I had a bit of a schedule change in the last couple of days and had to catch a flight to Doha on short notice. I am here now, but when I boarded the plane, all was still as it was in the Middle East -- not peaceful, but not on the brink either.

Now I have landed and am no longer disconnected from the pulsating throb of distressing Middle East-related news tonight.

I've missed a lot of detail -- and nearly all of the early emotional tension -- in the clash between a purported medical supplies/humanitarian flotilla heading for Gaza and the Israeli Defense Forces.

I'm in sort of a Rip Van Winkle moment in which I've awaken and lots has changed.

This reminds me of one time years ago when i was put under for some serious oral surgery right as the attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev was starting. When I woke, the first thing I could think of was to get caught up on the latest in Moscow intrigue.

I've been reading some correspondence that I received both from supporters of Israel's actions and those loudly crying foul on Israel for the deaths that have occurred. I need to catch up, need to see the video, and have some evolving thoughts that I'll try to share in the morning (my time).

Until then, I encourage "civil", unscreaming exchanges here in the comments section.

-- Steve Clemons

I really like former Clinton administration National Security Council official and Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Charles Kupchan's new book, How Enemies Become Friends: The Sources of Stable Peace.

Rather than taking yet another tired swipe at why war breaks out, Kupchan takes a refreshing and interesting look at where and why peace breaks out between warring parties.

During a longer book talk that I had the pleasure of hosting at the New America Foundation, Kupchan, who also is a Professor of Political Science at Georgetown University, runs through some historical cases of his peace breakouts and offers some thoughts on President Obama's engagement efforts with nations not currently in the America's friends camp.

The chat above is just a few minutes and will give folks a sense of the book, which I highly recommend to folks.

-- Steve Clemons

Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel published last week in the Washington Post a no nonsense assessment of America's situation in Afghanistan.

Read the entire oped, but the zingers are that General Stanley McChrystal has acknowledged that there is a stalemate in Afghanistan now. This means that after an increase of nearly 16,000 troops of the Obama-pledged 30,000, the U.S. is not seeing a shift in its fortunes.

Marja is a mess, and Kandahar lurks out there as a potentially very messy unknown.

Vanden Heuvel writes:

There is a sense of Taliban momentum -- even Gen. Stanley McChrystal recently declared, "Nobody is winning," and military officials are now minimizing expectations for the upcoming Kandahar offensive. The highly touted operation in Marja that began three months ago has failed to dislodge the Taliban.

The continued occupation of a fiercely independent and tribal Afghanistan -- as well as the death of tens of thousands of civilians -- engenders anti-Americanism and fuels terrorist recruitment. Military operations have also pushed violent jihadists across the border and further destabilized a nuclear-armed Pakistan -- a far greater threat to our national security than any tenuous al-Qaeda "safe haven" in Afghanistan.

Finally, focusing so many resources on Afghanistan -- where al-Qaeda is now minimally present -- diverts vital resources from other urgent security needs, including economic recovery at home. For the first time, the monthly cost of the war in Afghanistan exceeds what we spend in Iraq -- $6.7 billion per month, compared with $5.5 billion in Iraq.

At the end of May, appropriations for both wars will reach over $1 trillion -- mostly borrowed money that we're not investing at home. Upcoming congressional hearings on veterans care will demonstrate the human costs. No wonder a majority of Americans -- 52 percent -- believe the war "is not worth its costs," according to a recent Washington Post poll.

The real GDP of Afghanistan is just about $14 billion.

And at current levels, the United States is spending nearly half the entire GDP of the nation in just 30 days -- that's right, half Afghanistan's entire GDP!

This simply makes no sense. This is a huge misallocation of resources even if one believed that Afghanistan did represent a vital national security problem for the US. If one wanted to change the economic vector of the country, preferential trade and access to European, American, and Japanese markets would be one way to change the country's course -- though there would be politically consequential disruptions to firms and labor in the US that should receive impact support.

The costs would be trivial compared to what the Pentagon is demanding for a job that it is not designed for and in which it is not succeeding.

-- Steve Clemons

Eurasia Group President Ian Bremmer will be speaking at the New America Foundation TODAY from 12:15 pm-1:45 pm, discussing his new book, The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations? , with TWN publisher Steve Clemons.

If you can't join us for this event, we will be livestreaming here at TWN.

-- Andrew Lebovich

It will be released officially later today by the White House.

But here is the official pdf of the National Security Strategy report.

More on this important report later.

-- Steve Clemons

From the BBC:

West Bank rabbi bans women from local election

Rabbi Elyakim Levanon of the Elon Moreh settlement, near Nablus, said women lacked the authority to stand for the post of local secretary.

He wrote in a community newspaper that women must only be heard through their husbands.

No women have registered for the election due to be held later on Wednesday, Israeli media reported.

The rabbi made his comments in the community's newspaper after an unidentified young woman wrote to him asking if she could run for the position of community secretary, the Israeli news website Ynet News said.

From Al Jazeera:

Journalist Gregg Carlstron interviews Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban's former ambassador to Pakistan at 5th Al Jazeera Forum

Carlstrom: Women are half of the population of Afghanistan. They have somewhat more freedoms now than they did under the Taliban, to go to school, to work; would the Taliban be willing to compromise on women's rights if they became part of the government?

Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef: There is changing of world, changing of people, changing of policies, changing of strategies... I think the Taliban, they would not be against the woman. The Taliban, they were looking at the time [during their rule] for the priority, and the priority was the security and stability of the country to become united.

The Taliban had, just for one year's budget, they had $80 million for the government. I think this was not enough for the education... when I was the ambassador in Pakistan, we had a meeting with another ambassador, and we told him, if you want to do something for women in Afghanistan, you are welcome to do it. But the conditions were poor.

If you opened a school and prepared a situation for women to do to school, we were not against women, against education. We were not against the working of women.

But the priority is men; men are more responsible than women in Afghan society, because the men is responsible to provide shelter for the woman, to provide a house for the woman, to provide food for the woman, clothes for the woman.

Right now we are not able to provide jobs for men, let alone jobs for women. This was not some kind of thing to be against the women... but the priority was to provide something for men.

Both are wrong.

Clearly, Israel is a far more healthy place for the rights of women than any place in Afghanistan -- but the trends of some ultra-orthodox in Israel's settlements are just as anti-modern in some ways as what the US is fighthing in the Afghan tribal regions.

-- Steve Clemons

Ed Note: Hat tip to Jim Lobe.

This is a guest note by Dr. Christopher K. Tucker, founding Chief Strategic Officer of In-Q-Tel, the CIA's Venture Fund. Tucker is also a member of the Board of Directors of the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation.

Leon Panetta Should be Appointed Both DNI and DCIA

Chatter amongst Intelligence professionals is focused on assessing the political environment that the President faces at the moment, and how this will shape his decision regarding the next Director of National Intelligence (DNI).

With the Elena Kagan nomination, the festering oil-induced Gulf ecological disaster, the Euro situation, North Korea/South Korean tensions, an impending Kandahar operation, and November elections - I suspect that the President does not have the bandwidth to go through a controversial DNI appointment. Yet, it is clear that he cares deeply about fixing the deeply pathological issues within the US Intelligence Community.

Today's signal from Senator Feinstein, Chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), that she would like to see the current DCIA Leon Panetta become DNI certainly shines a light on a politically expedient path for the President. Particularly in the face of Senator Kit Bond's recent declaration that despite Gen. James Clapper's years of stellar service, that it was his opinion that the next DNI should come from the national intelligence community, rather than the military intelligence community. It seems clear that Panetta would cruise through appointment. But to miss this opportunity to address the structural problems that plague the IC would be unfortunate.

It is widely recognized that the DNI structure is incapable of achieving the goals that animated the reorganization that first begat it. It was created at a time when the consensus was that the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), which was also dual-hatted, did not pay adequate attention to larger Intelligence Community coordination issues, and that he lacked the authorities to do so. Most problematic, the DCI could not seem to achieve the level of information sharing needed to avert 9/11 in the first place, let alone another 9/11. While all this was true, the DNI role and structure was not much different, except for the fact that the DNI no longer had line responsibility for the behavior of the CIA. Under this structure, the DNI was immediately emasculated and in a vain attempt to be effective, the ODNI structure was evolved into a super-overlay staff function atop of the same agencies that existed just prior.

For all its critics, and despite the last decade of change, the centrality of the CIA has hardly been dislodged. Certainly, the powers of each of the 16 different organizations within the US Intelligence Community have been demonstrated in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and frankly, beyond the view of the mainstream media. But, the CIA's central position in this ecosystem has remained. And, it must be remembered which agency networks and personnel dominate the DNI's National Counter Terrorism Center (NCTC), National Counter Proliferation Center (NCPC), and the Open Source Center (OSC) - CIA.

To create a DNI that does not have line responsibility for the CIA is befuddling - and bad for our nation's security.

Many good lessons have been learned from the DNI experience. In my personal observation, the experience has even taught CIA to share information better, and to play better with others. But, the DNI structure as implemented was fatally flawed. If Panetta was dual-hatted as DNI and DCIA, it would be possible to transform the DNI structure into something that could truly tackle both inter-agency and multi-agency integration issues, including the perennial information sharing boogie man. In some important ways, the DNI
could fill an Office of Management and Budget (OMB) type role for the IC, truly exercising the budgetary and regulatory coordination that is needed - to include the currently impossible process of budgetary rescission.

Something Leon Panetta, as a very effective former OMB Director should be able to take on with panache. No doubt, this would require a major blood-letting in the DNI staff. But anything short of that would fail to breed the confidence needed in, and more importantly, within the Intelligence Community.

The President should convene in the White House Situation Room the Chairmen and Ranking Members of the six Congressional committees that provide direction to the IC (HPSCI, SSCI, HAC-D, SAC-D, HASC, SASC) and demand that they support a move to dual-hat Leon Panetta and begin collaborating in the long and painful process of partnering with the DNI to achieve real-time organizational change. This should include strong but streamlined Congressional oversight that will not require that the DNI live on Capitol Hill. We should not have to wait for another Pearl Harbor or 9/11 in order to re-open the issue of IC reform, to critically and proactively re-conceptualize and re-implement this essential public function.

American citizens and the rest of the world that depends on America deserve nothing less.

Dual-hat Leon Panetta.

-- Christopher K. Tucker

(Photo Credit: Deepwater Horizon Response photostream)

This guest post, which originally appeared at The Havana Note, is a guest note by Tom Garofalo, a consultant for the New America Foundation/U.S-Cuba Policy Initiative.

The blame for the environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is now flowing almost as freely as the oil, and even after a month, the full extent of the Deepwater Horizon disaster won't be known for some time. The explosion and the futility of efforts to stanch the flow have sounded a nightmarish alarm for the United States, Mexico and Cuba.

These three countries not only share the coastline of the Gulf, we share (to decidedly different degrees) the pain of recession. Only days before the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon, the Obama Administration moved to open new areas of the East Coast to oil drilling, in part in response to the siren song of jobs and profits for American companies. The American Petroleum Institute claimed that "exploring for and developing our nation's offshore resources could help generate more than a trillion dollars in revenue and create thousands of jobs to add to the already 9.2 million jobs supported by today's oil and natural gas industry."

What a difference a few weeks makes. While the debate about drilling will continue in the United States, Cuba is in a different position, and their economy in a different place: not facing mere recession, but a free fall. Cash-starved Cuba's drilling in its Economic Exclusive Zone is not a question of if, but when. And with U.S. law prohibiting any meaningful cooperation not only on exploration and extraction but also on disaster preparedness and mitigation, the future may hold more Deepwater Horizon disasters, and even less capacity to handle them.

The Spanish oil company Repsol has contracted with an Italian company to bring a deepwater drill rig into Cuban waters. If that's not ominous enough, the rig is being assembled in China, a country that does not enjoy a reputation for quality control. That may be unfair, but it is fair to say that many people who might not have been that concerned about such an operation before the Deepwater Horizon incident are paying close attention now.

Today's New America event U.S. - Cuba Engagement in the Gulf: Lessons from the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill asked the questions: Are we prepared? What's at stake? And, where should the Obama Administration go from here? The answers: no, a lot, and forward with alacrity.

Georgetown University Professor and Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Charles Kupchan has written an important book, How Enemies Become Friends: The Sources of Stable Peace, that deals with the vital issue of how to effectively negotiate and make peace with international rivals and opponents.

Kupchan will be at the New America Foundation from 12:15 pm-1:45 pm today to discuss his book with TWN publisher Steve Clemons.

The event will stream live here at The Washington Note.

-- Andrew Lebovich

Last week's controversial uranium enrichment agreement among Iran, Turkey and Brazil, along with the subsequent decision from the P5+1 countries to push forward with sanctions, throws into stark relief the tendency for the U.S. and Iran to talk past each other, as the possibility for constructive dialogue slips further and further away.

In this context Georgetown University Professor and Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Charles Kupchan's article from last month's Foreign Affairs, "Enemies into Friends," continues to be relevant. Based on his new book expanding on this theme, Kupchan writes that sustained diplomatic dialogue on a series of issues, large and small, can over time settle complicated issues between rivals and adversaries.

He writes:

Iran and North Korea, because of their nuclear programs, are particularly tough cases. Washington is justifiably intent on neutralizing the nuclear threats they pose. But both countries appear unwilling to give up their nuclear programs, which they deem necessary to maintain their security and bargaining leverage. The tightening of sanctions could help change the political calculus in Tehran and Pyongyang. Nonetheless, the logic of incrementalism would suggest that Washington should also pursue negotiations on a set of broader issues to help build the levels of mutual confidence needed to tackle the nuclear question. With Tehran, the United States could seek cooperation on Afghanistan, particularly on curbing the drug trade there, which flows into Iran. Washington could also discuss with Tehran the potential for a new security architecture in the Persian Gulf, which is of particular importance as U.S. forces prepare to exit Iraq. With Pyongyang, a dialogue on economic assistance, energy supplies, and the normalization of relations may help clear the way for a deal on North Korea's nuclear program.

Kupchan is right to point out that breakthroughs with hostile countries often occur not as a result of threats or harsh measures alone, but as part of an ongoing and sometimes halting process that utilizes both carrots and sticks to advance our end goal, which in this case is a reduction of the nuclear threat from Iran.

Kupchan will be at the New America Foundation tomorrow for a discussion of his new book (RSVP here). The event will run from 12:15 pm-1:45 pm, and will also be webcast here at The Washington Note.

-- Andrew Lebovich

This is an interesting short discussion between writer Mark Perry who broke the story on General Petraeus asking that the West Bank and Gaza be part of the Central Command's territory. Petraeus denied the report, but as Al Jazeera's Gregg Carlstrom writes, this triggered an important debate about the military's view of the costs of the US-Israel-Palestine standoff.

This short clip covers Perry's views on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and the prospects of engagement by the Obama administration with Hamas and Hizballah. Interestingly, he notes that we are beginning to engage the Taliban who are killing Americans while not yet engaging Hamas and Hizballah who are not. His treatment of National Security Council Counter-Terrorism Adviser to the President on dealing with "moderate Hizballah" is worth hearing.

Mark Perry met with Gregg Carlstrom at the 5th Al Jazeera Forum which I am attending as well in Doha.

-- Steve Clemons

Peter Beinart's important New York Review of Books essay, "The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment" outlining a generationally bifurcated American Jewish community in which Israel-focused institutions are increasingly dominated by zealots while more liberal American Jews are disconnected from the Israel enterprise has drawn some strong critical responses.

Authors of some of the leading responses to Beinart are Leon Wieseltier, Jonathan Chait, Jeffrey Goldberg, Jamie Kirchick, and David Frum.

All of the above essayists offer smart and interesting critiques of the brave, china-breaking revelations that Beinart offers. What is interesting is that Beinart marshals data-supported empirical observations in his portrayal of a structural shift in the American community while most of these critics focus on whether or not Beinart is playing fair in not starting off with ritual condemnations of Israel's enemies.

Beinart offers an effective response here -- and interestingly tries to remind the New Republic's Leon Wieseltier what he used to be like and how he used to think -- ending his piece by saying we need the real Leon Wieseltier back.

