Now here I was thinking to myself that there’s really just no way you could turn a discussion of Taiwan-PRC relations into a pretext for talking about the perfidy of the Palestinians. Obviously, I hadn’t taken Peretz-power into consideration. He’s talking about Taiwan’s quest for UN membership:

I have a suggestion–giving up the fight is not my way–and here it is: Without giving up its ultimate ambitions for U.N. membership, it should apply for observer status in the world organization. Like the Palestine Liberation Organization which, unlike Taiwan, rules no territory, commands no popular consensus, represents no coherent principles, has no economy, but struts around the world with embassies and ambassadors and plenipotentiaries and the usual bull-shit of diplomacy. Moreover, it actually speaks before the General Assembly and the Security Council and is represented here, there and everywhere in international organizations.

It is actually a lie that the P.L.O. has all these rights, none of which is passed onto the dazed people it purports to represent.

At any rate, it’s fortunate for Peretz that he was able to make this pivot, because the consideration of the issue earlier in the post (“What this movement wants is recognition that 23 million people cannot be represented by a government which is historically alien and politically hostile”) was veering dangerously close to endorsing a principle of self-determination that might have applicability to a certain stateless people somewhere.

Salon publishes Steve Clemons’ “Why Bush Won’t Attack Iran”. It’s an interesting piece, but as Brian Beutler points out the conclusion is actually that we should . . . worry about a war with Iran! Specifically, “an engineered provocation” that “would most likely be triggered by one or both of the two people who would see their political fortunes rise through a new conflict — Cheney and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.”

That said, I’ve become a bit of a skeptic about the short-term prospects for war. I see very little political interest in such a war from anyone. At the same time, the Iran hawks have succeeded in getting every major political figure to agree that all options, including war, must be “on the table” and that a nuclear Iran is unacceptable. And they’ve also succeeded in preventing everyone in practical politics from talking about the sort of things that would go into a serious diplomatic settlement. Under the circumstances, the medium-term prospects for war seem to me to remain decent, and from an Iran hawks’ point of view it’d probably be better to have any military strikes happen under a less discredited future president than under the unpopular incumbent.

Along those lines, Moira Whelan observes:

Bushies know Democrats want to look tough on terrorism—so if Iran is helping the Taliban, why are they being allowed to get away with supporting it? They know the progressive commitment to non-proliferation, so why is Iran escaping scrutiny? Then, of course, there’s their drum beat on Iran’s involvement in Iraq.

All of these arguments will be part of the neocons attempt to tie the hands of the next President. This benefits them in two ways. First, they use it as a domestic political issue to attempt to make Democrats look weak on critical national security issues if there is no action. Second, they attempt to get what they want–an attack on Iran—without the resulting mess on their hands. Either way, they spend some time driving the debate and acting as “deciders” of handling Iran being right or wrong (newsflash: it will be wrong). In the meantime, the Democratic administration will say things like “its complicated” and “we’re working it diplomatically”—a position that may be right, but is always a tough sell.

And, of course, there are some fairly committed Iran hawks on the merits inside the broad Democratic coalition.

Via Ezra Klein, Gallup’s graphic representation of their polling data on the state of America’s policy in Iraq.

It’s interesting to consider how the goalposts have shifted over the years. In the summer of 2004, most Americans thought things were going poorly in Iraq, and that was certainly the general sense one got of elite beliefs as well. Today, meanwhile, despite disagreement about the “surge” I think just about everyone thinks conditions have deteriorated from where they were three years ago.

Thanks to the Project on Defense Alternative’s compilation of exit plans for Iraq, I’ve just now been reading Steven Simon’s booklet “After the Surge: The Case for U.S. Military Disengagement from Iraq” for the Council on Foreign Relations that contains what is, I think, one of the best diagnoses of the problem:

Leaving U.S. forces in Iraq under today’s circumstances means the United States is culpable but not capable—that is, Washington bears substantial responsibility for developments within Iraq without the ability to shape those
developments in a positive direction. In consequence, Iraqi support for the U.S. presence has collapsed. Polls indicate that most Iraqis want the United States to pull out. Moreover, the Iraq war has fueled the jihad and apparently been a godsend to jihadi recruiters—and the process of self-recruitment—as indicated by the 2006 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the global war on terror. More broadly, the Iraq war has had a very damaging effect on the U.S. reputation in the Arab and wider Islamic world. Authoritative opinion surveys show this as well. The continued presence of U.S. forces is thus a severe setback in the canonical war of ideas, which the Bush administration has correctly assessed as crucial to American interests. [...]

In 2004, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the deputy to Osama bin Laden, said of the U.S. intervention: “America is between two fires. If it stays in Iraq, it will bleed to death; if it leaves, it will lose everything.” His forecast comes disturbingly close to describing current circumstances. It need not, however, be prophecy. More than three years after the intervention began, to be sure, the United States finds itself in an agonizing strategic position. The time has come to acknowledge that the United States must fundamentally recast its commitment to Iraq. It must do so without any illusions that there are unexplored or magic fixes, whether diplomatic or military. Some disasters are irretrievable. Having staked its prestige on the intervention and failed to achieve many of its objectives, the United States will certainly pay a price for military disengagement from Iraq. But if the United States manages its departure from Iraq carefully, it will not have lost everything. Rather, the United States will have preserved the opportunity to recover vital assets that its campaign in Iraq has imperiled: diplomatic initiative, global reputation, and the well-being and political utility of its ground forces. [...]

