“Everyone understood why,” Krauthammer writes. “You do not undertake a supremely risky preemptive war without the full participation of a broad coalition representing a national consensus“:

Because for Israelis today, it is May ’67. The dread is not quite as acute: The mood is not despair, just foreboding. Time is running out, but not quite as fast. War is not four days away, but it looms. Israelis today face the greatest threat to their existence — nuclear weapons in the hands of apocalyptic mullahs publicly pledged to Israel’s annihilation — since May ’67. The world is again telling Israelis to do nothing as it looks for a way out. But if such a way is not found — as in ’67 — Israelis know that they will once again have to defend themselves, by themselves.

“Nuclear weapons in the hands of apocalyptic mullahs publicly pledged to Israel’s annihilation” would obviously represent a serious threat to Israel, but it’s worth unpacking this statement and examining each of its three claims.

First, with regard to an Iranian nuclear weapon, while Iran still has yet to answer key questions from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) about the nature of its nuclear work, the current position of both U.S. and Israeli intelligence is that the Iranian government has not yet made a decision to obtain a nuclear weapon. In an interview last month, Israeli Defense Forces Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz said Iran “is going step by step to the place where it will be able to decide whether to manufacture a nuclear bomb. It hasn’t yet decided whether to go the extra mile.” Surveying the enormous pressure being brought to bear on Iran, Gantz continued, “I believe he [Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei] would be making an enormous mistake” by manufacturing a nuclear bomb, “and I don’t think he will want to go the extra mile.”

Second, while Twelver Shia theology does speak of an End Times scenario (as do other faiths), there’s no evidence that a desire to trigger the apocalypse is driving Iranian policy. In the same interview, echoing former Mossad chief Meir Dagan, Lt. Gen. Gantz said, “I think the Iranian leadership is composed of very rational people.” This isn’t to diminish Iran’s various aggressive actions, such as its continuing support for terrorism, only to point out that the evidence strongly suggests that Iran’s leaders are very much focused on the here and now, and not the afterlife.

Third, while Iranian leaders have made offensive and threatening statements about Israel, the last few months have seen Iranian leaders specifically walking back a number of those statements. Asked in March about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s oft-cited claim that Israel would be “wiped from the page of history,” Mohammed Javad Larijani, a key adviser and spokesperson for Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, disavowed Ahmadinejad’s remarks, saying they were “definitely not” meant in a military sense and that such a move was not “a policy of Iran.”

Similarly, in an April interview, former Iranian president Ali Hashemi Rafsanjani, who was recently re-appointed by Khamenei as head of Iran’s Expediency Council, clarified a 1999 statement about Israel’s vulnerability in a nuclear-armed Middle East, saying it was mistakenly interpreted as a threat against Israel. “Having nuclear weapons is not even in Israel’s interest,” Rafsanjani explained. “We deeply believe that nuclear weapons must not exist, and this has been part of our policy.”

Of course, given their record of deception on the nuclear issue, the Iranians shouldn’t simply be taken at their word, which is why getting them to satisfactorily address the IAEA’s questions is a top goal of the current P5+1 negotiations. And none of this is to diminish the very real and legitimate concerns that Israelis and others in the region have over the prospect of an Iranian nuke. But, as retired Israeli Big. Gen. Shlomo Brom noted in March, efforts to prevent that outcome are not helped by making wild claims about the nature and imminence of the threat. (It’s also worth noting that quite a few Israeli commentators have doubted whether the creation of a unity government has much to do with Iran at all.)

Finally, Krauthammer’s rendering of Israel standing alone against a gathering threat is simply not accurate. Not only has the Obama administration extended U.S. military support and deepened intelligence cooperation with Israel over the Iranian nuclear issue, it has also forged, with considerable diplomatic effort, a broad and durable international coalition toward addressing that issue. There may be disagreements as to the exact timing and strategy, but Israel is in no sense on its own. As Lt. Gen. Gantz put it, “The state of Israel is the strongest in the region and will remain so. Decisions can and must be made carefully, out of historic responsibility but without hysteria.”

Daniel Pipes

In short, Christie has hugged a terrorist-organization member, abridged free-speech rights, scorned concern over Islamization, and opposed law-enforcement counterterrorism efforts. Whenever an issue touching on Islam arises, Christie takes the Islamist side against those — the DHS, state senators, the NYPD, even the ACLU — who worry about lawful Islamism eroding the fabric of American life.

A perusal of the authors’ case against Christie reveals it as comically weak, full of highly questionable characterizations and buttressed by links that don’t actually demonstrate what they’re supposed to. In a typical example, they criticize Christie for voicing support for Mohammed Qatanani, imam of the Islamic Center of Passaic County, “on the eve of his deportation hearing for not hiding an Israeli conviction for membership in Hamas.” They do not mention that the hearing resulted in Qatanani being cleared of charges.

Pipes and Emerson knock Christie for his concern over revelations of the New York City Police Department’s spying on New Jersey Muslims, suggesting that he should’ve shown “gratitude” for the NYPD operating outside its jurisdiction.

And of course the authors take special offense at Christie’s bold defense of New Jersey state superior court judge Sohail Mohammed against attacks by anti-Islam activists, in which Christie offered the most cogent summation of the anti-sharia movement on record: “It’s crap. It’s just crazy.”

Pipes and Emerson suggest that there is tension between Christie’s friendly relations with Muslims and his “ostentatiously” pro-Israel stance. “This makes him unusual,” the authors write, “for a pro-Israel stance typically goes hand-in-hand with concern about Shari’a.” But in asserting such a zero-sum relationship between support for Muslim constituents and support for Israel, Pipes and Emerson inadvertently demonstrate two things: First, their own ignorance about Israel. Since its founding, Israel has maintained a publicly-funded Sharia court system for the some 19 percent of Israelis who are Muslim. (Israeli society is fraught with numerous challenges, but imminent takeover by sharia law does not appear to be one of them.) And second, that their real agenda involves creating difficulty for Christie among pro-Israel voters. As with all such smear efforts, the goal here isn’t to actually demonstrate that Christie has done anything wrong, merely to create the sense that there are “troubling questions” about Christie’s views and relationships.

