- businessmen, primarily -- who have other things going on in their lives and don't realize how the US economy and America's own moral credibility were being quickly undermined by the war in Iraq and our collectively bad national security decisions.

Vague -- who was at one time the founder of the largest credit card business in America -- is a moderate Republican, basically a Chuck Hagel-type Republican who respects and supports the positions and work of Senators like Joe Biden and Richard Lugar. I think it's important for the next presidential administration -- either under Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama -- to make a lot of space under their tent for Chuck Hagel Republicans, who in this environment and most likely in a McCain administration are considered "dissidents."

This quote from Barack Obama's speech today caught my attention:

Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? [No, the question is why stay in for years after these remarks.] And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way...

I have written before about the difficult decision Colin Powell and his team, including State Department Chief of Staff Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, made when they decided to stay in the first George W. Bush administration in an effort to limit the order of magnitude of the strategic debacle imposed on the United States by the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal.

One of the elements of that debacle, we now know, was the authorization of torture. And another member of Colin Powell's inner circle was Carl Ford Jr, who as Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research not only objected to the Iraq intelligence but also helped stop the nomination of John Bolton, calling him publicly, a "Kiss-Up, Kick-Down Sort of Guy."

Tomorrow at the New America Foundation, my colleague Peter Bergen will be moderating an event with Carl Ford, and Brigadier General Stephen Zenakis, MD, to help launch Washington Monthly's special issue on torture.

Among a bipartisan array of authors in the magazine's special issue on torture are: Bob Barr, Rand Beers, Peter Bergen, Jimmy Carter, Wesley Clark, Chris Dodd, Richard Armitage, Carl Ford, Chuck Hagel, Gary Hart, John Kerry, Carl Levin, Richard Lugar, Nancy Pelosi, William Perry, Paul Pillar, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Ted Sorensen, and Lawrence Wilkerson.

I cannot be there tomorrow as I'll be in New York and Philadelphia -- but I know some Washington-based readers may be interested.

-- Steve Clemons

This is sort of a public service announcement. I can't put the child's name on the blog -- other than that his name is "Alexander" -- and won't put a pic up, but an 8 year old boy got separated from his mother at the Philadelphia AMTRAK train station.

He got on the train, and she didn't. She must be going crazy looking for him -- but according to the conductor, no one has talked to the police or any AMTRAK officials in Philadelphia. They are handing him over to New Jersey state police in Trenton as I write this.

This occurred on AMTRAK 184 on the way from Philadelphia to New York.

One of the staff on the train said that in 30 years, he had never seen this kind of thing happen.

I do have the child's last name, but think it may be a privacy violation for me to post it. If anyone knows of someone looking for the child, I have some info.

On my way to New York now to host a dinner for former Israel Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami. Interestingly, US Ambassador to the United Nations Zalmay Khalilzad will be joining us.

-- Steve Clemons

At the end of the day Friday, Bear Stearns' stock market value was more than $3.5 billion. Over the weekend -- today in fact -- JP Morgan Chase has announced the acquisition of Bear Stearns at just $236 million. What happened?

The Fed has over the weekend just announced another surprise drop in its basic funds rate by another 25 basis points.

I just returned from Europe today where I secured for a friend 500 Euros cash because she is going on vacation to Europe in April and wants to protect herself from further deterioration of the dollar.

I had to chuckle on Friday when I saw Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's comment that U.S. policy is to support a "strong dollar."

There are many things at play at once right now regarding the global economy and why an arbitrage between the nasty geopolitical situation has finally begun to seriously drag down economic realities. For a long time, these two arenas were 'decoupled' -- but no longer.

I'm drawn to an October 20, 2003 article, "The Debtor's Empire", by former IMF Chief Economist Kenneth Rogoff. America is in a nasty economic mess at the moment and power is shifting to new quarters -- to those with oil, gold, dollars, and Euros.

America's power flows cynically through massive debt instruments and the Pentagon -- and that's just not enough to really be what Madeleine Albright called "the indispensable nation." What a moment of hubris.

-- Steve Clemons

The Brussels Forum, which I just left this morning to return to Washington, DC, convened a terrific array of policy and political talent from both sides of the Atlantic -- and had a distinguished group of attendees from Russia and Japan as well.

But one of the people most talked about behind his back was Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers.

