Noah Pollak already wrote the measured and reasoned version of this post yesterday so pretty much all that's left for me is vitriol. It's worth emphasizing, then, the unblinking, unthinking hypocrisy that this administration hides behind when they get called out on their Allies Last Enemies First diplomacy. A verifiable mix-up...

It was self-evident that Netanyahu's "stupidity not malice" explanation for Ramat Shlomo was accurate. Just days earlier, he had moved effectively to shut down Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat's incendiary plan to demolish dozens of Arab homes in Silwan. And yet, acting doubtless on the orders of her president, she resorted to what the ADL - no hysterical critic of the Obama administration - termed "gross overreaction."

... constitutes a mortal "insult" to Secretary Clinton. But Assad and Ahmadinejad standing side by side and actually literally insulting her by name?

Which part of the new "positive, constructive U.S.-Syrian relationship" involves having the US Secretary of State getting publicly mocked by grinning totalitarian thugs? "President Bashar al-Assad and his Iranian counterpart Mahmoud Ahmadinejad signed a bilateral deal to remove travel visas and attended a Muslim ceremony in the Syrian capital... "We must have understood Clinton wrong because of bad translation or our limited understanding, so we signed the agreement to cancel the visas," Assad said. "I find it strange that they (Americans) talk about Middle East stability and peace and the other beautiful principles and call for two countries to move away from each other," he added. Ahmadinejad told a joint news conference: "Clinton said we should maintain a distance. I say there is no distance between Iran and Syria." He added: "We have the same goals, same interests and same enemies.""

Suffice to say that our outreach to Syria continues apace.

Also apropos of this nonsense, you should check out the NY Sun editorial on Clinton's credibility as she heads into AIPAC. It turns out that the woman who smooched blood libeler Suha Arafat before becoming pro-Israel before becoming mildly anti-Israel before detonating the US-Israeli alliance - it turns out that she actually has a history of strong Arab financial connections. Strange, that.

For what its worth Shmuel Rosner thinks she'll get plenty of applause. Presumably he imagines that she'll mouth empty banalities - "Israel's security" etc etc - and that the crowd will pretend to believe her. I think he's wrong. I think she'll go in there talking about how Israel's future requires concessions - "difficult choices" etc etc - and that she'll be greeted by stony silence.

Then I think that anti-Israel journalists will muse sophisticatedly about how Obama had to rough up Israel because "Netanyahu's intransigence" was stymieing the President's vigorous appeasement of the Muslim world (my language, not theirs). In between they'll gloat about how the all-powerful Israel Lobby has been cut down, which after all is what Jesse Jackson promised Obama would do.

References and related after the jump...

Mere Rhetoric, October 18, 2008:

Memo to ostensibly pro-Israel Obama supporters: circa 2010 there are going to be headlines about the "severe crisis in US-Israel relations." You're not going to be able to say that you didn't know.

Reuters, March 15, 2010:

Israeli envoy sees "historic crisis" with U.S.:report - Israel and the United States are in a "crisis of historic proportions" over a settlement dispute that has brought relations to a 35-year low, Israel's ambassador to Washington was quoted on Monday as saying.

The Washington Post writeup about Clinton's over the top condemnation also included the line "the close allies are facing their deepest crisis in two decades." But the headline wasn't as on point and elegant as with the Reuters story, so that's what you got.

The idea is nonetheless the same throughout. Netanyahu had announced a temporary construction freeze that excluded East Jerusalem. Clinton had described the freeze as an "unprecedented" concession. Then Israel announced new construction within that framework.

But sensing the opportunity to pick a public fight with Israel, Obama personally ordered Biden to "condemn" the Jewish State. Clinton followed up by insisting that the US had been "insulted." For their part the Palestinians tweaked their ever-expanding construction halt demands, setting up Israel to take the blame for failed proximity talks. All over a neighborhood that borders two other Jewish neighborhoods and that had never, ever been controversial before.

Coincidentally - and just in time - there are a flurry of articles being published with different reasons why the US-Israeli relationship should be abandoned. This morning's is from Mark Perry, who "reports" how Israelis are getting American boys and girls killed. His FP article fails to note his previous job as an Arafat adviser, though that detail did seem salient to Laura Rozen. Also seemingly salient: "There seems to be more in the ether in recent days suggesting a diverging of perceived U.S. and Israeli interests in the region." Yes, there do seem to be that.

The really obnoxious thing? We're supposed to pretend that this policy is a reluctant recourse by an otherwise pro-Israel administration. Or that journalists are slowly discovering and objectively describing the situation. Come on now.

References and related after the jump...

We're a couple hours away from today's episode of One Jerusalem Radio's Omri Ceren Show. With Mitchell and Biden on the ground the show is going to be extremely diplomacy-heavy, making allowances for the time needed to cover this-week-in-Iranian-warmongering. You can tune in live via the show page or the episode page starting at 6:30pm PST, and as always I'll have the chatroom and the phone lines open for questions and comments.

There are functionally two full interviews this week. Larry Greenfield, Claremont Institute Fellow and Executive Director of The Reagan Legacy Foundation, comes on as a special guest to talk about "Israel's Increasingly Dangerous Neighborhood," the enormous writeup he just completed on the recent Jerusalem Conference. Given his role in conservative and Jewish politics - the Obama campaign banned surrogates from debating him when he was head of the California RJC and then NJDC moron Aaron Kayek targeted him in one of the dumbest attacks I've ever read - that comes up too.

Today's Diker segment goes for almost 20 minutes, which is what you'd expect given that the show topic is diplomacy and he's among Israel's top diplomacy analysts. One of the money lines from the beginning of the conversation: "we haven't seen this type of sympathy by an American administration... really since Carter, and even the Carter administration was somewhat more measured in its approach." Cf. the rest of the Israeli political world, where that exact conclusion is on its way to becoming conventional wisdom. You'll want to stay till the end where he evaluates whether Obama will actually succeed in detonating the US-Israel alliance. Tough to say, tough to say.

Official show blurb:

Omri interviews Larry Greenfield, Claremont Institute Fellow and Executive Director of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. They discuss Greenfield's recent missile defense talk at the 7th Annual Jerusalem Conference, the political climate in Israel and within American Jewry, and the future of the US conservative movement. Dan Diker also joins the show, talking about Israel's recent public and state-to-state diplomacy in the context of the Iranian threat. In between Omri runs down the week's news on global terrorism, Middle East geopolitics, and the left's Big Government push in the United States.

I'm also in the process of going over all the old shows and reediting them to make them listenable (or at least to remove cracks and pops - any unlistenable content will, alas, stay the way it is). More on that in the next week or so. In the meantime, see you in a bit.

References:
* Jerusalem's Misgivings with Larry Greenfield [TOCS]
* Israel's Increasingly Dangerous Neighborhood [Larry Greenfield]
* Obama Campaign Demands Ban On Republican Jewish Group, Escalates Thuggish Intimidation [MR]
* NJDC Tool Aaron Keyak Helpfully Illustrates How Liberal Activists Sneeringly Cocoon Themselves In Asinine Arguments And Dishonest Smears [MR]
* Politics: Not afraid to speak her mind [JPost]
* Israeli Officials: Hey, Do You Think That Maybe Obama's Going To Detonate The US-Israel Relationship? [MR]

Related Mere Rhetoric Categories:
* The Omri Ceren Show
* Anti-Israel Diplomacy
* Jewish Politics

This is the second time in as many weeks that the State Department has, for reasons that are largely unfathomable, unilaterally taken an anti-Iran option off the table. Two Wednesdays ago Clinton told Al-Arabiya that military action wasn't even a consideration, which had the predictable effect of emboldening the mullahs. Now comes this announcement, which basically tells Tehran they don't have anything to fear from sanctions. Wonderful.

Remember during the election, when Obama's surrogates wouldn't shut up about "strong sticks and strong carrots"? The original liberal tagline was actually "real sticks and real carrots" but apparently "strong" focused better than "real" so that's what we got. Dennis Ross was even dispatched to reassure Jewish voters that the era of "weak sticks and weak carrots" was over. Then after the election Clinton went to the Hill and - trying to reassure Congresspeople who were nervous about Obama's appeasement - she explicitly promised to mobilize "crippling" international sanctions if outreach failed.

Nope:

The United States said on Thursday it does not aim to impose crippling sanctions on Iran but rather to pressure the Iranian government to change course on its nuclear program while protecting ordinary people. "It is not our intent to have crippling sanctions that have... a significant impact on the Iranian people," State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley told reporters. "Our actual intent is... to find ways to pressure the government while protecting the people."

On the plus side, this is more honest than the last few months' of spin. Obama doesn't have the means to establish a robust international sanctions regime, even if he wanted to. The Iranians knew that and bragged about it. The pretense of credible sticks was meant for American audiences, the better to buy Obama breathing room for ever more engagement. Just because previous efforts had drawn humiliating responses didn't mean the approach was misguided. It was just that Iran's "unsettled political situation" was getting in the way!

But that only takes you so far. Eventually you need new excuses for why a crippling sanctions regime has failed to materialize. Giving up on the whole idea - that's certainly one excuse.

The other option was to continue unblinkingly asserting that Iran was still open for talks, no matter how many previous deadlines they had brazenly ignored. Again - remember "Obama says he wants progress with Iran by year's end?" If 2009 ended without a deal - the President intoned - then sanctions would be used "to ensure that Iran understands we are serious." Believable!

References and related after the jump...

Which part of the new "positive, constructive U.S.-Syrian relationship" involves having the US Secretary of State getting publicly mocked by grinning totalitarian thugs?

President Bashar al-Assad and his Iranian counterpart Mahmoud Ahmadinejad signed a bilateral deal to remove travel visas and attended a Muslim ceremony in the Syrian capital... "We must have understood Clinton wrong because of bad translation or our limited understanding, so we signed the agreement to cancel the visas," Assad said. "I find it strange that they (Americans) talk about Middle East stability and peace and the other beautiful principles and call for two countries to move away from each other," he added. Ahmadinejad told a joint news conference: "Clinton said we should maintain a distance. I say there is no distance between Iran and Syria." He added: "We have the same goals, same interests and same enemies."

Interesting bit about enemies at the end. If Khamenei had recently and officially emphasized that the US was an enemy of Iran, that would be even more troubling than Assad's sneering jokes about bad translations.

In any case - very disappointing. Sure Assad rebuffed Obama's craven obsequiousness - six high-level delegations to Syria, promises to restore relations, waivers for aircraft parts, deals worth billions in cash, and so on. And sure he's exporting jihadism across the Middle East, financing among others the AQI cretins trying to reignite the insurgency. And sure his interference in Iraq got so severe that the Iraqis appealed directly to the UN. And sure he just threatened to saturation bomb Israeli civilians. And sure he's reestablishing Syria's stranglehold on Lebanon, having forced Hariri to capitulate.. And sure he's extending his strategy of building multiple, redundant nuclear sites.

But I really thought he'd come around this time.

Guess not.

References and related after the jump...

Compare...

Washington refused to endorse British claims to over the Falkland Islands yesterday... Despite Britain's close alliance with the US, the Obama Administration is determined not to be drawn into the issue. It has also declined to back Britain's claim that oil exploration near the islands is sanctioned by international law, saying that the dispute is strictly a bilateral issue... a State Department spokesman told The Times. "The US recognises de facto UK administration of the islands but takes no position on the sovereignty claims of either party."

... and contrast...

The Obama administration criticized Israel Wednesday for designating two shrines on Palestinian territory as national heritage sites... Underscoring those difficulties, the State Department on Wednesday sharply criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government for adding two shrines in the West Bank to Israel's list of national heritage sites... State Department spokesman Mark Toner said the administration viewed the move as "provocative" and unhelpful to the goal of getting the two sides back to the table.

The Palestinians have sovereignty over Jewish holy sites in the West Bank - which they've historically desecrated and destroyed - but the UK has no sovereignty over the Falklands. Nice to see the White House responding to increasingly public UK concerns that "Obama has it in for Britain." Overflowing with nuance and agility, is this government.

Add this to Obama's early snub of Brazil, which included misspelling Silva's name and was later repaid in the form of Brazilian backing for Ahmadinejad. But presumably Argentina now owes us a favor, so we've got that in our pocket in case they ever magically become the largest country in South America or a nuclear-armed European NATO ally.

Just out of curiosity, if Obama was trying to detonate all of the US's traditional alliances - what would he be doing differently?

References and related after the jump...

It'll be interesting to watch the guy who proved so critical to Iranian nuclearization...

The poor management of the crisis with Iran has to be attributed largely to [ElBaradei]. The Egyptian diplomat is responsible for his organization's placatory approach toward the Iranian nuclear program. For almost a decade, starting in 1992, the agency inspectors did not notice that Iran had a secret nuclear program that violated its international commitments. Even when the agency had the information, in 2002... ElBaradei ignored it and made every possible effort to undermine its reliability. He intervened repeatedly to distort his inspectors' reports on Iran's nuclear sites, and he made sure that the IAEA's periodic reports about Iran would be camouflaged in diplomatic gibberish. Time and again they repeated the phrase that "no proof was found" that Iran's nuclear program had military aspects, even though they were blatantly obvious. ElBaradei was opposed to sanctioning Iran, not to mention military action, and repeatedly attempted to conduct a dialogue with Tehran in order to reach a compromise.

... take control of Tehran's most powerful Arab rival. From a certain perspective it almost seems like the basis for a kind of de facto anti-Western alliance:

Nobel Peace laureate Mohamed ElBaradei, former head of the UN nuclear watchdog, is awaited in Cairo as police warn his supporters not to mark the homecoming of a would-be electoral challenger to President Hosni Mubarak. ElBaradei, who is expected to fly home on Friday, has repeatedly called for democratic change in Egypt since stepping down as head of the International Atomic Energy Agency in November. On the eve of his return, he reaffirmed his determination to "do everything I can for Egypt to advance toward democracy and economic and social progress."

When he wasn't busy denying Iranian weaponization - here he is calling highly enriched Iranian uranium "of little significance" - he was perennially promising to "pin down" deals with the mullahs. When his summits fell through, as they inevitably did, he delayed Western responses by asserting that Iran was still considering offers. And in the twilight of his term - when it was clear that Iran was intent on weaponization and that negotiations were a cover - he continued deriding even non-military solutions because sanctions "really don't resolve issues." From "no problem" to "no solution" in just a few years.

Though you know who really does merit close IAEA scrutiny, per this tool? Israel. Because someone hatched a feverish tale that the IDF used uranium against Gazans, so of course that had to be probed. And not only are Israelis a bigger threat than North Korea - another country that got nukes under ElBaradei's watch - they're actually the number one threat in the Middle East. Not Iran, which is actively engaged in undermining the stability of the Egyptian government. Israel.

Should ElBaradei become President, those kinds of geopolitical delusions probably won't be a problem. The Middle East is a pretty forgiving region. You can afford to indulge in the occasional fantasy.

Speaking of the region, he's also pledging to open up Gaza. That's an extremely popular position domestically and it fits in addition to fitting the rest of his political inclinations would be an extremely popular campaign platform. Sure it would be an invaluable boost to Hamas, facilitating their contacts with Iran and giving them an endless supply of goods to siphon off for military purposes (think of all the medicine grenades!) But he's a humanitarian. You don't hate humanitarianism, do you?

Regardless. He's pretty popular in Egypt right now. He hopes - and I'm quoting - "to be an instrument for change." So this is probably going to become a thing.

References and related after the jump...

Fresh off creeping rapprochement with the US - Obama just reinstated our ambassador and State has dropped their travel advisory - Syria wants you to know that they're ready to return to the Western fold. Or to light up the Middle East in the process of completing a decade-old genocidal war against the Middle East's sole, beleaguered democracy. But definitely one of the two:

Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem recently told Israelis that "you know that war at this time will reach your cities." The statement bolsters the recognition that the Syrian strategy in a future war will be based on targeting population centers in Israel. It seems that after the enemy's attempts to act through conventional military means and terrorism failed, it tried to locate Israel's weak point. Damascus sees our cities as a weak point. The Syrian minister's comments show the extent to which Damascus has adopted a terrorist modus operandi that is no different from that of Hezbollah or Hamas.

It must be nice to have the freedom to explicitly threaten the other side's civilians. Israel, of course, focuses exclusively on military targets. Which isn't something they should be rewarded for - it's what decent countries do - but the contrast is stark. Not only does the Israeli political echelon refrain from threatening war crimes, but the IDF really does goes out of its way to limit civilian casualties. And yet for some reason, over the last year, Syria has grown closer to America while US/Israeli relations are at historic lows. Strange, that.

Syria's also skirting their NPT obligations and refusing the IAEA access to their bombed nuclear site. Israel haters will point out that the Jewish State isn't even a member of the NPT, so Syria is more in line with global norms than is the Jewish State. Then someone will remind them that Israel's entire concern is that international law is politicized, and that Israel's Arab enemies don't live up to their treaty obligations. So this spectacle crystallizes exactly why Israel refuses to sign ostensibly balanced treaties that in practice allow totalitarian regimes to cheat with impunity. Then the Israel haters will scream about how it's not right to accuse them of antisemitism and shoot off an email to Andrew Sullivan.

Rational debate.

References and related after the jump...

So perfectly does this fit the "Obama is deepy anti-Israel" narrative that I'm almost inclined to doubt it's true. A story about how the WH is generically hamstringing weapons sales, fair enough. The Pentagon is again dragging its feet on Israel's Joint Strike Fighter requests, because apparently the two year delay created by WH "obstacles" hasn't sufficiently damanged US/Israeli relations. So there's some precedent.

But blocking Apaches that are critical to Israel's urban warfighting because Israel used them to fight an urban war - that's meat a bit too red. And yet, two separate sources:

The administration... is delaying an upgrade project for Israel's military on the grounds that it could be deployed against Palestinian militants. Industry sources said the Defense Department has taken measures to slow down an upgrade of Israel's AH-64 Apache attack helicopter fleet. The sources said at least three Apache helicopters have been awaiting an upgrade at Boeing, the prime contractor... The sources said the delay of the Apache project stemmed from the White House's concern that Israel was rebuilding its military for another war. They said... Obama was dismayed by the widespread use of the Apache and other U.S. platforms during the January 2009 war with the Hamas regime in the Gaza Strip. "Everything having to do with Israel's Apache fleet has been delayed by the administration," another source said.

So much for that year-end Forward article about how US/Israeli arms sales demonstrate that "strategic security relations between the two countries are flourishing." It's become a standard lefty talking point in the last few months, and it really ought not be.

It's not just that Obama's anti-Israel diplomatic offensive has actually damaged strategic security relations across the board, though it has. It's that the entire article - from the headline about arms cooperation all the way through the stuff about promoting Israel's qualitative military edge - is the opposite of true. No arms deal has been made with Israel since Obama took office, while Arab countries have been the beneficiaries of unprecedented largess:

This story won't get international play until there's an incident between Gaza fishermen and the Israeli Navy, but apparently Hamas has found a new set of Palestinian human shields. Those explosive-filled barrels that have been washing ashore in Israel are coming from Hamas boats disguised as fishing vessels, all but guaranteeing a miscalculation that will drag in Palestinian civilians:

Barrels filled with explosives sent by terror organizations from Gaza are putting Palestinian fishermen in danger, a senior Navy official estimated Tuesday following the discovery of explosive devices off Israel's southern shores... "The terror organizations often use innocent-looking fishing boats in order to carry out attacks, making things very difficult for us. On the one hand, we would like to allow Palestinian fishery, but on the other hand, it's our duty to thwart attacks. This leads to serious inner conflicts."

And when Palestinian fishermen do get tangled up in an Israeli anti-terror operation, you can be quite sure that Israel will get the blame. Because per the rules codified by the Goldstone Report, normal reasoning like "the people who use human shields are responsible for their deaths" doesn't apply when the Jewish State is defending its civilians.

