The Wonk Room

Perino: Politicize National Security? Never! What?

Former-Bush-spokesperson/forever-Bush-flack Dana Perino made a pretty startling claim last night on Hannity in the course of questioning the Obama administration’s avoidance of the term “terrorism” in reference to the Fort Hood murders:

PERINO: There is one thing that I would say about Fort Hood that I feel very strongly about, which is — and I don’t say this to be political — I think it matters a lot what we call it. And we had a terrorist attack on our country. And we should call it what it is because we need to face up to it so that we can prevent it from happening again.

HANNITY: I agree with you. And you know, why won’t they [the Obama administration] say what you just so simply said?

PERINO: It’s — they want to do all of their investigations, I don’t know all of their thinking that goes into it, but, you know, we did not have a terrorist attack on our country during president Bush’s term. I hope they’re not looking at this politically. I do think that we owe it to the American people to call it what it is.

The decision whether or not to call an act of violence “terrorism” — which is, after all, defined as the use of violence against civilians in the pursuit of a political goal — is inextricably bound up with politics. Though I tend to lean toward “yes,” I think there are real questions as to whether Nidal Hassan’s shooting spree qualifies as terrorism. Those who think there aren’t tend to be die-hard “war on terror” types interested in marketing a particular (and politically advantageous to conservatives) conception of an undifferentiated Islamic threat.

Obviously, a former Bush official waxing sanctimonious about the politicization of national security is, to say the least, bold. It’s a matter of public record that the Bush administration was exploring ways to exploit 9/11 for political ends literally before the fires had been doused at Ground Zero.

As to Perino’s claim of “no terrorist attacks under Bush,” one of the main Bush legacy talking points handed out to administration officials as Bush was leaving office was “No terrorist attacks… since 2001!” Maybe Perino just forgot to mention that last part. Or perhaps Perino has gotten so used to insisting that the administration she served actually had an effective strategy for fighting terrorism that she’s simply come to believe that the attacks took place before Bush’s presidency began.

Another side of this, though involves effort, thus far unsuccessful, by some conservatives to cast Fort Hood if not exactly as “Obama’s 9/11,” (which would be ridiculous on its face) then at least as a “terrorist attack” sufficient for their purposes of attacking Obama’s response to the shooting as insufficient, and his broader counter-terrorism approach as ineffective. A Google search of “Fort Hood, Obama, Pet Goat” turns up quite a bit, none of it making much sense, but revealing nonetheless the continuing conservative shame at President Bush’s response to the September 11 attacks, and a deep desire to believe that President Obama’s response to tragedy was just as bad, if not worse, than Bush’s.

Conservatives have been telegraphing this tactic for while. As far back as January 2009, Robert Robb complained in the Arizona Republic that “Bush has been given remarkably little credit or appreciation for the fact that there has not been a domestic terrorist attack since 9/11,” but went on: “If, however, there were to be a terrorist attack during Barack Obama’s watch, the public’s view of Bush would spin on a dime.” It should be pretty obvious that Perino and others are trying to use Fort Hood to change the public’s view.

Hitchens: Still Partying Like It’s 2002

Christopher Hitchens apparently didn’t get the memo that it’s no longer verboten to recognize that certain U.S. policies have, in some cases, exacerbated the very problem of Islamic extremism that they were intended to address. Responding to Robert Wright’s Sunday New York Times op-ed, in which Wright suggested that Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan and Little Rock shooter Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad were driven to violence in part by images of U.S. forces killing Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan, Hitchens fumes:

For a start, did Hasan or Muhammad ever say what “killing” of which “Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan” they had in mind? There isn’t a day goes by without the brutal slaughter of Muslims in both countries by al-Qaida or the Taliban. And that’s not just because most (though not all) civilians in both countries happen to be of the Islamic faith. The terrorists do not pause before deliberately blowing up the mosques and religious processions of those whose Muslim beliefs they deem insufficiently devout. Most of those now being tortured and raped and executed by the Islamic Republic of Iran are Muslim. All the women being scarred with acid and threatened with murder for the crime of going to school in Pakistan are Muslim. Many of those killed in London, Madrid, and New York were Muslim, and almost all the victims callously destroyed in similar atrocities in Istanbul, Cairo, Casablanca, and Algiers in the recent past were Muslim, too. It takes a true intellectual to survey this appalling picture and to say, as Wright does, that we invite attacks on our off-duty soldiers because “the hawkish war-on-terrorism strategy—a global anti-jihad that creates nonstop imagery of Americans killing Muslims—is so dubious.” Dubious? The only thing dubious here is his command of language. When did the U.S. Army ever do what the jihadists do every day: deliberately murder Muslim civilians and brag on video about the fact? For shame. The slippery slope—actually the slimy slope—is the one down which Wright is skidding.

It’s probably important to point out here the yawning chasm between saying that “we invite attacks on our off-duty soldiers” through a “hawkish war-on-terrorism strategy” — which Wright did not do — and saying that a “hawkish war-on-terrorism strategy” and its attendant right-wing propaganda has generated resentment which in turn fed Hasan’s and Muhammad’s extremism, which is was Wright does say. As a general point about radical extremism, I think it’s so obvious as to no longer be controversial. In specific regard to Hasan and Muhammad, I think the jury’s still out.

I find it hard to believe, though, that Hitchens hasn’t yet moved beyond this idea that saying “the terrorists are very bad!” and then detailing some of the very bad things that “the terrorists” do constitutes an actual argument. This sort of petulant sanctimony went out of style years ago. For the record: Yes, “the terrorists” are very bad. So are some of the consequences of our poorly thought out policies for dealing with them. These two ideas are not mutually exclusive.

Limbert: ‘Iran’s Ruling Consensus Is Breaking Down’

At the Middle East Institute yesterday, John Limbert, who was recently appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary for Iran in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, discussed his his new book Negotiating with Iran.

Limbert spent 33 years in the Foreign Service, serving in Algeria, Djibouti, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. From 2000-2003 he served as ambassador to Mauritania, and retired in 2006 with the rank of Minister-Counselor. In 1979, he was among those taken hostage by radical Iranian students at the American embassy in Tehran. As Politico reported, Limbert “is the recipient of the Department’s highest award, the Distinguished Service Award, as well as an Award for Valor for his more than a year as a hostage in Iran, months of it spent in solitary confinement.”

Though Limbert made clear that he was speaking yesterday as an author and not in his capacity as a State Department official, his comments do provide insight into the thinking of a key U.S. official dealing with Iran.

The important question of his book, Limbert said, “is not ’should we or shouldn’t we’” negotiate with Iran. “The important question is, when we finally end our thirty year estrangement, how do we do it?” It is important to acknowledge, Limbert said, that “hostility and suspicion still run very deep, and they run deep on both sides.” The Iranian view is typified, Limbert said, “in a famous rhetorical question from Ayatollah Khomeini. When asked about negotiations with the United States, he [Khomeini] replied: ‘What for? What does the wolf have to negotiate with the sheep?’”