People were stunned by his candor and apparent strong commitment to climate change action. His first line when he spoke at the Forum yesterday was to tell the audience to focus on the numbers 3, 12, and 41.

He said that Duke Energy was the third largest emitter of carbon in the United States and the twelfth in the world -- and if considered an independent nation, Duke Energy would be 41st in the world -- so carbon emissions is a huge issue for him and his firm and wants to turn that around.

The video is available on the Forum's website. Unfortunately, the German Marshall Fund does not provide direct URL permalinks to any of its content on the Brussels Forum site and you have to wade through other material to watch -- but it's well worth the time.

-- Steve Clemons

This is a note from a good friend -- unnamed -- in the Senate regarding my earlier post about US Senators on their way to the Brussels Forum getting stuck in Newfoundland:

Hey Steve,

I just saw your post. I was on that broken-down plane, along with my boss Senator XXXXXXXX. Senators XXX and XXX were on the delegation too. Long story short, after we made a refueling stop in Gander, Newfoundland, a problem developed with the starter ignition, so the plane couldn't start. They were unable to get a replacement part flown in until this morning. By that time, there would have been no point flying onward to Brussels and so we just returned home.

Too bad, it looked like a great agenda. One of the TV channels in our hotel rooms this afternoon was showing the BBC debate between Holbrooke and others, so we got a small taste of the Forum!

Cheers,

An enthusiastic TWN reader

My friend -- all I have to say is that the night owl sessions were great -- and then the owl owl sessions were even better.

-- Steve Clemons

For the last two days, I have been deeply embedded in German Marshall Fund President Craig Kennedy's "Brussels Forum".

In years previous, I have been to the World Economic Forum, the Clinton Global Initiative, Economist Intelligence Unit seminars, McKinsey sponsored meetings, and I generally like them all. But I found this meeting in Brussels to be quite important, extremely well organized -- and surprisingly worth the time. It really is one of the premier conferences that brings together international notables -- but also wrestles with real issues and ideas.

The Forum has quite a number of papers that have just been released along with the conference -- and will be posting videos online of the public, on-the-record sessions -- though I feel the best meetings were the off the record sessions.

One of the very coolest and most informative blogs I check in on a daily basis is ArmsControlWonk.com published by my New America Foundation colleague Jeffrey Lewis.

Both of us were asked by the Better World Campaign to offer comments for its "On Day One" initiative. He talked nukes, and I talked Cuba. . .though I'd also like to talk about Israel/Palestine, Syria, China, Iran, climate change, oil/energy, and nukes. I may fool them and wear different hats and perhaps a moustache to make myself appear differently.

But listen to Jeffrey Lewis share in one minute what I think is a vital approach to a key national security challenge.

I share my "On Day One" thoughts here and believe strongly that it is in American interests that the U.S. open up exchange and travel with Cuba:

-- Steve Clemons

Cuban President Raul Castro has started his reforms -- well, he did quite a while ago actually though few noticed. But the new news is that the Cuban government has removed restrictions on the sale of computers, DVDs, and video players inside Cuba.

Old story first. When I was doing research in Cuba last March, Fidel Castro was ill and Raul Castro had assumed the responsibilities of acting head of state. In the past during Fidel's tenure, ministers -- questioned by legislators in Cuba's National Assembly -- used to wait for the President to instruct them on how to respond to legislators and the public.

Raul Castro changed that -- and told the ministers that they needed to be accountable for the performance of the institutions for which they had responsibility. Competence was the signal he was sending -- accountability. And he was telegraphing that they ought not wait for dictates of political correctness from his office.

But what Raul Castro has done today is open the door for a new consumer appetite. He is allowing people to purchase -- completely unrestricted -- the vehicles for the consumption and transport of "culture." DVDs, computers, and video players are how American power and culture are really heard and seen around the world today -- not through Pentagon machinery.

But as things stand now, America won't allow its content into Cuba. As the embargo stands, we hope that Venezuela's Hugo Chavez fills the scarce bandwidth now available in Cuba and are giving him no competition.

Raul Castro is moving forward in a constructive direction. The U.S. needs to adopt a set of policies now that is less "self-destructive" of American interests.

The Washington Note and The Havana Note look forward to many more readers now in Havana and throughout the nation of Cuba.

