Over the last couple of years, I have been increasingly impressed by the work and thinking of Georgetown scholar and now outgoing Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemispheric Affairs Arturo Valenzuela.

I didn't start there.  When Obama Land was picking its team, I had held some private doubts about Valenzuela when I first learned he might land his current job as he then appeared to me as part of the 'preserve the status quo establishment' on US-Latin America relations.  Many Democrats and Republicans in this business are essentially values-crusaders with no sense of the damage that the US-Cuba Embargo has done to American national interests and very little understanding of the costs of US arrogance to relations across the region.  I couldn't have been more wrong. 

Valenzuela is a serious, pragmatic strategist about America's national interests in the region.  He came in to his current position in turbulent currents just as Senator Jim DeMint was squaring off the with the State Department and White House over who DeMint wanted to be the leader of Honduras in what was perceived by many to be a coup against the legitimate President of that country.

Wanting to know more about Valenzuela's thinking I went to see him after he overcame the long "hold" that Senator DeMint had placed on his nomination and got an extraordinary tour de force not only of America's interests in the region but heard a thorough inventory of how leaders in the region saw America's behavior and actions.  He is an active listener -- and spent a great deal of time hearing out the issues bubbling in many frustrated nations to America's south. 

I got a sense of what America's real strategy was in the region -- as opposed to the politically correct optics, which I found vapid and tired, particularly when it came to the stale, badly managed US-Cuba situation.  Valenzuela convinced me that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had drilled down into the realities of Latin America's dynamics and really understood how important it was to get beyond the disfunctional cycles of neglect and hyper-attention that had left a residue of deep mistrust.

Valenzuela confessed to me that US-Latin America policy does not follow the same tracks as, say, US-China policy, or policy towards Iran, or Russia, or NATO-member nations.  Latin America policy -- set by the White House -- no matter how rational and conscientious and planned one wants to be about it, is easily hijacked by events, distractions, or the next perceived bigger item on the policy docket. 

I once quoted Center for Democracy in the Americas President Sarah Stephens who wrote that in one of Barack Obama's major foreign policy essays offered during his first presidential campaign, he committed only 13 words to Latin America.  One of his campaign aides then sent me another speech of Obama's in which he spent 2,115 words on Latin America -- but Valenzuela's point still stands:  Latin America gets surges of interest and then is often neglected.

That is the world that Assistant Secretary of State Valenzuela has operated in.  So, what has he accomplished?

According to numerous sources on the Latin America side of things, Valenzuela pumped life into somewhat moribund channels of communication, both bilaterally and multilaterally in the region.  There is great distrust in Latin America about America's intentions in the region when the US is engaged and anger about America's neglect when disengaged -- and according to sources in the diplomatic arena, Valenzuela balanced that better than nearly any of his predecessors.

Concomitantly, America's favorability ratings in the region have moved substantially higher -- meaning that there is less sense of US meddling, less of an ideological gap that rubs raw the nerves and sensibilities of Latin American citizens. 

Valenzuela also handled the Wikileaks fallout smartly -- convincing most impacted countries to get beyond the episodic moment and to focus on long term strategic bridge-building. Ecuador and Mexico proved to be the standouts -- but even those cases are moving in a better direction now.

US-Brazil relations were going into the tank, and are still rough, but Valenzuela managed a substantial 'reset' of the relationship with President Obama's visit (when the US and allies  launched the Libya action).

Given that Valenzuela came into his job with the Honduran political situation erupting, it's impressive that he just helped usher Honduras' return to the OAS, from which it had been expelled.

Close to my own interests, Valenzuela helped move forward some degree of sanity and common sense in restoring cultural, educational, scientific and other dimensions of US-Cuba travel and exchange.

Valenzuela accomplished much during his tenure at the State Department -- and I fear that his leaving will result in some loss of ground for those who want a more dynamic, healthy, and modern American relationship with Latin America -- but am hopeful that his successor will move along a similar course as he laid out.

The truth is, however, that America tends to move backward on Latin America far more consistently than it moves forward.

-- Steve Clemons is Washington Editor at Large of The Atlantic, and this post also appeared on The Atlantic's International Channel.  Clemons can be followed on Twitter at @SCClemons

Part of the annual foreign policy ritual in Washington is that the US President, Vice President, and leading Members of Congress make major campaign and fundraising speeches, sign on to resolutions, and pledge unconditional support to Israel, often referring to it as "the only genuine democracy in the Middle East." 

But will it remain so?  The Israel Knesset just passed 47-38 a bill outlawing its citizens from supporting any anti-Israel boycotts.

I have been to Israel and am always impressed by how wide the margins of debate are there -- far wider than inside the DC Beltway where thought control harassment and political intimidation have become art forms when it comes to discussing Middle East dynamics. 

But in Israel, in the Knesset, there has been real debate for decades.  I've spent quality time discussing issues in a completely civil manner with Orthodox rabbis, with members of the Shas Party, with members even of Avigdor Lieberman's party.  I've talked with chairs of the various settlers' associations -- and have worked hard to develop relations across Labor, Kadima and Likud.  Israeli politicians play hardball with each other - and the country, in the end, is better for the level of civil society debate demanded by citizens.

Israel has an impressive rough and tumble democracy, or had.

There is just no doubt that Israel has been King of the Hill in democracy terms and now seems to be kicking down its own democratic hill with the passage of this law.  For the record, I don't support a boycott of Israel just like I don't support anyone burning the American flag. 

But free societies show themselves to be better and more stable than their totalitarian cousins because they allow free debate and governments allow themselves to be challenged by their own people. 

If South Africans, inside South Africa, had not supported the various boycotts of their country during the battle over Apartheid, then Mandela may have remained imprisoned and the despicable ethnic divide might have endured. 

Israel has just hoisted on itself the equivalence of a McCarthy-like witch hunt for those it feels might be traitors to the Greater Israel cause.  These kinds of loyalty oath stunts and such government brittleness undermine democracy and narrow national debate during times when its smarter to keep the gates of ideas as widely open as possible.

Despite today's vote, I don't think that Israel will careen off its more deeply embedded democratic foundation so quickly, but what passed should stand as a huge red flag for Israelis and those of us concerned for its future (and yes, I am).

One of my close mentors, the late and well known Japanese politics expert Hans Baerwald, told me that one really never knows the norms and real truth of a political system until observed under stress.

Real democracies need to cling to their basic code -- not take the shortest, most expeditious, extra-legal route in times of perceived national crisis and undermine the rights of citizens.  That violates basic trust -- and eventually plants the seeds of real rather than imagined rebellion.

-- Steve Clemons is Washington Editor at Large at The Atlantic and can be followed on Twitter at @SCClemons

Christopher Hitchens just pulled all the sticky veneer off of a cancerous Pakistan-US relationship -- that has been going into the muck not just since we learned that Osama bin Laden was living somewhat pleasantly just down the street from Pakistan's West Point but much before, particularly when A.Q. Khan -- also living luxuriously and as a national hero in a well-buffed world called 'house arrest' -- was out pushing highly sensitive nuclear bomb-making technology to leaders of the world's most thuggish regimes.

Hitchens, not off his game at all, sets the rip at the beginning of his important Vanity Fair piece, "From Abbottabad to Worse":

Here is a society where rape is not a crime. It is a punishment. Women can be sentenced to be raped, by tribal and religious kangaroo courts, if even a rumor of their immodesty brings shame on their menfolk. In such an obscenely distorted context, the counterpart term to shame--which is the noble word "honor"--becomes most commonly associated with the word "killing." Moral courage consists of the willingness to butcher your own daughter.

