President Obama has said that an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal is going to be a top priority for his administration. During an interview with Al-Arabiya last week, Obama said the Israel-Palestine issue is “interrelated” with “what’s happening” throughout the region. He also offered support for the so-called two-state solution. “I think it is possible for us to see a Palestinian state,” Obama said, adding, “But it is not going to be easy.”

No it will not be easy. As CBS reporter Bob Simon noted on 60 Minutes last week, “hundreds of thousands” of Jewish settlers would have to withdraw from the West Bank for it, along with the Gaza Strip, to be part of a Palestinian state. But also during Simon’s report, this two-state solution may have received a small boost. Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who is in the running to become the country’s next prime minister, told Simon — bluntly — that in order to achieve peace and advance a Palestinian state, the Israeli government would force the settlers to leave the West Bank:

SIMON: Can you really imagine evacuating the tens of thousands of settlers who say they will not leave?

LIVNI: It’s not going to be easy, but this is the only solution.

SIMON: But you know that there are settlers who say, “We will fight. We will not leave. We will fight.”

LIVNI: So this is the responsibility of the government, of the police to stop them, as simple as that. Israel is a state of law and order.

Watch it:

However, it appears that Livni’s promise may have been short-lived. Conservative Likud Party Chairman Benjamin Netanyahu, who is also in the running for Israeli prime minster, said this week that he would not be bound by the current government’s “commitments to withdraw” from the West Bank. “I won’t evacuate settlements. Those understandings are invalid and unimportant,” Netanyahu said. As such, Livni changed her tune:

After Netanyahu and senior Likud officials blasted Olmert and Livni’s “promises” and accused Livni of agreeing to divide Jerusalem, she was forced to disassociate herself from the understandings.

“I will advance only an agreement that represents our interests. Maintaining maximum settlers and places that we hold dear such as Jerusalem — not a single refugee will enter,” Livni said.

The Wonk Room’s Matt Duss notes, “When leaders of competing Palestinian factions make maximalist claims to appeal to hardline constituencies, it’s extremism. But when Israeli leaders do it, it’s politics. If the goal of the U.S. and Israel is to strengthen Palestinian moderates like Abu Mazen against Hamas — and people keep telling me that’s the goal — it’s hard to see how this helps.”

Tzipi Livni and Binyamin Netanyahu, partners for peace:

Likud Party Chairman Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday said he would not be bound by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s commitments to evacuate West Bank settlements and withdraw from the territories.

“I will not keep Olmert’s commitments to withdraw and I won’t evacuate settlements. Those understandings are invalid and unimportant,” Netanyahu said.[...]

After Netanyahu and senior Likud officials blasted Olmert and Livni’s “promises” and accused Livni of agreeing to divide Jerusalem, she was forced to disassociate herself from the understandings.

“I will advance only an agreement that represents our interests. Maintaining maximum settlers and places that we hold dear such as Jerusalem — not a single refugee will enter,” Livni said. [...]

[Netanyahu] said he would invite Kadima and all the Zionist parties to join his coalition providing they agree to his guidelines — no division of Jerusalem, no return to 1967 borders.

When leaders of competing Palestinian factions make maximalist claims to appeal to hardline constituencies, it’s extremism. But when Israeli leaders do it, it’s politics. If the goal of the U.S. and Israel is to strengthen Palestinian moderates like Abu Mazen against Hamas — and people keep telling me that’s the goal — it’s hard to see how this helps.

Reporting on the atmosphere in Iraq before tomorrow’s important provincial elections — “perhaps the most competitive election in the country’s history” — Anthony Shadid cautions that they “are by no means a panacea.”

In some ways, they have revealed a landscape perhaps more precarious than the one the United States inherited in 2003. Tribes, with archaic traditions, have become kingmakers, and Islamist parties, despite their unpopularity, have proved a singular ability to mobilize resources and followers. Some worry about the onset of warlords. Others worry about the Kurdish-Arab frontier, where borders with an autonomous Kurdish region have yet to be drawn. In the province around the disputed city of Kirkuk, the vote has been postponed indefinitely.

As Brian Katulis, Marc Lynch and Peter Juul wrote in Iraq’s Political Transition After the Surge, Iraq’s political factions remain at loggerheads over key aspects of the Iraqi state, centralism vs. federalism, sectarianism vs. secularism. We should not expect tomorrow’s elections to provide answers as much as clarify the questions.

The International Crisis Group also has a typically excellent report examining the major issues at play. While recognizing that “the elections inevitably will have severe shortcomings,” ICG notes that they “mark a remarkable transition.”

In the past four years, politics have evolved from a violent conflict focused largely on the capital to an essentially democratic contest over positions and institutions, including at the local level. Former confessional blocs are fraying, as sectarianism is increasingly challenged by more nationalist sentiment and promises of better governance by political actors seeking to capture the public mood. Competition between communities is joined by competition within them. Violence persists in Baghdad and elsewhere, often fierce and ruthless; the past few weeks alone have witnessed incidents -– targeted killings, bombings and intimidation –- that in one way or another are designed to influence the vote. But, for now at least, virtually all major players, including those that boycotted the polls in 2005, have accepted the principle of elections and fully thrown themselves into electoral battle.

In our recent report, The Fractured Shia of Iraq, Peter Juul and I described some of the fault lines within Iraq’s Shia religious community, and how, as with Iraq’s various factions more generally, the elections could significantly redraw these lines.

