Former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, and former FBI Director Louis Freeh are overflowing with admiration for a terrorist cult leader:

In evaluating the bona fides of the MEK movement and its public commitment to a democratic and liberal Iran, the American people and the Congress have never had the benefit of hearing from its charismatic Paris-based leader Mrs. Maryam Rajavi. She has not been permitted a visa to visit the United States. But perhaps the time has come for a first-ever Congressional “Skype” hearing – allowing Senators and Representatives to put directly the questions that administration skeptics have floated for an answer by this intelligent woman who has endorsed a liberal democratic future for Iran.

We have never had the “benefit” of this because she is the leader of a terrorist organization. On the whole, Americans frown on letting leaders of terrorist organizations come into the U.S. to raise money and propagandize. How hard is it to understand that foreign political groups, militant or not, will adopt all the right rhetoric and claim to share our political values if they think it will get them what they want? When Americans are so eager to take claims of democratic values at face value, it is no wonder that even a totalitarian cult will attempt to present itself this way. The MEK’s attempt to reinvent itself as a democratic movement cannot be taken seriously, and the readiness with which so many prominent Americans accept these falsehoods suggests that they are either incredibly gullible or intent on misleading the public.

Update: One of the commenters alerted me to today’s NPR report on the MEK.

John Guardiano rises to the defense of Michele Bachmann:

The only thing that seems “obvious” to me is that Bachmann is a candidate of substance who deserves to be taken seriously. She certainly doesn’t deserve to be airily and patronizingly dismissed as some sort of second-rate, subpar presidential candidate.

There are a few things to say about this. Bachmann can be a “candidate of substance” and still be obviously unqualified to be President. She could be all the things Guardiano says she is, and it wouldn’t prove that she was prepared for that office. Many Republicans judged Obama to be similarly lacking in qualifications for the office when he ran with just about as much experience in elected office as Bachmann has right now. Bachmann is in the same position in the 2012 Republican field that Obama occupied in the 2008 Democratic race in some ways, but she has the disadvantage of running an insurgent campaign from the right in a party that normally scorns and rejects ideological insurgents in its presidential nominating contest. She could withstand the challenge from Perry, but at that point the party’s leadership and donors would rally to Romney to prevent a repeat of 1964.

Guardiano says that it is obvious that “she can win,” and I take him to mean that he thinks she can win the general election. That seems impossible. It is still hard to see how she could win the nomination once the contest moves to larger primary electorates. That isn’t to say it absolutely couldn’t happen. When Obama announced his candidacy in early 2007, it seemed absurd that a newly-minted Senator with a decade of experience in the state legislature could win his party’s nomination, but it happened. As I said, insurgent Republican campaigns tend to fail, but it is possible that anti-establishment sentiment could be strong enough to keep Bachmann going long enough to secure the delegates she needs. The argument against Paul Ryan as the nominee is the same as the one against nominating Bachmann. Even if the party were inclined to accept a young House member, the electorate would not, because a large majority would find such a nominee to be ill-prepared for the position.

What is interesting is how important the strength and intensity of Bachmann’s beliefs are to Guardiano’s judgment. She is “adamantly opposed” to federal health care legislation, there is virtually no one “more committed” to cutting federal spending, and she opposed raising the debt ceiling. There is no question that she takes uncompromising stances on all sorts of issues. It doesn’t follow from any of this that she would be a competent or effective executive. What we have seen of her on the national stage gives us no reason to believe that she would be. Indeed, the viability of her candidacy depends on a very large number of Republican voters understanding that she is unqualified and supporting her anyway.

Beth Reinhard sums up the new conventional wisdom on the 2012 race:

The Romney-Perry showdown seemed unlikely months ago, but came to the fore in recent weeks as Pawlenty continued to fizzle and Perry lined up donors and strategists. Pawlenty’s exit on Sunday and Perry’s announcement on Saturday just made the two-man race official. Bachmann defeated Pawlenty because she managed to make him look weak, a feat she is unlikely to engineer with the swaggering three-term governor of Texas.

