Author: Spencer Ackerman

After 17 years of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the next bill authorizing the Department of Defense’s budget will contain a provision instructing the Pentagon to repeal the military’s ban on open gay service after its Working Group issues its guidance for doing so. And the healthy margin by which the amendment cleared the House floor — 234 to 194 — indicates that the already politically sacrosanct defense bill has a similarly healthy likelihood of full passage in the chamber, probably today. But that doesn’t mean the bill is out of the woods quite yet.

One of the amendments to the bill that didn’t pass last night was a measure to strip out $485 million worth of funding for a second engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. President Obama, backing Defense Secretary Bob Gates, announced yesterday that he’ll veto a defense bill that contains the engine. “This program is a perfect example of wasteful spending that Congress must begin to address, and I am disappointed that our amendment failed,” Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), the amendment’s main sponsor, said in a statement after last night’s vote. “I hope we can work in conference with the Senate to eliminate this program once and for all.” They’ll have to. The Senate mark-up of the bill managed not to include the money for the engine.

It’s unclear what Senate Republican strategy is going to be for the defense bill. Only one Republican, Susan Collins (R-Maine), voted for the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” repeal, and several others, including John McCain (R-Ariz.), were angry at the measure’s passage in committee last night. There would be no shortage of cognitive dissonance if the Republican caucus filibustered over a half-trillion for defense and over $150 billion for two wars just months before an election.

But the veto threat could give them a way out of the dilemma. If the conferees are unable to strip the funding for the engine out, Obama — who last night said repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” would “help make our Armed Forces even stronger and more inclusive” — would have to choose between infuriating his defense secretary or abandoning one of his central promises to a key Democratic constituency.

After Blumenaeur’s amendment failed, Gates’ spokesman, Geoff Morrell, emailed reporters, “We don’t want nor need the extra engine, but this is just one step in a long journey and Secretary Gates is committed to staying engaged in this process the whole way, including if necessary ultimately recommending President Obama veto this legislation.” All eyes will be on the House-Senate conference.

Just as the National Security Strategy places an international order based on binding global norms at the center of President Obama’s foreign policy, a United Nations official tells Charlie Savage of The New York Times that Obama’s drone strikes ought to come to end:

Philip Alston, the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said Thursday that he would deliver a report on June 3 to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva declaring that the “life and death power” of drones should be entrusted to regular armed forces, not intelligence agencies. He contrasted how the military and the C.I.A. responded to allegations that strikes had killed civilians by mistake.

“With the Defense Department you’ve got maybe not perfect but quite abundant accountability as demonstrated by what happens when a bombing goes wrong in Afghanistan,” he said in an interview. “The whole process that follows is very open. Whereas if the C.I.A. is doing it, by definition they are not going to answer questions, not provide any information, and not do any follow-up that we know about.”

Alston stops short of calling the drones a violation of the laws of war. But that doesn’t diminish the tension between the rules-based internationalism Obama seeks and the drone strikes he considers a crucial counterterrorism tool.

Consider that the drones are a fairly cheap and unsophisticated technology. It’s only a matter of time before some other country replicates the U.S.’s move to outfit them with missiles. China, for instance, has at least seven types of unmanned aerial vehicles. Russia has at least eight. Will the Obama administration accept an assertion by China or Russia that they retain the right to launch missiles from remotely-piloted aircraft at foreign military targets in defiance of the wishes of a U.N. special rapporteur?

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

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

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

Image by: Matt Mahurin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After the provision won a major vote in the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this evening, the House voted tonight to include an amendment overturning the military’s 17-year-old ban on open gay service into the fiscal 2011 defense authorization bill. The vote was 234 in favor to 194 opposed, with only five Republicans voting in favor and 26 Democrats voting against.

“Lawmakers today stood on the right side of history,” said Human Rights Campaign President Joe Solmonese in a prepared statement emailed to reporters as soon as the bill cleared the 216-vote threshold necessary for passage. “This is a historic step to strengthen our armed forces and to restore honor and integrity to those who serve our country so selflessly.”

The move followed impassioned speeches in favor of repeal by Reps. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), John Lewis (D-Ga.) and Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), all of whom argued that repeal was a crucial moral test for America.

This means that both the House and Senate now have a defense authorization bill that repeals “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” The House may vote on the bill as early as tonight.

Yesterday I was chatting with a House aide about the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” legislative repeal. Before I could ask about inflection points for passage in a House vote that could come as early as this evening, the aide waived me off his entire chamber. Don’t even bother with the House, the aide told me. The big question for is whether the Senate Armed Services Committee can approve the repeal.

And it just did. The vote was 16 to 12, with Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) joining 15 Democrats in voting to attach an amendment to repeal the military’s ban on open gay service to the fiscal 2011 defense authorization.