On the American side, Limbert said, “you find something similar.” There is an idea “that one could never have successful negotiations with leaders who do and say what Iran’s leaders do and say… Because they are too fanatical, too xenophobic, too suspicious, and too untrustworthy to deal with.” This view is alive and well in Washington, Limbert said, “and I’ve encountered it as recently as last week.” Limbert suggested that this view was simply a reverse of Khomeini’s view, asking instead “what do the rational have to negotiate with the crazies?”

Knocking down some of the caricatures of Iran that tend to dominate U.S. media coverage, Limbert said “There’s much more to Iran — and much more to negotiating with Iran — than the absurdity of presidential statements coming out of Tehran and the nastiness of the current system.” Trained as an historian and fluent in Farsi, Limbert noted his great interest in Iran in the 14th century, a time in which he said “you had creative, vibrant artistic people living under rulers who, to put it bluntly, were thugs, fanatics, and bigots.” It was not incorrect, Limbert said, to notice “a similarity between conditions then and conditions now.”

Limbert was asked at what point the administration might say “enough is enough” and walk away from engagement. “I think you’re going to need a lot of patience,” he said. But “if it’s worth it — and I think from what I read and what I hear, this administration has decided that it is worth it, and knows that it will take a lot of patience. Thirty years of suspicion, thirty years of trading insults, thirty years of name-calling, and sometimes exchanges going beyond just rhetoric, that’s tough to overcome.”

Asked whether Iran’s current domestic politics would impact negotiations, Limbert replied “obviously it will,” and would likely make striking a deal more difficult. But, Limbert said, “if you wait for a good time” to try and change the relationship, “it will never come. It’s always going to be a bad time.”

Limbert said it was clear that “The system that’s been in place, where you have a ruling men’s club of about twenty five senior people” was passing away. “The core elite of the Islamic Republic… are getting old and departing the scene,” but more important, Limbert said, “the consensus which had existed among this group whose cohesion allowed the Islamic Republic to survive some horrific shocks…seems to be breaking down, and something different is coming out of it.” Limbert said that “the system to seems to be reverting to an earlier model of rule by the gun, and rule by force. Some of the features you see emerging now are reminiscent of what you saw under the Pahlavis.”

Asked whether human rights should be part of the negotiation, Limbert’s answer was direct: “Of course.” The Iranians deserve a far better government than they have, Limbert said. “Should it [human rights] be a matter for negotiation? Of course. Should it be the only matter for negotiation? I don’t think so. I would hope that we’re smart enough to deal with one issue at a time. And I think we are.”

Consequences Of An Israeli Strike On Iran: Still Very Bad

A new memo from Steve Simon of the Council on Foreign Relations looks at the possibility of an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. “In assessing the likelihood of an attack,” Simon writes, “it is useful to look back on the origins of the Six Day War in 1967 and the raid on the Osirak reactor in Iraq.”

In each case, Israel attacked only after a long period of procrastination. In 1967, Washington’s hands-off posture tipped the balance in the cabinet in favor of preemption. In the case of Osirak, the Carter and Reagan administrations’ unwillingness or incapacity to intervene left Israel feeling cornered and compelled to act unilaterally. One lesson to be learned from this is that Israel is more likely to use force if it perceives Washington to be disengaged.

I’m not sure what lesson this has for Obama. No one can say that he’s been “disengaged” in the Middle East. Clearly, Obama hasn’t been “engaged” in precisely the manner that Netanyahu would probably prefer — i.e. taking a harder line on Iran while ignoring Israel’s settlement building — but he has repeatedly stressed both the U.S. commitment to Israel’s security and that he recognizes Iran’s nuclear program as a threat to that security. So I suppose the question is whether, or at what point, Netanyahu will decide to interpret Obama’s pursuit of engagement with Iran as “disengagement” from Israel.

Simon concludes that, while Israel could carry out such a strike, the margin of error for a successful strike — that is, one that destroys or at least seriously incapacitates Iran’s known nuclear facilities — is razor thin.

And then there are the consequences of such a strike. Here’s a summary:

First, regardless of perceptions of U.S. complicity in the attack, the United States would probably become embroiled militarily in any Iranian retaliation against Israel or other countries in the region. [...]

Second, an Israeli strike would cause oil prices to spike and heighten concerns that energy supplies through the Persian Gulf may become disrupted. [...]

Third, since the United States would be viewed as having assisted Israel, U.S. efforts to foster better relations with the Muslim world would almost certainly suffer. [...]

Fourth, the United States has a strong interest in domestically generated regime change in Iran. Although some argue that the popular anger aroused in Iran by a strike would be turned against a discredited clerical regime that seemed to invite foreign attack after its bloody post-election repression of nonviolent opposition, it is more likely that Iranians of all stripes would rally around the flag. [...]

Fifth, an Israeli attack might guarantee an overtly nuclear weapons capable Iran in the medium term.

Sixth, although progress toward an Israeli-Palestinian final status accord remains elusive, an Israeli strike, especially one that overflew Jordan or Saudi Arabia, would delay fruitful renewed negotiation indefinitely. [...]

Finally, the United States has an abiding interest in the safety and security of Israel. Depending on the circumstances surrounding an Israeli attack, the political-military relationship between Jerusalem and Washington could fray, which could erode unity among Democrats and embolden Republicans, thereby complicating the administration’s political situation, and weaken Israel’s deterrent. Even if an Israeli move on Iran did not dislocate the bilateral relationship, it could instead produce diplomatic rifts between the United States and its European and regional allies, reminiscent of tensions over the Iraq war.

That’s a lot of downsides. One that I have yet to see discussed, however, is the potential effect on U.S. public support for Israel of attacks by Iran on American troops in retaliation for an Israeli strike. As retired General Anthony Zinni put it back in September, “Eventually, if you follow this [a strike on Iran] all the way down, eventually I’m putting boots on the ground somewhere. And like I tell my friends, if you like Iraq and Afghanistan, you’ll love Iran.” A solid majority of Americans support the U.S. Israel relationship, but I’m not sure Netanyahu really wants to test the depth of that support once America starts taking casualties as a direct result of precipitous Israeli military action. And no one wants Israel to be put into a position where he has to do that.

Support Iran’s Opposition Or Bomb Iran: You Can’t Do Both

Washington Times national security editor Barbara Slavin has an article on Iranian filmmaker and dissident Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who has become a spokesperson for Iran’s Green Movement in the wake of the June 12 elections. Makhmalbaf called upon President Obama to more explicitly support Iran’s opposition movement and more strongly condemn Iranian human rights abuses. He also had some interesting things to say about the prospect of further sanctions:

“Inevitably, you are going to put [new] sanctions on Iran,” Mr. Makhmalbaf told a small group of Iran specialists and journalists in Washington. He said the U.S. should “let the Iranian people know why you are going to sanction and what the targets are so they can support you.”

He rejected proposed U.S. legislation that would target gasoline imports to Iran, saying that would hurt average people. He said it was better to focus on the Revolutionary Guards, who have been at the forefront of repressing demonstrations and who have taken control of considerable elements of the Iranian economy.

