Obama’s comprehensive speech covered a variety of topics, though he emphasized the United States would give its support to countries forming new democracies — specifically Egypt and Tunisia — and would protect Israeli security interests, while fostering tolerance of religious minorities in the Arab world.

However, the President also called for restoring the pre-1967 borders between Palestine and Israel, which met with some disagreement from certain lawmakers in Washington D.C.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), said he appreciated the President’s support of Israel as it “complements the goal of spreading freedom and peace in the region,” but was also critical of Obama’s idea to reinstate the borders between long-time foes Israel and Palestine.

“While the United States has a role to play in setting the stage for peace negotiations, we shouldn’t undermine this process by setting preconditions on Israel, as the President now has done,” Grassley said through a spokesman Thursday.

U.S. Rep. Leonard Boswell (D-Iowa), called Obama’s speech both “timely and comprehensive,” and said he agreed with Obama’s support of Egypt and Tunisia.

“The Middle East is changing, and I am hopeful that this progress will bring stability and peace to the region,” Boswell said through a spokesperson. “I was pleased that he addressed Arab-Israeli relations and the need for a two-state solution.”

Other legislators hope Obama’s stances will redefine U.S.-Arab relations and foreign policy in the Middle East.

“With the death of Osama bin Laden, it is time to get away from the ‘war on terror’ mentality that has driven so much of our policy, which I’ve never agreed with, and which puts great strain on our relations with Islamic nations,” Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) said through a spokesman.

Watch President Obama’s remarks below:

Since his announcement of an exploratory committee for a possible 2012 presidential campaign, former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum has been carving out a campaign platform that simultaneously paints President Barack Obama as a failed leader who has no faith in his nation while portraying himself as the hopeful successor whose belief in American “exceptionalism” will fix all the nation’s economic and national security issues.

“America in a nutshell is all about you, and you’re free,” Santorum said Thursday during a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where Santorum is a senior fellow and director of the EPPC’s Program to Protect America’s Freedom.

The bulk of Santorum’s speech –- dedicated entirely to his foreign policy stance –- focused on President Obama and his lack of faith in the American people.

“What I see is a consistent policy of leading from behind,” Santorum said, calling out the country’s handling of events in Libya and Syria as examples. “I don’t know if anybody can successfully lead from behind, particularly if you’re talking about deploying our military. … It’s clear to me that this president is trying to hide so that he doesn’t take political heat. This is a president that believes that our [former] policies were wrong and should be apologized for. And anyone who was complicit with us in our policies by their very nature is suspicious and therefore not to be trusted and not to be supported.”

Santorum asserted that thanks to Obama, America’s relationships with all of its traditional allies have worsened. He criticized Obama for not believing in American exceptionalism and recently making the argument that other nations also believe they are exceptional.

Watch Santorum responding to a question asking, “What is so wrong with having to say there are nations that are exceptional, too?”

“Open terrorism [has been] rewarded by this president,” Santorum said. “Our allies are seen by this administration as complicit with our past sins. … As for Libya it’s a morass. If we were going to support rebel forces we should have acted swiftly in the early days.”

He continued criticizing the administration on its continued reliance on foreign oil (“We need more liquid fuels here in America”), on sitting “idly by” in the face of drug-trafficking trends in Venezuela and for looking more and more like Europe (“Soft economic socialism is turning much of Europe into toothless tiger.”)

As for what he would do as president, Santorum suggested a 10-point plan to “reverse our course” and re-establish America’s greatness:

1. See the world the way it truly is: “See evil for what it is and confront it; see decency for what it is and nurture it.” This point involves increasing the country’s military preparedness, which Santorum expounded upon later in the talk, saying America should employ missile defenses.

“There’s some real threats to our country that nobody talks about that I believe are serious electromagnetic pulses … something that could be debilitating to our country,” he said. “There’s no reason not to protect us from such an ominous and consequential threat. And that’s just one missile threat.”

2. Understand that America is in a war. “The failure to define our foes lest we be politically correct does not dissuade them.”

3. Reinvigorate human intelligence in the Middle East. Santorum spoke at length about the need to fight Sharia law, which he sees infiltrating this country:

4. Change foreign policy abroad to promote freedom, equality and democracy.

5. Cease our verbal diplomatic model as good and evil

6. Support conditions of liberty abroad.

7. Resume America’s commitment to humanitarian aid in Africa. Santorum, who helped author a global AIDS bill during President George W. Bush’s term, said that thanks to this policy, there are now more than 200,000 babies in Africa who don’t have AIDS. “This is what I call pro-life foreign policy,” he said. But Santorum said his focus on giving money to fight AIDS in Africa is primarily a national security policy. “States that are dysfunctional … particularly in that area of the world which borders … large Islamic populations, is a breeding ground for terrorists and state sponsors of terrorists. When your population’s being decimated by a disease, it’s very hard to be a successful economic enterprise as a state. … Given the enormity of our budget, it’s a relatively small amount of money, and I think it has been a great investment not just in keeping these states from becoming terrorist havens and state based sponsors of terrorists but in fact promoting the very ideals of who America is.”

8. America must stand by Israel.

9. Work for the release of dissidents in foreign prisons jailed for their beliefs.

10. Restore the teaching of America in school, establishing “youth-informed patriotism.”

Santorum said it is time for America to resume its role as a world leader, and he blamed the current president for kowtowing to the United Nations.

“The world has no leadership,” Santorum said after quoting Pope John Paul II, “Freedom itself needs to be set free.”

The statement, translated from Spanish, reads:

In connection with information reported by numerous American and Mexican media outlets on an operation called “Fast and Furious,” conducted by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) of the U.S. Justice Department, the Secretary of Foreign Affairs states the following:

1. Detailed information on this matter has been requested from American authorities.

2. The Mexican Government will follow with special interest the investigations announced by both ATF and the Department of Justice.

3. The aim of the governments of Mexico and the U.S. is to stop the trafficking of firearms on a basis of shared responsibility and to both work to strengthen bilateral cooperation in the field. The Presidents of Mexico and the United States endorsed this priority on March 3rd in Washington, D.C.

The reference to “Fast and Furious” reflects a CBS News report from last week confirming that the project was not just informal policy within the ATF, but that it was fully authorized by the Department of Justice and even given an official name: “Fast and Furious.”

The statement comes at a time when relations between the U.S. and Mexico have ostensibly become slightly less strained after a ratcheting up of tension in recent years over skyrocketing drug cartel-related violence near the border. According to Mexican officials, around 35,000 people in Mexico have died in drug-related violence since December 2006, and while the U.S. is hardly the only source of illegal guns in the country, Mexican officials cannot be happy with a program that saw a U.S. government agency encourage the flow of guns into Mexico. Presidents Obama and Calderón held a joint press event last week in Washington at which they vowed to redouble efforts to mitigate violence in the border region and to end a years-long impasse over cross-border trucking that resulted in retaliatory food tariffs from Mexico, the U.S.’s second largest import market.