LGBT activists have waited for this day for 17 years. A sample reaction from the press releases flooding my inbox:

“The importance of this vote cannot be overstated – this is the beginning of the end of a shameful ban on open service by lesbian and gay troops that has weakened our national security,” said Human Rights Campaign President Joe Solmonese. “The stars are aligning to finally restore honor and integrity to those who serve our country so selflessly.”

Or:

“This initial victory today in the Senate Armed Services Committee is an historic first step forward in the drive to finally get the onerous ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ law off the books forever,” said Alexander Nicholson, Executive Director of Servicemembers United and a former U.S. Army interrogator who was discharged under “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” “All of us who have served under ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ and who have been impacted by this law will remember this day as the beginning of the end for ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.’”

From Chris Anders of the ACLU:

“For years, without being able to live openly, gay and lesbian service members have been fighting and dying for their country alongside straight soldiers. Our men and women in uniform deserve to be treated fairly, honestly and with dignity. We applaud the committee for including this provision and urge the House to pass its amendment as well. We cannot dare lose momentum now.”

A House vote on attaching a similar amendment will come possibly as early as tonight. But Senate Republicans tell TPM’s Brian Beutler that they’ll do anything to stop the Senate bill when it goes to the floor.

In 2002, the National Security Strategy issued by George W. Bush expressly precluded the United States from allowing a new superpower to develop. Speaking today at the Brookings Institution to officially unveil President Obama’s National Security Strategy, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton dismissed the idea that the U.S. had anything to fear from a “multipolar” world of new great powers like China or India.

Smirking a bit, Clinton, just back from a trip to Southeast Asia, acknowledged that “some” believe that a multipolar world “undercuts American power and leadership.” But she said that was simplistic. “We’re seeking to gain partners in pursuing American interests, and we happen to think those interests coincide with universal” aspirations, Clinton said. The alternative approach of demanding foreign nations cooperate with the U.S. is a nonstarter. ”We can’t begin a conversation with someone by saying, ‘Here are the ten things you need to do to be a responsible stakeholder,’” Clinton said when challenged by a former U.S. ambassador, Martin Indyk, on how to persuade sometimes recalcitrant nations that U.S. interests overlap with their own interests.

Several days’ worth of far-ranging dialogue with the Chinese government on energy security and China’s development role in Africa, Asia and Latin America, she said, contributed to her endorsement of the National Security Strategy’s rules-based internationalism. “The sum of the parts add up to a strong endorsement of American leadership,” she said.

If ever you want a distillation of the differences between Obama’s conception of how to handle the emerging problem of domestic extremism and how his right-wing critics view it, check out the National Security Strategy’s take on what intelligent domestic counterterrorism looks like:

Several recent incidences of violent extremists in the United States who are committed to fighting here and abroad have underscored the threat to the United States and our interests posed by individuals radicalized at home. Our best defenses against this threat are well informed and equipped families, local communities, and institutions. The Federal Government will invest in intelligence to understand this threat and expand community engagement and development programs to empower local communities. And the Federal Government, drawing on the expertise and resources from all relevant agencies, will clearly communicate our policies and intentions, listening to local concerns, tailoring policies to address regional concerns, and making clear that our diversity is part of our strength—not a source of division or insecurity.

The Department of Homeland Security has documented increased attempts by al-Qaeda and those inspired by it in recent months to attempt what John Brennan, Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser, calls attacks of “low sophistication” within the United States. That creates a choice for intelligence and law enforcement. One answer is to apply counterinsurgency principles of population protection. That entails treating host communities as essentially “at-risk” cohorts that run the risk of infection by radical recruitment techniques. By partnering with community leaders, you give financial and political support to the recognized and legitimate authority figures so they can prevent extremism from taking hold — and to isolate, marginalize, identify and target for law enforcement those people who might still fall under its sway. This is what the NYPD’s old counterterrorism chief, Mike Sheehan, did in Muslim communities in New York City early last decade. It was as often as simple — and as crucial — as showing up to mosque meetings and letting people vent their grievances.

And this is the approach the National Security Strategy embraces: one that distinguishes between the extremists and the communities that they emerge from and exploit; treats the communities as under threat; and empowers those communities to handle that threat at the most immediate, legitimate and basic levels.

There’s another approach. You could treat the communities as the threat. Andy McCarthy, the most influential conservative legal authority on national security at the moment, ridicules the very idea of “Muslim ‘moderates’” as a “hopelessly ill-conceived construct.” His new book portrays Islam itself as a threat to America. The natural remedy is to empower law enforcement to target those Muslim communities in the United States. Subject them to surveillance. Detain them when necessary. If every Muslim who looks to their faith to inform their politics — which is all the wide, varied, catch-all term “Islamist” means — is on a slippery slope to swearing fealty to Osama bin Laden, then that approach makes sense.