While Pipes and Emerson fail to demonstrate that Chris Christie has an “Islam problem,” they succeed in demonstrating that National Review still has an Islamophobia problem. Last month the magazine took important steps to rid itself of two writers who had expressed bigoted views toward African-Americans. It’s long past time that National Review do the same with those of its writers expressing similar views toward Muslim Americans.

Charles Krauthammer

Deploying probably the single most overworked accusation in the conservative lexicon, Charles Krauthammer condemns the Obama administration’s Iran policy as "appeasement":

[President Obama] began his presidency apologetically acknowledging U.S. involvement in a coup that happened more than 50 years ago. He then offered bilateral negotiations that, predictably, failed miserably. Most egregiously, he adopted a studied and scandalous neutrality during the popular revolution of 2009, a near-miraculous opportunity — now lost — for regime change.

Obama imagined that his silver tongue and exquisite sensitivity to Islam would persuade the mullahs to give up their weapons program. Amazingly, they resisted his charms, choosing instead to become a nuclear power. The negotiations did nothing but confer legitimacy on the regime at its point of maximum vulnerability (and savagery), as well as give it time for further uranium enrichment and bomb development.

No, actually, the negotiations have been a force multiplier for the administration’s efforts to put pressure on Iran over its nuclear program. As one Israeli defense official told me for an article Meir Javedanfar and I wrote about this, the Israelis were initially quite skeptical that engagement with Iran would have any benefit, but now recognize that the effort "contributed to building international consensus" around the problem. Negotiations actually did the opposite of conferring legitimacy on the Iranian regime: they made clear to the world, and to the Iranian people, that the regime, not the U.S., was the recalcitrant party.

As for the idea that we could have had regime change in Iran in 2009 if only President Obama had sided more forcefully with the protesters, I know this has become something of an article of faith for conservatives, but the next person to describe a plausible scenario in which President Obama’s speaking out more explicitly in favor of the Green Movement in 2009 results in the regime’s collapse will be the first.

One can disagree with the Obama administration’s two track approach of engagement and pressure. But to describe that approach — which includes the adoption of some of the most stringent multilateral sanctions ever, successfully supporting the appointment of a special UN human rights monitor for Iran, and unprecedented defense cooperation with regional allies — as "appeasement" is to declare oneself desperately in need of a dictionary.

Cross-posted from Middle East Progress.

Josh Block

People can make up their own minds, and I’m happy to defend anything I’ve written, but there are few particularly misleading items in the now-public document that I’d like to address.

Josh writes that I “seem ideologically and personally committed to mainstreaming the idea that Israel is a strategic drag on the United States.” As evidence, he cites a June 2010 post in which I note recent statements from Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and former Israeli Mossad Chief Meir Dagan warning of Israel becoming a strategic burden on the United States. Here’s the quote from me he uses:

Like Cordesman (for whom, full disclosure, I interned years ago) I’ve always been skeptical of claims about the strategic benefits of the U.S.-Israel partnership. As Cordesman writes, “At the best of times,” Israel “provides some intelligence, some minor advances in military technology, and a potential source of stabilizing military power.”

And here’s the rest:

But I’m also a strong believer in the moral and ethical basis of the U.S.-Israel relationship, in support for Israel as a fellow democracy — an imperfect one, sure, just as the U.S. was and still is in many ways — and as a country that shares many of our values, and holds enormous spiritual significance for many Americans.

Whether one supports or opposes the current U.S.-Israel relationship, on whatever basis, the fact is that the U.S. is deeply implicated in what Israel does. But supporting the relationship on the basis of values means recognizing that the U.S. has a unique responsibility to work toward halting Israel’s violations of those values, most obviously its four decade-old occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and creation of illegal settlements throughout occupied territory, rather than providing diplomatic cover for them. One can quibble with the manner in which President Obama has pursued the settlement issue, but the fact that he has made it such a central element of his approach to Israel shows how seriously he takes the relationship, and how he understands the threat that the settlements represent to Israel’s future. Though no two countries’ interests are perfectly aligned, I think that U.S. and Israeli interests in resolving the conflict, seeing Israel integrated into the region (and allowing the region to benefit from Israel’s vibrant culture and enormous economic accomplishments) are about as closely aligned as such interests get.

On the question of “linkage” – the manner in which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is linked to other challenges in the Middle East – Josh writes, “CAP’s Middle East people are committed to the idea that Israel is at the core of Middle East instability…CAP constantly pushes the talking point that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is the cause rather than the symptom of Middle East pathologies.” Here’s what I actually wrote in the December 2010 Foreign Policy piece Josh cites:

Basically, the “linkage” argument holds that continued irresolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict hinders America’s ability to achieve its national security goals in the region, both by serving as a driver of extremism and a source of anti-American sentiment. […]

It is of course true that hostility toward Israel and its U.S. patron will not simply dissipate upon the end of Israel’s occupation and the creation of a Palestinian state — the completeness of that de-occupation, and the contours of that state, matter greatly. There are also problems and pathologies in the Middle East that have nothing to do with Israelis or Palestinians. Securing a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will, however, make addressing some of those problems easier, by sealing up one well of resentment from which demagogues and extremists have for decades drawn freely and profitably.

“We don’t have to like it or even believe it makes sense,” wrote Ken Pollack, director of the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy, in his book A Path Out of the Desert, “but linkage is a reality and one we are not likely to be able to change in the near term.”

One reason this is particularly interesting is Josh and I discussed this in some detail while sitting together in the press section at the Herzliya Conference in Israel last February. I explained to him my view of linkage in nearly exactly the same terms as above, and explained why his interpretation of linkage is not one I agree with. Yet for some reason he chose to disregard that conversation, and characterize my views differently.

Another interesting thing about the Herzliya conference: In speeches there, Israeli opposition leader Tzipi Livni, NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen, and former national security adviser Gen. Jim Jones all offered variations of the linkage argument. Dennis Ross has done, too, along with many others. Josh may strongly disagree with it, but it is by no means a fringe analysis.

As for Josh’s outrageous anti-Semitism smear, I’m not going to bother responding, because I’m quite confident Josh knows that it isn’t true. I will offer a note, however, on what Josh refers to as my “unprofessional rhetoric” on Twitter. I will admit that in my tweets I do occasionally engage in a level of snark that some might reasonably call unprofessional. So do many, many others. But I hereby commit myself to being more judicious about the deployment of said snark, and to treating these important issues with the seriousness that they deserve.

