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

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

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

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

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

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

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

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

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

-- Steve Clemons

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

-- Steve Clemons

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

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

Despite the difficulties, UN agencies report that they have been active on the ground. The UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) says it has begun setting up "child-friendly spaces" in camps where people are sheltering, to ensure that children receive care and protection. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is using boats and vehicles to provide immediate assistance to people in 19 locations in the affected area. The World Food Programme (WFP) has reached 27,000 people in the Irrawaddy delta with crucial food supplies and the World Health Organization (WHO) has deployed experts to support Government relief efforts and to supply emergency health kits.

Also troubling is Hiatt's apparent misunderstanding of the emerging Responsibility to Protect norm. A bit of background: R2P was adopted at the 2006 World Summit. It's a complex concept and that boils down to two core principles. First, governments have a responsibility to protect their own people from grave crises. Second, the international community has a responsibility to protect populations that have been neglected or abused by their governments.

Unfortunately, Hiatt (like some others), seems to equate this principle with an international obligation to trample over the sovereignty of Myanmar in one fell swoop. It would be a disaster if R2P were first operationalized in the form of a hastily arranged military intervention in Myanmar, both for the Burmese people, for whom such an intervention could just as easily exacerbate the crisis as bring relief, and for the promise of the R2P concept, which actually outlines out a set of diplomatic and humanitarian options that are intended to avert a military showdown and preserve national sovereignty. For R2P to really grow in importance in a positive way, military intervention must be a last resort. Ivo Daalder and Paul Stares get R2P right, when they prescribe more diplomatic pressure and potential air drops of relief supplies. And while Michael O'Hanlon doesn't explicitly reference R2P, he makes a smart call for a "Chapter 6 and a half" resolution under the Charter.

Ironically, many of the folks clamoring for the UN to brush aside the regimes in Khartoum and Naypyidaw are also convinced that the UN poses a threat to U.S. national sovereignty. And so many people lamenting the slow deployment and other imitations of UN peacekeeping aren't outraged by (and often support) our policy of chronically underfunding missions that we authorize in the Security Council.

Any international response needs to be strong, but measured. And once we choose our course, we had better be prepared to pony up -- financially and diplomatically -- to make sure the job gets done right.

-- Scott Paul

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

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

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

By seizing Beirut and then handing it over to the army -- which all sides in Lebanon considered to be a neutral force -- Hezbollah showed it had the upper hand, and effectively cornered the government with an ultimatum: accept our demands or face civil war.

Hezbollah's swift takeover of Beirut, which happened in less than 48 hours last week, has stunned many Lebanese citizens as well as observers around the world and delivered a humiliating blow to the Washington-backed government here.

The fighting erupted after the Lebanese government announced it would shut down Hezbollah's telecommunications network and remove one of its allies as the head of airport security. Saturday, the Lebanese army announced those decisions would be suspended, a precondition to a truce from Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

Mr. Nasrallah also has demanded that the government give in to the opposition's terms and end the political deadlock that has gripped Lebanon for 18 months. Hezbollah withdrew from the government in December 2006, followed by all Shiites and a Christian party. Hezbollah says it should be given enough seats in the legislature to guarantee it veto power if it is to return with the other opposition parties and resume government business.

Prime Minister Fuad Siniora said his cabinet would meet soon to decide on the matters.

-- TWN Staff

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

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

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

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

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

--Sameer Lalwani

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

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

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

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

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

-- Steve Clemons

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

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

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

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

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

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

According to Amal Saad Ghorayeb, an expert on Shiite movements and on Lebanon, until recently attached to the Carnegie Center for International Peace Middle East Center: "US policy in Lebanon is underpinned by an overarching US Middle East strategy of reconfiguring the political map of the Middle East as we know it, aka, the "New Middle East" plan, formerly the "Greater Middle East Initiative" officially unveiled by Condi Rice at the start of the July War. The tactics change but the strategy remains the same: both in its earlier (promoting democracies) and most recent (supporting autocracies) incarnations. US strategy seeks political,military and economic domination of the region, while ensuring the security of Israel. Its chosen instrument for implementing this strategy is the "moderate"US-friendly client Arab regime.

Given its dissatisfaction with the results of democratic elections in the region, the Bush administration continues to support autocratic regimes in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, while de-democratizing existing democracies in Lebanon and Palestine. In the latter case, it is cultivating the latest breed of democracy, "the democratic regime,"a new form of government which is popularly challenged, constitutionally disputed and derives its legitimacy from outside powers. The formation and preservation of regimes such as Siniora's (the Lebanese Prime Minister) has necessitated a US policy of promoting instability and national disunity, in short, a policy of"constructive instability."

The Americans thought that they could pick a proxy and get him to rule Lebanon. But Lebanon is too complicated for them, and they didn't know that no single group can rule Lebanon. The Americans along with their Saudi allies backed the creation of sectarian Sunni militias in Lebanon, some of whom were even trained in Jordan. Their ideology consisted of anti Shiite sectarianism. But these Sunni militiamen proved a complete failure, and America's proxies in Lebanon barely put up a fight, despite their strident anti Shiite rhetoric. Now it is clear that Beirut is firmly in the hands of Hizballah and nothing the Americans can do will dislodge or weaken this popular movement, just as they cannot weaken the Sadrists in Iraq or Hamas in Gaza.

Jordanian training, which was provided to the Sunni militias in Lebanon, the Fatah militias in Palestine and even Iraqi security forces, has proven inadequate. Note that in Iraq, the Iraqi security forces are either sectarian death squads or are unable to fight, and rely on the Americans.

Say what you will about Hizballah and its allies, whether you sympathize with them or oppose them, it is clear that they cannot be dislodged, that they are an integral part of Lebanon and the Middle East. They proved this when they won the war of 2006 and proved this once again yesterday when they dispatched pro American and Saudi militias with ease and seized control of Beirut.

If one dreams of a Hizballah without weapons, or a Hamas that does not engage in violent resistance, or any sort of peaceful resolution in the Middle East, then one has to begin at the beginning, with the Israeli occupation of Palestine (as well as a little bit of Syrian territory).

-- Nir Rosen

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

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

-- Steve Clemons

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

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

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

-- Steve Clemons

From G. John Ikenberry:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Essentially, I make three points.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-- G. John Ikenberry

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

-- Steve Clemons