Except that it doesn’t. And as John Brennan explained yesterday, it’s the exact strategy that bin Laden wants the U.S. to pursue, because it will guarantee that greater numbers within those communities turn to extremism in their frustration, precisely the outcome the strategy seeks to prevent. It’s worth quoting extensively from Brennan’s remarks:

Finally, remaining faithful to our values requires something else – that we never surrender the diversity and tolerance and openness to different cultures and faiths that define us as Americans. Several months ago, I had the opportunity to speak at NYU, where I was hosted by the university’s Islamic center and the Islamic Law Students Association. The audience included people of many faiths – Muslim, Christian, Jew, Hindu and Sikh. I was there to have a dialogue on how, as Americans, we can all work together to keep our country safe from the terrorists who seek to drive us apart.

After I was finished speaking, person after person stood up to share their perspective and to ask their questions. Mothers and fathers, religious leaders and students, recent immigrants and American citizens by birth. One after another, they spoke of how they love this country and of all the opportunities it has afforded them and their families. But they also spoke of their concerns, that their fellow Americans, and at times, their own government, may see them as a threat to American security, rather than a part of the American family. One man, a father, explained that his 21-year-old son, an American born and raised, who was subjected to extra security every time he boards a plane, now feels disenfranchised in his own country.

This is the challenge we face. Even more than the attacks al-Qaida and its violent affiliates unleash or the blood they spill, they seek to strike at the very essence of who we are as Americans by replacing our hard-won confidence with fear and replacing our tolerance with suspicion; by turning our great diversity from a source of strength into a source of division; by causing us to undermine the laws and values that have been a source of our strength and our influence throughout the world; by turning a nation whose global leadership has meant greater security and prosperity for people in every corner of the globe into a nation that retreats from the world stage and abandons allies and partners.

That is what al-Qaida and its allies want – to achieve their goals by turning us into something we are not. But that is something they can never achieve, because only the people of America can change who we are as a nation. Al-Qaida can sew explosives into their clothes or park an SUV with explosives on a busy street. But it is our choice to react with panic or resolve. They can seek to recruit people already living among us, but it is our choice to subject entire communities to suspicion, or to support those communities in reaching the disaffected before they turn to violence. Terrorists may try to bring death to our cities, but it is our choice to either uphold the rule of law or chip away at it. They may strike our communities, but it is our choice to either respond wisely and effectively or lash out in ways that inflame entire regions and stoke the fires of the violent extremism.

To build out a theme from the previous post, it’s noteworthy how the National Security Strategy draws on conceptions of military power developed over the last few years by the theorist-practitioners of counterinsurgency in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Before 2006, counterinsurgency was an apocryphal focus of study by dissident officers in the Army and Marine Corps in search of an institutional home. Now this line is in the National Security Strategy: “We will continue to rebalance our military capabilities to excel at counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, stability operations, and meeting increasingly sophisticated security threats, while ensuring our force is ready to address the full range of military operations.”

If that sounds familiar, maybe it’s because you’ve read my 2008 interview with the patron saint of counterinsurgency. “You don’t get to pick your wars. Sometimes they are thrust upon you,” Gen. Petraeus said back then. “They don’t always turn out the way they were envisioned, or the way you envisioned them turning out. The enemy gets a vote. And that’s why I’m persuaded by the logic of the concept of full-spectrum operations.”

But it’s deeper than just declaratory statements about counterinsurgency. The National Security Strategy reflects key counterinsurgency concepts, like integrating security capabilities across the government and among allies. “We must update, balance, and integrate all of the tools of American power and work with our allies and partners to do the same,” it reads, echoing what Petraeus likes to call a “whole of government and whole-of-governments approach.” It’s concerned with the relationship between power and legitimacy, writing, “The United States supports the expansion of democracy and human rights abroad because governments that respect these values are more just, peaceful, and legitimate. (Or, as the Counterinsurgency Field Manual puts it, “Legitimacy Is The Main Objective.”)

And it tethers foreign support for American goals to local perceptions of how American power materially benefits others. In the NSS, that’s given a broad section about how to “Promote Dignity by Meeting Basic Needs.”  In section 2-6 of the Field Manual — an admittedly under-developed section — counterinsurgents are instructed to “take responsibility for the people’s well-being in all its manifestations,” not just “essential services, such as water, electricity, sanitation and medical care” but also “sustainment of key social and cultural institutions.”

It shouldn’t be surprising that the National Security Strategy draws on lessons of the counterinsurgent experience. The Obama administration is itself a coalition of progressive national security strategists and key counterinsurgents, and decisions like the Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy represent the crucible for that partnership and its relationship to the national interest. Increasingly, it’s inspiring a similarly improbable counter-coalition of progressive war critics and more traditionally minded military leaders. Adm. Eric Olson, the commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, called out the counterinsurgents earlier this week for offering an insufficiently martial strategy that bears little relationship, in his telling, to the realities of war.

Two years ago, before Obama’s strategy coalition took shape, one of the most prominent critics of counterinsurgency, Army Col. Gian Gentile, lamented to me that the “matrix” of counterinsurgency was overtaking Army thinking. Today’s National Security Strategy indicates that Gentile, now a West Point professor, was more prophetic than he thought in describing counterinsurgency’s influence.

