On October 19, 2005, Lawrence Wilkerson -- Colin Powell's aide, friend, and chief of staff respectively for 16 years -- cleared his throat and conscience about what he saw as a Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal that was warping and distorting the nation's national security decision making process. Wilkerson gave an amazing speech that I helped organize for the American Strategy Program of the New America Foundation -- and it took serious guts and courage for him to do this.

There are some jeering at Scott McClellan for not resigning earlier and not speaking up sooner (as he has now done in his new book) about what he knew about the misdeeds and deception being promulgated from Oval Office central in the White House.

But history needs those who had a front row seat to what was going on to speak up and put this material out into the public record.

This doesn't change what has happened and that Scott McClellan was part of the Bush machine -- but the fight over this president's legacy and awareness of the crimes this administration propagated really do matter. The political left really doesn't need to be convinced, but many on the political right do.

And when Republican folks like Lawrence Wilkerson, Flynt Leverett, Brent Scowcroft, Richard Haass, John Bellinger, and others speak up and help us know the truth and give us new wherewithal to encourage others on the political right to look disdainfully and skeptically at George W. Bush's eight years in office -- this should be applauded.

Scott McClellan says he is answering a higher loyalty now than the President -- "a loyalty to the truth." We need more like him to do the same -- just like Wilkerson, Scowcroft, and others like former CIA consultant and staunchly conservative scholar Chalmers Johnson, and former right wing Vietnam war hawk Daniel Ellsberg have done.

And I do applaud. Scott McClellan will be on C-Span's Washington Journal tomorrow morning (Friday) at 7 am EST.

-- Steve Clemons

(Kishore Mahbubani speaks at New America Foundation reception on the "Rise of Asia and the Decline of the West. Pictured are Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Robert Kimmitt, Kishore Mahbubani, and New America Foundation/American Strategy Program Director Steve Clemons. photo credit: Samuel Sherraden)

The following is the fourth installment in an evolving series of guest commentaries on an original post on The Washington Note titled "The Next Fault Line in Foreign Policy Combat: "The U.S. Matters" vs. "No, It Really Doesn't".

This guest post and response is offered by former State Secretary of Singapore's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Singapore Ambassador to the United Nations Kishore Mahbubani. Mahbubani, who now serves as Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore has authored the new book, The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East. Mahbubani also published this Foreign Affairs article, "The Case Against the West" that offers in abbreviated form some of the key points in his book.

A video clip of Kishore Mahbubani speaking for the New America Foundation/American Strategy Program in Washington, DC can be viewed here. Mahbubani also recently did a Q&A titled, "Peeling Away the Western Veneer" in Spring 2008 New Perspectives Quarterly. The rest of the pieces in a series organized by Nathan Gardels on Post-Globalization are quite thought-provoking.

The posts in this series thus far are:

"The Next Fault Line in Foreign Policy Combat: "The U.S. Matters" vs. "No, It Really Doesn't"

G. JOHN IKENBERRY RESPONDS: The Rise of Asia AND the West

The Debate on East vs. West Continues: Anne-Marie Slaughter Challenges Mahbubani

Mahbubani Responds: Western Intellectual and Moral Cowardice on Israel/Palestine is "Stunning"

Parag Khanna and Michael Lind will offer their responses this week -- and we expect G. John Ikenberry to be back as well. Others too.

The following is a guest post by Kishore Mahbubani

John Ikenberry is spot on when he stated at the outset "Kishore and I clearly have major points of agreement". Indeed, I may agree with John more than he thinks. In addition to agreement on the seminal importance of the rise of Asia, I also agree with the three big points he makes in his Foreign Affairs article, namely that we should reaffirm and strengthen the Western-led post-war global order; that China will be tomorrow's (if not today's) greatest supporter of this order and that America should prepare well for a post-American world order.

I deeply respect and admire both John Ikenberry and Anne-Marie Slaughter. They are formidable scholars who have the right instincts and approaches toward current global challenges. I hope that their voices will be the dominant voices of the next Obama Administration. If that happens, the world will be a safer and better place. I want their voices to become stronger in our world.

Given these many agreements, where are the points of disagreement? In the interest of a good debate, let me state three major points of disagreement as bluntly as possible (while emphasizing that I would nuance many of these points if I had more time and space to do so).

The first point of disagreement is over the nature and impact of Western power on the world. The post-1945 liberal international order created by the West has been benign. This does not necessarily mean that Western power has been or is inherently benign. There is increasing evidence that given a choice between promoting Western values (at some self-sacrifice) and defending Western interests, interests inevitably trump values.

The West incessantly preaches its noble goal of eliminating global poverty. But when America or EU have to reduce or eliminate agricultural subsidies that clearly harm the poorest people on the planet, no Western politician dares to advocate this. Similarly the West has provided the moral and intellectual leadership in educating the world on the dangers of global warming. Yet the West remains the single biggest obstacle to addressing the challenges of global warming because of its refusal to accept moral and political responsibility for the "stock" of greenhouse gas emissions the Western industrialized economies have put into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution.

How can China and India, which are still relatively poor, be expected to pay an economic price for the new "flows" of greenhouse gas emissions, if the West refuses to pay an economic price for the "stock" it is responsible for? In short, the rest of the world clearly perceives Western power as acting to defend the sectoral interests of the West against global interests while the West continues to nurture the illusion that it is only defending the global interests of humanity.

The second point of disagreement is about the impact of Western double-standards. Many Western intellectuals (including, I believe, John Ikenberry) are anguished by America's betrayal of its human rights values in places like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. But they believe that they are exceptions reflecting the aberrations caused by the Bush Administration. Once this Administration leaves office, all will be well again. The rest of the world does not believe that such double standards were invented by the Bush Administration. Nor will these double standards disappear with it.

The liberal internationalists were at the forefront of calls to hold Sudan and China accountable for the misery in Darfur under the concept of "responsibility to protect". Yet, many of these same voices did not bring up the concept of responsibility to protect when collective punishment was imposed on the people of Gaza. There is one point that needs to be emphasized here: there is always a litmus test to assess a person's intellectual and moral courage. In the West, especially in America, this litmus test is provided by the Middle East issue.

The intellectual and moral cowardice of Western intellectuals on this issue is stunning. Paradoxically, by censoring their views on Israel, they have done great damage to Israel by failing to point out to it the sheer folly of remaining in perpetual conflict with its neighbors. The next time any Western intellectual calls upon the rest of the world to show courage by speaking "truth to power" he or she should lead the charge by speaking "truth to power" on the Israel-Palestine dispute.

No liberal international order can be sustained if it is not seen to be responding to key challenges of the day. If we believe in the United Nations (as I believe we should), we cannot ignore the resolutions of the UN, especially the critical UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, on the Middle East. These resolutions serve the interests of Israel. By walking away from them, American Administrations have both damaged Israel and undermined the UN. It is our response to the hard cases which determine where we really stand on the liberal international order.

The Arab-Israeli issue is not the only area where double standards surface. China has been given a hard time on the Darfur issue (and here I agree that China should be doing more to help alleviate the plight of the poor people of Darfur). However, the premise on which China is criticized is that it is immoral for China to buy oil from Sudan. When my Chinese friends hear this, the question they ask is: "does the West only buy oil from moral regimes? If not, why should China be subjected to a higher standard than the West in the purchase of oil?"

The third point of disagreement is about the nature of the dialogue between the West and the Rest on the nature of our international order. Many in the West believe that they are open and listening to the voices in the rest of the world. However, what the 5.6 billion people living outside the West see is an incestuous, self-referential and self-congratulatory dialogue which often ignores the views and sentiments in the rest of the world.

This can lead to a dangerous disconnect between the West and the Rest.

The most recent example of this divide was seen over the Olympic Torch protests. Many in the West believed that the protestors were justified in trying to protect the interests of the oppressed Tibetan minority. Western leaders, like Merkel and Sarkorzy, were applauded for saying they might boycott the Beijing Olympics. The universal Western refrain was "what political courage!".

Actually, these Western leaders were showing political cowardice because they were only interested in looking good in the eyes of their own populations, without worrying about the impact of their actions on the liberal international order. Under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, China has committed itself to rising peacefully and to become a "responsible stakeholder". (Steve Clemons makes this point compellingly in a debate on China, the Olympics, and American politics with New Republic editor Richard Just)

However, by stoking the fires over Tibet, the Western protesters may unleash a virulent form of Chinese nationalism which may veer China away from the liberal international order. In short, we are at a very plastic moment of history. If the West mishandles it, it could destroy the liberal international order which has benefited humanity. The tragedy here is that few in the West can see how the West is now jeopardizing it more than the Rest.

This is why I wrote "The Case Against the West" in the current issue of Foreign Affairs to point out how the Western refusal to cede and share power with the Rest as well as the growing Western geopolitical incompetence pose the biggest threats to our international order.

In short, there is a real divide between the West and the Rest. The challenge for the West is to both understand the nature of this divide and figure out how to handle it. The good news here is that the Rest is willing to work with the West in bridging this divide.

-- Kishore Mahbubani

According to UVA's Larry Sabato, quoted in the Save Darfur Coalition's press release, it's the most significant joint statement by rival presidential candidates since advisors to FDR and Dewey pronounced the shared resolve of their bosses to defeat the Axis powers in 1944.

The statement is here. Of course, Darfur has generated tough talk all across the political spectrum, though only a few officials have actually committed substantial political capital to make things happen. Hopefully the candidates will offer specifics, pay peacekeeping dues to the UN, and urge others to commit the necessary personnel and equipment to make UNAMID 100% operational. Nonetheless, it's always nice to see some unity -- even if it's only in rhetoric -- on an important issue in the midst of a divisive election season.

-- Scott Paul

This is the third installment in a debate that The Washington Note is hosting between Kishore Mahbubani and other of the world's premier intellectuals on international affairs -- including G. John Ikenberry, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Parag Khanna, Michael Lind, and others.

In response to Mahbubani's latest book, The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East, I attempted to trigger a debate between Mahbubani, on one hand, who said that the rest is going to have to come to terms with its declining role in global affairs and the fact that it will no longer have a monopoly on writing the world's history and on the other, G. John Ikenberry and others. Ikenberry thinks that America and the West still possess a disproportionate share of global power.