From the end of Beinart's essay which should be read in full at the Daily Beast:

Finally, it's hard to see how the misdeeds of Hamas, Iran's Mahmoud Ahmedinejad or anyone else in the Muslim world explain--let alone justify--Avigdor Lieberman's campaign to delegitimize and disenfranchise Israeli Arabs, the vast majority of whom don't support either Hezbollah or Hamas, and simply wish to be equal citizens of Israel. The plight of the 20 percent of Israelis who are not Jewish gets short shrift in the American press, but it may be the greatest of all of Israel's challenges. In the words of Israeli civil rights lawyer Yoella Har-Shefi, "If we don't give Arab citizens this chance to become Israelis, the country will come apart. We are sitting on the edge of a volcano."

The grim truth is that there are powerful, internal trends pushing Israeli politics in an illiberal direction. In 2000, there were 200,000 settlers in the West Bank (not including East Jerusalem); now there are 300,000. About a quarter of them are Gush Emunim-style fanatics, and many of the younger settlers are so violent they actually scare the old guard. Shin Bet warns that if another prime minister of Israel tries to follow in Barak and Yitzhak Rabin's shoes, they should expect an assassination attempt.

Settler fanaticism is a cancer that has grown from within Israel; you can't blame it on Ahmedinejad. Nor are Iran's mullahs responsible for the fact that ultra-Orthodox Jews, who burn Christian holy books and assault women who try to pray at the Western Wall, have virtually taken over the city of Jerusalem. Their contempt for liberal values would have been problem enough had not the Israeli government bribed them with housing in the West Bank, thus joining their zealotry to the settlement enterprise. This too cannot be blamed on Hassan Nasrallah.

One last point. Leon, Jeff, Jon, Jamie, David and I are all Jews. In some sense, therefore, Israel's crimes--unlike those of Hamas or Ahmedinejad--are committed in our name. We have a special obligation to expose and confront them. And we have a special obligation not to use the crimes of Israel's enemies to excuse behavior that dishonors a Jewish state, and the Jewish ethical tradition that we all consider precious.

In 1994, after settler fanatic Baruch Goldstein massacred 29 Palestinians in Hebron, a man I once looked to for guidance on these matters expressed it better than I ever could. "When the comparative impulse becomes primary, accounting becomes apologetics. The really striking thing about the ethical texts of the Jews in exile is the extent to which they are silent about the adversity that the writers of these texts were regularly experiencing. For most of two millennia, the Jews had the standing alibi of anti-Semitism, if they wanted to take it up; but they did not want to take it up. They held themselves to the highest standards of conduct and then proceeded to the business of safety. One is not better merely because others are bad. And the better is not the same as the good."

The man who wrote those words is Leon Wieseltier. We could sure use him today.

-- Steve Clemons

(Photo Credit: U.S. Embassy London photo by SJ Mayhew)

In an article published in Foreign Policy last week, Turkey Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, widely considered the architect of Turkey's foreign policy under the Justice and Development (AK) Party government, lays out the principles of Ankara's "zero-problems" foreign policy.

The entire article is worth a read as a window into the interests and perspectives of an emerging regional power in the Middle East, but two aspects of Davutoglu's piece deserve special attention.

First, Davutoglu begins his analysis by lamenting that, unlike previous periods following wars, "no new international legal and political system has been formally created to meet the challenges of the new world order that emerged" after the Cold War.

This statement in and of itself is hardly surprising, but it is notable that Davutoglu does not go on to articulate a clear vision of what such an international order could or should look like. He implies that major reforms are necessary when he says that "we are faced with an incredibly difficult period until a new global order is established," but he does not elaborate on what kinds of ideas and institutions he has in mind except to reiterate the importance of the EU and NATO.

Second, it is interesting that Davutoglu's piece does not directly address the uranium enrichment agreement among Brazil, Turkey, and Iran reached last week. With regard to Iran, Davutoglu says only that Turkey's "orientation and strategic alliance with the West remains perfectly compatible with Turkey's involvement in, among others, Iraq, Iran, the Caucasus, the Middle East peace process, and Afghanistan" and Turkey's "constructive involvement in the Iranian nuclear issue are integral parts of Turkey's foreign-policy vision for the Middle East."

The full article can be read here.

-- Ben Katcher

President Barack Obama's speech at West Point on Saturday may be among the most important he has yet made during his sixteen month old presidency. The speech intimates a number of the key themes likely to appear in the National Security Strategy report to be issued this next week.

As one senior official on his national security team recently said to me, "we are moving past a time when the foreign policy agenda was set by a previous President and into a time when the roster of things to do are chosen and prioritized by this President."

In his speech, President Obama said that this is a time for "national renewal" and "global leadership". The entire tone of his speech was confident but humble - seemingly recognizing the vital need for the US to return to its role as a benign, constructive force in global affairs. He seemed to confess that for America to return to a position of global credibility that it needed to work constructively with other powers, not think that power or significant accomplishments can be made independent of other of the world's key stakeholders.

Obama said that this time in history was on of those "moments of change", a time of discontinuity in global affairs when America's global social contract needed to be re-forged. He said that while this time of globalization and individual empowerment created opportunities, we also were seeing the emergence of new powers and the rise of "ancient hatreds and new dangers".

In other words, the United States no longer has the comfort of a predictable global equilibrium in which what the nation says and does automatically produces the results America wants. America's place in the world - and its power - need to be re-earned, its mystique as a country with dynamic military, economic, moral and institutional characteristics less constrained than other nations recaptured.

The President made a compelling call for significant reinvestment in the core strengths of the country - in the sources of American innovation, in education, R&D, next generation energy projects, and the like. He said that there is no way that the US can presume global leadership when its home front is deteriorating and in poor shape.

While he did not say so bluntly, Obama is finally leveling with the American public that he inherited national security and domestic portfolios from the G.W. Bush administration that were manifestations of a precipitous collapse in American power.

Obama is declaring his intention to turn these negative trends around - and without simply, vapidly asserting that America is powerful and capable of great feats, he is admitting that it will take tough work, prioritization, and creativity.

I was very impressed with this speech, though there were key elements of it that I think were wrong-headed though certainly not fatal.

On the downside, this is the second major national security address that the President has given at West Point, the first being his articulation of a revised strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan in September 2009.

President Obama shoulders the burden of being a war-time President from the Democratic Party. Americans traditionally doubt Democrats to deploy power and to make the hard decisions on military deployments - and thus to compensate, I feel that the President and the entire contemporary Democratic Party leadership tend to over compensate on this issue. They want to speak before soldiers, show they are supportive of the troops, and unveil their national security plans with the military as a backdrop to show that they are tough.

But the time has come for the President to give the kind of speech he gave this weekend at the Oval office, or at a high school, or at a steel plant, or an innovative renewable energy firm because it is not just "hard power" that is in play. If the US is making commitments to fight in other nations at a cost of more than $160 billion a year and the President is saying that the nation needs more competitive schools and technology and workforce, then all of the country - not just those in the military - should feel the responsibility, debate the costs, and be part of the equation.

My second critique is that as the President recognized the wide diversity of talent in the student soldiers sitting before him at their commencement, noting in particular that the two top cadets were women, he should have used this speech - even with a minor nod - to recognize the sacrifice and commitment to the country's safety and security of gay men and women who cannot publicly acknowledge who they are. There are many soldiers in uniform today, and many gay men and lesbians there in the West Point graduating class, who cannot say "I am wearing a uniform. I am fighting for my country. I am gay, and I want to salute my President."

President Obama, who has acknowledged gays and lesbians in the military services when speaking before gay rights groups needs to begin acknowledging them when the entire nation and world are listening.

And lastly, the President's strategy must be more than about Afghanistan. Commending allies that support US efforts in Afghanistan is not necessarily the makings of a new global commons.

The single biggest error of this otherwise excellent speech was linking the ups and downs of Afghanistan to the much more significant revitalization of America's domestic innovation base and to the vital need to build-in developing powers like Brazil, Turkey, China, Russia, South Africa, Indonesia, and India into the next architecture of global power.

Afghanistan today looks like a sink hole for American power, not a multiplier. In contrast, the nuclear deal making the Obama administration has done has begun to reverse a 'systemic doubt' other nations hold about America's ability to achieve any of the goals it sets out to do.

It would be great if Afghanistan began to move in the right direction, either through progress in reconciliation and reintegration of key parts of the Taliban into some form of acceptable reconstructed political order. It would be even better if the US got Israel and Palestine and regional stakeholders off the narcotic of peace talk paralysis and on to a credible two state track.

Moving the Middle East into a place where Israel might be able to talk over security interests with scores of new Arab states with which it normalized relations - and decreasing America's military overextension in Afghanistan are two fundamental factors that could and probably would alter the calculations Iran's leadership is making today about American weakness.

Thus, the President needs to make his National Security Strategy about more than Afghanistan. Afghanistan may ultimately be a failure - but that does not mean that his Presidency is a bust or his chances for resurrecting a new global social contract that restores American leverage in a world of new and old power stakeholders should end.

All in all, the President's remarks - which I hope are reflected in the National Security Strategy - imply a commitment to creative reinvigoration of America's national capabilities and purposes.

If Obama follows this up with actions - for instance diverting a large portion of the $100 billion per year going to support a questionable military challenge in Afghanistan and rather divert those funds into a U.S.-led international R&D effort on mass scale renewable energy technologies, or other key, job-creating national infrastructure investment, then President Obama's legacy on both the domestic and the international front could be truly great.

-- Steve Clemons

Yesterday evening, I was at the annual board members/fellows retreat of the New America Foundation and got into an interesting discussion with one of the institution's supporters. He said he was at a meeting not too long ago in which people were discussing "what the world would look like in a hundred years."

He said that while they talked about nuclear weapons, and bio threats, and massive continental super nations, no one talked about human evolution.

Human evolution? Isn't that supposed to take thousands of years?

Not any more.

Probably the most important news in decades about mankind's ability to sculpt his own evolutionary track was released today -- and was about page A17 in most papers.

J. Craig Venter and his team have succeeded in creating the first self-replicating synthetic bacterial cell.

The implications of this are enormous -- and mean that eventually, humans will begin to shape themselves and their biophysical development in much the way that humans sculpt and fashion their external environment.

From a Bloomberg BusinessWeek report:

The first life form created entirely with man-made DNA opens the door to manufacturing new drugs and fuels, while raising the possibility that mail-order germs may one-day be available for bioterrorists.

Researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, reported today in the journal Science that for the first time, they made a copy of a bacterium's entire genome and then transplanted it into a related organism, where it functioned normally.

The culmination of 15 years of effort, the work provides a blueprint for making organisms that could be used to make better fuels, drugs, vaccines and sources of food, the institute's researchers said in a statement. It also suggests that companies that can manufacture DNA should stay on guard, said James Collins, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute-supported bioengineer at Boston University, in a telephone interview.

Read the rest here.

-- Steve Clemons

Freshman Congressman Alan Grayson (Fl-08), fresh off some real victories in the House on financial regulatory reform and Federal Reserve Bank transparency, is now focusing his attention on America's expensive wars.

He is making a direct connection between the income levels of regular Americans as well as the benefits they do or don't receive and the costly wars underway in Afghanistan and Iraq.

From a press release (pdf) from Representative Grayson's office:

Congressman Alan Grayson (FL-08) introduced a landmark bill last night, called the "War Is Making You Poor Act". The bipartisan bill does three things:

1) It limits the amount of funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,

2) It eliminates the federal income tax on the first $35,000 of every American's income ($70,000 for married couples), and

3) It cuts the Federal deficit by $15.9 billion.

Congressman Grayson said, "All three of those things need to be done. This bill brings them all together."

Grayson says that the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars need to be paid for out of a reasonably sized defense budget -- and sets up a "supplemental budget" to cut the federal budget deficit and cuts taxes on many American working families.

Read the entire press release (pdf).

I will be offering more commentary on this after I land in Doha, Qatar where I'll be participating in the 5th Al Jazeera Forum.

-- Steve Clemons

This is a guest note, exclusive to The Washington Note, by James P. Pinkerton -- a contributor to the Fox News Channel and frequent poster at FoxForum.com. Pinkerton is also fellow at the New America Foundation, and contributing editor at The American Conservative magazine.

America is in crisis, and yet a great resource, available to all of us, is substantially untapped. The most powerful development of the last 40 years, anywhere in the world--the flowering of computer/Internet culture--has occurred mostly within the United States. And yet the US government has been generally uninterested. Sure, officials are happy to have the gadgets that Silicon Valley provides, and happy to enjoy the campaign contributions and tax revenues, but politicos and policy wonks have distinctly not been interested in absorbing the deeper implications of geekdom: that computers and the Net offer new tools for problem-solving--most notably games and simulations--that could bypass traditional governing mechanisms. So while entrenched elites might have a self-interested reason to reject new problem-solving tools, such rejection doesn't make sense for the country, because we need all the help we can get.

My colleague Steve Clemons has blogged extensively about the "Solarium Project," a role-playing study of Cold War strategy, as conducted by the Eisenhower administration. That was back in 1953, when the Cold War raged hot in Korea and the coldest of cold everywhere else. The main problem: What was the best approach to dealing with the Soviet Union? At the behest of the newly sworn-in 34th President, three different teams advocated different approaches to the Cold War; the "game" was "played" within the White House complex. Eisenhower himself, of course, was hardly unfamiliar with critical issues of war and peace, but as the first Republican president in 20 years, he felt the need to sound out all possible policy options. The "winner" of the Solarium Project was "containment"--that is, a continuation of Truman administration policies. But the containment idea, as it went forward, was vastly strengthened by Eisenhower's bipartisan buy-in; the Republican ratified the overall Democratic policy, even as he put an honorable end to the Korean War. And so while it would be too much to say that the Cold War was won in the White House solarium, it is fair to say that America's successful Cold War strategy was strengthened by role-playing theater at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

As a geopolitically minded soldier-turned-politician, Ike understood the power of simulations, of imaginative alternative exercises. What the poet Coleridge called the "willing suspension of disbelief for the moment" is the essence of such speculation; it helps to get oneself in a different mindset, to see old problems from new angles.

And so we come to the present day, when America once again faces peril. What to do? Maybe, as a way of assessing the situation, we should take a page from Eisenhower's playbook.We should try "gaming" through the problems--and various solutions; we need new and better perspectives on our most stubborn dilemmas. And today we have an advantage that Ike didn't have; we have robust gaming technology, created by some of our best and geekiest. Indeed, thanks to the Internet, we have the capacity to include, in a constructive way, the input of virtually all Americans.

Yigal Schleifer, a journalist who consistently provides excellent analysis of Turkish politics and foreign policy from Istanbul, has a thoughtful article over at World Politics Review that breaks down the agreement among Brazil, Turkey, and Iran from Ankara's perspective.

From his piece:

Turkey and its foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, appear to be taking a longer-term view on the issue, hoping to manage Iran, rather than confront it. The hope is that confidence-building measures might slowly change the Iranian leadership's mentality. Turkish diplomats speak of changing Iran's "psychology," and, indeed, Davutoglu's comments after the agreement was signed echoed that very clearly. The agreement represents "an important psychological threshold" of trust with Iran, he said after it was signed, adding that it also requires Tehran to make "psychological sacrifices."

Turkey's approach also appears to be shaped by a view that despite their status as regional rivals and its own worries about a nuclear-armed Iran, working with Tehran is the best way for Ankara to fully develop and realize its economic, political and diplomatic potential in the region. In that sense, the fuel swap deal is part of a wider Turkish effort to engage Iran and to put itself forward as an interlocutor that the Iranian regime can trust.

The risk for Ankara is that its own long-term approach to bringing Iran "in from the cold" does not fit into the tight timetable posed by the urgent questions surrounding Tehran's nuclear program. At the same time, the Turkish government also appears to be staking its reputation and relations with Western allies on the hope that Iran is sincere in its own engagement with Turkey -- and that the Iranian regime can actually be reformed. If Washington decides to move ahead on sanctions and disregard the fuel swap deal brokered by Turkey and Brazil, then Ankara just might find itself in the position of having improved relations with Iran at the expense of its relations with the United States and some of its other traditional allies.

Clearly, these are risks that Ankara is willing to take. In recent years, the trajectory of Turkish foreign policy has been marked by increased independence and self-confidence. Like the March 2003 vote by the Turkish parliament that denied the United States the possibility of opening up a northern front in its invasion of Iraq, the fuel swap deal signed in Tehran could very well offer Turkey another opportunity to further assert its independence and its vision for itself and the surrounding region. But for now, Turkey's Iran policy remains a gamble.

