The Wonk Room

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.

Rule Of Law, Local Ownership Essential For Security Assistance

Nearly every major U.S. plan for Afghanistan under serious consideration by the Obama administration as it deliberates its options involves some form of an expanded train-and-equip program for the Afghan security forces. General Stanley McChrystal’s leaked assessment calls for expanding the Afghan National Army to 240,000 and the Afghan National Police to 160,000. Influential lawmakers like Senator John Kerry (D-MA) and Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) — respectively the chairs of the Senate’s Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees — are skeptical of sending additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan, but agree with McChrystal that the United States must rapidly build Afghanistan’s security forces.

With an apparent consensus on the need to train more Afghan security personnel more rapidly, it’s instructive to take a look at the United States’ smaller scale efforts to build security forces elsewhere in the Middle East. On Tuesday, I attended an event at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on Yezid Sayigh’s report on security sector reform in Palestine, Lebanon and Yemen. Sayigh’s presentation made several interesting points that should have a direct impact on U.S. decision makers and the implementers, most likely in the military, as they prepare for a larger train-and-equip effort in Afghanistan.

First, Sayigh noted that U.S. and EU efforts tend to have competing priorities — in the cases of Palestine, Lebanon, and Yemen, embedding security forces in a democratic rule of law framework versus building an effective counterterrorism force. In the cases he studied, Sayigh found that U.S. and EU efforts tend to focus on creating special counterterrorism units to the detriment of the rest of the security sector, and these new CT units are then prime targets for capture by political factions. Nicole Ball, a panelist at the event, later made the point that even solely CT-focused efforts wind up unsuccessful at achieving CT objective.

Second, success in building and reforming security sectors is possible when there is local ownership of the overall effort. As Sayigh told the attendees, “no amount of external coercion or bribery will work without local ownership.” He cites the relative success in reforming the Palestinian Authority’s security sector under Prime Minister Salaam Fayyad in 2007 and 2008.

These two main points have important implications for an expanded training effort in Afghanistan. The most important in my view is the need to get buy-in for the expanded effort from President Hamid Karzai and his new government, especially the defense ministry. Current Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak has long argued for a bigger Afghan army, and should he remain defense minister it’s likely he and his ministry will be on board with an expanded training mission. U.S. and NATO country diplomats should also work to make sure the opposition to Karzai, such as Abdullah Abdullah’s political faction, also support the new training program.

After buy-in is obtained, the United States will have to avoid Karzai politicizing the security sector. While Karzai has so far avoided overly politicizing Afghanistan’s national security forces, leaders with dubious legitimacy will always face the temptation to create regime protection forces loyal to themselves rather than professional security forces loyal to the state. U.S. and NATO diplomats and military trainers will have to work in tandem to ensure Karzai does not go down the path of security force politicization. Such politicization has occurred in Iraq, where former mayor Najim Abed al-Jabouri has stated entire divisions of the Iraqi army are beholden to the various political parties there. In addition, the United States needs to be careful to not let elite units like the ANA’s commando force become pawns in political jockeying in Kabul.

These largely political issues need to be considered by decision-makers here in Washington and implementers in the military as they embark on an expanded training effort. The key takeaway from our much smaller-scale efforts in Palestine, Lebanon, and Yemen is that these political issues can make or break a training effort, and are therefore integral to success. Fortunately, Afghans regard the ANP and ANA generally positively, and Karzai has shown little inclination toward politicizing them so far. The key for the United States is to keep its eyes open for signs of politicization and make sure Karzai and other Afghan government and political figures stay bought-in to the expanded training program. This task may be difficult, but it’s not insurmountable.

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.

What Does The Pentagon’s ‘Afghanistan-Pakistan Hands Program’ Say About Obama’s ‘Smart Power’ Efforts? »

Our guest blogger is Brian Katulis, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

An interesting effort at the Pentagon caught my attention in recent weeks: the “Afghanistan-Pakistan Hands Program.” Introduced earlier this year, the program raises broader questions about the emerging Obama doctrine on U.S. national security and the right balance of resources between military and non-military efforts.