Cross-posted from Middle East Progress.

The American withdrawal, which comes after the administration’s failure to secure a new agreement that would have allowed troops to remain in Iraq, won’t be good for ordinary Iraqis or for the region. But it will unquestionably benefit Iran.

President Obama’s February 2009 speech at Camp Lejeune accurately defined the U.S. goal for Iraq as “an Iraq that is sovereign, stable and self-reliant.” He then outlined how the U.S. would achieve that goal by working “to promote an Iraqi government that is just, representative and accountable, and that provides neither support nor safe haven to terrorists.”

Despite recent administration claims to the contrary, Iraq today meets none of those conditions. Its sovereignty is hollow because of the continued activities of Iranian-backed militias in its territory. Its stability is fragile, since the fundamental disputes among ethnic and sectarian groups remain unresolved. And it is not in any way self-reliant. The Iraqi military cannot protect its borders, its airspace or its territorial waters without foreign assistance.

What the Kagans seem to be describing here is a scenario in which the surge didn’t really achieve its goals. And this is, in fact, the case. As a September 2008 Center for American Progress report noted, while the surge did facilitate a dramatic reduction in violence, this was “purchased through a number of choices that have worked against achieving meaningful political reconciliation. The reductions in violence in 2007 and 2008 have, in fact, made true political accommodation in Iraq more elusive, contrary to the central theory of the surge.”

But, of course, the Kagans can’t possibly recognize this, as that would be undermining their signal achievement, so they have to spin a tale in which everything was going basically fine until President Obama came along and ruined it by irresponsibly adhering to a withdrawal agreement that President Bush signed (which Fred Kagan hailed as a “great accomplishment” at the time).

As for the idea that the U.S. withdrawal will “unquestionably benefit Iran,” newsflash: The Iraq war unquestionably benefited Iran. As an Iraqi friend put it to me at a conference in 2008, “America has baked Iraq like a cake, and given it to Iran to eat.”

As the New York Times reported earlier this month, Iran’s influence in Iraq — which was always primarily political, not military — has actually declined over the past two years (as with al Qaeda in Iraq, the U.S. has benefited from our adversaries’ ability to alienate their own allies), but it’s worth noting that Iran’s influence was at its height when there were over 100,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. Does anyone seriously imagine that a few thousand extra U.S. troops would make the difference here?

It must be pointed out how deeply humorous it is to see the Kagans belatedly sounding the alarm like this over Iran’s influence in Iraq. In the past, they’ve tended to downplay or selectively represent that influence in a way that buttressed their preferred narrative of the war’s progress, something which my colleague Brian Katulis and I pointed out back in April 2008:

One of the most skewed analyses of the recent intra-Shiite clashes in Iraq came from two architects of the Bush administration’s 2007 surge, Fred and Kimberly Kagan. Writing in the Weekly Standard, the Kagans described last month’s battle in Basra as a security operation launched by “the legitimate Government of Iraq and its legally constituted security forces [against] illegal, foreign-backed, insurgent and criminal militias serving leaders who openly call for the defeat and humiliation of the United States and its allies in Iraq and throughout the region.”

These depictions ignore an inconvenient truth: The leaders in Iraq’s current government are closely aligned with Tehran and represent some of Iran’s closest allies in Iraq. This is perhaps best illustrated by the warm welcome Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad received in his visit to Iraq last month, which punctures the myth that the current battle is between a unified Iraqi government and fringe groups receiving support from Iran. [...]

Over the past five years, Iran has hedged its bets, maintaining ties and offering support to all of the major Shiite factions in Iraq, including Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army, which fought pitched battles with the Iraqi army and the Badr Corps last month. But Americans should be clear about where Iran’s closest allies are in Iraq. They are at the highest levels of the Iraqi government.

Having now recognized this, the Kagans answer is the same as always: The U.S. must stay and stay in Iraq. If not, the U.S. will have failed. But, as Conor Friedersford aptly put it, “If the war you advocate requires for its success the indefinite deployment of U.S. troops, you’ve advocated a failed war.”

As my colleagues and I noted in our May 2010 memo, The Iraq War Ledger, in terms of its strategic, economic, and human costs, the intervention in Iraq has been a disaster for the United States. It’s blatantly and transparently dishonest for the war’s boosters to attempt to lay blame for this at the door of the Obama administration.

Cross-posted from Middle East Progress.

This retreat will have great costs for the United States. It squanders the gains made by both American and Iraqi military forces over the last four years, but, even more important, it squanders the enormous opportunity to forge an alliance with Iraq at a time when such an alliance would be of tremendous value to the United States. It dramatically increases the likelihood that the new and unstable Iraqi democratic experiment—already under attack from an authoritarian prime minister and a hostile Islamic Republic of Iran—will fail. The withdrawal of American forces now serving as peacekeepers along the Arab-Kurd seam greatly increases the likelihood of ethnic civil war. The withdrawal of American military protection from a state helpless to defend itself on its own effectively throws Iraq into the arms of Iran, however the Iraqis feel about the matter.

Interestingly, Kagan doesn’t mention that this “retreat” is being done in accordance with an agreement that the previous administration signed with the Iraqi government.

Even more interestingly, when that agreement was signed, Fred Kagan himself hailed it as a great U.S. success, telling radio host Hugh Hewitt:

The Iranians are desperate for Iraq not to align itself strategically with the United States, and they have been literally trying to bribe everybody they can bribe in Iraq, and running a fantastic information operations campaign in Iraq to make this an unpopular and hard thing to do. And the Iraqi government has done it anyway. And that is actually a great accomplishment for us, and it tells us a lot about where this Shia Iraqi government actually stands on whether it wants to be aligned with the United States, or whether it wants to be aligned with Iran.

So, just to be clear: Signing the agreement was a great success. Actually following it is a failure. Got it.

Cross-posted from Middle East Progress.

“The King of Saudi Arabia started lining up all the Arab countries to say to the Israelis, ‘if you work it out with the Palestinians… we will give you immediately not only recognition but a political, economic, and security partnership,’” Clinton said. “This is huge… It’s a heck of a deal.

