Partnership for a Secure America is pleased to announce the participants of its Congressional Fellowship Program Spring 2010 Session. These 25 Fellows are drawn from the personal offices or Committees of 12 Senators and 13 Representatives from across the political spectrum.

The Fellows come to the Congressional Fellowship Program from diverse educational and professional backgrounds including military, political campaigns, think tanks, journalism, the legal practice and international service organizations. To view the full list of Fellows, click here.

It is a good thing that that Liz Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, never tried to enlist in the U.S. military. Judging by her recent actions it appears she would never be able to say the oath of enlistment with a straight face. I mean the part where one swears to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution, which includes little things like subsequent amendments, such as those in the Bill of Rights.

What I refer to is when she and Bill Kristol, via their “Keep America Safe“ campaign, accused nine lawyers in the Justice Department, who had represented Guantanamo detainees of being the “al-Qaida Seven,” of working in the “Department of Jihad,” Perhaps Cheney and Kristol are simply exercising their First Amendment right to say anything that gets them on a talk show. After all, the right to cynically accuse someone of being a terrorist is protected under the Constitution. Unfortunately, for the rest of us, in so doing they trample underfoot other Constitutional rights that benefit all of us.

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On Tuesday, PSA Advisory Board member and chairman of the 9/11 commission Thomas Kean, along with 9/11 commission senior counsel John Farmer Jr., published an op-ed in The New York Times on what must be done in the aftermath of the attempted Christmas Day bombing.  Gov. Kean and Mr. Farmer called the thwarted attack a “systemic failure” to effectively analyze available intelligence.  Therefore, they insist that:

“First, we should dismiss the partisan bickering over the issue. Both parties have presided over security failures and successes; systemic failures cannot be ascribed to the stewardship of a political party.  Any effort to take partisan advantage of this unfortunate event, moreover, can only mask the more serious underlying issues, which President Obama raised squarely in yesterday’s remarks: are lapses in information gathering and sharing like those that occurred here endemic, or fixable?”

What Congress and the administration really must ask themselves, they say, is “whether the system we have in place has reduced the likelihood of human error to an acceptable, if not irreducible, margin.”  Gov. Kean and Mr. Farmer say that finding the solutions to the lingering failures of 9/11 that led to the 12/25 attempted attack require that President Obama and Congress “resist superficial sound-bite solutions and undertake the harder task of reinventing our national security system.”  Human error and an “element of judgment” will always exist in intelligence, but partisanship will only impede the procedural and structural changes necessary to prevent another systemic breakdown like the one that occurred on Christmas Day.

Click here to watch an interview of Gov. Kean
speaking about the importance of bipartisanship

Ted Sorensen, former White House Special Counsel to President John F. Kennedy, came to Washington last week to meet with PSA Congressional Fellows and speak at a briefing on Capitol Hill. Sorensen kicked off the PSA Congressional Fellowship Program alumni series with a private lunch for Fellowship alums, where he spoke about his personal experiences as a young Hill staffer in Washington. Sorensen explained the need for PSA’s Fellowship program, saying that “showing young staffers new to Washington that the other side is not necessarily the enemy, they don’t wear horns, they can be nice folks and come to agreement on issues that are important to the country as a whole; I think that’s very important.”

Later that afternoon, Sorensen appeared on a panel with Ambassador Thomas Graham at a Security for a New Century briefing on nuclear non-proliferation on Capitol Hill. Both Sorensen and Graham expressed the need for a significant reduction in nuclear arsenals around the world.

Prior to the briefing, Mr. Sorensen sat down with PSA for an interview where he spoke about the impact of bipartisanship over the course of his long and distinguished career in Washington:

In keeping with the PSA’s charter, we’re seeing bipartisan consensus emerging around U.S. policy in Afghanistan. The bad news? There are actually two bipartisan consensuses.

Technically, that is impossible. Consensus means “general agreement” or “a view reached by a group as a whole” so there can’t really be more than one.

And that is the problem. So long as the right is fighting the right, and others on the left are fighting the left, policymakers will be inclined to focus on other policy issues, content to let Afghan policy drift, and hope for a miraculous turnaround (e.g. Karzai becomes less corrupt and more competent; the Afghan economy begins to produce something other than opium; the Pashtuns decide to make common cause with the Tajiks, Turkmen and Hazara; Afghan men decide that Afghan women should have rights, etc). Our men and women in uniform, engaged increasingly in armed social work are caught in the middle while the pointy-heads pull on their respective chins.

Certain leading voices on the right agree with others on the left that we must redefine our ends in Afghanistan, and begin exploring ways to draw down the military presence there. My colleagues Malou Innocent and Ted Galen Carpenter have just completed a comprehensive study making this case (you can get a preview here), and will present it for the first time at Cato on Monday, September 14th.

A familiar group of hawks and neocons dismiss such sentiments as defeatist bordering on treasonous. Others suggest that talk of withdrawal is simply premature.

The debate got a jolt this week when George Will’s Tuesday column in the Washington Post declared that it was “Time to Get Out of Afghanistan.”

News of the Will column broke late Monday night. Bill Kristol — tipped off, no doubt, by the Post‘s editors who agree with him — had his response ready by 9 am.

The salient question: Would the GOP follow Will or Bill? By 4 pm, we had our answer when Michael Steele and the RNC weighed in…on Kristol’s side.

