Analyzing Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s acceptance of a highly circumscribed Palestinian state and his decision, after months of stonewalling, to temporarily honor some of Israel’s past commitments on settlements, the New York Times’ Ethan Bronner presents Bibi as a newly transformed peacemaker:

After a long career supporting Israeli settlement in occupied land and rejecting Palestinian statehood, Mr. Netanyahu said last June that he accepted two states. Three weeks ago, he imposed a 10-month freeze on building new residential Jewish housing in the West Bank, something no Israeli leader had done before. Settlers are outraged, and Mr. Netanyahu is facing a rebellion from within his party. Together with his removal of many West Bank checkpoints and barriers to Palestinian movement and economic growth, these steps went well beyond what many ever expected of him.

I doubt we’d ever see this sort of fawning write-up of a Palestinian leader who, after announcing his intention to ignore his predecessors’ commitments to police Palestinian incitement and violence, finally agreed to try and control some incitement and violence. Past Israeli leaders had already committed to the creation of a Palestinian state and to a settlement halt. Netanyahu arrived in office and rejected both of those commitments, and is now getting credit from the New York Times for slightly moderating that rejection. Netanyahu now accepts a Palestinian state — though one so severely circumscribed that it’s unlikely that any Palestinian leader could accept it and hope to retain Palestinian popular support. After months of brazenly and gratuitously humiliating his country’s key benefactor on settlements, Netanyahu has ordered a partial, temporary settlement halt — while continuing full-speed ahead in Palestinian areas of Jerusalem and assuring his settler supporters that it will be open season once the moratorium has ended.

Both Palestinian and Israeli leaders have, in the past, had difficulty living up to their various commitments. But until Netanyahu you haven’t had a leader who simply declared himself unbound by those commitments, and then expected to be paid again after eventually agreeing to be sort of bound by some of them. Netanyahu’s shifts have been in a positive direction, and that’s worth recognizing, but the time and energy taken getting there has had negative consequences both for the peace process and for U.S. credibility. Bronner does the Times’s readers a real disservice by soft-pedaling the broader effects of Bibi’s recalcitrance and going with a fuzzy “transformed man” narrative.

Today, the Associated Press is reporting that the same police chief, Matthew Nestor, who has been charged with obstruction of justice in association with the deadly beating of Luís Ramírez — an undocumented immigrant — was also named in a 2006 lawsuit which alleged that Borough police beat to death a Latino inmate and hung him from the bars of his cell to make it seem like a suicide. The lawsuit also claimed that Nestor arrested the inmate without warrant or probable cause.

Earlier this year, an all-white jury in Pennsylvania coal country acquitted two teenagers — Brandon Piekarsky and Derrick Donchak — of murder, assault, and ethnic intimidation charges in relation to the fatal beating of Ramírez. Prosecutors, family members, and advocates were baffled by the verdict, especially considering the “horrific details of the crime, damning evidence, and a number of serious criminal charges.” The Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund called on the Justice Department to “bring justice to the Ramirez family and send a strong message that violence targeting immigrants will not be tolerated.” A petition calling for federal charges received 50,000 signatures.

As a result, Piekarsky and Donchak have both been recently indicted on federal hate crime charges. Nestor and two of his officers, Lt. William Moyer and Officer Jason Hayes, were also charged with obstruction of justice. According to the indictment, the three policemen failed to “memorialize or record” statements made by Piekarsky and “wrote false and misleading official reports” that “intentionally omitted information about the true nature of the assault and the investigation.” They face up to 20 years in prison and the teenagers could be in jail for life if found guilty.

At the time of Ramírez’s death, Hayes was dating Piekarsky’s mother and Moyer’s son played on the high school football team with one of the teenage defendants. The officers have pleaded not guilty and are awaiting a bail hearing.

Last spring, North Korea belligerently tested missiles and conducted a second nuclear test. This was cited as an effort on the part of the North Koreans to “test” the new President. Since then, and without getting much attention the Administration’s approach to North Korea has quietly turned the screws on the Hermit Kingdom.

It was reported today that President Obama wrote a direct letter to Kim Jung Il (something that was also done by President Bush and Clinton). It was delivered last week by Special Envoy Stephen Bosworth when he visited Pyongyang. The timing of Obama’s letter and Bosworth’s visit was well planned, as the Hermit Kingdom is now increasingly anxious to come back to the table. While there has been no set timetable for talks to resume, the North Koreans have signaled that they are ready for them to restart.

The clamp down on North Korean arms trafficking is having an impact. The recent dramatic seizure in Thailand of a North Korean arms shipment required intense collaboration between intelligence agencies and was a byproduct of the UN sanctions that were pushed for by US Ambassador Susan Rice last May in response to North Korean missile and nuclear tests. It is “clear evidence of the sanctions increasing pressure on North Korea.” The Financial Times explained that “Kim Jong-il is feeling the noose of sanctions tighten” and that the world is becoming more adept at cracking down on his arms exports. It is estimated that illicit arms-trafficking brings in more than $1 billion per year and helps fund the North Korean military. The Thai seizure along with another one earlier this year will likely put a significant dent into that cash flow, explains Daniel Pinkston, north-east Asia Deputy Project Director at International Crisis Group.

This will impact on the revenue stream. … It is a sign of the increasing risk of doing business for the buyers, who are also violating UN Security Council resolution 1874.

Importantly, the loss of revenue, has made it more likely that North Korea will climb down and restart talks. Baek Seung-joo of the Korea Institute of Defense Analyses (KIDA) in Seoul noted that the there is a “greater likelihood that the North will look to dialogue with the United States and also the six-party talks as a way out. They are not going to be able to abandon dialogue.”