While it’s important not to grant any credence to the conservative argument that the improved security conditions in Iraq represent a vindication of George W. Bush’s Iraq policy — there is no remotely plausible moral or political calculus by which the costs, human and otherwise, of this war do not far outweigh its benefits — it’s also important to recognize the significance of Iraq’s new politics, both for Iraqis themselves and potentially for the future of the United States’ relationship with the region. The Obama administration faces serious challenges in the Middle East, many of them created or exacerbated by the Iraq war, but helping to facilitate the emergence of a stable and democratic Iraq is key to meeting those challenges.

John Yoo, infamous author of the Bush administration legal memos authorizing the use of torture on suspected terrorists, slams President Obama for banning torture in a Wall Street Journal op-ed today, gravely warning that Obama “may have opened the door to further terrorist acts on U.S. soil.”

Throughout the article, Yoo insists that torture is America’s most effective weapon against terrorists and warns that without it, the U.S. will be incapable of intelligence-gathering:

Eliminating the Bush system will mean that we will get no more information from captured al Qaeda terrorists. Every prisoner will have the right to a lawyer (which they will surely demand), the right to remain silent, and the right to a speedy trial. [...]

Relying on the civilian justice system not only robs us of the most effective intelligence tool to avert future attacks, it provides an opportunity for our enemies to obtain intelligence on us.

Considering the Bush administration repeatedly insisted its use of coercive techniques was “limited,” it would be a far stretch even for loyal Bushies to suggest that torture is not the one and only method to obtaining information. And as ThinkProgress has made clear again and again, numerous intelligence experts and real interrogators agree that, far from being “the most effective intelligence tool,” torture simply doesn’t work.

Yoo continues his screed by making up facts about Obama’s ban:

The CIA must now conduct interrogations according to the rules of the Army Field Manual, which prohibits coercive techniques, threats and promises, and the good-cop bad-cop routines used in police stations throughout America. … His new order amounts to requiring — on penalty of prosecution — that CIA interrogators be polite.

Yoo has no idea what he’s talking about. Nothing requires anyone to “be polite” — although the rapport building method has often proved to be interrogators’ most effective technique. And the notion that good-cop/bad-cop would be banned is simply false, Media Matters pointed out earlier this week:

In fact, the Army Field Manual explicitly permits good cop-bad cop interrogations under the name of “Mutt and Jeff” interrogations, which involve two interrogators “display[ing] opposing personalities and attitudes toward the source.” The Field Manual says the “goal of this technique is to make the source identify with one of the interrogators and thereby establish[ing] rapport and cooperation.”

It’s no secret that Yoo is an ardent torture enthusiast: He famously said that only those techniques that inflict pain equivalent to “death, organ failure or permanent damage resulting in a loss of significant body functions” constitute torture, and last year refused to agree that the president could not order a detainee buried alive. With Obama signaling a clean break from the Bush administration’s terrorism policies, it’s no wonder Yoo is desperate to restore his crumbling torture regime.

Pointing to the absence of “soaring poetry” in Barack Obama’s inaugural address and the President’s shocking statement to Al Arabiya that “we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect” with the Muslim world, Fouad Ajami laments the “return to realpolitik and business as usual in America’s encounter with that Greater Middle East.”

Say what you will about the style — and practice — of the Bush years, the autocracies were on notice for the first five or six years of George. W. Bush’s presidency. America had toppled Taliban rule and the tyranny of Saddam Hussein; it had frightened the Libyan ruler that a similar fate lay in store for him. It was not sweet persuasion that drove Syria out of Lebanon in 2005. That dominion of plunder and terror was given up under duress.

True, Mr. Bush’s diplomacy of freedom fizzled out in the last two years of his presidency, and the autocracies in the Greater Middle East came to a conviction that the storm had passed them by and that they had been spared.[...]

Where Mr. Bush had seen the connection between the autocratic ways in Muslim lands and the culture of terror that infected the young foot soldiers of radicalism, Mr. Obama seems ready to split the difference with their rulers.

Yes, maybe Bush’s policies were an abject failure, and Middle East autocracies strengthened as a result, but hey, for a minute there Bush put those autocracies on notice (Here’s Bush putting Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah on notice back in April 2005, holding hands as they stroll around the ranch.) This is all delusive nonsense, but its unsurprising delusive nonsense. After all, Ajami was bemoaning the heartless realpolitik of the Obama administration even before the Obama administration had begun. Even though Obama’s inaugural address contained an explicit attack on authoritarianism, Ajami has chosen to interpret the new president’s lack of enthusiasm for invading more Arab countries and killing vast numbers of their inhabitants in the name of democracy as evidence of a troubling “realism.”

Like most of his neoconservatives comrades, realism is clearly not, in any sense, something Fouad Ajami is troubled by, as evidenced by his continuing inability to grasp that, while Bush’s words about the need for democracy in the Middle East may have been nice to listen to, his actual plans for promoting democracy the Middle East were staggeringly dumb. Bush’s “freedom agenda” proved hollow because that agenda also included kidnapping, torture, indefinite detention, invading and occupying foreign countries, enabling a sectarian civil war in which hundreds of thousands were killed and maimed and several millions displaced, all of which contributed to previously unseen levels of anti-Americanism while further empowering some of the most conservative, undemocratic forces in the region. It was not out of a loss of nerve, but out of a need to contain those forces that Bush unceremoniously discarded the freedom agenda. But expect Ajami to continue arguing that neoconservatism didn’t fail, it’s just never been tried.

As for Obama’s foreign policy, there’s no evidence thus far that President Obama plans anything like the global withdrawal that Ajami projects. As the ThinkProgress team showed in yesterday’s Progress Report, every indication is that Obama intends to strengthen America’s global leadership role, though with greater emphasis on responsible governance and less emphasis on invading and occupying foreign countries.