G. John Ikenberry offered his first response to Mahbubani here. Princeton University Woodrow Wilson School Dean Anne-Marie Slaughter's response follows below -- and Mahbubani's response to both will be posted tomorrow.

Anne-Marie Slaughter is Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Bert G. Kerstetter '66 University Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University.

The following is a guest post by Anne-Marie Slaughter.

I will forgive Steve Clemons for trying to find a new job for one of my most valued faculty members, John Ikenberry - Steve may think he would be perfect to be the next head of the Carnegie Endowment, but we at Princeton are very happy to have him right where he is.

Turning to the matter at hand, however, I will second John in my personal admiration and friendship for Kishore Mahbubani. I will add that Kishore loves to play the provocateur, and his analysis of Asia's inevitable rise and America's imminent decline should be read in that light. He has already ruffled the feathers of many of his former colleagues in the Singapore foreign office, some of whom are giving speeches warning against "Asian triumphalism."

From my point of view, triumphalism goes before a fall in both East and West, so Kishore should be wary of Asia's catching America's disease.

But three quick points in response to Kishore. First, he talks about the "West," but what he really means is the U.S. In his book he ignores Europe almost completely - that conglomerate of 27 nations, 500 million people, and a GDP of $16.8 trillion (although we should really now measure GDP in Euro, fast becoming the world's second reserve currency) - an amount estimated to be 30% of the world's GDP.

When he does mention Europe, he dismisses it as yesterday's news. That's a huge mistake. The subtitle of Kishore's book is "The Irresistable Shift of Global Power to the Asian Hemisphere." But if the world is divided into two hemispheres, one of them Asian, then the other is the transatlantic hemisphere, which includes Europe (all the way to Russia and really to the Urals), North America, Central and South America, and Africa. If I look down the decades of the 21st century, I wouldn't exactly count that hemisphere out, particularly as trade and investment increasingly flows north-south as well as east-west.

Second, although Kishore is right to say that it is essential to reform global institutions - the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, the G-8 - to give Asia full representation and say, he conveniently overlooks a critical fact. The vast majority of the calls for reforming these institutions are coming from Western scholars and officials. One of the key blockers of the last round of proposed Security Council reforms from 2004-06, which would have finally brought in India, Brazil, South Africa, and other developing countries was China - Kishore's no 1 example of the power shift to Asia - because it could not countenance the idea of Japan joining the Security Council.

And whenever Western scholars ask their Asian counterparts what they would like to see in the way of reforms - do they want a G-13? A G-16, a G-20? What do they propose for the Security Council and the IMF, we get a cautious response that essentially asks the West to take the lead. At least from the Chinese perspective, as John Ikenberry has argued so persuasively in his last Foreign Affairs article, China wants to integrate into the current Western order, not create one of its own.

Which brings me to my third point and one of the deeper underlying problems with Kishore's argument. It is an argument that makes sense for Singapore, which is already completely developed and ready to play a much more powerful role in shaping global events. The problem is that it is tiny, so it must work through larger Asian institutions. Its government officials are the smartest and most competent I have ever met -- a league in which Kishore belongs. Unfortunately, those great Asian powers that Kishore wants to take the reins of global domination in the 21st century are far from ready, other than Japan, which is neither psychologically ready nor suitable for historical reasons.

You need only live in China this last weeks, with the awful stream of pictures from the earthquake - pictures of soldiers trying to lift fallen buildings with their bare hands to unearth the tens of thousands of victims below in mountain villages so inaccessible that they have not been able even to reach the epicenter yet, to be reminded of how far China has to go. It has accomplished extraordinary things, but it has vast tasks ahead. A trip from Shanghai, China's most Western and in many ways most developed city, to Singapore quickly highlights the differences between developing and developed.

Kishore Mahbubani is frustrated, a frustration I understand, that "the West" does not seem to be paying enough political attention to the East. A book as provocative as his may help change the conversation. But the future of global power will not involve a zero-sum shift of power from West to East, but rather a negotiated, positive-sum integration (see Richard Haass's The Opportunity: America's Moment to Alter History's Course) of many new powers, east and west, into a more effective, dynamic, and representative global order.

PS: I deliberately wrote this before reading John Ikenberry's response to Kishore, just to see how I might come out differently. Not surprisingly, I see that we agree, as usual, on many key points. He is absolutely right about what the U.S. now needs to do in terms of thinking through ourselves, and with others, about what kind of international order we all want in 2050.

-- Anne-Marie Slaughter

This is my next read. It's overdue -- and I'm sad to see that McClellan basically waited all of this time to tell his story. He should have gotten word to Patrick Fitzgerald that Libby and Rove were coordinating their Valerie Plame stories.

But the worst is even more confirmation that George W. Bush wasn't just hoodwinked by neoconservative zealots on Iraq. I have known that for a long time -- but to hear it yet again, Bush's role in pumping out the propaganda to sell the war -- is heart-ripping when one considers all who have died on all sides of this conflict and those too who have been physically and psychologically maimed.

McClellan confirms what Council on Foreign Relations President and former senior Bush administration official Richard Haass and many other national security experts have said about Iraq being a "war of choice":

"History appears poised to confirm what most Americans today have decided: that the decision to invade Iraq was a serious strategic blunder. No one, including me, can know with absolute certainty how the war will be viewed decades from now when we can more fully understand its impact. What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary."

And John McCain wants to keep it going. . .

-- Steve Clemons

Just today, the Sea Studios Foundation has released a new short documentary on what states are doing on the climate change front.

Innovation at the state level is impressive and outpacing by far what is happening at the federal level -- but the feds and a new set of international protocols are needed.

Watch.

-- Steve Clemons

First, in this National Journal interview, John Bolton slams Barack Obama, arguing that negotiation is not a policy but rather a technique. Yet, most of the interview is dedicated to defending the pre-2006 Bush approach of non-negotiation as policy.

Then, Bolton is asked about Israel's recent decision to negotiate with Syria. Here's his surprising response:

I think they are making a mistake trying to negotiate with Syria now, because I don't think Syria has any independent ability to make decisions. Over the past several years, Syria has become functionally a satellite of Iran, so that if the Israelis really wanted to negotiate with somebody, they ought to be in Tehran, not in Damascus. They are not talking to those capitals. I think it's a mistake on their part.

-- Scott Paul

No big surprise, but it turns out that many countries really don't like having to jump through so many hoops in order to apply for a U.S. visa. In 2003, a consular officer in Moscow told me that when the Russian duo t.A.T.u. applied for a visa, they were asked to sing for the staff to verify their identities.

Another consular officer recounted a story about a national champion youth martial arts team applying for visas to go to the U.S. to compete in an international tournament. The officer cleared out the room and forced the team to perform in order to demonstrate that they were who they said they were. One child, who had broken his leg in the national competition, couldn't participate in the demonstration. His visa application was denied, the consular officer told me proudly.

(portrait of President Dwight Eisenhower by Mike Hagel; hanging in Senator Chuck Hagel's private Senate office)

Joe Lieberman may lament what he considers to be the shift of the Democratic Party, but he may also want to reflect on how neoconservatives have so dramatically changed and warped the Republican Party in foreign policy.

Spend some time with these lines from Eisenhower, gathered together for The Washington Note by regular reader Michael Beaver. They remind me of Senator Chuck Hagel's anger about reckless wars of choice in the Middle East, his view that we need a new centrist social contract across our nation, that we need to make America an example that inspires others around the world -- not a nation that tries to force feed democracy down the throats of others. This reminds me of the time Chuck Hagel gave a speech for the New America Foundation in which he said posing questions to the White House about matters of war and peace was not disloyal and was absolutely patriotic.

If I was in Barack Obama's shoes and Hillary Clinton had turned down my offer to run as Vice President, I'd go with Eisenhower in a unity ticket -- and because Eisenhower is not available, I'd go for Chuck Hagel. John McCain couldn't put a ticket together to beat that combo.

From TWN reader Michael Beaver's Eisenhower-isms roster:

How far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without?

-- Dwight D. Eisenhower

I despise people who go to the gutter on either the right or the left and hurl rocks at those in the center.

-- Dwight D. Eisenhower

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.

-- Dwight D. Eisenhower

I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.

-- Dwight D. Eisenhower

If men can develop weapons that are so terrifying as to make the thought of global war include almost a sentence for suicide, you would think that man's intelligence and his comprehension. . . would include also his ability to find a peaceful solution.

-- Dwight D. Eisenhower

If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking. . . is freedom.

-- Dwight D. Eisenhower

In most communities it is illegal to cry "fire" in a crowded assembly. Should it not be considered serious international misconduct to manufacture a general war scare in an effort to achieve local political aims?

-- Dwight D. Eisenhower

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

-- Dwight D. Eisenhower

May we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.

-- Dwight D. Eisenhower

Only Americans can hurt America.

-- Dwight D. Eisenhower

The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.

-- Dwight D. Eisenhower

Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose.

-- Dwight D. Eisenhower

War settles nothing.

-- Dwight D. Eisenhower

We seek peace, knowing that peace is the climate of freedom.

-- Dwight D. Eisenhower

We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security.

-- Dwight D. Eisenhower

When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war.

-- Dwight D. Eisenhower

-- Steve Clemons

I have many liberal friends who are not into Grover Norquist -- but my policy is to reach out to all parties across the political spectrum to try and balance against the incredibly destructive influence of pugnacious nationalists like John Bolton and neoconservatives like Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and William Kristol.

Grover Norquist makes an appeal to his Republican friends to get sane again on foreign policy in this video clip my colleagues and I encouraged him to do for the Better World Campaign's "On Day One" collage of public personalities talking about what the next President and team should do on their first day.

-- Steve Clemons

As it has done for the past eight years, SustainUS is sending all-star group of young leaders to the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development. Their group blog is here, and it's well worth a read.