You know who also opposes U.S. legislation targeting gasoline imports to Iran? The Iranian regime. For some, this shared interest is quite enough to tar Makhmalbaf as a regime apologist. Those who are genuinely interested in supporting Iran’s opposition — and not just in smoothing the road toward a U.S.-Iran war — understand that this is silly, of course. The Iranian opposition — and its supporters outside the country — include a number of different factions and trends with various end goals and methods of reaching them.

Speaking of smoothing the road toward a U.S.-Iran war, the very same Washington Times also runs an editorial today telling Americans to Get Ready To Bomb Iran:

Force need not be used to be effective, but the threat of force must be credible to have any chance of influencing Iranian behavior. Right now, there is no credible threat emanating from the United States. The Obama administration unambiguously opposes military action against Iran, particularly by Israel. But it would help to have a little ambiguity on this issue. So long as Tehran thinks the United States will work actively to prevent Israel from taking action, it has one less reason to worry. It would be most helpful if the United States began to send signals to Tehran that the United States will assist Israel in its preparations for military action and maybe even participate when the attack ultimately is launched.

If the regime in Tehran is not made to fear serious consequences for its continued intransigence, it has no reason to abandon its nuclear ambitions.

Leaving aside that anyone who talks seriously about bombing Iran has revealed themselves to be no friend of Iran’s opposition — Abbas Milani represents the overwhelming consensus when he writes that “the forces now controlling Iran would be immeasurably strengthened by an American or (especially) Israeli attack” — this shows a pretty serious misapprehension of the situation in Iran right now.

It’s not at all clear that Iran’s ruling hardliners, who are currently weathering the most serious crisis of legitimacy in the Islamic Republic’s history, wouldn’t actually welcome a military strike by either Israel or the U.S. Such a strike, in addition to extinguishing the Green Movement, would effectively end the ongoing debate within the regime over whether to obtain a nuclear weapon in favor of those who have been arguing “yes,” in very much the same way that the preventive U.S. invasion of Iraq convinced Iran’s hardliners that they needed to keep open the option of having a strategic deterrent.

It’s pretty broadly understood across the U.S. defense establishment that a strike on Iran — either by Israel or the U.S. — would very likely result in a number of disastrous consequences, consequences Iran knows that the U.S. would rather avoid. There’s really no credibility to be generated by pretending otherwise.

When Do We Stop Pretending Netanyahu Is A Partner For Peace?

Americans for Peace Now’s Lara Friedman analyzes Bibi Netanyahu’s latest thumb in the Obama administration’s (and the Abbas government’s, and the international community’s) eye, the authorization of 900 new homes in the East Jerusalem settlement of Gilo. “This is a crisis engineered by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,” Friedman writes, one “intended to create a head-on collision with the Obama Administration over Jerusalem.”

[W]hile Bibi had a number of “conventional” options for dealing with the issue, he chose to go nuclear by making this issue — and his defiance of US concerns — a top story. In doing so, he has undermined the prospects for the very negotiations he claims he wants. [...]

The plan, if implemented, will allow the construction of 844 units, and these units won’t be inside the existing footprint of the settlement. Rather, they will be on the settlement’s southwestern flank, expanding Gilo in the direction of the Palestinian village of Wallajeh (a village in which a large number of the homes are fighting Israeli demolition orders). This new Gilo plan clearly dovetails with another plan to build a new settlement, called Givat Yael, which would straddle the Jerusalem border and significantly extend Israeli Jerusalem to the south, further sealing the city off from the Bethlehem area and the West Bank (and connecting it to the Etzion settlement bloc). That plan, it was reported yesterday, also appears to be suddenly gaining steam. (for a map showing both the Gilo plan and Givat Yael, click here.)

The Gilo plan is thus extremely provocative on several levels. It represents a clear and public statement from the Netanyahu government that it is neither “freezing” nor acting with “restraint” in East Jerusalem. It compels the Palestinians to respond, just as it compels other regional actors to respond. Finally, it has important strategic implications, since the plan, implemented, would impact on border options for Jerusalem under a future peace agreement.

Israel’s Yedioth Ahronoth reported — and a U.S. official confirmed – that Obama administration envoy George Mitchell had asked an aide to Netanyahu at a meeting in London on Monday to block the proposed construction in East Jerusalem. This latest affront comes less than a week after President Obama met with Netanyahu for 70 minutes in the White House.

Writing in yesterday’s New York Times, Roger Cohen suggested that recent history “makes clear that the right-wing government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu won’t deviate from the pattern of settlement growth established since 1967.” The U.S. has its own history of recognizing the illegitimacy of the settlements, and recognizing the role that they play in powering Palestinian resentment and violence, while never undertaking serious measures to pressure Israel to curb them. The Obama administration showed admirable clarity at the outset about these things, but then refused to stand strong behind its demand that Israel abide by its previous commitments to halt settlement growth, and its credibility has suffered for it.

The administration has certainly made its own mistakes on this issue, and I think the Palestinians have been unwise in refusing to negotiate without a complete settlement freeze. But we need to recognize that Netanyahu’s intransigence, born of an ideological commitment to seizing as much Palestinian land as possible, is a huge part of the problem here. Add this to his tendency to provoke crises and humiliate his country’s key patron, the United States, at almost every opportunity, I wonder when the Obama administration will simply stop pretending that Netanyahu is a partner for peace.

The Fruits Of ‘Dithering’ In Afghanistan

Given that the charge that President Obama is “dithering” on Afghanistan originated with former Vice President Dick Cheney, one can and should dismiss it out of hand as a transparent attempt to distract Americans from the fact that the Bush-Cheney administration vastly under-resourced the U.S.-led effort there for the last five years. But it’s also worth pointing out that, as it has conducted its deep review of options in Afghanistan, the president and his team haven’t simply been sitting around talking. They’ve been working with and encouraging and cajoling our partners in the Pakistan and Afghanistan government to step up and play a more positive role. And they’ve made it clear to both governments that a demonstrated willingness to do that will influence the president’s decision on U.S. troop and resource commitments to the effort.

On Sunday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton again made it clear that Hamid Karzai’s government must do more to eliminate corruption if he wanted continued civilian aid from Washington. Government corruption at all levels has been a huge problem in Afghanistan, preventing the state from establishing any genuine legitimacy and powering the resentment that feeds the Taliban insurgency.

Yesterday, the government of Afghanistan “announced new anticorruption measures in response to pressure from Washington and its allies, unveiling a special task force that will investigate graft by senior officials”:

“This force will make sure no high-ranking official who is involved in corruption will go unpunished,” said Interior Minister Hanif Atmar, accompanied by the U.S. and British ambassadors to Kabul. The new body will get training and support from the European Union and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, officials said.

The task force, which began operating in recent days, has netted three high-ranking government officials and charged them with stealing money meant for the families of policemen killed in the line of duty, said Amrullah Saleh, chief of Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security. He didn’t identify the detained men beyond saying that one of them was a general.

