Is there no problem a surge can't fix? Michael Chertoff tells the New York Times that the Department of Homeland Security's efforts to build a fence and boost security on the Mexican border aren't just about immigration, they're also to keep Mexico's drug violence on the other side of the border. If it does spill over, they have a plan:

"We completed a contingency plan for border violence, so if we did get a significant spillover, we have a surge — if I may use that word — capability to bring in not only our own assets but even to work with" the Defense Department, Chertoff said in a telephone interview.

Officials of the Homeland Security Department said the plan called for aircraft, armored vehicles and special teams to converge on border trouble spots, with the size of the force depending on the scale of the problem. Military forces would be called upon if civilian agencies like the Border Patrol and local law enforcement were overwhelmed, but the officials said military involvement was considered unlikely.

I'm glad that DHS is paying attention to the unfairly overlooked drug violence in Mexico, but I doubt that U.S. military personnel operating in the southern United States would be any more effective at combating drug traffickers than the 45,000 troops that Mexico has deployed in its own territory. Or, for that matter, the Colombian military's U.S.-funded efforts.

Let's hope it doesn't come to that.

Photo: Mike Lutz/DHS via Getty Images

Four new names over at The Cable.

I hate to diss the folks at Pajamas TV, who were nice enough to let me come on recently to promote our worst predictions list, but sending Samuel "Joe the Plumber" Wurzelbacher to cover the war in Gaza seems like a questionable decision:

Mr Wurzelbacher, 34, says he will spend 10 days covering the fighting in Gaza and explaining why Israeli forces are mounting attacks against Hamas.

He told WNWO-TV in Toledo, Ohio, that he wants "go over there and let their 'Average Joes' share their story".

If you're a little fuzzy on Joe's foreign policy views, just recall that he agreed with a voter on the campaign trail that a vote for Barack Obama was equivalent to a vote for the death of Israel.

Meanwhile, the Internet is still anxiously awaiting Joe the Blogger's debut. Joe the merchandiser is going strong though.

Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Best Defense blogger Tom Ricks recently found out that Steven Metz, chairman of the Strategic Studies Institute at the U.S. Army War College and Best Defense commenter, was sending e-mails to colleagues in 2005 telling them to "avoid Tom like the plague" because of his coverage of the war in Iraq. Then just last year, Metz asked Ricks to blurb his new book.

Good thing Ricks has a blog now. (Incidentally, he also has by far the most bad-ass author photo on the Internet.)

Update: Metz responds.

As part of our expansion, Foreign Policy is now hiring for positions working on both the print edition and Website.

We're currently accepting applications for the jobs of entry-level editor, Web development director, and editorial researcher. If you've got a passion for international affairs journalism, the requisite skills for any of these positions, and fresh ideas about how to improve the magazine, you should definitely get in touch.

With Gaza suffering and Eastern Europe shivering, one person seems to be in a perfect position to take advantage of both crises: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Not suprisingly, Iran is taking the lead in expressing the Islamic world's anger over the Israel's actions in Gaza and Ahmadinejad has been right in the thick of things.

The president has been losing some popularity lately as the financial downturn has highlighted his dismal economic record. The anti-Israel outrage is providing him a boost, just when he needed it the most:

Whether or not Iran's Gaza strategy wins points on the international front, Israel's offensive has been a domestic windfall for Ahmadinejad and his circle of hard-liners, analyst Javedanfar said. On Tuesday, the president submitted to parliament a controversial bill to eliminate decades-old subsidies on fuel and electricity.

"This will make him even more unpopular," Javedanfar said. "But the Gaza affair is a gift to him, which he will use to distract the Iranian people from the economic [pain] about to hit them."

Ahmadinejad got another gift this week as the Russo-Urkainian gas-pricing dispute led to supply disrputions in Turkey. Iran is already Turkey's second-largest gas provider, sending 18 million cubic meters of gas per day. With the Russian supply looking questionable, Ankara has increased their order for Iranian gas. With the Gazprom spat becoming an annual occurence, can it be long before European countries start taking a second look at Iran as an energy source? Recovering oil prices can't hurt either.

Things may be looking up for Ahmadinejad, which is to say, down for everyone else.

