After the bi-partisan effort to defund the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) over the winter failed — at least for the 2011 fiscal year — two Republicans are renewing attacks on the Congressionally-chartered and -funded organization with a new approach.

In late May, Reps. Chip Cravaack (R-MN) and Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) introduced an amendment to the Defense Authorization Act that would go beyond defunding — it would repeal the 1984 law that established USIP.

So far, the American Enterprise Institute’s resident moderate Norman Ornstein has issued the measure’s harshest denunciation, writing in Roll Call last week that the pair of Congressmen had won the “dubious distinction” of undertaking the “Most Head-in-the-Sand Neanderthal Effort of the Year”:

[T]his is not some collection of pointy-headed peaceniks — USIP has been engaged in serious and risky work, hand in hand with our military, in Iraq, Afghanistan and other trouble spots. It is engaged in mediation, nation building and other efforts to reduce conflict and save lives.

Defenders like Ornstein frame the debate over USIP’s existence in terms of national security. Indeed, as Rep. Mike Honda (D-CA) and USIP president Richard Solomon point out, USIP is active in conflict areas where the U.S. is fighting wars — and others where it is not — often doing jobs that direct work for the U.S. government won’t allow.

Chaffetz and Rep. Anthony Wiener (D-NY) led the effort to defund USIP last winter. Both lawmakers wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed in February calling for defunding, but labeled USIP a “fine think tank.” Chaffatz and Wiener went on:

The USIP has a role to play in our modern world, but the level of taxpayer support that this private organization receives is excessive…. Although there have been no oversight hearings on the USIP since 1985, the organization’s value is not in question — only its need for taxpayer funding is.

Since Chaffatz signed this op-ed too, he should explain what changed since the time of its writing. After all, as February’s defunding battle shows, USIP can have its taxpayer funding taken away while allowing it to retain its Congressional charter. This latest episode seems like a mere work-around for defunding after the bid failed through to make it through the final budget for the 2011 fiscal year.

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak pushed back against comments by ex-Mossad chief Meir Dagan who had made waves by publicly asserting that, referring to Iran’s nuclear program, “An aerial strike on the reactors is a dumb idea that has no benefit.” Challenging Dagan, Barak said, “Any ability to disperse the ambiguousness surrounding the issue of Iran” hurts Israel’s ability to defend itself against Iran, adding that the military option must remain on the table if international efforts to stop Iran’s nuclear program are to be effective.

Barak emphasized the importance of ambiguity in deterrence and clarified Israel’s position on a military strike. “There is no decision to attack Iran,” he said, adding, “We don’t make decisions beforehand for hypothetical situations. I don’t think that anyone would be happy to pull the trigger on a military operation against Iran.”

While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has been pushing hard to keep the threat of a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities “on the table,” members of Israel’s security elite have been lining up against an attack. In a recent tally, eight of the 18 former heads of Israel’s security services are working against Netanyahu’s stance on Iran and another four have expressed alarm over the possible drumbeat to war.

Dagan warned an audience at Hebrew University last month that “Any strike against that [the civilian program] is an illegal act according to international law” and that an attack was “the stupidest thing I have ever heard.”

Indeed this distinction between Iran’s civilian and potential military program has caused a great deal of confusion in recent months. The 2011 NIE, despite near constant pressure from Iran hawks to renounce the 2007 NIE, reportedly finds no clear evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program — that is a nuclear program with components that have no possible civilian use (e.g. warhead design). That is not to say that Iran doesn’t seek a nuclear weapon but the evidence available to the 16 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community did not offer proof that a nuclear weapons program was being conducted alongside the civilian program.

Both the 2007 NIE and recent comments by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper present a consistent message that there is little conclusive evidence that Iran has decided to pursue a nuclear weapons program.

The 2007 NIE said:

Iranian entities are continuing to develop a range of technical capabilities that could be applied to producing nuclear weapons, if a decision is made to do so.

