Rolling Stone's Michael Hastings is a consistent home run hitter. First, he profiled the culture of disdain that General Stanley McChrystal and his command staff had for their civilian leadership partners -- ending McChrystal's storied military career.

Now, Hastings has something right out of bad fiction. Lt. General William Caldwell, who is reportedly one of President Obama's favorites, actually hatched and deployed a plan to use psy-ops against US Senators and Congressmen. Unbelievable, and illegal.

Two of those US Senators targeted were Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin and US Senator Al Franken. Levin has already issued a statement that his views on building Afghan security forces have been consistent and stands by his views -- i.e. saying he didn't feel that the psy-ops worked on him.

But I'm not so sure.

In January 2010, I participated in a substantive and interesting conference call with Senator Levin when he was returning with Al Franken via Dubai from a CODEL trip visiting Afghanistan. I wrote about it then and was fairly surprised given the skepticism both had previously expressed for Afghanistan that they believed so readily what the military was telling them. It really seemed strange to me.

Here is what I wrote after the conference call. I also did a few media shows about this leap that Levin and Franken had made on Afghanistan, particularly on Pete Dominick's SiriusXM POTUS Channel show.

Caldwell should be fired. What he did, if Hastings has his details is right, is really outrageous and a further testament to the wobbliness of civilian control over the military in today's world.

But bigger question is whether any psy-ops operations were directed at the President of the United States and/or his direct team.

Someone needs to ask that in the White House press briefing.

-- Steve Clemons

This is a guest note by Mark Leon Goldberg, Managing Editor of UN Dispatch, where this piece originally ran.

Leave it to Muammar Qaddafi to bring together the Israelis and Palestinians at the United Nations.

I have just obtained the copy of a draft resolution from the Human Rights Council that strongly condemns the violence in Libya. The resolution is as strongly worded as they come. But what is more significant than the substance of the resolution is the broad support that it has attracted by a diverse set of members.

Check this out (full pdf):

You'll also note that Qatar and Tunisia co-signed.

As it happens, Libya is on the Human Rights Council right now. But given the broad support for this resolution, I can't imagine that they will last much longer. (A two-thirds vote of the General Assembly is required to boot a member from the Human Rights Council.)

Very interesting times. And a situation like this demonstrates the value of the Human Rights Council -- it can be used to show the cruel Libyan regime just how united the world is against it.

"We've joined many concerned members of the Human Rights Council in supporting this session," Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Suzanne Nossel tells me over email, "It is significant that the international community will speak with one voice in condemning the violence."

-- Mark Leon Goldberg

Wow. This could be big. The conversation the right on the Afghanistan War is really beginning to happen. Huckabee could be No. 23.

More from HuffPost's Sam Stein.

To read more on US policy towards Afghanistan, a good resource is the Afghanistan Study Group report.

-- Steve Clemons

I wish Beck could be just laughed off.

He's absurd, ignorant, poisonous -- but also dangerous. He does have an audience, some of which is obnoxiously pugnacious and alarmingly coercive.

Today, Salon's Alex Pareene has a very good profile on Beck's lunacy as he continues his Roger Ailes-sanctioned rant against George Soros and "reformed Judaism.

Beck says that "reformed Judaism" is basically akin to radical Islam.

Now, the Fox Network is aiming its bigotry at Jews as well as Muslims.

Pareene writes:

Glenn Beck said something stupid about Jewish people, today. Just FYI. On his radio program, while discussing George Soros, Beck says Reform Judaism is "almost like" "radicalized Islam."

Glenn Beck has called Soros a Nazi collaborator and claimed that the man is bent on world domination, and now he is claiming that Reform Jews are not real Jews, because many of them tend to be liberal. Most surveys find that a plurality of American Jews are Reform, and Glenn Beck thinks they resemble religious extremists, because he does not consider them sufficiently spiritual.

Beck will almost certainly not be called on any of this by the Anti-Defamation League, the self-appointed arbiter of what should be considered anti-Semitic or not, because the head of the ADL is very, very good chums with Beck's boss, Roger Ailes (a man who helped make virulent anti-Semite Richard Nixon president way back in the 1960s). When he utilized ancient and obvious anti-Semitic tropes to attack Soros in the first place, they gave him a pass because, they said, he "doesn't understand" what he's doing.