In light of Ajami’s disdain for the pragmatic new direction of U.S. foreign policy, however, I think it’s useful to consider — again — something Ajami wrote in his most popular work, 1998′s Dream Palace of the Arabs, his critical examination of the worldview of modern Arab intellectual elites:

In an Arab political history littered with thwarted dreams, little honor would be extended to pragmatists who knew the limits of what could and could not be done. The political culture of nationalism reserved its approval for those who led ruinous campaigns in pursuit of impossible quests.

What a difference a decade makes.

Anticipating Iraq’s provincial elections this Saturday, the Center for American Progress has released a report by Peter Juul and me, The Fractured Shia of Iraq. This report examines the ongoing competition among Iraq’s dominant Shia religious factions.

As they have done since 2005, religious Shia political parties are likely to shape Iraqi politics at all levels in central and southern Iraq. It remains to be seen which, if any, of these factions will dominate. The end of Saddam Hussein’s regime, followed by the 2005 election of a transitional government, opened a new political space for Iraq’s Shia, bringing Shia Arabs into power for the first time in the Arab world. This power shift represented a significant change for a Middle East previously neatly divided between the mostly Persian Shia of Iran and Sunni Arab-led states, unsettling regional politics, especially among those Sunni Arab nations with significant Shia minorities, including the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia, and Lebanon.

As Juul and I argue in the report, exploring the history of Iraqi Shia political-religious trends is necessary for understanding Iraq’s political future. Whether and how the points of contention among Iraq’s Shia parties, which mirror the divisions within Iraq more broadly, are resolved will significantly affect the Obama administration’s Middle East policy as it seeks to shift greater attention and resources eastward to Afghanistan and Pakistan. The U.S. troop surge in Iraq in 2007 and 2008 was intended to provide the political space for reconciliation among the Kurds and Sunni and Shia Arabs, but this remains elusive.

These elections are the first in a series of elections Iraq will have later this year, and may serve as a barometer of what’s to come. There are concerns about low voter turnout given that these elections fall close to a major Shia holiday. Early voting is going smoothly.

But Iraq faces a long road ahead in its political transition. Importantly, it may well be the struggle for power within the Shia community that determines how the United States exits Iraq. Importantly, it may well be the struggle for power within the Shia community that determines how the United States exits Iraq.

During today’s SCHIP debate, Republican Senators tried to block efforts to overturn a provision that currently subjects most legal permanent residents to a five-year ban on eligibility for Medicaid and SCHIP.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) introduced an amendment that strikes the immigrant provision and increases “the enrollment of uninsured low income American children.” Sen. Orrin Hatch’s (R-UT) amendment similarly prohibits coverage of non-citizen children until a state demonstrates “that it has enrolled 95 percent of the children eligible for Medicaid or CHIP who reside in the State and whose family income does not exceed 200 percent of the poverty line.”

A lot of this is political posturing. Denying Democrats a victory, rallying the base, but ultimately alienating thousands of soon-to-be citizen voters:

HATCH: I simply cannot support a CHIP bill that allows states to cover legal immigrant children when there are 6 million at the 200% level and below eligible for CHIP and Medicaid. These children ought to be our first priority. [Senate floor, 1/27/2009]

KYL: The bill would add “huge costs” to the SCHIP program at a time when “we acknowledge that we can’t even pay for things like, for example, the physician update, every year, whereby American doctors take care of American citizens in the Medicare program.” [NPR, 1/27/2009]

In their effort to divide and conquer, conservatives are rowing their boats against the tide of popular opinion and logic, hoping to sidetrack a conversation about health care into a debate about immigration. Why must we choose between expanding the program to cover more children and ensuring that eligible children enroll in greater numbers? Why can’t we do both simultaneously?

We can. In fact, if conservatives were truly interested in expanding children’s health care they would be focusing their efforts on simplifying the application process, funding outreach and enrollment efforts and providing incentives for states to encourage greater enrollment.

For one, providing health care coverage to immigrant children is extremely popular. According to a poll commissioned by First Focus, 67 percent of Americans “favor eliminating the five-year waiting period for legal immigrant children.”

And the investment is well worth it. Forcing immigrant children to go five years without affordable insurance only increases SCHIP’s costs once the now sicker children become eligible for insurance. The current ban has contributed to “higher costs for emergency room visits and poorer health outcomes”, “exacerbated the disparity in health coverage between immigrants and native citizens,” contributed to the increasing uninsured rates among immigrants, and “shifted the burden of covering this population to sates and local safety net providers.”

Yesterday, President Obama sat down with Dubai-based Al-Arabiya television for his first formal interview in office. The interview was notable not only for the substance of Obama’s remarks, but also for the symbolism of directly reaching out to Muslims so early in his presidency. Obama said that his job “to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy.”

Host Hisham Melhem noted that President Bush had framed the struggle against extremism as a “war on terror,” using terminology like “Islamic fascism” to describe America’s adversary. “You’ve always framed it in a different way,” Melhem said. Obama then talked about the advantages of shifting away from Bush’s language:

OBAMA: I think that you’re making a very important point. And that is that the language we use matters. And what we need to understand is, is that there are extremist organizations — whether Muslim or any other faith in the past — that will use faith as a justification for violence. We cannot paint with a broad brush a faith as a consequence of the violence that is done in that faith’s name.

“But to the broader Muslim world what we are going to be offering is a hand of friendship,” Obama added. Watch it:

Indeed, a Pentagon funded RAND study last year recommended that the U.S. do away with its “war on terror” terminology as the strategy behind it was “not successful in undermining al Qai’da’s capabilities.” The report said it also “encourages others abroad to respond by conducting a jihad (or holy war) against the United States and elevates them to the status of holy warriors.”