Despite the easy media and think-tank cynicism about the irrelevance of National Security Strategies — quick, what did George H.W. Bush say? — presidents reveal themselves through the document’s animating focus. For George W. Bush, the question was: how ought the United States respond to terrorism? For Barack Obama, it’s about a theory of how to sustain American power over the long haul.

There’s a certain caricature of Obama on the right that holds he only accepts American exceptionalism — the view that America has an outsize role to play in global affairs — in the sense that he finds America exceptionally blameworthy. The responsible exercise of U.S. foreign policy for Obama, goes this view, is to restrain it until it withers away. Charles Krauthammer offered that thesis. Mitt Romney put it in hardcover. Sarah Palin put it on Facebook. And it won’t go away with the National Security Strategy, because it was never tethered to reality. But the National Security Strategy demonstrates how it’s the exact opposite of what the Obama presidency is about.

Every single focus outlined in the National Security Strategy is about the maintenance of American power on the international stage in an era when the international order is less tethered to the traditional power of big alliances of states than ever, thanks to global financial destabilization, super-empowered individual extremists or proliferating nuclear weapons. American power, Obama argues, rests on insolvent foundations if it doesn’t invest in domestic priorities, principally “the long term growth of our economy and competitiveness of our citizens.” It won’t rally global actors to a common purpose if it doesn’t pursue “comprehensive engagement” with the world, predicated on the international institutions that represent and reflect the world’s forums for expression of consensus standards of behavior. And it won’t possess credibility if it violates “respect for universal values at home and around the world.”

That creates an interlocking series of obligations for implementing the strategy. “National security draws on the strength and resilience of our citizens, communities, and economy,” Obama argues, so that requires the maintenance and integration of not only military, diplomatic, development, intelligence and economic power, but also of domestic prosperity and justice. This is a blueprint for investing in health and education as much as it is a blueprint for investing in the military. When you think about it, how can you really separate the two? The military is worried about the security implications of the obesity epidemic, after all. This is a broad expansion of a military concept known as “interdependent capabilities,” where the assets within one service or branch or department can support and magnify those of others — applied across the government, and across governments.

Second, it requires a “a rules-based international system that can advance our own interests by serving mutual interests. International institutions must be more effective and representative of the diffusion of influence in the 21st century. Nations must have incentives to behave responsibly, or be isolated when they do not.” International power isn’t a “zero-sum game,” Obama argues — a central refutation of Bush’s insistence that the U.S. ought to never allow a new superpower to develop — with one major conceptual exception. Isolated nations and actors really do face zero-sum situations against an international community united around common norms. And that’s how Obama argues American leadership can marshal institutions for common objectives over the long term.

Those nations that refuse to meet their responsibilities will forsake the opportunities that come with international cooperation. Credible and effective alternatives to military action—from sanctions to isolation—must be strong enough to change behavior, just as we must reinforce our alliances and our military capabilities. And if nations challenge or undermine an international order that is based upon rights and responsibilities, they must find themselves isolated.

The logic here requires a recognition that such a thing applies to American power as well. The National Security Strategy ties that recognition to the broader theme of avoiding insolvency. “When we overuse our military might, or fail to invest in or deploy complementary tools, or act without partners, then our military is overstretched, Americans bear a greater burden, and our leadership around the world is too narrowly identified with military force,” the document reads. “And we know that our enemies aim to overextend our Armed Forces and to drive wedges between us and those who share our interests.”

Obama’s opponents might argue that means he’s got an insufficient appreciation for American military power. But this the exact same recognition contained in the Army and Marine Corps’ Counterinsurgency Field Manual. The manual’s chapter on paradoxes observes, “Sometimes, the more force is used, the less effective it is” and that the more successful a strategy is, “the less force can be used and the more risk must be accepted.” There are sections in the National Security Strategy that clearly drink from the same well as the counterinsurgency field manual, which ought not to be surprising when considering the administration’s embrace of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

So overreaction contributes to the insolvency of power. When it comes to terrorism, the document states, “If we respond with fear, we allow violent extremists to succeed far beyond the initial impact of their attacks, or attempted attacks—altering our society and enlarging the standing of al-Qa’ida and its terrorist affiliates far beyond its actual reach.” John Brennan spoke about that yesterday. But the document doesn’t rule out what civil libertarian critics consider to be fear-based responses: military commissions and indefinite detentions without charge. Nor does it consider their impact on the rules-based order that the document seeks to bolster. After all, if the preservation of American power is based on the expansion of such an order, won’t insolvency occur if the U.S. keeps granting itself exceptions to that order?