I've seen enough young people go through this process to be able to predict how this will read. At the beginning, everyone is pretty starry-eyed -- very excited to be in the historic UN building, awed by their own access and impressed by their fellow youth advocates. Within a couple of days, as they're asked to prepare formal interventions and policy positions, folks start to feel as if they're in over their heads. About halfway through, the delegates feel overwhelmed and exhausted. Then, as the conference comes to an end, many of the participants decide this whole exercise has been a waste of time -- that the UN is worthless and that very little is accomplished in international negotiations. With a few days to reflect, most of those delegates then realize how empowered they've become, how much they've learned, and how these negotiations, which move at a glacially slow pace, are actually an important component in the larger international policymaking process.

Hm. "The Five Step Process of Coping With International Negotiations." Maybe I should try to brand this...

-- Scott Paul

Last week I left Citizens for Global Solutions after a few years as an advocate there. I'm doing some personal travel through Russia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and China starting in about a week and probably won't be up on this blog during that time, but I'll share pictures when I get back.

The other news: I'm leaving D.C. to start law school in the fall. It's hard to look forward to three years of something so academic after being involved in such important policy battles, but a legal education is the tool I need and this is the right time for me to get it. So, starting in the fall, expect my posts to be less frequent and less informed on some of the issues I've tracked. But I won't disappear, I promise.

-- Scott Paul

Don't believe anyone who says s/he knows exactly how much power Dmitriy Medvedev will wield as Russian President. My answer, for now at least, is: more than none, less than a whole lot. In his campaign and early days as President, Medvedev has invested a great deal of his time and political capital into a new campaign to reign in corruption and establish the rule of law. The campaign obviously won't be ambitious enough to, say, keep government influence out of partisan politics. Medvedev is, however, promising to reduce corruption and enhance judicial independence. Here's the English version of his most recent speech on the topic.

Considering the courts were one tool in Putin's arsenal against the oligarchs not so long ago, judicial independence seems an interesting priority for his supposed puppet (Medvedev's new cabinet is a virtual reshuffle of Putin's). Some closer Russia watchers than me have suggested that this is either a "ritual incantation" or a direct attack on the silovki that make up Putin's power base. I don't buy either explanation. Medvedev is investing too much for this to be a symbolic effort. And it was too prominent a part of Medvedev's Putin-backed campaign for it to be a direct challenge to Putin's base -- at least not at this stage.

As the Russians say, we will wait, we will see...

-- Scott Paul

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My favorite foreign minister/blogger, David Miliband -- who serves as Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom -- will be having a conversation today at the New America Foundation with a unique group of Transatlantic Young Leaders who are part of the British Council's new TN2020 project. I have invited about 40 other American and European bloggers/journalists, business people, Hill and administration staff, and social and political activists.

Miliband will also be giving a major speech today at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. I'll post the text later on The Washington Note, but I know that his primary theme is going to relate to how the "democratization agenda" -- the commitment of the West to liberal values, justice, healthy and balanced civil society, to human rights -- can be salvaged from a decrepit and tarnished state in the post-Iraq War, post-Abu Ghraib, current-Guantanamo era we are in.

I'm probably more blunt than Miliband can politically afford to be -- but that's what he's essentially going to talk about today. And it's a subject that should occupy the attention of all reasonable leaders concerned with the unhealthy dysfunction that exists today between liberal political democracies and illiberal regimes, between developed nations and undeveloped, between strong states and states that feel part of their governing structure dissolving into transnational grievance movements.

Miliband is a much discussed favorite to potentially succeed (eventually) incumbent British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, though I imagine people actually saying that doesn't add much to Brown's enthusiasm for the idea and means that the political animal that Gordon Brown is may be on edge as Miliband demonstrates in intellectual, policy, and political agility that few European leaders have today. He's also been rumored as a potential successor to High Representative of the European Union for the Common Foreign and Security Policy Javier Solana -- perhaps a rumor that Gordon Brown has helped launch.

In any case, Miliband is impressive -- and he's a blogger, and we look forward to hearing his thoughts today.

For those interested in even more, here's a good clip of Miliband on the Charlie Rose Show.

YOU CAN WATCH LIVE on this site (in box above) from about 10:30 am EST until 11:30 am. I have asked Andrew Sullivan of the Daily Dish and Washington Post staff writer Nurith Aizenman to offer comments on David Miliband's presentation today.

Then jumping to London and the London School of Economics, George Soros will be speaking about the global financial crisis and his thoughts on what we should do about it from 12:00 pm EST until 1:00 pm -- and this too will run live on The Washington Note. It is best to watch Soros here.

Soros has repeatedly addressed the problem of credit default swaps -- an unregulated $42 trillion sector of synthetic derivatives -- that he thinks could be "the next shoe that drops" in potentially aggravating global economic calamity. Soros is absolutely brilliant in talking about the nuts and bolts of the global economic system and the tension and play between central bankers and those making the markets move.

For those interested in going further, take a look at Soros's new book, The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means. Here is an audio file of a New America Foundation conference call I did with George Soros recently on the book.

So, watch here, listen, learn, and then write to your Congressman asking for hearings on the credit default swap industry.

-- Steve Clemons

Barack Obama is within 100 delegates of securing the Democratic presidential nomination.

Hillary Clinton has promised to stick it through all of the primary races -- going at least until June 3rd. Perhaps she is seeking at this point to secure a policy in Democratic primary history and showing how tenacious a female candidate can go -- showing that a future female candidate will go all the way and not give up.

But I have to admit that the Saturday Night Live skit above with John McCain made me chuckle.

-- Steve Clemons

(National Interest editor Justine Rosenthal talks with News Hour with Jim Lehrer Senior Foreign Policy Producer Michael Mosettig at New America)

I read many journals, including Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, The American Interest, and others -- but I am particularly into The National Interest, the journal that realist Owen Harries ran for years within the Irving Kristol compound simultaneously balancing evolving neoconservative thinking with the important and then dominant currents of realist foreign policy thought.

When I was serving as Executive Director of the Nixon Center, I spoke with my then bosses -- Dimitri Simes at the Nixon Center and John Taylor at the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace -- about the possibility of trying to wrestle this important journal from Irving Kristol. It didn't happen when I was there as I went to work in the Senate as senior foreign policy and economic policy advisor to Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), but years later, Dimitri Simes pulled it off and brought one of the great journals of foreign policy opinion over to his institution.

Today, The National Interest and its parent organization The Nixon Center have announced that Justine Rosenthal will succeed the talented and now academically-directed Nikolas Gvosdev as the journal's new Editor.

Rosenthal has a sharp wit, knows her stuff, and gets marketing -- and that is what "realism" as a field needs more of.

Too many realists think that they themselves have to convey a dark, Hobbesian world of anarchy, chaos, wars, and messiness to be effective. My pal John Mearsheimer is one of these types in my 'friendly' estimation. Rosenthal has the talents, in my view, to update the realist framework, spiff it up, provoke debates with neocons, liberal interventionists, and even with the close sibling of realism, the liberal internationalists.

According to an announcement I got a sneak peak at:

Rosenthal joined The National Interest in 2007 from the Atlantic Monthly Foundation, where she served as Director. She has considerable experience in both think tanks and academia, including fellowships at the Brookings Institution and Brown University's Watson Institute. She also served as director of the executive office at the Council on Foreign Relations. She holds a BA from the University of Chicago and MA and Ph.D. degrees in Political Science from Columbia University. Rosenthal has written extensively on international security, terrorism and nuclear weapons proliferation and has traveled widely in Asia as a Luce Scholar.

My hunch is that Justine Rosenthal will spice up the press releases that go forward under her watch. With all due respect to my friends at the Nixon Center, the release was a bit drab for such an acquisition. Rosenthal is sharp, intellectually tuned into the trends afoot in the national security field, and dresses -- well -- a bit like someone that the Devil Wears Prada must have been modeled on.

I think that The National Interest is going to be an exciting vehicle in its next phase -- and all congratulations as well to the outgoing Editor, Nikolas Gvosdev, who has decided to take a teaching position at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island.

I'm a regular reader of his blog, The Washington Realist, which I hope he keeps up.

We'll miss Nik Gvosdev -- but very much look forward to what Justine Rosenthal does with one of the most important foreign policy journals in the business.

-- Steve Clemons

Some Occidental College students in a "grand strategy course" have just gone through an interesting exercise contemplating and considering solutions to America's spate of strategic problems, and they have just issued a report on their findings called Rebranding America. (pdf here)

I have found much in the student report with which I agree -- and a few things I don't.

For instance, I'm not in sync with their seeming confidence in the military dimensions of America's national security portfolio. They state they want to "maintain military supremacy" in one part of the report, and frankly, I don't think that that means much at this point in America's palette of strategic choices. It has been America's seeming over superiority in a given kind of potential warfare that has actually made the U.S. relatively weak given in other spheres -- particularly in trying to deter nuclear weapons proliferation and its vulnerability to assymetric warfare tactics.

But these students of close Clinton family friend and former U.S. Ambassador to Finland Derek Shearer have engaged in something that should be telegraphed across the country to other college professors and students. The model of what they did helps build habits of thinking and approach that encourage strategic, proactive policy thinking, rather than the ad hoc, reactive approach that so frequently gets hijacked by special interests, swagger, or emotionalism.

Specifically, the students followed these steps:

1. They engaged in a systematic review of challenges that involved a clear specification of the "problem" or challenge.

2. They then worked to identify America's "strategic interests" and to put them in context with the challenge.

3. They considered the "means" that could be used for a variety of scenarios over a 6 month period.

5. They then specified a set of policy options and "means" over a one-year and beyond time horizon.

6. And then -- without much bias that I could find -- they considered a variety of possible outcomes.

The foreign poicy issues areas the students considered were Iraq; Transnational terrorism, al-Qaeda and torture; relations with Europe, NATO, Russia, and CIS; Iran and nuclear proliferation; oil and energy issues; US-UN relations, humanitarian intervention and global health; China, Pakistan & Afghanistan; Israel-Palestine; illegal immigration & NAFTA.