Clapper essentially repeated this point in statements made before Congress earlier this year. He said:

We continue to assess Iran keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons in part by developing various nuclear capabilities that better position it to produce such weapons, should it choose to do so. We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons.

New evidence released by the IAEA last month does offer hints that Iran is exploring some technologies that could be related to nuclear weapons but the agency’s allegations did not indicate that Iran was pursuing a full nuclear weapons program.

Barak’s comments about Dagan hurting Israel’s deterrence capability — a questionable statement considering Israel’s presumed second-strike nuclear capabilities — is clear evidence that Netanyahu’s government is threatened by any criticism, regardless of how salient, that questions the assumption that Iran has an active nuclear weapons program. Israel’s security elite and some in Washington are expressing growing concern that Netanyahu’s saber rattling could have disastrous consequences.  Not the least of which being Iran, facing a threat of military action from Israel, choosing to pursue the construction of a nuclear warhead as a deterrent against perceived Israeli aggression.

Despite clashes Sunday along the de facto border with Syria and protests at West Bank checkpoints, the Washington Post’s interactive map on ”the Middle East and North Africa in turmoil” still omits Israel/Palestine from its graphic of clickable countries. There’s even an empty space in the clickable grid below the map:

Sunday’s protests marked Naska day, commemorating the beginning of Israel’s occupation of lands outside its 1967 boundaries including East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights.

Three weeks ago when, celebrating Nakba day, Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and neighboring countries engaged in massive demonstrations. Unarmed demonstration against the occupation and Israel’s separation barrier have been a common phenomenon for years now.

Furthermore, Israel’s March 15 unity movement, led by Palestinian youths on the model of the Arab Spring in other nations, has already garnered some limited political victories. In an article for the Nation, Joseph Dana and Jesse Rosenfeld outlined how the March 15 Movement, like protest movements elsewhere, marked a generational shift. They wrote that the movement is also a first step in nationalizing the model that has been used by popular committees protesting against the separation barrier in individual villages, noting that protests occurred in both the Palestinian Authority-controlled West Bank, where Fatah rules, and Hamas-controlled Gaza. On April 27, the rival factions announced a unity deal, marking a success for the March 15 demonstrators.

The New York Times also left the Palestinian territories off of its chart of Middle East Protests (the Times stopped updating the chart in April). In another New York Times map on Middle Eastern nukes, Israel, which maintains a covert arsenal estimated at more than 100 nuclear weapons, was designated by its shading as only having “construction begun” on its nuclear program.

Way back on the first day of the Palestinian unity marches, Philip Weiss published on the oversight of Israel/Palestine on the Washington Post’s list of Mideast and North African protests. But no change has yet been made. In light of the March 15 movement, Nakba and Naska days, and the popular committee protest movement in the West Bank, one wonders why Israel/Palestine still gets left off the map.

Congress is currently looking at two important fixes to keep guns out the hands of people shouldn’t have them. First, fixing the private sale loophole. In many states, attendees of gun shows and flea markets can negotiate private sales to purchase a firearm — including assault rifles — from unlicensed dealers without being subjected to a federal criminal background check. And second, individuals on the federal terrorist watch list are not excluded from purchasing firearms in the United States.

Last week, American-born al-Qaeda spokesmen Adam Yahiye Gadahn urged the terrorist group’s followers to exploit this so-called “terror gap“:

Muslims in the West have to remember that they are perfectly placed to play an important and decisive part in the jihad against the Zionists and crusaders and to do major damage to the enemies of Islam, waging war on their religion, sacred places and things and brethren.

This is a golden opportunity and a blessing from, Allah, subhanahu wa ta’ala, and a way to show one’s appreciation and thanks for this blessing is to rush to discharge one’s duty to his ummah and fight on its behalf with everything at his desposal. And in the West, you’ve got a lot at your disposal. Let’s take America as an example.

America is absolutely awash with easily obtainable firearms. You can go down to a gun show at the local convention center and come away with a fully automatic assault rifle, without a background check, and most likely without having to show an identification card. So what are you waiting for?