Obviously, simply creating a new anti-corruption unit and making some arrests isn’t the same as actually “fighting corruption,” but it’s a positive step. As with the Pakistan Army’s move against Taliban redoubts in Waziristan, a sustained commitment on the part of the Afghanistan will significantly impact the ability of the U.S.-led coalition to roll back the Taliban and stabilize the country. Karzai’s move is a welcome one, though, and should be recognized as the result of the successful use of American leverage by the Obama administration to elicit a positive change in behavior — as well as proof that the administration’s hawkish critics continue to be best ignored.

The Only Thing That Can Destroy Us Is The Terror-Industrial Complex

In light of the conservative meltdown over the Obama administration’s decision to bring the 9/11 plotters to trial in New York, I think it’s worth revisiting this October 2007 Colin Powell interview, in which the retired four-star general and former Secretary of State said that one of the best ways for the United States to combat global extremism was to “show the world a face of openness and what a democratic system can do.”

That’s why I want to see Guantánamo closed. It’s so harmful to what we stand for. We literally bang ourselves in the head by having that place. What are we doing this to ourselves for? Because we’re worried about the 380 guys there? Bring them here! Give them lawyers and habeas corpus. We can deal with them. We are paying a price when the rest of the world sees an America that seems to be afraid and is not the America they remember.

You can drive up the road from here and come to a spot where there is a megachurch over here, a little Episcopal church over there, a Catholic church around the corner that’s almost cathedral-size, and between them is a huge Hindu temple. There are no police needed to guard any of this. There are not many places in the world where you would see that. Yes, there are a few dangerous nuts in Brooklyn and New Jersey who want to blow up Kennedy Airport and Fort Dix. These are dangerous criminals, and we must deal with them. But come on, this is not a threat to our survival! The only thing that can really destroy us is us. We shouldn’t do it to ourselves, and we shouldn’t use fear for political purposes — scaring people to death so they will vote for you, or scaring people to death so that we create a terror-industrial complex.

Today in the Weekly Standard, one of the key organs of the terror-industrial complex, former Bush administration official Michael Anton exemplified this mindset. “The odds are of course against KSM winning an acquittal, though one never knows,” Anton wrote. “But that is not the point.”

The point is that our civilian justice system is designed to do specific things, and to try non-citizen enemy combatants who make war on this country and slaughter innocent civilians is not one of them. Now that system will be used for what will likely be a months-long propaganda circus that will make a mockery of our principles and broadcast a message of weakness and pusillanimity to terrorists, their fellow travelers, and intellectual mentors around the world. Even if the U.S. government ends up winning the legal case, we all lose. And the reversion to a federal court trial will, along with other actions of the current administration, conspire to lull the American public into the view that we’re not really at war.

The indefinite detention without trial of terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay has itself been a years-long propaganda circus that did make a mockery of our principles and broadcast a message of weakness and pusillanimity to terrorists, their fellow travelers, and intellectual mentors around the world. As Powell noted more than two years ago, correcting the Bush administration’s tragic error in opening the Guantanamo facility in the first place is essential to re-establishing American credibility on the rule of law. That credibility an important force multiplier in U.S. attempts to combat global extremism. As Gen. David Petraeus said in his statement of support for closing Guantanamo Bay prison, “We ought to live our values.”

WSJ’s Henninger: Bush Critics Enabled Ft. Hood Shootings

The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger thinks he knows how the Fort Hood shootings happened:

In our time, nothing was bigger than the nearly 3,000 killed on September 11. But anyone who got involved with the development of public policy then knows that for the next seven years the battle never stopped over the details of the Patriot Act, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, then Guantanamo, then waterboarding, renditions and secret prisons and all the other issues that for some could be summed up in two words: “Bush-Cheney.”

This will never come up in the Lieberman hearings next week, but I think that nonstop policy battle is why Hasan’s overseers dropped the ball.

The most-heard reason for the possible failure is political correctness. No doubt. But Sen. Lieberman’s committee should avoid making this its main line of inquiry, because that is a problem without a policy fix. It minimizes the real problem.

The problem is confusion. The combatants at each end of the spectrum in the war over the war on terror know exactly what they think about surveilling suspected terrorists. But if you are an intel officer or FBI agent tasked with providing the protection, what are you supposed to make of all this bitter public argument? What you make of it is that when you get a judgment call, like Maj. Hasan, you hesitate. You blink.

Now everyone thinks the call was obvious. But it wasn’t so obvious before the tragedy. Not if for years you have watched a country and its political class in rancorous confusion about the enemy, the legal standing of the enemy, or the legal status and scope of the methods it wants to use to fight the enemy.

In war, uncertainty gets you killed. It just did.

Yes, if we could all just stop being so confused and see things more clearly, we could do something about all the problems. It should go without saying that the idea that we can simply do away with “uncertainty” when managing the tension between liberty and security is nonsense. Did authorities either miss or fail to act on what, in retrospect, seems like solid evidence of Hasan’s increasing radicalization? I think it’s fair to say yes. Is there any evidence that this failure was the result of “confusion” generated by the “nonstop policy battle” between the Bush administration and its critics? No, there isn’t.

Essentially, Henninger’s argument is that the practice of democracy itself set the stage for the Fort Hood tragedy. If everybody would have just shut up after 9/11 and not distracted President Bush with stupid questions about warrantless surveillance and indefinite detention and torture and the Constitution, then maybe the FBI wouldn’t have been so scared of hurting peoples’ feelings. And of course it goes without saying that this applies only to criticisms coming from the left. Conservatives who challenge Democratic presidents are just patriots asking tough questions. Progressives who challenge Republican presidents are sapping the nation’s vital essence.

What Does A Conservative Have To Do To Be Considered ‘Unserious’ On National Security?

My friend Rob Farley recently recorded an interesting diavlog with John Mueller, author of the new book Atomic Obsession. In his book, Mueller argues that fears of nuclear holocaust during the Cold War, and now of nuclear terrorism, are overblown.

In one funny segment, Farley and Mueller chuckle over the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) “awareness movement” — I think the “Pulsers” deserve their own spot alongside the Birthers and Deathers in the grand and glorious tapestry of goofballery that is the contemporary conservative movement — noting that achieving the sort of effect that they warn of — detonating a nuclear device at a high altitude, shutting down electrical power across most of the continental United States — would require a level of technical expertise that even the United States may not possess:

MUELLER: There’s a guy named Lawrence who used to be head of the Los Alamos lab, in weapons design, and in a recent book he asked somebody who knew all about EMP about that, and the idea that the North Koreans could do that, could basically wipe out the communications of the United States with a single bomb — I mean, right now their delivery system can barely hit the Pacific Ocean –but he didn’t even think the United States could do that. [...]

The technological ability to do that is fantastically high. It takes a huge amount of ability to even begin to do that.