If the most elemental of human instincts becomes warped in this bizarre manner, other morbid symptoms will disclose themselves as well. Thus, President Asif Ali Zardari cringes daily in front of the forces who openly murdered his wife, Benazir Bhutto, and who then contemptuously ordered the crime scene cleansed with fire hoses, as if to spit even on the pretense of an investigation. A man so lacking in pride--indeed lacking in manliness--will seek desperately to compensate in other ways. Swelling his puny chest even more, he promises to resist the mighty United States, and to defend Pakistan's holy "sovereignty." This puffery and posing might perhaps possess a rag of credibility if he and his fellow middlemen were not avidly ingesting $3 billion worth of American subsidies every year.

I once met and got a tour-de-force of the rough cultural, ethnic, and economic dynamics of the two "statelets" that Hitchens describes within Pakistan from the assassinated Punjab Governor Salman Taseer.  I'm convinced that he knew his rivals would attempt to use his support of intellectual and religious liberalism against him.

We support Pakistan today -- and remain engaged -- because it is the most dangerous nation on the face of the planet today. 

Withdrawing from Pakistan, despite what Hitchens accurately describes as a nearly criminally perverse relationship, would trigger wildly dangerous scenarios -- in part because a substantial portion of the Islamist radical cells that exist in key corners of Pakistan's national security establishment seem to relish a nuclear conflagration with India and are as ideologically committed to global destabilization schemes as Osama bin Laden was.

But America needs to invent leverage in this relationship rather than become more trapped in the muck of it.  Today, Pakistan is engaged in high stakes extortion -- demanding funds and support or its already bad behavior could get much worse.  That's how North Korea survives.

Barack Obama is beginning a long process of beginning to pull troops out of Afghanistan -- but as long as the US maintains a large military footprint there, we have less leverage than otherwise with Pakistan, which controls many vital choke-points that the US depends on in waging war in Afghanistan.  A key to diminishing Pakistan's leverage over the US and changing the equation in the relationship is to 'shrink' the US presence in Afghanistan and minimize dependence on Pakistan.

Some inside Pakistan did applaud the killing of Osama bin Laden; some even helped behind the scenes provide intelligence that eventually led to the storming of his compound.  But the people that mattered, who are in the news, who are running the national security, diplomatic and intelligence ministries and agencies did not come out and say "We would have killed bin Laden had we found him."

They are not saying that -- and are instead condemning the US for its covert Seal Team Six operation -- because they are fearful of their own angry, armed religious radicals.  To secure legitimacy in Pakistan right now, one must be allied with the Taliban in Afghanistan and overtly anti-American, at least in public. 

Unfortunately, the raw truth is that America has no real choice but to remain engaged with Pakistan -- but this can't be a binary arrangement in which Pakistan extorts and the US turns a blind eye to Pakistan's role empowering rogue regimes and animating some of the world's worst transnational terrorists. 

Slow disengagement, a decrease in financial support (as the US has just done) -- though not a full suspension -- some arm-twisting of its patrons like China and Saudi Arabia and some strategic clarity in the Obama administration on what the real prize here is -- which is a less psychotic Pakistan -- rather than plodding along in the debilitating Afghanistan quagmire could move things, eventually, to a less dangerous course.

-- Steve Clemons is Washington Editor at Large at The Atlantic and can be followed on Twitter at @SCClemons

Watching on a long flight the other day the classic 1966 Sergio Leone spaghetti Western The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly I couldn't help but think that Afghanistan would make a great backdrop for a remake of the Clint Eastwood classic.

I'm not sure whether Kandahar region 'super governor' Ahmed Wali Karzai would have been cast as "The Bad" or "The Ugly", but the half brother of Afghanistan's President -- shot dead today by a family bodyguard -- was no force of noble spirit. 

The US intelligence establishment has amassed a mountain of material alleging his core involvement in Afghanistan's drug trade and his role not only as a profiteer in the lucrative private security business, but as someone who, like a mafia don, has allegedly had rivals and people of means kidnapped and harassed in an extortion racket.

Karzai's half brother was considered a war lord by many, often referred to as "the most powerful man in Southern Afghanistan."  When then US Representative and now Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Director Jane Harman was pounding the Obama administration and General David Petraeus to show her a plan on how such a morally insolvent and corrupt regime could ever become an adequate partner in stabilizing the country, she was in large degree talking about the intelligence sector-documented nefarious activities of President Karzai's brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai.

The Taliban have publicly claimed responsibility for Karzai's assassination by security guard and trusted Karzai household-insider, Sardar Mohammad.

If true, this shows the Taliban have great reach still throughout the power corridors of Afghan society -- and have enormous patience and skill to manage what would have been a complex and risky operation.  If not true, then one wonders what motivated this guard, and we just don't know those answers yet, if ever.

The other thing to remember though is that to many, Ahmed Wali Karzai was a self-aggrandizing mafia boss; people feared him -- and while many also may fear the Taliban, there is no clear battle between the good and the bad, between those with white hats and those with black.

Maybe for anyone to be the kind of power broker Karzai became, every one eventually becomes "The Ugly."

-- Steve Clemons is Washington Editor at Large at The Atlantic and can be followed on Twitter at @SCClemons

For the next couple of days, some of the world's leading thinkers will be spending time in Aix-en-Provence wrestling through "The State of the World" organized by Le Cercle des Economistes. 

I arrived late yesterday and have missed some of the headliners including Francis Fukuyama, now of Stanford and author of the recently published The Origins of Political Order: From Pre-Human Times to the French Revolution; former French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine; and Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Zhukov.

But I did catch a sliver of a session exploring the growing tension between political rather than economic zones and whether 'states' were back or still getting fuzzed up by various transnational saboteurs.

The most interesting moments of this panel came from my New America Foundation colleague and friend Parag Khanna as well as McKinsey & Co. Managing Director (the top one) Dominic Barton.

Khanna said that globalization is not a trend that can just be quickly turned on and off.  He thinks globalization is a much, longer deeper process stretching back a thousand years in which the Silk Road was an early part of the platform.  Khanna said we are "now entering a phase in which globalization is really global" and that it can't be slowed by the fiscal straits of a few of the larger developed countries.

Khanna also said that nation states as the term of unit in the international system was being undermined by "Four C's" -- Countries, Cities, Companies, and Communities.  He believes that these groupings will share authorities, overlap, and intensify their communication and coordination in ways that don't depend on the state for intermediation.

McKinsey's Dominic Barton, the most fun of all the speakers on the panel which included former Mexican foreign minister Jorge Castaneda and Asian Development Bank Chief Economist Changyong Rhee among others, said that the best depiction of world affairs was not a "cube" or "globe" -- but rather a "bowl of spaghetti."  (I wanted to slip him a note that while Wednesday might have been Italy in his schedule, that he was now in France. . .)

But building on Khanna's offering on the rise of cities and communities as new global building blocks, Barton said that there is more intense interaction between the world's 600 largest cities than ever before.

Barton also said that there are now 2 billion people on the internet; that China added 150 million internet users last year alone.  There are 600 million Facebook users and 190 million on Twitter.  He said that many in China believe that "Crest" (the toothpaste) is a Chinese company.

He also made an appeal to the world's bloggers and writers to focus on the important issues of our time -- and said that everything is changing.  He lampooned 800,000 bloggers out there in the world who apparently write about their shampoo -- that's right, shampoo.  He basically said that was a waste of bloggage and that these folks needed to get into discussions about what mattered.  (perhaps some of the Tea Party crowd are listening. . .)