-- Steve Clemons

Today at 9:30 am, Former Israel Foreign Minister Schlomo Ben-Ami will be speaking about his work to encourage a Gaza ceasefire and then how to trigger moves in a positive direction for Israelis and Palestinians. He'll be at the New America Foundation today in Washington, DC, and yours truly will be moderating the meeting. It will be available digitally on the web later today or tomorrow.

Then tonight, I'm off to Brussels for 'The Brussels Forum'. It looks like a great conference -- and one of my favorites, David Ignatius, will be there among many other notables. I plan to be the sane counterpoint to what appears to be a Cold War-hugging panel on Cuba.

Washington, DC is actually, really, seriously becoming a hip place. Helene Cooper -- the New York Times' diplomatic correspondent -- is occasionally forced to write for other sections of her paper, and she's been asserting that DC hipsterism is on the upswing more by assertion than empirical surveys. . .but I'm now with her.

While Cooper -- who no doubt will soon be featured on Oprah when her personal memoir of growing up as a youthful Liberian elite until civil war hit and she was returned to the America her Liberia-founding forefathers departed and compelled to fit in with red state African-Americans hits Barnes & Noble -- is looking for sizzle and drama in DC's restaurant, club, and think tank scene, I look for what the "people" here are doing.

I have three entries -- big ones, sort of. And they are both from three neighbors on 17th Street in Dupont Circle.

In its infinite wisdom, the Senate Budget Committee slashed $4.1 billion from President Bush's proposed International Affairs budget.

International Affairs, which includes our diplomacy, development and international organization expenses, comprises just over 1.2% of our total federal budget and 6% of our national security spending. It accounts for almost all of our global non-military footprint.

The former Foreign Minister recently penned an op-ed in the Lebanon Star making the controversial case for what Israel needs to do to revive the Annapolis process:

Israel must change its strategic objective in Gaza from toppling Hamas to rescuing the Annapolis process, and with it the last chance for a two-state solution. This requires not only a cease-fire with Hamas, but also a return to a Palestinian national unity government that alone can offer the peace process the vital legitimacy that it lacks today. Without the resurrection of the Mecca agreement, which put Hamas and the Palestine Liberation Organization in a coalition government, Hamas cannot expect to secure its control of Gaza and the PLO cannot deliver a peace settlement with Israel.

The notion, dear to the architects of the Annapolis process, that peace can be achieved only when a wedge is driven between Palestinian "moderates" and "extremists" is a misconception. A Palestinian national-unity government would not impede a settlement for the simple reason that the moderates now negotiating with Israel must in any case strive for an agreement that the extremists could not label as a treacherous sell-out. Hence, the difference between the Palestinian positions in the current negotiations and those they may hold when a unity government is restored would only be very minor.

I think Ben-Ami is on to something but the crucial factors that can derail such an approach constantly loom large -- sequencing, coordination, synchronicity, and spoilers -- some of which Hussein Agha and Robert Malley wrote about in the Washington Post back in January.

Ben-Ami will discuss a number of these issues he raises in the article -- as well as the broader regional dimensions and the role of the United States -- tomorrow ay 9:30am at the New America Foundation at 1630 Connecticut Ave, NW 7th Floor. Further details can be found here and if you'd like to attend, you can send an email to communications@newamerica.net .

--Sameer Lalwani

This was an exchange last night on Lehrer News Hour between my friend and former colleague Nir Rosen and AEI scholar and "surge architect" Frederick Kagan:

JIM LEHRER: And now, two very different views of the surge. They come from two frequent visitors to Iraq. Both are experts who have written extensively about the situation on the ground there.Nir Rosen is a fellow at the New York University Center on Law and Security. Frederick Kagan is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a former professor at West Point.

Neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama can publicly acknowledge that either would accept the 2nd slot on a Democratic ticket because it would spell the end of their campaign.

But I have to take exception to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's comment that a joint ticket is impossible. Dems in total are screaming out for a hybrid between experience and vision/hope -- and Pelosi's prognostications on what is possible or not possible in an election that simply has no precedent actually gives an assist to the Republican rivals of her party.

The chances of a major train wreck for Democrats who adopted primary mechanisms that seem to be paralyzing and potentially deeply dividing their party just got a bit worse.