Watch it:

Farley recently wrote an article about the EMP crowd which offers up this slice of fried gold:

Despite the effort that conservatives have devoted to this cause, it appears to have gained little traction in the mainstream media. The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, Fox News, and other major television news organizations declined to cover the EMPACT conference. Indeed, even the neoconservative Weekly Standard, which seems perpetually on the lookout for ways to plug purported existential threats to the homeland, stayed away from Niagara. One Standard editor said in an interview with the author, “I don’t go for that EMP stuff. Kind of more interested in dangerous scenarios that might actually happen.”

Think about that for a moment: The threat from EMP is so remote that not even the Weekly Standard is willing to fear-monger about it. This hasn’t stopped two of the leading likely GOP presidential contenders, Mike Huckabee and Newt Gingrich, from making it a big part of their national security agenda. In terms of “serious ideas about things that might ever actually happen,” it’s the equivalent of a leftist candidate calling upon Americans to simultaneously begin chanting and thinking good thoughts about Al Qaeda in the hopes that our “love rays” will cause them to abandon their war against us. It’s a sad commentary both on the state of the GOP and on the nature of the U.S. national security debate that Gingrich and Huckabee’s advocacy of these ideas hasn’t prevented them from being taken (kind of) seriously.

Was It Terrorism?

It is utterly unsurprising that most of the usual right-wing suspects declared Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan a terrorist as soon as they heard his name was Nidal Malik Hasan. That, however, doesn’t mean that there aren’t difficult questions to ask in regard to Hasan’s motivations. As I see it, there are two main ones: How much did Hasan’s faith play into his decision to commit mass murder? And if the answer to that question is “a lot” does that necessarily make the shooting a terrorist act?

Jeffrey Goldberg writes that “Elite makers of opinion in this country try very hard to ignore the larger meaning of violent acts when they happen to be perpetrated by Muslims,” and suggests this “simple test“:

If Nidal Malik Hasan had been a devout Christian with pronounced anti-abortion views, and had he attacked, say, a Planned Parenthood office, would his religion have been considered relevant as we tried to understand the motivation and meaning of the attack? Of course. Elite opinion makers do not, as a rule, try to protect Christians and Christian belief from investigation and criticism. Quite the opposite. It would be useful to apply the same standards of inquiry and criticism to all religions.

The obvious example here is the assassination of abortion doctor George Tiller by anti-choice activist Scott Roeder. Roeder had a long association with extremist anti-abortion groups, had been caught with bomb-making materials before, and had threatened violence against abortion providers before.

I think relevant to point out that acts of murder by devout Christians do not, as a rule, result in reprisals and discrimination against American Christians. To the extent that some opinion makers were trying to “protect” anyone, I think they are (rightfully) simply trying to avoid jumping to conclusions and lower the temperature on a situation that could have real consequences for American Muslims. I’d also suggest that an aversion to drawing immediate conclusions about Muslims and violence is appropriate, given the very recent American history of using wild claims about Muslims and violence to generate public support for enormously stupid invasions and occupations of Muslim countries. That said, obviously we shouldn’t avoid recognizing the evidence of religious radicalization when it’s there.

As for the question of whether the Ft. Hood shooting qualifies as an act of terrorism, as I noted Friday, despite what Daniel Pipes and Michelle Malkin would have us believe, the definition of terrorism is not “any violence by any Muslim anywhere, at any time, for any reason.” It’s gotten somewhat lost in the years since 9/11, but terrorism actually does have a fairly broadly accepted meaning, “the use of force or the threat of force against non-combatants to achieve a political goal.” Did Hasan have a political goal, as Scott Roeder clearly did? Did Hasan intend his violence to frighten Americans away from enlisting in the military? Did he intend to cause Americans to withdraw their support for U.S. interventions in the Middle East (even more than they already have done)? As James Joyner writes “If he’s just an angry Muslim who went nuts and started shooting people, he’s a psychopath and a killer but not a terrorist.” On the other hand, if it’s determined that Hasan did hope to achieve some broader political goal through his violence, then it should be considered terrorism.

Panel: Iran Will Look To Repair Regional Appeal Damaged After Election

The unrest and repression in Iran following the country’s controversial elections is reversing some of the regional political gains that the Islamic regime enjoyed over the past decade, according to a panel at the University of Maryland today.

Speaking at the symposium After the 2009 Elections: Domestic, Regional, and International Dimensions, Stanford University professor Abbas Milani said that that the Islamic Republic is currently dealing with “the most serious crisis in thirty years,” and “is more divided than it has ever been.” Milani said that “Two pillars of the regime” — Khamenei and Rafsanjani — “are at each others’ throats.” More importantly, Abbas said, not do people no longer believe in the regime, but many of the people “now believe that the regime is afraid of them.”

At the same time, according to Milani,”The international situation has never been as dangerous for [Iran] as it is now.” After significantly increasing its political reach and influence as a result of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, post-election repression has caused the regime to lose legitimacy not only in the eyes of much of the international community, but also in the eyes of many Islamists throughout the Middle East who had previously looked to Iran as a standard bearer of resistance against the West.

Milani referred to a recent paper by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the seminal Islamist organization in the Middle East, which he said described the Brotherhood’s shifting view. “Before June 12,” Milani said, “the view among the Muslim Brotherhood was to support Iran against the West’s bullying.” But now “Brotherhood leaders are finding it more difficult to defend Iran.’

Groups like Hezbollah and Iraq’s Shia parties, Milani said, are also “hedging their bets, [and] are no longer assured that their future lies in an alliance with the Islamic Republic.

Assessing Iran’s appeal to the Arab Middle East, Panelist Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace quipped that “Iran is to the Middle East what Rush Limbaugh is to the US.” They appeal to “the alienated and downtrodden.” Iran’s “Death to America” propaganda resonates most “when people are outraged over U.S. and Israeli behavior”.

UMD’s Shibley Telhami noted the divergence between how Arab governments view Iran and how Arab publics view Iran. “Many Arab regimes are unpopular for their own corruption,” Telhami said “but also, in the case of Egypt and Jordan, because of the Israeli issue.” It is the continuing importance of the Israeli-Palestinian issue to their publics, and anger at regional governments for not having donw more to help the Palestinians, Telhami said, that compels states like Egypt and Jordan to hype the threat from Shiite Iran.

Iran’s loss of appeal could have negative short-term consequences for the region, however. Sadjadpour said that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps is now “essentially running Iranian foreign policy in the region, [while] the foereign ministry been sidelined.” Iranian Foreign Minister Mottaqi “is basically a spokesperson, [and] not deciding policy,” according to Sadjadpour.

The recent seizure by Israel of what Israel claims were Iranian arms headed for Hezbollah could be an ominous sign of what’s to come, as the Iranian regime may look to regain some of its lost resistance bona fides by drawing from the well that never runs dry: The Israel-Palestine conflict.