Here is the rest of Pareene's piece.

-- Steve Clemons

Former Reagan Administration Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs and frequent Fox News military affairs commentator Bing West is now, by my count, the 22nd big time Republican opposed to the course of US policy in Afghanistan.

Huffington Post's Nick Wing and Ben Craw compiled a list of the first 20 Republicans to tilt against the war.

Although Grover Norquist says he is calling for "a conversation on the right" about the costs and consequences of the Afghanistan War rather than directly opposing the war and calling for a withdrawal of US troops, his stance works for me to give him the #21 spot.

But after his appearance on the Colbert Report and publication of The Wrong War: Grit, Strategy and the Way Out of Afghanistan, I hereby grant Bing West the #22 slot.

-- Steve Clemons

Breaking News from ABCNEWS.com:

Cost of a Barrel of Oil Exceeds $100 for the First Time Since 2008 [1:30 p.m. ET]

-- Steve Clemons

I took this video clip in March 2010 when I visited Tripoli, Libya and was interested in counter-terrorism activities of the Libyan government. When I was there, we were taken to a prison where hundreds of prisoners -- most of whom were either Libya Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) members or other young jihadists who wanted to fight "infidels" in Afghanistan and Iraq.

These men were dancing and singing tributes to their leader, to Moammer Gaddafi. The scene very much disturbed me -- and thus am only posting it now.

But this is the kind of celebration of dictatorship that people do to survive. When they got out of the prison, I saw the eruptive emotional outcries when they connected with their families. They would do anything to get out of those prisons.

I would wager this men and their families are not singing tributes to their Leader now.

-- Steve Clemons

Politico's Laura Rozen has the scoop that National Security Council Senior Director for the Middle East and North Africa Dan Shapiro will be moving to Tel Aviv to serve as the next US Ambassador to Israel.

This is a big shift and one wonders who will succeed Shapiro at the NSC desk and whether Obama is thinking that having Shapiro right there in Israel will help soften up Bibi Netanyahu.

The combination of Shapiro's close working relationship with President, Tom Donilon, Denis McDonough and Ben Rhodes may mean that Shapiro may be more than the normal Ambassador who has to process through State Department bureaucracy and cables -- but rather be a direct guy on the line for Obama wrestling with the Israeli government.

Very good move in my view. I have had the privilege of knowing Dan since the mid-1990s when he was Senator Dianne Feinstein's brain on foreign policy, and he has always impressed me.

Rozen writes about Shapiro:

Shapiro has been one of Obama's closest Middle East advisers, and one who uniquely seems to get along well with everyone. The President trusts Shapiro, who has worked closely with National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, Deputy National Security adviser Denis McDonough, the NSC's top Iran and regional strategist Dennis Ross, as well as Middle East peace envoy George Mitchell, and has a good rapport with Congress, where he previously served as a staffer. Shapiro also has good ties with the Jewish community, having served as a key White House point of contact for the Jewish community, and helped head up Jewish outreach for the Obama campaign.

Shapiro, who speaks fluent Hebrew, also has good ties with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and has accompanied Mitchell on countless shuttle diplomacy trips in the region.

We'll see what other chairs move around -- but this one is good for the mission of 'eventually' getting to yes on an Israel-Palestine deal.

-- Steve Clemons

The Los Angeles Times 2010 Book Prize finalists have just been announced -- and I'm pleased to report that this year I served as a judge on the history panel. That meant that we had about a hundred books to read through and consider from this past year -- and while edifying, it's also a real time juggling challenge.

I really liked all five of these history category finalists:

Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life (The Penguin Press)

John W. Dower, Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor/Hiroshima/9-11/Iraq (W. W. Norton & Company and The New Press)

Susan Dunn, Roosevelt's Purge: How FDR Fought To Change the Democratic Party (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press)

Thomas Powers, The Killing of Crazy Horse (Knopf)

Steven Solomon, Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization (HarperCollins)

Special thanks to James Fallows of The Atlantic and Diane Smith of Montana State University for their terrific work as co-judges of this history panel; and also to Ann Binney and Kenneth Turan for hanging in there with us as we went through our process selecting the finalists.