If the “two-man race” became official on Saturday, it must have been a one-man race before that, because Pawlenty was never in any danger of competing with Romney. Pawlenty was anointed the acceptable anti-Romney by journalists and pundits, and on paper the argument made a certain amount of sense, but it was never based on any significant support in terms of funding or popularity. Perry is already positioned to do better than Pawlenty in both, but the rush to make Perry the natural alternative to Romney and to declare it a “two-man race” is much the same as the premature elevation of Pawlenty as one of the main contenders.

The meme that it was Pawlenty’s appearance of weakness that doomed him would be poetic justice if it were true. He repeated incessantly how important it is to project strength to ward off aggression from other states, and he has been roundly derided for failing to project strength against Michele Bachmann, but this is too easy of an answer. There is some truth to the claim that Pawlenty was insufficiently combative when he needed to be, and he was arguably too combative when he shouldn’t have been, and he often picked fights with the wrong people. His handling of questions on military spending before a generally friendly audience at the Cato Institute was a clue that he didn’t understand the current political landscape. His full-throated attack on “decline” and “isolationism” at the Council on Foreign Relations not only identified him with the deeply discredited foreign policy views of the first George W. Bush term, but it reinforced the impression that Pawlenty was very concerned with what party elites thought of him and not attentive enough to what voters were thinking. On paper, Pawlenty seemed to be what the GOP needed and wanted, but the assumptions going into this speculation were mistaken.

Doug Mataconis compares Perry and Bachmann on paper (via Andrew):

Nonetheless, just looking at these two candidates on paper there really doesn’t seem to be any comparison. Perry has served in Executive positions (Agriculture Commissoiner, Lt. Governer, Governor) for twenty years. Bachmann has been a Congresswoman from a central Minnesota Congressional District since 2006, and before that served in the Minnesota State Senate for six years. During her time in Congress, she has no significant legislative accomplishments to put on her resume, and has essentially earned her reputation and a backbbench bomb thrower. If you’re a voter in Iowa looking for a conservative who is actually qualified to sit in the Oval Office, the choice is rather obvious I think.

To be blunt, when was the last time in an open nominating contest that the Republican primary electorate selected someone actually qualified for the job? It could well be that Perry displaces Bachmann in the same way that she displaced Pawlenty, and we will then realize that her candidacy functioned as a placeholder until a more electable anti-Romney conservative could be found. Even so, it seems to me that it is not going to be her lack of qualifications or lack of legislative achievements that is going to be her undoing. If qualifications and achievements were what Bachmann’s supporters were interested in, they would be supporting other candidates. As Mataconis and others have already noted, she has started building a celebrity cocoon around herself, and that could prove disastrous for her in both Iowa and New Hampshire. It is this distance from voters and the perceived sense of entitlement that goes with it that could sink her.

Looking at Perry on paper, the same flaws that made a Perry presidential bid seem implausible six months ago are still there. In addition to the vulnerabilities Mataconis lists here, it is hard to forget that everyone assumed until very recently that any governor of Texas would be weighed down by the legacy of the last President from Texas. Perry boosters like to emphasize his personal rivalry with Bush, and in terms of some of his domestic policy views he could plausibly present himself as the anti-Bush, but as a political matter the GOP doesn’t want a potential nominee to conjure up associations with the party during the Bush years. What they certainly don’t want is a candidate who has said repeatedly that he believes George W. Bush will be judged to have been “an incredibly good” President.

Note that he didn’t say that Bush did some things right, or that he agreed with many of Bush’s decisions, which would have been a reasonable answer for a committed partisan, but that he thinks he will be seen as “incredibly good.” That is such a bizarre judgment and one so wildly out of step with the vast majority of Americans, including a significant bloc of Republicans, and the fact that Perry still holds that view should serve as fair warning that he should not be entrusted with the Presidency. Taken together with the strong similarities between Perry’s foreign policy and that of the previous administration, Perry’s assessment of the Bush Presidency tells us why he must not become the nominee.

In the end, the Bachmann-Perry contest is probably a competition to decide who will end up losing to Romney. What is most likely to happen is that Bachmann and Perry will compete with one another as Huckabee and Romney did in 2008, and by splitting the anti-Romney vote they will allow Romney to capture the nomination in the same way McCain did by eking out a number of victories in the early states. Perry will be very strong in Southern primaries, but outside the South his appeal may be as limited as Huckabee’s was last time.

