The Wonk Room

Netanyahu Spokesman: ‘Normal Life Must Continue’ In Settlements

On a conference call today facilitated by the conservative Israel Project on “Israel’s Diplomatic Efforts for Peace,” Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev restated Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s position that “normal life” — which is the new Israeli government word for “natural growth,” which was the previous new word for “relentlessly expanding settlements” — must be able to continue, despite Israel’s previous commitments under the road map to halt such growth.

I was not able to get a question, but if I did I probably would have asked about “normal life” in Silwan, a Palestinian neighborhood in Jerusalem where the Israeli authorities have been evicting families and demolishing homes as part of a larger plan to put areas of Jerusalem’s Old City under the control of settler groups. It seems to me that getting kicked out of your house and then having your house destroyed is not conducive to “normal life.”

CAP’s Brian Katulis recently returned from a trip to Israel and the Palestinian Territories. He published this photo essay and wrote this post about how the settlements are complicating a two-state solution.

Obama More Dangerous Than Bush — For Extremists

Apropos of this ridiculous exchange last night between Glenn Beck and Michael Scheuer, in which both fretted over whether the Obama administration is interested in using “as much violence as is necessary” to protect America, terrorism expert Thomas Hegghammer reports that an article in the extremist publication al-Sumud “confirms that jihadis feel threatened by Obama in their fight for Muslim hearts and minds.”

The two-page article (pp-18-19) is written by the Saudi sheikh Abd al-Aziz al-Julayyil and is actually taken from the latter’s website, which says the text was written on 17 May 2009.

Al-Julayyil starts off by saying he was motivated to write this article after observing a lot of optimism among Muslims over the arrival of the new US administration. He says he realises many will react to the headline (”Obama is more Dangerous than Bush”), for how can the Satanic Bush, who invaded Muslim countries and whose planes and tanks killed Muslim children, be less dangerous than Obama, who has declared he is not at war with Islam? [...]

[Al-Julayyil writes] that Bush’s follies actually benefited Muslims by inflicting significant damage to America. The most important fruit of Bush’s policies was the wake-up call it produced among Muslims in terms of realising the true nature of their enemy, reviving the creed of loyalty toward Muslims and dissociation from infidels, and raising the flag of jihad in several battlefields. Another benefit of the Bush era was the infamy suffered by America on the world stage and the demise of its false discourse on human rights; in the world’s eyes America itself became a proponent of oppression and a threat to human rights. Add to this the American economic and military decline.

In other words, and has been pointed out numerous times by numerous analysts, President Bush’s war on terror played right into Al Qaeda’s hands (conservatives called this “showing strength”.)

But, according to Heghammer, Al-Julayyil writes that now comes Obama “with his sly policies and his attempts to deceive the world, especially the Muslim world, with his professed love for peace and criticism of the policies of his predecessor.”

And many Muslims were duped by his sweet-talk and pinned their hopes on this man to lift the oppression from them.

This is extremely dangerous, al-Julayyil argues, because it is weakening their enmity toward America and makes them more positively inclined toward her future policies. It is numbing them, reducing their hatred toward infidels, and making them stop fighting.[...]

Al-Julayyil concludes: So beware of this cunning Satan, for he is more dangerous than the foolish Satan.

We saw some evidence of this recognition of the danger Obama posed to the extremists’ agenda last fall, when an Al Qaeda-affiliated website posted a message insisting that “Al Qaeda will have to support McCain in the coming election” because he would be more likely to continue the “failing march of his predecessor,” President Bush. Whereas Obama, they suspected, would be much less likely to spend trillions of dollars affirming Al Qaeda’s propaganda by treating them as the enemy in a “transcendental” apocalyptic struggle. This turns out to have been right.

Conservatives can bash Obama’s outreach to the Muslim world all they want, but the fact is that he is reaching many of the young Muslims who Bush alienated. And the extremists know it, and they’re scared. That’s what happens when you have a president who doesn’t confuse strength with macho grandstanding and counterproductive military intervention.

Iraq’s ‘National Sovereignty Day’

The celebrations taking place in Iraq today marking the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq’s cities and towns provide a pretty explicit picture of how Iraqis have viewed the large U.S. military presence in their country — unfavorably. This is understandable. There’s something inescapably and unalterably repellent about having foreign troops patrolling your country, something that has been too little acknowledged in the American debate about Iraq, but which I suspect we would have no problem understanding were we confronted by machine gun-toting foreigners every time we went down the street for a loaf of bread.

Suggesting that today’s withdrawal “is far more important symbolically than practically,” Marc Lynch notes that “the Obama administration and General Odierno’s team deserve a lot of credit for their careful, rigorous, and publicly affirmed adherence to the agreement.” I think this is right — it’s done an enormous amount for the legitimacy of the Iraqi government that the Obama administration has refused to hedge on the terms of the agreement.

Meanwhile, Michael Rubin relays, in somewhat subtler and therefore more insidious form, the conservative “stab in the back” narrative that Dick Cheney floated yesterday. Rubin warns that today “will likely mark another milestone: the end of the surge and the relative peace it brought to Iraq.”

In the past week, bombings in Baghdad, Mosul and near Kirkuk have killed almost 200 people. The worst is yet to come. [...]

In effect, his strategy is an anti-surge. Troop numbers are not the issue. It is the projection of weakness. Not only Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki but Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani have also reached out to the Islamic Republic in recent weeks.

In Cairo, Mr. Obama said the U.S. had no permanent designs on Iraq and declared, “We will support a secure and united Iraq as a partner, and never as a patron.” Indeed. But until the Iraqi government is strong enough to monopolize independently the use of force, a vacuum will exist and the most violent factions will fill it.

Power and prestige matter. Withdrawal from Iraq’s cities is good politics in Washington, but when premature and done under fire it may very well condemn Iraqis to repeat their past.

As I wrote here yesterday, the war’s supporters hailed the signing of the security agreement as a victory for Bush’s Iraq policy — even if it was essentially an adoption of candidate Obama’s plan. But now we’re apparently to believe that President Obama’s honoring the terms of that agreement is a “projection of weakness” that could endanger the United States.

Rubin also introduces a new element to this argument by implying that Obama’s “weakness” has caused members of Iraq’s government to reach out to neighboring Iran. As Rubin surely knows, and as my colleague Brian Katulis and I wrote about in April 2008, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki President Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani, among other Iraqi leaders, have longstanding ties to the Iranian regime — indeed, Talabani was among the very first leaders to congratulate Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on his controversial re-election victory. The suggestion that these leaders are only now drawing closer to Iran as a result of the U.S. drawdown is both patently ridiculous and misleading.