On April 29th, you'll get to hear who the winner is.

-- Steve Clemons

Moammar Gaddafi:

I will not leave the country and I will die as a martyr.

I have no comment.

-- Steve Clemons

My colleague Daniel Levy who directs the Middle East Task Force shared a useful line on Michele Kelemen's NPR show focusing on what now needs to be done regarding Israel-Palestine peace efforts. He said:

It's difficult to be a friend of Arab democracy if you are perceived to be an enemy of Palestinian freedom.

Kelemen's segment is important as it makes the key point that any further progress in Arab-Israeli peace is going to have to build in Arab public opinion.

From the transcript:

It can't be business as usual, says Levy. The U.S., he says, can no longer rely on Egypt to back talks that were going nowhere, or to continue sealing off Gaza -- the territory controlled by the Palestinian militant group Hamas. Levy says Egypt and Israel will have to find new ways to keep weapons out of Gaza without punishing Palestinians. He says this may be a chance to build on what he calls a "pyramid peace."

"Until now, it was only the very tips of the two pyramids that had anything to do with each other on a very narrow, often security-interest related basis," Levy says. "A democratic Egypt and a democratic Israel could have a much broader peace. You could get the bases of those two pyramids into the peace. But only if you can also do right by the Palestinians."

He calls this a new era for U.S. peacemakers -- an era when public opinion in the Arab world matters.

I agree -- and I think that there are many in Israel who can get behind a reset in this process given what they see unfolding rapidly around them.

-- Steve Clemons

Last week Thursday I spoke at the Tulsa Committee on Foreign Relations and thanks to the hospitality of the community, I had the opportunity to chat with Studio Tulsa's Rich Fisher, who hosts a thoughtful public affairs program at KWGS Public Radio Tulsa, a National Public Radio affiliate that reaches three states.

The topic: A Middle East in Transition.

Here is the link so folks can listen to or download the audio.

-- Steve Clemons

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has today released the statement below on Libya where things are getting worse.

Here is the Libya twitter feed; the government is reportedly bombing citizens from the air in Tripoli and elsewhere.

STATEMENT BY SECRETARY CLINTON

Situation in Libya

The world is watching the situation in Libya with alarm. We join the international community in strongly condemning the violence in Libya. Our thoughts and prayers are with those whose lives have been lost, and with their loved ones. The government of Libya has a responsibility to respect the universal rights of the people, including the right to free expression and assembly.

Now is the time to stop this unacceptable bloodshed. We are working urgently with friends and partners around the world to convey this message to the Libyan government.

I just heard the Libyan Ambassador to the United States Ali Aujali bravely and succinctly condemn his own government for what is happening. Libyan diplomats posted at Embassies and Missions around the world, to the United Nations, and to the Arab League are resigning their posts. Some parts of Libya's military are standing down and defecting.

Gaddafi used to seem like a bumbling lunatic to most whose experience with him was limited to watching him speak at UN General Assembly sessions -- but inside Libya, his control was firm and severe. That's over now -- and he and his retainers seem intent on destroying a country that they must know that they can never lead again.

-- Steve Clemons

Most know George Soros as either the world's most consistently successful investor or as a philanthropist -- but more should know him as a philosopher and strategist about complex systems. Soros thinks that mankind is constantly working to establish points of equilibrium and while these may hold for a while, particularly through the efforts of people and governments to hold things in balance, eventually that balance is eroded and things shift. This is a small part of what he refers to as "reflexivity."

Soros once said at a Council on Foreign Relations meeting that central bankers do their best -- but ultimately, their fate is to lose control of things. This is an inadequate and too brief description of part of Soros' thinking on 'reflexivity,' but I think he has a very valuable insight into the eruptions we are seeing in the Middle East.

To a certain degree, America's longstanding investments in Egypt as a peace partner for Israel and in various other totalitarian regimes either as friends or even as managed foes is part of keeping order and balance in the West's national security portfolio. But the equilibrium has collapsed and everything is shifting.