Watch it:

So it seems like it might be a pretty responsible and relevant idea to force individuals to go through a background check at gun shows and to prevent those on the terrorist watch list from purchasing firearms.

However, there are powerful people in this country that don’t want that to happen. The National Rifle Association is opposed to eliminating the gun show loophole. And, referring to the terror gap, an NRA spokesperson said recently that “it’s wrong to arbitrarily deny a law-abiding person a constitutional right.”

Republicans in Congress don’t seem to want to address these problems either. Last month, the House Judiciary Committee voted down an amendment that would have prevented those on the federal terrorist watch list from buying guns. All “nay” votes came from Republicans and all “ayes” came from Democrats.

The Government Accountability Office reported last year that suspected terrorists bought firearms and explosives from licensed dealers 1,300 times since 2004. And just last month, FBI data showed that 247 people on the terror watch list purchased guns in the last year.

New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg and Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, co-chairs of the 550-member Mayors Against Illegal Guns coalition, issued statements in response to Gadahn’s video. “This video may help Washington understand that weak gun laws aren’t just a crime problem, they’re a national security threat,” Bloomberg said. “It has never been more clear — or more urgent,” Menino said, “that Washington must act swiftly on these proposals to protect national security.”

The United States is fast approaching a time when it will no longer be able to ignore the threats of the Iranian nuclear program led by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a top official in the Israeli government told ThinkProgress Saturday. In an interview at the Faith and Freedom Conference, Deputy Speaker of the Knesset Danny Danon told ThinkProgress that “we are far beyond diplomatic sanctions and resolutions” regarding Iran, and the time when military action may be America’s best hope is coming soon.

Comparing Ahmadinejad to former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, Danon would not rule out a preemptive strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, and said that while adding another war to the list of increasingly unpopular conflicts in which the U.S. is already engaged may not be popular, it may be necessary to protect both the U.S. and Israel. Danon stated that a coalition of Western countries may need to go so far as to take out Ahmadinejad, just as it they did with Hussein in Iraq:

WALDRON: Are you suggesting that…should the U.S. take preemptive military action against the Iranians?

DANON: I think it should not be only the burden of the U.S. But the Western society must come and put a timeline to Ahmadinejad. If you don’t finish by this date, we will knock you down. The same way we did with the Iraqi leader, we should do with the Iranian leader. You cannot ignore it. [...]

I think if the American people would realize that there is a force that is gaining in momentum and is coming after them, they will be able to fight. Today because it is so far away, so remote, people say, ‘Well we see what is happening in Afghanistan, in Iraq, we don’t want to go into another adventure.’ But Iran is different, because Iranian leadership speaks directly against the American people. You will be able to ignore it for a short while, but in the long term, you will have to face it.

Watch it:

Danon, a member of the rightist Likud party, is not the first Israeli official to back potential military action against Iran. In the U.S., meanwhile, the idea has also been endorsed by neoconservatives like Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol and former UN representative John Bolton, who said military action was the “only option” for dealing with Iran. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) and many of his Republican colleagues — including potential presidential candidate Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) — recently revived a resolution backing Israel if it decided to take its own military action against Iran.

Former Israeli spy chief Meir Dagan, however, has a different view. Dagan has long cautioned American and Israeli leaders — including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — against attacking Iran. Dagan has also referred to strikes as “the stupidest thing I have ever heard” and recently reiterated his concern that an attack would have devastating effects on Israel. And many former Israeli security chiefs “want to dial back the rhetoric on Iran and stop the Netanyahu-led talk of military action.”

Adm. Mike Mullen, the outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also spoke out against military action last year, saying Iran would be “a big, big, big problem for all of us, and I worry a great deal about the unintended consequences.”

And as ThinkProgress’ Matt Yglesias notes, it is likely that a direct preemptive strike would actually embolden Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons. Rather than deter the Iranians, a preemptive strike is “likely to persuade Iran’s leaders that its existing deterrent capabilities are inadequate to deter aggression,” justifying further advancement of Iran’s nuclear program.