Samuel Charap argues for the “reset” with Russia along much the same lines I did last week:

What it was, and remains, is an effort to work with Russia on key national security priorities where U.S. and Russian interests overlap, while not hesitating to push back on disagreements with the Kremlin at the same time. The idea is that engagement, by opening up channels of communication and diminishing antagonism, should — over time — allow Washington to at least influence problematic Russian behavior and open up more space in Russia’s tightly orchestrated domestic politics.

At the core of the reset policy is a determination that “linkage” — making bilateral cooperation on a given issue dependent on a given country’s behavior on other matters — is an ineffective instrument when dealing with states that are neither ally nor enemy. That’s especially true for great powers like China and Russia, which, whether Americans like it or not, play a major role on global issues that matter.

The usual tactic that the “reset-bashers” use when attacking this policy is to point to some Russian government move that Americans find objectionable, and declare on the basis of this or that episode that “the reset has failed.” Of course, what bothers the “reset-bashers” is precisely that the policy has not failed and keeps working, and their preferred policy of confrontation has been shelved because it already failed and made the “reset” necessary. These critics remain wedded to the notion of Russia as a neo-imperial power and a threat to regional stability, which is profound misunderstanding of post-Soviet Russia. Thomas Barnett comments on Dmitri Trenin’s new Post-Imperium: A Eurasian Story*, and explains that the reality is quite different:

Meanwhile, America moved in militarily from the south as part of its global war on terror, and China progressively encroached — in an economic sense — on Russia’s “near abroad” in Central Asia. To Moscow’s credit, Trenin notes, it has not moved toward any remilitarization of its relationship with the outside world. If anything, the military reform movement begun in 2008 signals Moscow’s near-complete abandonment of the field of great-power warfare, save for a nuclear deterrent that it nonetheless continues to reduce in agreement with the United States, the one power it truly fears.

One reason why the “reset” has been possible is that Russian ambitions are fairly modest. Barnett writes:

Instead, for the first time in modern history, we have a Russia that just wants to be Russia, and not an imperial project.

Most of the disagreements between the U.S. and Russia today concern how much U.S. and other influence Russia can accept along its borders. The “reset” is an indirect acknowledgment that the U.S. had pushed too hard to acquire influence in post-Soviet space. Washington seems to have recognized for now that this push for influence and the reaction to it were ultimately harmful to U.S. interests and the interests of Russia and its neighbors.

* A review of Trenin’s book in The Financial Times can be found here.

One of the stranger reactions to the Ames straw poll results is the growing chorus claiming that Rick Santorum’s star is rising. Politico reports on Santorum’s Ames “bump,” Quin Hillyer believes Santorum has gained momentum from his fourth-place finish, and Jennifer Rubin thinks his campaign has “new life.”

The reality is that Santorum has been living and campaigning full-time in Iowa for weeks, he ought to be rallying social conservatives to him in much larger numbers than he does, and his fourth-place finish out of a field of six direct competitors is confirmation that his campaign is going nowhere. Beating out Herman Cain and Thad McCotter on the ground does not mean much at all. His presidential bid has always seemed to be a vain effort to re-fight the battles of his failed 2006 re-election campaign. His debate exchange with Ron Paul on Iran seemed to epitomize this. The most bizarre moment was when he declared, “I don’t apologize for the Iranian people being free for a long time,” referring to the period when the Shah was in power. There is an argument for preferring the rule of the Shah to that of the current government, but it has nothing to do with Iranian freedom, and the argument for preferring the Shah (i.e., he was a reliable American ally) is one that Iranians see as one of the problems of that period of their history.

Santorum’s statements last Thursday were typical of someone hostile to Iranian national interests, but one who nonetheless insists on presenting himself as a friend of the Iranian people. He insisted that “Iran is a country that must be confronted.” The list of countries that Santorum believes “must be confronted” is quite long, and it runs from Burma to Venezuela. The direction he recommends for the United States is one that would exhaust and ruin us. The foreign policy he was advocating was unreasonable even by the standards of the Bush years, and five years later it seems even worse.

Jennifer Rubin lists Santorum’s many supposed advantages, but it is this one that has to be the hardest to take seriously:

Santorum is also extremely tough on foreign policy issues, and with the benefit of Senate experience, has some detailed knowledge at his finger tips. That, too, can pose a challenge to the other candidates less well-versed and less tough on national security.

