Columnist Douglas Bloomfield reports that The Israel Project (TIP) — a Washington- based group that describes itself as “devoted to educating the press and the public about Israel while promoting security, freedom and peace” — advocates accusing those who support removing illegal Israeli settlements of promoting “a kind of ethnic cleansing to move all Jews” from the West Bank.

Bloomfield obtained a copy of TIP’s 2009 Global Language Dictionary, “a manual on how to talk to journalists and opinion molders about the Arab-Israeli conflict.” The manual states:

“The single toughest issue” to defend among Americans generally and American Jews in particular is settlements, says the manual, and “hostility towards them and towards Israeli policy that appears to encourage settlement activity.” [...]

Similarly, TIP says the “best argument” for settlements is this: Since Arabs citizens of Israel “enjoy equal rights,” telling Jews they can’t live in the Palestinian state “is a racist idea.”

As Bloomfield notes, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said recently that Jews who choose to live in the new state of Palestine “will not enjoy any less rights than Israeli Arabs enjoy now in the state of Israel.”

Last Thursday, TIP organized a press call with Israeli spokesman Mark Regev, who defended continued building in Israel settlements. Given the numerous Israeli administrative and security measures that function to divest Palestinians of their property and put it into the hands of Israeli settlers, TIP’s use of the term “ethnic cleansing” is patently ridiculous.

Mark Krikorian, Executive Director of the anti-immigrant Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), hit a new low this week when he warned National Review readers that 1,350 of Saddam Hussein’s best friends will be entering the U.S. Though not readily apparent, Krikorian is talking about the State Department’s decision to let a group of Iraqi Palestinians into the country as refugees. The U.S. hasn’t accepted many Palestinian refugees from Gaza or the West Bank in an effort to avoid stepping on Israel’s toes, but Iraqi Palestinians fall in a different category for many reasons. Krikorian writes:

“Besides the specific problem of welcoming to our shores people who danced in the streets at the destruction of the Twin Towers, there’s the more general issue of resettling as refugees people who have somewhere else to go…Resettlement in America, regardless of the total numbers (and I obviously prefer lower numbers), should be reserved only for those who can’t stay where they are and will never have anywhere else to go.”

It’s unclear whether Krikorian’s limited knowledge of the subject is driven more by his xenophobic agenda or intellectual laziness. Iraqi Palestinians are definitely not in a position to stay where they are and they have limited options in terms of where they could possibly go. Iraq’s Palestinian community is largely made up of those who were already driven from their homes in 1948 and others that were expelled from Kuwait in 1991. According to Refugees International, following the U.S. invasion, Iraqi Palestinians have fled killings, kidnappings, torture, and death threats as nearly 3,000 of them were left stranded in three of the “most desolate refugee camps in the world” along the border between Syria and Iraq. Most of the Arab world has shut its doors, as Europe and Canada have already accepted the responsibility of several hundred refugees. For many in the State Department and international community, accepting these individuals is “part of a moral imperative” the U.S. has to “clean up the refugee crisis created by invading Iraq.”

Krikorian’s suggestion that Iraqi Palestinians are terrorists is based on the same shamefully misleading logic that the Bush administration used to justify the war in Iraq. While it is true that Saddam treated them well, they are a far cry from being Saddam loyalists. Iraqi Palestinians are “apolitical,” and “basically desperate, scared, miserable and ready to just get out of Iraq,” says Human Rights Watch refugee policy director Bill Frelick.

Krikorian doesn’t just think that the U.S. refugee program is a load of crap, he’s also suggesting we dump our “problems” into the backyards of other countries. Krikorian insists that there must be some other country for the Iraqi Palestinians to settle in, preferably somewhere within the Arab League of Nations. Krikorian told the Christian Science Monitor:

“This is politically a real hot potato…[A]merica has become a dumping ground for the State Department’s problems — they’re tossing their problems over their head into Harrisburg, Pa., or Omaha, Neb.”

Krikorian’s perception of Iraqi Palestinian refugees isn’t just cold-hearted and stringent, it’s ignorant. In fact, it’s surprising he’s even recognizing their right to simply exist as individuals seeing as he’s previously described their homeland as having “no past, no distinctiveness, no commonality other than being the negation of Israel, the anti-Israel — anti-matter, if you will, on the periodic table of nations.”

The Council on Foreign Relations’ (CFR) Independent Task Force on immigration released a 118-page report on immigration policy at an event held at the CFR’s Washington office this morning. The Task Force’s co-chair and event headliner, former Gov. Jeb Bush (R-FL), was noticeably absent due to “plane issues.” He was replaced by the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission’s president and prominent figure in Republican politics, Richard Land.

In his absence, CFR’s Senior Fellow, Edward Alden, was asked by moderator Mark Whitaker to speak on behalf of Bush:

WHITAKER: Since Governor Bush is not here, I’m going to ask you to channel him. Obviously, he had a lot of experience with this issue in Florida. I’m sure it came up in some of the sessions of the task force. What would he say about the political obstacles and constraints if he were here?

ALDEN: That’s a tall order and I wouldn’t presume to speak for him. But, I think what he would point to is simply the fact that our experience over the last 20 years has not been a good one on the illegal immigration front. I mean there was legislation that Congress passed in 1986 that was supposed to address this problem. And it got much worse after 1986 and there’s lots of reasons for that, there’s been lots of analysis.