Yochi Dreazen at the Wall Street Journal mentioned the program in this article earlier last month (calling it the “Afghan Hands”), and this recent article on the Pentagon’s website provides more details.

The program seeks to bring officers from all of the military services to serve for 3-5 years on Afghanistan and Pakistan. The overall aim is to promote greater focus and continuity on these countries as well as reduce the steep learning curve facing personnel on language and cultural issues when they land in Afghanistan. The program has 300 billets, including 121 new positions. Military personnel who enter the program would have their assignments focused on the Af-Pak region of the world –so after serving on the ground, they would rotate to positions in the Defense Department that are focused on this part of the world. The training would include several weeks of language training in Pashto, Dari, and Urdu, as well as combat training. And the Pentagon has stated that those who enter the program won’t be penalized in terms of advancement and seniority – easier said than done with the sometimes rigid bureaucratic procedures governing such a large group of personnel.

The idea for the program emanated from the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s review of Afghanistan strategy that General Stanley McChrystal chaired before he became the current top U.S. commander in Afghanistan.

Obama administration officials are careful to note the obvious – that this program could be scaled back if the commander-in-chief decides to move to a strategy that includes a more modest military footprint in Afghanistan. I doubt that the creation of this program signals all that much about what President Obama will decide in the coming weeks, beyond restating the obvious that we’re seeing a recalibration of more resources to Afghanistan and Pakistan and that the center of gravity for U.S. policy in the broader Middle East and South Asia is shifting eastward.

Two questions I had about the Af-Pak Hands Program:

1. Why did it take eight years to come up with this idea? I don’t find it a particularly innovative idea that America might want to know something about the countries where it sends tens of thousands of soldiers and Marines and spends billions of taxpayer dollars. There are more tactical questions such as whether a few weeks of language training are really enough – as an Arabic speaker, I know how hard it is to develop and then maintain the language skills. The creation and existence of this program demonstrates the gap that exists between what counterinsurgency (COIN) theorists often propose our troops should do and the actual capacity among our troops to implement those tasks.

2. What do Pentagon programs like these mean for the “smart power” ideas that are the threads of an emerging Obama doctrine on national security? The Obama administration’s top national security officials have all talked about the need to focus on investing in diplomacy and development as tools of national power – putting it under the label of smart power. And Afghanistan and Pakistan are probably the toughest test cases of this emerging Obama doctrine of smart power.

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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.

Electronics and Atrocities: Tech Supply Chains Must Do No Harm »

Our guest bloggers are Sarah K. Dreier, a graduate student at the University of Washington and a former researcher at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, and David Sullivan, Research Associate at the ENOUGH project.

From the satellite mapping of atrocities and data-driven prosecution of war criminals to the use of social networking to mobilize against repressive regimes, advances in science and technology hold unprecedented potential to make human rights a reality across the world.

A new report from the Center for American Progress, “New Tools for Old Traumas,” calls on President Obama — recently dubbed “Scientist in Chief” for his unprecedented commitment to research and development — to lead efforts to use these new tools to bring human rights perpetrators to justice; halt ongoing atrocities; and empower victims to fight against injustice. Cell phone companies have crucial roles to play as well because part of the complexity of this issue is ensuring that these tools do not foster human rights atrocities as well as stop them.

Today, the mobile phone that an activist uses to mobilize protesters in Tehran is made with tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold, whose mining in eastern Congo has fueled the world’s deadliest conflict since World War II.

All electronic devises — from satellites to smart phones — require these specialized metals. Tin is used to affix components to circuit boards. Tantalum is a vital element of capacitors that store electrical charge. And tungsten is a key ingredient in vibrate alert functions and LCD displays.