One of the most vigorous proponents of passing legislation this year to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is the first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who had to implement the military’s ban on open gay service, ret. Gen. John Shalikashvili. His Washington Post op-ed on Saturday outlined the basic plan that’s being marked up in the Senate Armed Services Committee right now: repeal the ban while punting on its implementation until a Pentagon Working Group instructs Defense Secretary Robert Gates in December how to least disruptively integrate the services. Now he’s wading back into the fray after the service chiefs came out in opposition to that compromise this afternoon in a series of letters to legislators.

“There is nothing in these letters that gives Congress any reason to delay enacting the legislative compromise that was proposed this week,” Shalikashvili writes to compromise supporters Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Carl Levin (D-Mich.) from his Washington state home, in a letter released by the LGBT activist coalition working for legislative repeal. The service chiefs want the Working Group to guide implementation of the repeal? Then Congress should give them what they want by passing a legislative repeal first, since otherwise, “the Pentagon will be powerless to implement the Working Group’s recommendations.”

It’s also a compromise that respects military sentiment about repealing the ban, Shalikashvili continues: “[T]he proposed implementation and certification requirements contained in the legislative compromise ensure that the views of Service members and their families will be respected and given full weight in determining how best to implement this shift in policy.”

In a big setback for Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Rep. Patrick Murphy’s (D-Pa.) efforts to insert amendments overturning the military’s ban on open gay service in this year’s defense authorization bill, Igor Volsky of ThinkProgress has obtained letters from the chiefs of the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force urging legislators to forestall a legislative repeal until after the Pentagon’s Working Group on implementing the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” completes its report in December.

The markup of the Senate version of the bill is underway in the Armed Services Committee. A floor vote in the House is expected tomorrow.

As Volsky observes, the compromise enshrined in the amendments would punt implementation of the repeal until after the Working Group issues its guidance. But I’ve been hearing for days that key Pentagon leaders, despite Defense Secretary Gates’ begrudging support for the legislation, were embittered by the White House’s Monday pledge to LGBT activists to acquiesce to the legislative push. Regardless of the amendment’s substantive respect for the Working Group’s timetable, those leaders thought that the Working Group represented a mechanism for overturning “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” with maximum military buy-in and minimal disruption to wartime operations. (Of all the service chiefs, only Gen. James Conway, the Marine Corps commandant, opposes overturning the ban on open gay service.)

The chiefs’ opposition indicates that the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” fight has fallen into in a briar patch of acrimony, where substantively small differences appear massive due to injured pride and perceived disrespect.

Something else to keep an eye on in the Senate Armed Services Committee’s defense authorization mark-up: via Satyam Khanna, Steve Vladeck finds the remnant of a much-denounced smear on attorneys who have defended Guantanamo Bay detainees in the bill.

[S]ection 1037 of the Act [page 403 of the PDF], titled “Inspector General Investigation of the Conduct and Practices of Lawyers Representing Individuals Detained at Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,” instructs the Department of Defense IG to “conduct an investigation of the conduct and practices of lawyers” who represent clients at Guantánamo and report back to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees within 90 days.

“Reasonable” basis for an investigation of these lawyers includes such vagueries as believing an attorney “interfered with the operations of the Department of Defense at Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.” As Vladeck points out, this can mean any attorney, since the overlapping DOD commands at Guantanamo Bay (the Office of Military Commissions; the Naval Base; Joint Task Force-Guantanamo; the Office of the Secretary of Defense) ensure that any lawyer will inevitably “interfere” with some operation on the base. Consider the chilling effect that will have on detainees’ access to counsel in the commissions.

For instance. Right this moment, the chief commissioning authority for the military commissions at Guantanamo, Vice Adm. Bruce MacDonald, is in talks with detainee Omar Khadr’s attorneys to see if the Khadr’s case can be resolved through a plea deal. The government’s interest in seeking a plea? First, a judge might throw out a lot of the basis for its case against Khadr as improperly coerced; and more broadly, a detainee who was 15 years old when first captured by U.S. forces might not make the best poster boy for the justice dispensed by the military commissions.

So how cooperative might Khadr attorneys Barry Coburn and Kobie Flowers be in those plea talks if a different military command is investigating their activities at Guantanamo Bay? More broadly, how might an appeals court consider the overall fairness of a system that allows for detainees’ access to counsel — but places the specter of military investigation over counsel’s heads?

We’ll see whether this survives the Senate committee mark-up or the floor vote in the House.

The Senate Armed Services Committee goes into room 222 of the Russell building today at 2:30 p.m. to mark up the fiscal 2011 defense authorization bill. Until members emerge at 9 p.m., it’s a black box of information for determining the contours of the half-trillion-dollar-plus piece of legislation, including the fate of Sen. Joe Lieberman’s (I-Conn.) amendment to repeal the military’s ban on open gay service. That’s why the coalition of LGBT-rights organizations pushing to secure passage in the committee and then later this week on the House floor are trying as hard as they can to lock down votes by mid-afternoon.

