A reader sends a link to this curious article by Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, head of the Israel Project, which we met this morning pressing presidential candidates to get hawkish on Iran. Her key thesis — “if I go to yet another synagogue that has a sign about Darfur and nothing about the threat of Iran, I think my heart will break.”

Not that she’s against worrying about Darfur per se: “Worry about Darfur? Yes. But why can’t we worry about Iran — perhaps the greatest threat to Israel ever?” Once again, one is left to wonder why Israel went through all the trouble of building the most powerful conventional military in the region and acquiring a nuclear arsenal if all this actually leaves the country more vulnerable than it was in 1966 or 1948. And, again, we see the wearing pattern continue where failure to manifest dual loyalties makes one a bad Jew, but any suggestion of the existence of dual loyalties is anti-semitism.

Ari Berman notes a Jerusalem Post article featuring Colin Powell being sensible. “They won an election that we insisted upon having,” Powell said. “And so, as unpleasant a group they may be and as distasteful as I find some of their positions, I think through some means, the Middle East Quartet… or through some means Hamas has to be engaged.”

The normal next step after Powell says something sensible is to furiously denounce him for having endorsed the policy he’s now denouncing back when he was Secretary of State, but the “isolate Hamas” blunder is an entirely post-Powell Bush administration screw-up. His hands are clean!

(well, okay, semi-clean; his public support was important to Bush in the 2000 and 2004 elections so in some sense everything really is his fault)

Photo by Flickr user Charles Haynes used under a Creative Commons license

Martin Peretz finally grows disillusioned with Barack Obama, over the Senator’s totally correct remarks here:

Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Thursday the United States cannot use its military to solve humanitarian problems and that preventing a potential genocide in Iraq isn’t a good enough reason to keep U.S. forces there.

”Well, look, if that’s the criteria by which we are making decisions on the deployment of U.S. forces, then by that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now — where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife — which we haven’t done,” Obama said in an interview with The Associated Press.

”We would be deploying unilaterally and occupying the Sudan, which we haven’t done. Those of us who care about Darfur don’t think it would be a good idea,” he said.

Right. Just because there’s a very bad situation someplace doesn’t mean you take action to halt it whether or not that action will work, makes strategic sense, or is likely to improve the situation. Occupying Iraq isn’t working, and can’t be made to work; the fact that more tragic days are likely ahead for the Iraqi people is no reason to stubbornly continue a failed policy.

Should we respond to the al-Qaeda presence in Pakistan with U.S. military action? Blake Hounshell says no, arguing convincingly that the Pakistani population is supportive of efforts by the Pakistani government to crack down on violent groups but would turn sharply against American incursions.

As someone who favored the Kosovo War, I sure am glad Bill Clinton didn’t Take Tom Friedman’s advice (April 23, 1999) and bomb Serbia into the 14th century:

Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation (the Serbs certainly think so), and the stakes have to be very clear: Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set back your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too.

The actual policy was, obviously, not without deleterious consequences on the lives of ordinary Serbians, but certainly much less harsh than the Friedman “send a war criminal to catch a war criminal” collective punishment approach would have been. And it more-or-less succeeded in getting Milosevic to back down. It’s amazing what war fever and a desire to prove one’s masculinity by demanding that other people kill additional other people can do to someone. In Friedman’s defense, the actual point of the column was to argue against those calling for an immediate ground invasion, so perhaps he felt the need to cover his left flank with that little bloody-minded reverie.

Photo by Flickr user Charles Haynes used under a Creative Commons license

The Israel Project, a newish hawkish adjunct to the existing hawkish Israel policy infrastructure, seems to have issued some kind of open invitation to political candidates to provide them with pandering statements about Iran which they then compiled here. The Democrats are all a bit vague, but seem to be saying different things. They do, however, frame things differently. Hillary Clinton leads by laying it on thick:

Today’s event has the important goal of drawing attention to the security threat posed by Iran. Iran poses a threat to our allies and our interests in the region and beyond. The Iranian president has held a conference denying the Holocaust and has issued bellicose statements calling for Israel to be wiped off the map. His statements are even more disturbing and urgent when viewed in the context of the regime’s quest to acquire nuclear weapons. This regime also uses its influence and resources in the region to support terrorist elements that attack Israel. Hezbollah’s attack on Israel last summer, using Iranian weapons, clearly demonstrates Iran’s malevolent influence even beyond its borders.

John Edwards is a bit more measured, but like Clinton seems interested in deliberately misleading the American people about who the lead decision-maker is in Iran: “Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is a politically unstable leader and an open supporter of terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas. Iran’s possession of nuclear weapons could also set off a regional nuclear arms race in one of the unstable regions in the world, which directly threaten US interests.” Edwards does, however, partially atone for his sins by directly emphasizing the need to place carrots on the table. Obama says the least in policy terms (surprise!) but also avoids the Ahmadenijad demagoguery of the other two.

I still know plenty of people on the left hand side of things who think that we should stay in Iraq more-or-less indefinitely for humanitarian reasons. I would recommend to such readers Charles Krauthammer’s enthusiastic write-up of the surge and the war. He’s dead wrong, but at least relatively clear-eyed:

That’s why so many Sunnis have accepted Petraeus’s bargain — they join our fight against al-Qaeda, and we give them weaponry and military support. With that, they can rid themselves of the al-Qaeda cancer now. And later, when the Americans inevitably leave, they’ll be better positioned to defend themselves against the 80 percent Shiite-Kurd majority they are beginning to realize they may have unwisely taken on.

And that right there is your training. If your concern about Iraq is humanitarian, the solution is political reconciliation. Unfortunately, we’ve spent the past two years showing that the US government has no way of bringing this about. The training, by contrast, does sometimes “work” and create somewhat disciplined armed groups of people trained and ready to do some killing. This, though, is the civil war. The policy is to make training and equipment available to multiple factions so as to encourage different groups to try to curry favor with us. The consequence is that we’re arming multiple sides of a hugely complicated civil conflict — fueling the violence and distrust that have torn Iraq apart in order to better maintain the viability of a large US military presence in the country.

There’s a demented Krauthammerian logic to this, but it’s the logic of a war without end. There’s no guarantee that our friends tomorrow will be the same as our friends today. The Sunnis we’re arming were fighting us twelve months ago. It’s folly and it’s hubris. At best, it’s cold-eyed cynicism. Nothing about it is humanitarian.

Defense Department photo by by Cherie A. Thurlby