As the Washington Post noted, Bush’s “war on terror” came to an end this week, with Obama signing executive orders eliminating torture, rendition and indefinite detention. “We intend to win this fight,” he said. “We’re going to win it on our terms.”

Moreover, Obama has made a number of bold maneuvers indicating his intention to extend a hand of friendship — and not just more guns — toward Muslim nations:

– Called out to Muslims in his inauguration speech: “To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect,” Obama said.

– First international phone call was to Abbas: “This is my first phone call to a foreign leader and I’m making it only hours after I took office,” Obama told Palestinian President Abbas.

– Appointed George Mitchell as ambassador: Obama appointed Mitchell as his top diplomatic envoy to the Middle East. Mitchell is considered “fair” and “meticulously even-handed” in the Israeli/Palestinian debate.

– Will give a speech to the Muslim world: Obama’s aides say he is likely to make a major foreign policy speech from an Islamic capital during his first 100 days in office.

Naturally, Commentary calls the interview “seriously ill-advised.” The American Spectator’s Quin Hillyer’s wrote a post titled, “This…Blows…My…Mind.” But this new posture is indicative of why Obama has such strong support from Muslims abroad and why al Qaeda is rendered “nervous” by his international stature.

Last night on the O’Reilly Factor, host Bill O’Reilly blasted Afghan President Hamid Karzai for appealing to U.S. forces to do more to limit civilian casualties in Afghanistan. O’Reilly chastised Karzai, calling his appeal “insulting” and suggesting that Afghans are ungrateful for the support they receive from U.S. and NATO forces:

OREILLY: U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan are risking their lives to protect the Afghan people from the Taliban and al Qaeda. But President Karzai does not seem to get that. Once again, he has condemned American forces after a raid killed some civilians.

In that raid, a top Taliban commander and some of his cronies were also killed, but apparently, Karzai doesn’t understand that in war, collateral damage is constantly present. U.S. military is investigating the situation, but Check believes Karzai is making a political grandstand play, and it is insulting. Without us, his head is on a stick.

Watch it:

O’Reilly was referring to a recent air strike that the U.S. military claims killed 15 Taliban fighters, but that Karzai claims killed 16 civilians. While the investigation is ongoing, O’Reilly’s blanket condemnation of Karzai’s concern for civilian deaths misses the broader point: American success in Afghanistan depends on reducing civilian casualties there.

U.S. and NATO forces are increasingly reliant on air strikes to prosecute its counterinsurgency objectives in Afghanistan. As Human Rights Watch explained, “There has been a massive and unprecedented surge in the use of air power in Afghanistan in 2008,” resulting in higher civilian death rates. According to the latest U.N. figures, foreign forces in Afghanistan were responsible for the deaths of 577 civilians in 2008 “including 395 deaths caused by airstrikes” — a 40 percent increase over the previous year.

This increase in civilian casualties has “dramatically decreased public support for the Afghan government and the presence of international forces.” As Defense Secretary Robert Gates put it to the congressional testimony today, “civilian casualties are doing [U.S. interests] enormous harm in Afghanistan“:

I will tell you that I believe the civilian casualties are doing us enormous harm in Afghanistan. And we have got to do better in terms of avoiding casualties. I say that knowing full well the Taliban mingle among the people, use them as barriers, but when we go ahead and attack, we play right into their hands. … My worry is that the Afghans come to see us as part of the problem rather than part of their solution and then we are lost.

Ignoring the increasing levels of “collateral damage” — as O’Reilly appears to recommend — is not only unethical, it would further empower the very forces that U.S. and NATO forces are attempting to defeat.

Our guest blogger is Peter Juul, a research associate at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

In his first two full days in office, President Barack Obama made clear that one of his top foreign policy priorities will be resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His first calls to foreign leaders were to the leaders of Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, and Jordan – all key players in moving toward a viable Israeli-Palestinian peace. The president and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton further solidified this high-level shift in U.S. policy by naming former Senator George Mitchell as Special Envoy for Middle East Peace. Mitchell’s work bringing peace to Northern Ireland and as chairman of the 2001 Sharm el-Sheikh Fact-Finding Committee makes him uniquely qualified to be President Obama’s special envoy for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (Read Middle East Progress’ November 2007 interview with Senator Mitchell here.)

President Obama and Secretary Clinton have taken the right first steps in establishing relationships with the major players and getting a high-level team in place. But when they start putting the flesh on the bones of the United States’ reinvigorated Israeli-Palestinian policy, they would be wise to remember that a for a two-state solution to be viable the question of Israeli settlements in the West Bank can’t be wished away or swept under the rug.

Last night on 60 Minutes, correspondent Bob Simon explored the destructive consequences the settlements have both on the prospects for a two-state solution and the Palestinian people. As one settlement leader told Simon, “Settlements prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state in the land of Israel. This is the goal. And this is the reality.”

Watch it:

As Israeli journalist Gershom Gorenberg has noted, the longer the question of Israeli settlements outside Israel’s pre-1967 borders is put off, the bigger a threat it becomes to a two-state solution. The more settlements grow, the harder it will be for the Israeli government to remove them and the greater the risk of Israeli-on-Israeli violence becomes.

Making matters worse, the settlements undermine Palestinian popular support for negotiations with Israel and a two-state solution. From 1993 to 2000, during the most intense period of Israeli-Palestinian talks, the number of settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip rose from 116,000 to 198,000. By 2008, more than 290,000 settlers resided in the West Bank (excluding the 187,000 Israelis living in East Jerusalem). This continued growth sends a signal to the Palestinian people that the Israeli government is not really interested in a two-state solution, and gives credibility to the arguments of rejectionist groups like Hamas.