There’s going to be a rally/press conference on the Hill at 11 a.m. with six veterans, five of whom were either discharged or chose not to re-enlist because of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” urging senators and congressmembers to vote for repeal. Veterans are going to deliver 20,000 pro-repeal postcards to Congress — focusing mostly on the Senate. Specifically, the coalition – comprised of groups like Servicemembers United, the Human Rights Campaign and the Servicemembers Legal Defense Fund — continues to target six states represented by undecided or wavering legislators: West Virginia, Virginia, Massachusetts, Nebraska, Indiana and Florida. Already, its released polling in those states that show scrapping “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” has wide support.

In advance of a complementary House floor vote later this week, the coalition sent an email alert yesterday asking 750,000 people around the country to email their members of congress in support of repeal. It’s going to send another one today asking them to phone member offices. The idea is to escalate pressure, capping off a build-up of several months that’s brought veterans affected by “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” — and those who just believe overturning it is the right thing to d0 — to key states and districts.

That effort got the White House to acquiesce to the strategy on Monday, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates to reluctantly accept the legislative push on Tuesday. But it’s not won over every member of Congress it’s targeted. Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) saw 77 percent of Massachusetts voters backing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” repeal, but the new senator — a lieutenant colonel in his state’s National Guard — said yesterday that he’s voting against Lieberman’s amendment. So is Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), a Marine veteran of Vietnam and a former Navy secretary, even after the coalition sent a letter from Virginia servicewomen urging him to support repeal. Both claim that Gates’ original plan — to hold off legislative efforts at repeal until a Pentagon working group on its implementation issues guidance to him in December — ought to proceed. Over in the House last night, the chairman of the armed services committee, Rep. Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), made the exact same argument as his grounds for opposition.

The coalition believes that the Senate committee still has a significant number of undecideds, soft-yes and soft-no votes. (For what it’s worth, I’m not going to give my own whip count, because I don’t believe that’s journalistically responsible in a fluid situation like this one.) But it’s also used to setbacks, even though the legislative compromise provides perhaps the best shot for repealing the law since its enactment in 1993, and that speaks to the resilience of the activists who have pushed the White House, Congress and the Pentagon this far already.

“This is one of the best opportunities for repeal that has come around,” said Michael Cole of the Human Rights Campaign. “The fact that you have congressional leaders supporting it, the president supporting it and Secretary Gates and Adm. Mullen saying it will do what they want in respecting the working group, the stars have aligned for putting repeal closer to reality than ever.” If the votes are there.

Assistant to the President for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security John Brennan (EPA/ZUMApress.com)

John Brennan has a tough rhetorical job ahead of him Wednesday morning. Speaking to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Brennan, President Obama’s most influential terrorism and intelligence adviser, will attempt to reconcile the harder edges of Obama’s escalation in Afghanistan and his enthusiastic embrace of drone-enabled assassinations of terrorists with the broader approach to grand strategy that the White House will finally unveil this week. Some wonder if that reconciliation is even possible.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

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That grand strategy, previewed by Obama in his Saturday speech to West Point Army cadets, presents the world with a U.S. eager to uphold and sustain the rules of the international order, rejecting the Bush administration’s asserted right to take preventive military action against hostile foreign states. The U.S.’s leadership role within that global system, Obama contended, is to direct “the currents of cooperation… in the direction of liberty and justice,” for positive-sum international action on global concerns like economic security, climate change, nuclear disarmament, pandemic disease and weak or failing states. Those efforts and that approach will be the centerpiece of his forthcoming National Security Strategy, a defining document of U.S. grand strategy that the administration has labored for months to complete.

The National Security Strategy will be formally unveiled on Thursday. And Brennan won’t be the only senior official previewing it and amplifying its themes. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, just back from a wide-ranging trip to China, will present it to the Brookings Institution. Vice President Biden will do the same on Friday, to the graduating class of Navy midshipmen at Annapolis. Jim Jones, Obama’s national security adviser, has said that the “defining feature of our foreign policy” is that the U.S. is “willing to commit to a new era of engagement based on mutual interests and mutual respect.” He’s finalizing the details of his own National Security Strategy-related speech.

Brennan tried this once before — at CSIS, in fact, last August. But back then, Brennan was more interested in articulating discontinuities with the Bush administration in how Obama handled terrorism, such as eschewing a war-centric construct for viewing the conflict and taking it away from Islam. One senior administration official, Dan Benjamin, the State Department’s counterterrorism chief, has urged an expansion of that critique, arguing last June that U.S. strategy needs to “shift away from a foreign and security policy that makes counterterrorism the prism through which everything is evaluated and decided.” The National Security Strategy is supposed to be that prism, but it remains to be seen how the administration’s counterterrorism efforts can be viewed through it.

Marc Lynch, a professor at George Washington University and a non-resident scholar at the Center for a New American Security, grapples with that reconciliation in a forthcoming paper for the influential think tank, and doesn’t come away with particularly easy answers. “The problem they face is they make a series of pragmatic decisions, each on its own terms, and you can see the logic behind any of them,” Lynch said. “But add it all up, and you see the implementation is clearly at odds with the philosophy.”

