Happily Noted: The UN Makes Harry Potter Go 'Round Posted by Heather Hurlburt

What have international organizations done for America lately?  I am not making up this excerpt from the UN's daily briefing:

DELIVERY OF HARRY POTTER BOOKS A FEAT FOR WORLD POSTAL SERVICES

• The Universal Postal Union (UPU) is also joining Potter-Mania as millions of copies of the seventh and final Harry Potter novel will go on sale July 21.
  

• The UPU – the primary forum of cooperation between Posts—says that never before in the history of the postal service, will postmen and women the world over have delivered so many identical books on the same day.

Wizardly thanks to the young-at-heart Potter fan in sunny CA who pointed this out to me.

Sadly Noted: We Are "Done" With Iraq, and with its suffering people too Posted by Heather Hurlburt

Remember a while back when an outcry went up about how few Iraqi refugees the US was admitting?  Then the US pledged to take 25,000, a whopping one percent, of the 2.2 million estimated to need resettlement?

We were supposed to resettle 7,000 in FY '07 (which ends in September), but the US recently announced we would only process 2,000 by then.  Only 133 have made it into the country so far, apparently thanks mostly to the careful work of the Department of Homeland Security.

Warren, Michigan (an industrial city outside Detroit) has a large population of Iraqi Chaldean Christians.  It made the Money Magazine top 100 places to live in the US last year.  It also has a lot of unemployed former industrial workers in a state with the highest unemployment rate in the country.  Many of the Iraqis applying to come here have family there.  Although the Administration pledged to spread refugees around the country, local civic and religious groups have begun gearing up to welcome the newcomers.

Not the Mayor of Warren, who this week sent out a news release claiming that 15,000 Iraqis were coming to "unfairly burden" Warren and neighboring Sterling Heights.  (Interestingly, the good people of Sterling Heights seem to be coping just fine.)

The press release that Warren's Congressman, long-serving Democrat Sander Levin, put out in response is quite an indictment both of how little the US is actually doing on refugee resettlement and how viciously Warren Mayor Steenbergh seems to have distorted that pathetic reality.  How many refugees are expected in Michigan in the coming weeks?  90.  How many of those are expected in Warren and Sterling Heights combined?  45.

Kudos to Levin and shame on us. Not just on Mayor Steenbergh and his fear-mongering, but all of us who don't live where employment is 6.9 percent and no new jobs are coming soon, who talk and think about Iraq being "over" like pulling a tooth or driving away from a traffic jam. 

"Mission Completion!" Posted by Moira Whelan

Those with children will get the reference to Little Einsteins. But the Little Einsteins in the White House aren’t measuring up to Disney’s young problem solvers, and frankly are not doing their Republican friends in Congress any favors.

Republicans should be getting the message that if they want “Mission Completion!” to be shouted from the rooftops, they need Tevo, the Disney Channel, and their Favorite Rocket Ship, because they’re not going to get it from the White House.

 

What the Baker-Hamilton Commission Could Do Next Posted by Heather Hurlburt

Trying to use the phenomenal popularity of the Baker-Hamilton Commission (itself very astutely feeding off the phenomenal popularity of the 9-11 Commission) to stand in for strong action on troop withdrawal, Senators Ken Salazar (D-CO) and Lamar Alexander (R-TN) put forward a proposal, now apparently dead, for a "Baker-Hamilton II" to propose a way forward in Iraq.

I'd like to see something a little different:  ask the Baker-Hamilton wise folks to go back to work and give us a dispassionate, bipartisan estimate of how Congress can start now, and the next Administration can continue, to clean up the damage the Iraq war has done to our national interests in the Middle East, our position in world public opinon, our military preparedness, and our core national values.

I doubt they'd come up with a sadder, tighter statement of the problem than this piece by Timothy Garton Ash from the LA Times, "Iraq hasn't even begun."  But having bipartisan agreement on the dimensions of the problem -- and bipartisan recommendations on what to do about it -- might do a lot to move some issues off the dime in a closely-divided Congress and past the veto pen of this White House.  It would also prepare the ground and make things easier for the next President, whomever s/he may be.

Just a thought.

Homeland, anyone? Posted by Moira Whelan

Fran Townsend has worked herself into a lather over the last few days to exploit the connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Townsend’s circular logic on the issue isn’t sitting well with the national security community, most notably, Richard Clarke. He argues in an op-ed today that we learned a great deal from the NIE by what WAS’T in the report.

I’d like to take it a step further. We learned a lot about how our homeland is prepared by what Townsend has never said. In all of her comments, our White House Homeland Security Director failed to call on Republicans in Congress to dislodge the 9-11 legislation and homeland security appropriations bills that have been languishing in Congress because Republicans are standing in the way.