Of course Israel will end up getting demonized for this even without a live fire incident. If Hamas is going to use Gaza fishing to turn the Mediterranean into a minefield, Israel will have to restrict Gaza fishing to prevent the Mediterranean from being turned into a minefield. The headlines about Israelis starving Gazans will follow shortly thereafter, just like they did after Israel shut down the border crossings that Hamas kept spraying with gunfire. Those headlines were false back then and will be false the next time around. But whatever.

Hamas is only throwing explosives off fishing boats because they can't launch attacks out of Gaza any other way. The security fence that surrounds their little terror statelet has limited them to a grand total of one successful suicide bomber in the last few years. All of which is weird because the foreign policy experts who tried to block Israel's West Bank security barrier assured us that fences don't work.

References:
* Militants pledge to float more bombs toward Israel [WaPo]
* IDF source: Gaza fishermen in danger [YNet]
* Deputy IDF chief: Terror groups facing difficulties [YNet]
* Main terrorist attacks carried out at Gaza Strip crossings [Israel MFA]
* Gaza's Booming Economy - Underground Mall System, Hundreds Of Supermarkets, Latest Fashions (Plus: New Gaza Tunnel Wasn't For Smuggling) [MR]

Related Mere Rhetoric Categories:
* Anti-Israel Diplomacy
* Israel
* Palestinians

Compare...

A meeting between US Middle East envoy George Mitchell and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, aimed at restarting the peace progress with the Palestinians, saw 'interesting' ideas raised, the Israeli leader said Sunday. 'I heard several interesting ideas to renew the process. We are systematically interested in doing this ... and if the Palestinians will express a similar readiness, we will find ourselves in the midst of a political process, something which is important to us and to them,' Netanyahu said at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem.

... and contrast:

US Middle East envoy George Mitchell was meeting... after apparently failing to budge Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas toward negotiations during their talks on Friday. Mitchell met with Abbas in Ramallah for about three hours, but failed to get him to drop his insistence that Israel declare a complete construction freeze in the West Bank, including in east Jerusalem, before resuming negotiations... A statement released from the Prime Minister's Office said that the Netanyahu government... "has consistently called for the immediate resumption of talks without preconditions. The fact that talks have not taken place until now was clearly at the responsibility of the Palestinian side that has placed new unrealistic preconditions, preventing the resumption of talks."

Of course Abbas can't drop his East Jerusalem precondition, since the Obama administration painted him into a corner by demanding it themselves. So he's placed in the absurd position of demanding up front all the Israeli concessions that are supposed to be negotiated later. Since that's embarrassingly nonsensical, he ends up ruefully suggesting that maybe the US can negotiate with Israel in the Palestinians' place. That wouldn't placate the Arab world or the perpetually seething Palestinian street - Israeli concessions would be met with conspiracy theories about US/Israeli plots to cede the absolute minimum - but at least it's internally coherent. "We'll begin negotiations only Israel starts at the end" - less so.

Stephen Walt, by the by, thinks that Mitchell should resign. Apparently Obama played Mitchell for a fool by promising to pressure Israel and then backtracking because of the all-powerful Israel Lobby (quote: "I suppose I ought to be grateful to have my thesis vindicated in such striking fashion, but there's too much human misery involved.") Of course Obama actually imposed unprecedented pressure on the Jewish State only to have it harden Palestinian demands and make the peace process impossible. But whatever. Walt has been dismantled for his feverish rent-a-validator antisemitism even by lefty Chas Freeman supporters. He spent decades positing a geopolitical metaphysics where nation-states unerringly pursue their self-interest, expect apparently where American Jews and the Christians they've corrupted sully said metaphysical perfection. How original

References and related after the jump...

Because this kind of rhetoric...

Iran and Syria plan to create a new world order, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Thursday. "Iran and Syria have a joint mission to create a new world order on the basis of justice, humanity and belief in God," Ahmadinejad told visiting Syrian Parliament Speaker Mahmoud al-Abrash. Syria is Iran's main ally in the Middle East and both countries consider Israel to be their political arch-foe. "At the current juncture, the role of Iran and Syria is historic."

... and these kinds of moves...

Iran sees Latin American nations as partners in creating a new world order. Ahmadinejad recently told the visiting Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro: "We need to establish a new systemand take measures based on that system.... Many countries will join the new system." That Iran and Venezuela view nuclear power as part of an attempt at global hegemony was reinforced in a joint press conference this month between Maduor and his Iranian counterpart Manuchehr Mottaki: "Our experiences prompt us to generate nuclear fuel independently and even broaden the scope of our activities to meet the demands of other countries."

... always end well.

Meanwhile China says that the proper response to Iran's firm and seemingly final rejection of nuclear talks is more nuclear talks. Because maybe the mullahs are just kidding. Or maybe - per the faux sophistication Obama picked up from whichever experts are feeding him lines - maybe they're just really confused. They're not so confused that they can't deploy three new satellites as a cover for their ballistic missile program or launch a massive anti-dissident crackdown. But to figure out their negotiating stance after a decade-plus of nuclear talks - well they just haven't had enough time to think about it.

Is there going to be a clash between the West and Iranian's global coalition? Of course there will be. But it will happen on Iran's own nuclear timetable and, because of that, it will be particularly horrific. Future generations will rightly ask why the US and its allies allowed lunatics - lunatics who openly expressed their intentions - to acquire WMDs. And they'll be told that a loose coalition of duly-appointed diplomats, self-declared intellectuals, fully-accredited journalists, and intellectually dishonest liberals cooperated to knock the knees out of the last American President who had the opportunity and intention to stop Iranian nuclearization.

Then they'll go to college and learn that it all goes back to American settlers attacking the Indians or something.

References and related after the jump...

I'm finally back in One Jerusalem Radio's Los Angeles studios, which you'd think would enhance the technical side of tonight's broadcast. Unfortunately there's a gigantic storm tearing apart the city - editing out the thunderclaps from the prerecorded interview with Lee Smith was a singular pleasure - so the studio might well be blacked out. If we do have electricity the show will go live as planned at 6:30pm PST / 9:30pm EST. You can tune in live to call in, hang out in the chat room, or just listen.

Huge show today. Lee Smith shows up to talk about his new book The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations. About halfway through I ask him about why liberal foreign policy experts get to just imagine the Middle East as they'd want it to be rather than as the cluster of warring tribes that it actually is. The conversation before and after goes into the precise level of disaster that can be expected, given that the WH seems bent on indulging in exactly those kinds of pseudo-sophisticated fantasies.

Dan Diker will be calling in from Israel to talk about Israel's efforts in Haiti, making the case that Israel's global leadership on disaster relief - coupled with a public diplomacy push on Twitter and YouTube - can't help but bolster the Jewish State's image. I'll be making my usual point that antisemites are simply too antisemitic - and have too many media enablers - for public diplomacy to make much of a dent. I obviously think I'm on the right side of that debate but Dan has "data" and "arguments," so take from that what you will.

References:
* The Pseudo-Sophisticated Horse - Lee Smith, Dan Diker [Omri Ceren Show]
* The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations by Lee Smith [Amazon]
* What Is the Arab World's Problem? [Lee Smith]
* ISRAEL: Sending soldiers of peace to Haiti [LAT]
* Israel builds a field hospital in Haiti. Anti-Zionists not fooled! [Gutmann / Telegraph]
* Haiti: An Israeli Public Relations Moment? [MediaLine]

Related Mere Rhetoric Categories:
* The Omri Ceren Show
* Public Diplomacy
* Foreign Policy Experts

On one side of the vaunted Palestinian territories, Hamas absolutely refuses to negotiate with Israel, thereby confirming every single thing they've ever said. On the other side Fatah can't handle their own terrorists let alone go after Hamas or Islamic Jihad infiltrators. It's an open question whether they even want to any more:

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Tuesday spurned a new US effort to revive Mideast peace talks, sticking to his position that he will not resume negotiations unless Israel freezes settlement construction. With Abbas digging in, an upcoming diplomatic mission by US Mideast envoy George Mitchell could be doomed from the outset... the US has failed to get Israel to halt construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, lands the Palestinians want for their state... Abbas said on Tuesday he will not resume talks under the current conditions... "We won't agree to resume negotiations without a full settlement freeze, especially in Jerusalem, for a certain period." The Obama administration has recently suggested bypassing the settlement issue by getting the two sides to discuss the borders of a Palestinian state. US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has said that by focusing on the endgame, such talks would defuse the problem of settlements.

Yeah, listen. If the US didn't want the Palestinians to focus on settlements they shouldn't have functionally forced the Palestinians to focus on settlements. Abbas had always been willing to negotiate in the face of ongoing Israeli settlement construction, both during the Bush years and during the first months of the Obama administration. Then State and the WH - bragging all the while about publicly slapping around Netanyahu - launched their anti-Israel diplomatic offensive last spring. Among the demands: a full construction freeze. No playgrounds or supermarkets for Jews, not even in Israel's capital. Abbas had to follow along lest he appear less pro-Palestinian than the US President.

In the most generous scenario this was a misguided attempt to move the goalposts, bleeding the Israelis on concessions. More likely the WH actually believed the self-deceiving propaganda of ostensibly pro-Israel groups like J-Street - duly funneled into the Oval Office via a special someone - that the Israeli public is much further left than the last election would indicate. Anti-Israel foreign policy experts like Walt even supplied polling data on the question. You can't argue with science!

The hope was to use settlements as a wedge issue to peel Israeli citizens away from the government, creating a win-win for anti-Israel diplomats. If Netanyahu caved then Obama would see his stock rise in the Arab world, this per the predictions of foreign policy analysts like Marc Lynch. If Netanyahu resisted then he would be toppled via popular disapproval and - by assumption - the next Israeli government would reflect the Israeli public's pro-concessions position.

As will inevitably happen with plans based on pseudo-sophisticated fantasies, the entire stunt backfired and Obama managed to alienate Israel and harden Palestinian demands. Smart power!

References and related after the jump...

Of course:

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Monday the Obama administration remains open to negotiating with Iran over its nuclear program, despite intransigence from Tehran... Clinton said it is clear that administration efforts to engage Iran in talks to restrain its nuclear program in 2009 fell short... Obama had said that if Iran did not respond positively to his overtures by the start of 2010 he would move toward tougher sanctions. Clinton said the administration is consulting with other nations about new sanctions, but she stressed that this does not mean the administration is abandoning its effort to start a dialogue with Iran. There is no hard-and-fast deadline for Iran to respond, she said.

I'm a little sad they're giving up on deadlines. Iranian laughter in the face of Obama's blustering - plus the inevitable US crumbling - made for some easy content. Though the WH probably didn't have a choice now that China, after years of evading existing sanctions, just said no to new UN sanctions. So Obama's oh-so-sophisticated charade - that there were ever any "genuine sticks" behind all of the "genuine carrots" - wasn't going to last much longer.

Of course the Iranians still sneeringly chortled in victory about how they agree with Clinton that sanctions are meaningless. They've been so emboldened by this WH's appeasement that they're now setting their own deadlines on negotiations, a nice little demonstration of just how brazen they've gotten:

Iran's foreign minister warned the West on Saturday that it had one month to accept Iran's counterproposal to a deal brokered by the United Nations aimed at slowing the Iranian nuclear program, or else Iran would begin further enriching its nuclear fuel stockpile on its own. The comments by the foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, were broadcast on state television and presented as an "ultimatum" to the West just two days after Iran missed a deadline set by the United States and its allies to accept a deal that was brokered in October in Geneva.

They're also holding large-scale military exercises next month, right about the time that their "ultimatum" will be expiring. No worries though. This isn't anything that the WH's vaunted "targeted sanctions" - specifically designed to be watered down - can't fix right up. Smart power and all the rest.

References and related after the jump...

Back in October 2008, on his way to securing American Jews as his single most sustained bloc of supporters, candidate Obama seemed quite explicit about the status of US loan guarantees to Israel. Quite explicit:

US presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama has promised not to cut foreign aid to Israel if he is elected in November, a spokeswoman for Obama has said. In a statement to the Israeli business daily Globes, a spokeswoman for Obama said he would honor existing agreements pertaining to foreign aid and as such was committed to 'increasing aid to Israel to $30 billion over 10 years.'

So a few months ago the Israelis went ahead and locked in 2010/11 loans without any peace process-related conditions. Unfortunately they forgot the part where all Obama promises come with an expiration date:

On the eve of his visit to the Middle East, US special envoy George Mitchell threatened that his country would freeze its aid to Israel if the Jewish state failed to advance peace talks with the Palestinians and a two-state solution. Mitchell clarified in an interview to the PBS network that the United States would use incentives or sanctions against both sides. According to American law, Mitchell said, the US can freeze its support for loan guarantees to Israel. He added that all options must remain open and that the sides must be convinced about what their important interests are.

Forget the part about how this White House seems committed to detonating the US/Israeli alliance, if only because that's not really newsworthy. More broadly - and here I'm shamelessly cribbing from Instapundit - if Obama was trying to wreck America as a superpower, what would he be doing differently? If he was deliberately working to erode US influence in the Middle East, would there be a better way than putting the US on a collision course with both of the region's most powerful countries? He's taking a softline approach with Iranian antagonists, which only emboldens them, and a hardline approach with Israeli allies, which only alienates them. Smart power!

Both Israel and Iran will respond by doing what countries do: pursuing their own interests. Like so many other world leaders are beginning to do, Israeli and Iranian pols will simply start ignoring Obama. It'll be bad for the United States to lose its influence in one of the most dangerous and energy-rich regions in the world. It would be disastrous for Israel to lose its most consistent and powerful international ally. But it's not like Israel doesn't have other options, some of which they've been neglecting precisely because of US pressure. Cf. Caroline Glick from this morning.

References and related after the jump...

The Iranians can't even muster enough respect for Obama to let him send envoys to debase themselves in front of the mullahs. The administration wanted to dispatch Kerry to Tehran in the midst of the most recent crackdown, a move naturally seen as a shameless betrayal by the Iranian dissidents being beaten and shot and run over by basij cars. Nope.

Pathetic:

Iranian legislators on Sunday decided to not allow a visit from Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.), according to Iranian media. "Members of the Iranian parliament's Foreign Relations Committee (a subcommittee of the parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Commission) voiced opposition to the request after studying the issue," Hassan Ebrahimi, head of the committee, told the semi-official Fars News Agency. Several Iranian news outlets reported last week that Kerry had submitted an official request to visit Tehran in an emissary role... On Saturday, Iranian legislators stepped up the rhetoric against the news that Kerry was considering traveling to Tehran with the blessing of the White House.

At least we're not also trading top Iranian-backed Iraqi terrorists for British computer specialists who were brutally kidnapped while tracing exactly how Iran interferes in Iraqi affairs. The raid that captured the specialist involved the kidnap of four British body guards who were later executed - bound - with bullets to the head. Which is exactly how Khazali's gang murdered the American soldiers they had kidnapped in a separate raid:

So mind-bendingly insane is this that I thought Roggio might have been duped by his sources. Not so: Both the Guardian and now Jake Tapper have independently confirmed that it's true. Remember Qais Khazali?... He used to be an al-Sadr deputy, then broke away and hooked up with Iran to start his own little mini-Hezbollah. That group, the "League of the Righteous," ended up pulling off one of the most notorious, sophisticated anti-American operations of the Iraq war in Karbala. The toll: Five Americans murdered, four of them after they were kidnapped, bound, and shot in the head like animals. U.S. troops caught up to Khazali... Petraeus ... accused Iran's Quds Force -- the creme de la creme of the Revolutionary Guard, responsible for assisting Iranian proxy jihadis like Hezbollah in other countries -- of bankrolling the whole thing. And now, after three years in U.S. custody, he's free.

Obama wanted to send the Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to Tehran to - what? Explain how there's no hard feelings about the whole "brutalizing their people and executing our captured soldiers" thing? Insist that we're willing to look the other way if they'll pretend to think about maybe not laughing at our threats of toothless sanctions?

And they wouldn't even let us go through the motions of groveling to them.

Remember when conservatives ridiculed "smart power" as a faux sophisticated excuse for US obsequiousness? And the left said that conservatives were thoughtless warmongers and - in fact - Obama was going to restore America's dignity and respect? That's definitely the sense I'm getting from this gambit. Dignity. And. Respect.

References and related after the jump...

I'll be broadcasting 2009's last TOCS episode live from Bulgaria, Bulgaria being a country that suffered for five centuries under the Ottoman yoke and - emerging from that and later from the Iron Curtain - has just committed more troops to the West's efforts in Afghanistan. That's in no way relevant to tonight's topics, though New Europe/Old Europe divides are always worth emphasizing both as matters of ideology and of Iranian weapons range. In any case - 6:30pm PST, live from Bulgaria, tune in via the Blog Talk Radio page to participate in the chat room and get on the air.

As a way of closing out a tension-soaked year, the show is shaping up to be what the kids call a doozy. Prof. Gerald Steinberg - NGO Monitor President, Bar Ilan University Political Studies chair, and bane of conspiracy addled human rights organizations inclined to hire Nazi-obsessed anti-Israel partisans - discusses the role NGO's are playing in the multi-pronged assault on Israel's legitimacy. Divestment, lawfare/universal jurisdiction, and government funding of pro-Palestinian NGO's are all discussed, plus the prospects for pushing back against those efforts.

The weekly call with Dan Diker will focus on a couple of recent revelatory US/Israeli flashpoints. The first is this stunt that US consul officials just pulled, where they tried to run over an IDF soldier. I actually need to do a full post about this because the US Consulate in Jerusalem is the de facto US embassy to the Palestinian Authority, and this is the second time in two years they've pulled this kind of nonsense. Dan has more than a few comments on that point.

The second incident is this flap over Israel's retaliation to the terrorists who murdered Meir Chai. The US demanded "answers" from Israel because the operation happened in Area A, where US-trained and funded Palestinian forces were supposed to have control. In Dan's JPost op-ed on the controversy - for which he provides context and background on today's show - he pointed out the idiosyncrasy of that demand:

Iran's building next-generation centrifuges and has just formalized the construction of 10 new nuclear sites. Those 10 new facilities were supposed to lock in their "isolation" according to the White House. Instead Obama will push back the so-called drop dead date for a third or fourth time. I don't think anyone's under any illusions any more. This is what it is:

Obama has long proclaimed a Dec. 31 deadline for cooperation or retaliation of some unspecified kind. But Iran and, before it, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, has confidently counted on years of international dithering on enforcing printed sanctions. So naturally on ABC's "This Week" this week, George Stephanopoulos asked Obama adviser and ex-newspaper reporter David Axelrod about the approaching Obama deadline. Axelrod started to say something about talking but checked himself and spoke instead of "consequences." But, as often occurs in diplomatic-speak -- and politics-speak too, come to think of it -- it's what you don't say that's often more important than what you do utter. Axelrod declined to reiterate the Dec. 31 date.

Now you might think that Iran officially settled on confrontation months ago when Mottaki confirmed the "no" that had been coming from every Iranian lawmaker. Certainly his his followup - "we'll only accept the kind of swap where we don't have to really swap anything" - was seen as a diplomatic non-starter.

But what you don't understand is that Iran has actually been very secretly demonstrating a clear willingness to negotiate. Here's how it probably went down. First Iran decided to export their radical ideology and expand their sphere of influence by broadly and continuously supporting a Shiite insurgency in Yemen. Then we gave them a super-secret signal that we would look the other way by having a State Department Undersecretary announce at a conference that we don't think they're involved. Then Iran didn't do something that our experts retroactively decided they had been planning to do, which was a covert signal back from the mullahs that they were interested in negotiations.

Or maybe it happened differently. Maybe the signal was our continued inaction in response to Iran's bloody interference in Iraq. We didn't do anything. Then they invaded Iraqi territory. Then we still didn't do anything. Now they're staying on Iraqi territory. And that's a sign that they're open to low-level confidence building measures. Because why else would they grab territory except as a setup for making concessions during negotiations?