But the most provocative thing that Dominic Barton put on the table -- really shocked me actually -- was his reflection that American multinationals are ready to chat about industrial policy.  He stated that while these firms have for decades had a strong allergy to any discussion of "industrial policy" that they now see many factors amiss when both corporate profitability and unemployment are very high.  Barton said unequivocally that leaders of these firms are now willing to entertain serious discussion about a "new American industrial policy."

If true, that is striking -- and the Obama administration should listen in on the conversation.  I know from my own discussions with leading White House economic advisers to the President, the term "industrial policy" is the policy that cannot be uttered.

I'll be speaking on the US panel this morning and whether or not America is a "tangled up Gulliver" or not along with former Chief of Staff to Vice President Biden Ron Klain, former House Member from Minnesota James Oberstar, Harvard's Jeffrey Frieden, IFRI's Jacques Mistral and others.

(This post originally ran at the new page for The Washington Note at The Atlantic's Voices page.)

West Point now has its first "openly gay" member on its Board of Visitors thanks to the appointment of former Army captain Sue Fulton, a founding Board Member of OutServe, by President Obama. 

That checks off a federal military academy box in the New York -- which as a state just made same sex marriage legal.

But a second recent appointment at a major American university in a much less gay-tolerant climate just occurred in Virginia.

Announced on July 1st, the well-known DC lobbyist and Democratic gay political poobah Jeffrey Trammell was 'unanimously' elected the new Rector of the College of William & Mary.  The Rector serves as chair of the College's Board of Visitors.  Trammell is the 79th Rector at William & Mary, which was founded in 1693 and is America's second oldest college.

There is a lot of resistance still throughout the country in crunching down the discriminatory laws that inhibit the normalization of gays into regular life -- but the appointments of Fulton and Trammell move this forward a couple of key notches.

Congrats to both and all of us.

(This post originally ran at The Atlantic Voices page for The Washington Note)

This is a guest note by Daniel R. DePetris, an MA Candidate at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, where he studies security issues and Middle Eastern affairs. He is an associate editor of the Journal on Terrorism and Security Analysis and blogs at the Atlantic Sentinel.

Muammar al-Qaddafi may be down, but he is certainly not out. This is the perception that is currently floating in the minds of NATO leaders as the humanitarian intervention in Libya reaches its fourth month.

Libyan army and government officials may be gradually resigning their positions and joining the opposition's side, but Qaddafi and his family still find themselves in control of their own destiny. And with rebel forces and Qaddafi loyalists in the midst of a tit-for-tat battle in western Libya, politicians in the United States and Western Europe are starting to get antsy about the entire endeavor.

Of course, the NATO mission is not a total failure at this point. Eight senior military officials, including five commanders, threw up their hands in surrender and defected to Italy last week. Qaddafi's youngest son, Saif al-Arab, was killed in an airstrike in April, sending a message to the Libyan strongman that his family members are just as susceptible to NATO military might (unfortunately, a few of Qaddafi's grandchildren were killed in the same attack). What is left of Libya's command-and-control systems are getting increasingly worn down by persistent NATO bombing runs, and an escalating barrage of air strikes was recently conducted over the skies of the capital city. A total of 60 bombs were dropped in Tripoli on Tuesday, June 7 alone. The prosecutor at the International Criminal Court has recently asked for an arrest warrant on Qaddafi to bring him to justice for his crimes against the Libyan people over the past forty years. Qaddafi is clearly feeling the heat.

So why, after four months of the world's most powerful militaries going after him and his family, is Qaddafi still around? Part of the answer, as Daniel Byman and Matthew Waxman suggest, is political.

The countries leading the mission- the United States, Great Britain, and France- have to justify their actions to a domestic audience in order to sustain popular support for the Libyan operation, while Qaddafi can hide in his bunker and blend in with his own civilians.

Qaddafi clearly sees the ambivalence on the face of President Obama and his national security team. Indeed, their hands are tied: striking Libyan government targets from the air is essentially the only option the United States and its NATO partners have with regards to offensive operations. At a time when the United States is trying to withdraw troops from Iraq and tone down a fluid and effective insurgency in Afghanistan, the American people would downright refuse, or at the least be very hesitant, to support an escalation that places American soldiers on Libyan soil. A third military conflict is something that Washington, and especially the Obama administration, does not need at the moment. Such sentiment is even higher in Europe, where an aversion to war has been a safe position for politicians to have, especially after an Iraq campaign that is widely seen on the Continent as a debacle.

But there are another variables at play that explains Qaddafi's survival after months of heavy bombardment. First and foremost is the fact that NATO still does not have a clear and consistent mission statement. At the outset, the opening salvos of the operation were based on a humanitarian justification, designed to persuade Russia and China to abstain from the final vote. Fearing the imminent slaughter of thousands of innocent Libyan civilians in Benghazi at the hands of Qaddafi's military forces, the UN Security Council decided to approve military action in order to save those lives.

As the fighting intensified, President Barack Obama outlined much the same rationale to the American people in his defense for joining the international coalition:

Confronted by this brutal repression and a looming humanitarian crisis, I ordered warships into the Mediterranean. European allies declared their willingness to commit resources to stop the killing. The Libyan opposition and the Arab League appealed to the world to save lives in Libya. And so at my direction, America led an effort with our allies at the United Nations Security Council to pass a historic resolution that authorized a no-fly zone to stop the regime's attacks from the air, and further authorized all necessary measures to protect the Libyan people.

Yet since that speech, the very nature of the fighting has changed markedly on both sides. What was once a no-fly-zone operation designed to protect Libyan civilians on the ground evolved into a traditional air war against Qaddafi's government. Sensing that his survival was at stake, Qaddafi responded by blended his security forces into populated areas, in effect daring NATO and making their mandate all the more difficult. Armed Qaddafi supporters continue to transport themselves to the battle lines in civilian vehicles to this day. Three months in, loyalist forces continue to target civilians and cities controlled by the opposition, especially the Western Libyan city of Misurata, are being shelled. While the organization will never admit it publicly, NATO is finding it virtually impossible to distinguish civilians from combatants in the middle of this type of warfare.

The main problem for NATO is that the current strategy, while effective in destroying Libyan government installations and convincing some top officials to switch sides, is not having a similar effect on Qaddafi's hard-core elite. An arms embargo on Libya, the freeze of Libyan government assets, and economic sanctions are putting a dent on Qaddafi's checkbook, yet not nearly fast enough to solicit universal domestic support for the mission.

Meanwhile, President Obama is having trouble with the mission back home, with the United States Senate getting impatient with the administration's refusal to solicit congressional approval for the air war. Lawmakers remain in the dark on how long it will take before the operation is successful, and how much money will be needed in order to maintain the current pace of the bombardment. Just this past week, the United States House of Representatives approved a non-binding resolution, by a vote of 268 to 145, expressing criticism of the Obama administration's presumed avoidance of the War Powers Act. The fact that the resolution was endorsed by congressmen on all sides, from anti-war Democrats to hard-right Republicans, is an illustration of how serious the US Congress views the issue. Indeed, the American public appears to agree with Congress's interpretation: a CNN poll finds that 55 percent of Americans believe that Congress, rather than the president, should have final authority to expand the Libyan conflict. Considering that the President of the United States is the Commander-in-Chief, this poll should serve as a dire warning to the Obama administration that they are either failing to communicate their position to the American people or are losing the public's confidence.

Muammar al-Qaddafi may be a dictator who has lost his credibility among his own citizens, isolated from the international community, his compound destroyed, with NATO bombers flying overhead. But his enemies in NATO are also weighed down with a significant amount of pressure. If the stalemate on the ground continues, it may be NATO instead of Qaddafi that has to explain themselves the most.