I very much like this report and its methodology and want to provide in full just one section from "Rebranding America" on Israel-Palestine. This section was authored by Occidental students Anna Castagnozzi-Bush and Matthew Mikuni:

Israel-Palestine

Problem

A solution to the Israel-Palestine question is one that has eluded the international community for more than half a century. While progress has been made since then, in the past four years advancement towards resolution of the conflict has been mostly stagnant. In addition, the situation has become even more complex, with the takeover of the Gaza Strip by Fatah and the exclusion of Hamas cabinet members from Prime Minister Abbas' administration. The result is that there no longer is a single person who is viewed as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. Also, Prime Minister Olmert's invasion of Lebanon has depleted much of his political capital that could have been used to offer meaningful concessions to a Palestinian state.

Strategic Interest

It is crucial to the United States' security, economy, and international political stability that the government undertakes a strong and active role in the peace process with a clear and consistent position on absolute and permanent borders in accordance with a strategy for the economic development and inclusion of Palestine, as well as regional stability. This necessitates a comprehensive approach inclusive of Palestine and Israel's regional neighbors and partners to secure a forward thinking solution as opposed to previous strategies primarily focused on ideological and societal grievances.

When we are seen as unconditionally supporting Israel and ignoring the plight of the Palestinian people, our credibility and image are hurt in the Middle East. However, if we are also seen as ignoring Israeli concerns and grievances, their willingness to accept a peace proposal will run into significant obstacles. The Israel-Palestine issue has also been used quite effectively to help foster anti-American extremism throughout the Middle East. If the United States can facilitate a peaceful and fair solution between the Israeli and Palestinian people, a major recruiting tool for al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups will be effectively neutralized. Being seen as a neutral and effective arbiter in resolving this conflict is an essential part in rebranding America to the rest of the world.

Means

First Month:

~ The President should visit both Israel and the Palestinian territories to show his or her commitment to the resolution of the conflict.

~ Prior to visiting, the President should appoint a special envoy to deal specifically with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to accompany the President during his or her first visit. Tony Blair will be an important person in representing the other Quartet members, so constant contact between the two envoys will be essential.

~ Send the US Ambassador back to Damascus to re-open diplomatic ties, showing our acknowledgement of Syria's vested interest in the resolution of the conflict.

~ Bring the Quartet back together to put pressure on both the Israelis and Palestinians and monitor the implementation of any agreements reached during negotiations. Saudi Arabia should be included as they have come to be the closest to an 'Arab spokesman' in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

~ Consult the RAND Palestinian State Study Team for any updates that they might have for building a Palestinian State in light of any recent changes in the region.

First Six Months:

~ Work with Israel (secretly) and Fatah (openly) to end the blockade of Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

~ A Palestinian state will never be considered legitimate if it does not include the Gaza Strip along with the West Bank. Hamas can serve as a serious impediment if they are ignored or excluded from the peace process.

~ If Abbas can be seen as the one liberating the Gaza Strip from the Israeli blockade, it will strengthen him and other moderates in the administration and undercut the message of violence coming from Hamas.

~ Return the Golan Heights to Syria in exchange for security agreements from the Quartet, along with a personal security agreement between the US and Israel to defend it if it is invaded by other Arab states.

~ This Security guarantee should be contingent on Israel adhering to any agreements they make during the peace process.

~ By making the first step in giving the Golan Heights back to Syria, Syria will lose its motivation to prolong the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through Hezbollah, Hamas, or any other of the groups it harbors.

~ Negotiations (possibly backchannel) must be opened with Iran. Iran provides Hamas with much of its funding, and negotiations with Iran might be able to convince them to either limit funding to Hamas, or at the very least, make it conditional on their participation in the peace process.

~ Work with the Quartet to appoint a NGO coordinator that will separately fund and synchronize projects within Israel and Palestine. A committee with a representative from each NGO should be formed to give participating NGOs an official forum to express their concerns and questions.

First Year and beyond:

~ Design UN aid packages to assist Arab countries that hold Palestinian refugees.

~ These aid packages would also be administered or monitored by the Quartet to avoid cases of wasteful spending or corruption.

~ Huge numbers of Palestinian refugees, especially in Lebanon, might immigrate in huge numbers to a new Palestinian State, possibly collapsing its economy. Aid packages should also be designed to help those refugees integrate into the economies of the countries they currently live in.

~ Use foreign aid, along with Palestinian workers, to rebuild the infrastructure of the Palestinian territories (e.g., roads, power, water, sanitation, public buildings).

~ This will help the chronic unemployment that currently exists in the Palestinian territories and will provide a solid foundation on which a viable economy could be realized.

~ UN officials, preferably those who have expertise in specific fields, such as managing a power plant, should work side by side with the Palestinian officials in charge of the project to increase efficiency and reduce corruption.

Possible Outcomes

The creation of a new Palestinian state will finally be put back on track with the implementation of the policies listed before. The negotiations will inevitably be very tough, as of right now many people are skeptical of the prospect of peace, and the number of those advocating against compromise on key issues, on both the Israeli and Palestinian side have increased. If everything is successful, the prospects for a peaceful and economically prosperous Palestinian state can finally be realized. No longer will Israelis have to flee to bomb shelters when an air raid horn sounds, nor will Palestinians be forced to live in decrepit conditions or in the fear of an Israeli incursion or surgical strike. By being the country to actively restart the peace process (although we won't be alone) we can empower moderates all around the Middle East and dampen the appeal of the extremists in the region.

Authored by Anna Castagnozzi-Bush & Matthew Mikuni

We need the kind of exercise these students were engaged in to proliferate through our college system. While this kind of work is probably standard at the graduate level, I'm not familiar with many undergraduate courses that engage in this kind of strategic think work. I imagine that Steve Weber at UC Berkeley and Bruce Jentleson at Duke probably offer similar, challenging work to their undergrads -- but my sense is that we need more.

We may not need a single "Mr. X" again to help us sort out our future strategic architecture -- we probably need a number of them. And Occidental College may indeed produce one of these needed intellectual architects.

After all, Barack Obama went to Oxy -- as did my colleague and friend Steve Coll who won the Pulitzer for Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 and now has The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century out in bookstores.

-- Steve Clemons

Mike Huckabee spoke to the National Rifle Association on Friday and while on stage, there was noise in the background off stage about which he said, according to CNN:

"That was Barack Obama, he just tripped off a chair, he's getting ready to speak," said the former Arkansas governor, to audience laughter. "Somebody aimed a gun at him and he dove for the floor."

There are a lot of outrageous things being said in this presidential race -- and I think it will get much worse, but this is a kind of recklessness that can't be tolerated.

To put the issue on the table, this is a time when I fear the impact of an assassination attempt on various of our political leaders and the candidates. The impact could upend the American political system at a very fragile time.

To joke about it -- and intimate the casual possibility of such a thing is unconscionable.

Huckabee should publicly and immediately apologize.

-- Steve Clemons

I'm late to this particular debate, but I wanted to highlight that there is an effort underway to dislodge John Yoo, one of the key enablers of America's torture program, from his seat at UC Berkeley's Law School.

Read this bit in Vanity Fair by Philippe Sands who recently spoke at the New America Foundation and authored The Torture Team: The Rumsfeld Memo and the Betrayal of American Values as well as a post by economist, blogger, and UC Berkeley professor J. Bradford DeLong.

-- Steve Clemons

One of my most active readers and commenters directed me to a blog site, artLife that is art contextualized with commentary.

I've had a hell of a week -- and next week is worse -- with some work load demands that have kept me on the run. But this picture has caught my eye when all I should be doing is writing about Japan as a "stakeholder nation" and completing grant applications.

I'm almost addicted to the above painting now -- and it's caption "Hell for Bad Cows."

I know that there is a political metaphor in this -- but am not willing to go there. But this painting and the zinger title caught me sort of like Marlene Vasilic caught that whopper carp below.

More later -- for those interested, in a Financial Times article just out, I note that the McCain campaign is going to be trying to define Obama in outrageous, racist ways in the months ahead -- but also note that Barack Obama, trying to inoculate himself from attacks from McCain threw one of his most loyal followers, Robert Malley, not only under the bus -- but then stopped the bus and ran it back over him again -- in this Financial Times article.

More soon. It's like a tune in my head I can't shake, "Hell for bad cows. . ."

-- Steve Clemons

(Marlene Cooper Vasilic holds her 24 lb. carp caught and released in Washington DC's tidal basin)

Marlene Cooper Vasilic, Director of Outreach and Special Events for the Center for American Progress, does away with stress by fishing for monster carp in the waterways around Washington, DC.

Marlene just won a carp fishing tournament in the DC tidal basin last weekend -- and made her husband Aleks Vasilic pretty envious. But if anyone has a copy laying around, he is on this month's cover of the North American Carp Angler (that is not him featured in the magazine pic linked).

Ever tried to catch a carp? It's tough. I'm reading up on it.

I have mastered catching Chesapeake Bay blue crabs with chicken necks though. More on that another time.

Congrats to my pal Marlene who happens to be the sister of Helene Cooper, diplomatic correspondent of the New York Times and author of the forthcoming The House at Sugar Beach: A Memoir which recounts her life growing up in pre-chaos Liberia and which recently was featured in the New York Times Magazine.

Don't worry about the carp. Marlene releases all of them so that her husband has a chance to catch her fish in the future.

-- Steve Clemons

I don't keep a secret of the fact that Grover Norquist and his wife Samah are friends of mine -- and I just had him in to speak at the New America Foundation on his new book, Leave Us Alone: Getting the Government's Hands Off Our Money, Our Guns, Our Lives.

It's an interesting, thoughtful, provocative book that progressives should read. Norquist is a major kingpin of Republican party politics -- but he's fighting against the nativism and bigotry in the party which I think is worth noting. Of course, he's monomaniacally opposed to tax increases. And yes, I know his name percolates in the Abramoff files. Not my issue, at least not right now.

However, I find his book the antithesis of both the style and content of an Ann Coulter book.

Christopher Hayes of The Nation already has a post up that ties into the Norquist event today.

The personal ethical challenge I am having is that he just left his black bag here -- full of binders, charts, strategy points, playbooks, schedules, all of that -- possibly the Republican electoral game plan from his perspective. It even has a copy of the no new taxes, "Taxpayer Protection Pledge" that he got Stephen Colbert to swear loyalty to last night. (see above)

And I'm not going to go through Grover's 'black bag'.

