So far so good: The White House china survived in tact. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, PA President Mahmoud Abbas, Jordanian Prince Abdullah, and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak managed to dine peaceably last night with President Obama. No plates thrown, no glasses busted in anger.

I wrote a quick piece the other day about what to watch for coming out of these talks. In terms of body language and messaging, everyone’s saying the right things.

To thank or not to thank?

Yesterday morning, that’s what we were wondering around the PPI offices — would Obama thank President Bush during his Iraq address that night? I had a conversation with my colleague Lindsay Lewis, who had just heard White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs mention that Obama was scheduled to call Bush that afternoon. Might Obama directly thank Bush for adopting “the surge”, which, as the incomplete political narrative goes, was responsible for the decrease in violence in Iraq in 2007?

Just after President finishes his Oval Office speech on Iraq (and because they’re somewhat linked, Afghanistan), you may flip to your favorite cable news channel and listen to your favorite talking head or two banter on about the war’s history. In an effort to set the record straight, here’s a quick guide to Barack Obama’s political history with Iraq (and by extension Afghanistan). If you want to a more detailed timeline, you can click over to the Washington Post, which has a good interactive map and timeline. Or you can check out my new favorite site, LetMeGoogleThatForYou.com.

Here’s the bottom line: After reading just about ever single speech Obama has given on Iraq since 2002, he has been remarkably consistent for a politician.

For the first time in 20 months, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators will sit down face-to-face in Washington, DC this week. Building on a year and a half of shuttle diplomacy “proximity talks” shepherded by George Mitchell, the White House’s Middle East envoy, this Wednesday, September 1, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu will sit down with his Palestinian counterpart, Mahmoud Abbas.

There’s been broad skepticism surrounding these talks from the get-go. Is the Obama administration convening talks for domestic political reasons within a pessimistic geo-political environment, or because there’s actual hope? My colleague Will Marshall shares this decidedly luke-warm take: “It’s not hard to find grounds for pessimism,” he wrote last week here on ProgressiveFix.

Here are five ways to gauge the talks’ success:

The White House today withdrew charges against Abd-Al Rahim al-Nashiri, the al Qaeda operative who lead the attack on the USS Cole in Aden harbor, Yemen in October 2000, and was awaiting trial in a reformed military commission in Guantanamo Bay.

Reasons for the withdrawal remain unclear, but one possibility is that the Obama administration is not comfortable with how rules for the new military tribunal system are being implemented.

Gasp! The CIA is paying bad people in Afghanistan!

The New York Times implies there’s a problem with fighting corruption in the Afghan government while paying the corrupt, in this case Mohammed Zia Salehi, the chief administration on Afghanistan’s National Security Council

I pity journalists on the terrorism beat. Take Greg Miller and Peter Finn’s piece in the Washington Post this morning, entitled “CIA sees increased threat in Yemen,” referring to the al Qaeda splinter group called Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (or AQAP). The journalists’ challenge is to quantify the scale and immediacy of the “threat”, an amorphous term that implies danger, yet remains extraordinarily difficult to quantify.

When Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari played the terrorism card Monday appealing for flood relief funds, I had to stop my eyeballs from reflexively rolling back in my head. Zardari called the flood the “ideal hope of the radical” and cast relief efforts as a struggle between his government and Islamic extremists. On the surface, it sounds cheap, it sounds disingenuous. Worse yet, it sounds like something George W. Bush would say. But desperate to spur the international community and its sluggish financial response to the crisis, Zardari made a calculated pitch framed in stark terms: help us or the terrorists win.

The thing is, he might just have a point. The flood might not be the radical’s ideal hope, but there is certainly an opportunity to further divide Pakistani’s allegiances.

For the first time in my life, I think I agree with John Boehner (R-OH) when it comes to national security. Well, sort of. (And trust me, that’s a tough admission from a guy who wrote this column eviscerating Boehner’s track record on national security.)

Here’s what the Minority Leader said following yesterday’s war funding vote to send $33 billion to support the military deployment in Afghanistan:

We’ve been through all of this wrangling, and for what? All we’ve created is more uncertainty for our troops in the field, more uncertainty for the Pentagon, and it’s all unnecessary.”