Update: Al Qaeda's having a pretty good week too, says Marc Lynch.

I'm not really a cat person, but this is still just mean:

Islamic militants posted sarcastic comments on an extremist Web site Tuesday ridiculing a recent announcement by First Lady Laura Bush that the family's cat had died.

The online comments were unusual on the site that usually focuses on official statements by al-Qaida and other militants. Commentators, who must be registered members of the site, frequently post their opinions, but normally the topics are humorless.

But on Tuesday, one commentator, called Dark-Side, sarcastically urged followers to offer condolences for the cat.

"For God's sake, could someone tell us where the wake is to be held?" the online commentator wrote.

What did the cat ever do to them?

Anyone know how to say "Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated," in Japanese? Not suprisingly, the land of the rising sun blows away the competition on IEEE Spectrum's robot density map:

I guess it's impressive, but this sort of thing makes me very worried for them.

(Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan)

The debate continues on Steve Walt's "thought experiment." Today, David Rothkopf joined Chris Brose in taking on Walt's hypothetical Jewish Gaza. Ross Douthat also weighed in over at the Atlantic. Walt seems to be taking the impressive buzz he's generated in his blogosphere debut in stride and has just posted a follow-up experiment.

But it's not just Israel's critics who can play the analogy game. Blogging for Haaretz, Bradley Burston proposes this one:

A fanatical religious party wins a string of elections in Mexico's northern states, then stages a civil war to drive out the federal government and take full control.

The party's charter demands the return to Mexico of the occupied territories of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Texas.

Firing homemade rockets and more advanced projectiles smuggled in from Iran and China, the party's gunners can hit a total of one of every seven Americans, or 43,598,000 people, in a broad swath which includes Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Austin, San Antonio and Houston, and Las Vegas.

In all of these areas, pre-schools, grade schools, and universities are all forced to shut down. Families sleep in bomb shelters, and return to them several times a day during air raids. Businesses are shuttered, and the economy shuts down.

I dunno. I must admit I'm a little confused by which part of Mexico corresponds with which Palestinian faction and the model pretty much ignores five decades of Israeli history.

I find this need to put Israel in context by pretending that it's something else a little strange. Why, in order to understand this country's situation, do we need to imagine that Israelis are actually Arabs, or that the Palestinians are Mexicans, or that Israel never existed, or that it existed but was in Alaska?

Analogies and hypotheticals can be useful for putting a complicated situation in context, but can also be dangerous if you're altering your perception of reality in order to fit your chosen narrative. In a conflict as ideologically divisive as Israel/Palestine, they're rhetorically useful but pretty rarely enlightening.

Believe it or not, Israel is a real place. So is Gaza. No theoretical construct is going to absolve either side of responsibility for inflicting violence or get them any closer to a resolution. 

The Washington Post's Walter Pincus has an analysis of Robert Gates recent articles and media appearances. He writes:

A longtime Russia analyst during his years with the CIA, Gates today sees Moscow as less of a threat than do many inside and outside the U.S. military establishment.

Pincus is referring to statements like this one, from Gates' piece in the new Foreign Affairs:

Russian tanks and artillery may have crushed Georgia's tiny military. But before the United States begins rearming for another Cold War, it must remember that what is driving Russia is a desire to exorcise past humiliation and dominate its "near abroad" -- not an ideologically driven campaign to dominate the globe. As someone who used to prepare estimates of Soviet military strength for several presidents, I can say that Russia's conventional military, although vastly improved since its nadir in the late 1990s, remains a shadow of its Soviet predecessor. And adverse demographic trends in Russia will likely keep those conventional forces in check.

Good point, but do "many inside and outside the U.S. military establishment" really disagree with it? I find it hard to believe that even those who think the military is neglecting conventional threats by focusing on counterinsurgency would argue that Russia today is a comparable threat to the Soviet Union.

If there actually is a real debate about this, I'm glad Gates is the one in charge. Here's hoping he and his colleagues continue the recent strategy of basically ignoring Russia's pointless military posturing and focusing their attention where real damage can be done.

Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Richard Perle and Doug Feith think Leon Panetta, a Democratic insider if there ever was one, is just the man to clean up the CIA:

Panetta is "a very smart, very capable guy with a lot of experience - I think he's the right sort of person to take a shot at improving the place," said Perle, an agency critic who, as chairman of President Bush's Defense Policy Board, was an architect of the Iraq war, and called the quality of the CIA's analysis "appalling."

"It's going to take somebody from outside to right that ship, if it can be done," Perle said. [...]

"One possible implication of appointing somebody from the outside is that the president recognizes that there are serious problems at the CIA and he wants somebody who is not a part of those problems," said Feith, who was Bush's Undersecretary of Defense for Policy.

Senate Democrats aren't so thrilled, particularly Intelligence Committee chair Diane Feinstein, who will oversee Panetta's confirmation process and believes that "the agency is best-served by having an intelligence professional in charge."

Panetta may have been an "any port in a storm" pick as time ran out for the transition, but may in the end turn out to be a great one for an agency in dire need of a fresh set of eyes. That said, this clumsy leak is certainly not the way Obama wanted his outside-the-box pick rolled out. As Ezra Klein notes:

It doesn't look good that the worst leak of the Obama administration came in its spymaster.

Hope you've all enjoyed the first day of the new ForeignPolicy.com. This is still very much a work in progress and we're only just beginning to figure out how to take advantage of the new format. In particular, it looks like the interaction between our all-star lineup of bloggers is going to be fun.

I also wanted to take this chance to heap much-deserved praise on two of the unsung heroes of this endeavor, Web Developer Blaine Sheldon and Webmaster Tom Stec. Even under normal circumstances there's no way we could function without these guys and in the runup to the relaunch, they worked ridiculous hours to get the site running smoothly and looking fantastic.

Thanks also to everyone who wrote in or blogged with feedback, both positive and (constructively) negative. Keep it coming!

Having bid farewell to the Green Zone last week, U.S. forces today opened the brand new Baghdad embassy, which will house "1,200 employees, including diplomats, troops and staff from 14 federal agencies."

For a detailed look at America's new digs in Iraq, it's worth revisiting architectural historian Jane Loeffler's analysis of the structure from the September/October, 2007 issue of FP, written before it was constructed:

It will be six times larger than the U.N. complex in New York and more than 10 times the size of the new U.S. Embassy being built in Beijing, which at 10 acres is America’s second-largest mission. The Baghdad compound will be entirely self-sufficient, with no need to rely on the Iraqis for services of any kind. The embassy has its own electricity plant, fresh water and sewage treatment facilities, storage warehouses, and maintenance shops. The embassy is composed of more than 20 buildings, including six apartment complexes with 619 one-bedroom units. Two office blocks will accomodate about 1,000 employees. High-ranking diplomats will enjoy well-appointed private residences. Once inside the compound, Americans will have almost no reason to leave. It will have a shopping market, food court, movie theater, beauty salon, gymnasium, swimming pool, tennis courts, a school, and an American Club for social gatherings. To protect it all, the embassy is reportedly surrounded by a wall at least 9 feet high—and it has its own defense force.[...]

If architecture reflects the society that creates it, the new U.S. embassy in Baghdad makes a devastating comment about America’s global outlook. Although the U.S. government regularly proclaims confidence in Iraq’s democratic future, the United States has designed an embassy that conveys no confidence in Iraqis and little hope for their future. Instead, the United States has built a fortress capable of sustaining a massive, long-term presence in the face of continued violence.

Yeah, it's safe to say there's going to be a sizeable U.S. presence in Iraq for a while.

Interesting choice. The New York Times' caucus blog reports:

President-elect Barack Obama has selected Leon E. Panetta, the former congressman and White House chief of staff, to take over the Central Intelligence Agency, an organization that Mr. Obama criticized during the campaign for using interrogation methods he decried as torture, Democratic officials said Monday.

Panetta has managerial chops and a close relationship with Obama but virtually no hands-on intelligence experience. Perhaps more importantly, he's not tainted by associations with Bush-era detention, interrogation of surveillance policies like some of the other candidates who were considered. He's also a much bigger name.

Langley may be in for a shakeup.

Update: Our new colleague David Rothkopf calls the pick a reminder to the "knowledgeable intel community (IC) insiders just how wrong they can be about key issues."