Norquist's messengers are on the way to pick it back up. But part of me thinks I should have called Jon Stewart and gone through Grover's bag together on his show.

But no, not going to do it. . .not gonna. . .no. . .well. . .but then again, what would Karl Rove have done?

On another front, stay tuned to the "On Day One" effort by the Better World Campaign to ask a cross section of leaders what he or she would do on the first day of the next presidential administration. I did one of these on US-Cuba policy.

Grover Norquist did his video clip today and it should be up on their site soon.

-- Steve Clemons

The Council on Foreign Relations has just released a zinger report on Latin America. It's just fantastic, and I have to admit that I rarely find myself doing jumping jacks and running around my block in Dupont Circle in Washington after reading a CFR Task Force report. But I am.

I think that the 96-page document is stacked full of sensible thinking and proposals that on each and every page fundamentally reject the kind of self-destructive pugnacious nationalism that former Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Jesse Helms and his chief acolyte John Bolton have helped institutionalize.

It's just so good. The report is titled U.S.-Latin America Relations: A New Direction for a New Reality and can be downloaded as a pdf here.

I fear that CFR President and former Bush Administration senior foreign policy official Richard Haass is going to be really uncomfortable with the effusive enthusiasm that I have for the strategic intelligence of this Task Force's work, but this is the kind of thinking we need across the entire geostrategic map -- particularly on the Middle East.

The Cuba proposals are a case in point -- and in the words of one person close to the effort, the group decided to go for "the full Monty" in advocating a complete break with current, failed embargo policy of the U.S.

The Task Force chaired by former Clinton Administration US Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky and former four-star Army General James T. Hill endorsed the following changes to US-Cuba policy:

1. Permit freer travel to and facilitate trade with Cuba. The White House should repeal the 2004 restrictions placed on Cuban-American family travel and remittances.

2. Reinstate and liberalize the thirteen categories of licensed people-to-people "purposeful travel" for other Americans, instituted by the Clinton administration in preparation for the 1998 Papal Visit to Havana.

3. Hold talks on issues of mutual concern to both parties, such as migration, human smuggling, drug trafficking, public health, the future of the Guantanamo naval base, and on environmentally sustainable resource management, especially as Cuba, with a number of foreign oil companies, begins deep water exploration for potentially significant reserves.

4. Work more effectively with partners in the western hemisphere and in Europe to press Cuba on its human rights record and for more democratic reform.

5. Mindful of the last one hundred years of U.S.-Cuba relations, assure Cubans on the island that the United States will pursue a respectful arm's-length relationship with a democratic Cuba.

6. Repeal the 1996 Helms-Burton law, which removed most of the executive branch's authority to eliminate economic sanctions. While moving to repeal the law, the U.S. Congress should pass legislative measures, as it has with agricultural sales, designed to liberalize trade with and travel to Cuba, while supporting opportunities to strengthen democratic institutions there.

This report throughout impresses me -- and I am only bummed that I wasn't a member of this particular CFR group, as others I have participated in haven't come anywhere near the clarity and potential impact of this.

Something is changing in Washington, and it could be for the better. One just doesn't see papers of this sort too frequently emanating from institutions populated by many who know that they may face Senate confirmation hearings in the future.

The membership roster of the CFR Study Group on Latin America included former US Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky and General James T. Hill as mentioned but also Inter-American Dialogue President Peter Hakim, futurist and strategist (and New America Foundation board member) Francis Fukuyama, National Security Network czar Rand Beers, AOL founder James Kimsey, former Republican Congressman and German Marshall Fund Senior Fellow Jim Kolbe, author and strategist David Rothkopf, Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Julia Sweig, among others. Special kudos to Council on Foreign Relations Fellow Shannon O'Neil who directed the independent task force.

-- Steve Clemons

Check out this interesting piece by Aram Roston and Kianne Sadeq.

The NBC news correspondents report that the U.S. has finally cut off Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi for his "unauthorized" contacts with Iran.

It's worth nothing that Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress provided an essential vehicle exploited by Douglas Feith, James Woolsey and others to agitate for the invasion of Iraq. In fact, the offices of Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress used to cohabit the same space of Douglas Feith's law firm.

Roston is author of one of the best treatments of Chalabi out right now, The Man Who Pushed America to War: The Extraordinary Life, Adventures, and Obsessions of Ahmed Chalabi.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

Hoffmania posts what I consider to be one of the most important, powerful exchanges I have seen on The Daily Show. While posing some of the discussion points for laughs, Stewart conducts an intense, tough interview.

The segments are nearly 20 minutes in length. In the first segment in posted on the link, Stewart says that the Administration's level of deception slid over from "manslaughter to homicide."

In the second segment, Stewart tells Feith, "You removed the ability of the American people to make an informed decision" about Iraq.

Don't buy Doug Feith's book, but watch these Jon Stewart clips.

-- Steve Clemons

It's never too late, perhaps.

We have not heard yet whether John Edwards is joined by his wife Elizabeth Edwards, who is believed to tilt towards Hillary Clinton preferring her health care proposal to Obama's.

-- Steve Clemons

In yesterday's Washington Post, Fred Hiatt makes the case that the UN is at fault for suffering in Darfur and Myanmar.

Yes, that's Darfur, where the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations has been begging and pleading with member states to contribute essential equipment, weapons and supplies (much has been made of a critical helicopter shortage, but right now it seems that water is just as much a limiting factor), and Myanmar, where the UN is the only actor that has actually been able to provide substantial aid.

Lebanon is one of the most diverse nations in the Middle East. The country is home to many religious communities and serves as an experiment in Middle East pluralism. In part because of Lebanon's pluralistic makeup, it has been in a near-constant state of conflict for decades. Frequent meddling by and skirmishes with Israel and Syria have left some Lebanese desperate for a sense of security and stability, which Hezbollah has readily been able to provide.

New America Fellow Nir Rosen has reported extensively on Hizb Allah, or the Party of God, which he has long argued (both here on TWN and elsewhere) has a political agenda with greater legitimacy than the US and its regional allies credit and a currency that they all must come to terms with in order to advance any meaningful political progress in the region. Hezbollah formed as a militia in South Lebanon in 1982 in response to Israel's military presence in Lebanon. They have steadily increased in popularity and influence, particularly after the 2006 war with Israel, and Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah's young leader, was found to be the most popular in the Arab world by the 2008 Annual Arab Public Opinion Poll.

This morning at 9:30am, New America will be hosting a briefing on Lebanon to provide further detail on the current political and security situation as well as their implications for the country and the region at large. The briefing will be chaired by Steven Clemons, featuring New America Senior Fellows Daniel Levy and Flynt Leverett, Al Arabiyah Bureau Chief Hisham Melhem, and Nir Rosen and Daily Star Editor Rami Khouri via conference call LIVE FROM BEIRUT. Walk ins are welcome or you can watch a live webcast online here.

For some more details on the past week's events, the Wall Street Journal provides some useful background:

AP is reporting that Nawaz Sharif's party has pulled out of cabinet positions from the coalition government with the PPP led by the late Benazir Bhutto's husband Asif Zardari. While they've pledged to try to work out their differences, my sense is that despite the triumphalism and high expectations of democracy cheerleaders, the coalition continues to reside on a shaky foundation that can fall apart at a moment's notice.

The difference is over judges dismissed last year by President Musharraf -- reports states the two have disagreed not on "whether" to reinstate the judges but merely "how". But the devil (not to mention the locus of power) is in the "how". After all, Musharraf could contend that he too wants a stable and sustainable representative government for the future for Pakistan, he merely disagrees with Sharif and Zardari on the "how."

The situation as it stands now strikes me as untenable -- there is little advantage to remaining in a coalition government if one doesn't have control of certain ministerial portfolios, especially with a feudal politics of Pakistan where the ministries are essential to shoring up political support amongst one's constituencies. And one cannot reap the political rewards and capital of taking a distinct stand on the judges issue unless one is formally in the opposition. Sharif is likely making a power play to threaten dissolution of the coalition. To retain power, Zardari would have to bring in other parties into the coalition government, possibly the remnant of Musharraf's party and coalition partners, which would proportionally forfeit his newfound democratic credentials and legitimacy.

It was expected that Sharif and Zaradari would have a hard time forming a coalition and holding it together given the legacy of bad blood between the two and their respective parties -- Sharif's party kicked electorally booted out Bhutto party twice in the 1990s, Zardari served a prison sentence for corruption under Sharif's second term as Prime Minister, and Bhutto/Zardari initially tried to cut an American-brokered deal with Musharaff and squeeze Sharif out of the Pakistani political scene.

Most importantly, so long as Pakistani politics continues to be feudal in nature, governance will primarily remain a task of channeling the national patrimony to one's base. And this fundamentally problemitizes a power-sharing arrangement between two dominant parties with very different constituencies.

--Sameer Lalwani

When I was recently in Saudi Arabia, I visited the impressive campus of King Saud University which sports more than 80,000 students and is making major investments in the science infrastructure of the country.

We also visited SAGIA, the Saudi Arabia General Investment Authority, which is helping to oversee and implement the Kingdom's competitiveness agenda. Saudi competitiveness as a place to do business is surging among all countries, and particularly in the Middle East. This year, Saudi Arabia ranked 23rd among all countries, up ten positions from its 2007 ranking.

SAGIA's economic cities program is mammoth in scale -- and either could possibly be one of the most foolish or very best gambles a country has made on its own future. Firms like Cisco Systems are embedding their highest speed, next generation information management infrastructure in the foundation of these economic cities -- and it will be interesting to see whether the Japanese, Chinese, European, Korean, and possibly even American populations that move into these cities along with Saudi citizens become more than the sum of the impressive parts that have been assembled or not.

But while working through our itinerary, at many of our stops Dell CEO Michael Dell had just been there. According to the people he had met in the goverment and in the academic establishment, Dell had not been to Saudi Arabia before -- but it does seem that American firms are investing time in the Kingdom again. . .and their interest is not driven just by oil but by the effort of Saudi Arabia to remake the national and regional economic landscape.