Iran provokes. The US responds with milquetoast banalities. Like clockwork:

The new medium-range missile tested by Iran is "not particularly different than what we've seen in the past," said Pentagon defense spokesman Geoff Morrell on Wednesday, according to a Reuters report. The report quoted Morrell as saying that US intelligence shows the missile - said to be capable of targeting parts of Israel - is not a sign of advanced military capabilities acquired by Teheran... "Such actions will increase the seriousness and resolve of the international community to hold Iran accountable for its continued defiance of its international obligations on its nuclear program," he said.

Really? Because according to the NYT the new missile is more accurate and can be launched faster than all of their previous missiles. Meir Javedanfar - writing an article titled "The plus side of an arms race with Iran" - also admits it's "a sign that Iran is making significant advances in its missile programme" and moving past its inaccurate Shahab-3's.

Now Iran is threatening to launch precision strikes against Tel Aviv's skyscrapers and against Israeli nuclear sites. In the former case Israel would have to respond with overwhelming force well beyond its conventional capabilities. In the latter case Israel would interpret the attack a non-conventional strike and respond accordingly. So in a very real way, the inaccuracy of Iran's missiles is all that prevents an inevitable Israeli/Iranian war from going nuclear.

Now just for completion's sake. Iran's got enough material to build a nuclear bomb. They've been developing nuclear warheads for years and the IAEA - for all that they've been hiding the fact - undeniably knows it. They've been developing nuclear triggers for years and the US - for all that the 2007 NIE authors misled Americans about it - has known it all along.

Oh. And they might building an H-Bomb:

I'm posting the streams from MR's Twitter and Facebook pages at the top, and then after the jump I've added a bit of context for these, plus a few other thematically relevant links. The full speech is here.

If you're a conservative the speech was good, then not good, then good again, then not good again, then you'd be ambivalent, then good, not good, not good, good. If you're a liberal it was bad, then not bad, then bad again, then not bad again, then you'd be ambivalent, then bad, not bad, not bad, bad.

If you're someone who thinks that even ostensibly balanced and abstract speeches should have some kind of structure, with implicitly defined sections that clarify central values and themes, then this was not the best speech, no:

* Final thoughts on Obama speech: good parts and bad parts but oh-so-rambling. Failure of me and my discipline: http://bit.ly/7oq2Oj #tcot

* Typo: "Truths: war is sometimes necessary, and war is... an expression of human feelings" He meant "failings" #tcot #irony #totus

* Obama: "I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence." Keep in mind this is after the passage about being "humble"

* "I do not bring with me today a definitive solution to the problems of war." Thanks for clearing that up. #ffs #tcot

* Obama Nobel reax (1) Too much wiki-based pontification (2) Unusual sent struct is hackish not deep (3) VDH is going to have kittens #tcot

(1) The 38 uses of the word "I" may or may not be justified in an acceptance speech, but any sentence that begins with "I am living testimony" had better involve either a gulag, a disability, or a parody of someone who would say that without having survived a gulag or overcome a disability. Typical.

It's unclear whether Human Rights Watch has reinstated their anti-Israel investigator Marc Garlasco yet. His obsessive collecting of Nazi regalia got him suspended a few months ago, but reader JM says that Garlasco's HRW bio page doesn't reflect the suspension - and that it used to. I asked a second guy who would know and he didn't remember anything like that, and there's no way to definitively check. Gigablast reports that HRW had disabled caching on the page, which would explain why none of the search engines have an old copy.

Either way it won't be very long now. Doug Bandow has a post up on HuffPo - HuffPo being where Garlasco started his rehabilitation with innocent protestations of naivety before having sympathetic journalists write him up in Esquire - hinting that Garlasco's good to go:

I'm thinking a bit more about my collecting these days after the controversy that erupted over Marc Garlasco of Human Rights Watch, who collects World War II German militaria. It is the most popular military genre, but Garlasco was attacked as a Nazi-sympathizer by people who don't like his analytical work critical of Israel. Garlasco--whom I have never met--seems to have survived the kerfuffle, but the controversy demonstrated not only Washington's tendency toward the ad hominem but also a more general failure to understand collectors. Collectors collect. The doing often is as important as the what. Few collectors collect because they identify with the politics behind the items they are accumulating. In fact, many can't even explain why they like what they like.

I'll admit that I "don't like" Garlasco's reports, though in fairness they're an objectively unlikable pile of systematic and repeated - to say nothing of inaccurate - smears and fabrications, all of which he happily funnels to legacy and new media outlets.

Not that it matters. Motivation and bias are things you get to attack after you disprove something. So a pro-Israel activist might say "given that Garlasco's anti-Israel publications have been repeatedly debunked, it's relevant to investigate what's so consistently undermining his objectivity." Less argumentatively legitimate: "even though Garlasco's critics are undeniably right, you should ignore how a Nazi-obsessed investigator fit in so well at our organization because those critics don't like us and you do." And since we're on the topic of what exactly is getting proven, it's flat false to imply that I ever accused him of being a Nazi sympathizer, bigot, or racist.

The way I know that is because I wrote things like "Garlasco's not a vulgar racist. He's simply not. He's someone torn by sensibilities that make him wildly inappropriate as a choice for a Middle East investigator" and "I would guess that he clings very, very tightly to the belief that he's a history buff who happens, for purely familial reasons, to be utterly fascinated by the Nazis." Which are all the things that Bandow pedantically claims people "fail to understand."

The only caveat I added - a minor one, admittedly - is that anyone riven by an inchoate obsession with the color and pageantry of Nazism ought abstain from multi-year campaigns to demonize the Jewish State and drag Jewish officials in front of politicized international tribunals. Garlasco was drawn to Nazi collectibles for some reason. The guy wasn't collecting postage stamps, even though his Nazi grandfather presumably mailed stuff.

This emerging theme of vague "people" engaged in "ad homs" so as to undermine "work critical of Israel" has nonetheless become quite the pro-HRW talking point. When HRW founder Robert Bernstein turned his back on the organization for its anti-Israel pathology, that was the reality-based community's instinctive go-to. And here's HRW program director Iain Levine sounding exactly the same note:

Ha'aretz broke the draft of their resolution, which recognizes a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. Sweden insists it will represent and commit all 27 EU members. An utterly devastating diplomatic game-changer.

Israel will focus on how the resolution locks in unilateral Palestinian moves in explicit violation of the Oslo accords, a shameless bait-and-switch that began with promises of EU coordination in exchange for Israeli territorial concessions. One Jerusalem just blogged it, honing in on the gall it takes for an international organization to carve up the territory of a sovereign and democratic country:

The Europeans have become aggressively active in a desperate attempt to save the collapsing government of Palestinian Authority. Ever since Hamas won the "elections" in Gaza, the PA has been fighting an uphill battle to stay relevant. All indicators are reporting that with each day the PA and its President Abbas are growing weaker and weaker... But it is important to understand that this is not just a debating point. Israel is now faced with a very serious challenge. How can it function in an international community that feels it can impose its will on Israel without consent of this democratic government.

All true and fair enough. But there's also the small matter of the EU's breathtaking moral hypocrisy. Arabs who left Israel in 1948 apparently still have a colorable claim to the "right of return" five generations later. But Jews who were ethnically cleansed from the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem after thousands of years of continuous habitation - they're expected to stay cleansed just like the gleeful Jordanian war criminals of the time intended:

At the turn of the 20th century the Jewish population of the quarter reached 19,000... In 1948 [its]... 2,000 Jews was besieged, and forced to leave en masse. Colonel Abdullah el Tell, local commander of the Jordanian Arab Legion... described the destruction of the Jewish Quarter: "The operations of calculated destruction were set in motion.... I knew that the Jewish Quarter was densely populated with Jews who caused their fighters a good deal of interference and difficulty.... I embarked, therefore, on the shelling of the Quarter with mortars, creating harassment and destruction.... Only four days after our entry into Jerusalem the Jewish Quarter had become their graveyard. Death and destruction reigned over it.... [By] Friday, May 28, 1948... the Jewish Quarter emerged convulsed in a black cloud - a cloud of death and agony."...

The Jordanian commander who led the operation is reported to have told his superiors: "For the first time in 1,000 years not a single Jew remains in the Jewish Quarter. Not a single building remains intact. This makes the Jews' return here impossible."

Then again, Sweden's a country where calls to "kill the Jews" are - as a matter of juridical precedent - political opinions about Middle East policymaking. When other EU nations walked out of Ahmadinejad's speech because of his genocidal incitement, Sweden declared him in-bounds. So it's not exactly a surprise that they'd have some problems understanding the nuances of ethnic cleansing.

At least now we know what unblinking pretexts Obama's getting from his Iran advisers. They need to explain why all their nuanced Tehranology - which always ends with some new inscrutable justification for pro-Iran gestures - has merely emboldened Khamenei into confidently coming out as a hardline thug. It can't be that liberal foreign policy experts have spent the last few decades disingenuously denying that the Iranian political echelon is controlled by apocalyptic hardliners.

It's not that they produced paper after paper in the 90's predicting - incorrectly - that "moderates" would be electorally empowered if Albright made apologies and Clinton offered back channel concessions. It's not that they spent the Bush years howling - untenably - that offering a Grand Bargain would enable "conservative pragmatists" to "get Khamenei's ear." And it's certainly not that they made up tales - suspiciously - of Iranian wiggle room on nukes while lunatics were being installed as negotiators.

Sure it all looks exactly that way. And sure a genuinely nuanced analysis of Iranian ideology explains why it looks that way, since Khamenei's commitment to pan-Islamism would stymie state-level negotiations even if he wasn't the ultra-hardliner that he is.

But what you don't understand is that there are all these factions. And they're fighting with one another. And - even though it might appear like one side keeps winning, indicating either that there's no internal struggle or that it doesn't matter - you need to ignore that in the same way you ignore decades of failed diplomatic outreach. Just a few more weeks of sophistication and all this carefully calibrated groveling will yield a modus vivendi. You'll see!

U.S. President Barack Obama said on Monday an unsettled political situation in Iran may be complicating efforts to seal a nuclear fuel deal between Tehran and major world powers... "But it is going to take time, and part of the challenge that we face is that neither North Korea nor Iran seem to be settled enough politically to make quick decisions on these issues," he told Reuters in an interview at the White House.

Which is weird, because it certainly looks like the regime came to a quick decision. Here's how the talks have been going post-Qom, pegged either to the dateline or - where the lede was explicit - to when specific statements were made:

Each week, the members of the Watchers Council nominate one of their own posts and a second from outside the Council for consideration by other council members in a contest for the week's best post. With a new list coming out in a few hours, it's probably about time for me to post last week's nominated posts. That's the kind of tight ship we run here at MR HQ.

Why do these posts always go up at the last minute, even though they're basically cut and paste jobs plus a little commentary? Tough question. Without getting into too many details the answer involves a "happy hour," a "patio" and "how it's always 70 degrees in LA." There's also a bunch of stuff having to do with side projects and daily travel blogging and assorted other rent-targeted activities, rent being an unfortunate monthly necessity that if you could see your way to defraying I would be much obliged.

Anyway, here are last week's nominations from the Watchers Council and beyond. For the record, Joshuapundit's meticulously written post ended up squeaking past my own "liberals seem to have a lot invested in glittery displays of sham erudition" nit-picking, so if you're pressed for time that's the place to start.

Council Submissions
* Mere Rhetoric - Agitprop-Funding NEA Chief: "Barack Obama Is The Most Powerful Writer Since Julius Caesar
* The Glittering Eye - Triage
* Rhymes With Right - Just A Reminder - Hasan Not The First
* Bookworm Room - Watch the Democratic dominoes fall
* The Provocateur - Dr. Chacko Comes to Lahey
* The Colossus of Rhodey - The problem with Islamic terrorism and the Left
* The Razor - Suburban Perspective on Rural America
* Right Truth - A Small Nation
* Joshuapundit - Death By A Thousand Cuts

Honorable Mentions
* Okie On The Lam - Nanny Nancy Pelosi Shoving 1990-Page Health Care Up Our Collective Wazzoo!
* Tel-Chai Nation - Turkey's Erdogan continues with his bigotry

Non-Council Submissions
* Submitted By: The Watcher - Selwyn Duke/American Thinker - Jihad and America, the land that cried sheep
* Submitted By: The Glittering Eye - Tigerhawk - The myth of American heroism
* Submitted By: Rhymes With Right - Red County - Tragedy At Ft. Hood
* Submitted By: Bookworm Room - Villainous Company - Obama doesn't "get" the military he commands
* Submitted By: The Provocateur - WSJ Blog - Doctor: I Was Fired for Fighting Hospital's Ties to Medtronic
* Submitted By: The Colossus of Rhodey - The Scientist - Promises, Promises
* Submitted By: Right Truth - Right, Wing-Nut - A Nation, Hi-Jacked
* Submitted By: The Razor - MG Hoft - Wash U Shuts Down Freedom Memorial
* Submitted By: Mere Rhetoric - Danger Room - Is This China's Anti-Satellite Laser Weapon Site?
* Submitted By: Joshuapundit - Ron Radosh/Hot Air - The Nation, Jihad and General Casey

References:
* Watcher of Weasels » Watcher's Council Nominations, Veteran's Day Edition [Watcher Of Weasels]

Related Mere Rhetoric Categories:
* American Politics Coverage
* Democratic Politics Coverage
* Republican Politics Coverage

The elegant thing about Turkey's slide from the West is how starkly it juxtaposes liberal pseudo-sophistication with conservative warnings. On one side you have Obama's ephemeral charisma, where Turkey was the first Muslim country he visited as part of his global Presidential apology tour. At a minimum that should have made Ankara more rather than less inclined to lean toward the US and NATO.

On the other side you have the hard geopolitical realities being created by Obama's supine foreign policy, where a soon-to-be-nuclear Iran is pushing back US allies and installing proxies across Asia and South America. If Obama's critics are right then the prospect of regional Shiite hegemony will force states to accommodate the Islamic Republic, cut whatever deals they can, and try to exist within the Iranian orbit.

Interesting debate:

Relations between Turkey and Iran appear to be getting closer and those ties are raising concerns among some of Turkey's Western allies... Turkish President Abdullah Gul said... his country is keen to bolster relations with neighboring Iran. Increasing closeness between Turkish leaders and Iran, and Turkey's quest for better ties in the broader Muslim world, have fueled concerns in the West that this key U.S. ally is... is turning its back on the West to embrace Islamist regimes to the East - a vast region that extends from the Middle East to the Balkans, the Caucasus and Central Asia.

Obama's obsequious engagement can't even provide diplomatic wiggle room, where both sides would put on a show of agreement for public consumption:

The growing number of disagreements over global and regional affairs between Turkey and the United States signals a "bumpy road" to Washington, D.C., for Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in early December. The deterioration in ties between the two allies was obvious during Philip Gordon's trip to Ankara last week. At a press conference held here, the assistant secretary for the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs hinted that "there were more points of disagreement than of agreement with Turkey."

This is after Turkey banned Israel from US/NATO air exercises as a way of nixing the drills completely, the immediate and predictable withdrawal of the US and Italy being a feature rather than a bug. If they had just been targeting Israel they wouldn't have followed up two days later with joint Turkish-Syrian military maneuvers. That stunt, plus the 10 Turkish ministers they sent to Damascus in the context of a formal cooperation deal, goes deeper than a Turkish/Israeli temporary spat.

I just checked this to be sure, and "AfPak" definitely stands for Afghanistan and Pakistan. It's the region in which we're currently engaged in a hot war that we're desperately trying not to lose. So - at least in theory - alienating the leaders of both Afghanistan and Pakistan would be one of those geopolitical blunders that we've been assured were hallmarks of the Bush administration. Smart...

Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai questioned the reliability of the United States as a partner Sunday, as he fought off criticism of his government's legitimacy following fraud-marred elections... underscoring the political headache that Washington faces if Karzai wins a run-off against Abdullah next month, Karzai pointed the finger at the United States in a separate, pre-recorded CNN interview. "Is the United States a reliable partner with Afghanistan? Is the West a reliable partner with Afghanistan?" Karzai asked... The comments appeared to allude to Karzai's longstanding criticism of civilian deaths in US air strikes, and to President Barack Obama's still unresolved review of US strategy and his commander's request for up to 40,000 more US troops.

... power:

In Lahore, Pakistan, today Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered a blunt message to six prominent Pakistani newspaper editors. Asked by Asha'ar Rehman, an editor of Dawn, why the US war on terror is so localized to Pakistan, Clinton did not mince words. "Al-Qaeda has had safe haven in Pakistan since 2002," she said. "I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn't get them if they really wanted to... there are issues that not just the United States but others have with your government and with your military security establishment.''

Which is not to say that Clinton was wrong to be concerned about everything from Pakistan's internal stability to the reliability of their security forces. Pakistan's nuclear arsenal is most definitely not secure. And it's no secret that the ISI has some gentlemen who are disinclined to view the West favorably. When Pakistan finally becomes a failed state - and ignoring the geopolitical situation its economic freefall will ensure that it does - things are going to get real dicey real fast.

But Clinton's job as a diplomat is to express those concerns in a way that doesn't cause potentially irreparable rifts with countries we rely on for military victory. Though she did find the time to blame it all on Bush! So at least there was that.

There's a much broader discussion to be had about the sheer self-absorbed gullibility of liberal foreign policy experts. They've spent the last 7 or 8 years in conferences at Geneva and Doha, and they actually belied the cocktail party chatter about how things would be copacetic if only Bush was out of office. "Emir so and so, don't you think that President Bush is destroying the US's credibility in the Arab and Muslim world?" "Certainly Madam such and such, Islam would totally abandon its thousand year ebb-and-flow intrusions into the West if the US had a 3 point electoral shift."

Morons.

References and related after the jump...

Well sure it sounds batshit crazy. But if you look at it from the perspective of a conspiracy-addled antisemite - "whatever helps Israel must have been instigated by Israel, including the genocidal wars Arab States start and lose" - then it makes a lot of sense. Why wouldn't Israel fire on its own citizens, thereby exposing Lebanon to the unbearably withering prospect of an Israeli complaint to the UN:

Lebanese President Michel Suleiman claimed Tuesday's Katyusha rocket attack on Kiryat Shmona was in Israel's interest, and suggested that an Israeli agent may have launched the projectile. In an interview with the Lebanese Arab-language newspaper Al Akhbar published Thursday, Suleiman said that an Israeli agent may have launched the rocket, stressing that one "must not rule out" the possibility that Israel was behind the attack. On Tuesday night, a Katyusha fired from the Mount Dov (Shaba Farms) area slammed into a field not far from Kiryat Shmona, causing a fire but no casualties. The IDF immediately shelled the Lebanese territory from which the projectile was launched, using several rounds of artillery.

Presumably those four rockets aimed at Israel that the LAF just dismantled were also planted by Israeli agents. It's not that Lebanon has been systematically ignoring Hezbollah's rearmament in violation of even its symbolic obligations under UNSC 1701. It's that the agents of the Jewish State are really sneaky. And they're everywhere.

When Sunni/Shiite tensions finally erupt - and they will, not least of all because the country has been infiltrated hundreds of Al Qaeda operatives ready to wage jihad against Jews and Hezbollah-backed Shiites - that'll be Israel's fault too.

That the "UNSC" in UNSC 1701 stands for "United Nations Security Council" is particularly ironic given how Lebanon currently sits on the Security Council. I don't really think that's fair. The UN is supposed to be a one-state one-vote kind of place and Iran and Syria already had their turn.

References and related after the jump...

First things first: make sure you check out the exclusive Richard Landes interview over on the One Jerusalem audio page. The highlights I played on the air were less than one-third of the total material - academics, it turns out, err on the side of thoroughness - and there are entire categories of questions that you don't get except on the full interview. The extended section on how Stockholm Syndrom is the generous explanation for why journalists carry Hamas's water is especially brutal.