All of which are unilateral actions that have met with significant opposition overseas. None easily fit within the framework of “a new era of engagement based on mutual interests and mutual respect.” A senior Republican congressional aide agreed that that framework was the “essence” of Obama’s foreign policy. “There are norms and there are laws and ways of doing things in the world that we in the U.S. have in large part put into place, and sustain,” summarized the aide, who declined to speak for attribution. “Those laws, norms and ideas are above every nation and every nation has a responsibility to uphold them. So we need to do better at meeting our responsibilities and so too, incidentally, does the Iranian government.”

Obama’s approach to Afghanistan might not be such an anomaly, even if the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize inherited the war he has escalated. That’s because even though Obama has nearly tripled the number of troops in Afghanistan, by July 2011 the so-called “extended surge” will begin to give way to more of a supporting role for U.S. forces. What’s more, as Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s visit to Washington two weeks ago highlighted, Obama has recast relations with both Afghanistan and Pakistan in terms of long-term diplomatic, economic and security cooperation, beyond just counterterrorism. What’s more, not only is military action in Afghanistan a multinational affair operated by NATO and not the U.S. alone, it is specifically legally authorized by the U.N. Security Council. Lynch, a former Obama campaign adviser and a critic of the Afghanistan war, observed, “Afghanistan is a big hole in the strategy in all kinds of ways of ways that matter, but not in a conceptual way.”

Heather Hurlburt, an administration ally at the progressive National Security Network, said that the problem is indicative of an inherent tension between a rules-based international order and the prerogatives of a superpower. “What any administration says is the strategy and what the national-security apparatus does on a day-to-day basis are not necessarily the same thing, especially early on,” Hurlburt observed. The role of a National Security Strategy isn’t necessarily to eliminate those tensions, but rather to bring the military and the intelligence services into rough alignment with the broader vision. “It’s a very powerful signaling mechanism across the government and outside of it, to say ‘We’re serious about this rules-based multilateralism, this human rights stuff, this non-proliferation stuff, and you can’t outlast it.’”

But if the administration keeps granting itself exceptions to following the international order for the exigencies of terrorist emergencies, Lynch said, it will be left without the intellectual underpinnings — and, accordingly, the public support — for an appropriate response if a terrorist attack ultimately succeeds. “What i’m afraid of is that as soon as you get turbulence — like an actual terrorist attack — there’s going to be a big backlash and you can’t hold the overall structure in place,” Lynch said. “Right now, Obama’s got the rhetoric, but they’ve done precious little to institutionalize it and put on durable legal foundations.”

The “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” repeal provisions about to be inserted into the fiscal year 2011 defense authorization bill are getting all the attention. But don’t forget that the bill is a venue for a much different showdown between the Pentagon and Congress. Defense Secretary Robert Gates certainly hasn’t.

For weeks now, Gates has done everything he can to get Congress not to put money into the bill for a second engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which he has repeatedly characterized as a “costly and unnecessary” engineering curiosity. He’s even made a legacy-building speech at the library honoring the patron saint of sensible defense spending, Dwight D. Eisenhower, holding out the engine as the crucible of a fight over Pentagon bloat. Again and again for the past several weeks, he’s told anyone who would listen that if the second engine is in the defense bill, he will recommend that President Obama veto the entire half-trillion-dollar bill.

None of that actually stopped the House Armed Services Committee from putting $485 million for the engine into the bill last week. My understanding is that the second engine is not currently in the Senate version of the bill that will go through committee mark-up tomorrow. But now that the White House has blessed a legislative maneuver to make the defense authorization bill the vehicle to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” a signature issue for the Democratic base, is Gates standing firm on his recommendation to veto a bill containing the second F-35 engine?

“Absolutely, positively, unequivocally, yes,” says Geoff Morrell, Gates’s spokesman.

It’s possible Gates won’t have to recommend any veto and Obama won’t have to consider using one. Although it’s more likely than not that the Senate committee will put funding for the engine in the bill, sometimes miracles happen. Over in the House, Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) and Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.) announced today that they’re going to push their own amendment during the floor vote to block the money for the second F-35 engine.

Those measures are perhaps the best chances for the politics of repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” not to run smack into the politics of Gates’s efforts to curb defense waste. The “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” repeal votes in the House and especially the Senate committee tomorrow are already extremely close, according to Hill sources and LGBT repeal advocates. Who knows how a potential veto recommendation from Gates on a different issue would impact members’ calculations.

Perhaps only two things here are clear. First, the congressional fight over repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” isn’t the congressional fight that Gates wanted the defense authorization to be about, even if he did issue reluctant support for the move earlier today. And second, it’s possible that Obama will be put in the difficult position of having to choose between a core priority for his much-snubbed supporters in the LGBT community and a core priority for his defense secretary.

