THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED, that the Republican National Committee identifies ten (10) key public policy positions for the 2010 election cycle, which the Republican National Committee expects its public officials and candidates to support:

(1) We support smaller government, smaller national debt, lower deficits and lower taxes by opposing bills like Obama’s “stimulus” bill;

(2) We support market-based health care reform and oppose Obama-style government run healthcare;

(3) We support market-based energy reforms by opposing cap and trade legislation;

(4) We support workers’ right to secret ballot by opposing card check;

(5) We support legal immigration and assimilation into American society by opposing amnesty for illegal immigrants;

(6) We support victory in Iraq and Afghanistan by supporting military-recommended troop surges;

(7) We support containment of Iran and North Korea, particularly effective action to eliminate their nuclear weapons threat;

(8) We support retention of the Defense of Marriage Act;

(9) We support protecting the lives of vulnerable persons by opposing health care rationing and denial of health care and government funding of abortion; and

(10) We support the right to keep and bear arms by opposing government restrictions on gun ownership; and be further

RESOLVED, that a candidate who disagrees with three or more of the above stated public policy position of the Republican National Committee, as identified by the voting record, public statements and/or signed questionnaire of the candidate, shall not be eligible for financial support and endorsement by the Republican National Committee.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is holding out the possibility that Iraq’s national election could be delayed beyond January because of a dispute over the allocation of seats in parliament.

Clinton told reporters at the State Department Monday that U.S. officials are involved in trying to help Iraqi politicians sort out their differences over an elections law that must pass before the vote can be held.

The election is supposed to be conducted in January. Clinton mentioned no specific dates but said the election “might slip” as a result of the continuing dispute over the elections law. She expressed confidence that the voting eventually will be held.

Iraq’s upcoming election, the second since the 2005 passage of Iraq’s constitution, has no shortage of problems. Last week the Sunni vice president vetoed a cobbled-together election law intended to ensure the election could proceed on time. And today an amended law passed parliament — but only after Sunni lawmakers walked out in protest.

I suppose Clinton is saying that the United States will follow the Iraqi lead on this one. But it’s hard to shake the suspicion that if this were Afghanistan, the U.S. would possess a greater urgency about the election being held on schedule.

I admit I overlooked this case, because it was initially reported as a suicide. But it’s no longer so clear that that’s the case.  now looks like that may not have been the case. Guantanamo spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Brook DeWalt told According to journalist Naomi Wolf, “the status of the investigation into Mr al-Hanashi’s death … is now a Naval criminal investigation – meaning that he is no longer considered a suicide but a victim of a murder or a negligent homicide.”

Guantanamo spokesman Lt. Cmdr Brook DeWalt, however, who I spoke to after initially writing this post, denies that interpretation. According to DeWalt, “any death is investigated by NCIS [Naval Criminal Investigative Service] on navy bases. Whether it be natural causes, whether it be suicide, criminal, across the board.”

Wolf’s “news” has just gotten a little fuzzier. What is clear, though, is that five months after al-Hanashi’s death, we still don’t know what happened to him.

In all the discussion of where the administration is going to try Guantanamo detainees, the news about Hanashi has been buried.  It’s In fact, both the Bush and Obama administrations have been extremely tight-lipped about the deaths of detainees in U.S. custody. Although the government reports when a Guantanamo detainee dies, As I’ve pointed out before, at some point the military stopped reporting the deaths of its prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. I’ve repeatedly asked why, and I’ve asked the Pentagon to define its current policy for reporting deaths of detainees in U.S. custody overseas.

I’ve never received any explanation. I’ll keep trying.

This post has been updated for clarification, based on DeWalt’s statement that Wolf misinterpreted his remarks.

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan (USUHSy/ZUMA Press)

The new unit created by the Obama administration to interrogate the highest-value terrorism targets is unlikely to play a role in the case of the highest-profile new potential terrorist target in U.S. custody: Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the alleged Fort Hood shooter.

The director of the new interrogation unit, FBI Special Agent Andrew McCabe — who has not been previously identified in the press as the leader of the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG) — referred all questions about the Hasan case to the FBI’s public affairs office and said he would not be able to elaborate on HIG operations beyond an August statement by Attorney General Eric Holder announcing the group’s creation. Still, it is unlikely that the HIG would interview Hasan. Dean Boyd, a spokesman for the Justice Department’s national security division, clarified that the new group is mandated to operate “overseas only.”