While Rubin is of course correct that “power and prestige matter,” it’s typical of the conservative mindset to think that the best way to maintain power and prestige is through the continued, open-ended projection of military force, rather than through the cultivation and support of legitimate domestic governance. President Obama’s honoring of the security agreement is an important step in doing that for Iraq.

Diehl: Obama’s Israel-Palestine Policy Too Effective

It’s unfortunate for Jackson Diehl that this column, in which he argues for Obama to ease up already on Israel over its past commitments to a settlement freeze, should come out the same day as this story in the New York Times, which reports that “Israel would be open to a complete freeze of settlement building in the West Bank for three to six months as part of a broad Middle East peace endeavor that included a Palestinian agreement to negotiate an end to the conflict and confidence-building steps by major Arab nations, senior Israeli officials said Sunday.”

A settlement “pause” is, of course, far short of what Israel committed to under the roadmap, as Peter Juul pointed out in an earlier post. While the Obama administration should continue to pressure Israel on its obligations, I think we should recognize this proposal, as with Netanyahu’s qualified endorsement of a Palestinian state, as positive (if certainly insufficient) progress.

While a settlement freeze is by no means impossible, there’s no doubt that it will be extremely difficult for Netanyahu with regard to his right-wing, settlements-supporting political coalition. Knowing this, it seems to me that the Obama team has created an excellent incentive for the Israelis to engage in final status talks, determine the final borders of Israel and Palestine, after which time Israel can build all it wants — inside Israel.

Diehl, on the other hand, frets that “the extraction of a freeze from Netanyahu is, as a practical matter, unnecessary.”

While further settlement expansion needs to be curbed, both the Palestinian Authority and Arab governments have gone along with previous U.S.-Israeli deals by which construction was to be limited to inside the periphery of settlements near Israel – since everyone knows those areas will be annexed to Israel in a final settlement.

To call this argument — because the Palestinians have begrudgingly gone along with past agreements under which the U.S. acquiesced to continued Israeli building on Palestinian land, it’s no big deal if Israel just keeps building on Palestinian land — specious really does injustice to the word.

It’s also strange that Diehl would accuse the administration of “raising the stakes” by holding Israel to commitments on settlements — commitments that he does not deny that Israel has made. This bespeaks a pretty cynical view of agreements between the U.S. and its partners. I should think Diehl would be more concerned with the loss of American credibility in the region that has resulted from years of a U.S. “wink, wink” policy toward Israeli settlement building — credibility that Obama is now trying to restore as a necessary first step toward resolving the conflict.

Iran’s Second Islamic Revolution?

Last week, Ali Gharib made the important point that what’s happening in Iran is thus far not a rejection of the Islamic republic, but a struggle over its founding principles. Reviewing Moussavi’s formal statement Saturday, Gary Sick described it as diagnosis of “a revolution gone wrong,” writing that Moussavi has “issued a manifesto for a new vision of the Islamic republic.”

In an especially good post, Spencer Ackerman flagged a key passage from Moussavi’s statement:

If the large volume of cheating and vote rigging, which has set fire to the hays of people’s anger, is expressed as the evidence of fairness, the republican nature of the state will be killed and in practice, the ideology that Islam and Republicanism are incompatible will be proven.

This outcome will make two groups happy: One, those who since the beginning of revolution stood against Imam and called the Islamic state a dictatorship of the elite who want to take people to heaven by force; and the other, those who in defending the human rights, consider religion and Islam against republicanism.

As Spencer notes, that last bit is a pretty clear rebuke to those Western critics who, in criticizing the brutality of the Iranian regime, have tried to present Islam and democracy as irreconcilable.

Speaking of which, conservative scholar-activist Martin Kramer, in a comically mendacious (and, as usual, Rashid Khalidi-obsessed) dispatch, tries to argue that the “events in Iran have left Obama’s simplistic mental map of the Middle East, first learned from a few Palestinian activists and an old Hyde Park rabbi, in shreds.”

But, in fact, what is in shreds is the representation of Islamism — peddled for years by Kramer, Daniel Pipes, and ideologically affiliated think tanks and publications — as wholly and irretrievably hostile to modernity, to human rights, and to democracy. Having spent years vilifying the Islamist discourse of struggle and sacrifice as deployed by Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah, these pundits have now been pantsed by the Iranian demonstrators deploying the very same discourse on behalf of freedom and reform. Moussavi has declared himself “ready for martyrdom” — will conservatives now condemn his “death cult“?

The point here is not to call out those whose skewed analysis of the Middle East strongly informed America’s disastrous and costly attempt to implant democracy there by force. Okay, that’s part of the point. But the larger part is to note how significant it is that the Iranian clerical-dictatorial regime is being challenged from within Islam, and that a very credible scholarly-religious critique that has long been suppressed by the regime now seems to have found a vehicle in Moussavi and the movement around him.

Even in the best outcome, I think it’s likely that the Iranian government will continue to be, in key respects, Islamist-controlled (matching the Islamist-controlled government in neighboring Iraq.) But it’s important to understand that this, much more so than any Western-imported concept of “secularism,” has the potential to really spur the already vigorous debate in the region over the arrangement of a fair and just society, by underscoring Islamism’s contribution to that debate. As with President Obama’s wise caution in regard to the demonstrations, the most productive thing the U.S. do, while continuing to voice support for human rights, is to get out of the way and make space for the debate to occur.

McCain: Sanctimonious Grandstanding In Defense Of Liberty Is No Vice »

Matt Corley already commented on a section of this clip, in which Sen. John McCain treated Iran’s Supreme Leader with the same “abject solicitousness” that Charles Krauthammer condemned from the president. But I think the segment is worth seeing in its longer form, as it neatly encapsulates the conservative attempt to use the Iranian protests as an instrument to regain control of the U.S. foreign policy conversation, inconsiderate — indeed, proudly defiant — of the potential negative consequences for the protesters’ cause, or for the protesters themselves.