NATO needs to change the balance of power in Libya, and fast. All Qaddafi and his relatives need to do is prolong the fighting and wait for public opinion in the west to sour.

-- Daniel R. DePetris

I recently had breakfast with FrumForum proprietor and smart issues strategist David Frum who said that if the GOP was really an oligarchy, then Mitt Romney would come out on top. If the party was a democracy, the someone else -- anyone else -- would get the Republican presidential nod because the rank-and-file viscerally disliked Romney.

I think that Frum is correct -- as I keep running into top tier, propertied Republicans who think Romney is the only choice and have disdain for the rough and tough, populist currents that are gaining attention and perhaps a political edge in defining the GOP.

And now David Brooks has framed the divide in the GOP as not between oligarchs and the rank-and file, but rather between those who are civic-minded and love the United States and those who have become ideologically fixated on doing harm to the country.

Here are some of the key lines of his powerful, provocative essay, "The Mother of All No-Brainers" in which he commends the Republicans for setting up the foundation for a historic, epic deal with Dems on tax cuts with minor revenue increases -- and then ridicules the base for its fanaticism:

But we can have no confidence that the Republicans will seize this opportunity. That's because the Republican Party may no longer be a normal party. Over the past few years, it has been infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative.

The members of this movement do not accept the logic of compromise, no matter how sweet the terms. . .

The members of this movement do not accept the legitimacy of scholars and intellectual authorities. . .

The members of this movement have no sense of moral decency. A nation makes a sacred pledge to pay the money back when it borrows money. But the members of this movement talk blandly of default and are willing to stain their nation's honor.

The members of this movement have no economic theory worthy of the name. . .

Members of this tendency have taken a small piece of economic policy and turned it into a sacred fixation. . .

This is one of the strongest indictments of current trends inside the GOP that I have read from a leading Republican commentator.

Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison and others fought ferociously amongst themselves as the nation was being set up over the balance to be achieved between those who had the capacity to understand the stakes in policy and government and those who reflected an uninformed, passionate mob.

Seems like the same debate is back, and it sounds like Frum and Brooks feel that real democracy inside the GOP could be a dangerous thing.

-- Steve Clemons can be followed on Twitter at @SCClemons. A version of this post appeared at TheAtlantic.com

(click image for larger version)

A semi-occasional feature of The Washington Note, which is in process of moving to this new spot at The Atlantic is a snapshot now and then of three awesome pups.

Meet Annie (on left) and her two brothers, Oakley the Amazing Weimaraner, and Buddy.

More soon.

-- Steve Clemons can be followed on Twitter at @SCClemons

(photo credit: Gary Burke)

"Duty, Honor, Country: Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be," General Douglas MacArthur said in August 1962.

I've often thought about these words and whom we owe for our nationhood. Do we owe those who put their lives on the line by signing the Declaration of Independence? The many who joined military service in the various wars America has engaged in or had to fight? Of course - but the picture is much bigger than veterans and founding fathers.

Regular Americans who vote, who pay taxes, who respect the rights of those who lose in contests, who pursue their passions without harming others, who support a system that constrains the power of the presidency, who contribute money to their local playhouse or little league, who get involved in their children's education, who volunteer, or who just become part of the glue holding together a complex society are those who we owe thanks to for supporting the country. And going a bit further, we owe these folks whether they are straight, gay, or any other complexion. There's a lot of diversity in our society -- and the straight crowd never gets things done on their own, whether they are conscious of it or not.

Speaking of the military though -- and the military in my view do deserve our respect, particularly enlisted men and women who don't get the officer perks -- the services are finally becoming an inclusive big tent operation.

This past year, President Obama started the process of dismantling Don't Ask Don't Tell - and thus is shrinking the gap between the norms of the military and the more tolerant and inclusive norms that are increasingly becoming the law of the land throughout the country. Gays and lesbians have always been in the military services, just hidden. I even had the privilege of getting to know Faubion Bowers, one of the gay but when serving closeted staff assistants in Japan to General Douglas MacArthur, some years ago.

But gay soldiers, gay janitors, gay think tank types, gay race car drivers and baseball players, gay writers and cops and firemen and architects, gay teachers, gay boy scouts, accountants, and gay chamber of commerce members all can feel the drama of "duty, honor, country" pulse through their hearts and minds as much as any other person - and America seems to be getting just to the edge of being able to respect this.

A year and a half ago when President Obama spoke at the annual Human Rights Campaign gala, the room was full of soldiers - some in uniform and some not. I advised a close friend who is a captain in the Air Force to think through the consequences of being outed if he wore his mess dress to that dinner. Wherever the President went, there was a ton of media - and that media is not required to respect the private rights of people at a public event. He ended up going in civvies - and leaving his uniform at home. We took pics of it hanging on my wall.

Because of the absurdity and immorality of Don't Ask Don't Tell, my friend could not honorably and without threat to himself salute his Commander in Chief in uniform at a DC dinner.

This idiocy is soon coming to an end. Obama delivered - with enormous assistance from Defense Secretary Bob Gates, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Michael Mullen, Senators Carl Levin and Joseph Lieberman, former House Member Patrick Murphy, among others.

President Obama should consider speaking at the Human Rights Campaign dinner in the spring of 2012 so that those soldiers who had to lurk in the audience as someone other than who they were can wear their uniforms and be proud of serving the nation and showing that straight or gay, they are as committed to duty, honor and country as any other soldier - or any other member of society.

It used to be in vogue to study and chat about "the civil-military gap" in DC think tanks. I remember senior fellow John Hillen, then of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, arguing about thirteen years ago that the esprit de corps of the US military would be seriously wounded if gays in service were allowed to reveal themselves. This scholar strongly defended the widening gap between military norms and those norms of tolerance and inclusion that were spreading in American society.

Fortunately, that kind of thinking seems to have been pushed to the periphery - and humor about these tectonic civil rights shifts are helping to make sure that duty, honor and country can be embraced openly by all in military service.

As a small example, at this year's White House Correspondents Dinner, I ran into a General I greatly respect, General John Allen - who is succeeding General David Petraeus as Commander of the ISAF forces in Afghanistan. General Allen was in full, fancy, mess dress - lots of colorful medals and ribbons; quite dashing. I saw him, and somewhat loudly yelled, "John!" And he yelled just as loudly "Steve!" One of us gave the other a manly bear hug -- can't remember which.

And standing next to us was AP's Anne Gearan as well as Admiral and Mrs. Mike Mullen. Mullen chuckled and said "Don't Ask Don't Tell."

Great moment - but the point is that the gap between "us" and the military is disappearing, and this is good for American society.

Duty. Honor. Country. I'm a patriot. My gay Air Force friend is a patriot. My non-gay General friend about to take the reigns in Afghanistan is a patriot. Seth Myers, who performed that night at the Correspondents Dinner and took some whacks at President Obama, Jon Huntsman, Michele Bachmann, Mitt Romney, and particularly Donald Trump is a patriot.

Has to be said again. Duty, honor, country -- Seth Myers was just brilliant. He did his part for the country that night.

Happy July 4th - and a salute to everyone - everyone in the big tent - who has helped move this country forward.

We have so much further to go. America is stuck in some ruts and has had some serious dips and shown some key economic, military and moral limits that have punctured its mystique. But I feel that America has a creative edginess that may help to undermine cynicism and get the country on a healthy, productive course that everyone has a hand in.

As controversial a man Douglas MacArthur was, he had a way with words - and these particular words of duty, honor, and country -- I feel -- apply to all of us.