Former Senator Chuck Hagel, now co-chair of the President's Intelligence Advisory Board and Chairman of the Atlantic Council, has an important tour de force article out that captures this point: there is no one size fits all doctrine for the complex realities of the world today and American strategy needs to work on that premise.

Hagel writes in a piece that should be read in full:

This unprecedented rate of change in the Middle East will require careful and deliberate planning for peaceful and politically sustainable transitions. There is no one model to apply to how this wave of unpredictability and reform will affect each country of this region, or how the U.S. should or will respond in each specific case.

The Middle East of 2011 has many of the same problems as the Middle East of 2010. The demands for reform take place as some see U.S. influence in the region waning, evident by setbacks in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, the influence of Iran in Iraq, and the role of a more assertive China, at least economically, throughout the Persian Gulf and internationally.

The uncertainty of the months ahead may, however, bring with it the chance for the U.S. to regain some of the credibility that it has lost as a result of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the continued stalemate in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

U.S. diplomacy must continue to actively engage our Arab allies to seize the initiative and begin a dialogue and program of reform with the next generation of Middle East leaders in their parliaments, universities, businesses and civil society sectors. The U.S. should encourage but not interfere. The Arab ruling elites should consider this dialogue and encouragement as a partnership for the future, not a vindication of the past or a threat to the present.

There is a historic opportunity in the Middle East to bridge the gap between rulers and citizens. This is the time for wise, visionary and steady statecraft. These U.S. diplomatic initiatives cannot be considered as optional or secondary. They are vital to U.S. interests and for the peaceful process of change and reform in the Middle East.

Reform and change share the ledger with stability and security; there is no longer a trade-off -- and never really was. The U.S. and its allies in the past got away with "transactional relationships." Dictators and authoritarian governments were accepted and tolerated because they fulfilled the basic criteria which defended our interests.

We were often caught -- and still are -- in the hypocrisy zone standing for democracy but supporting dictatorships. A distinction between reform and stability is now a false distinction. Democratic transitions are as exciting as they are complicated -- but always unpredictable. We must remember that democracy is more than an election. In a region where many governments for decades have tolerated little or no space for political thought, debate or opposition, reform will not come quickly, easily or without setbacks.

I've been thinking about how the Obama administration's steps taken during this fluid time will become to be known -- and think that the emerging Obama doctrine will include a mixed bag of approaches to problems to match the mixed bag realities of the international order today -- some mix of US interests, US values, and a message to regimes that they are on their own if their social contract between the governed and those who govern explodes.

-- Steve Clemons

This is a guest note by Chas W. Freeman, Jr. This essay comprises Freeman's remarks at the Camden Conference on February 17, 2011 in Camden, Maine.

The Challenge of Asia

The Greeks are to blame for many things. Not least of these is the somewhat preposterous idea of "Asia." For thousands of years after strategists in Greece came up with this Eurocentric notion, the many non-European peoples who inhabited the Eurasian landmass were blissfully unaware that they were supposed to share an identity as "Asians." After all, except during the near-unification of Asia under the Mongols, they had little to do with each other. Arabs and Chinese, like Indians, Japanese, Malays, Persians, Russians, Turks, and others had different histories, cultures, languages, religious heritages, and political traditions. Their economies were only tenuously connected by the gossamer strands of the Silk Road and its maritime counterpart.

But all this is now changing. "Asia" is leaving the realm of Greek myth and becoming a reality. Asians are drawing together as they rise in wealth and power. Their companies and their influence now extend throughout their own continent and beyond. In the Twentieth Century, the world had to adapt to American domination of its global political economy. Americans must now adapt to a political economy increasingly centered on Asia.

In much of Asia, as late as the last decades of the past century, post-colonial hangovers deranged politics with love-hate relationships that distorted attitudes toward the West. This is easy to understand. After all, Western colonialism had humbled the armies, crushed the self-esteem, and suppressed the values and political traditions of societies from Turkey to China.

In West Asia, Turks, Arabs, and Persians bit by bit yielded their autonomy, territory, and national dignity to predatory Europeans. In India, the British overthrew Muslim rule, imposed a single sovereignty, and embroiled the once-isolated subcontinent in the quarrels of Europe. States in South Asia that had for long contributed about one-fifth of the global economy were subordinated to British mercantilism and subjected to British rule.