Though the Foreign Ministry’s statement alludes to this cooling off, it remains to be seen whether Mexico will be satisfied with the American government’s level of cooperation or the comprehensiveness of the ATF and DOJ internal investigations. Attorney General Eric Holder authorized a preliminary investigation of the practice last week.

Florida Iraq War veteran Allen West (R), who is running against Rep. Ron Klein (D-Fla.), called Obama’s handling of the situation “immature.” He said, “I really do think it’s a very tragic thing that Gen. McChrystal was released. When I go back in history and look at some of the confrontations between American generals and American presidents, this is a very minor thing.” West, whom Sarah Palin endorsed as an “American hero” on her Facebook page, had a tenure in Iraq that wasn’t without its own share of drama.

Meanwhile, former Colorado Lt. Governor Jane Norton, who is running for the Senate seat currently held by Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), used the occasion to take a few swipes at President Obama’s foreign policy in a press release:

Major strategic grievances shouldn’t be aired in Rolling Stone, but General McChrystal was dead right on one critical and alarming point: the Obama Administration’s foreign policy drips of inconsistency, timidity, and lack of a will to win. The Obama Administration is committed to a withdrawal date, not to victory. General Petraeus was an unquestionably shrewd choice, and the fate of the war in Afghanistan and the broader War on Terror hangs on whether he can convince the White House to show real resolve and steel in prosecuting this fight. Let’s hope this move sharpens the White House’s focus on implementing a strategy to win.

The response from Republicans in Congress couldn’t be more different. House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) — who earlier justified McChrystal’s comments in Rolling Stone by saying the general must be “frustrated” with Obama — supported the president’s decision and said it was “his alone.” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said on “Good Morning America” Thursday, “It’s completely understandable why the president made the decision that he did, based on the civilian-military relationship that goes a long way back.” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said, “There are lines you cannot cross in the military. … David Petraeus is our best hope.”

Gen. Petraeus is expected to win easy Senate confirmation next week for his new role as top commander in Afghanistan.

President Barack Obama on Wednesday (epa/ZUMApress.com)

A year after President Obama’s speech in Cairo vowing to reset relations with the Muslim world, Muslims worldwide are telling pollsters about their disillusionment with what they consider unfulfilled expectations.

According to the Pew Center’s new survey of global attitudes (PDF), released Thursday morning, citizens of Muslim nations report disproportionate antipathy to Obama’s foreign policy. With the exception of Indonesia, where Obama spent a portion of his childhood, Muslims are the exceptions to the Pew poll’s findings that eighteen months of the Obama administration have seen a surge of international support for the United States after the public-opinion troughs of the Bush administration.

[Security1] “The Pew results reflect growing dissatisfaction with Obama’s policies, as many Arabs and Muslims are disappointed that Obama has not lived up to his promises, especially on the Arab-Israeli conflict,” said Marc Lynch, a George Washington University professor and the co-author of a recent Center for a New American Security report measuring Obama’s global engagement efforts. “They don’t see his actions matching his words, and until they do then it isn’t likely that there will be a sustained recovery in America’s image.”

In Jordan, the U.S. approval rating has fallen to 21 percent. It’s at 17 percent, the lowest of any countries Pew surveyed, in Turkey, Egypt and Pakistan. And this comes after the Obama administration has presided over the largest non-military aid package to Pakistan — the $7.5 billion, five-year Kerry-Lugar-Berman bill — in history.

“Opposition to key elements of U.S. foreign policy remains pervasive,” Pew analyzes, “and many continue to perceive the U.S. as a potential military threat to their countries.”

The news is not universally negative. Nigerian Muslims give Obama a 70 percent approval rating, up from 61 percent in 2009. But they’re the outliers. In Egypt and Lebanon, Obama’s ascendance — and the departure of George W. Bush — elevated Muslim attitudes toward the U.S. somewhat: 25 percent of Egyptians reported favorable opinions of the U.S. in 2009, up from 20 percent a year earlier; Lebanese Muslims in 2008 had given the U.S. a 34 percent favorability rating, which rose to 47 percent in 2008. Now Egyptian Muslims have reverted to their pre-Obama 20 percent favorability rating. Lebanese Muslims have settled into a 39 percent favorability rating.

More ominous from the perspective of Obama’s Cairo speech, Muslims express a sentiment directly opposite the speech’s offer of partnership: They fear that the U.S. will attack them. Majorities, and sometimes large ones, of respondents in Egypt (56 percent), Lebanon (56 percent), Indonesia (76 percent), Pakistan (65 percent), Jordan (52 percent) and Turkey (56 percent) believe the U.S. is a potential military threat. That shouldn’t be surprising: Pakistan, despite being a Major Non-NATO Ally of the U.S., is currently battered in its tribal areas by CIA drone strikes, a step the U.S. has taken in response to what it considers insufficient Pakistani military action against al-Qaeda-aligned extremist groups. In Cairo, Obama pledged that the U.S. “is not, and never will be, at war with Islam,” but many Muslims worldwide believe that the U.S. still has them in its crosshairs.

Support for the Afghanistan war and U.S. counterterrorism efforts in Muslim countries is also anemic. Lebanon is the only Muslim country surveyed by Pew where even 20 percent believe that the U.S. should keep fighting in Afghanistan. (Neighboring Pakistan? Seven percent.) While support for U.S. counterterrorism efforts have grown in non-Muslim countries since Obama took office, it’s at 18 percent in Egypt, 12 percent in Jordan, and 47 percent among Nigerian Muslims.

Several counterterrorism experts believe the U.S.’s counterterrorism efforts will ultimately be hobbled if they run into a headwind of Muslim antipathy. Malcolm Nance, a retired veteran military intelligence officer who served in Iraq, Afghanistan and throughout the Middle East, argues in a new book that rather than attempt to change Muslim attitudes, a more productive strategy would involve moving the conversation to al-Qaeda’s apostasy. Nance code-names this approach CIRCUIT BREAKER, and writes in “An End to Al-Qaeda” that subjecting al-Qaeda to a “deep analytical dissection of their religious motives” can provide a path to “a new era for reconciliation and cooperation with the Muslim street.” It would also provide a platform for popular acquiescence to military or intelligence action against al-Qaeda — or at least limit blowback from it.

The administration appears to be attentive to the challenges, even if it hasn’t figured out a programmatic way to overcome them. Last month, the Pentagon quietly established a new office to ensure that military efforts don’t inadvertently undermine the administration’s broader promotion of the rule of law around the world.

Lynch, who also recently evaluated Obama’s counterterrorism efforts for CNAS partially through the prism of Muslim acquiescence, disputed that the Pew numbers demonstrate that Obama’s outreach to the Muslim world was in vain. “It’s more that he said he would do things, but thus far hasn’t delivered,” Lynch said, “so the words lose their meaning. It’s a real problem for the broader counterterrorism strategy, since winning over mainstream support is absolutely key to the strategy.”