-- Steve Clemons

Here is The Nelson Report's take on CENTCOM Commander William Fallon's resignation dismissal:

The Nelson Report - 12 March 2008

FALLON FIRED...insubordination, not Iran war risk

FALLON...the speed with which Adm. Fallon's "retirement" was announced by DOD Secretary Gates tells you the real story: this came right from the White House.

That's the view of observers on Capitol Hill and in the defense community, following today's stunning announcement from Baghdad.

If you want to know why, the answer comes in the form of the question on many lips when the news broke..."did he speak out against war with Iran because he fears the President may actually order an attack this year?"

The pending mission to the Middle East next week by Vice President Cheney, the presumed "Darth Vader" of most of the "Iran war" conspiracy theories, only added fuel to the firestorm of questions about why Fallon shot his mouth in Esquire Magazine.

As we said in the Summary, the answer is "no, Fallon didn't fear that Bush was about to go to war with Iran".

And sources close to senior Administration decision-makers reinforce this conclusion, one saying "there is absolutely no chance of war with Iran, so far as the US is concerned."

(What Israel might at some point do, it was conceded, could be another matter...)

Still, basically, if the above interpretation of Bush's real intentions is the case, Fallon was fired for hubris which amounted to insubordination, Congressional and other sources feel.

It is both understandable and justifiable, given the chain of command and civilian control ethos of the US military.

Any administration, and not just Bush and Gates, would rapidly conclude that they could not tolerate having their hand-picked commander for Iraq and Afghanistan seeming to take on responsibility for deciding whether to go to war with Iran (or any other country), in an interview which appeared last week in Esquire Magazine.

Interestingly, in this time of instant world-wide communication, it took a few days for the Esquire piece to reach critical mass attention. Some observers feel it wasn't until Egyptian press picked it up and made a big deal that it reached the Bush/Gates level, after which "something had to be done".

I concur with Chris Nelson's assessment.

-- Steve Clemons

Admiral William "Fox" Fallon -- CentCom Commander -- has been fired for insubordination, for not stewarding his own views about war and peace privately and in a way that did not embarrass his commander in chief.

By numerous accounts, President Bush was absolutely enraged by an Esquire article -- since amended noting Fallon's demise -- that posited that Admiral Fallon was not on the same page as President Bush and that he was the single military man standing between war and peace.

Rumors are running rampant now in the aftermath of Fallon's resignation today that Bush called a war room gathering on Saturday this past weekend -- and launched plans to hatch a strike of some sort on Iran this spring. Internet bulletin boards, listserves, and chatter among many on the left and the right are hyperventilating (and some excited) about the prospects of a hot conflict with Iran.

My sources in the intelligence arena, in various command staff operations, near Defense Secretary Gates, and even in the White House tell me that nothing structural has changed in America's stance towards Iran. The US is still engaged in an effort to get Iran to the negotiating table if it stops its nuclear enrichment activities. It is continuing to apply UN sanctions pressure via unanimous consent of the UN Security Council to bring Iran into compliance with international obligations. And as Bush, Gates and others have said -- other options can be on the table.

But the diplomatic course is still dominant and preferred -- and there has been no decision to launch a war despite the opportunistic bravado that will no doubt soon be uttered by Vice President Cheney, John Bolton, Richard Perle and others who have long pined for a conflict with Iran's mullahs.

But the pieces are not there to support a full conflict with Iran, or even a near term military strike. That is not where Bush is headed -- but he felt he needed to remove someone who was undermining his authority and direction.

As one source told me shortly ago, "if there was a real chance we were flipping into war mode, there would be six Fallons commenting -- and six fired."

This source said "Fallon's real mistake was going public with what was common banter among many of the senior military officials about America's engagement in the Middle East and with Iran. His views are not atypical -- no matter what the Esquire article asserts -- but he made the mistake of being publicly vain and indulgent about his own take on this."

From my reading of the situation, Bush had to fire Fallon for his comments. I admire Fallon's sense of America's strategic situation -- but the sad thing about this incident is that the combined efforts of Gates, Rice, Hayden, McConnell and others to bring a new direction to America's national security course had worked. Bush had bought in. Fallon had to brag about it -- and that was a mistake.

-- Steve Clemons

The political tremors emanating from the news that Eliot Spitzer met a prostitute in Washington, DC at the Mayflower Hotel are obvious, but a friend of mine who is an expert on probability theory suggested to me that beneath the surface noise, this is really just a "dog bites man" story.