Image by: Matt Mahurin

It is not clear whether Hasan ought to be considered a terrorist, and most evidence to date suggests he is better understood as a criminal suspect. An inquiry that began shortly after he allegedly shot and killed 14 people at Fort Hood on Nov. 7 has yet to determine any substantive links to extremist organizations, and reportedly indicates that he acted alone. An FBI spokeswoman, Denise Ballew, declined to comment, and referred all questions about Hasan to the U.S. Army’s Criminal Investigation Division, which is leading the Hasan inquiry with FBI support. Spokespeople for the Criminal Investigation Division did not return phone messages.

But an al-Qaeda affiliated cleric now based in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaqi, has confirmed to The Washington Post that he communicated with Hasan, and Army psychiatrist, repeatedly before the shooting occurred. While Hasan is convalescing from wounds sustained when police officers stopped the attack, he might shed light on the circumstances that lead a very small minority of radicalized American Muslims to commit acts of extremism and even seek to connect with the broader terrorist infrastructure, which the counterterrorism community refers to as the “self-starter” or “lone-wolf” problem.

In a Senate hearing on Thursday, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) called the shooting a “homegrown terrorist attack,” a point not entirely accepted by his panel’s witnesses. Brian Jenkins, a terrorism expert with the Rand Corporation, testified that while “radicalization and recruitment to terrorism is occurring in the United States and is a security concern,” the small handful of examples of such behavior meant that American Muslim communities are “overwhelmingly unsympathetic to terrorist appeals,” a point Lieberman endorsed.

Individuals close to the HIG had mixed perspectives about whether it should play any role with Hasan. None agreed to speak for attribution, citing both the ongoing investigation into Hasan’s case and the secrecy surrounding the Obama administration’s new interrogation unit. “I can think of a lot of uses I could make of a HIG team while waiting for someone to be captured in Afghanistan,” said one such individual. “There’s no reason the HIG couldn’t be used domestically. There’s a ban on the CIA doing things in country, so they might just have to use FBI interrogators or interviewers. But aside from that I don’t see any other issues.”

A U.S. official involved with the establishment of the HIG said that it remained an open question whether Hasan is a “lone wolf with mental pathology” or someone who “latched onto extremist ideology and influence” like al-Awlaqi. As a result, there is insufficient evidentiary basis for involving the HIG, since it is unclear what actual information Hasan might have that could illuminate aspects of the broader terrorist puzzle. “I also have not seen anything that indicates known or suspected outside influence — other than firebrand al-Awlaqi’s call-to-arms, which is dangerous enough in itself — whether non-state actor or otherwise” is involved in the Hasan case, the official said.

A former U.S. counterterrorism official agreed: “The HIG is for high-value detainees and he’s not a high-vale detainee. He’s a criminal who did a heinous act.” The ex-official went on to say that if information emerged changing that picture, Army CID and FBI investigators have “a process to share information with behavioral analysis groups, [and] share with the HIG, to be careful to watch for other possible wackos.”

There are a number of investigations open into Hasan aside from the main CID-FBI probe. On Thursday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced the Pentagon would undertake its own review of the Hasan case to determine if its personnel missed warning signs leading to Hasan’s attack that might have prevented it. The intelligence community is reviewing what it knew about Hasan’s communications with al-Awlaqi or other extremists. Late last week, President Obama directed all relevant agencies to turn over information about those communications to his principle White House counterterrorism and homeland security adviser, John Brennan — who, coincidentally, is also the White House liaison with the HIG.

Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, wrote in a letter on Wednesday that his committee was told by a top State Department official that the company had engaged in “broad violations” of export laws and that the unlicensed shipments “went beyond weapons for personal use.”

In the letter, Senator Kerry asked the State Department’s acting inspector general to begin an investigation into the “continued fitness” of Xe Services to carry out contract work for the State Department. The letter cited a report in The New York Times last week that Blackwater executives had approved of a plan to make secret payments to Iraqi officials after Blackwater employees killed 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in September 2007.

“I am very confident that when I announce the decision, the American people will have a lot of clarity about what we’re doing, how we’re going to succeed, how much this thing is going to cost,” Mr. Obama told CNN in an interview at his hotel in Beijing. Most important, he said, is that he is asking “what’s the end game on this thing, which I think is something that unless you impose that kind of discipline, could end up leading to a multi-year occupation that won’t serve the interests of the United States.”

One of the more interesting things about Gen. McChrystal’s August strategy review is that it doesn’t evidently presume any limited costs. That’s not to say it’s cavalier with those costs. Far from it: practically every page underscores the importance of Afghan civilian lives and sensibilities. But what it doesn’t contain is a sense that the war has to operate within certain parameters. The closest McChrystal comes to a timeline is writing that “failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) — while Afghan security capacity matures — risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.” But that’s not the same thing as saying the war will end if those 12 months pass with Taliban momentum intact. And nowhere does it say that the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan that he commands has to operate within a budget of X billion dollars. Meanwhile, pretty much every other policy discussion operates within precisely that framework of time and expense.