By “extremely tough,” Rubin means that Santorum routinely exaggerates foreign threats, and then demagogues the threats he has exaggerated in the most alarmist fashion possible. It must be Santorum’s “detailed knowledge” that caused him to make flatly untrue claims during his exchange with Paul. Paul Pillar explained last week:

But Santorum also used a glaring falsehood: that “ Iran is a country that has killed more American men and women in uniform in Iraq and Afghanistan than the Iraqis and the Afghans have.”

This was hardly the only factual error uttered during the debate (and Paul didn’t get things quite right in characterizing what the U.S. intelligence community has said about the Iranian nuclear program), but it was the biggest whopper of the evening as far as foreign affairs were concerned. It also was the most dangerous falsehood. Inaccuracies such as Tim Pawlenty calling Michael Mullen a general rather than an admiral, or Jon Huntsman mistakenly characterizing the pace of U.S.-Chinese diplomacy, are unlikely to make any difference in public perceptions that could have policy consequences. But Santorum’s assertion, against the backdrop of habitual demonization of Iran, is just the sort of falsehood that is likely to stick and to contribute to mistaken public beliefs that in turn could provide support for disastrous policies.

Building up support for disastrous policies overseas has been Santorum’s business for the last five years at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he oversaw the “America’s Enemies” program, which was later renamed the “Program to Promote and Protect America’s Freedom.” The good news is that Republican voters don’t seem interested in Santorum’s sour alarmism.

Andrew Exum notices that Gen. Peter Pace, one of Rick Perry’s informal advisers, is one of the many former government officials being paid to speak in support of the terrorist group Mujahedin-e Khalq. He cited today’s New York Times op-ed by Elizabeth Rubin, and he reminds us about all the phony outrage when Robert Malley, an informal advisor to the Obama campaign, had met with Hamas members on his own:

What is the appropriate response here? Should Gov. Perry distance himself from those who have associated with and advocated on behalf of Mujahedeen Khalq?

I doubt we’ll see anything of the kind. Perry is no more going to distance himself from Gen. Pace than he is going to denounce Rudy Giuliani, whom he endorsed for president in the previous cycle. Both Pace and Giuliani have been involved in pro-MEK advocacy. Based on what we know so far about his foreign policy, Perry may even hold pro-MEK views as a result of his hostility towards Tehran, but among a disturbingly large number of Republicans and Democrats that is a cause for congratulation. Even though Pace’s pro-MEK advocacy may be more directly relevant to what Perry believes regarding Iran policy, it will be treated as far less relevant than Malley’s tangential role in 2008.

What I found most interesting in the op-ed was Rubin’s account of Gen. Jim Jones’ response when she told him about the nature of the group he was endorsing:

And General Jones said to Ms. Rajavi: “It is time for those of us from the United States who have come to know and admire you and your colleagues and your goals to do what is required to recognize the legitimacy of your movement and your ideals.” When I asked General Jones last week if he knew that some considered the group a totalitarian cult, he replied, “This is the first time I’ve heard anything about this.” [bold mine-DL]

He said he’d checked with military and F.B.I. officials. “I wanted to make sure we weren’t supporting a group that was doing nefarious things that I don’t know about,” he said. “Nobody brought it up, so I didn’t know what questions to ask.”

It’s probably a good rule that if you know very little about a controversial foreign militant group, you shouldn’t be engaged in public advocacy on its behalf. No one would put much stock in this excuse if it were almost any other militant organization. It seems hard to believe that former high-ranking national security officials and retired military officers had no prior knowledge of how the MEK treats its members and runs its organization, but I keep seeing this offered as an explanation (or excuse) for why so many well-known former officials and politicians are endorsing such a group.

Gen. Pace has taken a a different approach to his advocacy for the MEK. He acknowledges the group’s alliance with Saddam Hussein and admits that this has completely poisoned Iranian opinion against the group, but he sees this more as a P.R. problem to be managed than a major reason to have nothing to do with them:

But you can’t get where you want to go if you don’t understand what the obstacles are. And there’s another obstacle out there. And it is, folks believe that a lot of people in Iran do not trust the MEK, because of the alliance between Saddam Hussein and the MEK during the Iran-Iraq war. And that fear is also holding back many individuals, and it has to be overcome if you want to get to where you want to go, in regard to the MEK.