Unfortunately, the mines in eastern Congo that produce these mineral ores fuel and support armed groups on all sides of the conflict. These groups — including the Rwandan Hutu rebels who helped commit the 1994 genocide and Congo’s ill-disciplined and predatory armed forces — exploit impoverished miners and extort exorbitant ‘taxes’ from this trade. They use the profits to finance some of the worst human rights abuses in the world, including an epidemic of sexual violence that makes eastern Congo the most dangerous on the globe to be a woman or a girl.

Eastern Congo is the sight of the worst abuses in the supply chain for electronics products, but it is by no means the only one. From extraction in mining to unsafe and exploitative conditions in manufacturing facilities in Asia, the intricate supply chains that produce these products are opaque and electronics companies have yet to fully assume responsibility for the behavior of their suppliers or their suppliers’ suppliers.

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‘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?”

Is Congress Trying To Torpedo US-Iran Engagement?

Today the House Committee on Foreign Affairs is marking up H.R. 2194, the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act of 2009. Rep. Steny Hoyer has “committed to moving the bill quickly to a vote once it is passed out of the committee.”

The American Enterprise Institute’s Iran Tracker website looked at the potential impact of the gas sanctions, and concluded that “the imposition of sanctions might generate no significant change in Iranian policy in the short term.” It also notes that “the group that should be the target of strengthened sanctions, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), is least likely to be affected”:

Some analysts have argued that the IRGC actually benefits from a more economically isolated Iran because it no longer has to compete with foreign companies for government contracts. For example, one of the main engineering companies under IRGC control, Khatam al-Anbiya, has secured at least $7 billion in government oil, gas, and transportation contracts. Although IRGC companies do not always have the necessary technical expertise for some projects, they still generate revenue by acting as an intermediary between the government and international companies. IRGC members may continue to receive government contracts and subsidy money even if the government adjusted domestic economic policies.

So even the high church of U.S. aggression recognizes that not only would gas sanctions likely not have any effect on Iran’s nuclear policy, they could also end up empowering the very faction whose increased control over Iranian policy has resulted in Iran more aggressively pursuing its nuclear program. And that’s the upside. The downside is that the U.S. Congress moving forward with unilateral sanctions — with all the inevitable hawkish posturing that that entails — at an especially sensitive juncture in negotiations will provide opponents of a deal within the Iranian regime with precisely the demonstration of American bad faith — and thus a convenient excuse to walk away — that they’re looking for.

Harman: More U.S. Troops Not Going To Fix Afghanistan

Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) gave an address at the Center for American Progress Action Fund today, calling on Congress and the Obama administration to revisit and reform key provisions of the PATRIOT Act through a full and open debate.

Afterward, Rep. Harman sat down with ThinkProgress to discuss other issues relating to U.S. national security, such as the war in Afghanistan. Harman recently made news when she told an audience at the Brookings Institution that any further troop increases in Afghanistan “wouldn’t be well received” on Capitol Hill. Asked if she could elaborate on this, Rep. Harman said “I have been focused on this issue, and I am not one who is enthusiastic about adding U.S. troops. I don’t think that is going to fix the problem.”

HARMAN: I think what’s going to fix the problem is a massive effort by us, when we have leverage, which is right now, to fix the corruption problem in the government. It’s the corruption, stupid. If we just let Karzai operate going forward with a system of cronies I think that is a guarantee that the population of Afghanistan won’t support its own government and will move increasingly to the Taliban. So, that’s against our interest. So, we ought to eliminate the corruption there and set up a system where Afghans want to fight for their own country over time.

Watch it:

Indyk: The Israelis Hated Eastern European Missile Defense

At an American Enterprise Institute event today — “Should Israel Attack Iran?” (yes, they’re obviously trying to get peoples’ attention) — former Ambassador Martin Indyk revealed an interesting wrinkle to the story of Eastern European missile defense system, which the Obama administration canceled last month, a move conservatives have heavily criticized as — what else? — appeasement.

