Jackson Diehl works very hard to find something good about George W. Bush’s foreign policy legacy, and he comes up with this:

There is, however, one important way in which the president has been faithful to his cause — and one practice he has pioneered that ought to outlast him. Throughout the past several years, Bush has gone out of his way to meet personally with advocates for democratic change around the world — especially those under pressure from their governments. He has invited them to the White House and has looked for them in their own countries. Last year, in Prague, he even attended a conference of dissidents from all over the world.

Diehl’s account of Bush’s freedom agenda is essentially this: “Bush pushed for freedom, autocrats pushed back,” as if Bush gave it the old college try, but in the end was defeated by the mean old world. This is nonsense. The problem is that Bush’s freedom agenda was nested within a broader set of policies — the war on terror and the invasion of Iraq — that was fundamentally inimical to genuine democratic reform, and indeed has proven disastrous for the actual promotion of democracy, especially in the Middle East.

By offering democratic reform as a component to the war on terror, which many in the Muslim world see as a war against Islam, Bush alienated at the outset scores of potential reformist allies. By then promoting the war in Iraq as a showpiece for that agenda (“This could be your country! Who’s in?”) he discredited it even more.

Many praised President Bush’s soaring — at least on the page — freedom rhetoric, but did it help or hinder the cause of freedom for Bush to condemn authoritarian regimes like Syria at the same time that he was rendering suspects there to be tortured?

It’s a rather huge oversight for Diehl to ignore all of this in his account of the failure of Bush’s freedom agenda. Yes, it’s great that Bush took time out of his busy schedule to have coffee with some democratic activists. It’s important to show that the United States supports their work. It’s also important that the United States not pursue policies that make their work harder.

Our guest blogger is Moran Banai, U.S. editor of the Middle East Bulletin.

Yesterday, the Middle East Bulletin published an exclusive interview with Israel’s President Shimon Peres, in which Peres said that “ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and reaching regional peace is a mutual Israeli-American interest.” Peres also argued that “it is essential that the United States keep supporting an Israeli-Palestinian agreement” while also promoting “the Arab Peace Initiative as a means to achieve comprehensive peace between Israel and the Arab states.”

Peres’ comments come six years after the Initiative was first endorsed by the whole Arab League, and a few weeks after Peres himself endorsed the “spirit” of the Initiative. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas also published Hebrew-language ads in the three top Israeli dailies featuring the full text of the Initiative, and a group of former Israeli diplomats and generals launched their own campaign promoting the Initiative.

Calling Abbas’ advertisements a “welcome step” Peres added:

Our negotiations are with the other side and when we ignore their voices by writing in our own papers and then reading what we write, we fail to understand their position. We should do the same as Abbas on the other side.

Writing about the renewed interest in the Initiative, Ghaith al-Omari, director of advocacy at the American Task Force on Palestine and a former adviser to President Abbas, argues that for it to be successful, “Arab leaders need to explain the Initiative, not only to the general public, but also to policy makers in Israel.” Moreover, the Initiative must go from being an idea into being a plan. He suggests replacing the “all-or-nothing approach” with “a gradual, reciprocal process,” and defining the security guarantees promised in the plan.

“With so many challenges and obstacles in the path of forging Arab-Israeli peace,” al-Omari concludes, “it would be a mistake to fail to avail ourselves of such a potent tool as the Arab Peace Initiative. Yet, for it to be a truly effective tool, all the parties must bring the skill, energy and determination to make it succeed.”

Our guest blogger is Ken Gude, Associate Director of the International Rights and Responsibility Program at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Those who thought it couldn’t get any worse at Guantanamo were once again proved wrong on Monday after the farcical on-again off-again guilty pleas from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other defendants played out in front of the international media and the families of the 9/11 victims. President-elect Obama has consistently stated that he views the military commissions as fundamentally flawed and we need no more evidence than this latest sorry episode. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates should step in and immediately suspend the entire military commissions system to prevent any more fiascos.

The Bush administration had intended the latest pre-trial hearings — involving Mohammed and four others accused of the 9/11 attacks — to serve as an international media bonanza, complete with the presence of the families of 9/11 victims at Guantanamo for the first time. But KSM and the other defendants turned the tables on the Bush administration and instead used the assembled media for their own propaganda coup, offering to plead guilty in the hopes that they would be executed by President Bush after trial in this deeply flawed system.

Little did they know that the system is so flawed that the judge was unaware of whether he could accept the guilty pleas and sentence them to death. Imagine that, five defendants accused of the most heinous crime perpetrated on Americans in decades offer to confess and actually want to be executed, but the judge isn’t sure if he can accept what amounts to a complete victory for the prosecution.

It turns out the hastily crafted Military Commissions Act only allows for a death sentence to be imposed by a unanimous vote of a military jury and does not have any provision that grants authority for the judge to order execution in the instance of a guilty plea. The judge has set a hearing for January 4, 2009, to hear arguments about how to impose a death sentence if the defendants plead guilty and no military jury is impaneled.

Back to KSM. It is clear this offer to confess is not a sincere admission of guilty, but rather a cynical ploy to obtain his desired outcome: martyrdom at the hands of his most hated enemy, President Bush. After all of the shenanigans about whether the judge could accept them, KSM and his other defendants withdrew their offer to plead guilty. So now we are back to where we started after a humiliating series of events that makes the Keystone Cops look like Delta Force.

But the fallout from this embarrassing episode reaches beyond mere propaganda setbacks and could tie the hands of the incoming Obama administration. Perversely, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and George W. Bush now want exactly the same thing: a quick path to a guilty verdict and a death sentence. Even though the commissions as a whole have been a complete disaster, with both sides working towards the same objective it is not inconceivable the January 4 hearing results in a system to call in a military jury for the sentencing phase. Since the defendants actually want to be executed, that process may not take long and this military commission could produce a death sentence for these five defendants a mere two weeks before the Obama takes office.

Such a result may preclude any trial of KSM in U.S. federal court on criminal charges related to 9/11 because the double jeopardy clause prohibits any one person from being put on trial twice for the same offense. If that is true, then the Obama administration could be saddled with this horribly flawed result and stuck in a terrible situation: either carry out the sentence and execute KSM and the others, giving them exactly what they want and inviting international criticism that could imperil the whole project of closing Guantanamo; or deny KSM his favored path to martyrdom, instead imprisoning them for life, but risk a serious domestic political backlash that could also imperil the whole project of closing Guantanamo.

Secretary Gates can prevent all of this from happening. The Military Commissions Act make the secretary of defense the convening authority for the entire process. He has the power to suspend all activity in the military commissions and he should do so with immediate effect. However small the likelihood of this worst possible scenario, Secretary Gates should take action to ensure it does not occur because one thing we have learned about Guantanamo is that it can always get worse.