In other words, people meeting prostitutes happens regularly through our society.

He writes:

My instinct when the Spitzer news broke was that "married man visits prostitute" is a bit like "dog bites man". Happens all the time.

I did a little research to back that up. From studies it is estimated that there are 23 FTEP's (full time equivalent prostitutes) per 100,000 population seeing roughly 2.4 customers per day. With a population of 300 million that makes for 165,000 prostitute visits per day.

As to what percentage of those are by married men, I'd say 25% might be a conservative guess, so let's say 40,000 married men visit prostitutes per day. That number could be off, but I'm sure it's order of magnitude correct.

A source for prostitution's prevalance is available via wikipedia and its excellent roster of notes -- particularly the entry under "occurrence".

From the entry:

According to the paper "Estimating the prevalence and career longevity of prostitute women" (Potterat et al., 1990), the number of full-time equivalent prostitutes in a typical area in the United States (Colorado Springs, CO, during 1970-1988) is estimated at 23 per 100,000 population (0.023%), of which fraction some 4% were under 18. The length of these prostitutes' working careers was estimated at a mean of 5 years. A follow-up paper entitled "Prostitution and the sex discrepancy in reported number of sexual partners" (Brewer et al., 2000) goes on to estimate a mean number of 868 male sexual partners per prostitute per year of active sex work, and offers the conclusion that men's self-reporting of prostitutes as sexual partners is seriously under-reported.

A 1994 study found that 16 percent of 18 to 59-year-old men in a U.S. survey group had paid for sex (Gagnon, Laumann, and Kolata 1994).

A number of reports over the last few decades have suggested that prostitution levels have fallen in sexually liberal countries, most likely because of the increased availability of non-commercial, non-marital sex.[20]

I don't think that this will really help check the political drama around Spitzer -- but I think it's useful context.

-- Steve Clemons

If this fundraising appeal from Louisiana Senator David Vitter for his campaign to defeat the Law of the Sea Convention weren't so dishonest and misleading it would be hysterical.

Ok, actually, it's still amazingly funny.

For starters, the note includes a header at the top that reads "Personal & Confidential." Not two lines later, he begins the note with the most personal of salutations: "Dear Fellow American."

But that's just the beginning. The end is just as good. Vitter includes a postscript that reads:

"I have an urgent goal of raising $1,000,000 in the next couple months to fund my defeat LOST campaign."

"I'm willing to spend over $250,000 in the next critical few months to help put the U.S. Senate on notice that the American people want LOST to be defeated."

Oh, by the way, the campaign to defeat the treaty happens to be called "David Vitter for Senate." That's where donors are asked to send their checks.

I promise you, my organization wouldn't be in business for very long if we sent appeals bragging about 75% overhead.

But we're not done -- there's plenty more. This appeal is the gift that keeps on giving.

It seems since the end of the Cold War, NATO has been seeking a new purpose or agenda aside from the friction of new rounds of expansion and the ever-present monitoring of the Balkans. Perhaps mounting tensions with Russia over a premature declaration of Kosovo independence, the missile defense deployments in Eastern Europe, threats of treaty-withdrawals and energy cutoffs can occupy the military alliance for some time, but it seems these will move more into the category of European problems away from a shared portfolio of threats that NATO once held.

For that, a challenge more geographically and conceptually global in nature is required, such as the one posed by the unsavory intersection of economically and politically disenfranchised populations, radical religious majoritarian movements, and weak or failing states (that which the "war on terror" label fails to capture). And of course Afghanistan is the embodiment of this challenge (without the transatlantic scars that inhibit deeper cooperation in Iraq). But if the ISAF in Afghanistan crumbles under the assault of domestic politics, it could signal the beginning of the end of the alliance.

New York Governor Eliot Spitzer's acknowledged encounters with a prostitution ring probably hurt Hillary Clinton and help Barack Obama.

I had to laugh when I read this blog comment about my site redesign. I'm relieved that we are moving to a "new look" and owe a brilliant guy -- named Andrew -- a ton for making this come together.

I'm a "criteria guy." We are going through a hiring process at the New America Foundation, and I am one of the folks who harps a lot about establishing criteria for decisions. But I think that these criteria should be obvious to all.