This is not McChrystal’s fault. It’s a structural problem: defense discussions, and especially wartime defense discussions, do not typically feature fulsome discussions of timelines or constrained budgets. Indeed, for practically the entire Bush administration, officials solemnly intoned that it would be folly to put war strategy on a timeline — that is, until the Iraqi government forced the Bush administration to sign an accord specifying deadlines for U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq. It’s a curious feature of U.S. politics, and something that bothers Rep. David Obey (D-Wis.), the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, who last month asked why, if the Congressional Budget Office had to measure the cost of every health care proposal, “Shouldn’t it be asked to do the same thing with respect to Afghanistan?”

Despite what the president says, there is no guarantee that Obama’s strategy review will actually impose the clarity he’s promising here. “There’s got to be an exit strategy,” he told ‘60 Minutes’ in March, before unveiling a strategy that didn’t have one. And he needs to clarify which goal he’s seeking – a stable Afghanistan or a destroyed al-Qaeda, which are not the same thing. But his acknowledgment that a kind of resource drift will occur absent clear presidential guidance is a reassuring sign.

Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal (defenselink.mil)

If President Obama orders an additional 30,000 to 40,000 troops to Afghanistan, he will be deploying practically every available U.S. Army brigade to war, leaving few units in reserve in case of an unforeseen emergency and further stressing a force that has seen repeated combat deployments since 2002.

According to information compiled by the U.S. Army for The Washington Independent about the deployment status of active-duty and National Guard Army brigades, as of December 2009, there will be about 50,600 active-duty soldiers, serving in 14 combat brigades, and as many as 24,000 National Guard soldiers available for deployment. All other soldiers and National Guardsmen will either be deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan already or ineligible to deploy while they rest from a previous deployment.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

The shortage of available combat brigades means that an escalation of between 30,000 and 40,000 troops is “not realistic,” said Lawrence Korb, a former senior Pentagon official in the Reagan administration who now studies defense issues for the liberal Center for American Progress. To send practically all available soldiers into one of the two wars would leave the U.S. with “no reserve in case you had a problem in Korea.”

Click to Enlarge: Army National Guard combat brigade deployment data. (Source: U.S. Army)

Obama would have something of a cushion, but not much, in the early months of 2010. An additional five brigades will finish their 12 months of so-called “dwell time” at home between deployments by April 2010, providing an additional 22,600 troops, but by that time, about 10,200 troops will be scheduled to leave Afghanistan, leaving available a net gain of 12,400. More brigades become available in the summer and fall, although others currently in Afghanistan will be ending their scheduled deployments then as well. Under current Pentagon policy, dwell time for the National Guard varies, but can be no shorter than two years, and so it is possible but not certain that two National Guard brigades composed of 6,800 National Guard soldiers might be available for deployment by March 2010 as well, beyond the 24,000 theoretically available now. Pentagon leaders had hoped to extend dwell time this year, but that was before McChrystal’s request for additional troops.

Click to Enlarge: U.S. Army combat brigade deployment information. (Source: U.S. Army)

Furthermore, not all brigades are the same. Some are built around heavy equipment like tanks, while others are primarily light, mobile infantrymen. According to a September report by the Institute for the Study of War, a pro-escalation think-tank in Washington, no so-called “heavy” brigades have been sent to Afghanistan to date, a condition likely owing to Afghanistan’s lack of paved roads, high elevations and uneven rural terrain, all of which are inhospitable to tanks and other heavy vehicles. But of the 14 brigades available as of December 2009, five of them are heavy brigades, according to the information provided by the Army to TWI, accounting for 19,000 of the available 50,600 active-duty soldiers. There is precedent in Iraq for re-tasking heavy brigades as light brigades by deploying them without their heavy vehicles, as the Institute for the Study of War’s report points out. But there is no precedent for such a thing in Afghanistan. If the Obama administration decides not to re-task heavy brigades as light brigades, the pool of active-duty soldiers immediately available for Afghanistan shrinks to 31,600 soldiers.

Andrew Krepinevich, the president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a defense think-tank in Washington, told TWI that an escalation of between 30,000 and 40,000 troops required an inescapable calculation of risk. “The worst thing in the world is to have these people over there getting shot at, not being able to make progress, and the situation [in Afghanistan] just sort of gradually eroding, so it’s that versus the risk of breaking the force, [or] the risk that you’re not prepared for another contingency,” said Krepinevich. “So how do you weigh those risks? There is no formula or algorithm that’s going to give you the answer. It’s going to have to be a judgment call.”