The East Indies and Indochina also fell to European imperialism. In East Asia, only Thailand and Japan embraced key elements of westernization with sufficient alacrity to keep the West more or less at bay. Japan did this with such drive and discipline that it soon imposed its own colonial rule in Korea and parts of China. In the Russo-Japanese War and World War II, Japan went on to demonstrate that, when allied to modern technology, its martial traditions would let it punch far above its nominal military and economic weight.

Russia gobbled up Central Asia. It gnawed away at China from the north, as Western powers nibbled at it from the south and east. Foreigners carved China into spheres of influence, annexed parts of its territory, and placed bits and pieces of it under their extraterritorial jurisdiction. Europeans and Americans had to do this, we said, to be able to exercise our right to peddle narcotics and proselytize an alien religious ideology to the Chinese people over the outlandish objections of their rulers.

(Chas Freeman -- The Challenge of Asia -- extended on next page)

As I watch Al Jazeera and its reporting inspire and inform people across the Arabic world -- and educate many English-speaking people who are stuck to their TVs, I think it becomes increasingly clear and obvious that Barack Obama has made a mistake not himself appearing on this network.

It's time that President Obama spoke to the Arab-speaking Middle East through Al Jazeera. They are watching and want to know where America is going and how it sees things.

It's important for this part of the world to hear more about the principles of reform, respect for human rights, and non-violence that Barack Obama has made the pillars of his emerging doctrine.

-- Steve Clemons

In the age of HuffPost, Talking Points Memo, Red State, Powerline, DailyKos, Foreign Policy (2.0), Daily Beast, Frum Forum and so on -- it's easy to forget that there are fantastic resource pages out there on what is happening around the world. Al Jazeera is blasting by much of its competition in the US and UK in its penetrating coverage of the revolutions underway in the Middle East.

But PBS NewsHour is getting sexy again -- OK, maybe an overstatement, but I think it is really getting hip. I like the new PBS Online NewsHour World page.

In general, the resource pages for the NewsHour are superb. And Margaret Warner is tenacious at getting her targets lined up for interviews. I was with her in the galleries as a guest of Susan Rice at the UN Security Council meeting chaired by President Obama a year and a half ago and realized it was far better helping Margaret Warner get what she wanted rather than be someone in her way.

And I owe Jim Lehrer a lot for doing a "double take" when I mentioned during an interview with him that the US was spending more than $100 billion a year in Afghanistan which only had a GDP of $14 billion. His own astonishment at that figure, expressed on air, got hundreds of thousands of other Americans scratching their heads and considering whether the cost of America's neo-colonial experiment in Afghanistan was worth it.

But on the new World Page there is a lot of neat stuff -- including a Twitter list that includes @SCClemons, @globalvoices, @thedailybeast, @nytimesworld, @pjcrowley, @wsjworldnews, @globalpost, @nprnews, and @pritheworld. Good starting roster -- even with a bit of self-interested bias.

Onward and upward, and thanks to the NewsHour team for upping its game.

-- Steve Clemons

This is a letter from Richard Vague, a Philadelphia businessman and co-founder with Steve Clemons of the Afghanistan Study Group. Vague also publishes the daily eclectic ideas of the day blog, Delancey Place.

Dear Steve:

Perhaps one of your readers has already pointed this out, but the 2011 uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, etc are instructively similar to a wave of uprisings that occurred in 1848 in Europe - beginning in France and quickly spreading throughout the continent.

That year turned out to be one of the most pivotal in the history of Europe. It was a time when almost every country was still a monarchy, and even in England, where a constitutional monarchy limited the power of the king, the government was not yet a democracy, and lordships and heredity still held sway.

And so across Europe there were violent upheavals as the people, fueled by poverty and stoked by the more rapid communications possible in the wake of the industrial revolution, sought a voice and vote in the governance of their countries. Most of those uprisings fell short of their objectives. But they were harbingers of the demise of monarchy in Europe that came in succeeding generations.

Ultimately, the question was not whether monarchy would survive, but rather which form of government would replace it - and the competition was between inchoate forms of democracy and socialism.