You can read the full article here.

-- Ben Katcher

Financial Times Associate Editor and Chief Economics Commentator Martin Wolf will discuss the state of the global economy this evening at 5:30 pm EST at the New America Foundation.

Wolf is perhaps the most prescient, insightful economic commentator in the world today - and is an indispensable resource for those of us trying to keep up with the rapid pace of economic events.

Appearing at a New America Foundation economic policy forum last summer called, "What Will Replace the American Consumer?," Wolf began his remarks by dryly noting that the answer to that question was, simply, "Nothing."

Events unfortunately appear to be proving Wolf correct, and we hope you will join us for what should be an equally candid discussion about the tough economic choices ahead for the United States and just about everyone else.

TWN Publisher Steve Clemons will moderate today's event, which will stream live here at The Washington Note.

-- Ben Katcher

This is a guest note by Barbara Slavin, freqent TWN contributor and author of Bitter Friends, Bosom Enemies: Iran, the U.S. and the Twisted Path to Confrontation. Slavin has visited Iran seven times.

It is easy to dismiss Iran's nuclear agreement with Brazil and Turkey as a ploy to stave off a new round of economic sanctions.

The agreement, reached last weekend through the personal mediation of the presidents of Brazil and Turkey, came a day before the U.S. circulated a draft resolution against Iran in the U.N. Security Council. A vote is likely to take weeks, however, meaning that there is time for direct U.S.-Iran talks on new safeguards against Iran building a nuclear weapons capability.

The deal Iran has approved is contingent on the blessing of the United States, Russia, France and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Iran has promised to send a letter confirming the agreement to the IAEA within seven days.

"If it appears to be something that is a good jumping off point, it would be difficult for the Obama administration to completely stonewall it," said Suzanne Maloney, an Iran expert at the Brookings Institution who advises the State Department on long-term policy toward Iran.

The agreement, as reported in the Iranian press, is similar to one the U.S. put forward last fall with several important caveats. Iran has pledged to send out for storage in Turkey 2,640 pounds of slightly enriched uranium. In return, a year from now Iran would receive from the IAEA fuel for a reactor that makes medical isotopes.

The problem, from the U.S. point of view, is that Iran's stockpile of low-enriched uranium (LEU) has grown in the past six months. So it could send out 2,640 pounds and still have enough in the near future to make a nuclear weapon, according to David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security. Also, Iran has not promised to stop enriching uranium to levels that are dangerously close to weapons grade. And Tehran reserves the right to ask Turkey to return its LEU "in case provisions of this declaration are not respected." What that means is not defined. U.S.-Iran talks could help clarify this.

It is possible that the deal will collapse because of domestic Iranian opposition, which doomed a tentative agreement last fall. While the U.S. response to the latest offer has understandably been skeptical, Iranians are not uniformly enthusiastic.

The newspaper Jomhuri-ye Eslami (Islamic Republic), a hard-line publication, noted Tuesday that Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had insisted last year that any swap of LEU for reactor fuel should be simultaneous, take place on Iranian soil and involve only an amount of LEU "equal to [Iran's] its needs" for fuel. "Unfortunately, these three conditions were not met," the newspaper said. "Contrary to what has been claimed... this agreement is not a victory for Iran but an obvious retreat before the bullying demands of the West. The Islamic Republic of Iran should not accept it."

Domestic opponents of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on both the left and right fear that he is prepared to sell out Iranian interests to try to shore up his tattered legitimacy.

Ahmadinejad, who enjoys grandstanding abroad, has lost popularity in Iran because of economic mismanagement and government repression in the aftermath of disputed 2009 presidential elections.

The U.S. domestic environment is also tricky just months before mid-term elections. Republicans have accused the Obama administration of "appeasing" Iran by seeking to engage it. The administration's hard line in response to the Brazil-Turkey-Iran deal seems in part motivated by a desire to show that it is not naïve.

Still, experts say the Obama administration should act carefully to make sure that if the deal fails, the onus is on Tehran, not Washington.

"I would bend over backwards to be reasonable," said Patrick Clawson, an Iran analyst at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Chances are that "the Iranians will over-negotiate this and the deal will fall apart."

There is also a chance, however slim, that direct U.S.-Iran talks might actually accomplish something, providing more confidence that Iran is not seeking nuclear weapons and laying the groundwork for broader talks on Iraq, Afghanistan and human rights.

The Obama administration has always said that its sanctions policy was meant to convince Iran to seek a diplomatic solution to the nuclear stand-off and other disputes. The question is whether it is prepared to test that proposition.

-- Barbara Slavin

What follows below the fold is White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs' statement on Brazil & Turkey's possible diplomatic achievement with Iran.

Brazil has announced that Iran has agreed to store a considerable amount of its low enriched uranium in Turkey in exchange for a modest amount of more highly enriched uranium for use in the Tehran Research Reactor.

Key points in Gibbs' statement:

1. The US "acknowledges" efforts by Turkey and Brazil. This means that the US is prepared to applaud their efforts whether success is achieved or not. Privately, there will be some desire inside the White House to punish Brazil and Turkey for their high stakes freelancing if this deal falls apart. But at an official level, the administration is not going to try and embarrass Brazil and Turkey.

2. Until reviewed by the IAEA, the US is going to remain highly skeptical of the Iran deal. This could be interesting "statecraft". If the US too strongly endorsed Brazil's efforts or applauded this nuclear materials exchange agreement, the Iranians might not trust the arrangement and could immediately pull back. Skepticism from and resistance by the US may actually be the thing that gets Iran to trust the arrangement.

3. Gibbs notes that Iran states that it is going to continue to enrich uranium up to a 20% level. This is a problem -- and creates the angle that the US and allies can continue to attack Iran's core nuclear program motives.

4. Gibb's last statement leaves open the door for more constructive engagement and an open door if Iran's deeds lead to greater trust and confidence in its course. This is mostly boiler plate -- but important posturing that the rest of the international community needs to hear more than Iran if the US is going to maintain support for possibly tougher actions against Iran.

Live TV by Ustream

The Washington Note is live streaming a half day event this morning, May 17th, focusing on the war in Afghanistan in the wake of President Karzai's visit to DC.

The schedule follows below but some of the headliners include James K. Galbraith, Peter Galbraith, Paul Pillar, Matthew Hoh, Hillary Mann Leverett, Michael Intriligator and others. Steve Clemons will be speaking on the first panel as well.

For those of you interested, the meeting will be recorded and available later for viewing.

Here is the schedule -- and those of you in DC are welcome to attend. The session will take place in the Pavilion Room of the Ronald Reagan International Trade Center.

Conference:

The New America Foundation in cooperation with Economists for Peace & Security cordially invite you and your colleagues to an international policy forum

THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN:
PROBLEMS AND PROSPECTS IN THE WAKE OF KARZAI'S VISIT

Monday, 17 May 2010
8:30 am - 1:30 pm
Pavilion Room, Ronald Reagan Building & International Trade Center
Washington, DC

RSVP directly to this email or contact Andrew Lebovich at 202-596-3429

8:30 am
Registration & Breakfast

9:00 am
Welcoming Remarks

James K. Galbraith
Chairman, Economists for Peace & Security
Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr Chair in Government/Business Relations, UT Austin/LBJ School of Public Affairs

9:10 am
Session One -- Reviewing Afghanistan in a Strategic Context

Paul Pillar
Director of Graduate Studies, Center for Peace & Security Studies, Georgetown University
Former National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia

Matthew Hoh
Former Afghanistan-based official with Department of State
Former Afghanistan-based Captain, US Marine Corps

Hillary Mann Leverett
CEO, Strategic Energy & Global Analysis (STRATEGA)
Former Director for Iran, Afghanistan & Persian Gulf Affairs, National Security Council

Steve Clemons
Director, American Strategy Program, New America Foundation
Editor-at-Large, Talking Points Memo
Publisher, The Washington Note

The Hon. Thomas Andrews
National Director, Win Without War/New Security Action
Former Member, US House of Representatives (D-ME)

moderator
Michael Lind
Author, The American Way of Strategy
Policy Director, Economic Growth Program, New America Foundation

10:45 am
Keynote Remarks -- Comments on the Afghanistan Challenge: Key Actors and Competing Agendas

The Hon. Peter Galbraith
Former Deputy Special Representative for Afghanistan, United Nations
Former US Ambassador to Croatia

11:30 am
Session Two -- Reviewing Afghanistan in an Economic Context

Michael Intriligator
Professor of Economics and Political Science, UCLA
Vice Chairman & Director, Economists for Peace & Security
Former Director, UCLA Center for International & Strategic Affairs
Senior Fellow, Milken Institute

Miriam Pemberton
Research Fellow, Institute for Policy Studies

Winslow Wheeler
Director, Center for Defense Information/Straus Military Reform Project

Michael Lind
Author, The American Way of Strategy
Policy Director, Economic Growth Program, New America Foundation

moderator
Richard Kaufman
Director, Bethesda Research Institute
Former General Counsel, Joint Economic Committee, United States Congress

1:15 pm
Adjournment

RSVP Directly to clemons@newamerica.net

-- Ben Katcher

My colleague Peter Beinart has just published in the New York Review of Books what will be for his career a "defining piece" that challenges key Israel-focused institutions to change up their game or face a bleak future.

In "The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment," Beinart works through data that show that the American Jewish community has become increasingly divided, that the younger generation is more open and tolerant about Israel-Palestine possibilities than their parents, but more disconcerting -- those affiliated with the leading institutions of Zionism are more illiberal and intolerant of those possibilities.

Beinart paints a compelling picture of the problems in the Jewish establishment today and challenges leading Zionist institutions to recreate themselves and to work to balance their increasingly inflexible, strident membership with younger American, tolerant liberals.

Here is a clip of his piece, which should be read in full:

Among American Jews today, there are a great many Zionists, especially in the Orthodox world, people deeply devoted to the State of Israel. And there are a great many liberals, especially in the secular Jewish world, people deeply devoted to human rights for all people, Palestinians included. But the two groups are increasingly distinct. Particularly in the younger generations, fewer and fewer American Jewish liberals are Zionists; fewer and fewer American Jewish Zionists are liberal. One reason is that the leading institutions of American Jewry have refused to foster--indeed, have actively opposed--a Zionism that challenges Israel's behavior in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and toward its own Arab citizens. For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism's door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.

Morally, American Zionism is in a downward spiral. If the leaders of groups like AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations do not change course, they will wake up one day to find a younger, Orthodox-dominated, Zionist leadership whose naked hostility to Arabs and Palestinians scares even them, and a mass of secular American Jews who range from apathetic to appalled. Saving liberal Zionism in the United States--so that American Jews can help save liberal Zionism in Israel--is the great American Jewish challenge of our age. And it starts where Luntz's students wanted it to start: by talking frankly about Israel's current government, by no longer averting our eyes.

Since the 1990s, journalists and scholars have been describing a bifurcation in Israeli society. In the words of Hebrew University political scientist Yaron Ezrahi, "After decades of what came to be called a national consensus, the Zionist narrative of liberation [has] dissolved into openly contesting versions." One version, "founded on a long memory of persecution, genocide, and a bitter struggle for survival, is pessimistic, distrustful of non-Jews, and believing only in Jewish power and solidarity." Another, "nourished by secularized versions of messianism as well as the Enlightenment idea of progress," articulates "a deep sense of the limits of military force, and a commitment to liberal-democratic values." Every country manifests some kind of ideological divide. But in contemporary Israel, the gulf is among the widest on earth.

This article will no doubt create a storm of debate in the field. Let's hope that it stays civil and reasonable.

-- Steve Clemons

(Photo Credit: State Department Photo by Michael Gross)

This post also appears at The Race for Iran.

The New York Times, among others, is reporting that Turkey, Brazil, and Iran have agreed "in principle" to a nuclear fuel-swap that the three countries hope can placate the United States and its P5+1 partners at least enough to avoid a new round of Security Council sanctions on Iran.

More details will be available tomorrow, according to the Turkish Foreign Ministry.

The deal was reached after Turkey Prime Minister Erdogan - who said on Friday that he would not attend the talks in Iran this weekend due to insufficient progress in the negotiations - canceled a trip to Azerbaijan and joined his Brazilian and Iranian counterparts in Tehran today.

This is big news and geopolitical drama at its highest - but questions remain: "What precisely is the agreement - and is it something the United States will support?"

If the Obama administration considers the agreement merely what Steve Clemons has called a "political backdoor" that allows Iran to halt the momentum toward further sanctions without making meaningful concessions on its nuclear program, then there will be a very interesting divide between the Western P5+1 powers and the emerging power centers in Ankara and Brasilia.

Given the close coordination between Turkey Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, I would be surprised if Davutoglu reached a deal with Tehran that the United States cannot accept. On the other hand, Clinton's prediction on Friday that he Brazilian effort would fail perhaps suggests otherwise.

More soon.

-- Ben Katcher

Noam Chomsky's politics are not my own -- but I read him and want to remain aware of his views. I also read Alan Dershowitz, who essentially has become a Noam Chomsky of the right when it comes to Israel policy.

Blocking intellectuals, professors at leading American universities, from entering a country because of their "views" -- which is not yet the official reason but the probable excuse that Israel's Interior Minister will later offer -- is an enormous mistake.

Chomsky was scheduled to speak at Bir Zeit University near Jerusalem but was blocked from entering the country. Clearly, someone like Dershowitz is on the list of those who say approved things and will be permitted in the country.

I have always been intrigued and impressed with the depth and breadth of internal debate inside Israel and always wanted to import the quality of that debate to the US, which has a much more binary, narrow band approach to US-Israel issues. It's a really bad sign when official Israel begins to try and squelch those with which it disagrees rather than debating them publicly -- which was always Israel's forte.

-- Steve Clemons

(photo credit: Maxwell Snow)

Ali Gharib has just published "Behind Enemy Lines," a penetrating profile of Nir Rosen, whose supporters and critics alike recognize that he more than any other reporter has an unmatched ability to burrow into the meetings, mosques, networks, and thinking of insurgents who are fighting America and its allies.

Some consider Rosen a hero and others a traitor. I think he's brilliant, sometimes reckless with his own safety, obsessed with achieving results, unique in the real way, loyal to friends, uncompromising but willing to learn and listen.

The New York Review of Magazines profile deserves to be read in full, but I'll post the clip from the end which carries my own comments about Nir:

Despite his left-wing inclinations, Rosen has still grown into a respected war reporter, writing for a long laundry list of top publications -- virtually every major rag read by anyone who's anyone in Washington. The Times Magazine, Time, The New Republic, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Mother Jones, Salon.com and Harper's have all published his work. "He probably has more sources in the insurgency than any other American reporter," acknowledged The Weekly Standard while in the same breath accusing him of being a traitor.

"A lot of these people who are debating what's going on in Iraq and Afghanistan are doing it more from an ideological perspective -- they're severely hampered by their lack of detail," says Steven Clemons, a foreign policy thinker at Washington's New America Foundation, where Rosen was once a fellow. "I think it's that granular on-the-ground awareness that makes Nir more difficult to discount. He's seen and heard Muqtada al Sadr. While he's got his views, which are clear and distinctive, his real sword and armor is his appreciation for the facts."

Clemons is right. Rosen has gotten the stories, and he's not beholden to his ideology. Ahead of this winter's Iraq elections, many pundits were making dire predictions of a new round of open sectarian warfare. Rosen demurred, writing a spate of articles declaring that the civil war was over. But his evidence, culled from walking the streets, was still boldly critical of U.S. policy -- the ethnic cleansing of many neighborhoods had been successful, leaving monolithically sectarian neighborhoods unlikely to produce conflict. So far, his theory has been borne out. The election and the slow process of forming a government have gone down with little violence.

His fearless independence allows Rosen to do things like embed with the United States' enemy. He's beholden to them for his safety; he gets permission from clerical authorities, militias and even Taliban defense ministers to roam freely. But he is not a propaganda tool. He maintains a critical eye and, later, reports honestly on what he saw.

Rosen's "sword and armor" have also attracted the attention of the United States' own warriors. Military and intelligence types read his work, Rosen says, beaming with pride that his efforts get noticed. Attention from power circles clearly matters to him. He says he has little interest in writing for magazines -- GQ is an example he uses -- that are not likely to be read by policy makers.

