Here’s how Haaretz’s Avi Issacharoff reported on the Fatah conference earlier this month in Bethlehem:

President Mahmoud Abbas says his people must not “mar their legitimate struggle with terror” and that while his government seeks peace with Israel, it reserves the right to resort to “resistance.” [...]

“Although peace is our choice, we reserve the right to resistance, legitimate under international law,” Abbas said in a policy speech, using a term that encompasses armed confrontation with Israel and non-violent protests.

Colette Avital, in the Jerusalem Post:

[Fatah's] Bethlehem platform calls for “resistance by all legitimate means,” and leaves out the option of armed struggle.[...]

Abbas himself made his position very clear: “We must not stain our legitimate struggle with terror,” he said.

Here’s how The New Republic puts it:

What Fatah’s Defense Of Terrorism Means for Israel (8/20/09)

TNR contributing editor Yossi Klein Halevi reveals a variety of troubling details surrounding the Fatah convention in Bethlehem last week, arguing that the Palestinian faction’s alleged “right to terrorism”…

It is true that Fatah reaffirmed their right to armed struggle — a right retained by all people who suffer under foreign military occupation, as the Palestinians do. This is not synonymous with terrorism, Halevi’s flat assertion that it is simply a “code word” (and TNR’s misleading quotation marks) notwithstanding. As both Issacharoff and Avital report, but for some reason Halevi ignores, the conference ended with Fatah (again) choosing to abjure violence in favor of negotiation. This is a good thing, isn’t it?

It’s not surprising that 55% of Americans wrongly believe that health care reform will cover undocumented immigrants when you have the Senate Minority Whip, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), publicly stating that it’s perfectly “logical” to think so. Roll Call’s reporter John Stanton recently highlighted some comments made by Kyl in a conference call with reporters in which he supported right-wing concerns about insuring undocumented immigrants:

KYL: It’s a logical question for people to ask…In the last couple of bills…there were efforts to ensure that only eligible people would receive funding…the efforts to ensure that were defeated by Democrats…given the fact that illegal immigrants receive care — they go to the emergency room –it’s a big burden for hospitals.

But Kyl blatantly ignores the fact that both the House and Senate bills explicitly exclude undocumented immigrants and chooses to instead fuel misguided right-wing anger about immigration and health care. Stanton appeared on Fox News’ On The Record With Greta Van Susteren last night to clear up any doubts on whether health care reform would cover undocumented immigrants:

VAN SUSTEREN: Is there anything in either one of the bills, the house or — to the extent that we have a Senate one, and either one of them that suggests that illegal immigrants will get health care coverage under this?

STANTON: At this point, no. In fact, the House bill actually does have language in it right now which would make it so that it would not apply to undocumented workers as they are labeled in that bill. In the Senate, it is expected to be the same kind of dynamic.

Watch it:

At this afternoon’s online town hall meeting, President Obama once again reiterated that undocumented immigrants will not be covered by the proposed House or Senate health care bills:

OBAMA: This has been an example of just pure misinformation out there. None of the bills that have been voted on in Congress and none of the proposals coming out of the White House propose giving coverage to illegal immigrants. None of them. That has never been on the table. Nobody has discussed it. So everybody who’s listening out there — when you start hearing that somehow this is all designed to provide health insurance to illegal immigrants — that is simply not true. It has never been the case.

And while Kyl groans about the “burden” of emergency health care, Obama cited one big reason for why undocumented immigrants are treated at hospitals: a “basic standard of decency.” And if that’s not a good enough reason for Kyl, an article in the New England Journal of Medicine points out that most hospitals don’t collect information about their patients’ immigration status, so there are “no reliable national figures on hospital costs for undocumented immigrants” in the first place. Watch it:

Commenting on yesterday’s massive attacks in Baghdad, Michael Rubin insists that blame “rests solely on the terrorists who planted the bomb.” Then there’s this huge caveat:

The terrorists, however, very much exploit an environment made possible by the “Anti-Surge” withdrawal timeline sought by Obama during his campaign and, unfortunately, agreed to by the Bush administration in its twilight weeks.

Whenever national security and military strategy is determined by Washington’s political calendar, rather than the situation on the ground in various areas of operation, the results are disastrous. Creating security vacuums is never wise.

Rubin is actually making two pernicious arguments here. The first, and most obvious, involves his attempt to cast the U.S. withdrawal as the “anti-Surge“. The assumption being that (Bush’s!) Surge succeeded, but that (Obama’s!) withdrawal will squander that success. But, of course, if the security gains achieved by the Surge were such that they require an indefinite U.S. military presence to sustain, then by President Bush’s own metrics its “success” is, at the very least, questionable.

As Eli Lake reported last week, a forthcoming report by the National Defense University “warns that the Iraqi army and police are becoming pawns of sectarian political parties — a trend that it calls ‘a recipe for civil war.’”

The report by Najim Abed al-Jabouri, a former Iraqi mayor and police chief who helped run the first successful counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq after the U.S. invasion, also concludes that U.S. forces have failed to use their remaining leverage as trainers to insulate the Iraqi army and police from the influence of powerful Shi’ite and Sunni Muslim and Kurdish parties.

“U.S. efforts to rebuild the [Iraqi security forces] have focused on much needed training and equipment, but have neglected the greatest challenge facing the forces’ ability to maintain security upon U.S. withdrawal: an ISF politicized by ethno-sectarian parties,” he wrote.

In a report for the Center for American Progress last September, Brian Katulis, Marc Lynch, and Peter Juul wrote that the Surge had “achieved important gains in reducing violence in Iraq,’ but “has not delivered on its central objective: achieving a sustainable power consolidation among Iraq’s different political forces.” Almost a year later, many of the key challenges outlined in their report remain.

While it’s fine, if unoriginal, to lament the influence of politics upon military strategy, Rubin seems curiously unaware that Americans are not the only political actors here. The Iraqis have, like, their own government, their own political considerations, and their own security imperatives. This is as much, if not more of, a constraint upon the U.S. in Iraq as anything else.

The Surge was always designed to be temporary — that’s why it was called the “Surge” not the “Open-Ended Escalation of U.S. Forces into Mesopotamia.” Surges ebb. Rubin’s attempt to portray Obama’s adherence to the Bush-negotiated, Maliki-enforced withdrawal as irresponsible stewardship of the Surge’s hard-won gains wanders dangerously close to Dolschstoss territory.

The second issue involves Rubin’s attempt to have it both ways in regard to culpability for violence in Iraq. On the one hand, Rubin wants to blame Obama’s (Bush-negotiated) withdrawal for creating an environment that terrorists can exploit. But at the same time, it seems that Rubin would like to absolve the war’s supporters and architects (such as himself) for having created, by invading an occupying Iraq, an environment that terrorists exploited, and continue to exploit.

The uncomfortable truth — for American supporters and critics of the Iraq war alike — is that the United States bears the far largest share of responsibility for what occurred in Iraq, and for what Iraq has become. As I’ve written before, it’s possible that Iraq may yet yield benefits to the Middle East — but one can’t ever seriously claim credit those benefits without also accepting some responsibility for the cataclysm unleashed by the U.S. invasion.