In the meantime you should obviously check out Goldstonereport.org, where they're posting new debunkings on an almost daily basis. It would also behoove you to check out Landes's home blogs Augean Stables and Second Draft. It's really impressive how many different smears human rights organizations can invent without ever straying far from antisemitic canards like water poisoning, child murder, and cabalistic conspiracism. From a certain perspective it almost looks like they might be obsessed!

Now on to some site business. I think I'm going to start lightening up on the incessant Omri Ceren Show reminders and wrap ups. The routine is familiar enough by now: live radio show with news and interview highlights at 2pm on Wednesdays, exclusive full-length interview available at One Jerusalem shortly afterward. Plus MR has been getting a little too process-heavy lately. I'm beginning to worry that all the radio show posts, Watchers Council roundups, and LA event reminders are crowding out more substantive material.

Even worse, they're preventing me from constantly reminding you that micropayment donations are the future of citizen journalism.

So I'm going to try to limit TOCS-related blogging to just one post per week, a teaser on Tuesday afternoon or Wednesday morning about that week's interview and news segments. I'll trust you guys to remember to grab the full interviews on your own, since those are where the nuance and inside baseball discussions get hashed out. When that doesn't work I'll start dumping reminders into roundups and see if we can't strike a happy balance.

References:
* The Omri Ceren Show on Blog Talk Radio [Official Site]
* AUDIO EXCLUSIVE :: Dr. Richard Landes -- Full Interview! [One Jerusalem]
* Goldstonereport.org
* Augean Stables
* Second Draft

Related Mere Rhetoric Coverage:
* Human Rights
* United Nations
* The Omri Ceren Show

Each week, the members of the Watchers Council nominate one of their own posts and a second from outside the Council for consideration by other council members in a contest for the week's best post. And each week I inexplicably end up waiting till the subsequent Monday to post the nominations and the winners. Not this time: Sunday!

My own post dealt with how influential public diplomacy expert Marc Lynch advised the Obama administration to pick a fight with Israel, saw that strategy backfire as the Palestinians hardened their demands and fractured, and is now accusing Israel of "intransigence" in every other post he writes. He's a little bit bitter and it's getting kind of unseemly, though there's probably room for sympathy - the foreign policy left's recommendations have been exposed as naivete-soaked delusions, and that can't be fun. Right Truth's post on the ongoing Middle East-wide disasters triggered by State Department diplomacy and foreign policy pseudo-sophistication is to the point.

The Glittering Eye's post on health care probes a question that comes up again and again for foreign policy hawks: putting aside that the left can be relied on to appease our enemies and endanger our allies - see Bookworm Room's post - why is it that they're also so consistently useless and ideological even on domestic affairs? The word "meltdown" makes a couple of appearances.

But at least the GOP seems to have approximated something like a spine on health care. The rest of their stunts have put them at war with their own base, a situation that Rhymes With Right unpacks nicely. Not that the conservative grassroots are without their own potential problems, something The Provocateur lays out.

All of which is really a shame, because - per the Colossus Of Rhodey - the left is becoming unhinged to the point of open racism again. Usually they save that for election season. Ditto for the fangs they're showing about double-loyalty towards the Jewish State - complete with witch hunters who totally fail to implicate Israel but imply the opposite. See Joshuapundit on that last bit. Apparently the left is still addicted to the scapegoating rush they discovered during the campaign. It must feel really good.

References and related coverage after the jump...

I just wrapped up this week's recorded interview with Prof. Richard Landes - he of Augean Stables, Second Draft, and soon to be Goldstonereport.org fame - the sum total of which ran almost 40 minutes. Cutting it down to a dozen minutes for the show was interesting, and you'll be hearing "make sure you check out the full interview" more than a couple times tomorrow. There's some stuff about the violent intimidation of journalists, and how that causes them to overcompensate even when they're out of Palestinian territory, that didn't make the final cut. You'll want to download the full interview after tomorrow's show just for that part.

Speaking of which, let this be your official reminder to tune into The Omri Ceren Show's Blog Talk Radio page tomorrow at 2pm. Remember that's the only way to hear it live and get your chance to get on the air. The podcast gets posted to MR's sidebar widget afterward but the show is only streamed from the Blog Talk Radio site.

In addition to interview highlights, show topics will include: Hezbollah's latest moves in Lebanon, the White House's stupefyingly dumb decision to go to war with Fox News, and whatever excuse the Obama administration will be making up Wednesday morning for their failed Iran strategy. As always, much joy and celebration will be had by all.

References:
* Augean Stables
* The Second Draft
* The Goldstone Report
* The Omri Ceren Show on Blog Talk Radio [Blog Talk Radio]
* Obama's dumb war with Fox News [WaPo]

Previously:
* The Omri Ceren Show
* The Omri Ceren Show At 11am PST Today - Dore Gold On The Rise Of Nuclear Iran
* The Omri Ceren Show - Ledeen Wrap Up And Exclusive Full-Length Interview

This week's top Council posts, coming from an intimidating slate of nominations that mixed domestic and foreign policy issues, present a neat little juxtaposition between old-fashioned military honor at home and something less so abroad. The very top Council post came from Bookworm Room, who related several upshots from a family outing to see the Blue Angels at a fundraiser on the USS Hornet:

Despite the varied responsibilities of the people we met, all of the Blues have certain characteristics in common: First, and most obviously, they're all lovely to look at (men and women alike)... because its members are all in superb physical condition... Second, without exception, these people were gentleman and ladies in the old-fashioned sense of the term. They were kind to the children and courteous to everyone. They looked us in the eye, spoke clearly, and, despite the crowds around them, made every person feel as if he, or she, was important... Third, and this is something I tried to emphasize for the kids on the way home, the make-up of the Blue Angels shows that reputation matters... Fourth -- and this is something I've commented upon after every interaction I've had with men and women in the American military -- the Blues manifestly love their work. Each person with whom we spoke felt that his (or her) job has meaning and purpose

One of the two tied runner up Council posts, this one from Right Truth, paints a picture that some might characterize as a little bit unworthy of these men and women: our ongoing abandonment of women to sharia in the Middle East and in the AfPak. And per the non-Council post from Benjamin Kerstein at The New Ledger, Obama's betrayal of our natural friends and allies - freedom-loving people who are oppressed and besieged - goes all the way up to entire nations:

Obama's reputation in Israel might have survived... had it not been for his much-hyped "speech to the Muslim world" delivered in Cairo on June 4. Taken as a whole, the speech was simply a craven embarrassment; but the references it made to Israel could not have been more alienating and insulting had they been calculated for the purpose... Obama's speechwriters and advisors became convinced that equating the Holocaust with the Palestinian nakba (the word means "catastrophe," and Arabs use it to describe the establishment of Israel and its War of Independence in 1948), comparing Israeli treatment of the Palestinians to segregation in the United States, and pointing to the Jewish people's "tragic history" as the sole justification for Israel's existence would assuage Israeli concerns... this single speech (which everyone in Israel watched) did more to demolish Obama's credibility in Israeli eyes than any of his demands on Netanyahu ever could have.

Betraying allies, and the inevitable decline triggered by that kind of cravenness, doesn't have to be inevitable. The non-Council runner up article from Charles Krauthammer emphasizes that it's a reversible choice. Though given how our cultural bien pensants trash the complicated history of Columbus described by Council runner up The Glittering Eye, signs for a revival of national pride aren't exactly great.

References and previously after the jump...

References:
* Reputation Matters - Obama and Israel: Betrayal in the Broken Places [Watcher Of Weasels]
* Watchers Council Nominations - Who Needs Free Speech When You've Got A Post-Partisan Utopia? [MR]
* What's not to like about the Blue Angels? *UPDATED* [Bookworm Room]
* What about the women Obama? [Right Truth]
* Obama and Israel: Betrayal in the Broken Places [New Ledger]
* Decline Is a Choice [Weekly Standard]
* Columbus Day, 2009 [The Glittering Eye]

Previously:
* Watchers Council Results - Gratuitous Insults Are Especially Obnoxious Coming From Mindless Cultists
* Watchers Council Results - Dem's ObamaCare Strategy: If You Can't Beat Them, Bait And Switch Them. Failing That, Bully Your Own Hometown Newspaper.
* Watchers Council Results - Putting Israeli Self-Defense Out Of Bounds

But this time they pinky swear they'll be enthusiastic about supporting any US war effort. Not like when they promised to support "the necessary war" in Afghanistan if only we would abandon Iraq. For realsies this time.

This FP post from Carnegie Endowment for International Peace fellow David Rothkopf, subtly titled "Afghanistan is just not that important", is the second appearance in a week for this nuanced position. It includes the querulous insistence that Obama shouldn't be tied down by his over-the-top campaign posing, where he obnoxiously lectured Republicans about military priorities. Because why should Democrats have to run on what they actually intend to do? If they did that they might never get elected.

Of course changing circumstances require changing tactics, and if the left was making that argument it'd be a different debate. But that's not the argument they're making. They're not saying the Taliban or Al Qaeda have become less "the people who attacked us on 9/11," which was one of the left's tropes ad nauseam during the campaign. Instead they're saying - explicitly - that Afghanistan's just not that important. Now it's true that Obama convinced the American people to trust him as Commander in Chief by saying the exact opposite. But the left didn't really believe him at the time - they know Democrats have to say moderate-sounding things to get elected, and they don't hold that against them - so what's the big deal if he flip-flops now?

Of course The One will need a sophisticated-sounding excuse. And right on cue, here's the matriarch of the nutroots herself. In this post she's advocating that Biden should resign as part of a principled stance against putting more troops in Afghanistan, a decision she insists "generations to come will always be grateful for." Technically true, but obviously not for the reasons she thinks. Anyway:

If Biden truly believes that what we're doing in Afghanistan is not in the best interests of our national security -- and what issue is more important than that? -- it's simply not enough to claim retroactive righteousness in his memoirs. Though it would be a crowning moment in a distinguished career, such an act of courage would likely be only the beginning. Biden would then become the natural leader of the movement to wind down this disastrous war and focus on the real dangers in Pakistan.

That same post also had Huffington comparing Biden to Socrates. Unironically. Because when I think "the most honest and wisest of all men," I think about a a serial liar who, having declared that we have to bankrupt the country to avoid bankrupting it, this week announced that we're in a depressing. This is a thinker of such geostrategic genius that he managed to get every single thing wrong on Iraq, voting for the war, voting against the surge, and in between proposing a 3-way partition plan of such incandescent stupidity that factions engaged in a genocidal civil war came together to oppose it. This is ostensibly our military Socrates, a modern day warrior-scholar.

So in addition to being reflexive appeasers who coat their whimpering pro-surrender histrionics with tough-sounding pseudo-sophistication, leftists also appear to be thoroughly serious people.

References and previously after the jump...

You know, if I was a public diplomacy expert who spent the last decade staking my career on something like the Cairo speech, then I consulted for various principals in the leadup to the Cairo speech, then I watched the Cairo speech explode in Obama's face and send Israeli public opinion of the US President nosediving to levels heretofore unplumbed outside the Muslim world - if I was someone like that, I'd be pretty careful about sullenly blaming Obama's Mideast failures on Israel. At worst I'd casually mention it during Q+A's at invited University lectures. That way I could leave graduate students with the impression that it was the sophisticated opinion and link to them offhandedly if they ever published it.

I certainly wouldn't post it on my well-respected Foreign Policy blog, lest people read it and get the impression that I was overcompensating for something:

The [Goldstone Report] vote shows that Israel is paying a price for its short-sighted diplomatic strategy of confrontation with the Obama administration... Netanyahu has spent many long months doing everything in his power to subvert Obama's peace initiatives, defying the demand to freeze settlements and inciting American and Israeli public opinion against the President and against peace...

The passage of the [Goldstone Report] may slightly increase the odds of a Hamas-Fatah reconciliation agreement under Egyptian auspices... Given that the Egyptians are talking about holding two seperate signing ceremonies so that Hamas and Fatah don't have to be in the same room with each other, I doubt that any deal signed soon will amount to actual reconciliation...

Given how much importance the Israeli government has given to the Goldstone Report, [a US] veto might actually be used as a form of leverage. Obama's push for peace is at the brink of collapse almost entirely because of Netanyahu's intransigence. But the administration has thus far seemed highly reluctant to actually put any serious pressure on the Israeli government -- which has only emboldened Netanyahu and his enablers to dig in their heels further. The use of the veto to protect Israel from Goldstone should not be free.

See? Because Israeli public opinion used to be on the side of massive concessions but then Netanyahu "incited" Israelis "against the President and against peace." So any foreign policy experts who pushed Obama to "stand firm on settlements" as an anti-Netanyahu Israeli wedge issue in the context of currying favor in the Arab world - hypothetically, if such foreign policy experts were to exist - well, it wouldn't be their fault that their recommendations backfired spectacularly.

They couldn't have known that their expert expertise would have the President alienating Israeli leftists without much benefit in the Muslim world. The peace process isn't moribund because Obama's enemies-first allies-last strategy left Israelis feeling betrayed while inevitably failing to assuage eliminationist Palestinian sentiment. It's that Netanyahu mendaciously turned Israelis "against peace." Not their fault!

Lots of people are saying Obama's done nothing to promote global peace. Certainly, the refrain goes, he hadn't done anything by day 12 of his Presidency, which is when he was nominated to share in the same glory as Yasser Arafat and Iranian stooge Mohamed ElBaradei. I think that's just so unfair.

If you believe - as I do - that continued Israeli territorial concessions in the context of ongoing Palestinian intransigence are a recipe for war, you have to concede Obama's got at least some case. Before he came along the Israeli electorate was inclined to support further peace gestures. Palestinian leaders were willing to sit across the table from Israeli negotiators and offer unenforceable intangible promises in exchange for tangible land - promises Israeli diplomats were loath to reject.

Just two years ago the Bush administration - by pushing on Israeli leaders slowly without alarming the Israeli public - managed to stage Annapolis. It was predicted by secular Israeli centrists to be a total disaster for the Jewish State. It turned out merely to be a substantial disaster. That's the drip drip drip method you have to use if you want to get Israelis to buy into one bad diplomatic deal after another.

Instead last Spring the Obama White House decided to kind of sort of spectacularly detonate the US-Israel alliance. They leaked to everyone that they were going to kick Netanyahu's ass and ordered Israel to come up with a peace plan by July. Somehow that managed to backfire. I'm not sure if it was because Obama telegraphed his sellout on Arab TV or because Mitchell announced that America would push for the "Israel has to commit suicide" Saudi Initiative or because pipsqueak State Department officials publicly reveled in slapping around a sitting Prime Minister. But somehow Israeli officials got the distinct impression that Obama really didn't like them.

And just to keep things topical, yes Obama's counterproductive anti-Israel moves began before that crucial twelfth Presidential day. On the eve of the inauguration he promised to make a point of investigating Cast Lead literally on Day 1. Because why would Israel get nervous about promises to "address" their self-defense against Hamas?

It was Obama's weird demand for a total Israeli settlement freeze, though, that was really inspired. Netanyahu was willing to commit to offering the Palestinians statehood. So something else had to be found so Obama could pick a fight with Israel and build some anti-Israel cred in the Arab world. Settlements seemed like a good target since someone in Obama's inner circle really thought they could be used as a wedge issue with the Israeli electorate.

Sure the utterly shameless bait and switch on Bush's "settlement blocs" promises was particularly ill advised, given that Israel needs to believe in US security assurances to take "risks for peace." Sure it turned Israelis against Obama, united them behind Netanyahu, and even brought Ehud Olmert out of retirement to support the Israeli right that defeated him. Sure average Israelis started urging their leaders to reject Obama's demands, which Israel subsequently and loudly did on Jerusalem. And sure the situation became so grim that ostensibly pro-Israel liberal American Jews started openly whining that Israelis are spoiled (because that's persuasive!)

But it was the dustup's effect on the Palestinians that was really magical.

As promised, here are last week's Council winners. The top post was from Soccer Dad, who pointed out a week ago what Netanyahu was slamming the table about yesterday:

The media likes to boast that they are the "first rough draft of history." Part of that claim is that they are disinterested parties just reporting the facts as they are. Rafael Broch of Just Journalism had an excellent op-ed in Ha'aretz demonstrating the falseness of that claim... And so every Israeli self-defense is subject to a filter, which suggests that each such action might well be a violation worthy of condemnation if not punishment. Consider the other side of the coin. On Friday Israel released twenty female security prisoners in exhange for a video of captured soldier, Gilad Schalit. Schalit has been held for three years and not allowed any visits by the Red Cross. How did the Associated Press orient its story? On the plight of the prisoners!

Also on the subject of media mendacity, the runner up non-Council post was from Jammie Wearing Fool on CBS's attempt to discredit conservative blogs. CBS's demonstrably and embarrassingly failed attempt to discredit conservative blogs. We've now reached a point where the media rushes to defend Obama against "spurious" charges without actually checking whether those charges are spurious. You have to click on the links guys.

Back to Council posts, the runner up post was from Joshuapundit on the sham negotiations in Geneva:

We're not going to discuss 'sanctions', or anything like that with Iran, but we'd like to talk to them one on one about whatever's on their mind if that works out. But of course, we're not insisting or anything like that. We'd really, really like the Iranians to let the IAEA take a peek at their hidden nuclear facility near Qom, (as if the IAEA is going to be able to find its behind with both hands)but we don't insist on it. And we're certainly not going to try to get Iran to comply even by mentioning the prospect of sanctions against them, let alone force. And nothing harsh like any deadlines. Whenever things are all tidied up and it's convenient, El Baradi and the boys will drop by - if that's OK.

On a largely unrelated note, has anyone noticed the Kafkaesque turn domestic law enforcement has taken? The top non-Council post is about the age of opaque law enforcement we've apparently entered. Closer to home, the FTC is defending their new anti-blogger regulations specifically by promising they'll only selectively enforce them. I have yet to go to law school - and while we're on that topic, if you'd be so kind - but I'm pretty sure it's not supposed to work that way.

References and previously after the jump...

A counterpoint to today's new found Taliban-related sophistication, this comes from the second Obama/McCain debate and was and parcel of Obama's empty blustering about going hardline on Pakistan if they didn't crack down on militants. After the inauguration Karzai had to intervene and tell our nuance-filled international celebrity to "settle down" and use "better judgment," lest he find himself without even erstwhile allies in Central Asia.

Bonus: this is the same answer where Obama talked about sending more troops to Afghanistan and linked AfPak instability to resources diverted into Iraq. I cropped out the the resources part because I'm not sure why he made the claim, given that he started running from it even during the primaries. The "more troops" promise is a bit more timely given how he's barely clinging to "keep troop numbers stable" these days. He was on quite the roll that night, wasn't he?

They are plotting to kill Americans right now. As Secretary Gates, the defense secretary, said, the war against terrorism began in that region and that's where it will end. So part of the reason I think it's so important for us to end the war in Iraq is to be able to get more troops into Afghanistan, put more pressure on the Afghan government to do what it needs to do, eliminate some of the drug trafficking that's funding terrorism. But I do believe that we have to change our policies with Pakistan. We can't coddle, as we did, a dictator, give him billions of dollars and then he's making peace treaties with the Taliban and militants. What I've said is we're going to encourage democracy in Pakistan, expand our nonmilitary aid to Pakistan so that they have more of a stake in working with us, but insisting that they go after these militants.

And if you want to know why CBS's Lora Logan was so emphatic about tearing into the WH's moronic pronouncements today, here's Obama during the campaign bloviating to her about what a grim anti-Pakistani realist he is. Yes, of course the word "I" was prominently featured:

Hot Air has the substantive critique of the WH's discovery that the Taliban aren't really our enemy. It's also worth noting that Obama's been peddling similar-but-not-identical nonsense for a while - CT Blog was already ripping our super-keen CiC's myth of two Talibans back in March.