Watch it:

McCain states that any consideration of the historical context within which an American intervention might be viewed in Iran amounts to “a betrayal of what was declared on the Fourth of July, 1776.” He then launches into a remarkably incoherent mishmash of shopworn Cold War romanticism, half-remembered historical references, and shameless grandstanding, after which Neil Cavuto asks the obvious question:

CAVUTO: All right, so let’s say the commander, supreme leader, ayatollah hears that, Senator, and says yeah that’s all well and good but I’m going through with this, I’m cracking down on these guys, and it could be a very ugly, bloody weekend. What is the United States to do then? What is our posture going to be? How do we move forward? Because this could get very bloody.

MCCAIN: (Pause) Well, you know, and there may be those indications, since the Supreme Leader said they were not gonna tolerate further demonstrations in the street. If they do, we have to judge it by what the situation is as it unfolds, and by the way, the French president, the German chancellor, and the British prime minister, far more strong in their words in support of these protesters than the President of the United States. Interesting turnaround.

…After all the wind, a politician’s dodge. The potential consequences to Iranian demonstrators? Not McCain’s problem.

Full transcript below. More »« Less

Krauthammer Dreams Of A ‘Moderate’ Iran Dictatorship

In the midst of what is essentially a less skillful/more mendacious rewrite of Robert Kagan’s column from Tuesday, Charles Krauthammer daydreams about the Iranian demonstrations turning into “a true revolution that brings down the Islamic Republic.”

Imagine the repercussions. It would mark a decisive blow to Islamist radicalism, of which Iran today is not just standard-bearer and model, but financier and arms supplier. It would do to Islamism what the collapse of the Soviet Union did to communism — leave it forever spent and discredited. [...]

[W]ith Hezbollah having lost elections in Lebanon and with Iraq establishing the institutions of a young democracy, the fall of the Islamist dictatorship in Iran would have an electric and contagious effect. The exception — Iraq and Lebanon — becomes the rule. Democracy becomes the wave. Syria becomes isolated; Hezbollah and Hamas, patronless. The entire trajectory of the region is reversed.

First, a note of caution: I myself am also very interested in what a green victory could portend for political reform in region, but if the last years have taught us anything, it’s that when conservatives — particularly Charles Krauthammer — start to expound theories of Middle East transformation like this, people in the Middle East should start stocking up on water, food, and gasoline for their generators.

It’s clear from Krauthammer’s conflation of the Iranian regime with “Islamism” more broadly that’s he’s ignorant, or at least dismissive, of the diversity of Islamist thought, and of the role that Islamist thinkers and movements have and will continue to play in Middle East politics. It’s also clear from Krauthammer’s hailing of Iraq’s “young democracy” that he’s unaware that the main parties in power in Iraq — both Sunni and Shia — are themselves Islamist parties. (In regard to the lazy Communism=Islamism equation, I dealt with conservative attempts to shoehorn Iran into a tired Cold War narrative in The American Prospect yesterday.)

But here’s where I think Krauthammer really gives away the game:

The only hope for a resolution of the nuclear question is regime change, which (if the successor regime were as moderate as pre-Khomeini Iran) might either stop the program, or make it manageable and nonthreatening.

You’ll have noticed that no one in the street in Iran is calling for a return to the “moderate, pre-Khomeini” regime. That’s because the Shah’s regime in pre-Khomeini Iran was an oppressive, abusive authoritarian one, which regularly imprisoned, tortured, and executed its political opponents. It got so bad that, in 1979, they had this whole revolution over it. The Shah’s regime was “moderate” mainly in the sense that it was more amenable to U.S. hegemony in the region. Which, I guess, as far as Charles Krauthammer is concerned, is the point.

The fact that Krauthammer could claim the Shah’s regime as “moderate” while at the same time affecting solidarity with Iran’s “people in the street yearning to breathe free” bespeaks a real contempt for the principles he claims to espouse. Even as he excoriates the president (who, it bears repeating, continues to be praised by Iranian human rights activists for his prudence) for being “afraid to take sides,” Krauthammer himself has taken a side: The side of pure, naked American interest and power, brutally defined and unapologetically exercised. That’s a fair position to take, I suppose, but I just wish he would be honest about it, and stop disrespecting those risking their lives in Iran’s streets by using them as political props.

Open Letter To Robert Kagan

Dear Mr. Kagan,
First, let me just express sympathy for your situation. These last years have been extraordinarily unkind to your grand theories about the transformative potential of American explosives. President Bush’s “global war on terror,” the invasion of Iraq, his so-called “freedom agenda,” turned out to be a real carnival of bad ideas, for which you were a key intellectual barker. It’s hard out here for a neocon.

But I have to say, Mr. Kagan, your op-ed this morning is really beneath you. You can’t actually believe that President Obama is “siding with the Iranian regime” against the Iranian people, or that Obama’s outreach to Iran depends upon keeping hardliners in power, can you? You’re far too intelligent to buy the brutishly simplistic “realism” that you attempt to hang upon President Obama’s approach. These sorts of claims are better left to your friend and occasional co-author Bill Kristol, who uses his series of valuable journalistic perches (with which he inexplicably continues to be gifted) to launch an endless stream of comically transparent bad faith arguments. You’re better than that. You’re the smart neocon.

Aren’t you? While it’s nice that you recognize that “it’s not that Obama preferred a victory by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad” — though that was the stated preference of a number of your fellow neoconservatives — your claim that President Obama’s “strategy toward Iran places him objectively on the side of” Ahmadinejad is the kind of thing I thought we had left back in 2003, when opponents of the Iraq invasion (that is, the people who turned out to be right) were tarred as being “objectively pro-Saddam.” It doesn’t smell any better six years later.

You state that President Obama’s “goal must be to deflate the opposition, not to encourage it. And that, by and large, is what he has been doing.” How then to explain his State Department reaching out to Twitter and asking them to delay their scheduled maintenance, in order to allow the continued use of this technology that has proven so important to enabling communication within and out of Iran? That one gesture neatly encapsulates, I think, the difference between Bush and Obama on “democracy promotion.” Bush believed in America bringing the gift of freedom to the people of the world. Obama believes in practical steps to put the tools of freedom in the hands of the people themselves, and then creating the space for people to use those tools.

Just to be clear, most of us who “railed against the Bush administration’s ‘freedom agenda’” did so not out of any hostility toward freedom or democracy, but out of the belief, now completely vindicated, that strong, stirring words in favor of democracy mattered little if the policies behind them were counterproductive to the actual cause of democracy, as Bush’s policies were. By backing pro-democracy rhetoric with American war and occupation, President Bush and his conservative supporters cast the cause of freedom and democracy into disrepute, from which it must now be rescued and reclaimed by more responsible hands.