Here is a brief excerpt from the introduction of Mike Rapport's book 1848, published in 2008:

"In 1848 a violent storm of revolutions tore through Europe. With an astounding rapidity crowds of working-class radicals and middle-class liberals in Paris, Milan, Venice, Naples, Palermo, Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Krakow and Berlin toppled the old regimes and began the task of forging a new liberal order. Political events so dramatic had not been seen in Europe since the French Revolution Of 1789 - and would not be witnessed again until the revolutions of Eastern and Central Europe in 1989 or perhaps the less far-reaching Bolshevik Revolution Of 1917. ... The brick-built authoritarian edifice that had imposed itself on Europeans for almost two generations folded under the weight of the insurrections. ...

"For the Germans, Italians, Hungarians, Romanians, Poles, Czechs, Croats and Serbs, the year was to be the 'Springtime of Peoples', a chance to assert their own sense of national identity and to gain political recognition. In the cases of the Germans and the Italians, it was an opportunity for national unification under a liberal or even democratic order. Nationalism therefore was one issue that came frothing to the surface of European politics in 1848. While rooted in constitutionalism and civil rights it was a nationalism that ominously made little allowance for the legitimacy of claims of other national groups. In many places, such narrowness of vision led to bitter ethnic conflict which in the end helped to destroy the revolutionary regimes of Central and Eastern Europe. ...

"The revolutions were scarred almost everywhere by a bitter often violent political polarization. Moderates wanted parliamentary government - but not necessarily to enfranchise everyone - and they were challenged by radicals who wanted democracy - frequently combined with dramatic social reform - without delay. ...

"A third issue that came boiling to the surface in 1848 and never left the European political agenda was the 'social question.' The abject misery of both urban and rural people had loomed menacingly in the thirty or so years since the Napoleonic Wars. The poverty was caused by a burgeoning population which was not yet offset by a corresponding growth in the economy. Governments however did little to address the social distress which was taken up as a cause by a relatively new political current - socialism - in 1848. The revolutions therefore thrust the 'social question' firmly and irrevocably into politics. Any subsequent regime, no matter how conservative or authoritarian, ignored it at its peril. In 1848, however, the question of what to do about poverty would prove to be one of the great nemeses of the liberal revolutionary regimes."

-- Richard Vague

Saif Gaddafi has probably just assured the civil war he warned against in his finger-wagging comments that security forces would fight protesters down to the last bullet. Leading tribal chiefs inside Libya have called out for the Gaddafi government to show restraint and to back off, condemning government for the violence against those mourning at funerals and the indiscriminate shooting and shelling of unarmed crowds by snipers and from helicopters. Hundreds have been slaughtered and many thousands injured.

What is interesting is that Saif Gaddafi is no idiot. He has seen for some time that his father's government was brittle and fragile -- and that a spark could come along and unleash internal rage against those holding incumbent power.

Much to the distress and private anger of Libyan leader Moammer Gaddafi's chief internal security and military czars, Saif Gaddafi has led a domestic campaign of reconciliation and bridge-building with the Muslim Brotherhood, considered at that time to be the regime's chief political opponent. At Saif's urging and with grudging support from his father, various former leaders of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group had been appointed to various key government and semi-government positions of responsibility.

When I was in Libya, three of the LIFG's top tier -- the Emir of the group as well as the head of planning, and of armaments -- were taken off of death row and released. I was there and met them and watched the discomfort of the chief of internal security as this was happening. Saif was trying to make the police state his father had built relax its grip and to reconcile with many of those it feared.

Thus, while I am no fan of Gaddafi, the full story of the revolution inside Libya can't be told without understanding that Saif Gaddafi, a likely successor to his father, believed in certain kinds of reforms and inclusion early -- but given the tenor, the arrogance, and distance from reality he exhibited in his televised comments, he showed that he doesn't understand the public grievances driving this revolution.

There is little hope that any of these regimes in the Middle East really understand what an inclusive, non-totalitarian regime would really look like.

-- Steve Clemons

I very much support the creation of institutions and movements that support civil discourse -- and applaud the announcement of this new National Center for Civil Discourse at the University of Arizona which Presidents Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush will co-chair.