Clinton is right. It was a heck of a deal, so much so that earlier this year a group of prominent Israelis, including top former military and intelligence officials, put together their own initiative in response.

But the Arab Peace Initiative poses a real problem for conservatives who like to maintain the fiction that Israel has always said “yes” to peace while the Arabs keep saying “no.” The preferred method for dealing with this problem is usually just to pretend it never happened, as in this recent video featuring Israeli Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon.

Former Bush administration Middle East adviser Elliott Abrams, on the other hand, takes a different approach: rank misrepresentation:

That “deal” was adopted at an Arab League summit attended by only 10 of the 22 Arab leaders of the day, and among those not in attendance were the king of Jordan, the president of Egypt, and Yasser Arafat—suggesting that support for this proposal may have been quite limited.

Abrams is right that the initiative was adopted at an Arab League summit attended by only 10 of the 22 Arab leaders of the day. But for some reason Abrams doesn’t mention that it was unanimously reaffirmed at the 2007 Arab League summit, in which all 22 Arab member states but one (Libya) were present.

As for the “limited” support for the initiative, the king of Jordan limited his support to addressing a joint meeting of Congress to attempt to gain backing for it. In further evidence of Jordanian disinterest, the Jordanian embassy created an entire web page explaining the initiative in detail.

The president of Egypt’s support for the initiative, in contrast, was limited to merely publishing an op-ed in the New York Times touting it as the basis for regional peace.

Certainly there are criticisms to be made of the initiative, such as the Arab League’s insistence that Israel accept it first before offering changes. But the fact remains that the deal was entirely consistent with multiple UN Security Council resolutions, and by refusing to even officially respond to an offer of full normalization and end of conflict, the Israelis reinforced the perception that they aren’t interested in a negotiated peace, just as the Palestinians did when they walked away from Camp David in 2000.

Cross-posted from Middle East Progress.

Addressing the issue in today’s speech, Obama gave a nod to the first part of that analysis — “Now I know that for many in this hall, one issue stands as a test for these principles – and for American foreign policy: the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians” — but nothing to the second. Indeed, perhaps the most disappointing thing in the speech was the way in which it attempted to cordon off the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the broader shifts in the region, as if this were remotely possible. The May 19 speech was a courageous recognition of coming change, and a bold step toward adapting American leadership to those changes. Today’s was a step toward increased American isolation and irrelevance.

While Obama made a stirring and important statement regarding the security threats with which Israel lives, he made no similar statement about the Palestinians, nor any recognition that it is Palestinians, not Israelis, who are living under military occupation. And he certainly gave nothing to the Palestinian leadership that might help them justify to their public the sort of stand-down that he’s been pressuring them for. It’s hard to see how already-embattled Palestinian moderates don’t come away from the U.N. weaker and with even less political legitimacy than they had before. That is, to say the least, not a good thing for the goal of two states.

Having repeatedly and rightly declared the status quo in Israel-Palestine “unsustainable,” the administration’s efforts at the U.N. this past week, capped off by the president’s speech today, appeared as little more than an effort to preserve that status quo, at significant diplomatic expense and at considerable cost to America’s global standing. It was, in other words, probably the best demonstration possible for why the Palestinians decided to go to the U.N. in the first place.

Cross-posted from Middle East Progress.

Map Photo Courtesy of Peace Now

Tobin characterizes my view as “the dustup over Maen Areikat’s remarks is just a neocon canard.” Untrue. Not only did I criticize Areikat’s comments, as “troubling,” (and the previous day as “ridiculous”) I actually located and linked to the original source of the comments. I think the concern over the remarks is entirely warranted and legitimate (which is why it’s good to see the Palestinians clarifying today that “The future Palestinian state will be open to all its citizens, regardless of their religion.”) The canard, which we can almost certainly expect Tobin and others to keep repeating, is the claim that the Palestinian leadership is actively planning a “Judenrein” state.

Responding to my comparison between Areikat’s comments and Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s proposed plan to transfer Palestinian Israelis out of the country, Tobin argues that, “Areikat’s views are not, as could be said of the opinions of radical right Israeli settlers or even the more mainstream hard line views of Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, the opinions of a minority faction.”

Leaving aside the fact that Lieberman is himself a right-wing Israeli settler, Tobin’s argument that a PLO diplomat speaks for all Palestinians, while Israel’s foreign minister — that is, the boss of all of Israel’s diplomats — represents only “the opinions of a minority faction” is not one I find convincing.

Tobin takes serous issue, however, with my pointing out the hypocrisy of Areikat’s critics who’ve never had anything bad to say about Israel’s ongoing efforts to seize Palestinian property (the latest evidence of which we have this morning):

[F]or Duss to compare a promise to evict all Jews from a Palestinian state to property disputes in Jerusalem (in which some Arabs lost court cases in which Jews held the title to the land or houses in question) is an absurdity. Whether or not you believe Palestinians who have squatted on other people’s property in Jerusalem ought not to be forced to move, to compare Israel’s record on this with a Judenrein Palestine makes no sense. Duss seems to forget Israeli Arabs have full citizenship rights, serve in the Knesset and have redress to independent courts.

For a response to this, I spoke to Danny Seidemann, an Israeli lawyer with the organization Terrestrial Jerusalem, and considered one of the world’s leading experts on Israeli policy in Jerusalem. “Sure, the courts almost always rule in favor of the settlers,” Seidemann said, “because the law discriminates. Under Israeli law, Jews who lost property in East Jerusalem [in] 1948 may recover their properties. The Palestinians there are ‘squatters’. Those Palestinians who lost property in West Jerusalem [in 1948] may NOT recover their properties. The Israelis who live in these are ‘homeowners’, not ‘squatters’.”

Seidemann also corrected Tobin on the status of Jerusalem’s Palestinians. Apart from about 13,000 out of about 290,000 total, Seidemann said, “The Palestinians of East Jerusalem are not ‘full citizens’ of Israel, but rather permanent residents. They may not vote in national elections, get elected to the Knesset, serve as judges, become mayor or get an Israeli passport.”