Very best,
Matt

Montazeri: ‘In This Day And Age, One Cannot Hide The Truth From The People’

Grand Ayatollah Hoseyn Ali Montazeri is Iran’s most prominent clerical dissident. He was the designated successor of Ayatollah Khomeini, but Montazeri’s criticisms of the authoritarian nature of Khomeini’s government earned him rejection by Khomeini, followed by years of house arrest.

Montazeri issued a statement today strongly supporting political and religious pluralism, and cautioning both the regime and the demonstrators against violence:

The distinction of a powerful government — Islamic or non-Islamic — is its ability to heed both similar and opposing views and, with religious compassion, which is a prerequisite of government, allow all the strata of society, whatever their political beliefs, to participate in the running of the country, instead of totally alienating them and constantly increasing their [the dissidents] number. Since this government is known as a religious government, I fear that the conduct and actions of the officials may ultimately harm the religion and undermine the people’s beliefs. [...]

I urge all the people, in particular the youth, to pursue the realization of their rights with patience and grace, to maintain calm and security in the country by virtue of sagacity and intelligence, and to refrain from aggression or any action that may harm their image and legitimate demand, and which would give an excuse to those of unfit character, who infiltrate the crowds, to create turmoil and disorder, and set people’s homes and belongings on fire, in a bid to generate an atmosphere of fear and insecurity. [...]

I advise all the officials, as well as the military and security forces, to uphold their religion and not sell their souls; they must understand that the term “officials are excused [because they are only doing their duty]” would not be accepted by the Almighty God on the Day of Judgement. They must regard the protesting youth as their own children, and refrain from violent and cruel actions. They must learn from the mistakes of the predecessors and understand that, eventually, those who oppress the people will receive their just comeuppance. In this day and age, one cannot hide the truth from the people through censorship, closures and restrictions of communication means.

In conclusion, I beseech the Almighty God to grant success to all those who serve Islam and the Muslims, and honor and glory to the dear Iranian nation.

Unlike allegations of vote fraud from American congressmen and former presidential candidates, this is the sort of statement, a respected clerical authority making an appeal for justice, tolerance, and non-violence on the basis of Islam, that could has the potential to really change the outcome on the ground. Hopefully more clerics will join with him.

Ledeen Slanders Iranian Human Rights Supporter — Again

The Washington Independent’s Dave Weigel has a great article up on how conservatives who had previously scoffed at the idea that Iran’s elections had any meaning while praying for an Ahmadinejad victory are now casting about for a plausible position in regard to Iran’s reform movement and the growing legitimacy crisis.

The article also quotes neocon Michael Ledeen smearing Iran scholar and president of the National Iranian American Council Trita Parsi, whose knowledge of Iran and work on NIAC’s blog has been an invaluable resource over the last week. Ledeen says Parsi “is not a human rights activist…He’s a leading apologist for the regime.”

Leaving aside why we should take seriously the human rights views of someone whose eponymous “doctrine” was transmitted by acolyte Jonah Goldberg as: “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business,” this isn’t the first time Ledeen has slandered an genuine Iranian human rights activist who disagreed with his cracked theories. In his book The Iranian Time Bomb, Ledeen discussed the case of Iranian activist Akhbar Ganji, and suggested that Ganji’s opposition to the Bush administration’s threats against the Iranian regime were the result of Ganji’s having been broken by Iranian torturers:

The Ganji who had been brought back from the edge of death was no longer the forceful campaigner who had demanded that the regime submit to the people’s will…Indeed the regime sent him on a Western tour where he spent most of his time denouncing American pressure on the mullahs.

The Iranian torturers do their work well; Ganji is not the first dissident to decide not to sacrifice his own life, or those of his family and friends, in a desperate gesture of independence.

As this subsequent interview with Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman shows, Ganji remained a strong critic of the Iranian government. But, simply by virtue of criticizing George W. Bush’s foreign policy and disagreeing with Ledeen’s ideas about regime change, Ganji and Parsi are treated by Ledeen as dupes of the regime. Ledeen simply can’t countenance the idea that the reason that actual Iranian human rights activists (as well as most other people in the world) disagree with the neoconservative policy of bringing democracy to the Middle East at the point of an American gun is because it’s an irretrievably stupid policy, one that has done about as much as Iran’s hardliners could have hoped to justify and strengthen their hold on power.

McCain Reminds U.S. Of Bullet It Dodged In November »

Speaking to Fox News this morning, former presidential candidate Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) condemned the Iranian elections, stating that “it’s really a sham that they’ve pulled off and I hope that we will act.”

CARLSON: Senator, let me ask you this, because you said it’s important how we react. And to me that’s the most important part of this story today. How will the Obama administration react to this? Will they come out directly and say that this is unconscionable, that this can go on when they claim to be a democracy, or will they take an easier tact (sic) on it?

MCCAIN: Well, initial reports by, quote, administration officials, are that they say that they’re not going to change their policy of dialogue, et cetera, et cetera. I think they should be condemned, and it’s obvious that this was a rigged election and depriving the people of their democratic rights. We are for human rights all over the world.

Watch it:

But Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council told Spencer Ackerman that the Obama administration “is doing exactly the right thing.”

The framing that Ahmadinejad is presenting is one in which essentially the whole [opposition] is a Western media conspiracy…If the [Obama] administration is saying things or doing things before Moussavi and the opposition figures out what the plan is, then that’s a real problem, because then it seems like it’s between Ahmadinejad and the west and not Ahmadinejad and the opposition. So the administration is doing exactly the right thing. They’re not rushing in and they’re not playing favorites. They might prefer the democratic process to be respected, but that’s different than [supporting a] specific faction.

Were the U.S to clumsily wade into this Iranian political crisis, as McCain would have us do, it would support Ahmadinejad’s main arguments against his domestic opponents, and likely provide the perfect pretext for a more intense crackdown. In other words, the preferences of hardliners in Iran and the U.S. are pretty closely aligned here.

As with McCain’s impetuous response to the Georgia crisis last summer, his first reaction to the events in Iran is condemnation and a call to “act.” Fortunately, we have an administration in power that understands that knowing when not to act is as strategically important as knowing when to do so, and that the most productive thing the United States can do for Iran’s reform movement — and human rights — at the moment is to keep itself, to the extent possible, out of the equation.