Moreover, as the World Bank noted last year, the settlements impose severe economic penalties on the Palestinian population. Restrictions on Palestinian movement – designed to help protect settlements – inhibit the development of the Palestinian economy. Without addressing the impact the settlements have on Palestinian economic life, it will be difficult for a viable Palestinian state to emerge in the West Bank.

It’s too early to expect detailed statements on specific issues that bear on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the Obama administration has already made rhetorical statements that should lead them to address the settlement question head-on. In her written testimony for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Secretary Clinton stated that the 2003 Road Map – which calls for a freeze in settlement growth and the dismantling of settlement outposts erected since March 2001 – “remains one of the important bases for working toward a two-state solution.”

President Obama also laid an important rhetorical marker – “just as the terror of rocket fire aimed at innocent Israelis is intolerable, so, too, is a future without hope for the Palestinians.” Tackling the settlement problem will be essential to a future with hope for the Palestinians and the viability of a two-state solution.

Presumably from a comfy chair somewhere safely out of the line of fire, Max Boot declares the 2002 Arab peace initiative to be “laughable“:

The plan, in case you’ve forgotten, calls on Israel to withdraw completely from the lands occupied in 1967, including East Jerusalem, returning to the lines of June 4 1967; to accept a mutually agreed just solution to the refugee problem according to the General Assembly resolution 194; and to recognize the independent state of Palestine with East Jerusalem as its capital. In return, there would be an end to hostilities between Israel and all the Arab countries, and Israel would get full diplomatic and normal relations.

That this is not actually a solution to the Israeli-Arab dispute should be obvious to anyone with even a modicum of understanding of the region.

Apparently, among those who lack even Boot’s modicum of understanding of the region is Israeli President Shimon Peres, who has praised the plan as “a serious opening for real progress.” In a December interview with Middle East Bulletin, Peres explained that his interest in the plan is the result of “a study of the Initiative’s details and the realization that it presents Israel with a good opportunity that should not be missed.”

Arab colleagues told me explicitly: end the conflict with the Palestinians and get peace and normalization of relations with all of us. They don’t ask extra concessions of Israel, only that we end the conflict with the Palestinians, an end toward which we are working anyway, but they offer us extra benefits. [...]

Arab leaders think that ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would lead to comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace, which would in turn undermine extremists, end the regional turmoil and pave the way toward a different Middle East.

Among the extremists who would be undermined: Hamas, Hezbollah, neocons.

Ghaith al-Omary, a former adviser to Palestinian President Abbas and director of advocacy for the American Task Force on Palestine, wrote that “there is little doubt that the Initiative is a significant document.”

It provides symbolic incentives in the form of Arab and Islamic normalization with Israel, concrete security guarantees, as well as obvious political incentives (the first Israeli Prime Minister to visit a Gulf capital will go down in history.)

If nothing else, it represents a major departure in the Arab nations’ articulation of their understanding and definition of the conflict with Israel. It posits the conflict not as an existential one—as was defined in previous Arab League decisions, most notably the “three no’s” of the Khartoum summit—that can only be resolved by the destruction of Israel. Instead, it defines it as an issue that is related to the Israeli occupation: once that ends, hostility to and conflict with Israel end with it.

It’s pretty astounding how cavalierly Boot dismisses a plan that offers Israel full recognition by the 22 members of the Arab League. That seems like something an actual supporter of Israel would be in favor of.

At 4 pm ET today, it will mark exactly 100 hours since Barack Obama became the 44th President of the United States. The first week on the job has been a very busy one for the new White House, as the Obama administration has worked quickly to repair the damage done under the last eight years of President Bush.

As President Obama indicated in his inauguration speech, he is seeking to chart a new way forward in domestic and foreign policy. Obama has made a clean break from the Bush legacy in his early going, undertaking a number of actions that the former President would never have considered. ThinkProgress has compiled a report documenting Obama’s record so far:

REGULATIONS

The Bush Record: In his final months, the Bush administration issued a series of “midnight regulations” that gutted safeguards protecting health, safety, the environment, and the public’s general welfare.

Obama’s Clean Break: Hours after his inauguration, Obama ordered a freeze on new regulations at all government agencies and departments and the withdrawal of all final or proposed regulations not yet published in the Federal Register.

IRAQ

The Bush Record: After using false intelligence to launch the war, Bush “surged” 30,000 troops to Iraq in 2007 and vetoed all attempts to end the war.

Obama’s Clean Break: Two days into his presidency, Obama called on U.S. military leaders to start to plan for a responsible withdrawal.

DIPLOMACY

The Bush Record: In his first term, Bush — in contrast to President Bill Clinton — “generally avoided robust efforts” to resolve the Middle East conflict. Bush demeaned diplomacy with “terrorists and radicals,” likening it to the “appeasement” of Nazi Germany.

Obama’s Clean Break: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton rejected the “rigid ideology” of Bush and pledged to exercise “smart power.” Stressing diplomacy, Obama and Clinton “appointed high-level emissaries to handle the Arab-Israeli issue and Pakistan and Afghanistan.”

TORTURE

The Bush Record: Torture began with the drafting of a secret legal memo holding that Bush could authorize interrogators to violate anti-torture laws. Bush’s senior-most officials approved torture that, in some cases, lead to death.

Obama’s Clean Break: Obama signed executive orders ending the CIA’s secret prisons and ending torture by requiring interrogations to abide by the Army Field Manual.

Read more

One day before President Obama ordered the closing of Guantanamo Bay, Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) said he would be willing to facilitate the process by bringing some of the detainees into his district. “Sure, I’d take them,” Murtha said. “I mean, they’re no more dangerous in a prison in my district than they are in Guantanamo.”