Recounting recent meetings with Israeli national security officials, Indyk said that “the Israelis were upset at the way that Bush had offended Russia with missile defense” in Eastern Europe. The Israelis, like many Americans and most of the rest of the world, saw the deployment of untested missile defense technology in Poland and the Czech Republic as needlessly provocative of Russia, whose support is seen as necessary for any effort to bring Iran’s nuclear program under control.

Speaking about President Obama’s engagement policy, Indyk said “The key to this strategy has always been Russia,” because of their close relationship with the Iranians, and Obama “is bringing them [the Russians] around.” After the administration announced the canceling of the missile defense system, Indyk said, the Russians told the Iranians “if you do not go along with the proposal to ship out low enriched uranium” to Russia for reprocessing, “then you will be on your own.”

President Obama’s diplomacy “is about trying to concert the international community into a solid block against the Iranian nuclear program such that the Iranians would see that it is not in their interest to pursue nuclear weapons.” Indyk said “That is what is happening now.”

Amb. John Bolton, who was one of the biggest critics of the administration’s canceling of the missile defense system, was dismissive. “The Iranians are never going to be talked out of that effort” to obtain nuclear weapons, he said. As to the question of whether Israel should attack, Bolton said only that he believed “the use of force is necessary.” Bolton did, however, say that he did not think Israel “need[ed] to, or should” use tactical nuclear weapons against Iran.

AEI analyst Michael Rubin, who has been pretty clear-eyed about the costs of military action, said that in the event of an attack either by the U.S. or Israel, “Iranians will rally around the flag.” As for the idea that the Iranian people would rise up against the regime after such an attack, Rubin said “it’s wishful thinking. The best thing that ever happened to Islamic revolution was Saddam Hussein’s invasion” in September 1980, which allowed the still-wobbly regime of Ayatollah Khomeini to unify the country and consolidate power.

‘Nothing Is Agreed Until Everything Is Agreed’ »

Our guest blogger is Richard Parker, Executive Director of the American Foreign Policy Project*.

Today’s news that Iran has changed its mind and rejected a deal to send three-quarters of its low-enriched uranium stockpile to Russia no doubt will be heralded by opponents of engagement as proof that Iran is just stalling for time while it builds a nuclear weapon, so let the sanctions and bombs fly.

A much more plausible explanation, however, is that Tehran may have regarded the deal as a little too good (for the West) to be true. Think about it for just a moment from Tehran’s perspective, a feat of imagination that eludes most neocons. Under this deal, Iran would give away three-quarters of its biggest bargaining chip in the nuclear talks (its LEU stockpile) at the outset of talks. What Iran would get in return would be a status-quo negative: a tacit agreement that the West would not try to bomb or cripple Iran with sanctions for at least a few more months, during which time the West of course would demand further concessions.

I’ve never bargained with Tehran. But I did work as a trade negotiator at the Office of the US Trade Representative and remember well the mantra we practically lived and breathed by in trade talks: “Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.” The deal that Tehran just walked away from would have been a major departure from that rule, in the West’s favor. From public reports, what has not yet been agreed — or even seriously discussed — is the ultimate question of whether Iran, at the end of the day, will be allowed to enrich uranium to low levels under comprehensive IAEA safeguards, as Iran has maintained for six years that it has the right to do, and is determined to do.

With that huge issue still out there, unresolved, why should Iran make major concessions now? Is it really so totally incomprehensible that Iran might regard (a) a tacit western promise not to club Iran for a few more months as a less-than-adequate quid pro quo for (b) a very tangible concession on the disposition of Iran’s uranium stockpile? The promise will be much easier to reverse than the stockpile will be to replace.

