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.

Continue reading this article

-- Nir Rosen

(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.

I'll now go a step farther and make a connection I should have made earlier: McCain is trying to rescue the neoconservative project. He is still clinging to the idea -- despite all evidence to the contrary -- that U.S. military force can fundamentally transform Iraq and the Middle East.

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 Washin