Watch it:

It’s too bad Bush wasn’t able to speak for himself. It sounds like he played a big role working with Clinton’s former White House Chief of Staff, Mack McLarty, Alden, and other Task Force members, in putting together one of the most sensible reports to come out on immigration yet. The Task Force thoroughly explored the benefits of immigration, without neglecting the costs. Whether immigrants choose to stay or leave, CFR finds that they have a positive effect on the nation’s economic and political interests at home and abroad. CFR’s Task Force concludes that comprehensive immigration reform that includes an “earned” path to legalization, improvements to the legal immigration system, and strong enforcement provisions, will have the long-term effect of improving national security and US international relations.

McLarty observed at the end of this morning’s event that anti-immigrant platforms have ruined the political careers of most nativists, the majority Republicans. In a recent Esquire interview with Tucker Carlson, Bush indicated that he is well aware that the demographics are against his party. There’s been a lot of speculation as to whether Bush will run for president against Obama in 2012. If that’s the case, he’s certainly doing a good job of positioning himself to win over a massive emerging voting bloc of Latinos and naturalized immigrants. Yet following the immigration raids and harsh enforcement tactics employed by his brother’s administration, he’d probably want to avoid mentioning his last name.

Christopher Hitchens asks what I think is a necessary question for anyone honestly seeking to understand the effects of recent U.S. policy in the Middle East: “Did the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime, and the subsequent holding of competitive elections in which many rival Iraqi Shiite parties took part, have any germinal influence on the astonishing events in Iran?”

Many Iranians go as religious pilgrims to the holy sites of Najaf and Kerbala in southern Iraq. They have seen the way in which national and local elections have been held, more or less fairly and openly, with different Iraqi Shiite parties having to bid for votes (and with those parties aligned with Iran’s regime doing less and less well). They have seen an often turbulent Iraqi Parliament holding genuine debates that are reported with reasonable fairness in the Iraqi media. [...]

Iranians by no means like to take their tune from Arabs — perhaps least of all from Iraqis — but watching something like the real thing next door may well have increased the appetite for the genuine article in Iran itself.

A few days before Iran’s election, I put a very similar question — what, if any, discernible impact have recent elections in Iraq had on Iranian politics? — to a panel at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (video here).

The panelists were very skeptical of the idea. WINEP deputy director Patrick Clawson dismissed outright the idea that Iranians would be influenced by Iraqis, assuring me (at 1:19:55) that “if it comes to comparisons between Iran and Arab countries the Iranian people kind of go ‘huh?’”

Their self-centeredness and their conviction that they are unique, a polite way of saying superior, is deep and strong. And so the idea that you would make a comparison between them and “those people” would just seem strange to a great many Iranians. And let me just note that besides Iraq, Iran has another larger, more prosperous, more democratic, and more stable neighbor with a Islamist-of sorts-government, namely Turkey. And yet the ability of Iranians to ignore developments there is really quite impressive, quite impressive.

With due respect to Clawson’s recognized expertise on Iran, I’m less inclined to simply dismiss the possibility that elections in Iraq, or in Turkey for that matter, have influenced those in Iran. While it’s impossible to know just what and how much news from Iraq Iranians are receiving, it seems likely to me that events in Iraq have had at least some impact.

I think it’s important to recognize, however, as Iranians surely do, that an election isn’t the only thing that has happened in Iraq over the past few years. There has also been the collapse of the Iraqi state following the U.S. invasion, a sectarian civil war midwifed by the U.S. occupation, and then the slow, painful and still incomplete rebuilding of the Iraqi state, of which elections are an important element but by no means the whole game. This was always the problem with trying to promote democracy on the back of war and occupation. The idea that any people, anywhere, should want to repeat the Iraq experiment is just daft.

Having said that, I think we should be open to the possibility that the new Iraq could have positive effects on the region. This openness shouldn’t be conflated, however, with the suggestion that the Iraq war was, in any sense, “worth it,” which is the clear implication with which Hitchens’ question is loaded. Whatever positive consequences may eventually issue from the U.S. invasion of Iraq, there’s just no plausible moral or strategic calculus through which the positive effects can be said to outweigh or justify the war’s staggering costs. Americans and Iraqis seem, fortunately, to have managed to pull Iraq back from the brink of total destruction, but we shouldn’t ever confuse the avoidance of catastrophe with “victory.”

Finally, while Hitchens is right to spotlight the strong and growing critique of Ayatollah Khomeini’s theory of the “rule of the jurist” that exists among mainstream Shia clerics, both in Iran and elsewhere, (which I’ve also written about), his positing of “Saddam gone, Iraqi democracy now” obscures the significant role of Iraqi Sunni and Shia religious leaders in buttressing the legitimacy of the Iraqi government, as well as the religious nature of Iraq’s leading parties themselves, and thus the significant implications that all of this could have for political reform in the region. This is unfortunate, because I think this is actually where the potential impact on Iran, and on the broader Middle East, could be strongest. It’s deeply ironic, to say the least, that a war that was partially sold as a battle against global Islamism managed to deliver Iraq into the hands of Islamist parties, but Iraq’s being the first Arab country in which Islamists have been permitted to govern may eventually prove to be the war’s most important contribution.