"I want to get [U.S. Gen. David] Petraeus and [left-wing professor Noam] Chomsky to blurb my book," he half-jokes. "It's hard to criticize my facts because I've gone places where other people with my politics haven't."

-- Steve Clemons

(photo credit: PC Sightings)

Dear Readers and Spammers of The Washington Note:

Behind the scenes of the mostly pleasant, civil, constructive discussions that simmer in the comments section of the blog is a hard fought war against spammers.

Nearly every day, a couple of trusted colleagues of mine and I troll through the comments to remove the ads for handbags, gold, watches, and travel that agencies from various spots in Asia, Russia, Arkansas, and Tennessee (yep, I know you are there folks). Some of these ads are designed to look like responses to other posts. Some of them are down right crude and pornographic. Some have implied violence towards other commenters and those who have published on the blog. Some commit serious slander.

But the problem is controlled. Every day, someone is taking the time to enter the captcha requirement -- manually -- to post this material. And every day, your work will be undone, deleted, and the ISP from whence you operate will be banned. So, up to you.

I want to post this note, because it's clear to me and my other editors that the anger and frustration of these mostly thwarted spammers is rising as the level of personal attack on some of us has intensified. We can't always get these comments removed immediately as we are not watching the blog every moment.

Thus -- to all other readers -- when you see something beyond the innocuous advertisement that really turns your stomach, zap us a note. And to other commenters, please remember that debate is great. Ad hominem attacks are not. Anything that goes over the line will be removed if we see it -- or if we receive a complaint.

All best,

Steve Clemons

My friend Warren Coats, author of One Currency for Bosnia: Creating the Central Bank of Bosnia and Herzegovina, hosted a spring party yesterday, and I was reminded of his expertise in advising governments in war torn or besieged states how to create "hard currencies".

One government that is not his client is Zimbabwe -- though much of the rest of the rogue-ish, complicated world is on his client roster.

Warren pulled out a 50 trillion dollar note from Zimbabwe from his wallet -- and I was pretty shocked. I had no idea Zimbabwe's government had had such hyperinflation. He has one of these 100 trillion dollar notes as well. Of course, they are worse less than nothing -- and one wonders why they would print these unless to sell them eventually on Ebay or in glass paperweights as novelties.

Have a great Sunday. I'm going to be lurking in Chestertown, Maryland where the students of the 1782-founded Washington College will be graduating today.

-- Steve Clemons

The Washington Note will be live streaming a half day forum Monday morning, May 17th, focusing on the war in Afghanistan in the wake of President Karzai's visit to DC.

The schedule follows below but some of the headliners include James K. Galbraith, Peter Galbraith, Paul Pillar, Matthew Hoh, Hillary Mann Leverett, Michael Intriligator and others. I will be speaking on the first panel as well.

For those of you interested, the meeting will be recorded and available later for viewing.

Here is the schedule -- and those of you in DC are welcome to attend if you drop me an email. The session will take place in the Pavilion Room of the Ronald Reagan International Trade Center.

Conference:

The New America Foundation in cooperation with Economists for Peace & Security cordially invite you and your colleagues to an international policy forum

THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN:
PROBLEMS AND PROSPECTS IN THE WAKE OF KARZAI'S VISIT

Monday, 17 May 2010
8:30 am - 1:30 pm
Pavilion Room, Ronald Reagan Building & International Trade Center
Washington, DC

RSVP directly to this email or contact Andrew Lebovich at 202-596-3429

8:30 am
Registration & Breakfast

9:00 am
Welcoming Remarks

James K. Galbraith
Chairman, Economists for Peace & Security
Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr Chair in Government/Business Relations, UT Austin/LBJ School of Public Affairs

9:10 am
Session One -- Reviewing Afghanistan in a Strategic Context

Paul Pillar
Director of Graduate Studies, Center for Peace & Security Studies, Georgetown University
Former National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia

Matthew Hoh
Former Afghanistan-based official with Department of State
Former Afghanistan-based Captain, US Marine Corps

Hillary Mann Leverett
CEO, Strategic Energy & Global Analysis (STRATEGA)
Former Director for Iran, Afghanistan & Persian Gulf Affairs, National Security Council

Steve Clemons
Director, American Strategy Program, New America Foundation
Editor-at-Large, Talking Points Memo
Publisher, The Washington Note

The Hon. Thomas Andrews
National Director, Win Without War/New Security Action
Former Member, US House of Representatives (D-ME)

moderator
Michael Lind
Author, The American Way of Strategy
Policy Director, Economic Growth Program, New America Foundation

10:45 am
Keynote Remarks -- Comments on the Afghanistan Challenge: Key Actors and Competing Agendas

The Hon. Peter Galbraith
Former Deputy Special Representative for Afghanistan, United Nations
Former US Ambassador to Croatia

11:30 am
Session Two -- Reviewing Afghanistan in an Economic Context

Michael Intriligator
Professor of Economics and Political Science, UCLA
Vice Chairman & Director, Economists for Peace & Security
Former Director, UCLA Center for International & Strategic Affairs
Senior Fellow, Milken Institute

Miriam Pemberton
Research Fellow, Institute for Policy Studies

Winslow Wheeler
Director, Center for Defense Information/Straus Military Reform Project

Michael Lind
Author, The American Way of Strategy
Policy Director, Economic Growth Program, New America Foundation

moderator
Richard Kaufman
Director, Bethesda Research Institute
Former General Counsel, Joint Economic Committee, United States Congress

1:15 pm
Adjournment

RSVP Directly to clemons@newamerica.net

-- Steve Clemons

Yesterday, the New America Foundation and Foreign Policy hosted a great program focusing on the state of play in Middle East peace restart efforts and launching the new "Middle East Channel" at FP (which is a joint project of the Project on Middle East Political Science at George Washington University and the New America Foundation's Middle East Task Force).

Everyone was brilliant -- but Aaron David Miller set a compelling tone for discussing what was "serious" and was not in the Middle East Peace business. Miller authored this month's cover story of Foreign Policy titled "The False Religion of Middle East Peace."

Excuse my room organizing directions at the beginning -- all fun -- but the content of the meeting was excellent all through.

Susan Glasser, Editor in Chief of Foreign Policy, also offered worlds of welcome and introduced the Channel. George Washington University Professor Marc Lynch and the original driver of the Middle East Channel then moderated a discussion including Aaron David Miller, the International Crisis Group's Rob Malley, and New America Foundation's Daniel Levy.

-- Steve Clemons

A friend in Thailand just sent me this link to the geographic parameters of the brewing dangerous conflict in Bangkok.

TWN has a lot of friends and readers in Thailand and hope that everyone stays safe.

-- Steve Clemons

My friend and former New America Foundation colleague Paul Cruickshank has been at the forefront of CNN's investigative journalism on the nuts and bolts of Islamic terrorism. In one of Cruickshank's recent shows that he did with CNN's Nic Robertson, they showed how devastating a small bomb on a plane could be. This time, they are exploring the context of how an American citizen became a tool of Pakistan-based terrorists.

Cruickshank's and his colleague's CNN hour long documentary titled American Al Qaeda: The Path to Terror, An Anderson Cooper 360 Documentary will air on Saturday May 15th and Sunday May 16th at 8pm Eastern, and will bring viewers the story of how a young American from Long Island, New York, became an al-Qaeda terrorist.

The hour is filled with exclusives details about the life of Bryant Neal Vinas, including interviews with his family, best friend, neighbors, and confidants. Before he was caught, Bryant Neal Vinas traveled to Pakistan, connected with Al-Qaeda leaders, participated in three Al-Qaeda training sessions, fired at U.S. troops and helped plot a terrorist plan aimed at the Long Island Rail Road system with the intention of killing American civilians.

CNN's senior international correspondent Nic Robertson, along with CNN terrorism analyst Paul Cruickshank and CNN senior producer Ken Shiffman, spent almost a year uncovering how and why Bryant Neal Vinas went from a quiet teenager who grew up in suburbia to a jihadist.

Our team has tracked Vinas' story across three continents and will provide a definitive account of his transformation with the help of family, close friends, and top counter-terrorism officials.

American Al Qaeda will provide an exclusive interview with the man in Pakistan who counter terrorism officials suspect helped Vinas connect with jihadists. The hour will also include exclusive access to a letter Bryant wrote in prison and sent to his best friend.

CNN has a dedicated webpage on Vinas which includes an in-depth report on the never before told story of how Vinas was radicalized by Islamist extremists in New York and how he managed to join Al Qaeda's ranks in the mountains of Pakistan.

The webpage also includes interviews with top U.S. counter-terrorrism officials and experts, a timeline of Vinas's road to Al Qaeda, interviews with close associates of Vinas, interviews with individuals who allegedly helped radicalize Vinas, analysis of the current threat from homegrown terrorism, additional exclusive video content, and exclusive pictures.

I realize that this show will be controversial with some -- but I think serious, level-headed reporting on how Americans have been swept up into terrorist networks abroad is important to understand.

-- Steve Clemons

If you are a Middle East policy junkie, then you are most likely already acquainted with "The Middle East Channel" at Foreign Policy.

This channel -- a project of the New America Foundation Middle East Task Force and the Project on Middle East Political Science -- is already well on its way to being one of the most traveled pages in the rapidly expanding network of excellent franchises under the roof constructed by Foreign Policy's Susan Glasser, Blake Hounshell and team.

Today at 4:30 pm EST, the Middle East Channel will have its official launch at the offices of the New America Foundation. Featured in the program will be FP editor in chief Susan Glasser, Marc Lynch, Aaron David Miller, Rob Malley, and Daniel Levy.

Some cool data points. In March the channel had 375,305 page views. In May, the number moved to 535,480. Nice.

Join us if you are walking by.

-- Steve Clemons

This is a guest note by Barbara Slavin, freqent TWN contributor and author of Bitter Friends, Bosom Enemies: Iran, the U.S. and the Twisted Path to Confrontation. Slavin has visited Iran seven times.

Clinton, Karzai Define Down Kandahar: "A Process, not an Operation"

Experienced politicians are experts at downplaying expectations.

And that was just what Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Afghan President Hamid Karzai did Thursday in regard to an upcoming U.S. military action in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar.

Amid a polite exchange of compliments and pledges about strategic cooperation before an overflow crowd at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, both these political pros defined down Kandahar.

This is not going to be like "D-Day," Clinton said, "not a huge massive assault" but a "more targeted effort to weed out the Taliban" who are intimidating Kandahar residents.

"We are talking of a process, not an operation," Karzai said.

Clinton distinguished the upcoming U.S.-led effort from the February assault by coalition forces on the town of Marja in Helmand province that has had mixed results at best. Marja, she said, was much more dominated by the Taliban while Kandahar is "a bustling city with pockets of militants."

Thus a major military operation would be too disruptive and would probably backfire among the civilian population, she suggested.

The new spin on Kandahar was foreshadowed earlier Thursday when the commander of U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, described the Kandahar operation as a "slow, rising tide" that would gradually improve security in the city, the Associated Press reported.

McChrystal said he would be able to determine if the operation had succeeded if the city's population became more supportive of the local government.

That is an ambitious goal.

Giles Dorronsoro, an Afghan expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who recently returned from a visit to Afghanistan that included a stop in Kandahar, said U.S. and Afghan authorities "know they failed in Marja" - a town of only 80,000 people -- and expressed reservations about how successful they can be in curtailing growing Taliban influence in Kandahar, a metropolis of half a million that gave birth to the Taliban in the 1990s.

Afghan authorities were supposed to take advantage of the Marja assault to install a "government in a box" that would provide services to local people but that government failed to materialize. Dorronsoro said the coalition faces a similar problem in Kandahar.

"It's clear that the coalition doesn't have the resources to change the situation in Kandahar," he said.

That would require a wholesale reform of the local administration currently led by Karzai's brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, who is reputed to have ties to the drug trade. Even removing Karzai's brother would not be sufficient because "the whole system in Kandahar is totally corrupt," Dorronsoro said.

At USIP, Karzai was asked about his brother. He said he had raised the matter with President Obama and it had been resolved but gave no details. Clinton refused to talk about the subject.

-- Barbara Slavin

Maybe Newsweek's Ramin Setoodeh meant to stir up the controversy he did about gays being unbelievable in straight entertainment roles, and maybe he didn't. But the topic has been busted open, and he and others should use this as a learning moment.

While the real world is not Broadway and filming Sex in the City sequels, the fact is that there are tens of thousands of gay men and women who perform in "straight roles" every day in the US military. If they out themselves, they have a high chance of losing their jobs and being discharged by a military court of justice.

Setoodeh may not have meant to convey insensitivity and ignorance -- ignorance in that there are numerous gay actors performing in straight roles in the entertainment industry and insensitivity in the sense that throughout American society, there are men and women who adequately "perform" each day in the straight roles ascribed to them while shifting to their real gay identities when they can afford to.

When I watched a number of good "gay" friends unable to salute in uniform their Commander in Chief at last year's Human Rights Campaign dinner in fear of being expelled from employment, I saw the opposite of what Ramin Setoodeh describes.

I don't want to pile on much. I am a pundit as well and get things wrong on occasion -- and sometimes have to step back. This is one of those times when I think Newsweek's columnist should reconsider the empirical realities about gays in the entertainment industry vs. his own homosexual issues filter.

He would be wise to acknowledge that everyone is performing, and with his casual disregard for gays who constantly perform straight roles in life, he took a whack at a group far more numerous and significant than the talented Sean Hayes.

-- Steve Clemons

One of my frustrations with the global justice community has been a general aversion to thinking through and articulating clear road maps to secure human rights advancements in a way that can stand up to cost/benefit assessments of other contending policy goals.

There are some exceptions in the field -- Tom Malinowski at Human Rights Watch, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke during his career, and some others -- have a refreshingly Machiavellian approach (which I mean as a compliment) in securing major human rights deliverables. They both tend to be flexible in the means by which they achieve these ends -- and they are quite aware of political and other constraints on American power at the moment.

Ted Piccone, Deputy Director for Foreign Policy at Brookings, has impressed this morning with a piece he has just published at Global Post on other parts of the human rights puzzle that make a great deal of sense to me.

While focusing on American engagement in the UN Human Rights Council that former US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton worked hard to kill off as the reformed institution was being relaunched and rebranded a few years ago, Piccone outlines some of the ways that human rights gains "should" be advanced by nations.

Piccone writes:

. . .human rights defenders from around the world are focused, organized and engaged in cross-border advocacy to shine a spotlight on the worst abusers and to urge governments to defeat them.

Their message gets results because the instrument of competitive elections gives governments a viable choice in the voting booth. It is therefore critical that competition continues if, over time, we are to see an improved cast of characters in Geneva. In this regard, the United States must set the right example by insisting on competitive slates for its regional group, unlike last year when it pushed New Zealand aside to run unopposed.

Now that the U.S. is on the council, it seems to be making a positive difference. It campaigned quietly but determinedly to block Iran's candidacy. It is building cross-regional coalitions to address contentious issues like freedom of expression and hate crimes and terrible violence in countries like Guinea and Sudan. And it appears to be taking seriously its first-ever submission later this year to the Universal Period Review process, a new mechanism that now requires every state's human rights record to be evaluated in proceedings web simultaneously broadcast throughout the world.

The Obama administration is off to a good start, then, in its re-engagement policy at the U.N. Human Rights Council, but it must do much more, starting with our own actions at home. Seen from the eyes of human rights defenders on the ground, the most important thing Washington can do is to lead by example.

Piccone outlines the right way to help secure sustainable human rights change -- as opposed to thinking that the US military should be responsible for delivering in this arena.

-- Steve Clemons

This is a guest note by Dan Kervick, a regular reader and commenter at The Washington Note.

Reaction to Aaron David Miller's recent pessimistic piece on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has raised calls for outside-the-box thinking as the only alternative to despair and endless conflict in the Middle East.

So I thought it might be a good time to resurrect a proposal I have made tentatively a few times in the past: US statehood for Israel. I heard minimal sympathy for this proposal when I voiced it a few times over the past several years.

My hope is that with changed circumstances and evaporating prospects for a two-state solution, this is a proposal whose time might have come.

