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.

Continue reading this article

-- Steve Clemons

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.)

Leading up to the NATO Summit in Bucharest, the op-ed pages have provided a transatlantic policymaker's feast of competing proposals, warnings, and framings of the critical events facing the 59 year old military alliance. NATO expansion and commitments to the ISAF in Afghanistan obviously rise to the top as critical tests of the alliance's future, but at some level they seem to run into each other and potentially tradeoff with one another.

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.

Continue reading this article

-- Steve Clemons

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.

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-- Steve Clemons