As Israeli human rights groups like B’Tselem, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, and Ir Amim have rigorously documented, there exists in Israel a system of laws designed specifically to divest Palestinians of their property and put it under Jewish control. A 2009 European Union report “accused both the Israeli government and the Jerusalem municipality of working deliberately to alter the city’s demographic balance and sever East Jerusalem from the West Bank.” If that sounds ugly, that’s because it is ugly, for none more than the Palestinian families who suffer under it.

It’s quite true that this is not the same as planning a “Judenrein” Palestine, but it is nevertheless incredibly inhumane, not to mention entirely illegal under international human rights law. It’s also a highly provocative attempt to predetermine Jerusalem’s future status, which is why both the United States and the United Nations have condemned such evictions. But, for the committed apologist, all of this can be dismissed as merely a “property dispute.”

PLO Ambassador Maen Areikat

What appears to have people exercised is not anything Areikat said recently, but comments he made in a Tablet magazine interview a year ago, in which he said Jews who “fall under the jurisdiction of a Palestinian state” would have to be transferred.

AREIKAT: I think this is a very necessary step, before we can allow the two states to somehow develop their separate national identities, and then maybe open up the doors for all kinds of cultural, social, political, economic exchanges, that freedom of movement of both citizens of Israelis and Palestinians from one area to another. You know you have to think of the day after.

Despite the fact that Areikat described these as his personal views (and despite, or maybe because of, the fact that they resemble the views of Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman), they’re still pretty troubling. Obviously, the goal of U.S. policy should be a Palestinian state where people of all faiths can live and freely practice.

In a follow-up interview with the Huffington Post’s Josh Hersh, Areikat’s distanced himself from the remarks. “Under no circumstances was I saying that no Jews can be in Palestine,” Areikat told Hersh. “What a statement that would be for me to make! I never said that, and I never meant to say such a thing. This is not a religious conflict, and we want to establish a secular state.”

In another piece, the Palestinian Authority’s Minister of Religious Affairs Mahmoud Al Habash told Maan News, “The Palestinian state will a be a civilized state in which all faiths will live. The attempt of media outlets to play games with statements hostile to Jews has a purely political goal. The PA and its ambassador in Washington have a clear position on the issue and do not need to play games with words.”

As for the usual neocon outlets pushing the talking point that the Palestinian Authority envisions a “Judenrein” Palestine, it’s worth noting that, not only do any of these characters ever have anything critical to say about Israel’s policies of expropriation of Palestinian property and eviction of Palestinian families in places like Sheikh Jarrah, Silwan, and elsewhere in the West Bank, they stood foursquare behind those policies when the Obama administration criticized them. Apparently, kicking people out of their homes and seizing their property is only bad when the Palestinians might do it in the future, not when Israelis are actually doing it right now.

Cross-posted from Middle East Progress.

Well, as of today there’s no “shorter” necessary. Speaking to the Washington Jewish Week’s Adam Kredo, Walsh came clean on his support of one state:

Walsh asserted that “there is no such thing as a two-state solution, and no such thing as land for peace. The ultimate peace is going to come through annexation, through Israel having sovereignty over the whole land, from the Mediterranean to Jordan.”

Walsh did not specify whether Palestinians remaining within the borders of the new, greater Israel would be granted full political and civil rights, but we can safely assume that, as a supporter of American democratic values, his answer would be yes. Can’t we?

Recognizing that the Obama administration “deserves credit for the diplomatic effort that produced stricter sanctions,” the editors nevertheless assert that “Iran’s leaders have not been deterred from their goal of producing a weapon, and the project is making steady progress”:

Despite the loss of centrifuges, Iran’s rate of enrichment is nearly double what it was in 2009, according to a study by the Bipartisan Policy Center. The center estimates that, should Iran decide on a “breakout” strategy of rapidly producing the highly enriched uranium for a weapon, it could do so in as little as 62 days — and that by the end of next year that timeline could fall to 12 days, making it possible to produce the core material for a bomb between visits by international inspectors.

While it’s increasingly clear that Iran is determined to obtain a nuclear weapons capability, the position of the U.S. intelligence community is that there is still insufficient evidence to determine that the Iranian government has decided to actually produce a nuclear weapon. Given both the domestic political import and the likely international reaction to such a decision, as well what it suggests about the continuing possibility of influencing that decision, this is not a minor distinction. Yet the editorial irresponsibly skates right over it.

I spoke to Peter Crail of the Arms Control Association, who noted that the Post’s editorial also “gets a few [other] facts wrong”:

While Iran is enriching uranium with the advanced machines, this is currently for testing purposes and not for production. Iran [claimed it] was going to triple production of 20% with the advanced machines, but now that they are installing the older ones instead, this tripling is not slated to occur yet. Granted, that’s only a matter of time, likely months.

Iran gave itself until the end of their year (March 20) to complete the process of moving production to Fordow with the new machines. They can probably make that time line, but they missed the initial timeline of installing the new centrifuges this summer.

“Not to mention,” Crail concluded, “part of the reason for those delays are the very sanctions and denial efforts that the Washington Post calls ‘past measures’ and says the administration shouldn’t be boasting about.”

More troubling than these basic errors in fact, however, is the editorial’s suggestion that even intrusive inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities would not be enough to satisfy:

With its focus on the Arab Spring and other international challenges, U.S. policy hasn’t taken account of these developments; in fact, it appears adrift. The administration’s reaction to the new IAEA report was so low-key as to be virtually nonexistent. In the vacuum, others are offering bad initiatives. Russia has proposed that sanctions be lifted on Iran if it deigns to answer long-outstanding IAEA questions about explicitly military dimensions of its program, such as warhead designs. On Monday, Tehran played on this idea, offering five years of “full supervision” of its nuclear work if sanctions are ended.

The United States will surely oppose these plans. But it needs its own strategy for responding to Iran’s advances. Boasting about the effect of past measures is not enough when Tehran’s behavior remains unchanged.

While Iran’s recent offer of inspections in return for lifting sanctions is by no means a game changer, it is a significant development in that it’s the first offer of its kind in over two years. Simply dismissing it out of hand would be a great way to demonstrate bad faith, and could diminish the considerable international support that the Obama administration has been able to garner over the past two and a half years. It could also undercut the efforts that President Obama has made to demonstrate to the Iranian people that it is their regime, not an aggressive United States, that is the problem. At the very least, the opportunity should be explored.