There are a number of considerations that argue in favor of US statehood for Israel:

First, statehood for Israel would only be a culminating, formal acknowledgment of an already-existing special relationship. The relationship between Israel and the United States is very unique, and admission of Israel into the union would be a natural evolution of that special relationship.

Israel is filled with bright, industrious and well-educated people. It's incorporation into the union would be an economic boon to Americans.

Americans on the whole would eagerly embrace the inclusion of Israel in the union. Particularly those Americans whose religious traditions tie them to the Holy Land would view Israeli membership in the union as a source of pride and inspiration. But many others would see the admittance of Israel as a win, a good catch for the US, even if they are not moved by the religious considerations.

Admittance of Israel makes sense culturally: Israel is already closer culturally to the United States than was Hawaii, and Hawaiian incorporation into the union has been a great success. Many Israelis already have relatives in the United States. There are many prominent Jewish cultural centers in the United States, and Jews have a strong and secure cultural foothold in the country. And large numbers of Israelis already speak English.

Under statehood, Israelis could also move to any location on the US mainland, if that were their choice, just like any other US citizens. This would decrease the demographic pressure for the expansion of Israel. Those who feel the need to remain close to the ancestral Jewish homeland could remain in Israel; those who are more comfortable with Diaspora culture could move. And this freedom of movement would require no special political arrangements, or complex decisions about citizenship and permanent political commitments.

Under statehood, the US security guarantee toward Israel would be iron-clad, no longer based on highly debatable US strategic calculations and fluctuating considerations of national interest, as Israeli security would become a straightforward matter of US territorial defense.

The promise of lasting, durable security should give Israelis the confidence to wrap up their territorial dispute with the Palestinian Arabs quickly, on terms both acceptable and irresistible to most Palestinians. Seen no longer as merely a sliver of independent land between the West Bank and the Mediterranean, but the eastern-most edge of a very large territorial republic, Israeli confidence would be boosted, its paranoia would dissipate and much of the resulting Israeli hunger for more space and land would be abated. Existential fear would subside; the sense of besiegement would be gone.

As a result of the move to statehood, we should finally see ultimate acceptance in Israel for a genuine, real, viable Palestinian state with responsibility for its own security. Such a state would no longer be seen by security-obsessed and paranoid Israelis as a regional vanguard of an existential threat to Israel. The realistic security threat posed by remaining Palestinian rejectionists would be minimal, and easily deterred. Acceptance of a final resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict creating a Palestinian state and closing down the West Bank colonies, and admission of Israel into the American union, could be acted on as a concurrent package, with progress on each part generating momentum on the others.

As a means of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we might call this proposal the "two states plus fifty" solution.

Several of the factors which make the standard, Green Line based two state solution unattractive to rejectionist Israelis - predominantly, the small and narrow dimensions of the Israeli state that would result - would be neutralized by Israel's acquisition of the expansive North American "back yard", governed by the world's strongest military power. And once the conflict is resolved and a final Israeli border - now to become the US's easternmost border - is established and fixed, the global claims to legitimacy of armed, irregular resistance by Israel's neighbors would be immediately undermined in the minds of all but the hardest of hard-liners around the world.

Such armed struggle could no longer be seen as defensible resistance to invasion, conquest, occupation and colonialism, but as a dead-end and reactionary attempt to recover territory that the vast majority of the world's people would have already recognized as belonging to Israel.

Statehood would also help address the Israeli nuclear issue, about which the odd, officially prescribed US silence is certain to become an increasingly irksome diplomatic conundrum threatening the global non-proliferation agenda. Israeli nuclear weapons would be incorporated into the US nuclear arsenal. Their existence could then be declared immediately, and decisions about the future disposition of these weapons would then become part of ongoing US decision-making about its nuclear forces and nuclear posture.

Israel would be an excellent location for US military bases, military hospitals, and transportation and other logistics depots. The acquisition of this new territorial military asset would give the US much more latitude in the region, and allow the US the option of being more choosey and diplomatically reserved in its military relationships with other states in the region.

With Israel incorporated into the union, the US could end its aid program to the country. With Israeli taxes flowing into the US treasury, and with the economies of scale achieved by rolling Israeli security forces into the US armed forces and Pentagon planning - which already make financial provision for defense of Israel but which require complex state-to-state negotiations, inefficiencies and redundancy of effort - admission of Israel should be a net plus for the US treasury.

Issues of dual loyalty, dual citizenship, etc. would become moot. Jewish-American advocacy for and love of Israel would be no different than any other special interest taken by a US citizen in some particular part of the United States, and would no longer put Jewish-Americans in the compromised position of having an unusually intense commitment to, and devoted affection for, a foreign country. And those American Jews who are drawn to reside in Israel, and pursue public service in its government, would no longer have to renounce their US citizenship to do so.

Some Israelis and advocates of Israel have proposed NATO membership for Israel. But in the present environment of endless Israeli conflict and tension with the states and peoples in their neighboring region, along with the politically unacceptable situation of a non-existent eastern Israeli border, and persistent walks on the wrong side of international law, Israeli remains a somewhat pathological and unsettled state, and extending NATO membership to Israel seems out of the question as things stand currently. By joining the union of US states, Israel would acquire the protection of the NATO security umbrella more-or-less automatically.

Israel's hard-line rejectionist enemies in the region could no longer entertain long shot dreams of ending Israel's existence. The US guarantee of security would be unshakeable and beyond doubt. The assurance of swift US retaliation for attacks on Israel would be certain. And no rogue nuclear power, should one ever arise, could dream of defeating tiny Israel with a nuclear first strike, since overwhelming nuclear retaliation would be the certain result.

On the other hand, rogue Israeli behavior would also be checked. The defense of Israel's security would be undertaken in the context of ordinary Pentagon business, and Israel's armed forces would be recommissioned as members of the US armed forces. The dangerous recent tendencies in the IDF toward ultra-nationalism and religious and ethnic chauvinism and zealotry would be dampened significantly. With statehood, a range of extreme psychological reactions and destabilizing behaviors by Israel, flowing from Israel's self-perception as a small, friendless and insecure outpost, would likely come to an end.

Much traditional support for political Zionism's dream of an independent Israeli state is based on the idea that an independent state is necessary to protect and safeguard Jews - to serve as a sort of territorial lifeboat providing insurance against future renewals of militant anti-Semitism. But it is hard to make the case that the state of Israel as it exists today actually protects Jews on the whole. Rather it seems to isolate them, radicalize them, make them both more militant and more vulnerable, create more political enemies for them, and concentrate them as a potential target in a very small, difficult-to-defend state.

Security for people in the modern world doesn't come from aspiring to the medieval ideal of the isolated and impermeable citadel on the mountaintop, but from economic integration into a cosmopolitan global system. I would contend that it is an incontestable fact that Jews in America are significantly more secure - both in the short term and the long term - than Jews in Israel.

So Israelis have little to lose, and much to gain, from seeking to incorporate themselves as citizens into the same powerful nation in which so many other Jews have thrived.

Permanent revolutionary anxiety, militancy and lawlessness, the condition to which the inherently revolutionary and isolating Zionist project has fated Israeli Jews, is no prescription for lasting Jewish security.

-- Dan Kervick

(Photo Credit: Jon Connel's Photostream)

The huge news here in Istanbul this week is the resignation of Republican People's Party (CHP) Chairman Deniz Baykal. Baykal leads the main opposition party that represents a secular, nationalist, pro-military alternative to the conservative, religiously-oriented ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).

This is big news here because there are many Turks who would love to vote for a more liberal, more secular government but absolutely cannot stand Baykal, who is more "Mr. No" in Ankara than John Boehner could ever be in Washington.

On the surface, Baykal's resignation - in the aftermath of a sex scandal that appeared to show him having sex with a fellow CHP MP - is a positive development for Turkey. Baykal invokes visceral negative reactions from many Turks here who would like to vote for the CHP as a check on the AK Party government's growing power.

It will be interesting to watch whether Baykal's resignation allows younger members of the party to place CHP on a more progressive course or whether Baykal will succeed in appointing one of his more reactionary-leaning aides to replace him.

The press here is even suggesting that Baykal may try to reinstate himself as party chairman at the next Congress later this month, though I hear from connected CHP supporters here that a comeback in so short a time frame is unlikely.

More soon.

-- Ben Katcher

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's remarkable tenure closes at the end of this year -- and already some are speaking of him as a possible candidate to succeed Robert Zoellick as President of the World Bank or even Ban Ki Moon as Secretary General of the United Nations.

Normally, the head of the World Bank is an American while the head of the IMF is European, but in this age where the lines of global power and responsibility are rapidly being redrawn, some in the Obama administration are eager to show both magnanimity towards Lula as well as indicate "institutional flexibility" when it comes to building in the world's new rising powers.

In a deft Obama-esque move, the next head of the World Bank could very easily be a non-American.

When virtually overnight President Obama and other global leaders threw the G8 into the trash heap of history and selected the G20 as the primary workshop to deal with the rapidly worsening global financial crisis, the institutional order of the 20th century signaled that it was ready for a new era recognizing the consequential weight of stakeholders like Brazil, India, and China.

Brazil, however, in the twilight of the Lula administration needs to consolidate confidence in it rather than plant seeds of doubt as it faces fundamental choices about the type of nation it wants to be as it sits at a clear breakout point in its global ascendance.

On one hand, Brazil can move from being a significant regional power whose significance used to be defined in part by how it could slow US-led institution-building to a different sort of globally responsible stakeholder that wants to be in the first tier of nations rewriting a globally inclusive social contract.

President Lula's trip to Iran and his enthusiasm about injecting himself as a broker between Iran and the P5+1 countries (the UN Security Council Permanent Members of the US, Russia, China, the UK, and France in addition to Germany) is fraught with serious dangers for his legacy and for Brazil's aspirations to be accommodated in the world's most powerful institutions.

Iran and the West are in a serious standoff over the course of Iran's nuclear intentions, and the US and its UN Security Council counterparts are working to assemble a sanctions package to punish Iran for failing to abide by IAEA protocols, for developing a covert nuclear reprocessing site, and for not doing more to convince a skeptical world that its nuclear power program is not meant for military purposes.

Nations rarely indicate what their top tier national security priorities really are as politically correct platitudes about various causes get in the way, but there is little doubt that for the United States, encouraging Iran to pivot from a nuclear weapons capacity, latent or real, is very near the top, if not the single most important national security objective of the administration.

There are two possible outcomes from Lula's upcoming trip to Tehran. First, Lula's well-meaning efforts to defuse one of the world's tensest, building crises may result in convincing Iran that it has a political back door out of the increasingly tough wall that the US is trying to assemble around Iran with the support of China, Russia, Europe, Japan, and many of the other nations that participated in the recent Nuclear Security Summit and who are key players in the current Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty review underway now in New York.

Giving Iran a back door would seriously aggravate American policymakers who have enough problems at the moment communicating resolve to Iran's leadership.

Alternatively, Lula could succeed in taking the message that everyone from Obama to Europe's Javier Solana to the former IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei and others have issued to Iran -- which is to engage in a serious discussion that ranges from the Islamic Republic's own concerns about regime security to inclusion in global institutions to accommodation of its growing regional interests in exchange for helping to alleviate the West's lack of trust in its nuclear activities and ongoing concerns with Iran's funding of transnational terror groups.

Lula could perhaps be the person who helps Iran to move forward in ways that it has not -- but in doing so, Lula cannot afford to be seen as acquiescing to or promoting Iran's strident misbehavior.

In the wake of the Cold War, Brazil's statecraft has been brilliant as it has positioned itself as the new "indispensable nation" in nearly every nouveau cluster of states trying to fill the power vacuum in a world cluttered with anachronistic global institutions whose power grids don't match the real world. The recent Brazil-hosted BRICs summit (Brazil, Russia, India & China) and the IBSA (India, Brazil, South Africa) summit are examples of the positioning brilliance of Lula and his government; so too Lula's role in global climate change politics and his helping to make the G20 the new power center in global economic affairs.

But the reality is that the United States remains a vital global player that can enhance or restrict the aspirations of new powers.

President Lula's decision to jump into the US/Europe vs. Iran match has turned enormous Obama administration enthusiasm for Brazil and Lula into confusion; for some, real doubt about Brazil's judgment.

While the Obama administration was giving previous "special relationships" like the UK, Israel, and Japan some less privileged treatment than they had grown used to, Obama and his team were trying hard to 'upgrade' some of the relationships that are vital to the future. Brazil is clearly one of these, but its Iran moves threaten a lot.

Some senior folks in the administration as well as sophisticated observers in the US Senate and House of Representatives think that at just the moment when Lula got the US wanting to seriously advocate for Brazil's inclusion in any reformulation of the UN Security Council permanent membership, Brazil then stepped into the Iran mess. Lula's posture thus far has not necessarily been one of a fair-minded broker but oddly more as an advocate of Iran's declarations.

Perhaps Lula is just cozying up to Ahmadinejad and Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to be able to give them some tough love and deliver more serious words privately. However, if that is the case, Lula's government has not used back channels to either Europe or the US that that is his intention.

Recently, Brazil's Ministry of Foreign Affairs organized a significant day-long workshop to think about emerging institutions of global governance. Thirteen nations were represented in the meeting, and I was fortunate to be invited. Others there filling American slots included my New America Foundation colleague and 21st century Alvin Toffler-style futurist Parag Khanna, the Council on Foreign Relations' Julia Sweig, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's David Rothkopf.

The meeting, co-chaired by Rothkopf and Deputy Foreign Minister Antonio Patriota, was really superb and easily surpassed most US-based meetings I have attended on the subject of what comes next in the global order.

At Patriota's direction, we tried to seriously work through alternative paradigms for global governance. For instance, I gave my own thoughts on how we needed to modify the UN with a system of networked nodes of responsible global stewardship that was less hierarchal than today's system.

I haven't figured out how to explain my concept well -- but what I have in mind is something metaphorically like a cloud computing approach to global management in which there is an open source, Microsoft like portal for nations around the world -- be they Iran, India, Brazil, Indonesia, China, and others -- to help generate security and economic balance in their region without a globally dominant hegemonic overlord. In fact, the DNA of the previous hegemony is more embedded in the "software" of a mostly liberal global order that will continue on even if the US is not the global heavyweight it once was.

G. John Ikenberry at Princeton has been influential in my thinking about this -- which clearly needs more work. Nonetheless, Deputy Foreign Minister Patriota's Brasilia salon was mind-stretching and sophisticated, quite up to par for the kind of Brazil we should all want to see emerge.

There were many other proposals offered, some incremental fixes of the current system and others big conceptual leaps -- but during a sixteen hour long day of discussion, many senior Brazilian government strategists and diplomats from the President's office as well as from the Foreign Ministry remained with us, intensely involved and listening.

Brazil on many levels is becoming a vital global player -- and should be one. Lula's unique ability to be both a progressive global visionary while also a pragmatic realist about what is doable and what is not has earned him trust and confidence of most serious world leaders who want him to remain actively connected to the global order after his presidency ends.

That said, the trust needed among the world's biggest stakeholders to make space for Brazil's global leap forward is threatened by possible missteps on Iran.

Some observers think that beyond the issue of whether Lula fails or not with Iran is his judgment -- in which Brazil embraced an issue that probably was not its highest national security priority in order to add to Lula's legacy but potentially made itself an obstacle in what may be one of the highest priorities of the United States and Europe. Bad statecraft -- perhaps. Or at least a high stakes gamble that will have big costs associated with failure.

From my perspective, I think that this situation can still be managed depending on Lula's posture when in Iran, his willingness to communicate behind the scenes with the US and other key stakeholders in the Iran standoff, and whether or not he actually produces any shift in Iran's recalcitrant position.

This summitry represents a big gamble by Brazil's impressive President -- and one hopes that he understands that his nation's rightful place as a key pillar of emerging international stakeholders depends on getting nations like Iran to move beyond their past, to get beyond paranoia, and to constructively negotiate about strategic factors that divide Iran from the rest of the world.

-- Steve Clemons

This has to be watched. As the narrator says, "the Gulf appears to be bleeding."

Thanks to UT Austin/LBJ School's James Galbraith for sending my way.

For those of you following this disaster, the blog Gulf Oil Slick is a good resource.

-- Steve Clemons

Andrew Lebovich, a frequent TWN contributor and staff member at the New America Foundation's American Strategy Program, prepared today the AfPak page brief for Foreign Policy this morning.