Michael O'Hanlon seems to be a criteria guy as well -- but Spencer Ackerman, Matthew Yglesias, Ilan Goldenberg, and Ezra Klein zap him for being opaque about how he established his roster of "benchmarks" which he has dubbed as "Brookings Benchmarks."

All of their response commentary is great. No more needed from me.

-- Steve Clemons

Yesterday, I lunched with Last King of Scotland Director Kevin McDonald on the set of his new film, State of Play.

McDonald told me that on Saturday he and Russell Crowe and some others were racing a car in a scene around the Library of Congress. They made it twice around without incident, but McDonald want a third go at it with a huge camera truck and all. One of the producers sitting with us rolled his eyes back at the words "a third time" telegraphing that going for it just one more time a dozen times over is a McDonald trait. The Capitol Police came out and nearly arrested Crowe and McDonald allegedly as "terrorist threats" -- but "nearly" and "did" are different things.

I was there on the set along with a group of other distinguished journalists -- including Bob Woodward, Margaret Carlson, Bob Schiefer, John Palmer, EJ Dionne, and Katty Kay. They wanted a blogger/journalist/wonk in the mix, and yours truly said sure. Our task was to make a large group of pretend journalists look more real when Robin Wright Penn makes a statement to the press following disclosure that her Congressman husband (Ben Affleck) may have been having an affair with a now deceased personal assistant.

Jacob Heilbrunn has 'penned' a fascinating, no punches pulled essay on Samantha Power's resignation and her place in the foreign policy establishment. I don't agree with all of it and am myself a Samantha Power fan who thinks that, more than most, she has the ability to think somewhat strategically about ethereal global justice problems.

Heilbrunn is the author of the must-read They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons. After reading his essay which I clip below, Heilbrunn might want to begin preparing They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Liberal Interventionists.

Regarding Power and her faux pax, I suggested yesterday to Hillary Clinton that she take the magnanimous route and accept Power's apology and then offer her a job. All of us have said something we wish we hadn't -- including Hillary Clinton. I've heard about some of the "more tense" moments in Hillaryland and know that the language and crassness can hit thin-air levels.

It's true, I've given Hillary Clinton a harder time for her fear-based messaging than I've given Barack Obama for his.

Well, I have my reasons.

John McCain pushed to suspend Russia's membership in the G8 as early as 2005. Hillary Clinton says she looked into Vlad Putin's eyes and saw that he didn't have a soul and she says nothing will change with Dmitry Medvedev's election. Barack Obama's position seems pretty similar.

The fact is, no one really has a full picture of what Medvedev's election will mean for Russia. Anyone saying otherwise is selling something.

I think that Samantha Power is one of the outstanding intellectuals of our time. She has struggled with the question of how nations should respond to the signs of genocidal trends and been one of the key points of conscience within our foreign policy community.

When is a tent just too big?

Zbigniew Brzezinski and Anthony Lake both support Barack Obama. They come from different corners of a many-cornered foreign policy arena. George Soros supports Obama -- and now a Soros-nemesis Martin Peretz has thrown his enthusism behind Obama.

Oakley the Amazing Weimaraner and Annie his kid sis showed up in these outfits the other day.

I have a problem with their attire as I remain uncommitted to any of the candidates -- and would prefer them to be wearing Chuck Hagel attire. In fact, I just bought myself and the pups a copy of Chuck Hagel's new political missive, America: Our Next Chapter -- Tough Questions, Straight Answers.

Note to Senator Hagel: Call me next time when you are looking for titles for books. His book really should have been titled Beyond False Choices: It is Patriotic to Challenge Our Government and President.

Back to dogwear.

Oakley and Annie's other parent apparently got the Hillary Clinton attire through secret means. I'm committed to equal time. If the Obama and McCain people want to send outfits for the pups to model, I think it can be arranged -- small for Annie and medium/large for the Oakster.

-- Steve Clemons

If folks are free this evening and local, I'll be participating in a panel discussion at 7 pm EST with former New York Times correspondent and All the Shah's Men author Stephen Kinzer and Treacherous Alliance author Trita Parsi at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

I've talked to both Obama and Clinton campaign staffers tonight -- and both acknowledge that tonight's results were another amazing twist in an exhausting marathon battle between two compelling personalities in the Democratic party.