-- Steve Clemons can be followed on Twitter at @SCClemons. Clemons is Washington Editor at Large at The Atlantic and is Founder and Senior Fellow of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation

I enjoyed this ten minute discussion with ThomsonReuters Global Editor-at-Large Chrystia Freeland at this year's Aspen Ideas Festival, organized each year by The Atlantic and the Aspen Institute.

Our discussion ranged from the high stakes political standoff over raising the federal debt limit as well as jobs and economic policies to the new Obama course on the Afghanistan War.

-- Steve Clemons can be followed on Twitter @SCClemons

(photo credit: Steve Clemons, The Washington Note)

(This article is appearing simultaneously at TheAtlantic.com)

News is breaking that the prosecutor's case in the rape allegations against former IMF Director and French political kingpin Dominique Strauss-Kahn is collapsing.

According to reports, the accuser who worked at New York's Hotel Sofitel has allegedly been engaged in money laundering activities and has had substantial contact with an incarcerated drug dealer.  Strauss-Kahn's bails and terms of detention are reportedly going to be lightened today -- and others are suggesting that felony charges may be dropped against him.

Maybe he did harass this woman -- but it is also possible that he did not.  That's what the system of justice is for -- to presume innocence until guilt is determined.  That no longer sounds likely in this case.

But this week, former French Finance Minister Christine Legarde was named Strauss-Kahn's successor at the International Monetary Fund, and back at home, French Socialist Party Leader Martine Aubry declared her candidacy for President.

Strauss-Kahn, who may be innocent, who even Sarkozy said should be presumed innocent unless evidence led to a different conclusion, now cannot return either to the IMF or to his position as the next likely President of France.

One of the fears that I often hear from people when talking about the growing power of social network sites, blogs, as well as micro-journalism and micro-comment platforms is the one of scandalmongering, or a tsunami of mistruths and reputational attacks that take down some high profile person.

A good read on this sort of thing is the late William Safire's historical novel, Scandalmonger, which shares what slander blogging might have been like in late 18th century America in the person of James Callender who doggedly pursued, occasionally inventing, sleazy stories about both Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson.

I have generally argued, and may be wrong, that the internet is a much more honest and disciplining arena than print, that errors, mistakes, or misreporting would be instantaneously sniffed out and corrected by a global audience.  I know I have gotten things wrong before and had emails or posted comments that helped me put my information on a better, more accurate track.  But that isn't always the case, particularly in growing clusters of same-thinking people who care less about sorting out the facts than they do about the frame (or bias) they bring to some respective issue.

But in today's fast-paced world, a reputation can be destroyed rapidly -- and if, as in the case of Strauss-Kahn it seems, the consequences of charges made actually precede the processing of those charges, then we as a society are no longer extending the benefits of presumed innocence that are core to our form of democracy and our legal system.

I realize given the proliferation of commentary about Strauss-Kahn's alleged womanizing and the bandwaggoning criticism of him that built after his arrest that he is perhaps a flawed and tragic figure. 

But the problem of reputation wrecked still stands whether the target is warm and likeable or a brilliant storm, as I see Strauss-Kahn, and that lesson is a bad one for people on the internet, who are becoming commentators and writers, to learn.  They see the successful effects of attack, whether based in truth and credibility or not, and sense that the downsides of backlash and consequence to an accuser's or scandalmongerer's credibility are not serious.

When Georgia State USDA rural development director Shirley Sherrod was fired by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack for making 'alleged' racially-tinged remarks, we also saw consequences meted out before the entire story of that video, brought to light by Andrew Breitbart, was properly considered.

There is no clear fix to these problems.  We don't have a system that would let Strauss-Kahn have his job back, and Aubry is not likely to step aside in her presidential quest and let DSK go back and take the top spot challenging Sarkozy. 

Again, I am not saying that I know if he did or didn't engage in lewd conduct against a hotel chambermaid -- but his legally-based presumed innocence has been inconsequential to the penalties that he's already received, and that's something that should worry us.

-- Steve Clemons can be followed on Twitter at @SCClemons

Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies just released an ambitious study that attempts to quantify many of the complex costs of America's last decade of wars. Drawing on the expertise of economists, political scientists, legal experts, anthropologists, and others, the group has mapped out the "soft" price of these wars--including the human, social, and political impacts on the United States, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The group also put a price tag on more traditional economic costs of war.

Their conclusions are startling:

While most people think the Pentagon war appropriations are equivalent to the wars' budgetary costs, the true numbers are twice that, and the full economic cost of the wars much larger yet. Conservatively estimated, the war bills already paid and obligated to be paid are $3.2 trillion in constant dollars. A more reasonable estimate puts the number at nearly $4 trillion.

Such huge numbers are difficult to comprehend. The group's estimate puts the price somewhere around one of every four dollars of America's 2010 GDP. Such a massive financial commitment to our national security should be evaluated alongside investments of a comparable scale (the healthcare industry, by contrast, represents close to one of every six dollars in the US economy). However, the price of these wars must be measured not only in their human, socio-political, and economic dimensions, but also in terms of opportunity cost. It is appropriate, then, that the group from Brown University is called the Eisenhower Research Project.

While President Eisenhower's warning to "guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence... by the military-industrial complex" is well known, a less quoted speech may be more appropriate in this case:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people...

This is one of those times in the affairs of nations when the gravest choices must be made, if there is to be a turning toward a just and lasting peace. It is a moment that calls upon the governments of the world to speak their intentions with simplicity and with honesty. It calls upon them to answer the questions that stirs the hearts of all sane men: is there no other way the world may live?

These words echo as a question and a challenge to be answered by the United States as we continue to balance our competing commitments to freedom, prosperity, and security. As we continue to operate in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, Eisenhower's warnings serve as an important reminder to weigh all the costs of war against its benefits before committing to an uncertain future.

-- Jordan D'Amato

(President Obama with Afghanistan President Karzai, Pakistan President Zardari and Vice President Biden during a statement in the Grand Foyer of the White House May 6, 2009. Official White House Photo By Lawrence Jackson)

President Obama's decision to withdraw 10,000 US troops by year's end -- and another 23,000 by the end of 2012 has drawn little applause.
 
Some think he's moving too slowly and others think that he's forfeiting the field to the Taliban and leaving Afghanistan to become a sanctuary yet again for al Qaeda.

But Obama and his Vice President, Joe Biden, have it just right and have achieved something very important in the political battle over America's Afghanistan adventure.

Obama/Biden have broken the back of the COIN (counter-insurgency doctrine) -- that ever larger numbers of deployed troops equal ever large security and stability deliverables. COIN was always about size and resources -- the more deployed the more that could be achieved.

COIN was a nifty formula that led to occupation of a country and redirection of the habits and security situation of villages and neighborhoods.

Only problem is that occupation has its downsides. As US forces surged into corners of Afghanistan, so too did Taliban recruitment surge.

America's big footprint in Afghanistan has contributed to an impression that the military is overstretched, suffering from institutional fatigue.

Even General David Petraeus has said that his troop recommendations to the President were not based on an assessment of America's overall strategic needs and position -- but were focused exclusively on the needs of the Afghanistan/Pakistan environment.

In other words, America's most famous and arguably successful general, a celebrity now in his own right, has been advocating that his venture be the Moby Dick of concern in America's national security portfolio -- rather than a more balanced venture weighed against other problems with which the US is strapped.

But Obama has now definitively given up on the conception that "bigger is better."

Obama has also broken the back of the Petraeus frame on Afghanistan that America's mission was to 'defeat' the Taliban. The White House instead is suggesting that in the time that we have yet on the clock, the US and allies will 'shape the choices' of the Taliban and not allow circumstances in which the Taliban could overthrow the legitimate Afghanistan government, now headed by Hamid Karzai.