Fox News’s Glenn Beck called Murtha a “clown” yesterday because of the proposal. But Diane Gramley, president of the American Family Association of Pennsylvania, may have won top prize for the most absurd reaction. Calling the idea “ludicrous,” Gramley’s main complaint seems to be that the al Qaeda suspects will indoctrinate the other American inmates:

“I don’t think the average murderer or rapist hates all Americans or hates what America stands for like the terrorist prisoners from Guantanamo,” said Gramley, who lives in Venango County. “You intermix them with the prison population, and there’s the very real possibility they would influence those individuals in prison.”

While one local chamber of commerce president said he does not “see any downside” to Murtha’s idea because it would mean bringing jobs to the area, Pentagon officials are eying other military prisons in South Carolina, Kansas, and California.

But Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius (D) and Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS) have expressed strong reservations at housing former Gitmo detainees in their state. South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint (R) said the Obama White House “should be ready for a fight” if it decides to move the terror suspects to South Carolina. “Transferring detainees from Guantanamo Bay to U.S. soil will endanger American lives,” DeMint said.

However, defense experts have stated the opposite, that the Guantanamo debacle has led directly to American casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. But also, former Gitmo detainees will be locked in maximum security prisons and would pose no more danger than some of America’s most dangerous inmates:

– CNN senior analyst Jeffrey Toobin noted, “We have a legal system in this country that has tried Zacarias Moussaoui. It has tried the blind sheik. We have had terrorism trials. These people are in prison. Our legal system is completely capable.”

– “We have thousands of prisoners incarcerated who are as evil, violent and uncontrollable as I imagine any of the terrorist detainees are,” said Joseph Bobak, a local PA professor of criminology and forensic science.

Yet, facts like these don’t stop conservatives from making “absurd” arguments in favor of keeping Guantanamo open for business indefinitely.

Earlier this week on MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann,” former National Security Agency (NSA) analyst Russell Tice revealed that the agency had “monitored all communications” of Americans — specifically targeting journalists. To discuss this development, Olbermann yesterday hosted Pulitzer-Prize winning New York Times reporter James Risen, who famously angered the Bush administration by revealing the government’s domestic wiretapping program and its secret snooping on the financial records of thousands of Americans allegedly linked to terrorists.

Since that time, the Bush Justice Department had been trying to identify Risen’s sources for his book on the nation’s spy agencies, called State of War. In April, the New York Times reported that former government officials had been called before a grand jury and confronted with phone records documenting their calls with Risen. Neither Risen nor the New York Times had received a subpoena for those records.

Risen told Olbermann that in light of Tice’s revelations, he believes he may have been a target of the NSA’s journalist-spying program:

OLBERMANN: Do you believe you have been a target of this NSA wiretap program?

RISEN: What I know for a fact is that the Bush administration got my phone records. Whether that was obtained by the FBI or the NSA, my lawyers and I have been trying to investigate that. We’re not sure. But we know for a fact that they showed my phone records to other people in the federal grand jury. And we have asked the court to investigate that.

Risen added that he believes the purpose of the NSA’s efforts was to “have a chilling effect on potential whistle blowers in the government, to make them realize that there is a big brother out there that will get them if they step out of line.” Watch it:

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Yesterday, President Obama signed an executive order banning the use of torture in all military and CIA interrogations of suspected terrorists. The order specifically revoked the legal memos written by the Bush administration to justify the use of torture on detainees.

Today, the Wall Street Journal editorializes that Obama “wants to have it both ways on torture,” saying he will ban it but simultaneously carve out legal loopholes for coercive techniques to be used in an emergency:

The unfine print of Mr. Obama’s order is that he’s allowed room for what might be called a Jack Bauer exception. It creates a committee to study whether the Field Manual techniques are too limiting “when employed by departments or agencies outside the military.” The Attorney General, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Director of National Intelligence-designate Dennis Blair will report back and offer “additional or different guidance for other departments or agencies.” [...]

The “special task force” may well grant the CIA more legal freedom to squeeze information out of terrorists when it could keep the country safe.

Despite the Wall Street Journal’s foreboding intonations, Obama made it clear yesterday that the era of coercive interrogations had come to an end. Speaking to the State Department he said firmly, “I can say without exception or equivocation that the United States will not torture.”

News organizations appeared skeptical of Obama’s torture ban. The LA Times and the Washington Post noted that Obama “appeared to leave an opening for the CIA to again have expanded authority,” but administration officials insisted that the commission set to review interrogation and detention policies was not a loophole to allow the use of torture:

Administration officials emphasized that there was no intent to create a loophole.

“This is not a secret annex that allows us to bring the enhanced interrogation techniques back,” said a senior Obama administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity when discussing legal strategies. “It’s not.”

An administration official emphasized to the Washington Post, “We’re not talking about different techniques.”

The New York Times reports that “the emergence of a former Guantánamo Bay detainee as the deputy leader of Al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch has underscored the potential complications in carrying out the executive order President Obama signed Thursday that the detention center be shut down within a year.”

The militant, Said Ali al-Shihri, is suspected of involvement in a deadly bombing of the United States Embassy in Yemen’s capital, Sana, in September. He was released to Saudi Arabia in 2007 and passed through a Saudi rehabilitation program for former jihadists before resurfacing with Al Qaeda in Yemen.

Back in November, the Times had this story on the jihadist rehabilitation program, which apparently didn’t take with al-Shihri. Though the Times notes that Al Qaeda in Yemen “has been reinforced by foreign fighters,” it does not point out that some of those fighters, including some involved in the September attack, were returned fighters from Iraq.