This slightly disturbing kicker caught my attention:

Afghanistan's creepiest game

When not on the watch for Taliban, U.S. Army soldiers rotating through a remote Kandahar outpost hunt instead for the things that go bump in the night (AP).

Soldiers go out on patrols for snakes, scorpions and giant camel spiders, sometimes helped by mortar crews firing illumination rounds and cheered on by their colleagues.

I rather prefer the military lip synching and creating Lady Gaga tributes to this.

And then again, in the eyes of the local citizens and the Taliban soldiers we are fighting, both activities look like signs of real decadence that do nothing to win the hearts and minds of Afghans.

-- Steve Clemons

Nicholas Maliska is a research intern with the New America Foundation/U.S.-Cuba Policy Initiative. This post originally appeared at The Havana Note.

With President Obama's nomination of Elena Kagan to replace Justice John Paul Stevens, the U.S. Supreme Court is changing (although this change should not significantly alter the ideological balance of the Court). While the Judiciary is usually considered the least pertinent of our government's three branches to foreign policy issues, the Supreme Court does get to weigh in on international issues from time. Cuba is no exception, and over the nearly fifty years that the U.S. embargo on Cuba has existed, the Supreme Court has heard several cases that challenged the Constitutionality of the travel ban on Cuba.

Zemel v. Rusk was the first case heard by the Supreme Court that challenged the travel ban to Cuba. Previously, the Court had ruled in Kent v. Douglas that the freedom to travel is a right protected by the Fifth Amendment, so after several denied requests to travel to Cuba as a tourist, one citizen challenged the travel ban to Cuba. The proceedings took place in 1965 just four years after the travel ban was imposed on Cuba in 1961, and in a 6-3 decision, the majority ruled that the State Department did have the authority to impose such a ban and that the ban is Constitutional.

The Supreme Court again heard a case (Regan v. Wald) challenging the travel ban or more specifically the restrictions on travel-related transactions with Cuba in 1984 after the Reagan Administration had re-imposed the travel ban (which had been eased under the Carter Administration). In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court affirmed the President's authority to issue travel bans in the interest of national security, although they might infringe upon Americans' Constitutional rights to travel and move freely.

The United States, Cuba, and the Supreme Court have all undergone significant changes since that 1984 ruling. The Cold War is over and Cuba is no longer a security threat (and thus the original rationale for the travel ban has ended). Meanwhile, with Justice Stevens' retirement, there will no longer be any current Justices on the Supreme Court that were serving at the time of the 1984 ruling.

In addition to the original concerns of those who opposed the travel ban, a new twist has also developed in the travel ban since the 1984 ruling. Now, the travel ban is not a general ban on all Americans, but rather, the ban discriminates against ordinary Americans and allows Cuban-Americans with family in Cuba to freely travel to the island. Opponents cite the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which holds that no state shall "deny to any persons in its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws" and ask how one category of Americans is permitted the right to travel while others are denied it.

I am by no means a Constitutional Law scholar and explaining the legal nitty gritty of this is out of my league. However, the famous words of Justice Stewart come to mind: "I can't define pornography, but I know it when I see it." Similarly, I do not know how legal minds define discrimination, but I know it when I see it.

-- Nicholas Maliska

I am worried that there is substantial confusion in Democratic party ranks about what the appropriate role and function of the United States military is and isn't.

A powerful women's Congressional delegation led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi just returned from Afghanistan -- including Congresswoman Susan Davis, Congresswoman Madeleine Bordallo, Congresswoman Niki Tsongas, and Congresswoman Donna Edwards.

The focus on the plight of women in Afghanistan is commendable, and I believe that we must try our best to find ways to leave women in Afghanistan in substantially better circumstances than we found them -- but to make the plight of women 'the national security focus' of American engagement is an enormous mistake.

Human rights issues, womens issues, gay rights issues, the rights of children and protection from pedophilia in Afghanistan should all be on America's and the broad international agenda -- but we have lots of tools, protocols, and other forms of statecraft designed to promote justice and humanitarianism in these areas.

It is not wise or even effective to use America's overextended military power and focus it on these questions -- when there are large strategic challenges looming, including perhaps with Iran, with Russia and China, and other crises we have not yet seen emerge.

I greatly respect Donna Edwards and want to share her statement from the several offered -- but also want to respectfully disagree with the direction she is going.

Congresswoman Donna Edwards (D-MD):

This is really important and what we've learned is that if we want to gauge the prospects for success in Afghanistan, a key barometer has to be the status of women and their participation in governance, their participation in economic development activities, their ability to achieve an education. And after years and years of Taliban rule where women have been so suppressed, we must use women's success as a barometer for success -- overall success in Afghanistan. And that success is not just about the success of Afghan women -- in my view, that success is also tied to what is in our national security interest.

There are poor women and women who don't participate all around the world. The linkage and the difference for us is that it's tied to our national security interest and the security of Afghan women, the security that's tied to whether or not there is corruption in government, security that is tied to whether women can get an education, security is tied to whether a woman is safe in her home, security that's tied to whether a woman is able to go to market and to work and contribute. All of these elements are tied to our unique national security interest. And I think that it is that combination that is really important for us to understand how we measure women's success.

I'll conclude by saying that I hope -- I've been and it's no great secret -- a skeptic as to whether we can achieve that kind of success in Afghanistan, but what I know for certainty, is that we will not be able to achieve any level of success if it is not measured using a barometer of women's success and participation. I believe, I hope that President Karzai understands this and I look forward, as we go through this week in discussions with the highest levels of our government, that we're able to tie women's success to the overall success and the long-term success of Afghanistan.

More on this another time.

Full transcript follows at the break.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, a champion of tough-edged humanitarianism, too frequently falls into a linear, knee-jerk approach to global justice causes rather than embracing the complexity of most global problems. Nations are good or bad. We must take forceful action against some country or are otherwise appeasing them. And so on.

Kouchner does not live in nuances, unlike another lesser-known but vital part of France's foreign policy establishment, presidential national security adviser Jean-David Levitte or Levitte's successor as US Ambassador to France, Pierre Vimont. These latter two, and perhaps others in France's national security world, remind one of Brent Scowcroft or Zbigniew Brzezinski -- who are America's leading progressive realists today.

I mention Levitte and Vimont -- not to get them in trouble with the Foreign Minister -- but because they are constructive, geostrategic pragmatists with a sense of opportunity and costs that Kouchner seems to lack.

In a blunt Huffington Post essay today calling for broader international attention to and attempts at protection of cyber-dissidents and those challenging the authority of totalitarian regimes, Kouchner calls for the internet to be recognized internationally as a global commons that bad governments can be punished for violating the norms of freedom and liberty of global netizens.

I like Kouchner (and am a fan of his talented TV media famous spouse) actually, but this proposal is naive and potentially reckless.

Kouchner is right in his HuffPost comments that the web can sometimes help propagate the interests of scandalmongers, help criminal and terrorist networks move their agendas forward, and undermine the liberty of citizens whose every digital move can be spied on and monitored by state authorities.

What Foreign Minister Kouchner neglects is that deception and misinformation were far more rampant in the age of the telegraph, that old-line telephony and snail mail were used by organized crime and exploited by J. Edgar Hoover.

While he mentions positively the fact that more diffuse internet-based citizen reporting makes it "increasingly difficult to hide a public demonstration, an act of repression or a violation of human rights," he doesn't recognize that most "quality journals and news outlets" have long been controlled by editorial cartels -- which dole out space on their pages to preferred providers and only leave a small bit for the rest of the serious policy community to compete for.

The Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo, Powerline, Foreign Policy's The Cable, Daily Beast, Politico, DailyKos, OpenLeft, and many other new media operations and blogs in the US and abroad, even The Washington Note have seriously torn at the jugular of mainstream journalism and the cartels that have served as gate-keepers against too much citizen encroachment.

The internet today -- despite the occasional bouts of disinformation and invented scandal -- are far more effective and immediate marketplaces of information than the world for which Bernard Kouchner seems to pine.

I am all for protecting, where one can, the interests of citizen bloggers in totalitarian states, but I also know that citizen bloggers and new media operations are often in the sites of democratic governments as well.

I have little doubt that another term or two of Vice President Cheney and his chief aide-de-camp David Addington would have led to further distortions and manipulations of executive authority that would have brought back the equivalent of a "sedition act" in the United States -- used to squelch dissent with the excuse of war. Nations like France, the United States, and most developed nations have the ability today to track the digital behavior and decisions of all of their citizens in their totality.

Kouchner's call for an international body to further reify this capability that is today real but not widely acknowledged in most of the world -- and to divide the world between good and bad managers of this global commons seems to me to be a very complicated and dangerous path.

We may be going that direction anyway -- but Kouchner in his attempt to wave a flag in favor of humanitarian causes -- may in fact be undermining the interests of citizens in nations in the so-called free world.

Individuals and NGOs on the net, it seems to me, have a greater capacity to outrun and outmaneuver the illiberal authorities -- in democracies or not -- trying to cajole, control, or entrap them.

The good that the internet generates overall far outweighs the benefits -- for the time being.

My counsel, offered with respect, is that Minister Kouchner should work harder to recognize that his own facility with issues relating to freedom and control embedded in modern media is riddled with misunderstanding and perhaps lack of experience. He must move beyond the anachronistic yawn that the internet can turn invented stories into truth. Bandwagoning lies can indeed occur -- but the internet can also push back and regularly does. Compare the narrow band focus and homogenization of most mainstream media to the vibrancy and diversity of new media, and it's obvious which is the more healthy choice.

This is not to say that all of what Kouchner recommends is bad -- but to jump in to this topic as he has with such an outdated view of what is happening in social networks, with online video, and hyper-diffuse commentary and journalism can produce as many harmful outcomes as it can antidotes to the problems he thinks he is trying to fix.

-- Steve Clemons

Joe Biden had AMTRAK trips between D.C. and Wilmington, Delaware so imprinted in his DNA that he must really miss them now.

For 35 years, then Senator Biden commuted each working morning and each working night -- 100 miles each way -- to be with his wife and children. After losing his first wife and daughter in a tragic auto accident that nearly also took the lives of his two sons, Beau and Hunter, who survived, he made sure he was home.

I figure that Biden did about 48,000 miles a year on AMTRAK.

At 35 years, that's approximately 1.68 million miles. In air flight miles, that's like ten million miles - particularly given the number of segments traveled and frequency. The Hill newspaper previously approximated Biden's travel at 1.44 million miles -- but I give Biden credit for non-working session days that he still commuted.

George Clooney would be proud, even though we are talking trains.

I am this morning back in Wilmington's AMTRAK station -- Vice President Biden's daily arrival and departure spot for 35 years -- and am watching the station undergo some new raily retrofitting and station modernization. The waiting area for the public is pretty small for the time being -- as construction continues -- and the clustering is pretty intimate. But I'm sure that the Senator turned V.P. would have said hello and met every person at that station. Just the way he is.

I remember several times getting off of the AMTRAK in Washington on my way down from New York and seeing his long time national security adviser Antony Blinken or his legal counsel Brian McKeon. I'd say hello to them and would ask if the boss was with them. They'd say, somewhat sheepishly, yes -- he's still back there talking. He'd always find someone to talk to -- Biden's great strength and easy-to-spoof weakness.

But I think it's probably fair to say that Biden deserves a Guinness Book of World Records distinction for the Member of Congress who has traveled more on AMTRAK (or rails of any kind) than any other Member in American history.

Thus, I think he deserves a train station -- and while Wilmington AMTRAK is doing all of this fix-up stuff, it's about time that AMTRAK, the State of Delaware, and the City of Wilmington rebrand the station there:

The Joseph R. Biden Jr. AMTRAK Station

I'm one of those who generally likes AMTRAK, though my feelings are less warm and fuzzy when I'm on Shanghai's MagLev or one of the Shinkansen lines in Japan.

But this morning on this northeastern corridor line, I feel lucky to have it -- and think that it was good that someone like Biden, who despite having his own auto entourage now whenever he leaves his temporary home at the Naval Observatory, probably still feels a pull to trains.

-- Steve Clemons

(Photo Credit: Argenberg's Photostream)

While here in Istanbul for a series of meetings with foreign policy practitioners and analysts, I have been struck by the nearly complete absence of Turkey's European Union negotiations from my discussions.

As one prominent Turkish political commentator explained to me, Turkey's relations with Europe are in a coma. Neither side wants to pull the plug, but at the same time neither is willing to invest the energy to resuscitate Turkey's membership negotiations.

In this context, it is interesting that the European Union is set to announce today that it supports the ruling Justice and Development (AK) Party's controversial constitutional reform amendments, which were passed by Turkey's Parliament last week and are set to go to a referendum.

The constitutional reform debate is the latest manifestation of the defining divide in Turkish politics between the conservative, Islamic-oriented AKP government and the staunchly secular, Kemalist state led by the military, judiciary and bureaucracy.

The reforms would enhance the power of the government at the expense of the state by giving the government greater power to appoint justices to Turkey's high court and requiring that military officers accused of civilian crimes be tried in civilian courts. A third controversial proposal that would have made it more difficult for the judiciary to close political parties fell just short of passing.

As I predicted in March, the constitutional reforms place the European Union in a bind. The EU has called for Turkey to adopt a new constitution for years, but the reform proposal is neither as comprehensive nor as liberal Europe would like. The process itself is problematic as well because all three opposition parties opposed the reforms, which they perceive to be a power grab in disguise.

Europe's decision to support the reforms likely reflects a determination that they are better than nothing and that the accession process is best served by supporting the AKP government's initiative in spite of the reforms' shortcomings. Europe's position is understandable, but may result in a backlash among Turkish nationalists. It also might make it more difficult for Europe to push for additional reforms to Turkey's constitution in the future.

For an excellent treatment of the implications of Turkey's constitutional reform proposal for its relations with the EU, read this Brookings Institution paper by Emiliano Alessandri and Omer Taspinar.

Turkey watchers may also be interested in the breaking news that the leader of Turkey's main opposition party (CHP), Deniz Baykal has resigned in the midst of a sex scandal.

-- Ben Katcher

(photo is of White House Treaty Room, White House Museum Archives)

During a Maria Leavey Memorial Breakfast Series discussion with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), I asked the Senator in May 2008 whether there would be any action before the end of that Congress on the "Law of the Sea Treaty". This treaty was one that most Democrats supported, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar supported it, the military wanted it, George W. Bush wanted it -- even though his legislative staff undermined him on it, and Senator John McCain had strongly supported it before he strongly didn't.

The entire exchange with Senator Reid was interesting -- and it was clear that had Reid had more time on the Congressional clock, he would have tried to push through consideration of the treaty, but at the same time, there seems to be an allergy to treaties.

The Senate needs to get back into the Treaty business -- whether it is START, the Law of the Seas Treaty, or others like the Land Mine Treaty -- and the White House should jump at chances to push the Senate back to ratifying global protocols that show America is back supporting and promoting a global liberal order that simultaneously enhances US interests but also global stability.

Reid's answer to my query was:

First of all folks understand that the Republicans in the Senate do not represent mainstream Republicanism in the country.

Mainstream Republicanism in the country is moderate. The Republicans in the Senate are not moderates, with the one exception of Olympia Snowe are not moderates, they're right wing. And that includes some people who in the past have been moderates, someone you'd think like Arlen Specter. I talk about Arlen Specter in my book briefly and say that he's with us when we don't need him. (Laughter) Which is true, he never votes with us on an important vote. The only one who does is Olympia Snowe. So having said that, understand the Senate doesn't represent what's going on in the country either with Democrats or Republicans.

As a result of that we're not getting much done in foreign policy. You will once in a while get a Republican like Brownback, who as a sensitive man in some respects will work hard on an issue like AIDS, um, but his position on choice is so far to the right it interferes with his doing a lot of other things.

Now, there are many things that need to be done, the Law of the Seas is one. I do not have two weeks to spend on the Senate floor. I should do it, if for no other reason than to embarrass John McCain with his flip-flopping.

I've spoken over the weekend to Stephen Hadley about a couple of foreign policy issues that are extremely important. One is a treaty called the 1-2-3 Treaty, how it got that name I have no idea, but it is to work with the Soviet Union (sic) for further cooperation for taking down our military...our atomic weapons, and that's something we need to do. I hope they send it down soon, statutorily, if they do, we have 90 days to take actions. I will do my very best to make sure we take action on it.