Along with upping the pressure through sanctions, the Administration has also worked to get allies on the same page. This was one of the major objectives of Obama’s trip to Asia, as former Ambassador Mort Abramowitz explained in the National Interest.

From the beginning of his administration and as a major part of his trip, Obama has worked toward ending the discord on North Korea policy with our major treaty partners—South Korea and Japan. They now sing from the same sheet on North Korea, and that seems apparent in Pyongyang’s recently less truculent behavior. The saga with the DPRK is hardly over, and Pyongyang is not likely to give up its nuclear-weapons capabilities anytime soon. But progress is more likely when our allies are not snarling at our actions as they did in the last years of the Bush administration.

These efforts, along with reports of rioting among North Korea’s fledgling middle class, have helped pressure North Korea to go back to the negotiating table.

But why restart talks in the first place if North Korea is balking under pressure? Pyongyang announced in September that it was in the final stages of enriching uranium and weaponizing plutonium and we already know that North Korea, for instance, helped Syria produce a nuclear facility on Israel’s door-step. Restarting negotiations is critical, not so much because there is any realistic chance of getting the North Koreans to give up the weapons that it built during the Bush administration – their nuclear program is after all their sole claim to relevance on the international stage – but because of the potential proliferation dangers of an unmonitored North Korea. So preventing further enrichment and nuclear development is a top priority.

However, the right continues to hold on to a failed approach that it is better to speak righteously and do nothing. In response to Bosworth’s trip to Pyongyang, Stephen Hayes at the Weekly Standard writes:

The very fact that the high-level face-to-face meetings took place is a blow to human rights in North Korea, as any such discussions necessarily lend legitimacy to the repressive regime in Pyongyang, particularly when such bilateral talks came after repeated demands for them from the North Koreans.

This approach, is the perfect example, of what Obama described in his Nobel speech, as the “satisfying purity of indignation.” And this is exactly the failed approach that allowed North Korea to get the bomb during the Bush administration in the first place.

Neoconservative analyst Michael Rubin hails yesterday’s passage of the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act (IRPSA) as “a step in the right direction“:

The most effective diplomacy occurs when it occurs simultaneously with more coercive strategies. Indeed, if we wanted maximal leverage in diplomacy, we should attempt to maximize sanctions and then negotiate to suspend them as Tehran complied with international norms. There are many sanctions that would be effective even without Beijing or Moscow’s buy-in and which could not be exploited by Chinese and Russian businessmen. Most of these involve designations of Iran’s Central Bank.

There’s quite a bit that’s wrong here. Tehran is already the subject of numerous sanctions, and has been since 1979. No one would argue that these sanctions have shown any notable success in changing Iranian behavior — that is, apart from moving it in a more aggressive direction, strengthening a siege mentality among Iran’s hardliners and undercutting moderates’ calls for engagement. Even granting Rubin’s questionable assertion that “the most effective diplomacy occurs… simultaneously with more coercive strategies,” it’s worth noting that a recent report from Rubin’s own employer, the American Enterprise Institute, concluded not only that IRPSA “might generate no significant change in Iranian policy in the short term,” but that “the group that should be the target of strengthened sanctions, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), is least likely to be affected.”

But IRPSA is not just ineffective, it’s actually counterproductive to the goal of garnering necessary international support for the sort of carefully calibrated measures that might actually work to put pressure on the Revolutionary Guards, which is why the administration is now working with Senate allies to put the brakes on the Senate version of the sanctions bill.

Rubin also writes “Discussion of whether any particular Iranian figure endorses any particular sanction are silly“:

Designing any U.S. policy around the endorsement of any Iranian figure is silly. The Obama administration should instead base U.S. strategy on U.S. national interests and effectiveness. The Iranian people would certainly rally around the flag should there be any military action against Iran, but they have never rallied to the government’s side when faced with economic trouble. They consistently blame the government, as they did when during previous oil shortages.

I’ll give Rubin credit for this much: At least, unlike IRPSA sponsor Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA), Rubin hasn’t ridiculously suggested that the Iranian people actually want the U.S. to impose sanctions that will hurt the Iranian people. Rubin just says that we shouldn’t care. But, of course, we should care — at least if we’re serious about creating the political space necessary for Iran’s Green movement to successfully challenge, and ideally replace, the current regime. Blunt, poorly-designed sanctions like those contained in IRPSA, while perhaps providing Congresspersons opportunities for sanctimonious grandstanding, do just the opposite: They would offer Iran’s hardliners a powerful propaganda lifeline, and would likely facilitate greater regime consolidation right at the moment that the conservative consensus around Ahmadinejad is starting to crack up. This is probably the reason why Green movement leaders and spokespersons in the West have condemned them.

While it’s true that many Iranians blame their government for economic troubles, that doesn’t mean they don’t also blame the U.S. and the international community. Further, as Brookings Institution Iran analyst Suzanne Maloney noted yesterday in testimony (pdf) to the House Oversight Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs,”The Islamic Republic has experienced a number of episodes of severe economic pressure, but none have generated the kind of foreign policy moderation that the sponsors of ILSA, IRPSA or any of the other manifold punitive measures against Tehran sanguinely forecast“:

Rather, past periods of external pressure on Iran have facilitated the coalescence of the regime and the consolidation of its public support, and economic constraint has generated enhanced cooperation among Iran’s bickering factions. Tight purse strings have forced moderation of Iran’s economic policies but only rarely of its political dynamics.

Ironically, while Rubin writes that “the Obama administration should recognize that survival of the Islamic Republic as a regime is not a U.S. interest,” (there is, by the way, no evidence that the Obama administration thinks otherwise, but frankly why should anyone care what sort of republic Iran bills itself as, so long it’s not misbehaving or mistreating its citizens?) that survival — in its most hardline form — is made more likely by the very sanctions he supports.