The Nobel Committee is following its well-known proclivity of awarding the Peace Prize to people who make war more likely. Remember Jimmy Carter and Yasser Arafat?

Michael Ledeen considers that a green light for direct presidential involvement, writing, “stop pretending to be a sweet innocent, and get in there and fight for people who are dying in the name of our values, and who want to be part of our world.” It’s an understandable emotional response — if you’re going to get blamed anyway, why not actually get in the fight? — but it still neglects the actual situation the opposition is in. Consider that if this is going to be a real revolution, it’s going to need to convince people that aren’t already out in the streets to bandwagon with its arguments. And they’ll need to do so by convincing their compatriots that the opposition has a better and more authentic conception of Iranian interests than the regime does. Fewer things could get in the way of growing the movement more robustly than to have the Americans parachute in, even rhetorically, and lend complicating support. Indeed, if Obama were to get involved now, he’d inadvertently validate the regime’s misrepresentations. And that would probably cause at least some protesters pause to wonder if they were giving aid and comfort to a traditionally-hostile foreign entity.

Nationalism is a powerful and volatile thing, in the United States as in Iran. We shouldn’t do anything to get in its way — especially as its magnitude and direction all seem to favor the opposition.

Now, irony is when someone who helped broker the sale of American weapons to the Iranian government calls someone else “a leading apologist for the regime,” but if you read my colleague David Weigel’s piece today about conservative advice for Obama on Iran, you noticed that Michael Ledeen said exactly that about Parsi. Dismissing Parsi’s argument that external rhetorical support for the opposition could be used against it by Ahmadinejad, Ledeen told Weigel, “Why would a statement supporting the freedom of the Iranian people undermine the movement?”

Parsi said he wouldn’t reply to personal attacks. But he said, “no serious human rights actvist has gone out and supported making the U.S. the issue in the election,” since real human rights activists support “condemning the use of violence” by the regime. “What these conservatives are saying — they’ve got no track record of supporting real human rights in Iran, and are only seeking to advance their own agenda” by making “the U.S. part of the issue,” Parsi said. “They pretend to speak in favor of the protesters without ever considering what the Iranian people want. And the people who brought us the Iraq war don’t have a leg to stand on on this issue.”

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Clockwise from bottom-left: Michael Ledeen, Joshua Muravchik and The American magazine

?The buzz at this year’s American Enterprise Institute gala was, ironically enough, about how much easier it was to get inside. For eight years, entering the annual black tie dinner — put on by the influential conservative think tank that supplied the George W. Bush administration with dozens of high-level officials — meant sharing a vast hotel ballroom with the president or vice president, which meant extra scrutiny of your car and a security checkpoint to screen for weapons. This week, Dick Cheney was present, but armies of secret service agents were not.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

<.pullquote>”It’s much more fun without the metal detectors,” joked one libertarian think-tanker who’d been attending the galas for at least a decade.

There was also buzz about the size and style of the dinner, especially after Arthur C. Brooks, the new president of AEI, commented in his opening remarks about how the think tank was under some stress. Despite the international economic crisis, and despite the hand-wringing and rumor-mongering afoot at the city’s other think tanks, the event was at the same location, in the same scale, with the same open bar, that guests have grown accustomed to, with the same A-list guests: Ken Blackwell, Byron York, Doug Holtz-Eakin, Rep. John Shadegg, Tucker Carlson, John Fund, and Grover Norquist, to name a few.

These are trying times for most Washington, D.C. think tanks. Since the financial crisis began, the corporate and philanthropic foundations and donors who gird most think tanks have become stingier about their grants. In the case of AEI, the economic downturn has meant cutting back one prestige product and trimming some minor costs and low-level staff. AEI Outlooks are sent around digitally, instead of printed out en masse. Several long-time scholars have left for more complicated reasons. “I wouldn’t hear anything,” said one former staffer, “and then I’d notice that a name was off a door, or a scholar’s profile had been taken down from the web site.”

For liberals, a dip in AEI’s fortunes would be welcome news. This was the think tank that Slate’s Tim Noah called “the wellspring of President Bush’s worst ideas,” and its graduates include former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton, former Defense Policy Board Chairman Richard Perle, former Treasury Secretary John Snow, and Dick Cheney himself. There has been a mini-exile of neoconservatives from AEI, but there is little evidence that a sudden drying up of executive branch access is hurting the think tank. There are more mundane problems to worry about.

AEI’s bleaker financial picture is not a secret. It was clear at the end of Chris DeMuth’s 22-year tenure as president of AEI. At the November meeting of the Philanthropy Roundtable, a libertarian-leaning organization that produces research on and gives advice about charitable giving, DeMuth spoke on a panel about the future of conservative think tanks and acknowledged the “dramatic economic contraction” that was making their work difficult.

“We will work very hard on the revenue side,” said DeMuth, “soliciting support from people such as are attending this conference. But there is no way we are going to be able to get through the period ahead without looking at the cost side as well. We will have to become more lean, more focused.”