Does this mean we can be confident that Iran is bargaining in good faith and has no weapons program? Of course not. But if we don’t trust Iran, the thing to do is not to fuss and fume over Iran’s open-safeguarded enrichment to low levels and Natanz. What we need to do is get into place, as rapidly as possible, a comprehensive safeguards agreement that applies nationwide and gives us the maximum chance of making sure there aren’t more clandestine facilities out there. Yet right now, while all eyes focus on Natanz, we have little or no reliable means of knowing or verifying what is going on across the rest of Iran.

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Israel Hawks Gone Wild

The upcoming conference of the pro-Israel, pro-peace group J Street has unhinged a faction of hawkish pro-Likud types, who see J Street’s pro-peace message as a threat to their particular conception of the U.S.-Israel relationship. Yesterday I posted on Lenny Ben-David, the former AIPAC researcher, Netanyahu adviser, and current West Bank settler who launched a racist attack on J Street, accusing them of consorting with Arabs.

Today the Weekly Standard’s Mike Goldfarb carries on the effort, going after journalist Helena Cobban, who is participating in a discussion panel next week to which I’ll also be contributing. The panel is neither endorsed by nor connected with J Street, but this doesn’t matter to Goldfarb, who is fairly desperate to smear the organization with anything at hand.

Goldfarb accuses Cobban of using “Holocaust metaphors when talking about Israel.” Cobban’s offense was pointing out that the watchtowers, walls and barbed-wire of Israel’s separation barrier reminded her of a concentration camp. Goldfarb is also outraged that Cobban noted the rather uncontroversial — though inconvenient for a Muslim-baiter like Goldfarb — fact that Hamas’ program includes a strong social work component, and that defining them solely as a “terrorist organization” fails to understand the nature of their appeal to many Palestinians under Israeli occupation.

But Goldfarb’s limited knowledge of these issues is really beside the point. Cobban has studied the Arab-Israeli conflict for decades, and has spent a career working to build bridges of understanding between the various sides. Helena is a friend of mine, and her deep commitment to a peaceful and just solution to the conflict speaks for itself. In fact, she’s so well regarded that Mike Goldfarb himself has cited her work.

Goldfarb, on the other hand, has written in favor of killing Palestinian children in order to deter attacks on Israel.

It’s understandable that pro-Likud hawks like Ben David and Goldfarb (who is also a friend of mine) are freaking out about J Street, whose pro-Israel, pro-peace message threatens their deeply held view that the Arabs — or, depending on the day, Iranians — are the problem, and Israeli violence is the solution. Being targeted by wild, slanderous attacks like theirs is, unfortunately, the price one often pays for engaging in the public debate on this issue.

And here’s a new target for them: Former Israeli Foreign Minister and current Opposition Leader Tzipi Livni. Steve Clemons posted a letter from Livni congratulating J Street on its inaugural conference, noting that J Street shares her vision of “ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by realizing the vision of two nation state living side by side in peace and security is in the best interests of Israel, the United States, the Palestinians and the region as a whole.”

“In my view,” Livni writes, “the discussion [in] the pro-Israel community of what best advances Israel’s cause should be inclusive and broad enough to encompass a variety of views, provided it is conducted in a respectful and legitimate manner.” I anxiously await Goldfarb’s explanation of how Livni isn’t really pro-Israel.

Former Bibi Adviser Launches Racist Attack

In a long, meandering, barely-coherent screed against the pro-Israel, pro-peace group J Street published in Pajamas Media, former AIPAC researcher, Netanyahu adviser, and current West Bank settler Lenny Ben-David attempts to raise suspicion about the group by noting that some of its supporters are Arab:

Take for example, the case of Rebecca Abou-Chedid. She appears in the federal elections records as contributing to J Street’s PAC. Her occupation is listed as “consultant” for “USUS LLC.” But until recently, she was also the national political director at the Arab American Institute where she “was responsible for formulating AAI’s positions on foreign policy … and represented the Arab American community with Congress as well as the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, and State.” Today, Abou-Chedid is the director of outreach at the New America Foundation’s Middle East Task Force.