Ben Rhodes, right, in the Oval Office with Director of Speechwriting Jon Favreau and President Obama (White House photo)

“We’re at an inflection point,” Ben Rhodes observed about the United States’ global outlook, a year and a half into the Obama presidency.

Rhodes speaks from a unique vantage point. He’s the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, a title that obscures his importance as one of President Obama’s closest and most influential foreign policy advisers. He’s been with Obama since the beginning of his presidential campaign, helping shape and explain the contours of Obama’s foreign policy. And he’s the author of the National Security Strategy of 2010, that policy’s foundational text.

[Security1] The Washington Independent spoke with Rhodes about the document, its implications for American national security, and the “inflection point” it addresses. A lightly edited transcript follows.

The Washington Independent: The National Security Strategy pledges, “We must pursue a rules-based international system that can advance our own interests by serving mutual interests.” How do you build a constituency in the U.S. for that, after decades of that system being caricatured — sometimes accurately — as ineffectual?

Ben Rhodes: The tradition in the United States is actually the opposite. Look at the moment of our maximum global power after World War II. We had a clean slate and we chose to build an architecture of international institutions, international standards, international rules, to include the United Nations, to include NATO, to include international financial institutions, treaties, and to apply our power to strengthening that architecture so that it could solve common problems. And I think there was basically a pretty broad, bipartisan consensus that America was served well by an international architecture that could keep the peace and advance prosperity. Sure, there was skepticism about it — there’s always some skepticism about the international order in parts of the American political culture — but I think there’s a broad tradition of support for that because I think the American people are smart enough to know that if we don’t act within that context, we bear a far greater burden ourselves.

TWI: So this is a matter of reminding people of what’s worked in the past.

Rhodes: We’re at an inflection point. We’re clear-eyed about the shortcomings. We’re not starry-eyed about the efficacy of the international system as it is today. As the president has said many times, it’s in some instances buckling under the weight of challenges it wasn’t designed for. However, that presents you with a choice. And that choice is you can say there are emerging challenges like terrorism, like nuclear proliferation, climate, a global economy that’s more interwoven. We can deal with those challenges by saying that the international system is fatally flawed and we’re going to step outside the lines and deal with these issues on our own on an ad-hoc basis. Or you can say we are going to channel our strength and influence to reshaping an international order where we can effectively deal with these challenges.

TWI: Secretary Clinton said at the Brookings Institution yesterday that the document’s main takeaway should be its assertion that American power is fundamentally tied to the sources of our strength domestically. But we’re still in the midst of extraordinarily challenging economic times, and there are parts of the dignity promotion section about food security, global health and priorities that previous strategies considered peripheral. Is the agenda too ambitious?

Rhodes: No, I don’t think so. We’re actually demonstrating this kind of collective action, in our first 15 months, that we’re trying to describe in the actual document. So international economic coordination can no longer be effectively implemented through the G-8, it’s got to be a broader spectrum of nations at the table, to include both China and India, but also your South Africas, your Brazils, your Indonesias, so it’s the G-20. Climate change can’t be dealt with simply by the Kyoto signatories. You’ve got to bring in all major economies, again, to include China, to include India. So that’s the framework we’ve tried to begin through the Major Economies Forum, through the Copenhagen Accord. It includes us, India, China. So we’re already trying to broaden the circle responsibility to deal with these challenges.

There is a rebalancing of the application of American resources that this administration is pursuing that we describe in the document. We’re rebalancing in terms of the capabilities that we apply to our problems, in the sense that we are prioritizing investments and factors like education, clean energy that have been under-resourced over the years. Our commitment to draw down in Iraq and our plans to go over the hump in Afghanistan will represent a long-term rebalancing of our military deployments, which obviously take up a good deal of resources. So we have already begun to see shifts in resources that we project over time.

The second and very important thing, and this gets back to your first question, is an international order that can successfully deal with challenges necessitates less of an allocation of American resources. You were talking about how you make your case to the American people. You make the case to the American people that collective action is far cheaper to America than unilateral action. I mean, that’s just a fact. And if you look at something like the Food Security Initiative, certainly it’s going to take resources, but we pursue that through the G-8 and into the G-20 to try to leverage greater international action.

Similarly, if you look at the thrust of the dignity promotion and the development policies, a lot of it is trying to see capacity in partners. So that we’ll focus development policy on the kind of economic and social progress that we see as a human rights issue as well as a security issue and a prosperity issue. But frankly, by focusing on building the capacity of our partners, we’re trying through our investments to see progress that will diminish the necessity of foreign assistance over time, insofar as we’re building up the ability of nations to not just combat individual diseases, but to develop their own public health systems. We’re not just trying to help them feed their people in a humanitarian emergency, but the premise of the Food Security Initiative is to help them develop the technique and technologies that will allow them feed themselves over time.

So I think again the burden sharing is a critical aspect of the kind of force multiplication that you can get, again, through an effective international order. Similarly, just as we want more responsible action by a broader circle of nations, we want more capable partners, so that over time that’s the means through which we’re managing these problems.

TWI: I noticed some similarities between the National Security Strategy and the Army/Marine Corps Field Manual on Counterinsurgency, from the focus on legitimacy of action; on taking responsibility for promoting dignity in at-risk populations; and in its recognition that too much hard power can be counterproductive. Did you draw on any of the counterinsurgency lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan when writing the document?

Rhodes: Yeah, absolutely. As the president alluded to at West Point, the war in Afghanistan today is very different in some ways than the war that began nine years ago, as it relates to the nature of the fight and the tactics of the enemy and the lessons that we’ve learned in the application of our power in Afghanistan. And certainly the same would be true in Iraq, that we ended up fighting a war that was different than the kind of war that we, that many people felt like we’d be fighting at the beginning.

So the lessons, I think, we all learned included the importance of the legitimacy of our actions, as it relates not just to the international community but most immediately from the populations of the countries within which we’re operating. So that certainly informs Gen. McChrystal’s approach in Afghanistan, but it informs, again, our approach more broadly, as it relates to Iraq and also other partners that we’re also going to be having to cooperate with on security issues going forward.

TWI: As a strategic communicator, what do you want someone living in Miran Shah, in the tribal areas of Pakistan, who might be caught between the Haqqani network and a government program to degrade that network, to get out of this document?

Rhodes: That the United States is not seeking to control events where they live. Nor do we view their future narrowly through a purely counterterrorism lens. In the first instance, we’re trying to develop the capability in their local area, as well as their national government, to manage the threats within their borders rather than the United States doing so. In the second instance, that we have a broader agenda. We want to speak to their aspirations. America cannot by itself deliver a better life, but it can tilt the scales, as it were, in the direction of greater opportunity, greater human dignity.

We don’t simply have a negative agenda. We have a positive agenda that is focused upon both the capacity of their institutions to manage problems, as well as the dignity that they seek in their own lives.

TWI: If, as the document says, the force of American values is foundational for guiding international cooperation, is there a tension with its embrace of indefinite detention without charge?

Rhodes: Let me take a step back and look at the issues that are touched by this.