The problem though is that it's important to realize that the crowd they assemble to be stakeholders in these efforts can't just be the warm and fuzzy, genteel types. The announced board includes Tom Daschle, Madeleine Albright, Jim Kolbe, Greta Van Susteren, Ken Duberstein, Trey Grayson, and Sandra Day O'Connor.

I like all of these folks and know most of them fairly well -- but they are not the cutting edge of political discourse in America -- and they are already so civil that having them doesn't demonstrate a pathway to curbing incivility.

Only Greta brings a little sizzle because of her relationship with Fox, where a lot of the torpedoes of uncivil discourse are launched by Roger Ailes, Bill Sammon, Glen Beck and others as part of the business model of the network.

Others I think who are nationally important and would give this important institution a less stuffy feel that captures the dynamism of contemporary discourse would include Ann Coulter, Andrew Sullivan, David Frum, Robert Gallucci, Keith Ellison (in ex officio status given that he is serving in Congress now - but a leading Muslim American is important), Rahm Emanuel, Trevor Potter, Wes Boyd or Justin Ruben of MoveOn, David Brock, Fareed Zakaria, Grover Norquist, Arianna Huffington, Joshua Micah Marshall, Katrina vanden Heuvel, George Soros, David Boaz, Sidney Blumenthal, John Podesta, David Fenton, James Glassman, Chuck Hagel, Aaron Schock (another Member of Congress who seems cool with responsible political conflict), and more.

I might even try folks like Liz Cheney and David Addington who has recently become one of the top team at the Heritage Foundation and whose approach to national security infrastructure building is about as antithetical to my views as I can imagine. But if Addington felt strongly that civility in discourse was important, it would help decrease the too high temperatures of political debate.

We don't need bland, whitebread politics, and America wouldn't politically work as it is supposed to unless people, interests, media, bloggers, and institutions didn't pursue their interests vigorously in a competitive framework.

But responsible conflict, responsible debate, responsible discourse need to be a valued, supported part of the political commons -- and I think that some of the folks I have mentioned have demonstrated an ability to be both severe and balanced. Yes, even Ann Coulter. I admire her decision to speak to and "embrace" gay Republicans.

She has set an example that even the most strident and pugnacious of us can change and learn something.

So, kudos to Bill Clinton and G.H.W. Bush, as well as other movers behind the scenes in launching this Center -- but friendly piece of advice: you need to bring in some of the symbolically less civil or not always civil or downright uncivil as stakeholders in the enterprise to dent public attitudes.

-- Steve Clemons

John Judis has a sensible piece out now, pondering what a new US strategy in the Middle East should prioritize. As one friend commented to me, there seems to be a new current of freedom at The New Republic as it would have seemed inconceivable that such a line as that which follows would have made it past Marty Peretz's editorial pen.

Judis writes:

. . .The choice, in other words, does not simply involve what the United States should do in Egypt, but in the entire region. My own view is that given the choice between promoting Egypt's revolution and ensuring continuity in its own foreign policy, the Obama administration should change its policies toward the Middle East to accommodate the demand for democracy in Egypt. Not on every issue, nor toward every country, but toward the Netanyahu government, the Palestinians, and the dictators under siege in the Gulf and North Africa.

That would include pressing rather than discouraging a rapprochement between Hamas and Fatah (which is a prerequisite for meaningful negotiations over a Palestinian state), using the threat of withdrawing American aid--as George H.W. Bush did in 1991--to bring the Netanyahu government to the negotiating table, and distancing American policy from Arab rulers in the Gulf.

What Judis is getting at is that the US and Israel need to wake up and see the trends afoot in the region and get with the wave, or ahead of it. Cultivating responsible self-determination in the region, particularly with the rising political Islamic groups which view themselves as champions of a new democratic trend in the region, is necessary.

I have been writing for some time that Israel's security situation with the US, Egypt and Jordan was working sort of like a New Orleans levy -- working for the time being, but not getting better with time and that some day a storm would come and knock out those levies. Israeli security needs to be revisioned and constructed in other ways as the current arrangements have eroded and are failing. This is not good for Israel, nor America, nor the Middle East states around it.

-- Steve Clemons

h/t to Max Blumenthal for sending my way.