Unanswered questions about Iran’s nuclear program remain a key concern for the U.S. and its allies, but the fact is that there is only one way that the program will be brought under control in a way that sufficiently addresses those concerns: Inspections. The only question is whether those inspections will take place under the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Agency, or under the guns of occupying U.S. troops. The Washington Post’s editors have now strongly implied that the former would be unacceptable. If they favor the latter, they should come out and say so.

To take one example, here’s Greenwald giving Bush credit for the Arab awakening:

It was the Freedom Agenda of the George W. Bush administration—delineated and formulated as a conscious alternative to jihadism—that showed the way. Indeed, the costly American nation-building in Iraq has now led to the creation of the world’s first and only functioning democratic Arab state. One popular indictment of Bush maintains that he settled on the Freedom Agenda as justification for war after U.S. forces and inspectors found no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The record shows otherwise. “A free Iraq can be a source of hope for all the Middle East,” he said before the invasion, in February 2003. “Iraq can be an example of progress and prosperity in a region that needs both.”

And something of the kind has come to pass. “One despot fell in 2003,” [Fouad] Ajami has said. “We decapitated him. Two despots, in Tunisia and Egypt, fell, and there is absolutely a direct connection between what happened in Iraq in 2003 and what’s happening today throughout the rest of the Arab world.”

It’s probably a devastating enough rebuttal just to note that that quote from Fouad Ajami, one of the Iraq war’s most committed cheerleaders, constitutes the entirety of Greenwald’s evidence that the Iraq war spurred the democracy movements throughout the Arab world.

This is understandable, as there is no real evidence for the claim. Arabs themselves clearly don’t agree, as all available polling shows the war to be overwhelmingly unpopular in the region. An April 2010 RAND study also concluded that, rather than encouraging reform, “Iraq’s instability has become a convenient scarecrow neighboring regimes can use to delay political reform by asserting that democratization inevitably leads to insecurity.”

Examining the claim in an article back in July, the Council on Foreign Relations’ Steven Cook concluded, “It is time to put the Bush boosters’ arguments where they belong: in the trash heap of discredited ideas”:

There is no connection between the invasion of Iraq and Arab efforts to throw off generations of dictatorship. Other than helping to shape the Middle East’s discourse about political change, the effects of the Freedom Agenda are inconclusive at best. It is entirely possible that the uprisings would have happened without George W. Bush, or if he had been more like his father. Bush 41 placed a premium on international order rather than democratic change and, let’s not forget, presided over massive pro-democratic change anyway.

Back to Greenwald:

Meanwhile, as the noble call for representative government continues to be heard by Muslims around the region, let us not forget that the one existing democratic country among them is the successful American project in Mesopotamia.

From Saturday’s New York Times:

As leaders in the Arab world and other countries condemn President Bashar al-Assad’s violent crackdown on demonstrators in Syria, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq has struck a far friendlier tone, urging the protesters not to “sabotage” the state and hosting an official Syrian delegation.

Mr. Maliki’s support for Mr. Assad has illustrated how much Iraq’s position in the Middle East has shifted toward an axis led by Iran. And it has also aggravated the fault line between Iraq’s Shiite majority, whose leaders have accepted Mr. Assad’s account that Al Qaeda is behind the uprising, and the Sunni minority, whose leaders have condemned the Syrian crackdown.

Today’s Los Angeles Times:

A series of blasts and gunshots ripped across Iraq on Monday, killing at least 70 people and wounding more than 300 in a spasm of bloodshed that raised fresh concerns that the nation’s security forces might be overwhelmed by insurgents when American soldiers withdraw later this year. [...] It appeared Iraq was in a time warp, a nation still struggling with terrorists, sectarian gangs and militias at a time much of the Arab world is moving to replace extremism through revolutions for democracy.

As my colleagues and I wrote in our May 2010 report, The Iraq War Ledger, there is simply no conceivable calculus by which Operation Iraqi Freedom can be judged to have been a successful or worthwhile policy. The war was intended to show the extent of America’s power. It succeeded only in showing its limits. We’ll be dealing with the implications of that for many years to come, regardless of whether the war’s advocates can bring themselves to face it.

Cross-posted from Middle East Progress.

I want to focus on another part of the exchange between Rep. Ron Paul and Santorum, in which Paul responded to Santorum’s assertion that “Iran is a country that has been at war with us since 1979″ by saying that Santorum “is wrong on his history. We’ve been at war in Iran for a lot longer than ’79.”

PAUL: We started it in 1953 when we sent in a coup, installed the shah, and the reaction — the blowback came in 1979. It’s been going on and on because we just plain don’t mind our own business. That’s our problem.

A bit later, Santorum had a chance to respond:

SANTORUM: Well, anyone that suggests that Iran is not a threat to this country or is not a threat to stability in the Middle East is obviously not seeing the world very clearly. He sees it exactly the way that Barack Obama sees it, that he has to go — we have to go around and apologize for the fact that we’ve gone out and exerted our influence to create freedom around the world.

I don’t apologize for that. I don’t apologize for the Iranian people being free for a long time and now they’re under a mullacracy that tramples the rights of women, tramples the rights of gays, tramples the rights of people all — all throughout their society and it’s the greatest supporter of terrorism in the Middle East and around the world.

While Paul is right to point out that Iranian hostility to the U.S. didn’t simply spring out of nowhere in 1979, his characterization of the U.S. role in the 1953 coup that removed Iranian Prime Minister Mossadegh as “war” is pretty strange, and his “because we just plain don’t mind our own business” explanation of America’s foreign policy problems simplistic.

On the other hand, Santorum’s claim that the toppling of Mosadegh and the installation of Mohammad-Reza Shah Pahlavi was an example of the U.S. going out “to create freedom around the world” is simply ridiculous, as is his claim that the Iranian people were “free for a long time” under the Shah, a dictator so corrupt and brutal that the Iranian people eventually overthrew him in a revolution. The fact that that revolution was quickly co-opted by forces as brutal as the Shah is a tragedy, but not an argument in his favor.

Santorum’s rosy view of a corrupt, dictatorial regime like the Shah’s is, however, not particularly surprising. Back in February he criticized President Obama for siding with Egyptian protesters and accused him of “throwing [Egyptian president] Mubarak under the bus.” But I suppose Santorum would say that the Egyptian people were “free for a long time” under Mubarak, too.