These are big shifts, enormous ones -- and the President in my book has taken the opportunity of the death of bin Laden to check off the al Qaeda box and to pivot towards a slippery slope leading to a significantly reduced role in Afghanistan -- and a quality of role that in my view may very well leave Afghanistan in better shape in the long run than where the Petraeus plan was taking us.

These ideas were very much a part of the Afghanistan Study Group, which I helped found and which many leaders -- most lately Jon Huntsman -- are endorsing in spirit. I commend the entire report to you but here are the five quick takeaways that our group suggested 18 months ago:

1. Emphasize power-sharing and inclusion. The US should fast-track a peace process designed to decentralize power within Afghanistan and encourage a power-sharing balance among the principal parties.

2. Downsize and eventual end military operations in southern Afghanistan, and reduce the US military footprint. The US should draw down its military presence, which radicalizes many Pashtuns and is an important aid to Taliban recruitment.

3. Focus security efforts on Al Qaeda and Domestic Security. Special forces, intelligence assets, and other US capabilities should continue to seek out and target known al Qaeda cells in the region and be ready to go after them should they attempt to relocate elsewhere or build new training facilities. In addition, part of the savings from our drawdown should be reallocated to bolster US domestic security efforts and to track illicit nuclear weapons globally.

4. Encourage economic development. Because destitute states can become incubators for terrorism, drug and human trafficking, and other illicit activities, efforts at reconciliation should be paired with an internationally-led effort to develop Afghanistan's economy.

5. Engage regional and global stakeholders in a diplomatic effort designed to guarantee Afghan neutrality and foster regional stability. Despite their considerable differences, neighboring states such as India, Pakistan, China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia share a common interest in preventing Afghanistan from being dominated by any single power or being a permanently failed state that exports instability to others.

Making progress on all fronts. President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden have learned the lessons of 'too big to succeed' and are now correcting this hemorrhaging of US power.

-- Steve Clemons can be followed on Twitter at @SCClemons. Another version of this article appeared at TheAtlantic.com

Tom Donilon, President Obama's National Security Adviser, once told me that the thing he most needed but rarely had was "time to think."  

Donilon has almost single-handedly recrafted the national security decision making process from one in the George W. Bush administration in which Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld controlled "the flow" to one where not only more voices from the traditional defense and intelligence communities are heard in a decision but which now includes many dozens if not hundreds of others from the avant-garde national security arenas like climate, the economy, development, agriculture, and more.  Donilon is the master of meetings, lots of them, and he is now in a constant whirl.  

This brings me to this weekend of IDEAS I'm taking part in at the Aspen Institute's idyllic retreat in the Rocky Mountains.  Co-sponsored and jointly organized by Aspen and The Atlantic, the Aspen Ideas Festival is a collage of smart thinking on a hundred different fronts with an intergenerational collision of experiences and priorities achieved through the Festival's expansive scholarship outreach.  

I am taking some time to think in the next few days and will be reporting my reactions and provocations here at the new 2.0 incarnation of The Washington Note at TheAtlantic.com.  I wish Tom Donilon could join me here this round - but I'll work hard to get him here another year because he does need time and space to think.  It's vital for his White House team and him to hear what's going on outside the situation room.

I'm an ideas guy, sometimes called an ideas entrepreneur, and through the years have helped push along a provocative notion or two that got some policy traction through the New America Foundation, where I continue as Senior Fellow and Founder of the American Strategy Program.

But my new responsibilities at The Atlantic include serving as Washington Editor at Large as well as Editor in Chief of Atlantic LIVE, the global events division of the group.  

Lots of stuff to chew on in this new role - and I look forward to thinking out loud in the years ahead with not only my past readers but a whole new crowd of thinkers and writers who make The Atlantic, National Journal, and Government Executive part of their ideas habits.

Follow my Aspen Ideas Festival commentary at Twitter as well at Twitter.com/SCClemons.

-- Steve Clemons

Editor's Note: This post first appeared at The Atlantic.

When foreign policy makers analyze a situation they must consider not only what has happened, but also what could happen. So imagine for a minute how Chinese leaders might have responded if Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg had made the following statement after the sinking of the South Korean Cheonan frigate:

"Regarding the role of China in this, it is not directly related to the dispute, so it would be better for China to accept the results of the United Nations investigation and leave the dispute to be sorted out in a multilateral setting. I believe that North Korea is playing with fire, and I hope that China doesn't get burned."

China's leadership might interpret this as American grandstanding, but it is much more likely that they would view it as an aggressive and provocative statement. Moreover, in a tense strategic environment in which alliances could draw the United States and China into a conflict, such a statement could quickly escalate into a game of brinksmanship between two nuclear armed great powers.

It is all the more surprising, then, that China's vice foreign minister, Cui Tiankai, made a strikingly similar statement on Wednesday. As tensions over the territorial and economic claims to the South China Sea have risen dangerously in the past few weeks, Mr. Cui warned the United States to keep out of the dispute. According to the New York Times, Mr. Cui went on to say that:

"Regarding the role of the United States in this, the United States is not a claimant state to the dispute... So it is better for the United States to leave the dispute to be sorted out between the claimant states... I believe the individual countries are actually playing with fire, and I hope the fire will not be drawn to the United States."

Tensions in the South China Sea and the sinking of the Cheonan are obviously two different situations. Nonetheless, both the timing and the content of the Vice Foreign Minister's statement are quite peculiar. Beijing reiterated its commitment not to use force to solve the dispute late last week. However, it also chose to deploy its largest maritime patrol ship, the Haisun 31, and conduct maritime defense exercises in the disputed territory. Whether or not this was justified, given Vietnamese live-fire military drills and accusations that Chinese "fishing boats" destroyed Vietnamese oil and gas equipment, is unclear. What is clear is that China's military capabilities, its economic weight, and its sheer size mean that it must tread lightly if it does not wish to validate the fears of its neighbors. So far, it is not succeeding.

The South China Sea is only one of several flashpoints in Sino-American relations. But it is a serious one. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton declared last July that the United States had a "national interest" in freedom of navigation and respect for international law in the South China Sea. Against this background Mr. Cui's statement seems needlessly provocative. While it is highly unlikely that the United States would risk an armed conflict with China, negative perceptions of China's military ambitions can increase pressure on policy makers to "deter conflict" with Beijing. This sets the stage for a classic security dilemma. If China's leadership is truly committed to a "peaceful rise" they should take more care to watch what they say.

-- Jordan D'Amato

The greatest dog in the world, Oakley the Amazing Weimaraner, turned 9 two days ago -- and one of his dads has been too busy working on Afghanistan troop issue discussions behind the scenes to post a celebratory note to him. I know that Oakley has a large following here -- so wanted to let you know that this incredible, smart, and handsome pup is hitting the big time.

I have a lot of pics you haven't seen of Oakley and his brother and sister, Buddy and Annie. Those will go up soon.

More tonight and tomorrow on Afghanistan. Very interested in not just the reduction in troop "figure" but the context that President Obama surrounds his decision with. That is more important than whatever number is set tonight.

A couple of quick points on Afghanistan. First, Pakistan is threatening the US relationship on all sorts of fronts. Why? Because it can. Pakistan knows that as long as we are conducting a large scale war in Afghanistan, Pakistan has leverage over the US as it controls so many of the supply and logistics choke points -- despite being allied to some degree with the folks we are fighting there.

Second, Barack Obama cannot appear to be a tool of the US military or General Petraeus, who has emerged as the stamp of approval or disapproval for some -- like John McCain -- of what the President decides. This is not healthy for the country. The military executes the President's strategy, but some in the Pentagon have crossed lines they shouldn't. Obama needs to show he is in control.