Update 2: Another of our new colleagues, Laura Rozen, has reactions from former intelligence officials over at The Cable. RAND's Greg Treverton tells her that Panetta's White House experience might actually be more valuable than time spent in the intel trenches:

"One of my experiences with people like Panetta who have been chief of staff is that they have a clear sense of what is helpful to the president that most senior officials don't," Treverton told me. "They get it. What he could do and couldn't do. And that's an interesting advantage Panetta brings. Knowledge of what the presidential stakes are like, how issues arise, and what they need to be protected from, for better or worse."

This makes sense. In his CIA history "Legacy of Ashes," Tim Weiner writes that Harry Truman originally envisioned the agency's mission as producing a "secret newspaper" for the president's eyes only. As the CIA's secretive culture developed during the Cold War and emphasis shifted away from simple intelligence gathering toward special operations, the mission got a lot more complicated.

Picking an executive branch guy like Panetta may signal that Obama wants to push the CIA back toward something closer to Truman's original vision of an agency who's primary mission is to keep the president better informed than his international rivals.

If so, it won't be easy. The diverging views in Rozen's post gives a good preview of how this fight may play out.

Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Another cold Russian winter, another dispute about Russian gas prices. Time's Yuri Zarakhavich has a useful summary:

In the buildup to Dec. 31, Russia accused Ukraine of having arrears of more than $2 billion on its expired gas contract. Ukraine said that it had paid all its debt. Moscow said it would start charging a new price, which it presented as both the "market" price and a "preferential" rate—just $250 rather a sharp rise on the 2008 price of $179.5 per 1000 cubic meters of gas. Ukraine said that it could pay $201.

In response, Gazprom, Russia's state-run natural gas monopoly, dropped its "preferential" offer and said it would have to charge the real "market" rate of $418. It also insists that Ukraine still owes Moscow $ 614 million, and, at 10am on Jan. 1, turned off gas taps to Ukraine.

Pretty much the same thing has happened for the last three winters. Worried about its own supply, the EU is anxiously working to broker a compromise between Ukraine and Russia. As a European Commission representative said:

"Since we are the main market for Russian gas ... we have an obvious interest in applying pressure on these parties to reach as soon as possible an agreement which is definitive."

It's easy enough to cast Gazprom -- a state monopoly with a penchant for heavy-handed ultimatums -- as the villain in this recurring drama. But that lets Europe off the hook a bit too easily. As energy investor Jérôme Guillet wrote for FP during the 2007 edition of the dispute, Gazprom doesn't behave all that differently from any other company and it's demonization is a convenient way for European leaders to divert attention from their lack of a coherent energy policy:

[I]t’s a bit rich to see the supposedly pro-market Westerners calling for heavy subsidies. And a country like Ukraine that’s angling to join NATO (an organization that Russia understandably perceives as anti-Russian) can hardly expect a discount on its gas. So why is Russia getting demonized for defending its interests? The answer lies with European leaders, who are trying to distract the public from the mess they’ve made of European energy policy. Europeans themselves are to blame for their dependency on Gazprom, which is doing what any company would do in its place. [...]

As for European leaders, they have no one but themselves to blame for turning worrying domestic gas problems into a major international crisis. Europe, led by the United Kingdom, has made a conscious choice to rely on gas as its main new source of energy at a time when its domestic supplies are declining—and declining a lot faster than everybody expected. And Europe’s economic liberalization encourages market players to build easier-to-finance gas-fired plants, thus feeding demand for more gas. If political leaders were really worried about gas supplies from Russia, they should change that structural feature of the market rather than wailing about Gazprom’s clumsy—but ultimately harmless—fights with its neighbors.

Two years after Guillet wrote that, Europe is still just as dependent on Russia for its energy supply, meaning that this New Year's tradition is likely to continue. If the corner store continually rips you off, yet you continue to patronize it, can you really keep blaming the store?

Photo: SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP/Getty Images

Maybe I've just had Web design on my mind, but the placement of this pop-up ad on the Haaretz Website yesterday was pretty unfortunate given the rest of the stories on the page:

Somehow I don't think there are too many opportunities for white water rafting in Gaza right now.