We do believe that post-9/11 there were new realities that Americans were going to have to deal with as it related to terrorism and our response to it. Part of the problem is that we have not been able to, as a nation, forge sustainable, durable approaches to dealing with those issues that were effective and that were in line with our values. Now what we’re trying to wrestle with as an administration is the fact that we do need to recognize that there are unique threats that we’re now facing, but that we have to approach those threats and how we deal with them in line with certain principles. And what this administration has said is there may be circumstances where certain individuals who uniquely pose a threat that is demonstrable but that precludes criminal prosecution.

Now, we need to figure out a way to deal with this issue in a way that builds in oversight, that is not simply subject to the decisions of one person or the executive branch, but that is basically embedded in the principles of checks and balances, of oversight, of judicial review, that are at the core of our system. And as the document makes clear at the end, in some of these issues are going to take the actions of all three branches of government, because the executive branch alone can’t make these decisions. That’s been part of the problem in the past. So there needs to be buy-in from the executive branch and from the legislative branch and trying to forge a framework that, again, is durable, that can stand up to the test of our laws, that can protect our security and that, again, can be sustained for future administrations so that we’re not continuing to deal with these issues on an ad-hoc basis but rather within a framework that can absorb the threat of terrorism without overturning the principles of our system.

TWI: Do you expect the guy in Miran Shah to understand that?

Rhodes: I think so. If you are demonstrating that you’re affording rights to individuals and that you are operating within America’s system of checks and balances, of review and oversight, then that’s the case that you make. But I mean, that’s something that we still need to work at as a country. And again, that’s a responsibility that falls squarely on the executive branch but also falls on all three branches of government because this touched on very fundamental but new issues.

TWI: Peter Feaver, who helped write the 2006 NSS, blogged that he had some deja vu reading the 2010 version. His document called for “effective, action-oriented multilateralism to address the challenges of the day: to ‘strengthen alliances to defeat global terrorism and work to prevent attacks against us and our friends’ and to ‘develop agendas for cooperative action with the other main centers of global power.’” Is it fair to say there’s some overlap with the 2006 document?

Rhodes: I’d say a couple of things about that. Number one, there’s always certain forms of continuity in American foreign policy. Number two, there were approaches that were pursued in the latter years of the Bush administration that are certainly closer to the approaches that we’ve pursued than some of the decisions that were taken in the first years of the Bush administration.

But number three, there are also clear distinctions in the approaches that this administration has taken. I mean, I don’t think anybody could stack up the priorities that are embedded in this document as it relates to the focus on the domestic economy as a source of our strength in the world; as it relates to how we define our enemy as narrowly as “al Qaeda and its affiliates”; as it relates to our efforts to end the war in Iraq; as it relates to our focus on climate change and clean energy. I could kinda stack up a whole on a whole number of issues.

And that’s not even meant to be a criticism of Peter’s document, which I think is a good document. It’s meant to say that this document uniquely represents the worldview and the priorities of this president and this administration, which are different in some respects from the previous administration. And I also do think that, again, the cooperative approaches that we’re trying to foster are ones that we believe do represent more specifically the challenges of our times: the global economy, the focus we place on our nonproliferation agenda, the centerpiece of our efforts to apply pressure to nations like Iran. So, you know, I think that, sure, there are areas of continuity in American foreign policy, areas of continuity to, again, the latter years of the Bush administration, and then there are areas of increased distinction and different priorities that are natural to any worldview.

TWI: Finally, one of the criticisms I’ve seen of the National Security Strategy is that it doesn’t prioritize amongst its wide-ranging goals. As a foundational text across the national security bureaucracy, how will the government know how to implement the document?

Rhodes: Within the document you have a clear sense of the focus of the administration and how that relates to resource allocation. We’ve sent pretty clear signals about areas that are going to be prioritized going forward, while also recognizing the limits of what any one nation can do around town. Which again gets to some of the rebalancing around our military deployments, it gets to some of the burden sharing that we’re trying to foster, it gets to some of the deficit reduction that’s embedded in health care and other things that we’re doing.

On implementation, the Bush documents are much shorter. We made the decision to encompass what really are our key priority initiatives, so that the things that are listed in here represent our priorities This document can basically serve as a measuring stick that I think we would be happy to turn to in six months or a year or several years and say: How did we do in implementing this part of what we said was fundamental to our National Security Strategy? I think that it does stake out those priority areas that are important to us, that are important to American national security, and that we expect to measure ourselves against going forward. So it starts as a strategy document and then it turns into an implementation document.

Now, aside from that, I think these are actions that need to be taken in concert with other nations. And to try to make them into a list wouldn’t kind of effectively capture the nature of national security in 2010. We are moving in a concerted way on just about everything that is in that document. So I think we’re providing the blueprint.

TWI: Oh, good, because that allows me to make the Jay-Z reference.

Rhodes: Yeah, exactly. Blueprint 4: the National Security Strategy.

Mitt Romney at a book signing in Huntington, N.Y., on Wednesday (William Regan- Globe Photos)

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) effectively clinched the 2008 Republican presidential nomination in the 10 days between the South Carolina and Florida primaries. Up against a wall, with polls showing Mitt Romney moving up as Rudy Giuliani faded, McCain unleashed a new attack. Romney, he said, had given up on the Iraq War. Romney, said McCain, had wanted to “surrender and wave a white flag” and “set a date for withdrawal that would have meant disaster.” Thrown off his message, Romney stopped talking about the economy and tried — in vain — to get McCain to back off. Gov. Charlie Crist (R-Fla.) endorsed McCain, the senator won his state’s primary by 5 points, and within two weeks Romney would drop out of the race.

[GOP1] Romney won’t be caught in that position again. That’s at least some of the rationale for “No Apology: The Case for American Greatness,” a book he is launching with a national tour, a round of media sit-downs, and a series of speeches. The title — which Romney credits to an aide after he had spent “at least six months trying” to think of one — is a knock on President Barack Obama for purportedly conducting an “American Apology Tour” in other countries. For roughly 100 pages, Romney lays out a vision for American foreign policy defined against Obama’s “radical reworking of American and Western leadership” — and what Romney characterizes as Obama’s view that “America is in a state of inevitable decline.”

For a politician whose every action points at a 2012 White House bid, it’s a bold move. As unemployment hovers near 10 percent and health care reform trudges through Congress, support for Obama’s approach to foreign policy has been a source of strength. Polling released in January and February found approval of Obama’s handling of terrorism in the 50s, even after a thwarted airplane terror attack on Christmas Day 2009. A Gallup poll released last month found support for Obama on foreign policy at 51 percent, 15 points higher than support for the president’s domestic record. A Franklin & Marshall poll released last week found the same thing, with 57 percent of Americans backing the president’s approach to Afghanistan and a slight majority backing his overall foreign policy. The president and his party are more vulnerable on economic issues, which Romney, a self-made multimillionaire, has a unique ability to speak out on. Instead, he’s opted to challenge Obama on his foreign policy strength.