Spencer Ackerman writes “You will notice that nowhere in Lenny Ben-David’s post is there any accusation that Rebecca has taken any sort of objectionable stand or made any sort of objectionable point. And that’s because it is impossible to do so.” Ben-David’s attack on is premised entirely on her Arab background, and on the presumption that it is impossible for those of Arab background to be both pro-Israel and pro-peace.

MJ Rosenberg, who worked with Ben-David when he was research director for AIPAC, writes that Ben-David “compiled files on everyone who criticized Israeli policies in any way and used the material he gathered to destroy careers.” Looks like Ben-David’s habits haven’t changed much — only now he’s going after people simply for the offense of having an Arab name. “The racist tribalism” behind Ben-David’s argument, writes Andrew Sullivan, “is surely part of the problem, not the solution.”

Even Jeffrey Goldberg, who regularly smears those with whom he disagrees on the issue of Israel, thinks Ben-David’s post was too much. That’s saying something.

Beware Of Neocons Bearing Best Case Scenarios For War

One of the most interesting things about Christopher Hitchens’ latest argument for war — other than its extraordinarily bad timing, considering the positive news coming out of Vienna — is that he really seems to be under the impression that the Iraq war has gone well, and that he didn’t come out of it looking like kind of a fool.

Hitchens writes that opponents of the Iraq invasion claimed that “a military move against Saddam Hussein would incite him to saturate our troops with chemical weapons, ignite the oilfields, destroy Israel, inflame the ‘Arab street,’ and overthrow every friendly Middle Eastern government, etc., etc.”

Those of us who wanted to get rid of these hideous governments were bombarded with arguments that said, in effect, they are not only a threat but actually a lethal threat, and their forces are made up of people who are 10 feet tall.

Leaving aside how many of the war’s opponents did, in fact, make these specific claims, it’s pretty bizarre that Hitchens seems to consider it a vindication that all that did happen in Iraq was that the war attracted thousands of jihadists whose brutal attacks on civilians lit off a sectarian civil war which killed over 100,000 people and maimed many times that while functioning as an insurgent training ground for those who are now killing our troops in Afghanistan with tactics and tech developed in Iraq. Oh, and Iran also used that time to ramp up its nuclear program while trying not to laugh as the U.S. established Iran’s former clients as Iraq’s new rulers.

But Hitchens simply ignores this, as acknowledging it would make it difficult for him to portray opponents of forcibly liberating disarming Iran as a bunch of Nervous Nellies:

I have never been present for any discussion of any measures that could even thinkably be taken against Tehran that does not focus obsessively and exclusively on the possibly calamitous outcomes. Israel hits Iran and — well, you fill in the rest. The target sites are, anyway, too much dispersed and too deeply buried. You know how it goes.

And that’s how Hitchens simply waves away the concerns of people like Defense Secretary Gates, Anthony Cordesman, and Gen. Anthony Zinni, to name only a few who of those who have acknowledged that an attack on Iran — while setting back the Iranian nuclear program only temporarily — would “give rise to regional instability and conflict as well as terrorism,” as Cordesman wrote in a report earlier this year. But you know how it goes.

As for the “10 feet tall” argument, this is another straw man, an increasingly common one among the “bomb Iran” set. The key thing to understand in regard to Iran’s likely response to an attack, however, is precisely that Iran is not 10 feet tall, and Iran knows this, and has based its asymmetric retaliatory capability around this fact, building strategic depth through relationships with militant organizations throughout the region, which would enable it to cause trouble for U.S. interests and allies in various places and ways.

The bottom line here is that war is a serious, deeply consequential and unpredictable business, to be avoided whenever possible. Those who traffic in best case scenarios are simply asking to be ignored. It speaks well of Hitchens that he has the good sense to be uncomfortable with the label “neoconservative,” but as long as he persists in equating “a robust American attitude toward totalitarian and aggressive states” with “launching stupid and counterproductive wars,” the label will, alas, continue to apply.