Report: Israeli F.M. Lieberman Walks Out Whenever Mitchell Raises E. Jerusalem

In the midst of a profile of Secretary of State Clinton, Joe Klein drops a pretty shocking tidbit:

The Palestinians are weak and divided. The Israelis have been difficult, as always: whenever Mitchell raises East Jerusalem in talks with the Israeli Foreign Minister, the Israeli stands up and walks out of the room. Despite Netanyahu’s momentary, tactical enthusiasm for peace talks, his Likud Party has always favored the de facto incorporation of Palestinian lands into the state of Israel.

This is how Israel treats the guarantor of its security? It seems to me that if Prime Minister Netanyahu was actually serious about getting the U.S. to move with greater urgency on Iran — instead of just using the Iran threat (and the Goldstone Report, and whatever else is at hand at any given moment) to forestall serious 2-state negotiations — he might instruct his foreign minister not to behave this way toward the president’s special envoy. That he does not tells you a lot about what the current Israeli government’s actual priorities are.

Klein’s point about the Likud Party’s policy toward the taking of Palestinian lands is also important, and far too little reported. The Likud Party constitution states that “The government headed by the Likud will keep Jerusalem the unified capital of Israel under Israeli sovereignty.” Understanding the importance of East Jerusalem to the Palestinians, saying that Netanyahu supports a negotiated solution but won’t allow for Palestinian sovereignty of Palestinian areas of Jerusalem is like saying that Abbas supports a Jewish state as long as it’s in Burma. It’s a non-starter.

In the face of protests by the United States and the international community, under Netanyahu the Israelis have in fact been ramping up efforts to preclude any division of Jerusalem by strengthening the Jewish presence in Palestinian areas. A new study by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation found that, since 1967, “Israel has expropriated some 35 per cent of East Jerusalem’s territory, over 24,000 dunums of land, from its Palestinian owners”:

The study by the Germany-based organisation examined the building policies in Jerusalem intended to change the facts on the ground and ensure a solid Jewish majority in the city, said a statement e-mailed to The Jordan Times yesterday.

“The study highlights that since 1967, Israeli governments developed building and planning policies that were designed primarily according to the current struggle occurring in Jerusalem. The central tool used by the Israeli governments was the expropriation of land from private hands,” the press release said, adding: “Since 1967, Israel has expropriated over 24,000 dunums, mostly from their Palestinian owners.”

The report, which was prepared in partnership with the Macro Centre for Political Economics, indicated that about 50,000 housing units were built exclusively for the Jewish Israeli population within the framework of new neighbourhoods/settlements, while for the Palestinian population, Israel has built fewer than 600 housing units since 1967 in the scope of government assistance, the most recent of which was built over 30 years ago.

To be fair, this isn’t just a problem of the Likud. All Israeli governments since 1967 are implicated in the attempt to change the demographic character of Jerusalem in order to diminish the Palestinian’s claim to it. The latest report only confirms work done by other organizations like Israel’s B’Tselem, who report that “the government of Israel’s primary goal in Jerusalem has been to create a demographic and geographic situation that will thwart any future attempt to challenge Israeli sovereignty over the city.” Israel’s policy, according to B’Tselem, “gravely infringes the rights of residents of East Jerusalem and flagrantly breaches international law.”

In March, an EU report accused the Israeli government “of using settlement expansion, house demolitions, discriminatory housing policies and the West Bank barrier as a way of ‘actively pursuing the illegal annexation’ of East Jerusalem.”

The document says Israel has accelerated its plans for East Jerusalem, and is undermining the Palestinian Authority’s credibility and weakening support for peace talks. “Israel’s actions in and around Jerusalem constitute one of the most acute challenges to Israeli-Palestinian peace-making,” says the document, EU Heads of Mission Report on East Jerusalem.

Probably shouldn’t hold your breath for Congress to jump on this. On a GOP delegation to Israel in August, Rep. Eric Cantor spoke out strongly in favor of Israel’s right to evict Palestinian families to make way for Jewish settlers.

Americans for Peace Now’s Noam Shelef writes “Rising tensions in Jerusalem can be a matter of life and death. Past Israeli actions that were perceived as efforts to change the status quo in the Old City — such as the opening of the Hasmonean Tunnel in 1996 or the visit to the Temple Mount by Ariel Sharon in 2000 — triggered riots that caused many casualties.” In the event that continuing Israeli provocations in East Jerusalem result in a violent Palestinian response — as many increasingly fear they might — you can bet Congress will hop to it to sign another AIPAC-penned resolution blaming the Palestinians for everything.

Arguments That Don’t Get Better With Time

Defending recent suggestions that National Iranian American Council director Trita Parsi is an instrument of Iran, Reihan Salaam doubles down on one of the hoariest of hoary old conservative foreign policy arguments:

[W]hile Parsi is undoubtedly a believer in democratic liberalism who wants to see Iran radically reform its institutions, he objectively serves Iranian interests insofar as he discourages Western efforts to exert pressure on the regime. This doesn’t make Parsi a bad person. Plenty of Iranian dissidents believe that a democratic Iran should have a nuclear deterrent. Plenty want a denuclearized Iran, yet believe that Western pressure amounts to a kind of imperialism that should be actively resisted. This isn’t that complicated.

Iran doesn’t have an actual AIPAC. Instead, there is a loose network of policy scholars, activists, think tanks, civil servants, etc., who strongly oppose a forward-leaning U.S. policy in the Persian Gulf for a wide, sometimes overlapping variety of reasons. Some of these people have a real financial interest in a better relationship between Washington and Qom [sic], but most don’t. On some issues, members of this loose network get important things right. A lot of realists have raised important questions about the efficacy of sanctions, and they are right to do so. But it’s also true that these voices help today’s Iran. The Iranians among them have added credibility.

Remember when people who opposed the Iraq war — that is, the people who turned out to be right — were accused of being “objectively pro-Saddam“? They didn’t want the U.S. to invade Iraq, and neither did Saddam!

By this reasoning, those in favor of the Iraq war — that is, those who supported what I guess Reihan defines as “a forward-leaning U.S. policy in the Persian Gulf” — “objectively served Iran’s interests” insofar as the war removed Iran’s most hated foe and produced an Iraqi government dominated by Iran’s Shia Islamist clients. This isn’t that complicated. But it is very, very silly.

What is complicated, however, is answering the question of whose interests in Iran, exactly, would be served by further sanctions, or undermined by continued engagement. Reihan writes about “Iran” as if it were one group of people with one set of interests, but of course this is not the case, especially post-June 12.

For example, it’s pretty clear that the gasoline sanctions bill currently wending its way through Congress would hurt the Iranian people while benefiting the Revolutionary Guardsmen who control large portions of the Iranian black market. Does this make all of those who voted for and support the bill objectively pro-IRGC? I doubt anyone would say so. “Objectively pro-Evildoer X” arguments tend to apply only to those who don’t believe that “a forward-leaning U.S. policy” has to necessarily entail unilateral escalation and confrontation.

Mousavi and Iran’s Nuclear Politics

The New York Times has a very good and interesting analysis of the way that post-6/12 internal politics are threatening to derail any nuclear deal between Iran and the P5+1, but I don’t think this is quite right:

Since he was first elected president four years ago, Mr. Ahmadinejad has been the face of confrontation. Now he is talking about cooperation with the international community while the so-called pragmatic conservatives have sharply attacked the nuclear agreement as a potential trick that would undermine Iran’s rights.