Does the existence of a whistle-blower website like Wikileaks do more harm or good? Decisions about exposing information to the public depends on nuance and context, and it’s clear that in the wake of this case, Julian Assange, the site’s editor-in-chief and public face, has little appreciation for either.

Wikileaks is, in effect, a conduit for purported whistle-blowers, and describes itself as a “buttress against unaccountable and abusive power” and prides itself on “principled leaking.”

As a vehicle for whistle-blowing, the site has a responsibility to assert editorial discretion about the content it supplies, carefully weighing costs and benefits to the whistle-blowing party, those the information directly impacts and third parties. If Wikileaks is an open-repository for secret information without discretion and vetting, that’s a problem.

The story leading the day in the New York Times and Washington Post details the release of some 90,000 U.S. military documents by Wikileaks. Many of which detail the level of coordination between elements within Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, and the Taliban operating in Afghanistan. In fact, the Taliban and ranking officers within the ISI have worked together is not “news.” Pick up a copy of Steve Coll’s brilliant Ghost Wars, which ably details the relationship. Here’s an excerpt from a PBS Frontline interview with Coll on the topic:

Frontline: You describe [the Taliban] as a client of the ISI.

Coll: They received guns; they received money; they received fuel; they received infrastructure support. They also, we know, had direct on-the-ground support from undercover Pakistani officers in civilian clothes who would participate in particular military battles.

Frontline: Is it a fair characterization to say that the Taliban were an asset of the ISI?

Coll: They were an asset of the ISI. I think it’s impossible to understand the Taliban’s military triumph in Afghanistan, culminating in their takeover of Kabul in 1996, without understanding that they were a proxy force, a client of the Pakistan army, and benefited from all of the materiel support that the Pakistan army could provide them, given its own constrained resources.

With today’s New York Times’ article, we may be on the verge of a sea change in political attitudes on defense spending. To be sure, the political dialogue has not fully accepted the necessity of fiscal restraint at the Pentagon, but we’re getting there.

When you hear the likes of Republican Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) say, “defense should be looked at” as a part of deficit reduction and Democratic Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-HI) toe a harder-line, something’s up. Okay, Inouye has a long, hard-earned reputation as a defense porker, but the contrast with the conservative Gregg (even if he is from New Hampshire) is notable.

Defense spending has been a counter-intuitive third-rail of its own in domestic politics. Conservatives, allergic to every government program they’ve ever come across, drip with hypocrisy when they can’t seem to get enough pork at the barbecue of weapons systems. And progressives are often skittish about restraining defense spending in order to preserve home-district jobs and out of fear of “weak on defense liberals” charges.

But Erskine Bowles, Bill Clinton’s chief of staff and co-chair of the Deficit Commission, insists, “We’re going to have to take a hard look at defense if we are going to be serious about deficit reduction.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton raised concern over human rights during her trip to Vietnam, a country she last visited in the waning days of her husband’s presidency.  Per the NYT:

Noting Vietnam’s recent jailing of democracy activists, attacks on religious groups and curbing of Internet social-networking sites, Mrs. Clinton said she raised the status of human rights in a meeting with a deputy prime minister, Pham Gia Khiem. … She said the United States would press Vietnam to do more to protect individual freedom. …

Mrs. Clinton’s comments were notable, given that she has played down human rights concerns in visits to Vietnam’s neighbor, China. But her timing, at the outset of the visit, suggested that she wanted to make her point, and move on.

The last line is particularly intriguing, and offers potential fodder to critics from across the political spectrum: from conservatives wed to George Bush’s “Freedom Agenda” to liberal critics to issue-focused NGOs, like Human Rights Watch and Freedom House. Is the Secretary of State just making her point and moving on? Have human rights become simply a talking point, as Secretary Clinton unfortunately suggested before her first trip to China in early 2009?

After digesting three days’ worth of the Washington Post’s TopSecretAmerica series, consider me unimpressed.

As I said in my initial post, I do generally support the series’ aim — to demonstrate that we’ve had a massive intelligence community bureaucracy sprout up since 9/11, and that oversight and public accountability seem to be lacking. That point is well-taken, and one that I support.