Shahri was picked up in Pakistan in 2001, and shipped to Guantanamo in early 2002 after spending a month and a half in a hospital, recovering from wounds from an air strike. Pentagon documents charge Shihri with participation in “military operations against the United States and its coalition partners,” stating that he was an “Al Qaeda travel facilitator” who helped arrange travel to Afghanistan via Iran, that he trained in “urban warfare” in a camp north of Kabul, and that he attempted to assassinate a writer.

Asked about the Times story, CAP’s Ken Gude responded that “it is impossible to guarantee that no detainees released from Guantanamo will ever join up with terrorists or commit violent acts. The Obama admininstration must do all that it can to prevent this from occuring, but the chances are likely that it will.”

But you cannot assess the dangers of Guantanamo simply by looking at a handful of released detainees and whether they participate in terrorism. Guantanamo’s existence has driven far more individuals into al Qaeda’s ranks than those who could join the fight after being released.

And the Iraq war provided an environment in which to train them. Contrary to what conservatives will inevitably insist, the story of Said Ali al-Shihri doesn’t argues for abandoning the effort to close Guantanamo (it’s unknown whether al-Shihri’s Gitmo stint further radicalized him, as it has other detainees), but for a more competent and responsible process for dealing with detainees. More importantly, given the apparent ease with which al-Shihri was able to hook up with an Iraq-fed Al Qaeda affiliate after his release, it argues for a counter-terrorism policy that doesn’t actually fan the flames of extremism in the Middle East, as the Bush administration’s did.

CAP’s Brian Katulis was on MSNBC this morning to talk about U.S.- Middle East policy in the aftermath of Israel’s three week-long Gaza operation. Katulis helpfully reminded everyone that we didn’t come to this sorry pass by accident:

KATULIS: I think the new [Obama] team is surveying the wreckage in the Middle East. There’s one point to be made about the Israeli-Palestinian situation and the region as a whole, it’s this: The Bush administration destroyed this myth that Republicans and conservatives have some sort of edge on Democrats on national security. The region’s in a mess, and this most recent war in Gaza is emblematic of that. We have a terrorist organization, Hamas, that came to power, and it’s by no accident.

So I think the team is surveying the wreckage, they’re in conflict management mode. This is why I think President Obama made these quick calls. They’re trying to send a signal that, unlike President Bush, he and his team will be on top of it. And beyond that, they’re appointing a pretty high level team, which I think will be announced shortly, to get really engaged, and deal with this pragmatically, as opposed to rhetorically. We heard from the Bush administration mostly a lot of high rhetoric, but what the challenges in the Middle East require are presidential attention — high level focused attention — and I suspect you’re going to have a completely different approach to the region that’s based in pragmatism.

Watch it:

Cliff May of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies responded by objecting to Katulis’s “partisanship,” which is just what you might expect from someone whose ideas about fighting terrorism have only managed to generate more terrorism. It is, of course, not really “partisan” to point out that the Bush administration’s policy on Israel-Palestine, as with the Middle East in general, has created huge challenges for the incoming administration. Indeed, at this point I think it qualifies as stating the obvious.

Responding to Katulis’s suggestion that the Gaza war may have resulted in greater support for Hamas among Palestinians, May took the familiar neocon tack of drastically lowering the bar for success, and then substituting hope for a plan:

MAY: I think we’re going to find out — we don’t know yet — that Hamas is weakened, because they didn’t fight very well, they didn’t manage to resist the Israelis, the training provided by Iran and by Hezbollah did not pay off. I’d be surprised if people in Gaza didn’t say ‘what is the point of supporting Hamas if this is the result, our buildings are now rubble, our lifestyle is now more impoverished than ever, is this really the way to go?‘ But we don’t know that yet, we’re still speculating.

If by “resist the Israelis” May means that Hamas did not prevent Israel from entering and destroying Gaza, there’s really no one who believed that Hamas could do this, and it certainly didn’t require three weeks of sustained bombing to demonstrate it. But if “resist” means “survive,” then clearly Hamas has resisted. May’s “surprise” at the idea that Israel’s killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians might actually result in anger toward Israel — rather than toward Hamas, as he would prefer — is typical of the sort of blindly ideological approach that the Bush administration has pursued in the region, which seemed to be based in the belief that if a policy should have a certain result, then it will have that result. And if it doesn’t, it’s only because the terrorists are evil.

Like the Bush administration that he faithfully defended, May — whose organization was actually founded as a right wing “pro”-Israel propaganda operation — seems to think that simply reciting talking points about Iranian-supported Hamas constitutes an argument on how to deal with them. It’s also worth noting that May has now become the latest to admit that Israel’s goal in the Gaza offensive was explicitly political.

Last night on MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann,” former analyst for the National Security Agency Russell Tice revealed that the NSA had “monitored all communications” of Americans and specifically targeted journalists:

TICE: The National Security Agency had access to all Americans’ communications — faxes, phone calls, and their computer communications. And it didn’t matter whether you were in Kansas, in the middle of the country, and you never made any foreign communications at all. They monitored all communications. [...] But an organization that was collected on were U.S. news organizations and reporters and journalists.

OLBERMANN: To what purpose? I mean, is there a file somewhere full of every e-mail sent by all the reporters at the “New York Times?” Is there a recording somewhere of every conversation I had with my little nephew in upstate New York? Is it like that?

TICE: If it was involved in this specific avenue of collection, it would be everything. Yes. It would be everything.

Tice, a major whistleblower who helped reveal President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program to the New York Times in 2005, also told Olbermann that the agency sought specifically “to be deceptive” to prevent congressional committees from learning more about the program, calling it “a shell game”:

TICE: The agency would tailor some of their briefings to try to be deceptive for — whether it be, you know, a congressional committee or someone they really didn’t want to know exactly what was going on. So there would be a lot of bells and whistles in a briefing, and quite often, you know, the meat of the briefing was deceptive.