“It’s a good juxtaposition,” said Saul Anuzis, the former chairman of the Republican Party in Romney’s first home state of Michigan. “Obama has said he kind of wants to create this new world order. It’s been a year since his worldwide tour, and we haven’t seen many successes — potential adversaries are taking advantage of our perceieved weaknesses.”

Romney’s focus takes advantage of several developments in Republican Party politics. Despite Obama’s popularity on national security, one of the surest ways to draw standing ovations in conservative crowds is to call the president out for weakness, apology, “abandoning our allies” or “giving civil rights to terrorists” — points Romney made in his speech to CPAC and makes again in “No Apology.” And as Republicans look toward possible presidential candidates for 2012, the current field lacks any contenders with the built-in national security credibility of McCain. Some Republican strategists and conservative activists say that opens the door for any candidate to win over veterans and national security-minded voters by speaking out first and taking a hammer to Barack Obama.

“There are really no divisions between Republicans on national security,” said Michael Goldfarb, a former McCain campaign strategist who now works with Liz Cheney’s Keep America Safe. “There will be events we can’t predict, so you’ll see the candidates take different positions. I think you saw that in 2008. Everybody’s for keeping Gitmo open, so Romney will say ‘double it.’”

During Romney’s 2008 run, tactics like that couldn’t quite win over the GOP’s national security voters. In exit polling of the Florida primary, for example, 44 percent of Republicans called McCain “most ready to be commander-in-chief.” The 27 percent of primary voters who’d served in the military backed McCain by seven points over Romney; those with no service record backed him by only three points.

But no candidate on the 2012 horizon has a record like McCain’s — or any military record to speak of. Among the dozen candidates seen as most likely to jump into the race, politicians whose names have appeared on straw polls or who have been invited to address GOP dinners, none served in the military.

“If you’re gonna run for president you just have to make clear what your foriegn policy stances are,” said David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, and a Fred Thompson backer in 2008 who eventually switched to Romney. “It may have more to do with views and ability than with whether you were a corporal or private in the military. Perhaps what [Romney] wants to do is check that box on his resume. Everybody has to check that box.”

The way that Romney checks that box in “No Apology” is illustrative, with positions inspired by neoconservative thinkers — Fred Kagan, Charles Krauthammer, Thomas P. Barnett – cited throughout the text. America, argues Romney, is one of four competitors with “distinct strategies for twenty-first-century world leadership,” with the others being China, Russia, and “the jihadists.” Romney sees the first two rivals increasing their military power in a way that might cut America out of their spheres of influence. Were China, for example, to “become capable of declawing America’s military in Asia, they will gain freedom of action to do whatever they choose in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.’” The solution to this is more military spending: Romney calls it “inexplicable and inexcusable” that the 2009 stimulus package “devoted almost no funding” to defense. In other sections of the book, as in his speeches, Romney argues that President Obama is creating mounting crises by not dealing aggressively with critics of American power. “The day is coming,” he writes, “when [Venezuelan President] Chavez announces a ‘peaceful’ nuclear program organized and supported by the mullahs in Iran.”

These, said Republican strategists, are arguments that will build up Romney’s commander-in-chief credentials in the possible 2012 field. Possible candidates like Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-Minn.) and Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.), they said, hadn’t focused on national security to the same extent. Only supporters of Newt Gingrich suggested that their candidate could get a jump on Romney, pointing out to TWI that the former speaker of the House is also a Distinguished Visiting Scholar and Professor at the National Defense University and a co-chair of the UN Task Force, and has held other educational or ceremonial defense positions. But no one argued that Romney was staking an early claim on the GOP’s national security vote.

“By articulating it early,” said Anuzis, “by making a strong case early, he establishes his credentials — even if they are theoretical and political.”

At the same time, liberals who look at the foreign policy polling data are skeptical that Republicans have so many openings on President Obama’s national security record.

“There is a large sub-group of the Republican base for whom this is absolutely a winning argument,” said Heather Hurlburt, a Clinton administration veteran who now leads the National Security Network. “There’s a larger swath of moderates/independents — maybe as much as a third of the electorate — for whom national security is a ‘threshold issue.’ They aren’t — consciously — voting on national security issues. But they can’t really take in a candidate’s pitch on jobs, healthcare, values, whatever, if they haven’t first been convinced that the candidate will keep them safe and shares a baseline understanding of the threats we face. The ’06 and ’08 elections — and Obama’s ratings on national security and foreign policy — show that these people can be quite receptive to international approaches that start with diplomacy, engagement, cooperation and persuasion — as long as they believe that strength will be used when necessary.”

Some conservatives agreed, saying that whether a candidate like Romney can ride this message to success in 2012 — not just primary victories, but the White House — depends on what Obama does. David Frum, the former Bush administration speechwriter who now runs the Frum Forum website, wondered whether Obama was benefiting from a “benefit of the doubt bump.” It would take a while to sort out whether Romney’s play for national security cred was working.

“He’s got a theme and a tone,” said Frum, “but not a message.”

Mitt Romney (UPPA/ZUMApress.com)

Mitt Romney’s just-published book, “No Apology: The Case For American Greatness,” is a bid to bolster the former Massachusetts governor’s nonexistent national-security and foreign policy portfolio ahead of a possible 2012 presidential run. But a glance through the remarkable conflation of conservative shibboleths, paranoid global fantasies and deterministic myopia in “No Apology” makes it difficult to avoid the conclusion that the perennial GOP candidate might have been better off saying nothing at all.

Romney’s central contention is that there are four “strategies” for global power: the United States’ blend of benevolent, market-based hegemony; the Chinese model of political autocracy and unrestrained industry; Russia’s energy-based path to resurgence; and the “violent jihadists,” an agglutination of scary Muslims. Trouble in paradise, according to Romney, comes from President Obama’s “presupposition” that “America is in a state of inevitable decline.” As a result, Romney must warn the nation to continue to lead the world, lest one or more of these competitors overtake America. “[T]here can be no rational denial of the reality that America is a decidedly good nation,” writes Romney, or perhaps a third grader. “Therefore, it is good for America to be strong.”

[Security1]So many things are wrong with Romney’s view of an imperiled America that it is difficult to know where to begin. First, the idea that the U.S. is locked in a struggle for global supremacy with “violent jihadists” overlooks the exponential differences in economic resources, military strength, and global appeal between America and an increasingly imperiled band of Waziristan-based acolytes of Osama bin Laden. Al-Qaeda can attack us; it cannot displace the U.S. as a global leader. It manufactures nothing, trades with no one, and has absolutely nothing to offer anyone except like-minded conspiratorial murderers. In order to disguise these glaring asymmetries, Romney has to use an empty term — “the jihadists” — which he cannot rigorously define and with which he means to absorb the vastly different aims and ambitions of rival terrorist groups and separate nations like Iran.