This week, both the New York Times and the Washington Post ran articles in which the US Senate was calling on the White House to join the Land Mine Treaty, which has been globally in force without US support for more than a decade.

Senator Patrick Leahy, who has been leading the charge, says that there are enough votes in the Senate today to ratify the Treaty - and this could very well lay groundwork for other across-the-aisle cooperation on key treaty votes in this Congress and the next.

Beyond the good sense and global good will that would be achieved if the US did become a Land Mind treaty signatory, this lays the groundwork for the Obama team's efforts to get the recent US-Russia START agreement ratified. Since there is so much bipartisan support for it, the Law of the Sea Treaty should also be in line.

The White House would be wise to jump on the Senate's offer of ratifying one treaty to get it in the grooves to move others.

-- Steve Clemons

I am traveling today -- but wanted to note that the UK election yesterday is tracking with so many other elections in the world today like we recently saw in Iraq, and even in Afghanistan, not to mention the US presidential race in 2004. No definitive winner under the rules -- or at least close elections.

I thought that this commentary, above, was as good as any other I have seen.

More soon.

-- Steve Clemons

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Here is an exchange I had with Keith Olbermann yesterday on MSNBC's Countdown on what the broader geopolitical implications of the Faisal Shahzad case may be.

-- Steve Clemons

Noman Benotman, a former top tier member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) and a mujahadeen who fought along with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, has helped broker "reconciliation" between members of his former group and the Libyan government.

Benotman's strategy has been to intellectually challenge the Islamic narrative bin Laden and his fellow travelers push. And there is some evidence Benotman and others who concur with his approach have been effective.

Recently, I visited Libya as a guest of the Gaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation and met Benotman, and a number of the Islamic clerics who were working to bring about not only reconciliation between Gaddafi's government and jailed Islamists but who were trying to export to other countries in the region an alternative reading of key Islamic principles that they feel bin Laden, al Zawahiri and others are manipulating.

I found this interview that Noman Benotman did with Rania Karam of Al Shorfa to be a good illustration of the tensions inside Islamic doctrine -- and something those of us outside this debate should try harder to understand.

Here is a clip:

Al-Shorfa: Would that be the response of those who divide the world into two "camps", according to the bin Laden's classification?

Benotman: Even when we talk about the "Abode of Islam" and the "Abode of Disbelief" - as per the traditional Islamic concept - there is still ambiguity about these concepts.

The "Abode of Islam", according to the traditional meaning, is the abode where the legitimate Islamic Caliphate exists, governed by an Islamic political authority. This abode does not exist today. For the Abode of War to exist, it needs an Islamic Abode [in the political sense]. There is another Islamic definition [for Islamic abode] but that refers to a group of people who share a common faith, and they need not be organised into a political entity.

Let them designate where the Abode of Islam is, and I hope they don't say it's the caves of Afghanistan. Where is the Abode of Islam in terms of political authority, so that we can say that there is a corresponding Abode of War? There are 55 Islamic countries, so are there 55 Caliphates and 55 Caliphs? Is this conceivable?

Al-Shorfa: So, was bin Laden wrong?

Benotman: I would like to have a discussion with him on the subject of the camp that I am concerned with, which is the camp of Islam. I want him to delineate it for me, as Ibn al-Qayyim did. He must delineate it with precision. Is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia part of that camp? Is Algeria part of it? Are Libya, Morocco and Egypt also within that camp? Let him draw the borders of the camp of Islam.

Al-Shorfa: Perhaps he meant that the camp includes the regions under the control of people he considers as "Mujahideens" in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and other countries.

Benotman: Let him designate where it is. Is the camp of Islam Qandahar? Or Helmand in Afghanistan? Or Diyala Province in Iraq? Is this categorisation a valid one so we can say that this or that region is part of the Islamic camp?

I would like the one who came up with the issue of camps to specify where they are, because their answer would show the weakness of their theory. The slogan they promote about the existence of two camps is nothing but a political slogan meant to mobilise people and is not based on real concepts and knowledge.

-- Steve Clemons

The most recent terrorist attempt to attack New York on Saturday has got me thinking in the last few days, especially if it turns out to be true that the would-be-car bomber may have been acting in reaction to American drone strikes in Pakistan.

This just reinforces for me how serious our lack of strategic outlook is, and the fact that we need to seriously rethink our approach to terrorism, as it impacts not only our actions but also our interactions with countries around the world.

In that vein, I'd like to point you in the direction of a piece published today in The Atlantic by New America research associate (and sometime TWN blogger) Andrew Lebovich, on Morocco's disruption of an "al Qaeda-linked" cell last week. Two key paragraphs:

Reports last week that Moroccan security forces arrested 24 members of an "al Qaeda-linked cell" and were looking for another in France, for example, have raised concerns in Western media of an expanded al Qaeda threat in North Africa. But what do we really know about the case? As with many such regimes, the opaque nature of Morocco's government, especially concerning issues of terrorism, makes independent confirmation of official statements on the incident difficult. At the same time, the international and regional context of the arrests suggest the possibility that - whether or not the charges are true - Morocco's government may be invested in using the threat of terrorism for political and economic gain.

...For everything that's particular to Morocco, distinguishing the real threat of organized terrorism from the projections of interested governments is increasingly a global problem. Russia, for example, has used the language of the Global War on Terror to justify its brutal tactics in Chechnya, where Chechen terrorists are just one part of the complicated conflict. In more recent months, Yemen's government tried to link Huthi rebels, which challenged the state's hold in the North, alternately to al Qaeda and Iran. The challenge for us in the West is to be able to live with the threat of organized terrorism without assuming its involvement in any given act of anti-state violence - and without blindly accepting, when we look to other governments' responses, that their fights are the same as ours.

-- Steve Clemons

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Vice President for Communications Peter Reid emailed me the most fantastic suggestion.

After seeing my post about US soldiers in Afghanistan doing their Lady Gaga stuff, he sent me another YouTube link of US Air Force Academy cadets playing up Kesha's Tik Tok. Coolio.

And then he said, we should start a competition "America's Military Has Talent!"

The winner would appear at next year's White House Correspondents Association dinner.

Of course, the White House Correspondents Association has no connection to any of this yet -- but we think that they should call Peter and me and put us in charge.

There is no doubt that these folks have talent, which I think could be deployed better than in the various military surges we have going right now -- but still, that have talent.

-- Steve Clemons

Although he's just launched it, writer Allen McDuffee has a fun blog called ThinkTanked that is worth paying attention to.

He has a good roster of the better institutions -- although according to a Department of State study done at the direction of then Policy Planning Director and now Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass, there are more than 1,500 think tanks in Washington. Most of them are boutiques and exist more as concepts than working institutions -- but the bottom line is that think tanks play a huge role in political and policy work in Washington, and Americans know very little about them.

But some Americans are interested. Just the other night, I met up with an inquisitive Zach Galifianakis at the Bloomberg/Vanity Fair post-WHCA dinner who really wanted to know what think tankers thought about. And he was sincere, which most Americans who ask that question realize soon after they begin to get an answer that they didn't really want to know.

I am, however, interested in tracking work at other policy institutions and look forward to Allen McDuffee's coverage -- including of the New America Foundation.

-- Steve Clemons

The Rosenkranz Foundation puts on some very interesting ticketed "Intelligence Squared Debates" in New York at the NYU Skirball Center in cooperation with National Public Radio, Newsweek and Bloomberg Television.

I participated in one of these debates last year on President Obama's Afghanistan policy -- and found myself on the opposite side of the debate on stage from my New America Foundation colleague Steve Coll. Great fun and interesting session.

However the debate my DNA was forged for -- on Obama's Foreign Policy -- is taking place on Tuesday, May 11th, but I'm not in it. Darn it.

Those debating, however, include former senior Pentagon and White House official Dan Senor; US News & World Report editor-in-chief Mortimer Zuckerman; French philosopher and best-selling author Bernard-Henry Levy and retired four star General Wesley Clark.

Levy and Wes Clark are going to defend President Obama's foreign policy -- while Senior and Mort Zuckerman are going to argue that Obama spells America's decline.

NOTE TO MY FRIENDS AT ROSENKRANZ & INTELLIGENCE SQUARED: If Levy drops out or gets caught behind another cloud of volcanic ash, call me. Wes Clark is great -- and I'd love to partner with him.

The fact is that the George W. Bush administration, for which Dan Senor was a lead spear-carrier and which was often strongly defended by Mort Zuckerman (who I saw and chatted with at the White House Correspondents festivities), punctured the mystique of America's superpower status and sent American power over a cliff.

Superpowers can define themselves in four key areas -- military cability, economic power, moral leadership, and ideas and institutions.

George W. Bush's team, particularly the Cheney/Addington/John Bolton wing of that team, managed to show fundamental limits of America's power in the invasion of Iraq; managed to allow the exporting of toxic financial products to the rest of the world, undermined America's moral standing through the embrace of torture, abuse of detainees, warrantless domestic spying on US citizens, and more; and worked to undermine America's position at the UN, undermine the nuclear non-proliferation treaty regime, and sidestepped key international protocols America needs like the Law of the Seas Treaty that even George W. Bush supported but couldn't get past his own staff.

Barack Obama has a lot of challenges on his plate -- and he needs to do well at them. But American decline -- that can be measured in the behavior of our allies as much as our foes -- was started far earlier than the Obama administration.

So, this could be an interesting debate -- though I think that the Intelligence Squared folks did not assemble the strongest team in favor of Obama's foreign policy.

Still, it may be interesting to see.

-- Steve Clemons

A good friend and former senior government official sent me this inquiry today. I'm just not an environment/oil industry expert, but the way this person frames the question certainly puts me on edge:

Steve,

Are you following the oil spill?

I have had several scientists and engineers -- not the alarmist types -- e-mail me in the last 48 hours that this is a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions. One engineer suggested the USG use a small yield nuclear device to try to seal the leak.

Another said that every ocean on earth is threatened -- and not in a long time but a relatively short time. He also suggested there was no way to seal the leak due to the depth, high pressure with which the oil is being released -- compared it to Krakatoa -- and the fact that the heavy rig sunk and now lies on the site of the leak.

I have no way of evaluating the leak but find these scientists' and engineers' fears of deep concern -- particularly when I know somewhat the track record of the WH, BP, Haliburton, et al with regard to these sorts of crises.

Are you hearing anything remotely like what I'm hearing?

It would be useful for knowledgeable commentators to share what they know or think in Comments.

-- Steve Clemons

This is a guest note by Barbara Slavin, freqent TWN contributor and author of Bitter Friends, Bosom Enemies: Iran, the U.S. and the Twisted Path to Confrontation. Slavin has visited Iran seven times.

Let my reporters come: Iranian reporters blocked from covering Ahmadinejad

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to New York to speak at the review conference of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty is unlikely to help resolve the escalating dispute over Iran's nuclear program.

But since the Obama administration allowed him to come - a U.S. obligation as host to the United Nations - it should also have permitted the Iranian president to bring Iranian journalists with him. Unfortunately, their visas have been denied.

A State Department spokesman declined comment on the reasons, noting that the visa application process is "considered confidential." But Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, speaking on NBC's "Meet the Press," suggested one reason: "We're not going to permit Iran to change the story from their failure to comply" with nonproliferation obligations.

Restrictions on the press have been a factor in the three-decade-long dialogue of the deaf that passes for U.S.-Iran relations. Iran until recently has behaved better than successive U.S. administrations, giving visas to U.S. reporters to cover events such as a recent nuclear conference in Tehran and Iran's presidential and parliamentary elections.

However, the Bush administration refused to accredit Iranian reporters to cover the 2008 U.S. elections. And Iranian news organizations have been largely confined to a 25-mile radius around the U.N. while U.S. reporters have been free to travel outside Tehran.

Throughout the long Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, journalists from both countries interpreted each other's policies and helped domestic audiences see adversaries as human beings. What's more, Russian journalists based in the U.S. came to understand the strengths of the U.S. political system. That sort of experience should be available to Iranian journalists, particularly those who work for hard-line outlets that routinely denigrate the United States.

The situation for journalists in Iran has never been easy and has deteriorated significantly since fraud-tainted presidential elections in Iran last year. More than 30 Iranian journalists remain in prison and foreign reporters based in Tehran must exercise care for fear that they will also face prison or be expelled. Still, U.S. officials who rightfully criticize Iran's crackdown should jump at the chance to allow Iranian reporters to experience U.S. freedoms.

Let the Islamic Republic of Iran News Agency open a Washington bureau, let its reporters go to White House and State Department briefings and have President Obama and other top U.S. officials give interviews to its editors and writers. That would make it harder for Iran to censor information about U.S. policies and make it easier for U.S. media outlets to demand reciprocal rights in Tehran. At a time when confrontation appears to be building again between the two countries, the more access their journalists have to each other, the better.

-- Barbara Slavin

An excellent "committee report" has just been released by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee majority staff that condemns the operations and management of Radio and TV Marti.

The Cable's Josh Rogin at Foreign Policy got the scoop -- so read the whole story, but here were my own comments as captured by Rogin:

"Radio and TV Marti have been more about employing embargo proponents, paralyzing US-Cuban relations and perpetuating an anachronistic Cold War standoff than they have been about furthering American interests or triggering change in Cuba," said Steve Clemons, foreign policy head at the New America Foundation, "Barack Obama voted against these programs in the Senate because he said they 'don't work' and it's commendable that the Senator Kerry and his team are shining a spotlight on the corruption and incompetence embedded in these programs."

I remembered President Obama's vote against funding for these operations on the basis that they didn't work -- and found his posture on this refreshingly correct.

-- Steve Clemons

From May 10-14, Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai will be visiting Washington -- and much of his trip has been structured by the team working for Special Envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke in coordination with Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes.

I have confirmed that at least for the time being the scuffling between a team of National Security Adviser Jim Jones and US Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry vs. Richard Holbrooke is over. "They are all pulling the same direction now," one senior administration official shared.

During a recent trip to Afghanistan along with General David Petraeus, word has reached us that what was supposed to be a relatively brief meeting with President Karzai stretched on for several hours -- and word is that Holbrooke and Karzai reinvented their relationship and not only got on extremely well, but bonded.

The looming issue for the Karzai-Obama meeting and DC visit is getting consensus on an outreach and reconciliation strategy with leading figures from the Taliban. Holbrooke figures large in this -- particularly given his skill set of negotiating with some of the world's toughest personalities, particularly the thuggish Slobodan Milosevich.

In other news, there has been some silliness about whether Richard Holbrooke was or wasn't invited to The New Yorker bash at the ritzed up W Hotel last Friday as part of the pre-White House Correspondents Association festivities in Washington. The Washington Examiner reported that he wasn't -- but then David Remnick's team said he was invited, but never RSVP'd.

Holbrooke reportedly told someone when he thought he wasn't on the list, "Tell Remnick I'm crushed."

Instead, Richard Holbrooke and wife Kati Marton spent part of their evening at a fun Dupont Circle party with Sex in the City creator Darren Star and Talking Points Memo publisher Joshua Marshall. Holbrooke told Star that he watched the very first Sex in the City episode and got hooked and was Star's first fan when hardly anyone knew about the show in those early days.

By the way, huge shout out from this blogger to Jane Mayer -- one of my two favorite anti-torture divas (Karen Greenberg of the Center on Law & Security at New York University being the other) -- who did get me on The New Yorker party list, even though I had supposedly been invited and hadn't RSVP'd either.

-- Steve Clemons

Be all that you can be. I love this video.

These soldiers are in Afghanistan -- blowing off steam. Creative. They would be awesome entertainment at next year's White House Correspondents Dinner.

Drop the comic stuff. President Obama has that covered.

-- Steve Clemons

It really is true. Barack Obama can staff himself better on nearly all fronts than those who staff him -- even comedians.

Barack Obama so outdid Jay Leno, more by accident than by design (I think), at the White House Correspondents Dinner that next year the WHCA should just let Obama do the President's remarks and the follow-up humor. And yes, I know Leno was not "staffing" Obama, but still. . .

Morgan Freeman, one of the few actors at the White House Correspondents Dinner who expressed interest in political blogs and think tanks, told me that he thought that it was a mistake for Jay Leno to follow President Obama.