And isn't it interesting how administration officials have now become literal mouthpieces for Taliban propaganda. I saw this Taliban statement in the wires yesterday and wanted to blog it with a line like "how long before this gets picked up as the new sophisticated liberal read on the AfPak theater?" Good thing for you guys I didn't get to it. Can you imagine how insufferable I'd be right now?

Afghanistan's insurgent Taliban marked the eighth anniversary of the U.S. invasion Wednesday saying they have no "agenda" to harm other countries but would continue fighting as long as America and its allies remain in the troubled nation. The Taliban insistence that it would pose no threat to other countries appeared aimed at countering suspicions that the Islamist movement would support al-Qaida's global jihad if they returned to power. Supporters of the war fear that al-Qaida would regain its once-dominant position in Afghanistan if the Taliban topple the U.S.-backed Afghan government.

In an Internet statement Wednesday obtained by the SITE Institute, a U.S. group that monitors terror messages, the Taliban said their goal was "independence and establishment of an Islamic system. We did not have any agenda to harm other countries including Europe, nor we have such agenda today," the group said. "Still, if you want to turn the country of the proud and pious Afghans into a colony, then know that we have an unwavering determination and have braced for a prolonged war."

First, Europe isn't a country, regardless of what Obama said during the primaries. More importantly, I'm trying to square yesterday's wide-eyed claim of innocence with previous Taliban threats to destroy Paris, but I'm coming up short. Maybe someone in the administration can untangle it for me.

References:
* New White House spin: Taliban not really an enemy, has role in Afghanistan's future [Hot Air]
* The Myth of the Two Talibans [CT Blog]
* Taliban say they're no threat to other countries [MSNBC]
* NO WONDER THEY'RE AFRAID OF BRIT HUME [Ann Coulter]
* Taliban says maybe we won't always have Paris [Jihad Watch]

Previously:
* AfPak [MR]
* Obama Vs. Obama On Victory In Afghanistan
* AfPak | Mere Rhetoric

The State Department was quite adamant about Honduras reopening Radio Globo, which had been closed down by the government for broadcasting Zelaya's calls for mass chaos:

The U.S. State Department is calling on Honduras' de facto president to immediately rescind an emergency decree that limits constitutional rights such as freedoms of expression, travel and public congregation... "This decision was made because (Zelaya) was calling for insurrection ... but I'm going to listen to the other powers of the state and we're going to make the most wise decision in the interests of Honduras," Micheletti said... In the wake of Micheletti's decree... the Canal 36 TV station and Radio Globo were reported closed.

But while Honduras has been reinstating most civil liberties, Radio Globo has remained closed despite US objections. Which is a shame because they really seem like solid folks:

The U.S. Ambassador in Honduras has condemned anti-Semitic remarks by a local radio news director who has been an outspoken opponent of the coup that ousted President Manuel Zelaya... commenting on the rumors alleging Israeli involvement in the crisis, Romero referred to the "famous Holocaust" and added that "I believe it should have been fair and valid to let Hitler finish his historic vision."... "I cannot help but note the irony that you and Romero came to visit me last week to seek support after your station was closed by the de facto authorities," [Amb] Llorens said in his letter.

I'm not sure closing the radio station was a good idea and - all things considerede - it should be reopened. But this is who you end up rubbing shoulders with when you make a point of intervening on the side of totalitarian thugs. Pro-Zelaya antisemitism starts at the very top:

I guess I was wrong during yesterday's TOCS news segment when I said that Geneva would give Iran time to limp across the nuclear finish line. They're actually sprinting ahead:

Iran plans to install a more advanced type of centrifuge at its newly revealed uranium enrichment site, an Iranian newspaper reported Tuesday, a development certain to add to international concerns about the country's nuclear work. Iranian scientists have carried out research and development in recent months for the new generation of more efficient centrifuges, and most of the machines' components are made domestically, said the head of Iran's nuclear agency, Ali Akbar Salehi, according to the Kayhan daily newspaper.... Iran insists its enrichment work is only meant for use in generating power.

The size and nature of the Qom facility put to rest even the pretense that they might be telling the truth only wanting to generate power. But it's nice to see they're still willing to unblinkingly trot out the line. Saves people the trouble of unpacking new lies.

On sanctions, here's that NYT story about how we couldn't implement a robust sanctions regime even if we got Russia or China on board. Luckily we can get neither Russia nor China on board so that's not an issue.

Not that Obama seems particularly interested in trying. First there was that September deadline that he set and that the Iranians made a huge show of totally and completely blowing off. It promptly and mysteriously vanished, only to be replaced by a new December deadline.

Then there was that hardline announcement that Iran had two weeks to let inspectors into Qom. Guess how it went:

The One laid down the two-week deadline yesterday at around 3 p.m. ET; this dispatch from The Hill was posted at 2:23 this afternoon. The big "ultimatum" didn't last 24 hours: "A State Department spokesperson on Friday signaled the president's mandate that Iran has two weeks to permit inspections of its recently unveiled uranium refinement plant was not "written in stone." "I don't think that there's a hard-and-fast deadline," State Department Spokesperson Ian C. Kelley said during Friday's press briefing, after a reporter asked what the consequences of Iran's inaction might be."

As for our broader strategy - I can't blockquote this entire Fox News blog post so I'll just send you there directly. Title: "US Won't Push for Sanctions in Nuke Talks With Iran, Open to Direct Negotiations, Denial of Access to Covert Enrichment Facility Not a Deal-Breaker."

Meanwhile our State Department has taken to granting emergency visas to Iranian regime toadies "with unusual speed." Just to be nice, ya know?

References and previously after the jump...

It turns out that decades of treating totalitarian cretins like totalitarian cretins is having its effect on Syria. This is coming Farid Ghadry - one of the anti-Syrian activists in Lebanon that Assad hasn't gotten around to killing yet - so it needs to be taken with a grain of salt. On the other hand it can't be any less credible than the wild fantasies that professional Syria watchers routinely make up about peeling Syria away from the Iranian orbit.

Plus - again in contrast to the prognostications of our liberal foreign policy establishment - it has the benefit of kind of making sense:

Between US sanctions, a severe drought in an agrarian-based economy, sustained terror that has caused the migration of over 1 million Iraqis to Syria, political risks promoting "resistance" instead of cooperation, dwindling oil revenues, an alarming increase in Syrian population and a determined new Israeli government, Assad is being squeezed like a Syrian olive for its oil. Very few people grasp the reality Assad faces now that he has systematically destroyed whatever he inherited from his father through ill-advised policies. Some Middle East analysts are aware of the economic pressure Assad is under, but the extent of the harm his policies have caused the Syrian treasury is largely unknown.

Ghadry emphasizes that delegitimatizing Iran will bring enormous pressure to bear on Assad, which would be great news except for how the Geneva talks have allowed Tehran to rehabilitate itself. I wouldn't focus too much on the Iranian angle though, since Obama is doing his best to relegitimize the Syrian regime directly:

A senior Syrian official has been invited to Washington for talks, a U.S. Embassy official said Monday, in the latest signal of the Obama administration's efforts to improve relations with a country deemed a state sponsor of terrorism. The upcoming visit by Syria's deputy foreign minister, Fayssal Mekdad, is the first in about five years and is part of U.S. efforts to improve strained relations with Damascus. Mekdad, who is currently in New York as part of the Syrian delegation to the United Nations General Assembly meetings, will fly to Washington on Monday for talks with U.S. government officials on a range of issues, the embassy official said.

I wonder if we brought up the thing about how Syria refuse to budge on their ongoing incitement of violence in Iraq. Probably not. Wouldn't want to spoil the mood.

References and previously after the jump...

Thereby presenting the immediate question: is there a destabilizing nuclear rogue that China isn't trying to boost? I was going to say maybe Pakistan but Google News indicates otherwise. So at least they're consistent:

China pledged to strengthen bonds with isolated North Korea... The renewed courting between the two communist neighbors came in messages between Chinese President Hu Jintao and North Korea's top leader, Kim Jong-il, who on Sunday hugged Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao at the start of a visit intended to bolster bilateral relations. The messages marked 60 years since the countries established formal ties on October 6, 1949, and did not mention of the North's nuclear weapons program, instead stressing their focus on shoring up ties. "History demonstrates that developing China-North Korea relations is in keeping with the fundamental interests and shared wishes of both countries' people," said the congratulatory message from China, issued by the official Xinhua news agency. "It also benefits protecting regional peace and stability."

In MSM-related news, the Washington Post recently discovered that China has its own interests and that this makes Obama's job hard, which in turn makes him grumpy. But no worries because his tactic of dissing the Dalai Lama as part of a broader and totally useless Asian realism strategy will soon be paying off dividends. No doubt the Chinese are going to hop on board any day now.

We're getting trounced by rising hegemons while the Oval Office's first confirmed beta male is traipsing around the globe giving speeches about his own wonderful wonderfulness. Smart power!

References:
* Pakistani president hosts reception to mark new China's 60th anniversary [Binhua]
* China vows to stand by isolated North Korea [Reuters]
* Iran, China And Obama: Being President Is Hard [Ace]
* Obama's self-defeating "realism" in Asia [FP Shadow Government]
* Did We Elect a Beta Male As President? [American Thinker]

Previously:
* Chinese Support for Hamas - Not So Much Blindingly Hypocritical as Confidently Unworried
* Pro-Uighur Solidarity Marches Sweep Across Globe In Aftermath Of Chinese Clashes
* Swedish "Jewish Organ Theft" Blood Libeler Apparently Uninterested In Actual Chinese Organ Theft

The investigation's mandate was so structurally one-sided that Mary Robinson - the woman who oversaw the Durban I hatefest - avoided it lest she grant it her imprimatur. First the UN picked a time window that excluded the Palestinian rocket attacks which led to the war. Then, just in case any Palestinian war crime slipped through, they precluded the investigators from looking into much except "Israeli war crimes."

Goldstone took the job anyway, bringing his reputation and his Judaism to bear on legitimizing the predetermined anti-Israel slander. He actually invoked his personal views on the Holocaust as a reason to take the report seriously. Apparently the trauma of historical anti-Jewish persecution - totally forbidden as a reason for supporting Israel - is a laudatory ethical basis for trashing it. Cue sneering anti-Israel partisan Stephen Walt:

It was disappointing that the Obama administration felt it had to denounce the report within days of its release, despite Goldstone's impeccable credentials (former member of South Africa's Constitutional Court and chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for Bosnia and Rwanda) and his strong Zionist convictions. Israeli PM Netanyahu hasn't been doing Obama any favors of late, and the release of the report would have been a golden opportunity for Obama to play a little hardball and remind him that stiffing your principal patron has a price.

Elder of Ziyon has been compiling a seemingly unending list of Goldstone inaccuracies. He's currently on #18 and probably has at least a dozen to go (not exactly a surprise since the report has to make biased and untrue libels seem objective and tenable, which isn't straightforward).

His post about how "the Mission found no evidence that members of Palestinian armed groups engaged in combat in civilian dress" is as brutal as Israel Matzav's post is thorough. Israel Matzav's goes on for pages and pages, with photographs and videos specifically debunking Goldstone paragraph by paragraph. It's a really impressive take down, though in all honesty it's probably kind of a gimme.

More entertaining: Elder's discovery that Goldstone uncritically relied on a Palestinian who thinks Israel is infecting Gaza with sex gum.

And as far as structural bias is concerned - time window, mandate, etc - the recent post about how Goldstone condemned the Gaza blockade but excluded the reasons for it is to the point. There was no way to make the investigation fair. There was only a way to make it seem fair, which is what Goldstone tried and is trying to do. And now his daughter wants Israel to thank him for it:

Had Richard Goldstone not served as the head of the UN inquiry into the Gaza war, the accusations against Israel would have been harsher, Goldstone's daughter, Nicole, said... "My father took on this job because he thought he is doing the best thing for peace, for everyone, and also for Israel," Nicole Goldstone told Army Radio.... "It wasn't easy [for him]," Nicole Goldstone said. "My father did not expect to see and hear what he saw and heard." Nicole Goldstone, who currently lives in Canada with her family, spoke of her great love for Israel. "Every time I dream of returning to the country or that my son will one day immigrate there," she told Army Radio.

I don't know why she would want her son to move to such an ostensibly horrible place. But I'm beginning to see why Diaspora Jews felt the need to invent the word chutzpa.

References and previously after the jump...

Within a few minutes of the Iran nuke revelation Mark Knoller had a "senior US official" spinning it as some kind of "victory." It wasn't the most credible spin ever offered by an administration - and making it into an unblinking party line didn't help - but it wasn't "Honduras is a coup" deplorable or anything like that. It's undeniably dumb - Iran not only forced Obama to tip his hand but did it in a way that strengthened their negotiating position - but at least it was kind of sort of in the ballpark:

Paul Ingram, executive director of the British-American Security Information Council in London, an independent research and advocacy organization, said the timing of Iran's revelation -- in between United Nations General Assembly sessions and and the key meeting between Iran and key Western powers -- is deliberate on Iran's part. "It is not at all surprising that Iran would want this news to come out now," Ingram said. "It strengthens their hand." The fact that Iran has proactively informed the world helps Iran diplomatically in conducting nuclear negotiations, Ingram said, adding that to characterize this second facility as a covert operation is misleading. The Iranians have yet to start production at Qom and are revealing it before that happens.

So "US victory" isn't really a tenable argument. But it's what you're supposed to do and it's what they did. So points for that.

As it turns out, though, spinning diplomatic setbacks as victories doesn't only mean you're being inane. In this White House it also means you're off message:

Reid: "Thank you Mr. President, you just mentioned sanctions that have bite, what kinds of sanction, and I know you can't get into details but what kind of sanctions at all would have bite with Iran, do you really think that any kind of sanctions would have any effect on somebody like Ahmadinejad, secondly some of your advisers today said that this announcement was a victory, do you consider it a victory and if so why didn't you announce it earlier since you have known since you were President elect?." Obama flustered by the question: "I'm not interested in victory, I'm interested in solving the problem"

That's quite the nuance-infused take on the international scene, and it's certainly justified when countries can come together for mutual benefit. International relations obviously doesn't have to be a zero sum game. Except - weirdly - when it is a zero sum game. Like when one country wants to build a nuclear bomb and another country wants them not to, that's a situation where you'll have a winner and a loser. Best case scenario for pretending otherwise: you look moronic. Worst case scenario: the other side actually believes you and hardens their posture accordingly.

I guess the actual worst case is that Obama's not pretending. But that's just silly. Video via Gateway Pundit:

This is more or less the same stunt he pulled when he couldn't make up his mind on "victory in Afghanistan." So at least he's consistently inconsistent.

References and previously after the jump...

The stuff about the transition comes from what Knoller's reporting, and in retrospect it makes sense. If the NIE estimated that there were 10-15 hidden facilities - and they did - presumably they had explicit game on at least a few of them. Nice of Obama to trot out surrogate after surrogate to threaten Israel against taking out the facilities, always under the pretense that he had things under control. Speaking of which, how did Iran get wind that their cover was blown?

As for Russia, they still see Iran as critical to their economic health, so don't expect much from Moscow. Earlier this week, they sounded fatalistic about new sanctions, and some wondered if Obama hadn't worked out some quid pro quo based on the shift on missile defense in eastern Europe. Instead, it looks as though Obama may have shared this intel with Russia, which is probably how Iran found out about it.

Since this post is supposed to be about engagement and the faux sophisticates who fabricate pretexts for it, here are the Sept. 8 and Sept. 19 LA Times editorials urging "conversations" with Iran. In between the paper published a third pro-engagement Opinion, this one about how Iran was ever-so-close to moderation.

The drip drip drip consistency of the engagement push might cause some people to suspect that a loose group of pro-Iran journalists, intellectuals, and politicians were manipulating the news cycle. But the alternative - that the LA Times is filled with morons who didn't get the "no one really believes engagement will work any more" memo - shouldn't be totally dismissed.

Taking a step back: I was always kind of fond of the left's anodyne Bush-era assurances about how Iran could never get their centrifuges running. There were all kinds of reasons: contamination of the equipment, impurity of the uranium, the misalignment of the moons of Saturn, etc. It was the specificity coupled with the bluster in the context of the mindblowing stupidity that was always so delightful.

This current crop of Iran apologists is just unimaginative.

Why not? Iran already got precisely the right read on Western resolve when we let them blow off that September deadline. What's this going to do? Give the impression of appeasement?

The consequences of letting the September deadline pass without demonstrating a decisive response is clearly not understood in Western capitals. Iran will carefully calibrate its next moves on the basis of how it believes the U.S. and its allies will act in the weeks ahead. Up until now, President Obama's efforts to reach out to the Iranian leadership with carefully-crafted public messages and private letters have elicited the opposite response of what he intended... What might have been seen in Washington as a magnanimous gesture was perceived in Tehran as a sign of reduced Western resolve.

And so this morning - somehow knowing that their cover was blown - the mullahs went ahead and let slip a second previously undisclosed nuke facility. This one's not big enough to be helpful with energy generation. But if you were intent on, say, building a nuclear bomb - if that was your intention then it's quite useful.

This is the first facility out of the 10-15 secret ones that the 2007 NIE said Iran probably had. It's the third one they've been caught lying about. So in response we've issued a strong statement about how we're going to give them until December to explain themselves. Because maybe this whole thing is just a giant misunderstanding!

Obama called "disturbing information" -- a secret uranium enrichment facility Western intelligence agencies have discovered near Qom, 97 miles southwest of Tehran. Calling the news "a challenge made to the entire international community," President Sarkozy said that "if by December there is not an in-depth change by the Iranian leaders, sanctions will have to be taken." Brown said the "level of deception by the Iranian government and the scale of what we believe is the breach of international commitments will shock and anger the whole international community and it will harden our resolve...We will not let this matter rest.

So disturbed was Obama, per Tapper, that he began to experience "great and increasing doubts about the strictly peaceful nature" of Iran's nuke program. You know, they might actually be up to something!

References and previously after the jump...

Alternative MR headline: "Oh Please:"

Girl, 15, seeks justice for Gaza in world court (AFP) - Aug 31, 2009 - THE HAGUE -- A 15-year-old Palestinian girl who says Israeli troops killed her father and two siblings in Gaza in January, sought justice from the International Criminal Court on Monday. "I am here to lodge a complaint against the occupying army," Amira Alqerem told journalists in The Hague, seven months after her family was killed in an early-morning assault in the Tal Al Hawa neighbourhood that also left her severely injured. "I hope this complaint will succeed because it is the truth," the soft-spoken teenager said, seated next to her lawyer on his way to the ICC to file the complaint with the office of the prosecutor...

ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo announced in February he had begun a "preliminary analysis" of alleged crimes committed by Israel during the Gaza offensive... Amira, meanwhile, is undergoing physical and psychological rehabilitation in France. "I am doing this for all the children of Gaza," she said through an interpreter. "I want to do something to change the situation."

The headline for this oh-so-conveniently timed ICC prosecution, as it appeared on the blog of anti-Zionist activist Kawther Salam: "A Palestinian Child Against Israel at The ICC." Which means that an unedited blogger writing for a froth mouthed audience still managed to be less incendiary than the AFP hack who penned this crap agitprop.

As for the timing: putting aside the cringe-inducingly brutal and ongoing shreddings of the Goldstone Report, I don't think the specific charges were ever meant to be taken seriously. They were meant to create a sense of Israeli brutality, so that if any particular one was debunked anti-Israel partisans could slide to the next. And if all the smears were eventually debunked? Well, the effort that would take would be paradoxical lady-doth-protest-too-much proof of the charges in the first place. Elegant.