Unlike many think tanks that largely depend on endowments, AEI’s funding sources are inherently less stable. “AEI is heavily funded by corporate philanthropy,” explained Christopher Levenick, the editor of the Philanthropy Roundtable’s magazine and the former W.H. Brady Doctoral Fellow at AEI. “Naturally, they’ve taken a hit. Folks who have sponsored them for years have fallen by the wayside. They’ve always been a different kind of non-profit and they’re hurting because of it.”

The details of AEI’s financial picture are private, and spokespeople for the think tank do not discuss fundraising or financial specifics. Much of its donor information is privileged, although some foundations reveal the size and purpose of the grants they have given AEI. But it is clear that the foundation grants and large corporate donations that go to AEI have changed, in ways that have affected the bottom line, overall spending, and individual scholars. Companies that have given generously to AEI in the past, such as General Motors, are facing harder times.

“We’ve contacted AEI,” said Greg Martin, a spokesman for the General Motors Foundation, “and we’ve told them that this is a very tough time for General Motors and we’re either cutting or closely reviewing the contributions we’re giving to think tanks.”

Information about the think tank’s investments is similarly obscure. Tax filings from 2006, the most recent publicly available, reveal that some of AEI’s investments were in the hands of hedge funds that have been struggling. For example, AEI’s investments with Farallon Funds were worth $5.7 million in 2006, but Farallon Capital Management LLC took a 44 percent hit overall in 2008.

Norm Ornstein, the congressional scholar whose centrist work clashes with the neoconservative image of the think tank, was told last year by the Carnegie Foundation to look elsewhere for money to fund his Election Reform Project. He was pointed to the Open Society Institute, funded by George Soros, although he said Thursday he never made that call.

“In the last few years, I haven’t had to go out and beat the bushes because people were interested in what we’re doing,” Ornstein said. “That’s changed over the last few months. I’ve had to be a lot more active.”

Veronique Rodman, a spokeswoman for AEI, said the think tank is on “sound footing,” and pointed to the hiring of Toby Stock, a Harvard admissions dean who is now the think tank’s director of marketing and development. But she allowed that the economy was taking an obvious toll. “We may not get new desks and new furniture this year, but we’re OK.”

The most obvious cutback has been the fate of The American, the magazine launched in 2006 by James Glassman — the conservative editor who later served as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy — to replace The American Enterprise. In November, word came down that the print version of the magazine would stop, and the publication would continue online under current Editor-in-Chief Nick Schulz. The reason given, then and now, was that online magazines like Politico.com were proving that the medium could be profitable. The American was, according to someone familiar with this decision, “hemorrhaging” cash.*

Other AEI cutbacks that have drawn attention are explained as matters of organizational politics as much as by economics. Last year Joshua Muravchik, Michael Ledeen, and Reuel Marc Gerecht, all prominent neoconservatives, left the think tank in what journalist and historian Jacob Heilbrunn thought might be a “purge.” Ledeen said this week that his move from AEI to the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies “had nothing to do with any cash issue.” But Ledeen’s Freedom Chair Endowment followed him from AEI to FDD, and some at AEI said that the organization had suffered a hit with the loss of Ledeen’s friends and funders. Muravchik said he was fired because of differences with AEI Vice President Danielle Pletka, but that he was offered a smaller severance package than he’d been offered when the possibility had been discussed before.

Those familiar with the funding of other conservative think tanks are not surprised that AEI is taking some hits. Carsten Walter, the director of membership for the Heritage Foundation, said the aggressive marketing and direct mail campaign of that think tank had made up for expected damage from skittish large donors and foundations. Since 2006, Heritage’s network of donors has expanded from 275,000 to roughly 415,000. Small-money donors who are angry at the new Democratic administration can show their might by supporting a conservative think tank. This sort of revenue stream isn’t available to AEI.

Back at AEI, Rodman is confident, but well aware that a longer economic slump will lead to greater problems. AEI has been through financial crunches before–when Chris DeMuth took charge in 1986, the organization was facing a bigger budget crunch than now. In the years since, the think tank has been parsimonious. The economic crisis is providing some hard lessons in the virtues of fiscal conservatism.

* This article originally contained this sentence: “Duncan Currie, who was managing editor of the magazine and is now a reporter and editor of National Review, was informed that AEI was 20 percent over budget and that cutting The American sliced the shortfall in half.” Mr. Currie tells us that this is inaccurate.

An author I don’t know, writing at The Washington Monthly, argues that “rendition” would not permit CIA to transfer terrorists to foreign countries that practice torture. I hope he’s right, and I’ll try to follow it, although it’s not at all easy. Anyway, thanks to an alert reader who was kind enough to call my attention to the article.

The post is actually pretty straightforward. The Los Angeles Times printed a wobbly story on renditions and Hilzoy — who’s a woman, by the way — carefully went through the problems with it. It’s not hard to understand, but it’s certainly long. Maybe she could have used a famous dead person as a literary marionette to reaffirm her particular viewpoint with an added and unearned authority.

Smarter, please.