Third, whether Afghanistan gets "fixed" as a nation, or remains broken, is not a strategic problem for the United States. Having the US military look overextended, exhausted, at resource limits encourages our foes to pursue their ambitions and makes our allies think we aren't dependable when they may need us. Afghanistan cannot be thought of as a silo unto itself. it has become a black hole for money and is sapping US power.

There will be some who criticize the President's decision on troop reductions as too small -- but at least his move tonight will break the back of never-ending escalations. This is the right move to reduce, to turn a corner, and to pivot in a new direction. If the numbers are sound and the strategy articulated sounder -- you'll see me supporting the President.

But we need to hear the speech first, and I will keep my powder dry until then.

But back to Oakley, Happy Birthday!!

-- Steve Clemons

This is a guest note by Salman Al-Rashid, a Master's student at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service and a former intern with the New America Foundation's Middle East Task Force.

Against the backdrop of this watershed moment in Arab history, a Cold War between Saudi Arabia and Iran has emerged. Mistrust and tension between the two states, one predominantly Sunni Muslim and the other predominant Shia, is nothing new. Iran's support for Hezbollah curtailed Saudi Arabia's influence as an arbiter of affairs in the Levante, its support of the Houthi rebellion in Northern Yemen in 2009 unnerved the kingdom's leaders, and its perceived closeness with Iraq and several Gulf states has the Saudis fearing Shiite encirclement. These, among other issues, color the historic rivalry.

The Arab Spring has provided yet another arena for conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran. The persistence of protests across the region has forced the rivals to make critical decisions based on fears about the other's intentions. As a result, the rivalry has dramatically increased tensions across the region's sectarian politics.

While the Arab Spring holds the promise of socioeconomic improvement and political empowerment for Arabs across the region, it may not reach Saudi Arabian Shiites. King Abdullah has sought to improve the lot of Saudi Shiites and integrate them into society. The new regional Cold War, however, has raised the specter of Iranian intrigue, which could reinvigorate Sunni Saudi prejudices against Shiism and Shiites. This might compel Saudi leadership, ever anxious about Iranian machinations, to abandon King Abdullah's conciliatory posture toward this population after his death.

To begin addressing Shiite grievances, in 2003 then crown prince Abdullah formed the King Abdulaziz Center for National Dialogue, which is dedicated to "tackling social, cultural, political, economic and educational problems using dialogue channels." Though the Center's mission statement does not mention "sectarian," the initiative brings together Saudis of different classes, genders, and sects and ultimately seeks to address socioeconomic, gender-based, and sectarian grievances. According to the International Crisis Group, in one dialogue meeting "Sunnis, Shiites, Sufis, and Ismailis discussed rolling back militancy and promoting Islamic pluralism."

The Dialogue is one aspect of Abdullah's liberal agenda that includes social, economic, and political reforms. However, a member of the Saudi Majlis ash-Shura, a consultative political body, suggested that many Saudis believe Abdullah's reform program has "gone too far." Since prejudice against Shiites has historically run deep in Saudi society, might Saudis reject the continuation of Sunni-Shiite dialogue after the king's death and in an era of trumped up Saudi-Iranian and Sunni-Shia tensions?

The kingdom's education system provides helpful clues. Prior to Abdullah, textbooks contained material that discussed Shiites in a negative manner. The Guardian's Christopher Wilcke maintains that Saudi schoolbooks professed that Shiites are non-Muslim infidels. A 2006 Freedom House report on Saudi education confirms Wilcke's findings. Alluding to Shiites and other Sunni sects, textbooks condemned those who interpret the Qur'an differently as "polytheists." Though these reports are quite illuminating, it's important to keep in mind that textbooks did not directly attack Shiites and that these conclusions are subject to debate.

Abdullah's National Dialogue has emphasized the need to rid the Saudi curriculum of such intolerant material. Participants at the third annual National Dialogue meeting discussed efforts to "cultivate the spirit of tolerance and moderation" among members of the younger generation through curriculum reform. In terms of concrete action, King Abdullah reshuffled the education ministry's leadership in 2009 in order to accelerate key changes to the standard school curriculum, such as portraying Islam as a more accommodating religion in textbooks.

While many Saudis may have discarded some of the sectarian prejudices to which they were exposed in older textbooks, the kingdom's less-tolerant clerics can revitalize negative characterizations of Shiites in the wake of the intensified Saudi-Iran rivalry. The House of Saud has a contract with the conservative clerical establishment; as long as the al-Sauds uphold a rigid version of Shariah, clerics consider them legitimate custodians of the two holy mosques. In many ways, Saudi leadership is beholden to these clerics, many of whom sponsor an exclusivist social contract that embraces Sunnis and rejects Shiites.

The National Dialogue embodies Abdullah's courage in the face of some members of the religious establishment. Key questions remain. Is the dialogue's survival intimately linked to Abdullah himself? Do other senior princes agree with this aspect of his reform project? Is promoting a spirit of religious tolerance becoming institutionalized in general in Saudi society?

Abdullah's successor may shelve the dialogue not because of his own personal views but because of internal pressure to confront the sectarian threat that Iran poses; Saudi Arabia's Shiites will inevitably suffer if such an attitude grips Riyadh.

The emerging Cold War with Iran will only strengthen the influence of Saudi's less tolerant clerics and perhaps reinforce anti-Shiite prejudices; in turn, the manipulation of the debate on Shiites might pressure Saudi leaders to neglect the Shiite question. The kingdom's religious leaders can mine a long historical narrative of (alleged) Iranian intrigue to influence Saudi rulers. In the 1980s Ayatollah Khomeini sent Shiites to protest at the Hajj in Mecca in an attempt to undermine the House of Saud's Islamic credentials. And many now believe Iran is fueling Shiite agitations in Bahrain.

Many Saudi rulers suspected that Iranian meddling led to unrest in the tiny island-kingdom, and the Saudis obliged when Bahrain appealed to the GCC for help controlling protest. This paranoid, sectarian argument tantalizes American leaders. After his meeting with senior Saudi officials in April, Defense Secretary Robert Gates claimed that Iran might have contributed to the destabilized situation in Bahrain and elsewhere in the Middle East. If American officials continue to express anxiety about Iranian machinations, they will implicitly encourage Saudi rulers' tendency to view every development beyond and within their borders through a sectarian lens.

Moreover, Saudi leaders understandably have trouble separating what they perceive as Shiite activity in Bahrain from Shiite agitations in their own Eastern province, where a majority of Saudi Shiites reside. In fact, protests have occurred in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province simultaneously in the past. Recently, Shiites protested in the Eastern Province in response to the Bahraini government's demolition of Shiite mosques; thus, the connection between events in Bahrain and the Eastern Province seems crystal clear to Saudi leaders, who ultimately fear Iranian meddling in their own back yard.

This being the case, Saudi leaders may project their alarmed, sectarian, Iran-based view of Bahraini unrest on any calls for improvement amongst Shias in the Eastern Province. Since the argument that "Iran is causing trouble again" resonates in Washington, the US might remain passive if the Saudis claim that Iran has a hand in any potential unrest in the Eastern Province and condone any suppression of Shiite demands for improvement or change.

This is a worrisome possibility for Saudi Arabia's Shiites, who have discarded their old anti-regime disposition and reaffirmed their loyalty to the House of Saud. One can only hope that Saudi Arabia's senior princes will continue Abdullah's virtuous project and embrace this population.