The Goldstone Report, the anti-Israel motions at the UN launch, this ICC nonsense, the impending collapse of the peace process, pressure on Israel's nuclear arsenal - these are a cascade of ad hoc and foggy accusations that amount to a drip drip drip erosion of Israel's diplomatic and public positions. They're meant to set up a global anti-Israel boycott effort over the next few months, the first stirrings of which are already under way:

British trade unions approved a boycott against importing goods produced in some Israeli settlements. The boycott was approved Thursday by the Trade Union Congress at its annual conference. The congress also called for an end to arms trading with Israel and for disinvestment from some Israeli companies. According to the London Times online, the unions had considered a comprehensive boycott of consumer goods produced in Israel but reconsidered following "frantic behind-the-scenes negotiations." The statement approved by the delegates read: "To increase the pressure for an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian Territories and the removal of the separation wall and illegal settlements, we will support a boycott of those goods and agricultural products that originate in illegal settlements through developing an effective, targeted consumer-led boycott campaign."

It's weird though: when Israel withdrew from Gaza you actually saw boycott calls increase, as if anti-Israel sharks smelled blood in the water. It's almost as if the shrill histrionics over the "Israeli occupation of Palestinian Territories" are just a pretext for opposition to Israel that comes from a much uglier place (h/t: Richard Landes for the Salam post).

References and previously after the jump...

First thing's first: Elder of Ziyon is the guy who stumbled onto Garlasco's creepy and overly autobiographical Amazon review page. The lump sum of my subsequent work mostly involved the ability to Google "Marc HRW Flak" and take screenshots. I mention this both because Elder's work is consistently on point when it comes to debunking HRW and its ideological ilk - see both the Garlasco debunking that put him on the scent and his initial comments on the Goldstone Report that just dropped - and because that's where you should be directing your hate mail. Simple fairness demands that pearls like this...

What a load of shit you right on your blog. Obviously you don't have too much time for reading and education, twat. Bas Finnis

... and this...

Why not apply your website/blog to sway the Israeli government away from its Nazi-like behaviour?... Or perhaps you support the behaviour of Israel which places you amongst the Nazis .... not against them! Mathematemike

... get spread around evenly. Plus MR has already gotten enough approbation. As Stan texted me at 4:16am, this blog has joined the ranks of venerable right-wing fanatics everywhere:

The group, Human Rights Watch, had initially thrown its full support behind the analyst, Marc Garlasco, when the news of his hobby came out last week. On Monday night, the group shifted course and suspended him with pay, "pending an investigation," said Carroll Bogert, the group's associate director. "We have questions about whether we have learned everything we need to know," she said. ... Yaron Ezrahi, a professor of political science at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, said he did not believe that Mr. Garlasco's interest in memorabilia could support allegations of "premeditated bias." He said, however, that Human Rights Watch's credibility might have been wounded because Mr. Garlasco's hobby "has armed the right-wing fanatics" who "work day and night to demonize any individual or organization that raises questions about the military practices of Israel when they end up even with unintended civilian casualties."

The real question is what Human Rights Watch is investigating. Presumably they're not investigating Garlasco's obsession with Nazism itself, since by their own correct admission there's nothing intrinsically wrong about collecting WWII paraphernalia. And it can't be a process-level investigation about what Garlasco revealed during hiring since I doubt they have a "do you intend to write a detailed 430 page tome on shiny Nazi medals" question on the screener.

Yeah, of course he published his response on HuffPo. Second rule of damage control: do it in front of a friendly audience so you can remind your allies who they're supposed to be rooting for:

Now I've achieved some blogosphere fame... for my hobby (unusual and disturbing to some, I realize) of collecting Second World War memorabilia associated with my German grandfather and my American great-uncle... I'm now in the bizarre and painful situation of having to deny accusations that I'm a Nazi...

I've never hidden my hobby, because there's nothing shameful in it... Precisely because it's so obvious that the Nazis were evil, I never realized that other people, including friends and colleagues, might wonder why I care about these things. Thousands of military history buffs collect war paraphernalia because we want to learn from the past. But I should have realized that images of the Second World War German military are hurtful to many. I deeply regret causing pain and offense with a handful of juvenile and tasteless postings I made on two websites that study Second World War artifacts... Other comments there might seem strange and even distasteful.

Four times he acknowledges that his obsession with the color and pageantry of Nazism might be "disturbing" or "painful" or "hurtful" or "distasteful." You can almost imagine the "let's make this go away" emails HRW sent him: "you have to make it clear that you understand why people might be upset by this." The classic non-apology apology.

I'm pretty sure those blase "other comments" allusions are to forum posts about his SS chic and his Iron Cross hoodie. Neither line up particularly well with his "I'm just a misunderstood historian" ethos. And per Israellycool, his Bambiesque "I never realized" shtick is the opposite of true:

Garlasco also blatantly lies in his response. His contentions... do not compare well with this comment to him by a fellow Nazi memorabilia aficionado on one of the forums (no longer accessible without a login): "I remember you asking about using a psydonym before your book was published." The pretense that he studies "Second World War artifacts" is [also] just that - a pretense - given that his focus is clearly on Nazi memorabilia.

I think Dave goes too far in talking about those objectively disprovable "I never suspected" fibs the same breath as Garlasco's weasely "Second World War artifacts" descriptions. The descriptions are merely intellectually dishonest. Yes he's obsessed with WWII memorabilia. But the type of WWII memorabilia he's obsessed with is the Nazi type. For all his great-uncle's service for America, Garlasco hasn't written a detailed 430 page tome on US badges.

And speaking of intellectual dishonesty: at no point does Garlasco provide any link to anybody. At first I thought he was just being impolite - I was nice enough to link to his gushing forum posts about swastika-engraved paraphernalia - but now I'm thinking there might have been a more deliberate purpose. If he linked to his critics then he'd have to answer their real arguments instead of the arguments he's made up in his head.

Nobody serious has accused Garlasco of being a Nazi, though I guess it's heartening to have him on the record denying it (baby steps!) The criticism is that someone obsessively fascinated by Nazism is suspicious in the context of repeated apologism for Hamas and demonization of Israel. It's not one or the other, it's the convergence of the two. I know that's the criticism because I wrote it up myself in that first post and then people sympathetically linked to it:

ORIGINAL: Thanks to everyone who's emailing about this in the context of the Marc Garlasco controversy, but I intentionally passed up mentioning the "Flak88" who posts regularly on Stormfront.org. I'm sure it's not the Marc Garlasco Flak88 who posts on the medals forums.

The Stormfront Flak88 is the top hit for a bunch of searches on that handle, not least of which is "flak88 israel." But the Stormfront Flak88 is a vulgar racist who complains about unclean Turks and then complains even more that they're the only ones in Germany who sing nationalistic songs. He has challenges spelling, writing sentences, and conveying thoughts. He lists himself in Europe while the Marc Garlasco Flak88 puts New York in all his profiles. Same handle, different guys.

If it was proven that the Marc Garlasco Flak88 was the same as the Stormfront Flak88, I'd consider that strong evidence against my previous post. For all his faults real or imagined, the HRW Marc Garlasco is neither crude nor stupid. I would guess that he clings very, very tightly to the belief that he's a history buff who happens, for purely familial reasons, to be utterly fascinated by the Nazis.

I think that's one convenient bridge too far, and that his obsession colors the rest of what he does. I think he has very strong but tangled beliefs about Jews and the Jewish state that spring from a place that has nothing to do with level-headed analysis. But nothing I've read and no one I've spoken to leads me to believe he's an unsophisticated racist like Stormfront Flak88.

It's easy to get over-excited about these things, and collector Garlasco's medals are insanely creepy. But we shouldn't get distracted from the real scandal. This guy has spent the last few years producing untenable anti-Israel boilerplate for human rights organizations, UN committees, and international tribunals. Every time pro-Israel groups suggested that no one could make this many mistakes innocently they were told to stop "stifling legitimate criticism of Israel with implicit accusations of antisemitism." Hmmmmmm.

UPDATE: Also: while it's normally a good guess to associate "88" with the well-known hate symbol, in this case its a relatively innocuous reference to the 88mm caliber Flak gun.

Again: Garlasco's not a vulgar racist. He's simply not. He's someone torn by sensibilities that make him wildly inappropriate as a choice for a Middle East investigator. How he got to that position and stayed in that position despite error after debunked error goes to the heart of HRW's inappropriate obsession with and bias towards Israel. They couldn't notice anything wrong with the way he approached the conflict because, well, that's how they all approach the conflict. That's the scandal - that despite having ideological inclinations and personal tics, he fit right in.

References:
* Marc Garlasco - Is HRW's Anti-Israel Investigator A Nazi-Obsessed Collector? [MR]

Previously:
* Human Rights Watch Holds Saudi Fundraiser, Promises To Demonize Israel
* Human Rights Watch Shill Has Meltdown - Rants About "Sharanskys Of The World," Dares Critics To Find "One Incident" Of HRW Bias (UPDATED: Nasrallah Bragged About Using Human Shields)
* Human Rights Watch Earns Their Saudi Pay, Publishes Another Thinly-Sourced Report Demonizing Israel (UPDATE: Video Of Hamas Soldiers Hiding Behind White Flags)

UPDATE: I've published a critical followup to this post, both because I've gotten specific emails accusing Garlasco of being a Stormfront.org contributor (100% not true) and because there's a general risk that this controversy is becoming one about him personally (misses the point). He's a guy who has a lot of inchoate sensibilities when it comes to Jews and the Jewish State, and there's obviously something going on that's consistently tilting his reports in an anti-Israel direction. If he was just incompetent then 50% of his mistakes would favor Israel.

He should never have been tasked with producing reports about the Middle East, if for no other reason than there's something moving him other than level-headed analysis. It's not straightforward and its not vulgar, but it's obviously doing work.

But this isn't about him as an individual. It's about HRW's institutional culture, where people couldn't tell that something was amiss because everyone holds the same opinions he does. His anti-Israel biases are literally institutionalized in that organization. As I said at the bottom of this post, this is their mess as much or more than it is his. More elaboration at the followup.

ORIGINAL: There are two Marc Garlascos on the Internet. One is a top human rights investigator who, having joined Human Rights Watch after several years with the Pentagon, has become known for his shrill attacks on Israel. The other is a Marc Garlasco who's obsessed with the color and pageantry of Nazism, has published a detailed 430 page book on Nazi war paraphernalia, and participates in forums for Nazi souvenir collectors.

Both Marc Garlascos were born on September 4, 1970. Both have Ernst as their middle name. Both live in New York, NY. Both have a maternal grandfather who fought for the Nazis. I've put links and screenshots on all this after the jump, and you can click through for full-sized versions. It's hard to escape the conclusion that both Marc Garlascos are the same person.

Bloggers and activists concerned about Israel have been baffled and frustrated by the first Garlasco almost since he joined HRW. On his public photography site he posts gratuitous Palestinian and Lebanese death porn in between galleries of cute Western-looking kids playing soccer (no link - keeping his kids out of it). He provides a seemingly never-ending stream of interviews to all kinds of outlets, where he spins tales about ostensible Israeli atrocities. The only problem is that many of these tales - per Soccer Dad and IsraPundit and Elder of Ziyon and NGO Monitor and CAMERA and LGF - are biased and inaccurate. That doesn't stop Garlasco from putting them into the kind of HRW reports that make their way into international anti-Israel condemnations and academic anti-Israel dissertations.

Then there's the second Marc Garlasco, who I caught wind of from Elder of Ziyon. Elder had just finished tearing apart another one of HRW Garlasco's anti-Israel reports when he found the Amazon profile of collector Garlasco. This Garlasco's Amazon book reviews show a nearly obsessive knowledge of Nazi-era Luftwaffe Flak and Army Flak. A little more searching revealed that he's written a gigantic book on the subject that retails for over $100. He regularly participates in forums about Nazi medals under the handle Flak 88, where he posts galleries of his prizes and admires what others have managed to collect. On those forums he uses the email marc@garlasco.com, which points to a family genealogy site he set up in 2002.

If both Garlascos are the same, Human Rights Watch almost certainly knows about his creepy hobby. It took me less than an hour on Google to confirm Elder's hunch to my satisfaction, and not much longer to lock the whole thing down. There's even an Amazon widget displaying Garlasco's book at the bottom of his Huffington Post article, though that may be automatically generated. The book might even be listed on his CV because, after all, none of this is illegal. Just potentially unseemly.

The collector Marc Garlasco certainly doesn't keep his day job secret from his fellow memorabilia collectors. There are at least two public references to his life as an HRW investigator on the forums. In one thread he posts dozens upon dozens of pictures from his collection at the end of 2007, which he describes as having been a "very lucky" year. A friend responds "Jeez Louise!! I had no idea HRW paid the big bucks!!" In another thread he comments on a badge and gushes "I would kill for that - WOW!" A friend responds "now now, HRW boy, don't go overboard!"

So we have to assume he's not leading a double life and that his employers know about his extracurriculars. If so we can also safely assume they've investigated the numerous demonstrable errors in his anti-Israel writeups. They presumably concluded that his apologism for antisemitic genocidal Hamas lunatics is unrelated to his obsession with antisemitic genocidal Nazi lunatics. That would be interesting to hear.

If Garlasco has been less than forthright about what he does in his off-time - and if HRW hasn't taken an hour to Google him and figure it out for themselves - that would be interesting in a different way.

Either way, someone needs to explain why he keeps getting sent to the Middle East to write debunked report after debunked report, lest people suspect that he has an unseemly motive for his consistently anti-Israel errors.

So remember how yesterday morning I sarcastically asked "how soon before the Obama administration is issuing visas to Cuba but not to Honduras?" The link went to an article from the end of August about how State had stopped issuing most visas to Honduras.

Looks they got to the Cuba thing before the close of business yesterday:

Americans with relatives in Cuba can send them unlimited cash and visit the island as long and often as they would like under new rules that fissured a nearly five-decade trade embargo on Thursday. The rules, made effective immediately by the U.S. Treasury Department, fleshed out an announcement by President Barack Obama in April to ease U.S. trade restrictions imposed on Cuba after Fidel Castro's leftist revolution half a century ago.

The new Honduras guidelines mean you can only acquire a visa on an emergency basis, compared to the new Cuba rules which allow unlimited family travel. A few days ago the administration announced that they were looking to restrict visas to Honduras even further. Because the Cuban government is so much more democratic and legitimate than the entirety of the duly-elected and constitutionally-prescribed Honduran state (h/t: EW).

References:
* Breaking: US Cuts Off Aid To Honduras [MR]
* US Embassy in Honduras to stop issuing most visas [AP]
* U.S. allows unlimited visits to relatives in Cuba [Reuters]
* US likely to impose further visa restrictions on Honduras [Global Visions]

Previously:
* Shocker: Openly Anti-American State Dept Official Spent Decades Spying For Castro, Training Diplomats
* Obama: Screw Our Latin American Allies, Let's Cozy Up To Cuba
* Obama Flip-Flops: I'm Now Supporting Zelaya Again Because My Critics Are Hypocritical Or Something

Keep in mind that Gaza is inching toward the $1 billion mark in new State Department assistance. Because apparently Hamas is more legitimate than the duly elected and appointed legislative and judicial branches of Hondorus. Obviously:

The Obama administration on Thursday cut all non-humanitarian aid to Honduras over the ouster of President Manuel Zelaya, making permanent a temporary suspension of U.S. aid imposed after he was deposed in June. The State Department made the announcement as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was meeting with Zelaya. Spokesman Ian Kelly did not say how much assistance would be cut but officials have said previously that more than $200 million is at stake. Kelly said it affected "a broad range of assistance to the government of Honduras."

"The Secretary of State has made the decision, consistent with U.S. legislation, recognizing the need for strong measures in light of the continued resistance to the adoption of the San Jose Accord by the de facto regime and continuing failure to restore democratic, constitutional rule to Honduras," Kelly said in a statement. The San Jose accord, brokered by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, aims to return Zelaya to power with limited authority until elections now set for November. But Zelaya's replacement, Roberto Micheletti, has refused to accept it.

It's too bad for Micheletti that he isn't an intransigent genocidal lunatic. If he blew up some schoolchildren or threatened to wipe out a state, he'd have State's academic and journalistic enablers producing mountains of pro-engagement papers. Instead he's got Foggy Bottom officials condemning his Presidency as a "thug regime" a few months after they reflexively sucked up to actual Iranian thugs who were killing people in the streets.

How soon before the Obama administration is issuing visas to Cuba but not to Honduras?

References:
* US cuts aid to Honduras in support of ex-leader [AP]
* Unreal... US Official Condemns Honduran "Thug Regime"-- Compares President Micheletti to Napoleon [Gateway Pundit]
* Awesome: State Publicly Reassures Iranian Diplomats They're Still Invited To July 4th Parties [MR]
* US Embassy in Honduras to stop issuing most visas [AP]

Previously:
* Liberal Activism In Academia And Beyond
* Prominent Jewish Democrats Double Down On Obama. Unpersuasively.
* Obama Flip-Flops: I'm Now Supporting Zelaya Again Because My Critics Are Hypocritical Or Something

Typical fare from these cretins, though there's probably something to be said for how naturally he expects UN resources to flow according to his pathological demands. It makes perfect sense - the UN already funds Hamas's terrorist and military operations and feeds laughingly false Hamas propaganda to international media outlets - but the combination of unblinking entitlement and hysterical venom is still a little unsettling.

Anyway, your tax dollars at work:

Hamas spiritual leader Younis al-Astal lashed out after hearing that the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, the main U.N. body aiding Palestinian refugees, planned to introduce lessons about the Holocaust to Gaza students. Adding the Holocaust to the curriculum would amount to "marketing a lie and spreading it," al-Astal wrote in a statement. "I do not exaggerate when I say this issue is a war crime, because of how it serves the Zionist colonizers and deals with their hypocrisy and lies," he wrote...

UNRWA provides education, health care and welfare services to more than half of Gaza's 1.4 million people. Spokesman Chris Gunness said a final decision has not been made about the Holocaust course for Gaza schools. "While the Holocaust is currently not included on the basis of age appropriateness, all elements (of the curriculum) remain under review and under evolution," he said. Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri also objected to including what he referred to as the "so-called Holocaust" in the lesson plan.

Obligatory links about how the Arab world can't decide between celebrating or denying the Holocaust here and here. And just to change things up a little, here's a link to top Sunni clerics praising the Holocaust while insisting it didn't go far enough - a nice combination of celebration and minimization.

A fun question to take you out of the post, albeit one implying some vexing legal consequences: what do Hamas and Facebook have in common?

References and previously after the jump...

You know what's so weird about this? There were a whole slew of foreign policy experts who predicted that engagement by newly inaugurated President Obama would moderate Assad and peel Syria away from Iran. And now the exact opposite is happening. Not only is Assad - by his own admission - closer to Iran than ever, but the Syrians have even returned to destabilizing Iraq and directly endangering American lives:

An al-Qaida front group said Tuesday it carried out last week's truck bombings on government targets in Baghdad, attacks that Iraq has said also involved plotters among Saddam Hussein loyalists based in Syria. As the Iraqi government tries to fend off criticism for security lapses, it has focused its anger on Syria and demanded that Damascus hand over two suspected members of Saddam's ousted Baath Party whom it has linked to the attacks.

On Tuesday, Iraq escalated the diplomatic confrontation with its neighbor by recalling its ambassador to Syria. Syria, in turn, ordered its ambassador home and said that unless the Iraqi government provided evidence, Syria would consider the claims to be fabricated "for political goals." The Aug. 19 blasts that tore through the foreign, finance and defense ministries killed more than 100 people, weakening confidence in Iraq's security forces.

I wonder if the Al Qaeda cretin who confessed that Syria trained him to fight in Iraq counts as sufficient "evidence" for Assad:

Iraq aired a confession from a suspected al Qaeda militant Sunday who accused Syrian intelligence agents of training foreign fighters like himself in a camp before sending them to fight in Iraq. The videotaped accusations, aired by Baghdad security spokesman Qassim al-Moussawi in a news conference, could worsen a row between Iraq and Syria over accusations that Syria supports Islamist militants responsible for attacks in Iraq. Iraq and Syria recalled their ambassadors last week after Baghdad demanded Damascus hand over two alleged masterminds of bombings in Baghdad that killed almost 100 people, mainly at two government ministries.