There is a debate on the left as well. George Will’s position echoes a stance adopted by Sen. Russ Feingold last month, and repeated this morning on NPR (with Rep. Jim McGovern). But scholars at the left-leaning Center for New American Security and the Brookings Institution have joined forces with those from AEI and CSIS in recent weeks to make the case for increasing the commitment to Afghanistan, and explicitly discouraging any talk of withdrawal any time soon. (See, for example, this account by The Nation‘s Bob Dreyfuss.)

The public favors withdrawal. A CBS News poll found that 41 percent of Americans want “troops to start coming home, up from 33 percent in April and just 24 percent in February. Support for increasing the number of troops dropped from 39 percent in April to just 25 percent now.” A Washington Post/ABC News poll taken last month found that for the first time since they began asking the question, a majority of Americans no longer think the war in Afghanistan has been worth the costs.

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A very important development in Pakistan: Beitullah Mehsud is dead. The leader of the Pakistani Taliban was killed by a US strike drone. Mehsud was the driving force of a movement that was threatening the very fabric of Pakistani society and there is no doubt that the US and Pakistani government will be very happy that they successfully targeted him. There is still much work to be done to bring peace and security to Pakistan but this is a significant moment. The question for the morning is whether the US and Pakistani governments can build on recent military victories and win the peace via the hearts and minds of ordinary Pakistanis….in particular those in the tribal areas.

The Iranian people are putting the demos back in democracy.  Demos, or, to use the proper ancient Greek word, dēmos, stand for “The common people; the populace.”

By the way, Greek is a part of the Indo-European family of related languages now spoken on every continent on Earth. It includes most European languages along with the Indic and Iranian languages of Asia.

So it could be said that right now by virtue of their continuing demonstrations on the streets of Tehran and other cities that the Iranian people are the best examples of the ancient Greek democratic ideology, bar none.

Like many other people outside Iran I have been monitoring the coverage of the protests over the fraudulent results of Iran’s presidential election. And with all due respect to my fellow blogger Brian Vogt’s post on the subject there can be no doubt that the announced results were a fraud, as in blatantly rigged.

When I watch a YouTube video of a young Iranian woman daring to kick a body armored security force goon and then being repeatedly hit by a baton afterward my heart goes out to her and all the people in Iran confronting the forces of tyranny.

As I write this the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran reported that numerous Iranians beaten and injured by security forces as they tried to stage peaceful demonstrations have been arrested and detained when they sought medical treatment in hospitals.

The question is what can people outside Iran do about it? (more…)

Obama and Shultz at the White House on May 19 (AP photo)

At a meeting Tuesday with former Secretaries of State George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, former Senator Sam Nunn (D-GA), and former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry, President Obama summed up the group’s deliberations on the goal of achieving a world without nuclear weapons:

“This is a reminder of the long tradition of bipartisan foreign policy that has been the hallmark of America at moments of greatest need, and that’s the kind of spirit that we hope will be reflected in our administration.”

It’s great to hear this from the President who also made “bipartisanship and openness” an official plank in his campaign platform, and now identifies it as a key to effective US national security and foreign policy for his Administration.

You might think Obama’s commitment to bipartisan consultation and cooperation on national security would win nothing but plaudits from a group of former leaders obviously assembled not just for their substantive expertise, but for their bipartisan credibility. So then what are we to make of George Shultz’s reply, in the role of spokesman for the elder statesmen? Not once, but twice, the former Reagan administration official remarked that President Obama was wrong about nuclear disarmament being a “bipartisan issue,” because:

“It’s really nonpartisan. This is a subject that ought to somehow get up above trying to get a partisan advantage. And it’s of such importance that we need to take it on its own merits. And that’s the way we’ve proceeded. And that’s the way, at least it seems to us, you’ve proceeded.”

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After the House passed the stimulus bill without a single Republican vote last month, many declared the age of bipartisanship under the Obama Administration over.  How quickly the pundits and the talking heads who hailed the bipartisanship of the new President trumpeted its demise.

So, is President Obama bipartisan or isn’t he?  Everyone wants the answer and they want it now.  The media is tracking bipartisanship as if it can be quantified issue by issue and moment to moment.  This betrays a fundamental misunderstanding about what bipartisanship is and why it is important.

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“Bipartisan” surely won first place last week in the top ten of sound bites. Some congressmen spoke out on the issue with surprising candor: Apparently the lack of bipartisanship is making our elected officials melancholic. In a NY Times article, Carl Hulse quotes Senator Martinez (R, Florida) as saying:

I think there are some aspects of Senate life that haven’t been fun the last couple of years, which have to do with the acrimony and lack of getting things done,” said Senator Mel Martinez, the Florida Republican who announced this year that he would not seek a second term. “It is not fatal to the institution, it has been here a long time, but there are a lot of people leaving.

Acrimony? Lack of getting things done? And who is to blame, Mr Martinez? Apparently not the senators themselves, since Mr Martinez goes on to say:

… another factor is the incessant fund-raising needed to generate the money to run for the chance to win and raise more money to run again.

Then there are the politically charged message votes, the impossible-to-please interest groups, the strain on family, the angry constituents, the uninformed critics and the intensifying news media scrutiny.

Mr Martinez is right: serving the people under these circumstances doesn’t sound like much fun. It would serve the senate well to start thinking of ways to reform itself to avoid human hemorrhaging. For starters, it could try less acrimony.