Terrorism is often the lens through which Americans write about Saudi Arabia, but after seeing the country firsthand and witnessing the economic dynamism and change afoot -- journalists and other interlocutors are offering a badly distorted picture of the forces shaping the Saudi State and Gulf region.

-- Steve Clemons

Note from Steve Clemons. My colleague Nir Rosen who has been one of America's most significant chroniclers of the Islamic dimensions of America's war in the Middle East is now a regular contributer to The Washington Note. Please welcome him. And as always, the views he expresses are exclusively his own and not those necessarily of The Washington Note or mine. -- Steve Clemons

When Israel was bombing Lebanon in 2006, killing its civilians and destroying its infrastructure, Condoleeza Rice celebrated this as the "birth pangs of the new Middle East," a phrase that lives in infamy in Lebanon. The events of the last 24 hours in Lebanon were the death throes of the Bush plan for the new Middle East. In Iraq, instead of creating a democracy, the US introduced a civil war, sectarian militias, death squads and ethnic cleansing. It installed a series of ineffective dictators, Garner, Bremer, Allawi.

Then it surrendered to pressure from the sectarian Islamist Shiites it had empowered and agreed to elections, which of course ended in victory for sectarian Islamist Shiite militias who began slaughtering anybody they didn't like, especially Sunnis. Then the US decided it had had enough of its puppet prime minister Jaafari, who was not proving obedient enough, so they forced him out and replaced him with another sectarian Shiite Islamist, Maliki, who also proved a disappointment to them. But though they threatened to remove him, they have backed him as he loses popularity and even attacks more popular Shiite movements like the Sadrists. Meanwhile the US has introduced new Sunni militias composed of thugs and former murderers. Its icon was Abu Risha, the slain leader of the Awakening council in the Anbar.

In Palestine, furious that Hamas won democratic and fair elections, the US (along with the Saudis, Jordanians, Israelis, Egyptians and others), backed the unpopular Fatah and Mahmud Abbas, a traitor to his own people, collaborating with their occupiers. As Fatah tortured its opponents Gaza was suffocated and the Palestinian people punished for their decision to take part in elections. As Fatah thugs attempted a coup in Gaza, Hamas thwarted this threat with a counter coup and easily defeated the American backed Palestinian militias.

In Somalia, the Americans backed a coalition of hated warlords to go after the much more popular Islamic Courts Union, in the name of the war on terror. The Islamic Courts rise was the first reason for optimism in Somalia, the first time after 14 attempts to set up a government and 15 years of civil war.

The Islamic Courts introduced peace and stability to Mogadishu and its environs, got rid of warlords and their militias who terrorized Somalis. Women were able to walk on the streets unharassed and exiled businessmen returned to rebuild the broken country. But it was an Islamist movement, and in the era of Bush, that means al Qaeda, so the US backed the war lords and its local proxy, the Ethiopians, who invaded Somalia and occupied Mogadishu and are now raping and killing civilians, while the Islamists radicalized and the situation in Somalia is worse than ever.

Things aren't going very well in Afghanistan either, where Hamid Karzai, a weak puppet who controls nothing, relies on the Americans to back an every strengthening violent resistance.

(That's Matt Cooper on the left next to the great Al Franken)

I'm into "Facebook Journalism." I think it's really cool -- though one of my friends who is a genuine, old school journalist (and out of a job) pretty much handed me my head when I called John Dickerson's twitter reporting on Bill O'Reilly shoving an Obama staffer in New Hampshire "new journalism." He was miffed.

Now Matt Cooper of Conde Nast's Portfolio is reporting this on his Facebook twitter box:

Willing to bet this is the last Clinton election ever. No senate or presidential bid in '12.

That's interesting. I have been one to think that the Clinton franchise would hold together -- even if she steps out of the race or was ultimately defeated by Obama. But an alternative view is that the Clinton political machine could completely collapse when her forward momentum to the White House is definitively stopped.

Matt's bet that the Clintons, all of them, would head into a next 'electionless' life is not unbelievable.

Interesting stuff this Facebook journalism.

Here's my page. My twitter box currently says that I am "impressed by what Dianne Feinstein knows about nukes" after an interesting dinner I attended with her last night.

-- Steve Clemons

Many of the most senior members of the foreign policy Illuminati assembled in London last week, and neoconservative high priest Robert Kagan and neo-realist national security strategist Kurt Campbell had a collision that simply must be recorded for posterity.

The context was a dinner and then a conference featuring an intellectually and politically diverse crowd discussing the turbulent currents at play in the international system.

The dinner was held at the official residence of outgoing Ambassador of Germany to the UK Wolfgang Ischinger (he previously served in Washington as Ambassador) and featured special guests CENTCOM Commander-nominee David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker. The sponsor of the night was the new European Council on Foreign Relations whose executive director Mark Leonard is tying up European leaders in a new and important exercise in national security consciousness-raising.

I'm going to save what I learned about the Petraeus/Crocker exchange with people like Princeton University Woodrow Wilson School Dean Anne-Marie Slaughter, her colleague G. John Ikenberry (see his note below), UT Austin LBJ School Dean and former Clinton administration Deputy National Security Adviser James Steinberg and many others for another post. I was not in attendance (and thus am under no obligation to keep anything off the record, which I fastidiously adhere to when in such meetings) -- and have had to pull teeth and twist the arms of quite a few sources to piece together the content of the discussion.

The next day a conference in London was held sponsored principally by the Princeton Project on National Security that launched a report, "Forging a World of Liberty Under Law, U.S. National Security In The 21st Century" a year and a half ago.

But here's the zinger.

Sources report to me that Center for a New American Security CEO Kurt Campbell was sitting near Robert Kagan at the Ischinger dinner.

Kagan it should be noted has recently encouraged the Bush administration to engage in direct talks with Iran (in contrast to John Bolton who has been encouraging an expeditious bombing campaign) and has written an interesting essay on the new ideological contest afoot in the international system in which America will once again need to contrast itself and its norms and habits against those of illiberal regimes like Russia. Given Kagan's big leap on Iran, one shouldn't be blamed for thinking that Kagan was on a new track and that he might want to do stuff like shut down Guantanamo and get the U.S. to try out a little more Venus and a little less Mars.

So, it wasn't surprising to everyone there that Kurt Campbell felt comfortable next to Kagan saying that "despite Europe's best efforts and wishes, the neocons were not dead."

Campbell said that the "neocons were alive and well in the McCain camp" and then said that some people had a tough time searching for the right analogy to describe neoconservatives.

He said that he had heard some people call them "vampires and werewolves but these were both imperfect."

Campbell said "you can kill a vampire with a perfectly placed silver bullet, unlike a neocon -- and the werewolf paradigm is wrong because werewolves are fine during the day but do crazy things at night."

"Neocons do crazy things at any time," Campbell reportedly said to much laughter.

Then, on a roll, Kurt Campbell said that "a better analogy was 'intellectual special forces' -- highly trained, confident, ninja-like, working well in small teams but always seeking to define the terrain of conflict."

"They will not stand and fight if things go poorly but instead will search for a better battle," Campbell advised.

All along, Robert Kagan was frowning, fidgeting, growing visibly icy. It turned out he hadn't really left the comfort of the neoconservative collective at all and was highly displeased with Kurt Campbell's effort to be "flip and funny."

A source close to Campbell told me that despite the accuracy of the metaphor he used to describe neoconservatives, Campbell had not intended to offend Robert Kagan at all. In fact, given what many neoconservatives say about realists and liberal internationalists, this was pretty light fare.

Another source told me that Kagan decided he would not appear on the Princeton Project panel with Campbell the next day. While some would have said "great" -- now we can have a reality-based discussion, the fact is that there are times when balance and ideological diversity are important, and this was one of those. Kagan jumping ship would not have been good.

So, Campbell went out to buy Bob Kagan "a tie", wrote him a note of apology, and thanked him for his service "on behalf of a grateful nation."

I hear that the teasing of Richard Holbrooke at the dinner was even more sizzling, but that will wait for a few weeks so that my sources are not inadvertently outed.

My own analogy to describe the neocons to lay audiences is the "Borg" in Star Trek. The Borg mean well, but they want to 'assimilate' dissimilar cultures and peoples and make them look just like the Borg. If they can't assimilate them, they either annihilate them or wall them off.

Maybe Kurt Campbell will find that metaphor useful the next time he hangs out with a lost and wandering neoconservative soul.

(Honestly, I hope that Bob Kagan and Kurt Campbell both enjoy this a bit. It's just too good a story not to post. If not, can someone tell me what tie shop Campbell uses?)

-- Steve Clemons

Catherine Mann of the Brandeis University Business School is the latest addition to an impressive roster of people opposed to any flirtation with a rollback of the gas tax. I signed up last week.

I think that the chances of this proposal coming to pass declined a lot last night -- but I'm glad principled public intellectuals are expressing themselves on this.

-- Steve Clemons

Ilan Goldenberg has posted links to a huge dump of FOIA-obtained documents that the Department of Defense has made available to the New York Times and to the public. Goldenberg makes an appeal:

We need help from our readers. Let me know if you find anything interesting.

It's a lot of stuff -- and I bet there are some juicy, revealing items.

-- Steve Clemons

Note from Steve Clemons: This is a guest post by G. John Ikenberry who is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University in the Department of Politics and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. My personal thanks to Ikenberry and to Kishore Mahbubani and others for engaging in this debate -- as I can think of few other topics more important than theirs for the country to wrestle with.

From G. John Ikenberry:

Steve Clemons has provoked me to write about the "next fault line" in the foreign policy debate - "The U.S. Matters" vs. "No, It Really Doesn't" - by responding to Kishore Mahbubani's provocative new book. Kishore is a good friend and he is one of the smartest and most insightful public intellectuals on the scene today. So it is a pleasure to exchange ideas with him.

Kishore and I clearly have major points of agreement. These include many of his general themes: that the rise of Asia is perhaps the seminal macro-historical event of our era; that we are witnessing an extraordinary renaissance in Asian societies; and that Asia has a lot that it can bring - experience, resources, a huge portion of humanity - to the collective management of world order.