Full transcript below. More »« Less

Krauthammer Tours The Border Of Gaffneyland

This much is clear: President Obama’s speech last week in Cairo has Charles Krauthammer really, really steamed. In addition to last Friday’s extraordinarily dishonest (even for Krauthammer, whose respect for fact has always been negotiable) review, and various television appearances in which he recited a version of Middle East history that seemed derived mainly from watching Exodus a bunch of times, this morning he uses his valuable journalistic real estate to raise questions about the President of the United States’ true feelings toward the country that he leads.

Deploying once again the tired and false charge of “moral equivalence” — a term that has done quite a bit of work over the years as a life-raft for sinking conservative foreign policy arguments — Krauthammer writes:

Distorting history is not truth-telling but the telling of soft lies. Creating false equivalencies is not moral leadership but moral abdication. And hovering above it all, above country and history, is a sign not of transcendence but of a disturbing ambivalence toward one’s own country.

Krauthammer may not fall on the ground and foam at the mouth like Frank Gaffney, but the message is the same: President Obama doesn’t quite feel like we do about this country — he may not be one of us.

Questioning a president’s policies, vigorously and even with invective, is fine and appropriate. Questioning a president’s commitment to his country, and thus to his country’s security, is, in my view, something different. Sen. John McCain memorably and admirably shut down this sort of talk when it started cropping up at his campaign rallies. But yanking the mic from some yokel at a town hall meeting is one thing — calling out the most prominent conservative foreign policy columnist in the country is another. Are conservatives up to it?

New Conservative Line: Iran’s President Doesn’t Matter!

As Dana Goldstein indicates, the newly minted conservative position on Iran is that, regardless of all the time and effort they’ve spent over the last four years setting up Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the new Hitler, it really doesn’t matter who the president of Iran is, because Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is in charge. In the event that Ahmadinejad is defeated at the polls, expect a landslide of conservatives making this argument. I suspect that even John McCain — who famously refused to hear anything about it last year — will suddenly magically discover that the Supreme Leader is actually the supreme leader.

For example, check Daniel Pipes’s new line. Back in 2006, Pipes ominously warned of “The Mystical Menace of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad“:

[T]he most dangerous leaders in modern history are those (such as Hitler) equipped with a totalitarian ideology and a mystical belief in their own mission. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fulfills both these criteria.

Last week, however, speaking at a Heritage Foundation event, Pipes stated that “the president of Iran, despite his title, is not the final arbiter in [national security] matters.”

The president tends to have power in the areas — in the soft areas — having to do with culture and religion and education. And it is the Rahbare, the Supreme Guide of Iran, Khomeini at first and now Khamenei who has control of the military, the law enforcement, the judiciary system, the intelligence agencies. So its not clear that the president matters that much.

As Daniel Luban reported, Pipes was at least forthright enough to admit that, were he a registered voter in Iran, he would “vote for Ahmadinejad…I would prefer to have an enemy who is forthright and blatant and obvious.” Interestingly, Pipes’ thinking neatly mirrors the thinking of extremists elsewhere, such as the contributor to an Al Qaeda-linked website who declared that “Al-Qaeda will have to support [Sen. John] McCain in the coming election,” as McCain would be more likely to continue the policies of George W. Bush, which produced a propaganda and recruiting bonanza for the terrorists.

Pipes also flatly insisted that “when it comes to building a nuclear weapon…there is a wide consensus in the Iranian leadership that building these weapons is something that is desirableand there is no known dissent from that viewpoint .”

This is untrue. There is in fact rather well known dissent from that viewpoint — in the form of a 2003 fatwa (religious-legal decree) issued by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei which declared that Islam forbids the development and use of all weapons of mass destruction. It’s true that later statements and actions have called this position into question, but it’s flatly false to suggest that there is “no dissent” among the Iranian clerical leadership regarding the production and use of nuclear weapons.

Interestingly, the event at which Pipes spoke was called “New Thinking for Old Problems.” The old problem, I take it, being “how to gin up a war with Iran,” and the new thinking being “insist that a reformist electoral victory will be meaningless.” Of course, if Ahmadinejad wins, he’ll still be the new Hitler and the presidency will once again matter a lot.

Zakaria Declares ‘Victory’, Qualifies

Joshua Keating has a good post exploring the significance of Steven Colbert’s Iraq tour and his stint as guest/stunt editor of Newsweek. I don’t know if I’d go as far as Keating in calling Fareed Zakaria’s cover story on “victory” in Iraq “the kind of goalpost moving that Colbert has relished mocking for years,” but I do think the use of the term “victory” is troublesome — not least because it plays into the narrative of the war architects for whom the key goal of the surge was the salvaging of their reputations. We should note, however, that the word victory only appears in the article’s title (over which writers have notoriously little control, though I would suspect a star like Zakaria has quite a bit more), and that much of what Zakaria reports strongly challenges the idea that the word applies to what has been achieved. While U.S. and Iraqi forces may have admirably clawed Iraq back from the brink of total collapse, the costs of the war so staggeringly outweigh its benefits (most of which remain in the realm of the potential) that there is no moral or political calculus by which the decision to invade can reasonably be called the correct one.

Zakaria:

American influence is not what it was a few years ago. Yet America still has enormous leverage with a government that relies on U.S. forces for its basic security and well-being. The question is whether the Obama administration will use this leverage in a focused and purposeful way.

The reason to do so is simple. How Iraq evolves in the next few years will define America’s legacy there. After all, there were no weapons of mass destruction. The costs — in blood, treasure, anti-Americanism — have already been paid. All that is left to redeem the mission is the hope of a decent outcome — a democratic Iraq that represents a new model of Arab politics, one that does not force its citizens to choose between a repressive regime and an extreme opposition. But for that to happen, Iraq must become an inclusive democracy for all its people. Its potential as any kind of a model rests largely on this evolution.

On the contrary — while our forces remain in Iraq by the tens of thousands, while takfiri terrorists continue to employ and spread tactics and technologies developed in the Iraqi training ground we provided them, and while Iran continues to expand and strengthen its regional influence as a result of our removing their greatest enemy, we will continue to pay the costs of the war.