“Holding back many individuals” is a bit of an understatement. The vast majority of Iranians hates this group and wants nothing to do with them. It continues to be something of a mystery why so many prominent Americans think they can treat this awful group as if it were the vanguard of the Iranian opposition.

Update: Here is Maziar Bahari’s documentary on the Rajavi cult.

There are some conclusions to draw from the failure of Tim Pawlenty’s presidential campaign, which mercifully ended today, but Ben Smith’s suggestion (via Andrew) that this represents the failure of “Sam’s Club” Republicanism is a bit of a stretch:

It also marks a failure of the Sam’s Club conservative brand Pawlenty sought, at times, to personify.

That notion of a populist conservatism with a blue-collar edge fit Pawlenty’s story, and his denunciations of the trifecta of Big Government, Big Labor and Big Business fit its populist model.

As Smith notes, Pawlenty didn’t propose any policies informed by this, and his economic plan was notable for how little it focused on including any provisions that would have mattered to working- and middle-class voters. The main idea behind Ross and Reihan’s Grand New Party was that the Republican Party should actually try to serve the interests of its constituents with policies aimed at providing services and benefits. They took Pawlenty’s “Party of Sam’s Club” rhetoric and tried to make it into a policy agenda, but Pawlenty didn’t govern according to anything like that agenda, and he certainly never campaigned on it. We have to make a distinction between Pawlenty’s pseudo-populist use of his biography in his stump speeches and a policy agenda that was at least attempting to address problems of rising inequality, wage stagnation, and decreased social mobility that most Republican politicians ignore in their paeans to American exceptionalism.

Pawlenty’s failure mostly just reflects the flaws of Pawlenty as a candidate, but if it represents anything more than that it has to be a partial repudiation of the policy views that he actually promoted while he was running. Most Republicans found nothing interesting or desirable in Pawlenty’s uncritical embrace of neoconservatism. Like Santorum, Pawlenty spent an inordinate amount of his time as a candidate attacking the foreign policy of the administration and the rest of the 2012 field, but Pawlenty didn’t have Santorum’s excuse that obsessing over minor and non-existent threats has been his main preoccupation for years. In his speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, Pawlenty seemed eager to occupy the role of the party’s ideological enforcer, and it doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that rank-and-file Republican voters don’t care about Syria and Libya. The one thing that clearly distinguished Pawlenty from the rest of the field was a foreign policy vision that far fewer Republicans find credible now than they did a few years ago. There will be other candidates promoting the same foreign policy views, but I doubt that any of them will be quite as eager as Pawlenty was to identify so completely with such discredited ideas.

Ron Paul’s second place finish at Ames was in many ways the most notable result from the straw poll. There had been expectations that Rep. Paul would do well, and perhaps even win, but finishing within 200 votes of the candidate currently dominating the field in Iowa is still a very good result. Compared with four years ago, both Bachmann and Paul received more votes than Romney managed to get with his much more expensive straw poll effort. According to Rasmussen’s most recent Iowa poll, the top three in Iowa right now are Bachmann, Romney, and Paul, and both Bachmann and Paul are likely to receive a boost from coverage of their success at Ames. Much could change over the next five months, but Paul is showing some significant improvement in Iowa compared to the last race, and his campaign has typically excelled in caucus formats with their relatively smaller numbers of voters. Paul received just under 10% in 2008 in Iowa, and he is already polling ahead of that. It is conceivable that he could end up in the top three in the caucuses. If that were to happen, it would propel Paul into the top tier of candidates, and it would make it increasingly difficult to dismiss the part of the party he represents as unimportant.

Of course, Rick Perry will be a competitive candidate right away, and he could quickly win over Pawlenty’s supporters and poach many of Bachmann’s, but I have to wonder if he isn’t already being overrated. Despite his lack of organization and his narrow fundraising base, Perry’s candidacy is being taken seriously because of two things: his poll numbers, and because his bid seems credible “on paper.” Pawlenty’s campaign has reminded us how unimportant qualifications on paper can be. When the first big Perry story after his announcement is that Perry has a “crony capitalism problem” relating to questionable state funding of firms connected to Perry donors, Perry’s campaign may not take off as quickly as everyone seems to assume it will.