But I disagree with Kishore on other themes he advances, particularly his argument that the West is somehow impeding or resisting the rise of Asia. I also disagree with the thesis that sometimes works its way into Kishore's writing, namely that the "rise" of Asia entails the inevitable "decline" of America or the West as a producer of global order and governance. Most of all, I disagree with Kishore's tendency to cast the debate about the coming global order as a struggle between East and West.

The real struggle is between those who want to renew and expand today's rule-based global order - which America itself championed for most of the postwar decades - or move to some sort of less cooperative order built on spheres of influence and power balances. These fault lines do not map onto geography nor do they split Asia and the West.

I agree with Kishore that the international distribution of power is shifting with the rise of Asia, but I do not see a great transformation in the organizing logic or principles of international order following from it.

To put it bluntly, I do not see Asia offering anything new or distinctive in the organization and governance of the global system. I do not see a lot of new ideas about how global rules and institutions should be transformed. I do not see an "Asian way" of world politics. I do see efforts - legitimate efforts - to get seats at various tables. But the tables are not newly designed Asian tables. They are just tables, many of them dating from earlier decades when the United States really did shape the rules and institutions of the global system.

What I found missing in Kishore's book was a discussion of what actually a more powerful Asia might do with its power.

Indeed, what is most striking about the rise of Asia is a silence on the big questions. This is clearly the case with China, which has been quietly working with and within existing frameworks of global cooperation. Arguably, over the last seven years, it is the United States - not China - that has been most "revisionist" in its global orientation. China is more worried that the United States will abandon its commitment to the old, Western-oriented global rules and institutions than it is eager to advance a new set of Asian-generated rules and institutions.

So the idea of an "Asian century" is misleading. The notion behind this sort of grand thinking borrows from the old great power image of world politics. Great powers rise and fall. In this old fashion vision, America had its moment and now it is giving way to China.

But this misses my big argument: that the United States was not just a powerful state, it also built an international order. That order still exists - and indeed it has expanded to encompass much of the world. China - and Greater Asia - is rising in power but it is also integrating into this international order.

The order that America helped produce is unlike orders produced by earlier great powers. Compared with earlier orders, the American-led order is "easy to join and hard to overturn." Today this order is not really an American order or even a Western order. It is an international order with deep and encompassing economic and political rules and institutions that are both durable and functional.

The key point is that there is no alternative "Asian international order" that China and the rest of Asia are attempting to call forth - doing so if only the West would, as Kishore urges, gracefully make way for it. In my view, Asian countries want to join and help run the existing global system not overturn it.

It is here that I make a series of arguments about how the United States should think about the rise of China and the future of the West. I laid out my thesis in the January/February issue of Foreign Affairs.

Essentially, I make three points.

One is that the best way to shape the terms of China's - and Asia's - rise is to reaffirm and rebuild the Western-led postwar rules and institutions that define the current world order and through which the U.S. has exercised leadership all these years. This order has been -- in contrast to past international orders -- relatively easy to join. It is an international order that has - in contrast to past international orders - spread wealth and economic growth relatively widely. This international order has also been one - in contrast to past international orders - where political voice and influence has been widely shared among states. This Western system is America's greatest asset and we should strengthen it and by so doing strengthen the incentives China will have to integrate and join rather than oppose and seek to overturn it.

A second point is that, ironically, China may well be tomorrow's greatest supporter of the American-led postwar system. That system provides rules and institutions for openness and nondiscrimination. These are features of order that China will want going forward as its growing economic weight will be greeted by efforts by others (including some governments in the West) to close and discriminate. Rule-based international order is not a Western fixation. It is a system of governance that all states - East and West - have some interest in maintaining, China not least. China joined the WTO. Is the WTO a Western institution? I am not sure this is a useful question to debate. It is a functional institution that states - East or West - have incentives to join.

Finally, I argue that America's unipolar position will slowly wane. And so, today, the United States should be asking itself: what sort of international order do we want to have in place in 2040 or 2050 when we are relatively less powerful?

I call this the neo-Rawlsian question of our time!

It was the famous political philosopher John Rawls who suggested that political institutions should be designed behind a "vale of ignorance" - that is, under conditions where the architects of the institutions did not know precisely where they would be within the resulting socio-economic system. This thought experiment forced the institution builders to design institutions that would safeguard his interests regardless of where he or she ended up - weak or strong, rich or poor.

The United States needs to engage in a similar thought experiment. We should try to lay down rules and institutions today -- or reaffirm the old ones -- so that we can protect our interests when we are less commanding in our global presence. I don't know if John Rawls would approve, but I borrow his inspiration!

My answer is that the United States should want to invest today in renewing and expanding a global system what will give it the best opportunities to be safe and prosperous when the rest of the world looms larger.

In the age of rising Asian power, reports of the death of the West are greatly exaggerated. It is the grand liberal ascendancy of the last hundred years - and the quiet revolution of postwar liberal international order - that define the logic and choices of global order in the 21st century.

This is true regardless of whether Asia and the West are rising or declining or just standing still.

-- G. John Ikenberry

That's the latest death toll -- now expected to grow higher as more than 30,000 are still missing -- from the cyclone that hit Burma.

This is really horrible -- and despite the bias in the western media against the ruling junta and the hope that this catastrophe will shake the political hold of Burma's generals, I don't think that democracy grows from massive natural disasters. In fact, I think the opposite usually occurs.

-- Steve Clemons

That's William Ayers above standing on an American flag. Ayers is acquainted with Barack Obama -- and I don't feel that Obama should be responsible for the civil protest behavior of his acquaintances.

While I am not a fan of Ayers or his tactics and social views, I also think that Ayers should have the right to express himself and his views in this nation -- including desecrating the flag.

But we've entered a weird vortex of flag obsessions -- with criticism of Barack Obama for not wearing a flag lapel pin. We as a nation are sounding more and more like the old Soviet Union with antics like this.

But "flag respect" does matter for many. It's a fact of American political life.

John McCain had a tough time with flag issues in South Carolina in his 2000 presidential bid when he condemned the Confederate flag flying over South Carolina's statehouse and couldn't bring attention back to the American flag. I thought at the time that he should have said that when he was in the Hanoi Hilton, the only flag he cared about was looking out and seeing the American flag.

My business cards for The Washington Note feature an American flag -- and I made sure that the flag was highlighted in a website that I run some of my higher end foreign policy work through titled "America's Purpose."

I won't forfeit the flag to the likes of John Bolton, Frank Gaffney, David Addington, Richard Cheney, George W. Bush, Katherine Harris, Mario Diaz-Balart, Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, Alberto Gonzalez, John Yoo, and many others who have metaphorically trampled the flag and who have undermined the essence and spirit of what America is and should be.

I wish William Ayers would not either -- and I hope that Barack Obama agrees with me.

-- Steve Clemons

From the same person who broke the story on Prime Minister Tony Blair's January of 2003 conversation with President Bush that sealed their agreement to invade Iraq regardless of the UN Security Council outcome (and even use a UN plane to bait an attack), Matrix Chambers Barrister and University College London Law Professor Philippe Sands has produced a stunning cover story in Vanity Fair magazine this month on the legal maneuvers that laid the foundations for a US policy of torture.

Some excerpts from the article -- which itself is only a prelude to the book -- needed to pulled for the revelations they offered. Most entertaining, though of lesser importance, is the unflattering portrait Sands paints of former Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith.

First on international law and global perception:

"This year I was really a player," Feith said, thinking back on 2002 and relishing the memory. I asked him whether, in the end, he was at all concerned that the Geneva decision might have diminished America's moral authority. He was not. "The problem with moral authority," he said, was "people who should know better, like yourself, siding with the assholes, to put it crudely."

Then on plausible deniability:

Dunlavey described Feith to me as one of his main points of contact. Feith, for his part, had told me that he knew nothing about any specific interrogation issues until the Haynes Memo suddenly landed on his desk. But that couldn't be right -- in the memo itself Haynes had written, "I have discussed this with the Deputy, Doug Feith and General Myers." I read the sentence aloud. Feith looked at me. His only response was to tell me that I had mispronounced his name. "It's Fythe," he said. "Not Faith."

But Feith aside, Sands really lands a damning punch when connecting the dots on the points of contact between the highest level administration officials/decision makers and the operators who carried out their illegal plans at Guantanamo.

Not everyone at Guantanamo was enthusiastic. The F.B.I. and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service refused to be associated with aggressive interrogation. They opposed the techniques. One of the N.C.I.S. psychologists, Mike Gelles, knew about the brainstorming sessions but stayed away. He was dismissive of the administration's contention that the techniques trickled up on their own from Guantanamo. "That's not accurate," he said flatly. "This was not done by a bunch of people down in Gitmo -- no way."

That view is buttressed by a key event that has received virtually no attention. On September 25, as the process of elaborating new interrogation techniques reached a critical point, a delegation of the administration's most senior lawyers arrived at Guantanamo. The group included the president's lawyer, Alberto Gonzales, who had by then received the Yoo-Bybee Memo; Vice President Cheney's lawyer, David Addington, who had contributed to the writing of that memo; the C.I.A.'s John Rizzo, who had asked for a Justice Department sign-off on individual techniques, including waterboarding, and received the second (and still secret) Yoo-Bybee Memo; and Jim Haynes, Rumsfeld's counsel. They were all well aware of al-Qahtani. "They wanted to know what we were doing to get to this guy," Dunlavey told me, "and Addington was interested in how we were managing it." I asked what they had to say. "They brought ideas with them which had been given from sources in D.C.," Dunlavey said. "They came down to observe and talk." Throughout this whole period, Dunlavey went on, Rumsfeld was "directly and regularly involved."