But raising the prospect of desperate deterioration in Iraq and its environs after an American military disengagement necessarily tends to obscure two things. First, the presence of U.S. forces has not stabilized Iraq thus far. Second, conditions for instability have become structural elements of Iraqi politics. Given these facts, how long should the U.S. keep troops in Iraq, when its military presence only delays an inevitable escalation of intra-Iraqi fighting?

I still hear it often said, including by liberal-minded people, that all serious experts agree that we need to stay in Iraq, or even that the consensus on this score is so overwhelming that it’s inevitable that we’ll stay. Neither is true. Quite a lot of who’ve thought deeply about this problem have concluded that the best thing to do is simply to cut our losses and leave, focusing our remaining Iraq-related energies on doing what we can for refugees and to improve the broader regional diplomatic situation.

Here’s some video of Senator Norm Coleman (R-MN) talking to anti-war constituents and giving a preview of the political strategy I think we’ll be seeing more of from Republicans representing moderate areas:

As observed by the Uptake, Coleman repeatedly says that “we shouldn’t be in the middle of a civil war” even though in his role as a United States Senator he’s consistently cast votes designed to ensure that we do just that. His hope seems to be that triangulating rhetoric combined with steadfast support for Bush when it comes time to vote can shield him from the wrath of the pro-war base and the anti-war middle alike.

It seems that Hillary Clinton has a position paper on Israel and Israel-related issues coming out that says she “believes that Israel’s right to exist in safety as a Jewish state, with defensible borders and an undivided Jerusalem as its capital, secure from violence and terrorism, must never be questioned.” This is, obviously, a disaster. No division of Jerusalem is fine as an Israeli negotiating posture, but it’s absurd for the President of the United States to make this a baseline commitment. Simply put, it doesn’t matter to Americans exactly how the Jerusalem issue is resolved, and our emphasis needs to be on supporting whatever kind of compromise the parties to the conflict can agree upon.

Now, needless to say, I don’t think anyone thinks Clinton really believes this. As M.J. Rosenberg points out, her husband’s parameters involved sharing Jerusalem as would any realistic plan. She’s not a crazy person, and surely she realizes this. But, of course, the odds of actually achieving a settlement go down when leading American figures make these kind of statements that wreck their credibility as honest brokers. Similarly, Palestinian moderates are left hanging out to dry when American leaders give the impression that they have no intention of acting in a reasonable and impartial manner even if Palestinians change their behavior. And last, of course, the sort of addiction to the politics of pandering to You Know Who that this reflects doesn’t bode well for Clinton’s approach to this issue in practice no matter how sound her instincts may be in principle.

Photo by Flickr user Bernie CB used under a Creative Commons license

The Politico ran a story about how Rep. Peter King (R-NY) said that there are “too many mosques in this country.” Eventually, they updated the post with this:

The quote was taken entirely out of context by Politico. My position in this interview, as it has been for many years, is that too many mosques in this country do not cooperate with law enforcement. Unfortunately, Politico was incapable of making this distinction.

They also posted a video that lets you see the context:

We have too many mosques in this country, we have too many people who are sympathetic to radical Islam. We should be looking at them more carefully, we should be looking at how we can infiltrate . . . we should be much more aggressive with law enforcement.

That really doesn’t sound any better to me. On a policy level, though, in context we can see that King isn’t really calling for a reduction in the quantity of mosques. Rather, his proposal seems to be that Muslims should be treated to a presumption of guilt and their religious institutions treated as criminal conspiracies to be infiltrated. I was going to try to construct an analogy about how King probably wouldn’t be happy with a presumption of guilt being placed on Irish-American institutions, but it turns out King’s actually a longtime IRA supporter (though, it seems, not since 9/11) so he must understand this dynamic on some level. And, of course, King turns out to have some history here:

King, who has said that all Muslims aren’t terrorists but that all recent terrorists are Muslim, favors an ethnic and religious profiling scheme that would include foreign and American-born travelers. “I would give the investigators and screeners a lot of discretion as to where it ends,” he said.

Despite King’s endorsement of such a process, it is a technique that has been widely dismissed as a legitimate law enforcement tool.

NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly, a childhood friend of King’s whom the congressman calls one of the nation’s leading counter-terrorism officials, has previously called racial profiling “nuts” and “ineffective,” and eliminated the practice when he oversaw the U.S. Customs Service.

And, of course, King’s belief that Muslim religious institutions should be treated as if they’re criminal conspiracies makes more sense in light of his view that 85 percent of American mosques have extremist leadership, a delightfully made up fact that seems to undergird his thinking on this issue.