I'm thinking it must, given how exquisitely rational the regime is, per our vaunted foreign policy establishment.

References:
* US the key to Syrian rehabilitation: analysts [AFP]
* Syria And Iran Pretty Psyched About Renewed Alliance, "Resistance Front" Against US And Israel [MR]
* Iraq focuses bombings blame on operatives in Syria [AP]
* Iraq al Qaeda militant says Syria trained him [WaPo]

Previously:
* Syria Responds To Obama's Outreach By Strengthening Ties With Iran
* Aww: Al Jazeera Reports On "Real Appreciation" For Obama In Syria
* Obama's Anti-Israel Diplomacy Spectacularly Fails To Win Even A Single Arab Or Muslim Concessions

About time. The UAE has been the gaping hole in the Iran sanctions net for years:

The United Arab Emirates has seized a ship carrying North Korean weapons to Iran, marking the first time a nation has acted on UN sanctions to stop the communist state's proliferation, a diplomat said Friday... A diplomat, speaking to AFP in New York on condition of anonymity, said UAE government officials had informed the UN Security Council's sanctions committee, which is responsible for implementing sanctions on Pyongyang. "It is an issue that is being processed by the committee," said the source, who declined further comment on details on the weapons.

I was going to end with the MR post from last April about how Obama prevented our cutting-edge missile defense from getting deployed lest it "provoke" the North Koreans. But instead here's a post from last Tuesday about how Obama's diplomatic push toward Pyongyang is paying off.

Do you think the informal club of celebrity tyrants who so fascinate our liberal foreign policy community actually laugh out loud when they talk about Obama?

With regime change off the table, and President Obama dishing out "mutual respect" faster than the rulers of Tehran, Tripoli, Pyongyang or Caracas can spit their contempt right back in his face, tyrants are becoming ever more weirdly trendy. They are globalized, in our face, on the Web, on television--and as New York braces for the September opening of the United Nations General Assembly, some of them, with considerable ceremony, are coming to town.

The most flamboyant among them enter a VIP orbit, in which they may be officially reviled, but also eagerly sought after. Recall the banquet hosted by Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last September at the midtown Manhattan Grand Hyatt for 1,000 or so of his closest friends. Or remember the gushing accounts two years ago of the invitations sent out, as Time magazine described it, on "creamy stationery with fancy calligraphy," to a select 50 or so American opinion-makers to sup with Ahmadinejad at the Intercontinental Hotel in New York. Whatever the protesters shouted outside the security cordon, it has become an accepted part of New York's fall season that Ahmadinejad and his retinue arrive for a hoopla of motorcades, talk shows, press conferences and banquets.

It's easy to forget that Ahmadinejad was endlessly fascinating to the left, right up until his "no gays in Iran" stunt made it declasse to defend him. Before that happened foreign policy experts were actually flirting with painting him - apocalyptic lunatic though he is - as a relative moderate:

There have been rumors swirling for the past week that the IAEA is keeping an explosive Iran report in a drawer. Israel apparently got wind of it and went so ballistic that the US and Europe had to pick it up and push ElBaradei:

"What we and all the allies are pressing for is for the full case to be laid out, in public," one senior Obama administration official said last week, speaking anonymously because he was discussing intelligence data... But agency officials say that Mohamed ElBaradei, the departing director general, resisted a public airing, fearing that such a presentation would make the agency appear biased toward the West in the effort to impose what Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton recently called "crippling" sanctions. Dr. ElBaradei, who has argued for allowing Iran to maintain a token capacity to produce uranium under strict inspection, has said that the evidence does not create an airtight case against Iran.

Yeah, ElBaradei would never want to appear biased. That's why he refers to the "Arab world" as "we", calls the WMD-producing Syrians his "brothers," engages in personal boycotts of media organizations that are insufficiently hostile to Israel, won't acknowledge Israel's right to exist as a Jewish State, regurgitates untenable pro-engagement talking points on Iran, and goes out of his way to undermine the West's military options against the mullahs. Because he doesn't want to appear biased.

On the plus side, the IAEA pinky-swears they're not hiding any report, that Iran is slowing down their nuke development, and that there's no "evidence in the agency's files that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons capability":

The U.N. nuclear watchdog on Friday hit back at reports that it had hidden information about Iran's disputed atomic programme, in a rare public comment on the agency's sensitive inspections work... The IAEA has no evidence showing undeniably that Iran has a bomb agenda, a diplomat close to the IAEA said earlier this week. The diplomat said ElBaradei had been loath to publish information that could be used for political ends and make the agency look biased against Iran... His successor, Japan's veteran IAEA envoy Yukiya Amano, has said he has not seen any evidence in the agency's files that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons capability.

Meanwhile there are undiscovered tribes in the Amazon without access to electricity who have "seen evidence that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons." At this rate the UN's vaunted nuclear watchdog will be very last organization on the planet to discover that those lunatics really do have a nuke program. Or at least the last one to admit it.

References and previously after the jump...

Figures:

Desmond Tutu said that the Palestinians and the Arabs are paying "penance" for the Holocaust. In an interview Thursday with Ha'aretz, Tutu, the South African archbishop who is visiting Israel this week as part of the group known as the Elders, said that the West was consumed with guilt because of the Holocaust, "as it should be."

He added, "But who pays the penance? The penance is being paid by the Arabs, by the Palestinians. I once met a German ambassador who said Germany is guilty of two wrongs. One was what they did to the Jews. And now the suffering of the Palestinians." Israel is mistaken to think it can achieve security through force, he said. "The lesson that Israel must learn from the Holocaust is that it can never get security through fences, walls and guns," Tutu said.

This is either a totally incoherent statement or a mind-blowingly disgusting reference to how hiding behind the "walls" of the Warsaw Ghetto couldn't save Poland's Jews. I'm actually leaning toward incoherent statement, since self-important cosmopolitan scolding of Israel tends to proceed Mad Libs style: "Israel must learn from the Holocaust that ______ [dehumanizing and/or condescending pronoun] can never achieve ______ [noun] through ______ [something that has empirically actually been pretty successful "achieving" the last noun]."

Plus if he brought up the Warsaw Ghetto it might remind people that - historically - guns have been the only way Jews have been able to get security.

I still can't get over how Tutu and his venomous ilk travel under that "Elders" banner. Conspiracy theory 101 is that pathological conspiracy theorists always end up appropriating for themselves the symbolic trappings of their imagined enemies. But come on.

References:
* Tutu: Palestinians paying for Holocaust [JTA]

Previously:
* Boston Globe Notices UN Is Not Entirely Fair To Israel (Plus: Lebanese Muslims Pissed That Even Israel Is More Humane Than Syria) [Video]
* UN Sends Committed Anti-Semite Anti-Zionist To Conduct Unbiased Investigation Of Zionists
State Dept Forgets To Condemn Palestinian Terrorist Attack - Another Diplomatic Masterstroke

Via the Guardian, here's one perspective on what Obama's got planned for the opening. Let's call it - and I'm just choosing a random moniker here - the "official White House spin":

Barack Obama is close to brokering an Israeli-Palestinian deal that will allow him to announce a resumption of the long-stalled Middle East peace talks before the end of next month, according to US, Israeli, Palestinian and European officials. Key to bringing Israel on board is a promise by the US to adopt a much tougher line with Iran over its alleged nuclear weapons programme... In return, the Israeli government will be expected to agree to a partial freeze on the construction of settlements in the Middle East. In the words of one official close to the negotiations: "The message is: Iran is an existential threat to Israel; settlements are not."... Obama has pencilled in the announcement of his breakthrough for either a meeting of world leaders at the UN general assembly in New York in the week beginning 23 September or the G20 summit in Pittsburgh on 24-25 September.

And here's a different perspective that we might call - again for no particular reason - "what's actually going on:"

Several sources have informed One Jerusalem that the Obama Administration is planning to significantly step up the pressure on Israel by announcing a comprehensive plan for Israel and the Palestinians at the opening of the United Nations General in September. Picture this: The anti-Israel nations of the world surrounding President Obama as he demands that Israel give up sovereignty over Jerusalem, abandon settlements, and recognize a terrorist state on the West Bank. If this happens, Israel will be isolated from the rest of world in a very dramatic manner.

If Obama is actually holding Israel hostage on Iran it would be breathtakingly mendacious. It wouldn't be unexpected - British officials were leaking exactly this trade as far back as July, with Clinton playing the bad cop and saying that "Israel may lose Arab support on Iran" - but it would still be out and out blackmail.

Now consider that this "give up your territory of face nuclear extinction" bargain is the least anti-Israel of whatever Obama's got cooked up for the UN opening. Almost difficult to understand why only 4% of Israelis think he's is pro-Israel.

Which is weird because the functionally interchangeable cluster of pro-Obama liberal groups - J-Street, MJ Rosenberg's IPF, the NJDC, etc - have indicated that you'd have to be a total wingnut idiot not to realize that The One is a huge fan of the Jewish State.

References:
* Barack Obama on brink of deal for Middle East peace talks [Guardian]
* ALERT :: OBAMA PLANNING ISRAEL AMBUSH AT OPENING OF UN ASSEMBLY! [One Jerusalem]
* World may back Iran op as part of deal [JPost]
* Clinton: 'Israel may lose Arab support on Iran' [JPost]
* Poll: 4 percent of Jewish Israelis see Obama as pro-Israel [JTA]

Previously:
* Obama's Anti-Israel Diplomacy Spectacularly Fails To Win Even A Single Arab Or Muslim Concessions
* Obama: Israel Must "Engage In Serious Self-Reflection"
* Obama State Dept To Israel: You'll Open Your Borders To Who We Say You'll Open Your Borders To

Last week it was Rafsanjani, who had to pledge allegiance to Khamenei in front of the powerful Expediency Council and repudiate "law breakers." This week it's Hajjarian, arguably the closest thing Iran has ever had to a genuine reformist, brought out to denounce everything he's ever stood for. Pure Orwell:

Saeed Hajjarian was a die-hard hero of Iran's reform movement, campaigning to reduce the power of the Islamic clerics even after being shot in the head in an assassination attempt that left him partially paralyzed. On Tuesday, he was brought into a courtroom propped up by men who put him in the front row of defendants in Iran's biggest political trial in decades, where he proceeded to renounce his entire career as a reformist.

His speech slurred and nearly unintelligible from the 2000 attack, Hajjarian had a statement read proclaiming that Iran's supreme leader represents the rule of God on Earth and asking for forgiveness for his "incorrect" ideas... A procession of the biggest names in the reform movement has taken the stand during the past month, some looking thin and tired, all dressed in blue pajama-like prison uniforms and slippers. They have confessed to taking part in what the government says was a plot backed by foreign enemies to overthrow Iran's clerical leadership in a "velvet revolution."

"Thin and tired" is an understatement. Unremitting solitary confinement, imprisonment in literal tombs, regular beatings, and ritualized rape have left some of Iran's top reformers looking like this. Even TIME - one of the outlets more rather than less prone to publishing pro-engagement talking points as news - is considering the possibility that maybe possibly the IRG is in charge.

The drip drip drip of coerced confessions is developing into something of a pattern:

Iranian authorities put on trial Sunday a group of demonstrators who said they were directed by campaign officials of defeated presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi to destroy public property in the chaotic aftermath of the June 12 election. The arrested demonstrators made their statements, which could become part of a case against Mousavi if he is arrested, in the third session of a mass trial of politicians, journalists and academics. There has been widespread criticism of the confessions, which many government opponents say are coerced.

Actual Associated Press headline from the middle of this month: "Waiting on Iran: West seeking signs of Tehran's global direction after turmoil." Seriously. Because they could go either way!

References and previously after the jump...

This morning's One Jerusalem conference call was with Amb. Dore Gold, who's on a media blitz for his just-published book The Rise Of Nuclear Iran. Also on the call: Avi Green (Tel Chai Nation), Jerry Gordon (IsraPundit), and Jim Hoft (Gateway Pundit). The audio will be up on their frontpage in a couple hours but in the meantime there's a Fox and Friends video of Gold discussing the book below, also via One Jerusalem.

Basic points from the book and the call: (1) Engagement has already been tried and won't work, (2) Iran will keep their nukes off-limits during negotiations anyway, (3) the mullahs are very deliberately running out the clock, and (4) they already has enough nuclear material to build the Bomb plus the intercontinental ballistic missiles to deliver it.

Not that they'd need to, since some of their tests show they're preparing for a shore-based EMP attack.

Where the book gets particularly detailed is on the grinding diplomatic and military dynamics of a post-nuclear Iran: an Iranian "nuclear umbrella" to terrorists like Hezbollah and Hamas that detonates the War on Terror, Iranian hegemony over the Middle East that puts stability at the whim of the IRG, and increasing Iranian interference in Latin America at the cost of US influence.

The book is systematic, it has documents that have rarely seen the light of day, and it's as on-point to the next few months as any dead tree publication can be. Grab the audio from One Jerusalem and then buy it.

References and previously after the jump...

Pressure on Israel to give up the Golan, reinvigorated US-Syrian diplomatic ties despite Assad's continued interference with the Hariri tribunal, and a generous offer by Obama to look the other way while Damascus continues to develop WMDs - smart power is very smart:

Iran's supreme leader called his country's alliance with Syria a symbol of resistance in the Middle East on Wednesday, seeking to reinforce a key relationship as Tehran fends off continued criticism over its response to post-election unrest. Visiting Syrian President Bashar Assad exemplified that resistance by criticizing foreign countries for provoking the massive protests that followed Iran's disputed June presidential election. His comments will likely disappoint the Obama administration, which has stepped up diplomatic efforts to pull Syria away from Iran. "I've come here today to personally convey my warm congratulations to you and the Iranian nation," Assad was quoted.

Not only has Obama "stepped up efforts" to suck up to Syria: he's gone so far as to repeatedly trot out surrogates to announce that his oh-so-sophisticated strategy was paying dividends. Turns out not so much.

Iranian press spun Assad's visit as a veritably divine signal that regional actors need to open up a "resistance front" because Israel and the US have become "weak." Terrific:

In a telephone conversation, the Iranian and Syrian Presidents have stated Israel and its allies are getting "weaker" and instead the tide is turning in favor of regional Muslim nations, the Presidential office said in a press report on Friday. According to Mehr News Agency, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said "the enemies of regional peace are losing the ground but the formidable alliance of friendly countries like Iran and Syria are getting more powerful." The Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad also insisted that regional developments "are turning in favor of Muslim countries and to the detriment of the Zionist regime and its allies."

No worries though - I'm sure that our renewed promise to deliver Israel and the security team we're sending to Damascus will cause Assad to like us the bestest.

References and previously after the jump...

First Ahmadinejad's tirade from last week, a neat little example of the anti-British conspiracy theories that make up the fabric of daily life in Iran:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad warned that enemy states will be "slapped in the face" if they do not cease interfering in Iran's internal affairs. "The Iranian nation has for 30 years endured the actions of enemy states with magnanimity, but if you do not desist from your interference, it [Iran] will slap you in the face so hard that you will not be able to find your way back home... Ahmadinejad pointed to British interference in Iran's post-election unrest, saying, "Some of this country's officials thought that by launching a Persian-language channel they will be able to reach their objectives in the Islamic Republic, but they underestimated the Iranian nation's love for the rule of its just jurisprudent [Ayatollah Khamenei]."

And now a news petulant fit, this time directed at the US's Farsi language efforts:

Iranian lawmakers voted overwhelmingly on Sunday for a bill creating a $20 million fund intended in part to expose human rights violations by the United States, the ILNA news agency reported... The U.S. Senate passed a bill in July that would allocate $30 million for technologies to allow the U.S. government's Farsi-language satellite and radio stations to bypass Iranian government efforts to jam their broadcasts. An additional $20 million would be set aside for developing Web sites and other technologies that will improve Iranian access to censored information. An additional $5 million is authorized for documenting information about human rights in Iran.

"We must respond in kind to America's injustice and tyranny and the interference of this country against Iran," Boroujerdi said, according to Press TV. The lawmakers need to vote again on the bill within six months in order to finalize it.

The WaPo goes on to muse that maybe - maybe - this might be a sign that Obama's outreach isn't going to work because of lingering "distrust." Which is weird because just a few weeks ago the WaPo was channeling Scowcroft and Brzezinski on the point that The One's charming charmfulness had gotten rid of anti-Americanism.

It is interesting that there are foreign policy experts who ritualistically intone that Iran's paranoia over foreign interference is "unfortunately" justified and foreign policy experts who insist that we have to embrace public diplomacy and those are often the same foreign policy experts. Not there's anything wrong in theory with trying to win Arab and Muslim hearts and minds. It's only when State's institutional imperatives for success run up against the reality that there's a deep ideological conflict between the West and large swaths of the Islamic world - only then do we get our diplomats going on obsequious apology tours and our foreign media outlets broadcasting antisemitic cant.

Which also wouldn't matter, except that's all the time.

References and previously after the jump...

Just so everyone's clear: for the purposes of pressuring Israel to give away territory, there is a timeless distinction between Palestinian land and Israeli land. But when it comes to letting random Israel-hating US citizens wander between terrorist havens and Israeli cities - well, it's all just land, ya know?

The United States said Wednesday it had complained to Israel about restrictions on the travel of US citizens of Palestinian origin, calling the measures "unacceptable." The State Department said that Israel has been issuing entry stamps for some travelers, mostly those of Arab ancestry, stating that they are only allowed in the Palestinian Authority and cannot transit through Israel.

"We have made it quite known to the Israeli government ... that we expect all American citizens to be treated the same regardless of their national origin," State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said. "These kinds of restrictions we consider unacceptable," Kelly told reporters. "We will continue to protest."... Israeli authorities recently started to stamp in visitors' passports whether they are heading to Israel or the Palestinian territories, potentially preventing them from traveling to both.

Interesting. Usually the US asks Israel not to stamp passports because intransigent Arab states bounce travelers with Israeli stamps, making it harder for US citizens to get into those countries. That's a policy State is presumably not "continuing to protest." Now they're asking Israel not to stamp passports because it makes it difficult for genuinely suspicious US citizens "of Palestinian origin" - and believe it or not, such people do exist - to move between Gaza and Israel at their leisure.

The policy isn't racist, the AFP's implicit smear by omission aside. It very emphatically extends to moonbat activists who want to burn Israeli flags with terrorists in the morning and chain themselves to a Jerusalem building at night. It's not exactly hard to understand why Israel wants to limit their movement.

There's an easy solution to this though. If the choice is all or nothing - Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza or no entrance at all - well, that almost solves itself doesn't it?

References:
* US complains to Israel on Palestinian-American entry rules [AFP]
* State Dept Importing 1,350 Palestinian Saddam Supporters From Iraq Into Southern California [MR]

Previously:
* Obama Alienates The Israeli Left: "He Has Spoken About Us But Not To Us"
* Obama's Top NSA And CIA Picks: Harsh On Israel, Sympathetic To Iran And Hezbollah
* State Dept. Banning Pro-Israel Obama Officials From Speaking Out

Happy Wednesday!

U.S. President Barack Obama has started reaching out to some of Pakistan's most fervent Islamist and anti-American parties, including one that helped give rise to the Taliban, trying to improve Washington's image in the nuclear-armed state. Obama's special envoy, Richard Holbrooke, is initiating dialogue between the United States and religious parties previous administrations had largely shunned, both sides said. "The purpose is to broaden the base of American relations in Pakistan beyond the relatively narrow circle of leaders Washington has previously dealt with," explained Vali Nasr, senior adviser to Holbrooke.