McChrystal wrote in a late August assessment that the U.S. faces a “decisive” moment in Afghanistan. “Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) — while Afghan security capacity matures — risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible,” McChrystal wrote nearly three months ago. While deployment times vary, no brigade can be deployed to Afghanistan overnight, raising questions about how much time remains to turn the war around even if McChrystal gets the 40,000 troops that various news accounts have stated — without official confirmation — that the general wants.

Krepinevich testified on Tuesday before a House Armed Services subcommittee in favor of McChrystal’s proposed counterinsurgency strategy, and appeared to lend support to a troop increase of roughly 40,000. He said that recent steps taken by both the Bush and Obama administrations to increase the total size of the Army and Marine Corps would mitigate against prolonged deployments. “Even if Gen. McChrystal’s request is honored by the president, the combined total of our forces in Afghanistan and Iraq would still be significantly below the levels reached during the Surge,” he told the panel.

But the 2007 troop surge in Iraq was a one-time increase of five combat brigades that ended with those brigades’ tours. By contrast, a troop increase to implement McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy is more likely to be a sustained escalation lasting beyond the tours of the initially deployed brigades. And the brigades themselves called upon to implement the troop increase will have already served numerous deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of the 14 active-duty brigades that will be available for deployment in December, five have already served three tours abroad since 2002 and four have already served two. If either the 3rd brigade of the 101st Airborne Division or the 1st brigade of the 10th Mountain Division are asked to deploy to Afghanistan, it will be their fifth tour since 2002.*

Krepinevich said the stress on soldiers called upon to serve repeated tours was a problem for a troop escalation. “You really have to start worrying about greater incidents of post-traumatic stress disorder, [and] that we’re already seeing in terms of the the NCO corps,” he said, referring to non-commissioned officers like sergeants who play crucial leadership roles in enforcing soldier discipline and standards. “Yes, they’re experienced but they’re just so worn out. And that has to be a concern.”

That concern was echoed by Bing West, a Reagan-era senior Pentagon official who traveled to Afghanistan in October. “There is near-unanimous agreement that deployments on the lines over eight months are too long,” West reported for the blog Small Wars Journal on Nov. 1, citing interviews with “dozens” of soldiers and Marines. “Aggressive patrolling decreases as the length of tour increases. The troops wear down.”

Korb — who, like Krepinevich, supports the Afghanistan war — said a more realistic troop increase for Afghanistan would be 10,000 soldiers until the drawdown of troops from Iraq “begins in earnest.” There are currently 120,000 U.S. troops remaining in Iraq, almost twice the total in Afghanistan, though Gen. Raymond Odierno, the commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, told Congress in September that he plans to reduce that total to around 50,000 by August 30, 2010. Alternatively, Korb said, Obama could speed up the pace of redeployment out of Iraq in order to relieve the stress on the force, a point echoed by Krepinevich in an interview with TWI. But under current Pentagon policy, soldiers would still need to receive at least 12 months of recuperation time back in the U.S. before potential assignment in Afghanistan.

The chief of staff of the Army, Gen. George Casey, whose institutional role includes protecting the health of the force, endorsed a troop escalation earlier this month. “I believe that we need to put additional forces into Afghanistan to give Gen. McChrystal the ability to both dampen the successes of the Taliban while we train the Afghan civilian forces,” he told NBC’s “Meet The Press” on Nov. 8. The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, also has responsibilities for balancing the needs of the Afghanistan war with those of the overall military and threats to the U.S. worldwide. He told Congress in September that more troops were “probably” needed in Afghanistan as well.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a key swing vote in the Afghanistan debate, has told Congress earlier this year that he would seek to lengthen dwell time for the Army in the coming years. In January, he testified that he and Army chiefs wanted to extend dwell time to 15 months at home for every 12 months deployed by October 2010, but in July, he revised that plan and indicated that the Army might be able to shift to 15-month dwell times by summer 2010. But Gates reiterated in July a commitment to ultimately giving soldiers at least two years of dwell time by 2011. The Army public-affairs officer who released this information to TWI clarified that no unit was available unless it had ended a previous deployment by at least November 2008, indicating a continued 12-month dwell time policy.