“Violent jihadist groups come in many stripes across a spectrum,” Romney writes, “from Hamas to Hezbollah, from the Muslim Brotherhood to al-Qaeda.” But al-Qaeda exists because it considered the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt too accommodating of the Egyptian government; Hamas has literally fought al-Qaeda attempts at penetrating the Gaza Strip; and Sunni al-Qaeda released a videotape just this weekend that derides “Rejectionist Shiite Hezbollah.” There is absolutely nothing that unites these organizations in any programmatic manner except Romney’s ignorance, and the expansion of ignorance is insufficient to topple an American superpower.

The comparison between American and Russian or Chinese global power is less obviously stupid than between that of the “violent jihadists.” But that is not saying much. The amalgamation of Wikipedia-level facts about Chinese economic and military growth and renewed Russian assertiveness “No Apology” provides does little more than demonstrate that the Chinese are modernizing and the Russians again desire a prominent global position. But the U.S.’s military advantage over the Russians and the Chinese is massive, and will remain massive for decades. In 2008 alone, the U.S. spent over $700 billion on its military. China spent $122 billion and Russia spent $70 billion. At one point in the text, Romney is forced to concede that the Council on Foreign Relations wrote that until at least 2030 there is “no evidence to support the notion that China will become a peer military competitor of the United States.” He waves away that inconvenient fact:

On the other hand, Afghanistan fighters were certainly not a peer military with the Soviet Union, yet they defeated the Soviets — not globally of course, but certainly in Afghanistan.

One could conclude from this analogy that the lesson for the U.S., then, is not to invade and occupy China.

There are two salient global facts Romney never considers in his book. The first is that it is actually possible to obtain positive-sum relations with rising powers. The rise of China does not have to equal the decline of the United States. If, as Romney argues — following Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer — decline is a choice, so is permanent international competition. The concept of diplomacy is completely foreign to Romney. He dismisses the State Department as “assistant secretaries and… bureaucrats” and proposes designating regional relations to “one individual” who would become a “presidential envoy or the ambassador from CENTCOM or any of the other regional military commands.” Such an individual would “encourage people and politicians to adopt and abide by the principles of liberal democracy,” something that “would be ideal if other allied nations created similar regional positions, and if we coordinated our efforts with theirs.” That’s it for diplomacy, and he doesn’t have an agenda for global development. Why the world will simply do what America says simply because America says it is something Romney never bothers to consider. High school students at model U.N. conferences have proposed less ludicrous ideas.

The second concept Romney ignores is international institutions. He has practically nothing to say about the network of international institutions and regional alliances the U.S. engages with, from the United Nations to the G-20 to NATO to ASEAN to the IMF and World Bank. These institutions, occasionally the object of scorn from the right (the U.N.) and the left (the IMF), are permanent fixtures in international relations — fora for both international competition and cooperation. Romney has nothing to say about them — except for the invocation that NATO nations ought to spend more on defense — which might help explain why he views global power as a zero-sum competition.

That absence could be explained by the typical conservative hostility to anything resembling diplomacy or multilateralism. But there is a more surprising absence in “No Apology”: the Afghanistan war. Romney has absolutely nothing to say about a conflict in which 100,000 U.S. troops are committed, and which he would most likely inherit should he win the presidency in 2012. He proposes expanding the counterinsurgency capabilities of the military, but manages to say absolutely nothing about what they ought to do in Afghanistan, except for the content-free platitude that “we must draw upon the resources of our entire military.”

Romney himself never served, and his unfamiliarity with military issues is evident in “No Apology.” He proposes adding “at least 100,000 soldiers to the army and the marines” (Marines are not soldiers) and spending “at least 4 percent” of GDP on the military without explaining why. Why not 5, 10, 15 percent? Not only does Romney not discuss what to do in the actual conflict America fights, he can’t articulate why his proposals adequately resource the strategies he advocates. Most likely, he has been given a set of position papers from conservative think tanks and allowed a ghostwriter to weave them into something approaching a narrative. (Romney credits the conservative foreign-policy analysts Dan Senor, Pete Wehner, Mitchell Reiss and the Kagan family for some of the ideas that he presents.)

What he also barely articulates is his contempt for President Obama. Somehow Obama’s hypothetical out-year defense budget cuts to 3 percent of GDP — hypothetical because they are projections — leave the nation vulnerable to attack, but ticking that spending up to 4 percent of GDP (it’s at 3.7 percent now) means everything will be copacetic. That might be the most reality-based that Romney’s description of Obama’s approach of foreign affairs actually is. He imagines Obama taking an “American Apology Tour,” a staple talking point on the right to describe Obama’s 2009 trips abroad in which the president showed a conciliatory face to foreign leaders and publics. It is telling that Romney produces not a single quote from Obama deriding America, protecting himself from the inevitable charge of caricaturing Obama by saying the president, “always the skillful politician, will throw in compliments about America here and there.” The dishonesty of that statement is demonstrated by the most cursory glance at Obama’s major foreign speeches, from Prague (“Just as we stood for freedom in the 20th century, we must stand together for the right of people everywhere to live free from fear in the 21st century”) to Cairo (“America holds within her the truth that regardless of race, religion, or station in life, all of us share common aspirations — to live in peace and security; to get an education and to work with dignity; to love our families, our communities, and our God”) to Oslo (“Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms”). Romney is offended by Obama’s U.N. speech that “power is no longer a zero-sum game,” writing, “that by necessity means America does not have the ability to maintain a dominant position in the world.” Any first-year logic student can correct Romney on that.

Romney has little choice but to caricature Obama. The president’s foreign-policy record so far is one of increased relations with Pakistan that have finally yielded Pakistani arrests of Afghan Taliban leaders; a commitment to resourcing and waging the Afghanistan war capably; the effective international isolation of Iran over its nuclear program (thanks in part to improved relations with Romney’s Chinese and Russian bogeymen); and a so-far cautious drawdown of military forces in Iraq. If Romney has a problem with any of this, he does not say — but because he cannot credibly gain purchase with a suspicious Republican Party that repudiated him in the 2008 primaries without bashing Obama, he must attack the version of Obama that exists in his mind. It’s telling that Romney’s actual proposals to expand counterinsurgency efforts in the military, strengthen cybersecurity initiatives and build a more effective missile-defense system are all initiatives that the current administration has pursued. For all of Romney’s imagination, paranoia, ignorance and invective, he has managed to build a foreign-policy doctrine in “No Apology” that, at its most substantive, can be charitably called Obama Lite. If he ultimately runs for president, he may find himself before GOP audiences apologizing for it.

President Barack Obama talks with Afghan President Hamid Karzai in the Oval Office. (WDCpix)

On the eve of his first State of the Union address — a speech likely to be viewed as a response to a new Washington pessimism over his domestic agenda — President Obama is recording consistent support for his handling of foreign affairs and national security, according to an overview of recent polls. But despite this stable if mild support for his international agenda, dissatisfaction with his handling of foreign and security issues is growing.