Here’s an example of why LGBT activist groups who cheered the Obama administration’s acquiescence to a legislative push overturning the military’s ban on open gay service are girding up for a close fight.

Rep. Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), the powerful veteran legislator who chairs the House Armed Services Committee, came out just now against the compromise. Skelton thought Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ initial preference for delaying any legislative action on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” until a Pentagon working group instructs Gates on how the services feel repeal ought to proceed is the right way to go. And he read the reluctance in Gates’ acquiescence to the compromise as an opportunity to oppose the repeal push when Rep. Patrick Murphy (D-Pa.) offers it as an amendment to the fiscal 2011 Defense Authorization bill during the House floor vote later this week.

Here’s Skelton’s statement:

“In testimony before the House Armed Services Committee this spring and in a recent letter, Secretary Gates and Admiral Mullen asked Congress to defer any legislative action regarding ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ until after the Department of Defense completes its comprehensive review later this year.  In a statement today, the Pentagon indicated that ideally, Secretary Gates continues to prefer that the Department complete this review before Congress considers legislation.  This is a reasonable and responsible request that I respect.

“My position on this issue has been clear – I support the current policy and I will oppose any amendment to repeal ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.’  I hope my colleagues will avoid jumping the gun and wait for DOD to complete its work.”

It’s unclear whether Skelton’s opposition could derail the amendment. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) have maneuvered more controversial bills through the House with lesser margins for error. But it’s yet another sign that whatever the White House may have endorsed, passage of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” repeal is anything but guaranteed. And that’s not even factoring in tomorrow’s vote in the Senate Armed Services Committee.

In a statement she put out yesterday afternoon, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, sure sounded like she didn’t want defense intelligence chief James Clapper to take over for the departing Dennis Blair as the next director of national intelligence. (“It will be important that any nominee is not beholden to the Pentagon’s interests…”) But she wasn’t explicit about it. Josh Rogin gets her on the record about her opposition to Clapper’s prospective nomination — and way more.

“I have concerns about Clapper as a choice,” committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-CA, told The Cable in an interview, saying that the widely expected nomination of Clapper, who now is under secretary of defense for intelligence, would give the military too much control of the intelligence community. “The best thing for intelligence is to have a civilian in charge. The elbows are less sharp.”

In a bit of irony that surely warms hearts at Langley, Feinstein’s choice for the nation’s top intelligence post is — wait for it — Leon Panetta, the CIA director whose nomination Feinstein initially fought hard to scuttle. I suppose you could be cute and suggest that Feinstein secretly just wants the bureaucratic meatgrinder that is the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to finally grind Panetta’s flesh and bones. But most likely she’s just been impressed by his job as CIA director.

And so has Kit Bond (R-Mo.), the committee’s GOP vice chairman. Rogin further reports that there’s no daylight between the committee leaders on who they want for Blair’s job. Panetta is “the only one who has the clout to make it work,” Bond told Rogin, “I have reservations about [Clapper] in that job.”

Does Clapper’s (possible, prospective, never official) candidacy survive public opposition from the leadership of the Senate committee that will have to approve him?

Via The New Yorker’s twitter feed, North Korea, fresh from an unprovoked naval attack that killed 46 South Korean sailors, accuses South Korean President Lee Myung-bak of being a “wicked warmonger.” This call for “all-out counterattack” is from North Korea’s official news service:

“The Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea, accordingly, formally declares that from now on it will put into force the resolute measures to totally freeze the inter-Korean relations, totally abrogate the agreement on non-aggression between the north and the south and completely halt the inter-Korean cooperation.

“In this connection, the following measures will be taken at the first phase:

“1. All relations with the puppet authorities will be severed.

“2. There will be neither dialogue nor contact between the authorities during (South Korean President) Lee Myung Bak’s tenure of office.

“3. The work of the Panmunjom Red Cross liaison representatives will be completely suspended.

“4. All communication links between the north and the south will be cut off.

“5. The Consultative Office for North-South Economic Cooperation in the Kaesong Industrial Zone will be frozen and dismantled and all the personnel concerned of the south side will be expelled without delay.

“6. We will start all-out counterattack against the puppet group’s ‘psychological warfare against the north.’

“7. The passage of south Korean ships and airliners through the territorial waters and air of our side will be totally banned.

“8. All the issues arising in the inter-Korean relations will be handled under a wartime law.

“There is no need to show any mercy or patience for such confrontation maniacs, sycophants and traitors and wicked warmongers as the (South Korean President) Lee Myung Bak group.”

A fresh-out statement from Geoff Morrell, chief spokesman for Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, reacting to the proposed legislative language for repealing the military’s ban on open gay service and the general legislative strategy of putting the repeal in the fiscal 2011 defense authorization bill:

“Secretary Gates continues to believe that ideally the DOD review should be completed before there is any legislation to repeal the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell law. With Congress having indicated that is not possible, the Secretary can accept the language in the proposed amendment.”