Zakaria writes that “Arab regimes paint a picture of Iraq that suggests that American-led democracy has led to chaos, collapse and, perhaps more crucially, to Shiite tyranny. This is a damning indictment because for the rest of the Arab world — which is overwhelmingly Sunni — it suggests that democracy is something to be feared.” I think this is right, but let’s be honest, it doesn’t take much of a propagandist to convince people that the limb-strewn and blood-spattered marketplaces that they see almost every day on Al Jazeera are not preferable, or that a political system that produces such outcomes is sub-optimal. The greatest portion of blame for the disrepute into which democracy has fallen in the Middle East belongs to the president who undertook to remake Iraq as a shining example of it.

I do agree with Zakaria, though, that the manner in which President Obama manages the U.S.-Iraq relationship is hugely important. Acknowledging that the invasion of Iraq was and remains a major U.S. foreign policy blunder shouldn’t blind us to the potential ways in which a genuinely democratic Iraq could positively influence the region. I only advise against using words like “victory” in the hope that it will help us avoid trying to reproduce this experiment, and this policy, elsewhere. Ever.

Gaffney: The President ‘May Actually Still Be’ A Muslim

Proving once again that, for conservatives, there is no foreign policy scenario which does not merit a Munich analogy, Frank Gaffney looks at Obama’s Cairo speech and accuses the president of having “engaged in the most consequential bait-and-switch since Adolf Hitler duped Neville Chamberlain over Czechoslovakia at Munich.”

Here’s Gaffney in 2007, comparing the Annapolis conference to — can you guess?

It is fitting Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice chose the U.S. Naval Academy for the venue of today’s so-called Mideast peace conference. The reputation of that extraordinary institution in Annapolis has been sullied in recent years by a succession of rapes of young women.

Despite official efforts to low-ball its significance, Miss Rice’s conclave is shaping up to be a gang-rape of a nation on a scale not seen since Munich in 1938, when the British and French allowed Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini to have their violent way with Czechoslovakia.

This time, the intended victim is Israel. As with the effort to appease the Nazis and Fascists nearly 70 years ago, however, the damage will not be confined to the rapee. The interests of the Free World in general and the United States in particular will suffer from what the Saudis and most of the other attendees have in mind for the Jewish State — namely, its dismemberment and ultimate destruction.

So, Munich, but also: Gang rape.

Having established that Frank Gaffney — who previously assured us that Gov. Sarah Palin had acquired her foreign policy expertise “by osmosis” — is not to be taken seriously, let’s get to what’s really special about today’s item. Gaffney insists that “there is mounting evidence that the president not only identifies with Muslims, but actually may still be one himself.”

Consider the following indicators:

• Mr. Obama referred four times in his speech to “the Holy Koran.” Non-Muslims — even pandering ones — generally don’t use that Islamic formulation.

• Mr. Obama established his firsthand knowledge of Islam (albeit without mentioning his reported upbringing in the faith) with the statement, “I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the region where it was first revealed.” Again, “revealed” is a depiction Muslims use to reflect their conviction that the Koran is the word of God, as dictated to Muhammad.

• Then the president made a statement no believing Christian — certainly not one versed, as he professes to be, in the ways of Islam — would ever make. In the context of what he euphemistically called the “situation between Israelis, Palestinians and Arabs,” Mr. Obama said he looked forward to the day “. . . when Jerusalem is a secure and lasting home for Jews and Christians and Muslims, and a place for all of the children of Abraham to mingle peacefully together as in the story of Isra, when Moses, Jesus and Muhammad (peace be upon them) joined in prayer.”

Now, the term “peace be upon them” is invoked by Muslims as a way of blessing deceased holy men. According to Islam, that is what all three were — dead prophets. Of course, for Christians, Jesus is the living and immortal Son of God.

This is fever swamp stuff. Particularly pernicious is how Gaffney arrogates to himself the role of arbiter and interpreter of the world’s religions — this debate with conservative American Muslim Suhail Khan, in which Gaffney condescendingly presumes to lecture Khan about the tenets of Khan’s own faith, is typical — in order to produce a jumble of innuendos that clearly add up to “The President of the United States is a Muslim Sleeper.”

As I said, Gaffney’s own past work strongly argues against taking him seriously as an analyst. As someone willing to cast deeply irresponsible and transparently bigoted accusations against the president, however, he should be taken very seriously.

Krauthammer’s Distortions

Appearing yesterday on Inside Washington, Charles Krauthammer followed up Friday’s mendacity by calling President Obama’s Cairo speech a “victory for the Iranian radicals.” Krauthammer claimed that the president “did more in three minutes to delegitimize the existence of Israel than any president in American history,” — at which co-panelist Nina Totenberg understandably couldn’t contain her laughter.

An undeterred Krauthammer then charged that the president, by recognizing both Jewish and Palestinian suffering, was making a “moral equivalence” (a favorite term conservatives use when they can’t come up with an actual argument) between genocide and displacement. Krauthammer then insisted that the state of Israel bore no blame for the displacement of the Palestinians:

The Palestinian displacement occurred not as a result of the birth of Israel, but as a result of the invasion of Israel at its birth, by Egypt Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Transjordan, and by Palestinian irregulars. It was the war of extermination started by the Arabs which resulted in the Palestinian refugees. Now that is an extremely important distortion of history.

Watch it:

The real distortion of history here is, of course, committed by Krauthammer. The Palestinian displacement began months before the Arab invasion of May 1948, the result of a civil war between Palestinian Arab and Zionist militias. By March 1948, some 100,000 Palestinians had already fled their homes and lands. The problem only grew worse with the invasion of Arab armies. While there is some disagreement among historians as to the extent to which expulsion of the Palestinians was a set policy of the Zionist leadership, there is general consensus that various acts of expulsion and cleansing of Arab villages took place.

While I generally concur with the other panelists that the most important thing is to deal with the here and now, at the same time I think one has a responsibility to honestly represent the scholarly-historical consensus, to the extent that it can be gleaned, and push back against the sort of denialism in which Krauthammer is engaged. While we shouldn’t get bogged down in historical blame arguments, we should recognize that stupendously dishonest renderings of history by prominent newspaper columnists play an important role in preventing American political support for attempts to broker peace.

Related, earlier I attended a panel discussion at the Woodrow Wilson Center in which conservative scholar/activist Martin Kramer, while discussing the current problem of Palestinian disunity, raised the tired old question of “Are the Palestinians really a people at all?” As an academic question, this has essentially been settled. Of course, the purpose of this question is in no sense scholarly, but purely political. Questioning the genuine “peoplehood” of the Palestinians is intended to imply that the right of the Palestinians to a homeland is not equivalent to Israel’s, and, as with Krauthammer’s coloring book version of 1948, to support the idea that Israel bears no special responsibility toward a resolution of the Palestinian problem.