-- Salman Al-Rashid

This morning I'm sitting in the Coffee Cat in Easton, Maryland. Frederick Douglass was born nine miles from here. The great former US Senator Birch Bayh -- who led on Title IX education for women and got 18 year olds the right to vote -- lives in town

But my mind this morning is on American complacency about its own economic situation -- and the wobbliness of the global economy. Easton is a pleasant place; people are buying coffee and their morning muffins here -- and someone is discussing who should invite to a party for a local author. But what would it take for Pleasantville to become modern day Greece -- where people are losing all that they have built and the social stress is undermining the solvency of the state?

The fact is that we don't know. We pretend that US institutions are better than others around the world -- and that the massive corruption we saw in the sub-prime loan sector that brought the global economy to the edge of collapse is nonetheless less severe than the books-cooking corruption of the previous Greek government. But the truth is that people in Easton largely trust Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner and the folks at Goldman Sachs and in the banking sector to govern judiciously and make things work.

That trust no longer exists in Athens. The shock of the September 2009 financial crisis did shake trust in America but not fundamentally -- anger is at the edges, among the members of MoveOn and in the Republican-hugging Tea Party movement -- but the broad midsection of America is OK, complacent, trusting, and I'm not sure they should be.

I have become a big fan of Rob Johnson, a former music producer and promoter and former chief economist of the Senate Banking Committee, who now runs the George Soros-supported Institute for New Economic Thinking.

Johnson convenes the world's leading economists now and then; they range from Joe Stiglitz on the visible hand left of the spectrum to the sensible neoclassical sensibilities of Kenneth Rogoff -- and even right, though that is an inadequate term, of Rogoff. When one listens to some of Rob Johnson's court -- including Gordon Brown, George Soros, Joseph Stiglitz, Martin Wolf, Laura D'Andrea Tyson, Nouriel Roubini, and even lately Lawrence Summers (who spoke at this year's assembly at Bretton Woods, NH), one can't avoid suspecting that a next big thing is coming, a new crisis, one that will wipe out wealth at a scale we haven't yet seen.

George Soros' views on economic policy and investing are incredibly transparent, given the books he has written diagnosing the global financial crisis and then his "how he saved his fortune" decisions that he shared while in the middle of the financial meltdown -- the ultimate outcome being that he was one of the few who not only preserved his capital after the crisis had begun but came out billions ahead. I value his insights -- and he told me that only the most nimble investors with no biases and deep knowledge of all the new tools of modern finance will be able to surf the next economic tsunami. Even in the case of his own funds, he think he will take a large hit -- but that as he told me, "there will be something left over."

Gold and China may be the new bubbles of this era -- and as some top economic thinkers told me, during the next economic crisis, there is likely to be no refuge.

That is why the Members of Congress and even those advising President Obama are playing with triggers far more serious than dynamite, or even beyond the nuclear metaphor, when they flirt with capping the debt ceiling. It's not the silo of America's portfolio of debt that is the only issue -- and the fact as Treasury Secretary Geithner powerfully made at a recent Playbook Breakfast with Mike Allen that these debts were built by previous Republican and Democratic administrations -- but it is what will be unintentionally triggered if a debt ceiling deal didn't come through.

The sub-prime crisis was a big shock -- but in the scale of global economic tectonics, it was not the San Andreas. But the sub-prime mess did trigger and expose the massive imbalances between the US and a number of leading surplus nations, particularly China -- which depresses its own consumption and supports production and export led growth. That is the true global economic San Andreas fault.

So, the debt ceiling game could turn on the gravity switch for the US economy, end the global trust and reliance on the dollar, raise interest rates for cash-needing Americans and business across the board -- it could change everything.

I am generally a fiscal conservative, but of the Hamiltonian sort -- and believe in good credit focused at generating high value added, competitive jobs in America. America not only has a budget deficit, in part created by an ideologically driven focus on tax cuts for the wealthy coupled with large scale, unending, unpaid for wars and ongoing military commitments.

But because of past mistakes and a financial crisis hatched by the financial sector with cooperation of many in the federal government, the main street sector and small businesses are still gasping for capital. Big banks are lightly regulated with regulators complicitly allowing a "pretend and extend" game of not recognizing the collapse of value in much of the commercial real estate sector -- while small banks which did not gamble on sub-prime are heavily regulated and many well performing loans to small businesses being called in to tighten the loan exposure of these institutions. Backwards -- and stupid. This regulatory mess causes more "uncertainty" in the broad business sector than anything President Obama may or may not be doing on health care.

And the obsession now with cutting back spending after one of the largest financial crises in modern American history screams 1937. Read about it.

At Netroots Nation 2011 this past Friday in Minneapolis, I asked Center for Budget and Policy Priorities Senior Fellow Jared Bernstein, former economic adviser to Vice President Biden, whether he worried about 1937-like scenarios, and he said "Of course, I bring up 1937 with everyone in the White House I can."

Things may seem calm in Easton and wildly scary in Greece. Arbitrage between what is going on here and going on there is not automatic -- but the chances that affairs in Pleasantville will be shaken and rolled by something coming that we don't see at the moment are just too high -- and in this environment, high brinksmanship battles over debt ceilings and near term spending may be the trigger that really does shake global trust in American economic leadership and undermine the blind faith that Americans have generally had in their government and private sector economic leaders.

To ride the rapids ahead, we should not be throwing out the paddles and disabling the rudder.

-- Steve Clemons is Washington Editor at Large of The Atlantic, editor in chief of AtlanticLIVE, and Founder & Senior Fellow of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. You can follow Steve on Twitter at @SCClemons

While I am deeply disturbed by former CIA analyst Glenn Carle's recent revelations that there was a White House-directed appeal to the CIA to dig up dirt on my friend and blogging comrade Juan Cole, I am not surprised at all by this news.

The George W. Bush administration ignored the fact that no WMDs were found in Iraq and invaded nonetheless; went after Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame -- lying about who did what and who knew what at very high levels of government; created a Kafkaesque international legal purgatory in Guantanamo where normal rules didn't apply and where torture became a routenized part of managing high value detainees; and engaged in massive domestic spying on US citizens. We learned that many retired US Generals and Admirals hired out to US news organizations like Fox were given talking points and retainers by the Pentagon to not provide objective analysis but be 'seemingly' independent talking heads controlled by the Department of Defense.

So some in the CIA and White House wanted to slander and undermine blogging irritant Juan Cole for the uncomfortable material he would offer on his blog - much of which was reporting what was actually appearing in the Middle East press but not reaching American media.

Am I surprised?? Not at all.

Of course the government did this to Cole and perhaps others. Governments that begin fabricating lies and distorting norms of the American political system don't know where to stop and quickly become corrupt and abusive.

Kudos to Glenn Carle, and to some degree former National Intelligence Council Chairman David Gordon, for recounting what they saw happen. Hopefully these revelations will inhibit slander projects against others.

And as always, read Juan Cole's Informed Comment -- whose stock value will go even further up after this sordid effort to undermine him.

Many in that administration owe Cole an apology -- and Yale University which ended up withdrawing a job offer that it had extended to Cole after receiving significant conservative pressure should also investigate whether they played a role in the CIA's slander project.

-- Steve Clemons

Does China's rise strengthen the existing international order or overturn it? How we perceive and react to China's rise will have dramatic consequences for Sino-American relations and China's role in the world. Whether we see Beijing as a friend or a challenger -- or whether those labels engender a false choice -- is critical to how we develop the right foreign policy for a rising China.

Join Ely Ratner of the RAND Corporation and Steven Weber of UC Berkeley for a discussion on how we should approach U.S.-China relations during this period of great power transitions.

Click here to read their paper.

-- Jordan D'Amato