A lot of the hype surrounding Perry is based in a lack of scrutiny of his record and dissatisfaction with the existing field of candidates. The hints of corruption and cronyism in this story are bad enough on their own, but in connection with other episodes it suggests that there may be a pattern of making questionable decisions that happen to serve the interests of his donors and companies with which he is too cozy. This was an important part of the controversy over Perry’s vaccination order four years ago: the vaccine in question was made by Merck, and Perry had several personal connections to the company in addition to receiving donations from them. The vaccine controversy died away when the Texas legislature blocked Perry’s decision, but it is something that will win him no applause from social conservatives and activists disgusted by collusion between government and corporations.

Bachmann has to be considered the candidate to beat in Iowa. It was clear from early on that she had almost everything she needed to repeat Huckabee’s success in the caucuses, but what has distinguished her campaign so far is that she has been able to avoid being reduced to a factional candidate as Huckabee was. Bachmann is an evangelical and a social conservative, but she has managed not to be defined simply as “the evangelical candidate.” It remains to be seen if she can survive her habit of making false and misleading statements.

Following his weak third-place finish yesterday and his announcement today that he was abandoning the presidential race, it would be fitting to call Tim Pawlenty the pro-withdrawal candidate.

The Ames straw poll tomorrow will start winnowing the 2012 field as it is supposed to do. Tim Pawlenty is throwing everything he has at the straw poll in an all-out push, but he seems to be bracing for a disappointing result:

Tim Pawlenty acknowledged Friday that he “may not have any choice” but to dramatically scale back the size of his campaign organization if he falls flat at the Iowa straw poll this weekend.

The general consensus from last night’s debate seems to be that Pawlenty did not do nearly enough to overcome persistent doubts about his candidacy. His feuding with Bachmann doesn’t seem to have done him much good. Ed Kilgore describes their exchanges:

Tim Pawlenty got off some good prefab lines at the expense of Barack Obama (and, to some extent, Romney), but his attacks on his main straw poll rival, Michelle Bachmann, were shrill and complicated, and the general impression is that Bachmann—who otherwise did not dazzle as she did in the last big debate in New Hampshire—got the better of their exchanges.

Perhaps the worst thing for Pawlenty is that he confirmed the impression that it doesn’t matter how well he does at Ames, because he keeps establishing that he isn’t a very good national candidate. Steve Kornacki contrasted Bachmann and Pawlenty on the delivery of their lines:

Her words were strong, but so was her delivery — she spoke each word firmly and clearly, communicating just enough contempt to get her message across. Pawlenty’s delivery, on the other hand, called to mind a hostage tape, a man saying words that he knows he has to say, but doesn’t really want to or know how to.

This is similar to what I have been saying about Pawlenty’s policy statements. They are all conventional and match the party line in their content, but they always feel forced. Sean Scallon’s judgment in his TACprofile of Pawlenty has been proved absolutely right:

Pawlenty, like the proverbial five-star recruit, has a great deal of potential as a national politician, but there’s a reason his polling numbers are dismal—an explanation beyond simple lack of name recognition. In a new era where the search for authenticity dominates our political discourse, Pawlenty’s lack of it makes him a has-been before he ever was.

Kornacki noted that attacking Bachmann directly was a badly misguided move for someone trying to win over conservative voters currently leaning towards Bachmann:

They may have doubts about her electability, but by blatantly trying to stoke those doubts, Pawlenty only makes it easier for them to view him as a calculating sellout Republican politician.

Of course, one might point out that this is exactly what Pawlenty is, but leave that aside for the moment. Bachmann supporters not only see her as one of them, as Kornacki correctly observes, but I suspect they find her refusal to compromise a refreshing change from most would-be national leaders they have seen in the past. Romney represents the type of leadership they are rejecting, but when Pawlenty spends most of his time attacking Bachmann he appears to be siding with Romney and other Republicans like him against someone with whom they strongly identify. Pawlenty isn’t peeling away any Romney voters in the process, and he is giving Bachmann voters another reason to despise him. Perry may come in and take away a lot of her support, but Pawlenty has been doing everything he can to shore up her support among conservative voters.

Kornacki described Pawlenty’s performance as “bafflingly bad,” but Pawlenty’s poor performances really shouldn’t baffle anyone at this point.