Watch portions of the interview (full interview here):

In October, two other whistleblowers told ABC News that the NSA “routinely” listened in on Americans’ phone calls and agents would often share “salacious or tantalizing” intercepted calls with each other. All this despite Bush’s frequent protestations that his illegal wiretaping program was “limited,” that it targeted only “a phone call of an al Qaeda, known al Qaeda suspect,” and that he ensured “that our civil liberties of our citizens are treated with respect.”

To the end, Bush and Cheney defended the program. In his final days in office, Cheney declared that “it always aggravated” him that the Times won a Pulitzer for exposing his administration’s illegal spying program.

Our guest blogger is Peter Juul, a research associate at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

On the new White House issues website on Iraq, President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden state that “Any SOFA [status of forces agreement] should be subject to Congressional review to ensure it has bipartisan support here at home.” We agree with the new administration’s general sentiment goals of consultation, but – as we’ve pointed out earlier – the SOFA contains passages that may contain a defense commitment and necessitate full-blown Congressional approval.

For instance, the SOFA text states:

In the event of any external or internal threat or aggression against Iraq that would violate its sovereignty, political independence, or territorial integrity, waters, airspace, its democratic system or its elected institutions, and upon request by the Government of Iraq, the Parties shall immediately initiate strategic deliberations and, as may be mutually agreed, the United States shall take appropriate measures, including diplomatic, economic, or military measures, or any other measure, to deter such a threat.

When determining whether this passage constitutes a commitment to defend Iraq, the Obama administration should consult a piece of unpassed legislation -– the Iraq Security Agreement Act of 2008 (S.3433) -– that Joe Biden introduced in the Senate last August prior to his selection as President Obama’s running mate. Introduced with the support Senators Bob Casey (D-PA), George Voinovich (R-OH), Jim Webb (D-VA), and the now-retired Chuck Hagel (R-NE), the goal of Biden’s bill was “to ensure that any agreement with Iraq containing a security commitment or arrangement is concluded as a treaty or is approved by Congress.”

Biden and his co-sponsors defined a security commitment as “an obligation, binding under international law, of the United States to act in the common defense in the event of an armed attack on that country.” Similarly, a security arrangement was defined as “a pledge by the United States to take some action in the event of a threat to that country’s security. Security arrangements typically oblige the United States to consult with a country in the event of a threat to its security.”

Biden and company’s definition of a security arrangement is eerily similar to the language contained in the SOFA, and should therefore, under the new vice president’s standards, be subject to some form of Congressional approval -– even if the SOFA doesn’t rise to the level of an official treaty between Iraq and the United States.

President Obama should follow his vice president’s earlier advice and seek Congressional approval for the SOFA. Doing so would help repair the institutional relationship on foreign policy between the executive and legislative branches that has been badly damaged over the last eight years. Sending the SOFA to Congress would send a message that President Obama takes this relationship seriously and means to make it work.

Equally important would be the message a Congressional SOFA approval would send to Iraqis. While the Iraqi parliament has already approved the SOFA, it remains subject to a popular referendum this July. With many Iraqis skeptical that the U.S. will fulfill its end of the SOFA bargain -– withdrawing troops from Iraqi cities by the end of June, and then from the country altogether by the end of 2011 -– Congressional approval of the SOFA may help send a signal that the United States is committed to following both the spirit and letter of the agreement.

Boeing and Lockheed Martin have been “pouring money into a publicity campaign” and stepping up congressional lobbying efforts to maintain funding for the Air Force’s F-22 Raptor.

Their efforts appear to be paying off. 200 members of the House and 44 members of the Senate have signed letters to President Obama urging him to extend the $62 billion F-22 Raptor program. Currently, the Air Force has funds to purchase 183 of the stealth aircraft, “but the letter says, ‘We are convinced that this number is insufficient to meet potential threats.’” The members write further that the jobs at stake make the program, as Matthew Yglesias recently paraphrased, “too big to fail”:

The F-22 program annually provides over $12 billion of economic activity to the national economy. … If this certification is not provided, layoffs will begin as this critical supplier base shuts down. … Over 25,000 Americans work for the 1,000+ suppliers in 44 states that manufacture the F-22. Moreover, it is estimated that another 70,000 additional Americans indirectly owe their jobs to this program.

Despite the Congressional appeals, continuing the F-22 program is not in the interest of U.S. national security. The Pentagon recently announced that they would need $8 billion to upgrade 100 F-22′s which are already in use. The aircraft is “proving very expensive to operate .. and it is complex to maintain,” the Pentagon explained. The aircraft’s readiness rate fell to 62 percent last year, which the Pentagon called “unsatisfactory.” Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Larry Korb summarized the arguments against the F-22 in a column in 2005:

The F/A-22 Raptor is the most unnecessary weapon system being built by the Pentagon. In fact, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld tried to do away with it in the summer of 2002 but backed off when his Air Force secretary threatened to resign over the issue. It was originally designed to achieve air superiority over Soviet fighter jets, which will never be built. … Over the last 20 years, the cost of the total program has continued to grow even as the number of planes to be purchased has declined.

If members of Congress are truly concerned with preserving American jobs, they should look elsewhere. Indeed, committing further funds to the F-22 program would divert scarce government dollars away from more economically beneficial forms of government spending.

As the Center for Economic and Policy Research found in 2007, “increased levels of military spending leads to fewer jobs and slower economic growth.” CEPR’s Dean Baker explained, “most economic models show that military spending diverts resources from productive uses, such as consumption and investment, and ultimately slows economic growth and reduces employment.”