Leno just didn't hit his groove during his routine -- but President Obama said preemptively that night that everyone knew what happened to those who followed Leno's time slot -- and well, he wasn't gonna take any chances.

Obama, whose material was put together by Jon Favreau, Ben Rhodes and Jon Lovett, was hilarious. As I watched him perform, I remembered the self-conflident line on Obama that Ryan Lizza captured in a piece when the President remarked that he could do better than any of the people working for him in their jobs. As captured by Lizza, Obama said:

I think that I'm a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I'll tell you right now that I'm gonna think I'm a better political director than my political director.

It's totally clear now that President Obama can and should be his own White House Correspondents Dinner comedian.

The President joked about his missing birth certificate, lampooned Politico (whose co-founder John Harris said the "skinned knees were worth it"), called out to the Jonas Brothers with a polite warning that should they get any ideas about Sasha and Malia, he had just two words for them: "predator drones." He noted that his favorability ratings had fallen -- but that Hillary Clinton consoled him, saying "you're likable enough."

And back on his missing birth certificate, Obama said that he knew his popularity was still sky high "in the country of his birth."

People were gasping and laughing pretty hysterically at the edginess of Obama's remarks. Leno just couldn't beat him.

I saw Larry King with the collar of his jacket up -- looking nervous and a bit uptight. He told me he was freezing and wanted to find "who was in charge" to get the heat turned on -- but I think it was nervousness that the President might be offered Larry's slot on CNN.

This annual glitz fest is not as vapid and silly as folks might think. There are "thinkers" at all of the parties, policy wonks, real journalists who do solid work, even academics -- in addition to the Hollywood types who come into town.

Joshua Micah Marshall, publisher of Talking Points Memo and proprietor of TPM Media, invited me to join his table and team at the dinner -- including David Kurtz, Managing Editor of TPM, TPM White House Correspondent Christina Bellantoni, and Millet Israeli who is TPM's General Counsel. But the other guests Josh Marshall invited were stellar including my old friend Darren Star, creator of Sex in the City, Beverly Hills 90210, and Melrose Place; former National Security Advisers Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, and current National Security Council Chief of Staff and his wife Denis & Kari McDonough.

I can't go into detail about discussions at our table -- but it can be said that the glitz and fanfare of the dinner didn't come near to squelching an extraordinary exchange between Brzezinski, Scowcroft and McDonough built on an impressive combination of intellectual firepower and aggregated front line White House national security experience.

People seemed to get how "cool" Josh Marshall's table was -- situated in the far outer ring of the giant ballroom. His was a "new media" table with two of the most important thinkers and doers in national security in the modern era sitting with one of the most powerful national security practitioners in the incumbent White House. Brzezinski and Scowcroft are serious players -- but they are also a lot like the Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon of foreign policy. Darren Star who has helped shape cultural influences not only in the United States but globally was sitting with Josh Marshall -- who has been one of the primary agitants challenging status quo political journalism.

Denis McDonough's affability, intellect, and just overall "presence" were magnetic. It was fun to see Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough bring over many from their table which was down in the prime time center of the room to the outer ring spot we were at. Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski brought former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and actor Bradley Cooper -- one of the other unusually politically interested Hollywood stars -- over to hang out with us at table 214.

Josh Marshall, who is usually pretty circumspect about everything insiderish DC, basically saw much of the room begin to look over his way to see why the crowd began hovering over a table about as far away from the President as Pluto in the solar system. And about Kari McDonough, all I can do is gush -- seriously. She is such a non-DC type who can nonetheless handle all of the DC operators. I was pretty blown away by her, unexpectedly.

Just for the record, I need to report that Zbigniew Brzezinski turned Josh Marshall and me down for the dinner twice. On my third attempt when I reported that the table was becoming more and more interesting, he accepted and wrote:

Steve -- Re May 1st

persistence is a winning virtue, even if the win is not virtuous !

But when is the actual sitdown, so I don't have to participate in the endless milling around and mutual sniffing?

many thanks - zbig

That is pure Zbig. He hates the "mutual sniffing" but have to admit I do sort of enjoy it.

Before the dinner, I went to the Atlantic Monthly/National Journal reception and hung out with Senator Jay Rockefeller and his wife, Aspen Institute President Walter Isaacson, a fascinating guy who is now with Hewlett Packard but was head of feature film marketing for Disney for more than a decade (really interesting chap whose name I will put here if he sends me a note), and the Atlantic Media Group's Elizabeth Keffer, James Bennet, John Fox Sullivan and Justin Smith. General Scowcroft also spent a lot of time at the reception chatting with Darren Star and the uber-political district wired Charlie Cook and his wife.

And then I made my way down to the Newsweek Reception where Lally Weymouth was at the door meeting and greeting every single person who walked in, along with Newsweek's John Meacham. Lally pulled me in and just introduced me to five other great people in a few minutes -- really impressive.

At Newsweek, Former Secretary of State Colin Powell was enjoying chatting with folks. Bradley Cooper and Darren Star checked in with each other. Interestingly, Alex Gibney -- Academy Award winning Director of Taxi to the Dark Side profiling institutionalized torture and abuse at the US-controlled Bagram Prison in Afghanistan -- had his picture taken with former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Gibney's new film, Casino Jack and the United States of Money, that takes on politicos on both sides of the aisle for complicity in the Jack Abramoff scandal, hits theaters on May 7th. At Newsweek, I also had an always never long enough discussion with the very best economic columnist in the world, Martin Wolf, who was down from New York with his wife to "observe" at the Financial Times table with the new FT Managing Editor Gillian Tett and DC Bureau Chief Edward Luce.

Also at the big event, we checked in with Arianna Huffington who along with HuffPost political correspondent Sam Stein had Bill Maher, Scarlet Johansson, Alec Baldwin in various orbits.

Others I checked in with were Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke and his wife, journalist and author Kati Marton; Congressman Adam Schiff, Senator Christoper Dodd, Senator Amy Klobuchar, Senator Maria Cantwell, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (who left back for the city to deal with the Times Square car bomb incident shortly after we chatted); National Economic Advisor to the President Lawrence Summers; White House strategic adviser to the President David Axelrod; White House economic team members Michael Froman, Gene Sperling, Jason Fuhrman, and Austan Goolsbee; ABC's George Stephanopoulos and NBC's David Gregory, Yemen Ambassador to the US Abdulwahab Al-Hajjiri; UK Ambassador and Mrs. Nigel and Julia Sheinwald (who showed great stamina and were at every party I attended), producer Stephen Spielberg, NPR's Robert Siegel and Ari Shapiro; Asst. Secretary of State Kurt Campbell; White House speechwriter Adam Frankel and communications deputy Bill Burton.

Susan Rice's speechwriter Warren Bass was everywhere. I saw Rahm Emanuel on the main floor of the ballroom a few times -- but he didn't stop by Table 214. Valerie Jarrett was also in good form at the Vanity Fair gala at the home of French Ambassador Pierre Vimont. Some other pals included Newsweek's Michael Hirsh, the BBC's Kim Ghattas, Peter David and Zanny Minton Beddoes both with The Economist, and the Wall Street Journal's Amy Schatz. I heard that US Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice was there but missed her. Neera Tanden, now of the Center for American Progress, and David Frum, now not with the American Enterprise Institute, were engaged with the scene. Ana Marie Cox -- who is now political editor for GQ -- was having a lot of fun, very festive, but lost her purse. It was a busy night. . .

Earlier in the day, I attended Tammy Haddad's enormous White House Correspondents Association pre-dinner garden party -- and while many of the folks there were many of the same folks everywhere else during the weekend, I thought that she and Susan Axelrod did something very significant that deserves a real salute.

They took what could have been an otherwise merangue-ish event -- 'pretty' but not a lot of substance -- and made it really meaningful and paid tribute to CARE, focusing on maternal care issues, and Citizens United for Research in Epilepsy. Everyone received CARE post cards that they addressed to their mothers -- expressing what that person's mom had said to them that had been most important in their lives.

This may sound hokey -- but it impressed me. Tammy Haddad is a powerhouse producer in Washington and knows everyone. She can meet and greet better than the best -- but when she insisted that the enormous crowd "be quiet" and recruited some of us to be "shushers" quieting the din from people who wanted to ignore what was important and get back to who-knows-who stuff, Haddad got the place quiet and made the time and space for talking about serious health issues.

David Axelrod's spouse, Susan Axelrod, partnered with Haddad and took her time to explain what this was all about and not to race past the issues about epileptic seizures and maternal health issues that they were trying to spotlight. I was really impressed because the pressure coming from the guests was to skip the serious and just get back to the frivolous. And Axelrod and Haddad pushed all that back hard.

I'm not sure anyone will actually write about this exchange between an unruly audience and the principled wife of Barack Obama's strategic adviser as well as Haddad -- but I want to make sure it is here because these large glitzy events where the politically powerful and major stars of Hollywood mix need to have moments where something real is discussed -- and that happened at the Haddad Garden Party.

On the less serious side though, Haddad called up to the stage after Susan Axelrod three actors -- only one of whom I knew because I have some real American pop culture deficits. The only one I recognized was Glee cast member, Matthew Morrison, who is a great guy -- and who stayed out til at least 3:30 in the morning when I left him and others at the French Ambassador's home where the Bloomberg/Vanity Fair party was trying to close down.

But when Haddad asked Matt Morrison what his mother had said to him when he was young that made a difference in his life, he said "she introduced me to Pez". That's right, the Pez candy (and dispensers!), which he said he is still pretty addicted to. The other guys said that their moms told them to "be what they wanted to be" or "be themselves" and all that kind of apple pie stuff. But I thought the Pez line was actually fun. And I watched Glee as part of my recovery strategy from the party today.

I have to admit that when I was trying to wait for Matthew Shephard's parents in the media room of the Human Rights Campaign dinner where President Obama spoke, I met most of the Glee cast members and Lady Gaga -- but I had never seen Glee and didn't know that I had been hearing Lady Gaga all of the time but didn't know she was the singer of those songs I heard everywhere. I've fixed this since.

MSNBC had a great party last night -- but I didn't go. For some reason, I wasn't on the list for them -- though I appear frequently on Countdown and the Rachel Maddow Show. But I heard it was excellent, and Rachel was guest bar-tending again. Zero hard feelings though.

Where I did go was the home of French Ambassador to the US Pierre Vimont who opened his amazing residence to Vanity Fair and Bloomberg. The lighting in the back garden was stunning -- and there got a chance to check in with New America Foundation Chairman and Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife Wendy.

I wish Schmidt was Secretary of State or maybe something like Secretary of the next US-collaboratively sculpted global network. He's such a 21st century Dean Acheson who simultaneously sees trends and knows what has to happen with national and international institutions. He's kind of like Bill Clinton in the sense that his DNA will not allow him not to keep bubbling over with fascinating ideas on how the world is evolving and how these developments could be channeled.

I'm not saying this to be nice to Schmidt. In fact, it only hurts me when I am generous to him. He once said years ago when the New America Foundation was evolving from its earliest stages when my friend Ted Halstead had hatched us that if "Ted and Steve don't piss me off every three months with the stuff they do, then we'll have to fire them." Anyone in the non-profit industry knows how valuable board members are who actually encourage constructive risk-taking rather than the incessant risk-aversion that characterizes many of these organizations.

I met Kristin Davis and Cynthia Nixon and had great chats -- that I think were helped forward with Darren Star doing the intros. Andrew Shue was there as was his sister Elizabeth Shue who was approachable and really into policy issues with her talented husband, Davis Guggenheim, who produced and directed An Inconvenient Truth, who has what I hear from Newsweek's Jonathan Alter is a documentary on education, Waiting for Superman, coming out in the fall that will really shake the foundations of America's thinking about children and the opportunities we are and are not giving them in our anachronistic educational institutions.

Guggenheim got me pretty choked up when he told me about a couple of the vignettes of five students he follows as they work with their parents to make school choices - and when one young man and lots of other kids and their families are watching by lottery whether they are sent to a school where 98% of the graduates go to college vs. a school where nearly no one does -- and where kids drop out, are killed, get into drugs, and the like.

This is the kind of night that I would have liked to stay at until the sun came up. I could listen to Jonathan Alter, Davis Guggenheim and Elizabeth Shue all night. Yes, there was glitz -- but we were learning something about the educational mess this country still faces - and that made the connection between Hollywood and the political world here worth all of this.

Finally, or nearly finally, I decided that my favorite actor I met the entire night was Zach Galifianakis -- who introduced a young cool guy to me as his husband, though he wasn't. Galifianakis is just comfortable with himself and the guy is smart -- sort of honestly blunt but inquisitive. He asked me a lot about the meltdown of the Republican Party and why Republicans seemed to be making suicidal choices rather than picking "George Will-types" to save the party.

Galifianakis, the hilarious fourth in the half billion dollar earning film, The Hangover, really likes George Will (who I often do as well) -- but engaged some of us in a chat about politics, political personalities, and why trends were moving as they were. I have a lot of time for him -- and learned that the sequel to Hangover will start filming in the fall.

Galifianakis also told me that it's tough to urinate near a tiger that is just a few inches a way on a dinky leash -- and that the shot with Mike Tyson throwing a massive fist blow at his face took 45 takes.

There's more that I could add -- but what I wanted to convey beyond all of the indulgence of VIP lists, select tables, black tie and gown, meet and greet stuff at this gathering is that there were real moments of serious policy and political discussion that were not trivial.

I discussed Middle East policy, US-Cuba travel, China issues, the international economy, the choices David Petraeus faces in the future, President Obama's performance and his team, Russia, arms control, education policy, Af/Pak stuff -- lots of Af/Pak stuff, Iran, Don't Ask Don't Tell and gay marriage, Brazil and a global governance I participated in there with Senators, Congressmen, senior White House officials, Ambassadors, and Hollywood directors and stars.

When Jay Leno had finally given up trying to get laughs (this is payback for his once including me in a top ten list of people with the "worst hair" on C-Span), Darren Star and I walked through trying to find his friend Dana Delany (who I need to thank again for the ride to the Vanity Fair party), I introduced Darren to Wolf Blitzer -- who turns out has known Darren and his parents forever. Blitzer looked at Darren and then me. And then he pointed out waving his finger across the audience and said, "Darren Star -- from when he was a little kid -- Brilliant, just brlliant. . .ten times more brilliant than any of the folks in this room."

Blitzer is probably right -- though adding Josh Marshal, McDonough, Brzezinski, and Scowcroft to the table with Darren probably made it one of the higher octane collectives in the house.

Thanks to Josh Marshall and Talking Points Memo, the Atlantic Monthly team, Newsweek and Lally Weymouth, the New Yorker and David Remnick (who hosted one of the best parties I've been to the night before at the W Hotel), CNN/Time (who had another great reception) Vanity Fair and Bloomberg, Tamara Haddad and her husband Ted Greenberg -- and MSNBC (indirectly) as well as many great friends interspersed through all of this for an incredible weekend.

-- Steve Clemons

Academy Award winning director Alex Gibney -- who is in town and will be attending the White House Correspondents Dinner tonight as a guest of the Washington Post -- is in release mode for his next big documentary achievement, Casino Jack and the United States of Money, that doesn't just focus on the shenanigans of Jack Abramoff but puts a glaring spotlight on the Congressional and political enablers -- on both sides of the aisle -- of financial sector corruption.

The film opens in theaters on May 7th.

Gibney is a truth-teller, and his films cut through the obfuscation that Washington tries to cloak around most important policy issues.

The video piece above has some compelling clips from the film showing compelling commentary from director Alex Gibney as well as Thomas Frank, author of The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule and Melanie Sloan of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

Until I saw Gibney's clip, I had no idea that hedge fund managers only pay a 15% tax on their income -- because the income they make is considered "capital gains" -- even though it is NOT THEIR MONEY they are investing.

The so called "hedge fund" loophole costs the government $6.3 billion a year -- which the film notes equals "the cost of providing health care to 3 million children."

Gibney's Taxi to the Dark Side is one of the most important films ever in documenting for American history -- forever -- the horrible impunity that America unleashed in secret prisons, indefinite detentions, extraordinary rendition and the like under the direction of Vice President Dick Cheney and his chief architect of kafkaesque national security policy, David Addington.

I will be attending the White House Correspondents Dinner tonight as well, as a guest of Joshua Marshall of Talking Points Memo, where I have just been brought on as editor-at-large.

-- Steve Clemons