I'd love to know the paper trail behind this stroke of sophistication. Do you think that it originated in one of those roundtables that State occasionally organizes, where academics earn their consulting fees by spinning outlandish pro-diplomacy scenarios (top prize: a guaranteed invitation to the next roundtable!) Or did State's South Asia people just skip the formalities and conclude that (a) engaging people ideologically committed to our destruction is good and (b) Pakistani Islamists are really, really ideologically committed to destroying us so (c) engaging Pakistani Islamists must be super-good?

I wonder if we'll ask them about how radical Pakistani clerics are urging kids to spread Islam violently because "the tree of Islam was irrigated with the blood of martyrs?" Or about Pakistani intelligence, increasingly controlled by their side of the political spectrum, is outing US intelligence officials to Al Qaeda? Or about how Pakistani officials willfully destroyed a Christian graveyard to make room for a shopping mall? Or about how rampaging Pakistani mobs have taken to snatching up Christian women and children and openly torturing them? Or about how hardline Pakistani officials forced the government to free AQ Khan? Or about how the rape of Christian girls in the context of persecuting non-Muslims is now a thing?

I'm thinking we'll gloss over most of that and go straight to explaining all the reasons they should give us a second look. Because that's the problem - they just don't understand us enough.

References and previously after the jump...

That was fast:

An Iranian official has denied he said Tehran was ready for talks with the West on its nuclear programme based on mutual respect and without conditions. State television had earlier reported that Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Iran's envoy to the UN's nuclear watchdog, had announced its willingness to negotiate. "There have been no comments or interviews with TV networks on nuclear talks or conditions," he later said. Iran has been given until September to end its uranium enrichment programme. Otherwise it faces tougher sanctions. The West suspects Iran is secretly trying to build nuclear weapons, while Tehran insists its programme is solely peaceful.

On the upside, now we're in for a month of eyeroll-inducing Tehranology from our oh-so-sophisticated foreign policy community. I can't wait to learn what kind of subtle signal Khamenei was trying to send to Obama by having Soltanieh announce Iran's willingness to negotiate without preconditions and then immediately backtrack.

It can't be that someone got their signals crossed. It's obviously got to be that Khamenei was sending a note in a bottle about how there's an internal power struggle between him and the IRG, and so Obama should urgently reach out to Khamenei to isolate the IRG. Obviously.

For the record, even Clinton all but admits that engagement with Iran isn't going to work. It's clever of the administration to hold back the largely futile sanctions Obama's supposedly holding over the Islamic Republic - the better to ensure they don't visibly fail before negotiations state - but I think the Iranians cracked that secret a while ago.

Maybe another obsequiousness letter to the mullahs will work!

References and previously after the jump...

References:
* Iran denies nuclear talks offer [BBC]
* Official: Iran Ready for Nuclear Talks With West [Fox News]
* Khamenei Seizes Control Of Iranian Republican Guard Militias, Installs Son As Head Thug [MR]
* Great News: Obama And House Dems Blocking National, International Sanctions On Iran [MR]
* Clinton: Just A Head's Up, But Engagement With Iran Probably Won't Work [MR]
* Bolton: Israel Will Attack Iran By January (Plus: New EU Sanctions Somewhat Underwhelming, Still Better Than What Obama Will Do) [MR]
* EXCLUSIVE: U.S. contacted Iran's ayatollah before election [Washington Times]

Previously:
* Obama WH: When We Confirmed Ahmadinejad's Legitimacy Yesterday, We Didn't Mean To Do That
* Perfect: Iran Creates Propaganda Gold Out Of Hillary's Empty "We Empowered The Protesters" Bragging [Video]
* Iran PressTV Blows The Lid Off Anti-Obama Birther Conspiracy Theories. Turns Out: Jews.

When the post-election protests broke out the WH went out of its way to obsequiously suck up to the mullahs, taking the risk of deflating the dissidents, until public outrage forced them to withdraw their hot dogs and lemonade offers. Then Gibbs confirmed Ahmadinejad's legitimacy on the eve of the inauguration, potentially tipping the decision calculus of protesters, until public outcry forced him to issue noncommittal "the Iranian people will decide" talking points. The goal all along has been to avoid the perception of meddling by never taking a stand when it mattered, among other things on the gamble that the regime would survive and Obama would want to engage it.

It was a supine and disgraceful policy. It would never have been convincing because Iran and its leaders are true believers in conspiracy theories about omnipresent Western manipulation. Even if it had been convincing it would have been futile because engagement won't work. But at least it was a consistent supine, disgraceful, unconvincing, and ultimately futile policy.

And now this crap:

"We did not want to get between the legitimate protests and demonstrations of the Iranian people and the leadership," Clinton said in an interview with CNN broadcast on Sunday. "And we knew that if we stepped in too soon, too hard... the leadership would try to use us to unify the country against the protestors." "Now, behind the scenes, we were doing a lot," Clinton said. "We were doing a lot to really empower the protestors without getting in the way. And we're continuing to speak out and support the opposition."

I only caught the interview because Iranian Tweeters are going ballistic about it. Apparently Iran state media is plastering it all over the airwaves. No wonder Iranian MPs just doubled down on Western "meddling."

This gem recently appeared as a brand new YouTube video on an account with this bio: "Sign the petition to try the corrupted Iranian opposition leaders (Rafsanjani, Khatami, Mousavi and Karroubi). While some responsible of the attempt of 'velvet revolution' against Iran are facing trials and admitting cooperation with foreign powers, intelligence agencies and terrorist groups, the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, makes her own confessions." If this is what they're pushing into the English-speaking world, imagine what's being produced for domestic consumption.

I've removed the final frames from this propaganda. The clip originally ended with a pictures of Mousavi, Khatami, and Rafsanjani underneath text calling to "FREE IRAN from the Reformist/Moderate mafias," plus the url of the anti-dissident petition. It also had a menu with links to a range of other filth, including a video implying Neda was killed by "secularists."

Perfect:

Actually the State Department had little to nothing to do with Twitter staying open. The Twitter CEOs were more than smart enough to figure out that a "highly visible global event" was an opportunity they didn't want to screw up. As for giving Iranian dissidents financial or logistical support: Obama zeroed that out of the 2010 budget.

And yet Clinton's comments still forced Larijani - who once had come perilously close to opposing the election - to respond by siding with the regime against "Western powers."

Somehow the Obama administration has managed to garner all the negatives of boosting Iranian pro-democracy dissidents without actually doing anything to boost Iranian pro-democracy dissidents. Smart power!

References and previously after the jump...

Reset:

President Dmitry Medvedev has submitted a bill expanding legal reasons to deploy Russian troops abroad, the Kremlin said Monday. The bill released by the Kremlin would allow the president to send troops outside Russia to fend off attacks on the Russian military, deter aggression against another state, protect Russian citizens or combat pirates...

Medvedev told leaders of Russia's political parties Monday that the war with Georgia a year ago highlighted the need for the bill expanding deployment rules. "These issues must be clearly and precisely regulated," he said. "We wouldn't like to see such things happen again, but we must have clear legislation on the subject." Russia says it sent forces into Georgia to protect civilians and its own military personnel from a Georgian invasion of the breakaway province of South Ossetia.

Neat trick: get a supine international community to let you station forces internationally as "peacekeepers," whip up a counter-insurgency, and then roll across the border in full force. Warn the West to stay out and if US vehicles do get in the way - seize them too. At least Russia isn't snatching up new naval bases...

Despite the recent thaw in NATO-Russian relations, the Kremlin's latest move to project military force is raising some alarms. Russia and the breakaway state of Abkhazia announced yesterday they had concluded a deal that would allow Russia establish an air and naval bases in the republic. Abkhazia -- a once-lovely seaside resort that was trashed during a civil war in the early 1990s -- won recognition from Russia as an independent state after the war in South Ossetia this summer. (Besides Russia, only Nicaragua has recognized Abkhazia's independence.)

... as part of a broad push to station warships around the world...

An elegant followup to Hillary's public Nigeria musings about the stolen 2000 election. We really have become something of a Banana Republic, haven't we?

In a not-so-subtle dig at the Bush administration, U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice said Wednesday the United States has paid the price for "stiff-arming the U.N." and spurning international partners and is now embarked on a new era of global engagement. A key to this new engagement is a dramatic new approach to the United Nations, she said. Setting the stage for President Barack Obama's first address to the U.N. General Assembly next month, Rice called the 192-nation organization "vital to our efforts to craft a better, safer world" because "so many of America's security interests come together today at the United Nations." She never mentioned the Bush administration and its difficult and sometimes antagonistic relationship with the U.N., especially when John Bolton was ambassador. But her speech at New York University's Center for Global Affairs, released by the U.S. Mission, highlighted the differences in tone and actions under Obama.

There's a substantive argument to be made here, which is that Rice's enthusiasm for UN-centered multilateralism has us rubbing shoulders with thugs and dictators but has actually bought us very little influence.

Screw it though. She's mostly right about Bush stiff-arming the UN. During the last administration we barely had relationships with UN Jew-bashers like Mary Robinson. Now we're not only giving her Presidential Medals Of Freedom, we're releasing statements about how awesome we are for doing it:

The New York Times noted today that the "White House said Mr. Obama had no second thoughts" about honoring Mary Robinson with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Indeed, the ceremony bestowing on the former Irish president the nation's highest civilian award went off without a hitch and nary a discouraging word as Robinson and 15 other recipients received their medals amid a blizzard of presidential praise. Obama lauded Robinson... [who] is a longtime foe of the Jewish state and even today holds the post of honorary president of Oxfam, an NGO that gained publicity last week for firing actress Kirstin Davis of Sex and the City fame from her position as their spokeswoman because she also represents Ahava, whose Dead Sea cosmetics are considered off-limits by Israel-haters.

In fairness to Obama, do you have any idea how many Doha panels, Geneva conferences, and consular cocktail parties Rice and Robinson have mutually attended? It would be churlish for a WH with UN Ambassador Rice not to recognize the contributions that Robinson has made to uniting the world, albeit under the banner of venomous antisemitism. Credit where it's due.

References:
* Hillary In Nigeria: Don't Feel Too Bad About Your Corrupt Elections. Our 2000 Election Was Stolen Too. [MR]
* US sees UN as key after Bush era difficulties [AP]
* Obama's Decision To Join UN Human Rights Council Buys Zero Cooperation On North Korea [MR]
* "No Second Thoughts" on Robinson May Give Obama License for Future Mischief [Tobin / Commentary]

Previously:
* UN Sends Committed Anti-Semite Anti-Zionist To Conduct Unbiased Investigation Of Zionists
* Arab World Too Pathologically Anti-Semitic To Accept Israeli Water Tech And Expertise
* The WH's Eight-Step Plan For Detonating The US-Israel Relationship

There's a certain asymmetry in the international demonization of Israel. Organizations like Human Rights Watch get to make things up out of whole cloth but Israel has to spend precious resources and months of time disproving the charges. By the time the nonsense is debunked the news cycle is long gone. Plus nobody publishes "turns out, Israel didn't commit war crimes after all" articles. Plus anti-Israel academics just repeat the myths anyway since they can just footnote the original report.

Example: in 2006 HRW put out a report saying that Israel took potshots at Lebanese civilians waving white flags. It was dutifully picked up by the usual anti-Israel outlets. Of course the report was crap - Israel produced documents and videotapes showing that the "civilians" waving white flags were Hezbollah soldiers launching missiles. But as of 2008 the report is still being cited in academic dissertations under headings like "8.1.1 Possible war crimes committed by Israel."

Last week HRW put out a report pointing out that, yes, Hamas did in fact try to kill Israeli civilians. Rather than let that simmer for a while - or not, as Google News might indicate - they quickly published a brand new "Israel shot at civilians waving white flags" report. Because this way they can say "we release reports on both sides" - which is what they did in their Lebanon "white flags" report - without bringing up how their anti-Israel reports are (a) more numerous, (b) mostly false, and (c) timed to starve any anti-Hezbollah or anti-Hamas reports of coverage.

Money line from the summary of the new report, helpfully bolded on their website so media outlets know exactly what repetitious anti-Israel trope to quote and amplify:

In the 11 killings documented in this report, Human Rights Watch found no evidence that the civilian victims were used by Palestinian fighters as human shields or were shot in the crossfire between opposing forces. The civilian victims were in plain view and posed no apparent security threat.

This is the same organization that also stated - flat out - that there was no evidence that civilians were used by Hezbollah fighters as human shields. Of course there was the photographic evidence and the video evidence and how Nasrallah explicitly bragged about using human shields - but whatever. And in Gaza there's the photographic evidence and the video evidence and how Hamas explicitly bragged about using human shields...

And it's only been a week since she realized that North Korean engagement was also a waste of time? At this rate the WH will soon run out of intransigent thugs it can brazenly pretend are ripe for dialogue. If it wasn't for Russia, China, most of Latin America, and all of the Middle East except Israel, I'd almost be a little concerned:

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton says the United States has no illusions that Iran will accept overtures to return to negotiations about its nuclear program and will not wait much longer for Tehran to respond. Both Clinton and national security adviser James Jones said in interviews aired Sunday that Washington has little choice but to deal with the government of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, regardless of U.S. feelings about charges he was re-elected in a fraudulent election and sympathy for the thousands who have protested the outcome.

Of course if Obama had followed Europe's lead and come out early in favor of the protesters - as opposed to gambling on the sustainability of the IRG's military coup - the US might have a little more wiggle room now. Ditto if he hadn't imperiously told Israel to lighten up on the Islamic regime. In fact, Washington might have much more than "little choice" if Obama had done anything except shield the regime since he took office. But spilled milk, huh?

At least sanctions have no chance of working now that Iran is ready to go nuclear on a whim:

Unless Iran responds positively to President Obama's offer of talks on its nuclear program by next month, it could face what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton calls "crippling sanctions."... But a number of Iran analysts are skeptical that new sanctions will break the stalemate... Effective sanctions, say Administration officials, require participation by Iran's key trading partners. That's a problem, since neither Russia nor China is convinced that there's an imminent danger of Iran producing nuclear weapons. Coalition of the willing-style sanctions of the sort envisaged by the congressional legislation may have limited impact because they're unlikely to be implemented by neighbors such as Turkey and Iraq. And the use of naval power to enforce a blockade could easily provoke a war that the U.S. military is eager to avoid. But even if "crippling sanctions" were somehow imposed, Tehran still might not back down.

Which is weird, because I was assured that Obama's "strong carrots and strong sticks" approach - focus groups, it turns out, love buzzwords like "strong" - was the super-sophisticated solution that was going to keep the mullahs from getting the Bomb.

References and previously after the jump...

I know that Obama is a super-keen Vulcan with a grasp of logic beyond the grasp of mere mortals, let alone that of "rabid" conservative "animals." But I think the stress of the health care debate is sending Dear Leader over the edge. Now he's managing to alienate even his lefty allies:

President Barack Obama on Monday reaffirmed US support for ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya and accused critics of his policy on the political crisis of hypocrisy. "President Zelaya remains the democratically elected president and, for the sake of the Honduran people, democratic and constitutional order must be restored," Obama said during a summit with Mexican President Felipe Calderon and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper...

The US leader also took aim at critics who have accused Washington of meddling in internal Honduran politics. "The same critics who say the US has not intervened in Honduras are the same people who say we are always intervening and Yankees need to get out of Latin America," he said, accusing such opponents of "hypocrisy." "You can't have it both ways," he said in the western Mexican city of Guadalajara, adding that Zelaya had been removed from office illegally in a coup.

Of course the conservative criticism has been that Obama intervened too much in Honduras. The way I know that is because there were roughly a billion conservative posts going after him for "meddling" in Honduras while "not meddling" in Iran, where "meddling" was used in the traditional sense of "intervening." More explicitly, cf. this Hot Air post about how Obama was "intervening on Zelaya's behalf."

Now in some cases, getting criticism from the left and the right is a sign that a politician is navigating a perilous centrist course. Except in the zero-sum world of IR, where the left's new found respect for realism implies something close to a zero-sum power distribution. So when Obama weighs in on Zelaya's behalf, either he objectively succeeds - Zelaya gets back in power - or he fails. Appealing to some imaginary "international constituency" is at best secondary. By getting involved in a dispute he could have punted on, Obama has managed to fail at failing. Smart power!

Relatedly, is anyone in charge at the WH?

The Obama administration has backed away from its call to restore ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya to power and instead put the onus on him for taking "provocative actions" that polarized his country and led to his overthrow on June 28. The new position was contained in a letter this week to Sen. Richard Lugar... that also rejected calls by some of Zelaya's backers to impose harsh economic sanctions against Honduras. While condemning the coup, the letter pointedly failed to call for Zelaya's return. "Our policy and strategy for engagement is not based on supporting any particular politician or individual," said the letter to Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

This is the most artful Honduras-related diplomacy since Hillary discovered - to her surprise - that Zelaya is reckless. That replaced the WH's previous high-water mark, which was when Gibbs announced that Obama spoke up so people wouldn't blame us for the coup a day after Chavez blamed us for the coup.

In any case: American citizens at home exercising their Constitutional rights to assemble and petition the government: political terrorists. Chavez-linked thugs abroad who tried to overturn the manifest will of the Honduran electorate, the Honduran Supreme Court, and the Honduran military: fucking legit.

References and previously after the jump...

Temper Madam Secretary, temper:

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's temper flared on Monday when a Congolese university student asked her for her husband's thinking on an international financial matter... Clinton was clearly displeased by the question at town hall forum in Kinshasa. "You want me to tell you what my husband thinks?" she replied incredulously when the male student asked her what "Mr. Clinton" thought of World Bank concerns about a multi-billion-dollar Chinese loan offer to the Congo. "My husband is not secretary of state, I am," an obviously annoyed Clinton said sharply. "If you want my opinion, I will tell you my opinion. I am not going to be channeling my husband."

I'd be testy too if every month brought a new article about how I had been successfully pushed aside by the Obama Administration. Though after getting institutionally marginalized by Obama's army of czars and personally humiliated by Obama's misogynist brat pack, I'm not sure what she expects.

Eh. If she didn't want to be treated poorly she shouldn't have aired Birth Of A Nation-style race baiting commercials during the election:

There had to be a murky racial subtext in [the 3am ad] somewhere; every attack on Obama contains one if you're just willing to look hard enough. I thought TPM would be the ones to find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow but instead it's Orlando Patterson, drinking in a critique of a black candidate that features sleeping non-black children and concluding, naturally enough, that it's quasi-Klan propaganda.

See?

References:
* Clinton: I'm secretary of state, not Bill [AP]
* The curious case of the steadily shrinking Hillary Clinton [Daily News]
* Stephanopoulos Doesn't Ask Hillary If Obama Has Marginalized Her [News Busters]
* Video: Campbell Brown rips Hillary for laughing off Obama speechwriter's photo [Hot Air]
* Harvard prof: You know what Hillary's "3 a.m." ad reminds me of? Birth of a Nation [Hot Air]

Previously:
* CNN Spends Evening Searching For Democrat Who Can Explain Why Anti-Palin Smears Don't Reek Of Sexism. Fails. (Plus: Guess When "Shrill" Used To Be Sexist)
* Mind-Blowing Hypocrisy: US Leads Int'l Attacks On Israel For Evicting Illegal Palestinian Squatters From East J'lem After Igniting Crisis Over Legal Jewish Residents
* Hillary Asks "Who Painted" Miraculous Lady of Guadalupe On John Diego's Cloak

The crucial and delicate early days of post-election rioting, when dissidents had to calculate whether it was worth flooding into the streets: the Obama administration maintains that Iranian diplomats are still welcome at July 4 celebrations. That doesn't take the wind out of protesters' sails and the regime crackdown begins in earnest. In the middle of that State reverses its position.

The crucial and delicate hours leading up to Ahmadinejad's inauguration, when dissidents again had to make calculations about relative odds of success vs. relative risk: the Obama administration declares that Ahmadinejad is "the elected leader" of Iran in response to a question about his legitimacy. Whether that had any influence on protesters can't really be measured, but in any case critical mass obviously failed to form.

Now guess what:

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs on Wednesday sa