Beaver confirmed the account of the visit. Addington talked a great deal, and it was obvious to her that he was a "very powerful man" and "definitely the guy in charge," with a booming voice and confident style. Gonzales was quiet. Haynes, a friend and protege of Addington's, seemed especially interested in the military commissions, which were to decide the fate of individual detainees. They met with the intelligence people and talked about new interrogation methods. They also witnessed some interrogations. Beaver spent time with the group. Talking about the episode even long afterward made her visibly anxious. Her hand tapped and she moved restlessly in her chair. She recalled the message they had received from the visitors: Do "whatever needed to be done." That was a green light from the very top -- the lawyers for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the C.I.A. The administration's version of events -- that it became involved in the Guantanamo interrogations only in November, after receiving a list of techniques out of the blue from the "aggressive major general" -- was demonstrably false.

Sands will be speaking tomorrow (Tuesday May 5) at 3:30pm the New America Foundation offices in a talk sure to be littered with more zingers and telling anecdotes. Accompanying him will be by Col. (Ret.) Lawrence Wilkerson, another leading expert on the dilemmas of national security law who has been known to be quite a force when standing behind a podium.

-- Sameer Lalwani

In case there was any doubt, every ocean industry -- every single one, including telecom, oil and gas, mining, marine manufacturing, shipping, and fishing -- supports U.S. accession to the Law of the Sea Convention.

When businesses were invited to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, numerous business groups offered testimony in favor of accession. The only "ocean industry" group that offered opposing testimony was a "company" incorporated in Nevada by treaty opponents that doesn't actually do any business.

Nonetheless, there are still a few folks out there insisting that ratification would run counter to U.S. economic interests. They obviously are choosing to ignore this letter from business leaders to the President or this one sent earlier to Senators Reid and McConnell.

To believe the Convention will hurt the U.S. economy is to believe that U.S. businesses don't understand their own bottom lines.

The votes are there. It's time for Senators Biden and Reid to drag us over the finish line.

--Scott Paul

I have heard from Clinton campaign insiders that Hillary Clinton's gas tax rollback proposal is resonating with voters -- particularly the economically besieged in Indiana and North Carolina. She's offering a classic give away to lure voters -- and this is part of the retail politicking that the Clinton campaign is using to dismantle Obama's sizzle.

But my former boss Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), who chairs the Senate Energy Committee, endorsed Barack Obama last week -- and I think that Hillary's gas tax proposal was part of what put him over the edge. My hunch, knowing Bingaman and his views about nuclear language recklessness, is that Hillary Clinton's comments about "obliterating Iran" also cost her his superdelegate vote.

An effort is now underway among serious policy intellectuals from both sides of the political aisle to protest the Clinton gas tax rollback notion.

Brookings Institution's legendary economic policy guru Henry J. "Hank" Aaron is leading the effort -- and has issued an open statement signed by some of the nation's leading public policy voices. It's a completely non-partisan effort.

The statement reads:

An Open Statement Opposing Proposals for a Gas Tax Holiday

In recent weeks, there have been proposals in Congress and by some presidential candidates to suspend the gas tax for the summer. As economists who study issues of energy policy, taxation, public finance, and budgeting, we write to indicate our opposition to this policy. Put simply, suspending the federal tax on gasoline this summer is a bad idea and we oppose it.

There are several reasons for this opposition. First, research shows that waiving the gas tax would generate major profits for oil companies rather than significantly lowering prices for consumers. Second, it would encourage people to keep buying costly imported oil and do nothing to encourage conservation. Third, a tax holiday would provide very little relief to families feeling squeezed. Fourth, the gas tax suspension would threaten to increase the already record deficit in the coming year and reduce the amount of money going into the highway trust fund that maintains our infrastructure.

Signers of this letter are both Democrats and Republicans. This is not a partisan issue. It is a matter of good public policy.

But I have to post a line from Aaron that gets at what he really thinks of Hillary Clinton's proposal:

My own view is that in the long and sad annals of truly bad ideas, it is unusual for one to receive bipartisan support at such high levels right in the middle of a campaign as this one has.

-- Steve Clemons

The debate over McCain's 100 years comment is still pinging around in my brain. Here is my first interpretation of McCain's intended meaning when I wrote earlier this week:

More important is what McCain actually did mean: that the U.S. should maintain a military presence in Iraq not only as long as it takes to end hostilities, but long after hostilities have ended. Iraq will not be anything like Japan, Germany or South Korea in the foreseeable future. Given the events of the past five years, the Iraqi population simply will not tolerate a permanent U.S. military presence, especially if large-scale violence has ended. McCain is seeing things through a 20th century prism that minimizes the costs and sometimes destabilizing effects of projecting U.S. military power around the world.

If Democrats and moderate Republicans try to loop these comments into the tactical-level redeployment debate -- tempting as that may be, since it's become a politically safe space -- they would be backing down from a hugely important ideological confrontation. Clinton, Obama and their allies need to take this argument at face value and shoot it down. Otherwise, McCain just might be able to bring neoconservatism back from the dead.

-- Scott Paul

I've been pretty quiet on the Law of the Sea front these past few months, but now that's over. The clock is ticking. The "quiet strategy" has achieved as much as it is going to. It's time for an all out push -- there's simply too much at stake to let it go. Look for this site to become Law of the Sea central over the next few weeks.

The quiet strategy did achieve something over the past few months: I can confirm that there are more than enough senators in favor of U.S. accession to the Law of the Sea convention to get it through. Now it's up to Senators Reid and Biden to finish the job.

One or two of these pro-LOS votes could flip as a result of right-wing pressure, but there's easily enough cushion to pass anyway. Besides, once the treaty comes to the floor, President Bush, who is strongly supportive, is likely to bring a few more senators on board. He's been unwilling to get out in front to advocate for the treaty, but once its moving the White House will work to see it pass. The WH will be faced with a choice: secure a win and incorporate the treaty into the Bush legacy or add one more failure to its extensive list of blunders. They will choose the former and ensure that it passes.

This is a great opportunity for Senator Reid, who has faced accusations of excessive partisanship from the other side. In one fell swoop, Reid can collaborate with senior, well-respected Republican senators and President Bush as he helps the United States take a huge step towards greater security, prosperity and sustainability.

On the flip side, there is no excuse for leaving this clear victory on the table. The days of letting flat-earthers dictate U.S. foreign policy needs to come to an end and ratifying the Law of the Sea Convention is the first step.

-- Scott Paul

Update: The book event with Steve Coll will be streaming live here starting at 12:15pm today.

Two of America's leading terrorism experts, Steve Coll and Peter Bergen, are suggesting that Osama bin Laden is at his most vulnerable point since 2001 due to new political alignments and his increasing unpopularity -- both of which may soon unmask his whereabouts. But with a recent government report suggesting Ayman al-Zawahiri has emerged as the "strategic and operational chief," will bin Laden's inevitable capture really matter?

It's telling that just as our base of knowledge and understanding have caught up to challenge posed by our enemies of 2001 or even 2003, the face and strategy of our enemies may have already evolved.

Coll and Bergen have been at the forefront of investigating the evolving anatomy of terrorist networks like al Qaeda but also providing a richer context for the development of characters like Bin Laden himself -- the complexities and subtleties of his thinking that are intimately tied to the contradictions in Saudi Arabia's modernization path.

Today in a public event from 12:15pm to 1:45pm, New America Foundation President Steve Coll will be speaking about his new book The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century. Peter Bergen will be offering remarks as well, and Steve Clemons will be moderating.

-- Sameer Lalwani

Note from Steve Clemons. My colleague and friend Nir Rosen who has been one of America's most significant chroniclers of the Islamic dimensions of America's war in the Middle East has just become a regular contributer to The Washington Note. Please welcome him. And as always, the views he expresses are exclusively his own and not those necessarily of The Washington Note or mine. -- Steve Clemons

In June of 2003, two months after the United States conquered Iraq, I sat in on a briefing given by US Army intelligence officers in that most Sunni of Iraq's cities, Tikrit, to a couple of officers visiting from Baghdad. One of the American intelligence officers based in Saddam's famous hometown explained that they were worried about "Shiite fingers" from Iran "creeping" up to Tikrit to establish an Iranian style government.

At a time when the mostly Sunni Iraqi resistance had already established itself and its ability was improving, I was astounded by how stupid the notion of an Iranian threat in Tikrit was. I have remained shocked, like many journalists and academics familiar with the region and its languages, that the Americans have shown no improvement in their understanding of the Muslim world with which they are so deeply engaged militarily and as an imperial power.

We should expect little interest in understanding the outside world from an insular and isolated government whose leaders show open contempt for their own people. And we should expect diplomatic and military officials themselves required to maintain ideological purity to voice an equally unsophisticated world view.

But too often the so called experts are equally ignorant. Remarkably, their lack of background, expertise or language skills and their repeated errors have not diminished the credibility of people such as Fred Kagan of the far right American Enterprise Institute (a Russia expert!), or Kenneth Pollock of the Brookings Institute or their cohorts.

Ridiculously, Kagan and his wife, both of whom have only gone on official tours of Iraq with US Army babysitters, and neither of whom know Arabic, described the recent clashes in Basra as an operation initiated by the "legitimate Government of Iraq and its legally constituted security forces [against] illegal, foreign-backed, insurgent and criminal militias serving leaders who openly call for the defeat and humiliation of the United States and its allies in Iraq and throughout the region."

Why anybody even hires or publishes Kagan on the Middle East is a mystery, but there is nothing legitimate in the government of Iraq, it provides none of the services we would associate with a government, not even the pretense of a monopoly on violence, it was established under an illegitimate foreign military occupation and it is entirely unrepresentative of the majority of Sunnis and Shiites who are opposed to the American occupation and despise the Iraqi government.

Moreover the dominant parties in the government and in those units of the security forces that battled their political rivals in Basra and elsewhere are the ones closest to Iran. The leadership of the Iraqi government regularly consults Iranian officials and is closer to Iran than any other element in Iraq today. Moreover, the Americans have always blamed their failures in Iraq on outsiders, Baathists, al Qaeda, Iranians, because they refuse to admit that the Iraqi people don't want them. So Iran is a convenient scapegoat to explain the strength of the Sadrists, a strength actually resulting from the fact that they are a genuinely popular mass movement. Blaming Iran also lets the Americans maintain the illusion that the Mahdi Army's ceasefire is still in effect.