Ahead of the speech, Obama’s top aides have delivered a thorough defense of his past year’s actions on foreign policy, contending — as national security adviser Jim Jones did in a Monday speech — that his first-year task was to revitalize international support for an America weakened by the Bush administration. An early burst of domestic enthusiasm for Obama as an anti-Bush even broke the Republican Party’s traditional opinion-poll advantage on national security earlier this year.

[Security1] More recently, a look at changes in major polls over the past several months yields a picture that favors Obama, if tepidly so, on foreign policy. The afterglow of his first 100 days is clearly gone. What remains are stable pockets of support for both his administration’s foreign policy in general and specific priorities of his.

A Pew Research Center analysis of Obama’s handling of terrorism recorded 51 percent approval in early January, essentially unchanged from 52 percent support in early November, even after the failed terrorist attack on Northwest Airlines flight 253. While the number of people who believe his government is doing a good or very good job of reducing the threat of terrorism is down 10 points since Pew’s November survey, it remains at a robust 65 percent. CBS places it at 60 percent.

Similarly, Obama’s decision to increase troops in Afghanistan registers 45 percent support, according to a Quinnipiac poll earlier this month, a number that has risen and stabilized from the high 30s and low 40s before Obama’s December 1 Afghanistan speech. Yet even though Obama has yet to attract significant GOP criticism of his Afghanistan strategy, his disapproval rating on Afghanistan, according to Quinnipiac, is also at 45 percent. Pew also has Obama at 45 percent on his handling of Afghanistan, up from 36 percent in November — but his disapproval on the issue has slid from 49 percent to 43 percent in the Pew poll.

And on a general handling of foreign policy, Obama’s numbers in the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll on foreign policy have remained steady at 50 percent since September, down from a high-water mark of 57 percent in July. Pew has a lower number — 44 percent — down from a June high of 57 percent. Quinnipiac pegs that approval at 45 percent, down slightly from 49 percent in October and November. CNN/Opinion research puts him at 51 percent approval, down from a 58 percent high in September. CBS places it at 49 percent, statistically unchanged since November.

All of which comes as a mild surprise for a Democratic president, whose party has been greeted with greater public skepticism about international affairs since the Vietnam war. Heather Hurlburt, executive director of the National Security Network, a progressive security policy and messaging organization, said the breadth of polling on Obama’s handling of national security shows “the core Obama national security bet — that he can balance heightened international outreach and diplomacy with a willingness to show toughness on terrorism, Afghanistan — is paying off.”

That apparent success comes in contrast to his eroding numbers on crucial domestic policy questions. A CNN poll released Monday found only 36 percent of Americans believe the 2009 economic stimulus bill will aid the economy. Obama’s health care plan registers a 40 percent approval rating — and 54 percent disapproval — in the latest CBS poll, and is imperiled after months of furious GOP opposition and the election last week of Scott Brown to the Massachusetts Senate seat held by Ted Kennedy. His foreign-policy and national-security numbers are slightly ahead of his overall job approval rating of 48.8 percent, according to Pollster.com’s average of major polls.

In an effort to portray Obama’s first year on the international stage as an expectations-defying success, Jones, Obama’s national security adviser, turned a Monday speech on Afghanistan/Pakistan strategy into a robust defense of Obama’s first-year accomplishments abroad. Speaking at the Center for American Progress, Jones said Obama’s major task in 2009 was restoring and strengthening U.S. partnerships, alliances and multinational fora to tackle a host of international challenges, from stabilizing the faltering global economy to rallying an “unprecedented level of international consensus” on Iran to abandon any nuclear-weapons ambitions.

“The challenge of restoring the reputation of the United States as a nation willing to commit to leadership, willing to commit to a new era of engagement based on mutual interests and mutual respect,” Jones said, “is probably the defining feature of our foreign policy.”

One challenge for the next year will be winning congressional support for that international engagement amid a larger and emboldened Republican minority typically suspicious of such efforts. Jones returned Saturday from a trip to Russia to discuss a nuclear-weapons reduction treaty under negotiation. But that treaty will require 67 votes for approval in a Senate, necessitating the cooperation of an obstinate minority committed to inflicting political damage on Obama. Senate support is also crucial for Obama’s international efforts on global climate change, another priority Jones cited on Monday. Anecdotal evidence on even baseline Republican support for either is grim: James Jay Carafano, a leading foreign-policy scholar at the conservative Heritage Foundation, recently tweeted that a cap-and-trade system for carbon-emissions reductions is itself a “real national security threat” and that a pundit was “dead wrong” to assume the GOP will support the new treaty with Russia.

Still, the Republican opposition has yet to congeal around a foreign-policy alternative to Obama, despite a flurry of well-funded projects connected to former Bush-era figures like the Cheney family. Not only has the Bush legacy tarnished the Republican brand, but in May, for the first time in its history of national-security polling, Democracy Corps found that the Democratic and Republican parties were at parity on public confidence to keep America safe, erasing a decades-long Republican opinion advantage.

“The poll numbers suggest that the Cheney-led fear-mongering is not working,” Hurlburt said in an email. “Why? Because its chief practitioners are discredited, and because Obama’s had a consistent message — we face real threats and have better ways to face them — and a good team of messengers in [Defense Secretary Robert] Gates, [Secretary of State Hillary Rodham] Clinton et al. that the public takes seriously.”

President Barack Obama (WDCpix)

The National Counterterrorism Center is in for a brutal week. Its director, Michael Leiter, faces a battery of Capitol Hill hearings next week on what President Obama has described as a systemic intelligence failure ahead of the failed terrorist attack on Northwest Airlines Flight 253. But if lawmakers look beyond the immediate circumstances of how would-be bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was allowed to board a Detroit-bound jet despite a number of warning signs, there is evidence that NCTC has a host of structural problems, raising questions about its contributions to the effort against al-Qaeda.

[Security1]According to interviews with several veteran NCTC analysts, the five-year-old center, meant to be a hub for pulling together terrorism information from across the 16-agency U.S. intelligence community to better anticipate future attacks, has a cumbersome bureaucratic structure and a questionable set of institutional values. Only half of NCTC’s roughly 300 analysts focus directly on al-Qaeda — with some analyzing terror groups that do not threaten the United States, like the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka or the Hamas radicals of the Gaza Strip. Analysts are valued by the volume of writing they produce for policymakers, not the impact that analysis has on counterterrorism operations. Analysts entering NCTC from the partner agencies are assigned to areas where NCTC has vacancies, regardless of their particular specialties. And the managers who preside over analysts seeking to connect the dots — as Obama chastised the intelligence community for falling short on the Christmas would-be attack — are often inexperienced in intelligence analysis themselves.

“What counts over all in terms of promotion, recognition, etc., is the number of papers published,” one NCTC veteran said about the center’s standards for success. “It’s a numbers game.” Another added, “Publishing is the goal, not the effect of your paper.” All NCTC veterans interviewed for this piece spoke only on condition of anonymity due to their ongoing involvement in the intelligence community. Their goal in speaking out, they said, is to strengthen U.S. counterterrorism efforts by shining a light on aspects of the center’s apparent malaise.