Iran’s reformers, stung by Mr. Ahmadinejad’s past criticism of them for suspending enrichment, have also criticized the deal. Led by Mir Hussein Moussavi, a former presidential candidate, they have been looking to take a page from Mr. Ahmadinejad’s own playbook, using the nuclear card to try to score political points.

“To have an opportunity to go at Ahmadinejad for not being nationalist enough, it looks like an opportunity for someone like Moussavi,” said Michael Axworthy, a former diplomat and an Iran expert who lectures at the University of Exeter in England.

As one of the members of Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolutionary inner circle, Mousavi’s nationalist credentials are not in question. That’s a big part of what enables him to maintain his opposition of Ahmadinejad, and by extension to Khamenei, and remain free and alive. It’s true that Mousavi has seized the chance to attack Ahmadinejad from the right on the nuclear question, but this is consistent with Mousavi message during the campaign — back in April, Mousavi was quoted as saying “No one in Iran will accept suspension” of enrichment. And given his own significant past role in Iran’s nuclear program, I think it’s wrong to characterize it as simple opportunism.

After the revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini had decided to abandon the Shah’s nuclear program — begun in the 1950’s under President Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program– because Khomeini felt that going forward with the program would require too much of a dependence on Western assistance for components and expertise. Then-prime minister Mousavi and Hashemi Rafsanjani were key supporters of keeping the nuclear program going. The international community’s — and specifically U.S.’s — support for Saddam’s war against Iran gave a huge boost to their argument, convincing Ayatollah Khomeini that Iran should at least keep open the option of obtaining a strategic deterrent. Mousavi then gave the okay for the purchase of centrifuges on the black market.

All of this is to say that Mousavi has been a long-standing proponent of Iran’s right to enrich, a consensus issue among Iranians, and has as strong a claim as anyone to credit for Iran’s nuclear progress. What does this mean for the possibility of a deal between Iran and the P5+1? Nothing good, unfortunately. As was feared in the wake of the June 12 unrest, we now apparently have arrived at a situation in which neither Iran’s ruling clique nor the opposition can countenance the other being able to deliver rapprochement with the West. Apart from some sort of internal reconciliation, which does not seem to be in the cards, it’s unclear how we arrive at a deal that is both acceptable to the P5+1 and can survive Iranian politics.

‘Prissy Schoolmarm’s Lips’

Rachel Abrams, The Weekly Standard’s Meir Kahane Writing Fellow, manages to mix sexism and racism into her carefully considered analysis of the Obama administration’s climbdown on settlements:

“Palestinian” “leaders” are afloat in a sea of anti-Zionism and self-pity so deep and so wide, so intractable and so paralyzing, they have made bedfellows — odd as they may be — of Bibi Netanyahu and the U.S. secretary of state. Only a few months ago Mrs. Clinton was pursing her prissy schoolmarm’s lips at the Israeli prime minister over even the minimal “natural growth” of settlements; today she is using those same lips to hail his moratorium on new construction — a considerable compromise — as “unprecedented”.

See, Abrams puts Palestinian in quotes because she doesn’t believe the Palestinians really exist as a people, and thus they have no claim to Palestine, and thus no reason to complain when Israel steals Palestinian water and land for settlements. This was a big Israeli propaganda talking point back in the day. It’s discredited now, but still an article of faith for certain elements of the Israeli hard right.

As for Secretary Clinton’s “prissy schoolmarm’s lips,” I suppose I could feign surprise that The Weekly Standard would publish such stuff, but who would be fooled?

Diehl Disappointed That Iranian Dissidents Failing To Follow Western Playbook

In an op-ed that reveals far more about him than about Iran’s Green Movement, Jackson Diehl expresses disappointment that Iran’s dissidents apparently aren’t all Western-style democrats. Diehl kicks things off with a bit of the dusty old Orientalism:

The enduring nature of Iran is to frustrate outsiders who work by the usual rules of political logic or who seek unambiguous commitments. The West relearned that truth last week as the government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad dragged a straightforward plan to swap its enriched uranium for fuel rods into a swamp of double talk and counterproposals.

Those crafty Iranians — they’re so crafty! Unlike we Westerners, who always do things that make perfect rational sense. In point of fact, the P5+1’s uranium swap plan was itself a response to Iran’s original idea “to refuel the Tehran research reactor through purchasing fuel assemblies from international providers, including the United States.” Iran has apparently refused the uranium swap plan, and that’s bad news, but it shouldn’t be too much to expect the Deputy Editorial Page Editor of The Washington Post to be able to analyze this without resorting to tired cultural stereotypes.

Diehl:

I was reminded of [Iran's enduring nature] in a recent conversation with one of the leading representatives outside of Iran of the “green revolution,” who seemed determined to convince would-be Western supporters that they were wasting their time.

Ataollah Mohajerani, who has been a spokesman in Europe for presidential candidate-turned-dissident Mehdi Karroubi, came to Washington to address the annual conference of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. The mostly pro-Israel crowd was primed to cheer what they expected would be a harsh condemnation of Ahmadinejad and his bellicose rhetoric, and a promise of change by the green coalition.

I have to suspect most of the attendees at the WINEP conference were knowledgable enough about Mohajerani, and savvy about Iranian politics in general, not to expect “a harsh condemnation of Ahmadinejad” from one of Karroubi’s spokesmen traveling abroad. Iranian opposition leaders tend to be a bit more circumspect about trying to gain political advantage this way than, say, American conservatives.

Diehl:

What they heard, instead, was a speech that started with a rehashing of U.S. involvement in the 1953 coup in Tehran and went on to echo much of Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric about the United States and the nuclear program. Mohajerani, who served as culture minister in the liberal Iranian government of Mohammed Khatemi in the 1990s, distanced himself from the current president’s denial of the Holocaust and remarked at one point that Iran “should not be more Palestinian than the Palestinians.” [...]

As for Western support for Iranian democracy and human rights, “the green movement has no expectations whatsoever,” Mohajerani declared with a sarcastic smile. “When we say we have no expectations, then our expectations will be met.” On the contrary, he warned against “taking advantage” of Ahmadinejad’s weak regime to strike a deal “that would not be in Iran’s interest.” The suggestion was that the opposition would consider any concessions to the West by Ahmadinejad illegitimate — a position that was borne out by statements last week by green-movement leaders attacking the uranium swap plan.

Like most similar dissident movements, including the movement that overthrew the Shah in 1979, Iran’s Green Movement is made up of a number of factions expressing a fair variety of ideas of what a future Iran should look like. Some of those want a reform of the Islamic Republic, others want to move toward a more explicitly secular system of government. But there is a pretty broad consensus among these groups, as among Iranians in general, in favor of Iranian nationalism, in favor of Iran’s right to nuclear power, and against historically interventionist Western powers seeking to exploit the continuing unrest for strategic gain. This seems to me to be very much in keeping with “the usual rules of political logic.”