I was happy to see other panelists jump on Kramer for this, and then Kramer somewhat clumsily qualify his answer in response. Conservative scholars and pundits have been making these kinds of discredited claims for a long time, far too often going unchallenged in the mainstream media. With President Obama’s Cairo speech, however, in which he recognized both the Palestinian dispossession narrative and placed their claim to statehood on an equal footing with that of Israel, the president effectively placed the views of people like Krauthammer and Kramer where they belong: Out on the margins.

Kurtzer: Settlement Halt ‘Not Dependent On Reciprocity’ »

Repeating the “settlement freeze means no babies!” canard in his column today, Charles Krauthammer adds his voice to the chorus of conservatives who have never said a bad word about the tight Israeli restrictions on growth in Palestinian neighborhoods, but who think that holding Israel to its commitments on settlements is an outrageous injustice:

Obama says he came to Cairo to tell the truth. But he uttered not a word of that. Instead, among all the bromides and lofty sentiments, he issued but one concrete declaration of new American policy: “The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements,” thus reinforcing the myth that Palestinian misery and statelessness are the fault of Israel and the settlements.

Blaming Israel and picking a fight over “natural growth” may curry favor with the Muslim “street.” But it will only induce the Arab states to do like Abbas: sit and wait for America to deliver Israel on a platter. Which makes the Obama strategy not just dishonorable but self-defeating.

So let’s get this straight: The President of the United States went to Cairo, condemned anti-Semitism, called Holocaust denial “ignorant,” told Arabs to stop demagoguing the Palestinian issue, and quoted from the Talmud, but Krauthammer insists he “uttered not a word” of the truth. Okay.

Meanwhile, for those who prefer their discussions of this issue a bit saner, ThinkProgress recently sat down for an interview with Daniel Kurtzer, former U.S. ambassador to Israel and Egypt, to discuss the Obama administration’s initial foray into the Middle East peace process. Kurtzer said that he thought the administration had “gotten off to a terrific start, because the president, number one, made it clear that the peace process is a presidential priority.”

I asked Kurtzer about the apparent tension between President Obama and P.M. Netanyahu over the issue of settlement contruction — the Obama administration has requested a complete freeze, without exceptions, something which Netanyahu has called “unreasonable.” Kurtzer said that “as part of his establishing [the Israeli-Arab peace process] as a presidential priority, the president is talking about the need to deal honestly with issues that have not previously been dealt with as honestly they might have, and on the Israeli side settlements is the most pronounced of those issues.”

Every administration since 1967 has said to Israel not to build settlements and very few have done anything about it. And so the president is saying to Israel this is not dependent on Arab behavior, this is not dependent on reciprocity, it’s not dependent on anything else except Israeli action and therefore things have to change. I think one can be confident that the president will say the same things on the Arab side, on issues related to their behavior: violence, recognition of Israel, and other kinds of issues that have stalled progress towards reconciliation. But for an administration that’s only four months old, there’s been a lot of very serious work and some very important markers laid down.

Watch it:

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This Is What Diplomacy Looks Like

It’s doubtful that Barack Obama has ever delivered a speech as hotly awaited as the one he gave today in Cairo. I had hoped but not expected that, having already generated some credibility on the issue with his firm stance against Israeli settlements, the president would use the opportunity to address the cynical exploitation of the conflict by Arab regimes. I was pleasantly surprised, then, to hear the president tell the Arab States they “must recognize that the Arab Peace Initiative was an important beginning, but not the end of their responsibilities.”

The Arab-Israeli conflict should no longer be used to distract the people of Arab nations from other problems. Instead, it must be a cause for action to help the Palestinian people develop the institutions that will sustain their state; to recognize Israel’s legitimacy; and to choose progress over a self-defeating focus on the past.

Turning to Israel, Obama said that “Israelis must acknowledge that just as Israel’s right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine’s.” While past presidents have recognized Palestinian national aspirations, this is the first time I’ve ever heard an American president assert an equivalency between the right of the Jewish and Palestinian people to a homeland. I think the significance of this framing will not be lost on the regional audience.

I also found this part of the speech particularly compelling, especially in light of the attendance — apparently as the result of U.S. pressure — of members of the Muslim Brotherhood’s parliamentary bloc:

America respects the right of all peaceful and law-abiding voices to be heard around the world, even if we disagree with them. And we will welcome all elected, peaceful governments — provided they govern with respect for all their people.

This last point is important because there are some who advocate for democracy only when they are out of power; once in power, they are ruthless in suppressing the rights of others. No matter where it takes hold, government of the people and by the people sets a single standard for all who hold power: you must maintain your power through consent, not coercion; you must respect the rights of minorities, and participate with a spirit of tolerance and compromise; you must place the interests of your people and the legitimate workings of the political process above your party. Without these ingredients, elections alone do not make true democracy.

I interpret this as a message to Hamas, Hezbollah and other Islamist groups: Eschew violence and we will support your participation in politics. And his comment about elections could be interpreted as a dig at his Mubarak regime hosts — indeed, an audience member responded to the line by shouting “We love you!”

Obviously, this was one speech. Obama’s personal appeal and soaring rhetoric won’t matter much if he doesn’t follow it up with practical policies to create movement across the rather ambitious range of issues that he outlined. Viewed as the opening of a dialogue, and a restatement of American purpose in the region, however, I think it was an enormously encouraging one.

Will Islamists Be Part Of The President’s New Dialogue?

Two stories this morning highlight what I think is a key question about President Obama’s speech tomorrow in Cairo. The first is the news that, “under pressure from the United States, the Secretariat-General of the lower house of the Egyptian Parliament invited ten members of the Muslim Brotherhood parliamentary bloc to attend Barack Obama’s speech in Cairo on Thursday.”

The delegation will include Dr. Saad Al Katatni, leader of the bloc, who said that the invitation “came as a compromise solution between the American administration and the Egyptian government, considering that there is increasing pressure on the administration from the American press on the necessity of meeting with all members of opposition and other influential forces.”

Though Katatni explicitly denied it, Al-Arabiya’s reporter Mustafa Sulaiman speculated that Brotherhood members may also be invited to a special meeting that Obama will hold with writers, politicians and members of Egyptian civil society.