Steve Aftergood has heard these criticisms before, particularly about agencies that value publication above impact. “That’s kind of the default mode for an intelligence bureaucracy,” said Aftergood, an intelligence-policy analyst with the Federation of American Scientists. “It’s the characteristic decline of bureaucracies. Unless there’s someone on the inside pushing them to perform, they’re going to settle into a pattern of comfortable compliance.”

It was that pattern, in part, that the NCTC was created to fix. Worried about the compartmentalization of crucial fragmentary clues about terror attacks, the 9/11 Commission in 2004 recommended creating the NCTC to serve as “a center for joint operational planning and joint intelligence,” with its analytic component tasked with developing “net assessments (comparing enemy capabilities and intentions against U.S. defenses and countermeasures)” and to “provide warning” of imminent attacks. A major intelligence reform bill passed by Congress in December 2004 formally created the center and placed it on a campus in northern Virginia under the authority of the new head of the intelligence community, the Director of National Intelligence. Its budget is classified, and its operations have attracted very little press coverage.

As a result, very few on the outside know much about the organization or its structure. The 300 analysts of NCTC’s Directorate of Intelligence are organized into five groups, each of which is run by a chief and a deputy. Each group compiles analysis from across the intelligence community on one of five topics: al-Qaeda’s overseas operations; al-Qaeda’s efforts targeting the U.S. homeland; weapons of mass destruction; an International Terror Group division looking at non al-Qaeda terror groups and their impact on various nations; and the capabilities, both known and developing, of all other terrorist groups. The two al-Qaeda-centric groups are the largest, with 75 analysts each. Each group contains a varying number of smaller branches, from which most of the specific analytic work originates. The Middle East Branch — composed of eight or nine analysts that look at al-Qaeda’s operations in the Middle East, as first reported last week by TWI — falls under the al-Qaeda Overseas Group.

U.S. intelligence officials told TWI last week that NCTC is able to surge analytic capabilities to the branches as necessary in a crisis. Two NCTC sources told TWI this week that it is far easier to surge capabilities within Groups than it is to bring analysts across them. Surprisingly, the non-al Qaeda-focused groups “are not permitted to [study] al-Qaeda,” one said. The roughly 150 other NCTC analysts focus from areas like weapons of mass destruction, weapons that al-Qaeda has shown greater interest than capability in acquiring, to country analysis in places of marginal al-Qaeda interest at best, like Australia. Analysts — those who have worked on al-Qaeda and on other threats — describe themselves as “drinking from a firehose” of information shared with NCTC by the partner intelligence agencies.

Analytic studies produced by NCTC rarely result in the killing or capturing of specific terrorists. By the time a counterterrorist operation gets “closer to that stage,” according to an NCTC veteran, the intelligence community or the military has “mobilized already. It’s never [the result of] something a single analyst puts together.” Instead, analysts’ merit is measured by the number of studies they produce for policymakers — chiefly, the president. “The customer is POTUS, that’s the only one [NCTC is] concerned about,” the veteran said. “Impact” on counterterrorist operations “is secondary.”

In response to a detailed list of questions for this article, Carl Kropf, a spokesman for NCTC, told TWI: “Our Directorate of Intelligence staff is comprised of regional experts, technical subject matter experts, and persons possessing in-depth understanding of terrorism, terrorist network operations and their affiliations, a capability that is unequaled in the U.S. Government.” While Kropf said that he could not disclose information about the NCTC’s organizational structure or operating practices, he added, “The majority of the NCTC staff is comprised of intelligence analysts and officers from multiple departments and agencies who operate in an atmosphere and environment that promotes collaboration and initiative, and one that recognizes and rewards outstanding performance.”

The agency that has played perhaps the most important role in shaping NCTC has been the CIA, the country’s largest and most prestigious intelligence service. Senior CIA officials occupy most of the NCTC’s Group Chief positions. All incoming NCTC analysts must take a weeks-long remedial course that principally teaches students how to write analytic product according to CIA style. CIA provides its analysts at NCTC with on-site management to ensure their CIA career development during their tours at the center. And it often brings  junior analysts or recruits straight out of college to NCTC, where they can relatively quickly become managers or even Branch chiefs. Some experienced intelligence professionals find the track frustrating. “You can’t hire kids out of Georgetown,” one said. “You need people with 25 years in the [CIA] or 25 years in Army intel to say ‘This [information] is bullshit; this is the good stuff.’” Some speculate — cynically, perhaps — that CIA’s career track allows the agency to keep its most experienced analysts for itself.

CIA denies the charge. “The CIA has sent–and continues to send–seasoned and senior officers to NCTC,” said CIA spokesman George Little in an email. “That’s as it should be. The partnership between the two organizations is vital.”

Once inside NCTC for the typical two-year rotation, analysts are not necessarily assigned to their core specialties. If NCTC has a particular vacancy, “you could be analyst of the Russian or Baltic militaries, and you’re thrown into al-Qaeda,” said an NCTC veteran. While the intelligence community did not have a corps of al-Qaeda specialists before 9/11 to jump into senior positions afterward — the CIA created an Osama bin Laden Unit in 1997 within its Counterterrorist Center and staffed it with a handful of employees — it remains the case, said the NCTC veteran, that “suddenly you can be a senior manager” for a branch.

Branch leaders are responsible for green-lighting analytic products and sharpening analytic focus, much as editors do for writers. Several NCTC analysts described their branch leaders as saying — sometimes for good reason — “Let’s sit on it awhile until we have more information” and “We don’t want to go to POTUS with something we’re not sure about.” While several analysts describe that role as providing important pushback and preventing faulty intelligence analysis from reaching senior administration officials, one questioned whether that focus prevented analysts from piecing together information connecting Abdulmutallab to terrorism before the Christmas attempt. “That never would have been published, because it would have been too speculative” for the president to read, the analyst said — even though President Obama said on Jan. 5 that the intelligence community “failed to connect those dots, which would have placed the suspect on the no-fly list.” Information compiled and reviewed by an interagency process helmed by NCTC contributes significantly to the process that leads to someone’s inclusion on the no-fly list.

No NCTC veteran interviewed for this piece placed any blame on Leiter, who has run NCTC since 2007. Several described him as dedicated and competent, though they questioned whether the bureaucratic structure of the center is optimized to confront the threat of terrorism. The Federation of American Scientist’s Aftergood, however, said that NCTC needed “an agency head who is capable of leading & motivating his analysts to get out of their own rut.”

iAftergood did not have a fixed judgment on Leiter, who won crucial political support last week from White House counterterrorism chief John Brennan and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. But he said that he would gain a “better sense of what Leiter’s capabilities and intentions are” during the NCTC leader’s congressional testimony next week.

“The most useful [structural] changes could be identified by NCTC leadership itself — if it’s willing to go out on a limb of self-criticism,” Aftergood said. “If it’s in a defensive crouch, then the hearings are not going to be worth much, except as a confirmation that this is not a healthy organization.”