The Washington Post’s new series Top Secret America is well intentioned:

When it comes to national security, all too often no expense is spared and few questions are asked – resulting in an enterprise so massive that nobody in government has a full understanding of it.

That’s right. As an intelligence community analyst for some five years, I’ve seen plenty of the bureaucratic inefficiencies, excess and unchecked spending, and unwieldy sprawl that have mushroomed since 9/11. From this perspective, it’s important that questions get asked, money be justified, and overlap — where necessary and possible — be reduced.

“Is America really Israel’s ally? You think so? We’re not so sure.” An Israeli Defense Force reservist said this to me during a post-dinner drink on a deck overlooking the captivating Sea of Galilee last week.

My response was curt — “You better start believing it. Otherwise, you’re screwed.” Okay, perhaps that wasn’t terribly “PC” and perhaps my tone did little to convince him. After all, my reservist friend wasn’t particularly predisposed towards diplomatic nuance — he opposed any peace deal whatsoever.

Last Friday, the Jerusalem Post reported that some 265 Israeli soldiers were lured into a cybersecurity trap, unwittingly revealing the location of a secret Israeli military base.

Soldiers who formerly served at the secret facility set up a Facebook group to serve as a mechanism to share stories and reflections about their time at the base. It was a “public, closed” group, which means the wider Facebook community could learn of the group’s existence, but applicants must request membership from the group’s organizer.

The location was exposed when a journalist requested membership, which was granted without vetting his (non-existent) military credentials.

Speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, a soldier intimately involved in the army’s cyber operations said the group is one example of many serious security breaches by [Israeli Defense Force] soldiers in online social networks.

Last Thursday morning, I was perched and staring at Tel Aviv in the distance to my left, Haifa to my right, and the vast Mediterranean Sea that seemed to separate them. My crow’s nest view was from a lookout point from the Israeli settlement of Alfei Menashe, which is situated clearly inside the West Bank and guarded by the controversial barrier that separates Israel from the Palestinian territories (I had to chose my words carefully there — the Israelis call it a “security fence” and the Palestinians have far less PC terms for it. In the name of impartiality, I’ll go with “controversial barrier.”)

Israeli settlements in the West Bank have been a lightening rod for criticism and division. The major settlement push took hold under Menachem Begin, Israel’s prime minister from 1977-83, who supported Israeli construction in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as a way to consolidate Israel’s territorial gains in 1967’s Six Day War. In the present context, they’ve become a key issue as the Israelis and Palestinians negotiate peace — as Israelis continue to build new settlements or expand existing ones, it appears as though Israel’s government is interested only in tightening its grip on Palestinian territories, not giving them back.

You no doubt remember the now-infamous flotilla incident of May 31, when Israeli soldiers raided a ship off Israel’s coast and killed some nine Turkish—including one Turkish-American—citizens as they attempted to deliver supplies to Gaza Strip. The issue is of course highly complex and the point of this post is not to pass judgment on who’s to blame. Rather, I’d like to focus on a serious consequence of the flotilla, regardless of culpability: the severely negative impact on Israeli-Turkish relations. It’s critical that these countries get along.

Historically, the Middle East’s only semblance of a Muslim democracy has had stable if not excellent relations with Israel. But in the aftermath of the flotilla, Turkey recalled its ambassador to Israel and canceled scheduled joint military exercises with the Israelis. Turkey sought an official apology from Israel and insisted that Tel Aviv pay compensation to the victims’ families. Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s far-right foreign minister, who was in no mood to play nice, flatly refused and then personally insulted the Turkish ambassador in a meeting.

(And for those who really want to get into the weeds of Israeli politics, I’d encourage you to read up on the internal political maneuvering between Lieberman, Israeli PM Netanyahu, and Trade and Labor Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, who had a secret meeting with Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, probably in an attempt to skirt the caustic Lieberman and smooth things over.)

I’m not that much of a soccer fan. I don’t follow a club team, though by proxy, I suppose my obsessed Liverpool-loving Swedish best-bud Eric Sundstrom would claim me for his side.

But I love the World Cup.