To put it simply: Iran’s dissidents are, shockingly, not neoconservatives. Those who are expecting them to become so are the ones who are “wasting their time,” and ours. Give Diehl credit for one thing, though: At least, unlike Dick Cheney henchman John Hannah, Diehl didn’t discover anonymous Iranians who would welcome us as liberators.

Analysis Refutes ‘Anti-Israel’ Charge Against Human Rights Watch

In response to the ongoing propaganda war against human rights NGOs by the Netanyahu government and its outriders here in the U.S. — especially the recent criticism of Human Rights Watch from HRW founder Robert Bernstein — a couple of Canadian social scientists did a statistical analysis of both HRW’s and Amnesty International’s reporting. Here’s what they found:

There is no anti-Israel or anti-democratic conspiracy at work. Like Pakistan or Afghanistan today, Israel is, and has been for many years, a tremendously newsworthy place. This is true for many reasons, but much of the interest must be driven by Israel’s very large claim on America’s overseas assistance envelope and foreign policy resources.

Global watchdogs, like western reporters and politicians, are keen to be heard, seen, and make an impact. As a result, they join the public debate wherever it takes place, prompting them to devote more resources and attention to Israel than to North Korea, Niger, or Burkina Faso.

Note also, however, that Israel’s security forces regularly commit violations against Palestinians and southern Lebanese, and since the statistical models show that actual abuse is also a significant factor, Israeli behaviour — along with other factors — is also driving the coverage.

Careful analysis, in other words, is a calming remedy in times of emotion, allegation, and counter-allegation. Statistics, disdained as boring by so many university students, can, occasionally, offer useful insights not found elsewhere.

For the most committed Likudniks, of course, the fact that their charges of anti-Israel bias are not borne out by a careful analysis of NGO reporting will only be taken as proof that the authors of that analysis themselves — indeed perhaps even the entire social science discipline — suffers from an anti-Israel bias. Certainly that fact that the authors even suggest — and actually assert straight out — that “Israel’s security forces regularly commit violations against Palestinians and southern Lebanese” (a claim that is uncontroversial in any country other than the U.S.) is quite enough to get them tarred as Israel-bashers in some circles. But for those seriously interested in interrogating recent claims made against human rights NGOs, this analysis should be very useful.

There’s no question that Israel has to deal with a precarious security situation, however this does not exonerate the country from its own commitment to uphold certain human rights standards, nor immunize it from criticism when it fails to meet those standards. It’s really unfortunate that, rather than cooperate with an American president who has made it a priority to improve that security situation, Israel’s current government has chosen instead to thumb him in the eye while organizing a smear campaign against its human rights critics.

Krauthammer’s Latest Attempt To Avoid Admitting Error

Calling President Obama’s “compulsion to attack” the previous administration “unseemly,” Charles Krauthammer seems to have invented an alternate history of the U.S. in Afghanistan:

It’s as if Obama’s presidency hasn’t really started. He’s still taking inventory of the Bush years. Just this Monday, he referred to “long years of drift” in Afghanistan in order to, I suppose, explain away his own, well, yearlong drift on Afghanistan. [...]

The history of both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars is a considered readjustment of policies that have failed. In each war, quick initial low-casualty campaigns toppled enemy governments. In the subsequent occupation stage, two policy choices presented themselves: the light or heavy “footprint.”

In both Iraq and Afghanistan, we initially chose the light footprint. For obvious reasons: less risk and fewer losses for our troops, while reducing the intrusiveness of the occupation and thus the chances of creating an anti-foreigner backlash that would fan an insurgency. [...]

It was a perfectly reasonable assumption, but it proved wrong. The strategy failed. Not just because the enemy proved highly resilient but because the allegiance of the population turned out to hinge far less on resentment of foreign intrusiveness (in fact the locals came to hate the insurgents — al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Taliban in Afghanistan — far more than us) than on physical insecurity, which made them side with the insurgents out of sheer fear. [...]

In both places, the deterioration of the military situation was not the result of “drift,” but of considered policies that seemed reasonable, cautious and culturally sensitive at the time but that ultimately turned out to be wrong.

What happened in Afghanistan wasn’t that the Bush administration tried a strategy and it failed; rather, it was that the Bush administration tried a strategy, committed itself to resourcing it, and then lost interest as it refocused attention and resources to the showpiece invasion of Iraq — and then promptly screwed that up, requiring years of further attention and resources, and resulting in further disregard of Afghanistan. The strategic misjudgment of going into Iraq, which Krauthammer vigorously advocated, is, more than anything else, what led to the current crisis over which President Obama is deliberating.

And it’s not just Obama who speaks of “drift” in U.S. Afghanistan policy, but also the current Chairman of the Join Chiefs, Adm. Mike Mullen, who told the Senate Armed Services Committee in September that the U.S. had “very badly under-resourced Afghanistan for the better part of five years.” Speaking to the neoconservative Foreign Policy Initiative in March, Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) said “we have under-resourced Afghanistan for too long, we took our eye off the ball when we went into Iraq. All of our resources were devoted to that effort.” An international aid worker in Afghanistan told the New York Times’ Dexter Filkins that “the tragedy” is “the $70 billion that would have given you enough police and army to stabilize this place all went to Iraq.”

It gets tiresome to have to keep repeating all of this, but not as tiresome as reading Krauthammer’s ever more baroque efforts to avoid owning up to his massive errors in judgment. Like the rest of his neocon brethren, Krauthammer has expended an enormous amount of energy to distract from the fact that his ideas about the transformative potential of American military force have been utterly discredited. It’s a bit comical that the best advice Krauthammer can come up with for the president who has to deal with the consequences of those ideas is: “Needs more force!”

Sen. Levin: Cheney Creating a ‘Poisonous, Dangerous’ Political Environment

Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) pushed back hard today on former Vice-President Dick Cheney’s recent charge that President Obama was “dithering” on making a decision on Afghanistan strategy.

Speaking at a RAND conference on Afghanistan on Capitol Hill, Levin defended the Obama administration’s ongoing strategic review, and condemned those who were “willing to toss cheap and easy lines about presidential ‘dithering,’ or alleging the president is ‘afraid’ to reach a decision, in an effort to push him to immediately, indeed automatically, endorse recommendations from a general who is highly capable, but whose focus is understandably more narrow than that of Secretary Gates or President Obama”:

This pressure on the president goes beyond mistaken. It creates a political environment that is not just poisonous; it is dangerous — it creates growing pressure for decisions before the president has considered all the options, when what the nation needs and the troops deserve is careful, thoughtful deliberation. The wrong decisions could endanger far more lives than taking the time needed to deliberate and reach the right decisions.

Reaching for an historical analogy, Levin said “If we could go back in time, don’t you think President Kennedy would tell us that he wished he would’ve taken the time for his own deliberations, rather than immediately accepting his military advisers recommendations to undertake the Bay of Pigs invasion?”