Investigating Bernstein’s Claims Against HRW

Human Rights Watch founder Robert Bernstein takes to the New York Times’ op-ed page to accuse his former organization of “issuing reports on the Israeli-Arab conflict that are helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.”

At Human Rights Watch, we always recognized that open, democratic societies have faults and commit abuses. But we saw that they have the ability to correct them — through vigorous public debate, an adversarial press and many other mechanisms that encourage reform.

That is why we sought to draw a sharp line between the democratic and nondemocratic worlds, in an effort to create clarity in human rights. We wanted to prevent the Soviet Union and its followers from playing a moral equivalence game with the West.

I agree that it’s sometimes, though not always, useful when criticizing human rights violations to make a distinction between democratic and nondemocratic societies. At best, however, this only provides some benefit of the doubt to democratic societies — it doesn’t provide a “Get Out Of Geneva Conventions Free” card. And I’m not sure how or whether this distinction should apply to the territories that Israel has held under military occupation since 1967.

For Palestinians living in the West Bank, almost every movement — to school, to work, to visit friends or family — is circumscribed by the arbitrary decisions of Israeli military rule. Attempts by Palestinians to challenge and correct Israeli abuses through the legal system, in the rare cases that they actually see the inside of a courtroom, and the even rarer cases that they are actually successful, are often then simply ignored by Israeli occupation authorities. Non-violent protests are violently suppressed. (And, of course, life in the West Bank is a vacation compared to life in Gaza, which is maintained by Israel as the world’s largest prison.)

If we’re to draw a hard line between free and authoritarian societies, then, Israeli-occupied Palestine clearly belongs on the authoritarian side of that line. Israel could begin to solve this problem by ending its occupation, withdrawing from the settlements, and cooperating with U.S. efforts to achieve a two-state solution, but Netanyahu has apparently decided that a better strategy is to continue the occupation, increase the settlements, and attack Israel’s critics as anti-Semites and self-hating Jews.

Bernstein continues that, compared to Israel, “Arab and Iranian regimes rule over some 350 million people, and most remain brutal, closed and autocratic, permitting little or no internal dissent.”

The plight of their citizens who would most benefit from the kind of attention a large and well-financed international human rights organization can provide is being ignored as Human Rights Watch’s Middle East division prepares report after report on Israel.

This is a powerful claim, and it would good if Bernstein offered some data to support it. But he didn’t, because it’s not true. A 2005 report in The Forward determined that “Human Rights Watch has in fact devoted more attention to each of five other nations in the region — Iraq, Sudan, Egypt, Turkey and Iran — than to Israel.” A look at HRW’s website reveals that the organization has in fact prepared “report after report” on countries throughout the Middle East, everything from freedom of association in Morocco to Kurdish rights in Iran. Of the five reports this year that dealt with the Israel-Palestine conflict, all five focused on the Gaza war — understandable, given the serious regional implications of the event — and two of those specifically focused on and criticized Palestinian actions.

Obviously, criticism coming from Robert Bernstein carries a lot more weight than smears from the likes of Gerald Steinberg or David Bernstein. Unfortunately, his criticism traffics in the same unsubstantiated — and unfalsifiable — assertions of bias, and the actual claims he does, like theirs, make don’t really withstand scrutiny.

It is true, as Bernstein notes, that Israel has numerous domestic human rights organizations. But what he doesn’t mention is that many, if not most of them have come to the exact same conclusion as their international counterparts: The Israeli assault on Gaza was rife with abuses and attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure. Noting these allegations does nothing to excuse or diminish Hamas’ behavior, nor the behavior of authoritarian regimes throughout the region. But rather than investigate these allegations, as the United States has repeatedly encouraged it to do, the Netanyahu government has instead chosen to declare war on human rights NGOs. It’s unfortunate that Bernstein should now make himself part of that effort.