But serious Obama strategists say that the "big difference" in the Clinton operation was her campaign's "ground game." They said Patti Solis Doyle not only poorly organized the Clinton campaign in the early stages -- but somewhat flamboyantly exposed their vulnerabilities, particularly in caucus states which Doyle ignored.

Everyone I spoke with tonight -- on the Obama and Clinton team -- about the campaign's management said that newly appointed campaign director Maggie Williams pulled off Clinton's seeming bounce back.

-- Steve Clemons

Looking at the electoral map, John McCain has to break into the northeast liberal establishment to become competitive in November against either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.

I believe that the Vice Presidential running mate that will most turn out evangelicals and conservatives on behalf of McCain is Mike Huckabee -- as I have suggested previously.

Florida Governor Charlie Crist is still flirting with McCain for the spot -- but he won't get it. Joe Lieberman is hopeful too, but he no longer pulls in the Northeast the way "someone else" might.

But some folks near McCain and others near Michael Bloomberg are floating (already) the idea of the New York Mayor joining the McCain ticket. I have no idea how sound this would be -- but at first glance, it's an interesting pairing.

I just had a phone call from a prominent political strategist and was told:

Watch your TV. The primary is about to go to Hillary.

I'm watching. She's ahead. The race has not been called. And I have no idea what will happen in the caucuses.

Stay tuned.

-- Steve Clemons

Everyone is trying to scramble to explain Hillary Clinton's turnaround tonight. Negative campaigning. Aggressivness. Elbow grease. NAFTA. Rezko. Saturday Night Live. Lots of stuff.

But the bottom line is that Barack Obama's campaign had some air let out of the balloon this week by a media that began to feel guilty for imbalanced coverage of the two. And Obama's folks lost control of the agenda-setting function that a frontrunner usually has.

After the Wisconsin debate, I thought that Clinton had begun to acquiesce to Obama's surge. Many on her campaign -- at high levels -- thought this was the case as well. And what I thought was taking place after was a "negotiation" for what the role of the Clinton franchise would be.

That is now a dead narrative. Clinton is back and wants to win. Obama still has a magic aura, but it is a bit more tarnished this week than last.

And the bottom line tonight -- despite the fact that Obama won Vermont and that Texas is so close and the caucus process so mismanaged that it's hard not to believe that a recount won't be demanded -- is that Hillary Clinton "did a McCain" tonight -- and she's back in the race. . .big time.

-- Steve Clemons

The Associated Press has gotten hold of a memo widely distributed within the Canadian government that made it seem that Obama campaign economic adviser and University of Chicago economist Austan Goolsbee was walking back some of Barack Obama's highly strident comments about NAFTA and suggesting that Obama's views were just rhetoric and should not be considered 'policy.'

Goolsbee denies that the memo reflects his comments accurately.

From the report:

Barack Obama's senior economic policy adviser said Sunday that Canadian government officials wrote an inaccurate portrayal of his private discussion on the campaign's trade policy in a memo obtained by The Associated Press.

The memo is the first documentation to emerge publicly out of the meeting between the adviser, Austan Goolsbee, and officials with the Canadian consulate in Chicago, but Goolsbee said it misinterprets what he told them. The memo was written by Joseph DeMora, who works for the consulate and attended the meeting.

Goolsbee disputed a section that read: "Noting anxiety among many U.S. domestic audiences about the U.S. economic outlook, Goolsbee candidly acknowledged the protectionist sentiment that has emerged, particularly in the Midwest, during the primary campaign. He cautioned that this messaging should not be taken out of context and should be viewed as more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans."

"This thing about 'it's more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans,' that's this guy's language," Goolsbee said of DeMora. "He's not quoting me."

"I certainly did not use that phrase in any way," Goolsbee said.

On January 23rd, I moderated a forum featuring economic advisors to the Clinton, Obama, McCain, and Edwards campaigns. Austan Goolsbee did participate and responded to a question below on trade.

Here is an interesting snippet of a Blogginheads Diavlog between Jacob Heilbrunn and Eli Lake that the New York Times ran this morning.

The New York Times has a good piece today asking eight of the candidates who dropped out of the presidential race what they'd be talking about if they were still in the game. I liked two of them -- the one by Joe Biden on Afghanistan and Pakistan and another by Chris Dodd on the need for national infrastructure investment.