The second is Al Qaeda’s attempt to pre-but tomorrow’s speech:

Shortly after Obama landed in the Saudi capital, the television network Al-Jazeera aired a new audiotape, reportedly from al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, saying Obama was planting seeds for “revenge and hatred” toward the United States in the Muslim world, wire services reported. The taped message said Obama was following former Bush’s policy of “antagonizing Muslims,” and warned Americans to be prepared for the “consequences” of the White House’s policies. [...]

The tape follows a recent message from bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, urging Egyptians to shun Obama during his visit, saying his Middle East trip was at the invitation of the “torturers of Egypt” and the “slaves of America.”

While it’s unclear precisely when these messages were recorded — or whether bin Laden’s was held back by Al Jazeera until it could have its greatest, most newsworthy impact — there’s already a lot of evidence that Al Qaeda find Barack Obama a far less perfect instrument for their propaganda than their dream candidate George W. Bush — and that’s great. It’s clearly a good thing for the United States when the President of the United States isn’t the most reviled person in the world. But while being not-Bush is obviously an advantage for Obama, it remains to be seen whether the president will take advantage of this better footing to really address some of the aspects of U.S. policy that give extremist propaganda such resonance — such as American support for corrupt and oppressive authoritarian regimes like Egypt and Saudi Arabia — and begin to disaggregate America’s Islamist critics from America’s Islamist enemies.

In a recent BBC interview, the president described the “dialogue” he hoped to start with his Cairo speech, and said that message he hopes to deliver is that democracy, rule of law, freedom of speech, freedom of religion — those are not simply principles of the West to be hoisted on these countries.”

But, rather what I believe to be universal principles that they can embrace and affirm as part of their national identity. The danger, I think, is when the United States, or any country, thinks that we can simply impose these values on another country with a different history and a different culture.

The invitation of the representatives from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the seminal Islamist organization in the Middle East, to the Cairo speech is an encouraging sign that the president is entering into this new dialogue genuinely. One of the greatest mistakes of the previous administration, in my view, was to take an unerringly hostile view of Islamism, which is far more diverse and vital than many American commentators are willing to recognize.

Encouraging President Obama to make democratic reform a central element of his Middle East policy, Brian Katulis and Michael Cohen write today in World Politics Review, “Islamist political movements play an integral role in advancing democracy.”

Too many U.S. policymakers have bought into the notion that equates democracy in the Arab World with conceding power to jihadist Islamic movements, ignoring the millions of people who support Islamist and democratic parties while opposing terrorism. So long as Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt reject violence as a political tool and accept basic democratic principles, the United States should not shun them, but instead recognize their important role in advancing reform.

By conflating all Islamist movements together and treating these groups as hostile to democracy by definition, policymakers not only create more enemies for the United States, they also ignore the extremely valuable and vibrant debate that is now occurring among Islamic scholars as to the correct arrangement of society, a debate that has generated a deeply complex and compelling critique of Western-style politics. (At the risk of seriously oversimplifying, the key difference is that derived Western liberalism tends to see the goal of politics as the protection and expansion of individual liberty, whereas Islamism tends to see the goal of politics, and of society itself, as the pursuit of justice.) We shouldn’t kid ourselves: Islamism contains a significant challenge to many of liberalism’s assumptions. But it’s folly to think that genuine reform can occur in the Middle East while denying it a place at the table.

For various reasons, there is a deep misunderstanding and fear in the U.S. about Islamism. Discussions of it, to the extent that they occur in the major media, usually occur after some horrific act of violence, and are usually accompanied by footage of angry demonstrators or masked Hamas gunmen. It’s worth pointing out, however, the U.S. facilitated the establishment of the first Islamist-controlled government in the Arab world, in Iraq — even if the architects of the war are loathe to admit this. In that and other ways, the U.S. is already deeply engaged in this debate — my hope is that President Obama’s speech tomorrow will mark the beginning of a more forthright and productive engagement with it.

Differing Views On A Settlement Freeze

An editorial in Israel’s Haaretz praises the Obama administration’s call for a settlement freeze, writing that “the settlements threaten to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the implementation of the partition solution, which is essential for preserving Israel’s future as a Jewish and democratic state.”

Defending the settlements requires Israel to operate a complex system of access roads and roadblocks, which make Palestinians’ lives more difficult and inflict serious financial harm on them.

Every Israeli government since 1967 has insisted on building and developing the settlements, causing the country severe political damage. The massive resources invested in sustaining and enlarging the settlements come at the expense of other national goals, like the development of the Negev and the Galilee.

For all these reasons, the demand to freeze settlement construction is just and wise. The Obama administration is refusing to accept the natural growth excuse that Israel has made to previous American administrations. Under their protection, Israel has continually increased the number of settlers in the territories and the infrastructure meant for their use — primarily the segregated road system and the invasive route of the separation fence, which is intended to facilitate Israel’s de facto annexation of part of the West Bank.

Meanwhile, the Weekly Standard’s Mike Goldfarb takes time out from his role as the Internet’s leading purveyor of privileged white boy ressentiment to express outrage at the administration’s demand that Israel cease expansion of settlements in Arab East Jerusalem:

Now the Obama administration has decided that Jerusalem must be divided and that the Jews must stop building in areas that should be handed over to Palestinians at some undetermined date in the future. The State Department is demanding “that Israel limit Jewish growth in these areas of Jerusalem, ‘whose status remains to be determined’ in negotiations.” Apparently the third principle that must apply to Jerusalem is that Jews cannot build on land the Obama administration has set aside for other uses — like appeasing the Arabs.

Goldfarb also passes along a quote from an Israeli government spokesman, who complained that “I have to admire the residents of Iroquois territory for assuming that they have a right to determine where Jews should live in Jerusalem.” That’s funny, but I actually don’t think the comparison of Palestinians to Native Americans really works in Israel’s favor, given that most people now accept that the mass oppression and dispossession of indigenous peoples is a bad thing.

You will of course remember Goldfarb’s numerous posts condemning Israel’s bulldozing of Palestinian homes and the various other measures used to prevent Palestinian growth and strengthen the Jewish presence in East Jerusalem. Just kidding. Goldfarb has never expressed any problem with preventing Palestinians from building in Arab East Jerusalem. On the other hand, the Obama administration’s insistence that the Israelis stop expanding settlements on expropriated land elicits an immediate howl of injustice. And also appeasement.

On second thought, this still may qualify as privileged white boy ressentiment.