Sen. Lindsey Graham on Terrorists, Criminals, and Warriors Posted by David Shorr

Some of the things Sen. Lindsey Graham said Monday on Morning Edition about the habeas corpus debate are worth parsing. Here is my own transcription:

Everybody will have their day in court, but I am not going to sit on the sidelines and watch this war be criminalized. These are not common criminals; they’re accused of being warriors, involved in a global war And I think our military is best equipped to determine who is part of the enemy force, and the judges in our courts will be able to review military decisions in terms of whether it’s [inaudible].

Hearing the phrase "accused of being warriors" from a reserve officer and military lawyer struck me as very odd, and it's a good illustration of the war on terror's distorting politics. Let's set aside the questions of when the accused will get their day in court and the proper relationship between the military and civilian justice systems. The question of whether terrorists should be considered criminals or warriors is itself very important.

Sen. Graham stresses that terrorists are worse than merely criminals, they're warriors (which has it backwards, from my reading of military tradition). Why is he so intent on this?

Pulling an All-Nighter Posted by Moira Whelan

Hi all. Moira Whelan, here. I do the communications for the National Security Network. I’ll be blogging periodically.

 I wanted to start tonight by posting this pic of the vigil going on outside the Capitol right now as the Senate filibuster is underway.  More than 150 events are taking place throughout the country as well.

 I hope to post on things on the Senate floor and about the events tonight if anything pops up.

In the meantime, check this out. The Republican buzz phrases don’t seem to have changed, and sadly, neither has their policy.

What do we do with 23,000 Iraqi Detainees Posted by Ilan Goldenberg

For a long time human rights advocates have been up in arms over Guantanamo.  However, we’re actually facing a much uglier situation today in Iraq.  Alex Barker and Demetri Sevastopulo at the FT report (Sorry subscription only) that American forces are currently detaining 23,000 people in Iraq without any kind of due process. 

The U.S. government can’t exactly let them go because a lot of these detainees are dangerous people.  On the other hand, giving over a prison population, which is 86% Sunni, to a Shi’a dominated government in the middle of a civil war doesn’t exactly strike me as a good idea.  However, if American forces are going to eventually leave they’ll have to figure out what to do with all these guys.  Apparently our government is already on it.   Barker and Sevastopulo report:

The US has spent several years attempting to get the Iraqi government to assume responsibility for the detainees, but has missed its own targets for the transition. Pressure is growing to resolve the problem, but such a move would amount to an unprecedented transfer of prisoners from a western power to a weak, sectarian government presiding over what most experts have concluded is a civil war.

Let freedom ring.

What Should We Do About Political Islam? Posted by Shadi Hamid

Michael van der Galien at The Moderate Voice (an excellent new blog, by the way) wrote a very thoughtful post a couple weeks ago in response to my recent piece in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas on the US and political Islam.

It’s interesting; the author begins by calling me a “neorealist” because I “reject traditional realism, which sometimes advocates working with/supporting dictators and, instead, advocate that the US should accept reality as it is: Islamist movements are very popular in the Middle East, and it is in the best interest to work with them as much as possible - especially with the moderate elements in Islamist movements.” That’s as good a summary as any. And, yes, this is about honoring and promoting our ideals abroad by supporting democracy and democrats in the Middle East, but doing so without rose-colored glasses. We must see the Middle East not as we’d like it to be, but as it is - and that means accepting some hard facts – that liberals and secularists are nonexistent, as far as organized constituencies go, and that mainstream, nonviolent Islamist parties will play a major role in the political evolution of their respective countries.

We have two choices – we can either seek to "destroy" political Islam or we can learn to live with it, and perhaps even work it to further both our interests and ideals. The former is not a viable option, for what I hope are obvious reasons. That leaves some type of accommodation as the only possibility.

Anyway, back to Michael’s comments. He mentions a few “mistakes” that I make in the article. He says, “Hamid believes that Islamists will moderate their stances/policies once they are in power." Michael takes issue with this. Well, my argument is more that the mainstream Islamists in question have already moderated, to the point where they meet (and have met, for some time) two clear standards – unequivocal renunciation of violence, and a publicly-stated commitment to the democratic process.

In any case, it is by no means guaranteed that Islamists will further moderate once in power. In fact, they will likely advocate certain “hardline” policies which we as Americans will disagree with. But with the right combination of engagement, dialogue, carrots, sticks, inducements, and incentives, the US and its allies can help fashion a political context, under which Islamist moderation will become more likely.