Cross-posted from Middle East Progress.

Yesterday, Yerushalmi responded in the American Thinker, accusing the writer Andrea Elliott of taking his words “out of context” (his standard claim whenever confronted with his own past writings) and insisting, “I have never written anything that calls for discrimination against…Muslims qua Muslims.”

Really? Here’s Yerushalmi on the very same website in 2006:

Islam was born in violence; it will die that way. Any wish to the contrary is sheer Pollyannaism. The same way the post World War II German youth were taught by their German teachers and political leaders to despise the fascism of their fathers, with strict laws extant still today restricting even speech that casts doubt on the Holocaust, so too must the Muslim youth be taught from the cradle to reject the religion of their forebears.

I’d say that advocating a legal regime that forces Muslims to reject Islam pretty clearly qualifies as “calls for discrimination against…Muslims qua Muslims.”

But if that’s not plain enough for you, Yerushalmi also heads an organization called Society of Americans for National Existence (SANE), whose “draft law outlawing sharia” suggests the following measures for dealing with America’s alleged Muslim problem:

- It shall be a felony punishable by 20 years in prison to knowingly act in furtherance of, or to support the, adherence to Islam.

- The Congress of the United States of America shall declare the US at war with the Muslim Nation or Umma.

- The President of the United States of America shall immediately declare that all non-US citizen Muslims are Alien Enemies under Chapter 3 of Title 50 of the US Code and shall be subject to immediate deportation.

- No Muslim shall be granted an entry visa into the United States of America.

Maybe Yerushalmi just has his own secret, magical definition of “discrimination.”

Fortunately, it seems that more people are getting wise to Yerushalmi’s scam. Yesterday, Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League — which provided a good backgrounder on Yerushalmi — published an op-ed noting that “the threat of the infiltration of Sharia, or Islamic law, into the American court system is one of the more pernicious conspiracy theories to gain traction in our country in recent years”:

[Anti-sharia] measures are, at their core, predicated on prejudice and ignorance. They constitute a form of camouflaged bigotry that enables their proponents to advance an idea that finds fault with the Muslim faith and paints all Muslim Americans as foreigners and anti-American crusaders.

It is true that Sharia is being used elsewhere around the world in dangerous ways. While Sharia law can address many daily public and private concerns, it is nonetheless subject to radical interpretation by individuals or groups who subscribe to a more puritanical form of Islamic jurisprudence. Some individuals try to interpret Sharia law for their own radical agendas. It raises more serious concerns when it comes to implementing Sharia law in its entirety, as can be seen with the examples of Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Taliban. But that certainly doesn’t apply to America, where concerns about a “creeping Sharia law” are the stuff of pure paranoia.

Coming soon: Frank Gaffney with a Washington Times op-ed casting Foxman as an unwitting agent of the “stealth jihad.”

Via the Israeli news site YNet, “The Prime Minister’s Office stated that the phone conversation between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Barack Obama was ‘friendly and touched on political and economic issues that are on both countries’ agenda.’”

The White House issued this readout of the call:

President Obama spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu today to consult on regional issues and efforts to achieve Middle East peace. The Prime Minister expressed appreciation for U.S. support for Israel’s security, in particular the Iron Dome short-range rocket and mortar defense system. The two leaders agreed to continue to work closely together to address common security concerns.

And here’s how Israel thanked its most important ally this morning:

Israel’s interior minister gave final authorization to build 1,600 apartments in disputed east Jerusalem and will approve 2,700 more in days, officials said Thursday, detailing a plan that could complicate diplomatic efforts to dissuade Palestinians from declaring statehood at the United Nations.

The announcement drew immediate criticism from the Palestinians, and from Israel’s leading anti-settlement group, which accused the government of seizing on mass protests over housing costs to give economic justification to the always explosive issue of building in the holy city.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office knew the construction plans were moving ahead, Interior Ministry spokesman Roi Lachmanovich said. An earlier approval for the 1,600-apartment project embarrassed Netanyahu and caused a diplomatic rift with the U.S. because it coincided with a visit to Israel by U.S. Vice President Joe Biden.

In addition to the Obama administration’s unprecedented military support for Israel, and its significantly deepened intelligence cooperation with Israel on the Iranian nuclear issue, the Obama administration is currently using up an enormous amount of diplomatic energy and capital on Israel’s behalf in trying to head off the Palestinians’ bid for UN recognition.

The Netanyahu government’s idea of gratitude is to announce thousands of new settlement homes in occupied areas of Jerusalem, further undermining the moderate Palestinian leadership, and embarrassing (once again) its key patron and gratuitously complicating its efforts to achieve its goals.

As I noted in responses at the time, this was not only wishful thinking, but poor analysis that misunderstood, or simply disregarded, the evidence in regard to the quality and depth of Arab public opinion on the Palestinian question.

A piece in today’s New York Times backs this up:

In all the tumult of the Arab revolts, one of the most striking manifestations of change is a rejuvenated embrace of the Palestinian cause. The burst in activism in Egypt, Lebanon and even Tunisia has offered a rebuttal to an old bromide of Arab politics, that authoritarian leaders cynically inflamed sentiments over Israel and Palestine to divert attention from their own shortcomings.

But the embrace of the issue also helped confirm its status as a barometer of justice and freedom for many Arabs and Muslims. And now, the demands of an empowered public raise the possibility of a significant change in the region’s foreign policies which, at least tacitly, capitulated to the dictates of the United States and Israel.

“We always said, ‘If you want to liberate Palestine, you need to liberate yourselves,’” said Gamal Eid, founder of the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, in Cairo. [...]

Many surveys routinely find that the Israeli occupation is considered the biggest obstacle to peace and stability in the region. American interference is often listed as a close second.

In a tent in Tahrir Square with a Palestinian banner and a sign that read “Jerusalem will soon be back,” Mustafa Hesham, a 22-year-old with a narrow patch of beard on his chin, said he was “arrested and humiliated just because I support the Palestinian cause.”

“After the revolution that won’t happen again,” he said.