That proposal was devised before McChrystal’s request for additional forces, and it is unclear how the fulfillment of that request will impact the dwell-time policy, if at all. Spokesmen for both Gen. McChrystal and Sec. Gates did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

*Update, 4:35 p.m., Nov. 19: Maj. Stephen Platt, public affairs officer for the 3rd brigade of the 101st Airborne Division, writes to inform me that the brigade has indeed been scheduled to deploy to Afghanistan in “early 2010″ for what will be its fifth combat tour since 2002. I missed a press release from the Pentagon in July announcing the deployment, and word of the upcoming tour was not included in the information provided to me by the U.S. Army. I appreciate Maj. Platt’s clarification.

The massacre at Fort Hood, Texas, in which 13 soldiers were shot and killed by Army Maj. Nidal Hasan, paradoxically took my memory back to April 2004, when I was embedded with a Marine battalion during the first battle of Fallujah. The battalion just happened to have in the ranks a corporal of Syrian descent who did double duty as the commander’s translator for his meetings with the Iraqis. The young Muslim corporal was arguably the most valuable member of the battalion: simply by his presence he was able to cast the battalion in a different, more positive light among the locals.

The United States military needs more troops of Muslim origin within its ranks. We need a military that looks like the larger world for the global challenges ahead, such as helping to protect the “commons,” the air space and sea lanes. Think of the Navy’s slogan in its new television recruitment commercials: “A Global Force for Good.”

There are a whole bunch of right wingers who ought to read this piece. Quite possibly Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), too.

Update: Have I taken Kaplan’s argument a step too far? I don’t think so. But James Joyner does, and he’s a smart guy, so you make the call.

But leave aside the State Department’s own questionable judgment for a moment. Now we have some inkling of why the Iraqis allowed the firm to stay:

Four former Blackwater executives said in interviews that Gary Jackson, who was then the company’s president, had approved the bribes, and the money was sent from Amman, Jordan, where Blackwater maintains an operations hub, to a top manager in Iraq. The executives, though, said they did not know whether the cash was delivered to Iraqi officials or the identities of the potential recipients.

Watch this become a major accusation in the upcoming Iraqi parliamentary elections. Jeremy Scahill, the company’s chief journalistic pursuer, comments:

While the Bush administration certainly protected Blackwater after Nisour Square, part of the reason for the alleged or attempted bribes may be this: As the US and Iraq negotiated the Status of Forces Agreement and the Iraqi government attempted to impose more authority over private military companies, the stakes got higher for Blackwater. An official license to operate in Iraq, which Blackwater did not have and long believed was an unnecessary formality, became crucial for Blackwater in order to continue on as the State Department’s prime contractor. To many Iraqis, Blackwater’s continued presence was a stark symbol of the country’s lack of sovereignty. It is an incredible fact that Blackwater has remained as long as it has in the country given the severity and extent of its alleged crimes and the rhetoric from Iraqi political figures about the company. It was not until March 2009 that the Iraqi government announced it would not extend Blackwater an operating license. In May 2009, Blackwater’s prime contract was awarded to competitor Triple Canopy. What is undeniable is that Blackwater has remained in Iraq much longer than most analysts predicted. The Times story may provide hints as to why this was the case.

I also love this section of the Times piece:

Reached by phone, Mr. Jackson, who resigned as president of Blackwater early this year, criticized The New York Times and said, “I don’t care what you write.”

Blackwater: so persecuted by the media! Don’t it turn your brown eyes blue?

Top executives at Blackwater Worldwide authorized secret payments of about $1 million to Iraqi officials that were intended to silence their criticism and buy their support after a September 2007 episode in which Blackwater security guards fatally shot 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, according to former company officials.

Blackwater approved the cash payments in December 2007, the officials said, as protests over the deadly shootings in Nisour Square stoked long-simmering anger inside Iraq about reckless practices by the security company’s employees. American and Iraqi investigators had already concluded that the shootings were unjustified, top Iraqi officials were calling for Blackwater’s ouster from the country and company officials feared that Blackwater might be refused an operating license it would need to retain its contracts with the State Department and private clients, worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

Of course, bribing foreign officials is against U.S. law. Blackwater (which changed its name to Xe earlier this year) has repeatedly found itself at the center of controversies, in addition to the massacre at Nisour Square. The most recent came to light in August, when The Nation’s Jeremy Scahill reported that two former employees alleged in sworn statements that Blackwater owner Erik Prince “may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company.”

Five Blackwater employees are awaiting trial, scheduled to begin next year in federal court, for manslaughter related to the Nisour Square shooting. In 2007, the Iraqi government revoked the contractor’s license to operate in the country. According to The Times, a company spokeswoman dismissed the payoff allegations as “baseless.”