In the Christian Science Monitor, Ibrahim Sharqieh of the Brookings Doha Center argues that the Arab uprisings have already changed the dynamic between the rulers and the people of the region, and that the U.S. relationship with both would be seriously undermined by U.S. efforts to penalize the Palestinians for trying to have their national rights recognized at the United Nations:

To use financial aid as a bargaining tool over a basic human need not only complicates US relations with the region, particularly in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, but also raises serious ethical concerns. The Arab Spring has emphasized values of freedom, justice, and dignity, and US foreign policy in the region should be consistent with supporting these ideals, regardless of the political cost associated with such action. The Palestinians should not be punished for demanding freedom and the recognition of their state.

The United States should view the proposal for a Palestinian state at the UN in September, then, as an opportunity to demonstrate its commitment to universal human values of justice and freedom, rather than acquiescing to political pressure and lobbying. And it should also recognize Palestinian statehood as a foundational element not just in ongoing negotiations, but also in forging real peace in the region. The US vote over the Palestinian independence in the UN will therefore be critical not only for the Palestinians but also for the spirit of the Arab Spring.

Unfortunately, as of now it looks like political pressure and lobbying will win out, and the U.S. will end up voting (again) against its own stated interests at the UN in September.

Cross-posted from Middle East Progress.

Abrams has an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal with lots of advice for the Obama administration on Syria, some of it sensible, some of it already being done, and some of it simply evidence of the curious neoconservative belief in magic foreign policy wands.

As my colleagues and I wrote back in June, the U.S. has a hugely important role to play in marshaling the international community, in a number of multilalteral venues, against the Assad regime’s abuses. Blake Hounshell and Josh Rogin have a great, informative piece on the state of play in Syria, and the rather narrow range of U.S. policy options for influencing it, as does Hussein Ibish.

But as you read Abrams’ fulminating against the Assad “mafia,” do remember that back in 2002, when he handled Middle East affairs for the National Security Council under the George W. Bush administration, the United States rendered an innocent Canadian citizen, Maher Arrar, to this same “mafia,” who tortured Arrar repeatedly.

Unfortunately, and disgracefully, U.S. efforts to deny Arrar his day in court continued under the Obama administration.

Sanctions aren’t slowing Iran’s nuclear progress.

And this is from the May report of the United Nations special experts panel on the impact of sanctions adopted by the UN Security Council in June 2010:

[Sanctions] are constraining Iran’s procurement of items related to prohibited nuclear and ballistic missile activity and thus slowing development of these programs.

It is certainly fair to ask whether or not these measures actually serve the goal of a negotiated solution to the nuclear impasse. But it’s simply false to claim that they’re having no impact on the program.

The editorial goes on to cite British Foreign Secretary William Hague as support for its assertion:

As British Foreign Secretary William Hague wrote in an op-ed published by the Guardian last week, it would take only two to three months to convert the uranium enriched at Qom into weapons-grade material. That means that Iran could have a “breakout” capacity allowing it to quickly produce a weapon when it chose to do so.

And here’s the actual passage from Hague’s op-ed, substantially more qualified than the Post’s rendering:

[W]hen enough 20% enriched uranium is accumulated at the underground facility at Qom, it would take only two or three months of additional work to convert this into weapons grade material. There would remain technical challenges to actually producing a bomb, but Iran would be a significant step closer.

So, if Iran proceeded with plans to enrich to 20 percent, and if it then accumulated enough 20 percent enriched uranium, and if it then decided to convert this to weapons grade material, it could — if it overcame certain technical challenges — have a breakout capacity enabling it to produce a weapon within several months if it chose to do so.

The U.S. intelligence community continues to maintain that, while “Iran continues to develop a range of capabilities that could be applied to producing nuclear weapons, if a decision is made to do so,” there’s still insufficient evidence to determine that such a decision has been made.

Similarly, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Yukiya Amano said in an interview earlier this year that, “Despite all unanswered questions, we cannot say that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program.”

While Iran’s regional ambitions have been set back by the ongoing uprisings in the Arab world, it is still clearly engaged in a range of activities that are of major concern to the U.S. and its allies. As evidenced by its work in creating unprecedented international consensus and pressure on Iran’s nuclear program and its abuses of human rights, the Obama administration understands the extent of the Iranian challenge. But efforts to deal responsibly and effectively with this challenge are not served by alarmist misrepresentations of what we do and do not know about it.

Today’s editorial has echoes of the recent past. In the lead-up to the war in Iraq, the Washington Post disgraced itself by serving as an amplifier for the Bush administration’s false claims about the threat posed by Iraq. The Post’s editors have subsequently continued to mislead the Post’s readers about the extent of those deceptions. Troublingly, they now seemed poised to do it all over again.

Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Fouad Ajami

Those were Arabs, not Afghans, who struck America on that day, and it had been the proper thing to strike at an Arab “return address,” because the American strike against the Taliban did not suffice. Panetta, in an unguarded moment, gave voice to a fundamental truth about the U.S. expedition into Iraq. [...]

Our country made its way to Iraq some 18 months after 9/11 because the menace against America in that time of peril had come from Arab lands. It was Arab financiers who made it possible for the plotters and the death pilots to do their grim work. It was Arab religious preachers, with the prestige of the Arabic language, the language of the Islamic revelation, who were sowing the winds of anti-Americanism and “weaponizing” the faith itself. And it was sly Arab governments winking at the forces of terror and enabling it while posing as America’s clients and allies. We had to get the attention of the Arabs, strike against Arab targets, take on the pathologies of that world.

So, because the people who attacked us on 9/11 were Arabs, the U.S. needed to kill some Arabs in response. No matter how many times Ajami writes this, it never gets less racist. (It’s worth noting the similarity here to Osama bin Laden’s support for killing Americans, any old Americans, for the alleged sins of the American government. In both cases, what’s important is to send a message.)

Ajami goes on to once again scold critics of the war for failing to recognize its benefits, such as they are. I’ve noted repeatedly the importance of Iraq being the first Arab state where Islamists have been given an opportunity to govern and the possible lessons that might be drawn from this in regard to Islamists’ political participation in other countries in the region.

On the other hand, like so many of the war’s most vigorous cheerleaders, Ajami himself has never shown any real interest in grappling with the war’s costs, which far, far outweigh its benefits. Should he ever decide to do so, he can start with our May 2010 report.

This post was cross-posted from Middle East Progress.