In an article on Fox News’ website, former Bush administration officials Michael Mukasey and Tom Ridge and former FBI director Louis Freeh claim that in his apparent rush to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq, President Obama is abandoning the Iranian exile group the Mujahedeen-e Khalq’s (MEK):

[I]n a panicked haste to exit from Iraq, the Obama White House is abandoning the 3,400 members of the MEK – including young men, women and children – who are living in exile in a camp near Baghdad and intends to leave them to the indelicate mercy of Iraq’s new Shia prime minister, the Mullahs’ good friend Nouri al-Maliki.

There’s so much wrong with this brief clip of their piece that it’s difficult to know where to start.

To begin with, Obama is hardly in a “panicked haste to exit from Iraq.” As news reports have indicated over the past months, the Obama administration has been pressuring the Iraqis to strike a deal to allow U.S. troops to stay past the end of 2011, a deadline imposed by a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) struck by George W. Bush in 2008 despite warnings that the deal could constrict the next president’s policies.

Indeed, Freeh, Mukasey and Ridge acknowledged this fact five paragraph’s later in the same article:

The Obama administration is, of course, eager to complete a formal agreement with Prime Minister Maliki concerning the status of American troops remaining in Iraq after 2011.

Attacking Obama for wanting to rush out of Iraq seems just as disingenuous as the authors’ charge that the administration “intends to leave [the MEK adherents in Ashraf] to the indelicate mercy of…the Mullahs’ good friend Nouri al-Maliki.” The notion that Iraqis — who have officially wanted the MEK off their soil since 2008 — need to be pressured by the Iranians into harsh actions against Ashraf is absurd. As CAP analyst Matt Duss recently noted, the MEK, which is designated as a terror group by the U.S., is “despised…by many Iraqis for having aided Saddam [Hussein] in his crackdowns on Iraqi Shiites and Kurds.” Earlier this year, Duss explained:

The MEK also fought alongside Hussein’s forces after the 1991 Gulf War to put down the Shia uprising in Iraq’s south and the Kurdish uprising in the north. They were driven by MEK leader Maryam Rajavi’s infamous command to “Take the Kurds under your tanks, and save your bullets for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.”

The New York Times also recently noted that the Obama administration — far from abandoning the MEK members in Iraq — has been engaged in active diplomacy to get them out of harm’s way, eventually hoping to relocate them to a third country outside Iran (where they’re also likely to face persecution) or Iraq. However, the diplomacy, reported the Times, has thus far hit a dead end because “the residents are refusing to leave, and no countries have come forward to welcome them.”

That the three conservative officials-turned-pundits would make disingenuous attacks on Obama is no surprise. Their skewed perspective absolving the MEK of its role in blocking solutions to its predicament might also be easy enough to explain, though: Freeh, Mukasey and Ridge are among a coterie of top former U.S. officials who have been paid by groups that support the MEK, advocate for removing them from the U.S. terror list, and in some cases urge U.S. support and recognition as an Iranian government in exile despite the lack of any meaningful MEK political constituency within Iran.

During last week’s GOP presidential debate, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) questioned whether some of his colleagues are exaggerating the threat from a nuclear armed Iran, suggesting that the United States and other nuclear states would contain the Islamic Republic should it go nuclear, just as the U.S. had during the Cold War with the Soviet Union. “We tolerated the Soviets; we didn’t attack them. And they were a much greater danger” than Iran, Paul said, referring to the policy of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD).

Rep. Allen West (R-FL) last week attacked Paul for his comments on Iran during the debate. “I gotta tell ya, that’s not the kind of guy you need to have sitting at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” West said, claiming that mutual assured destruction “is out the window with Iran“:

WEST: How many people understand when I talk about the MAD theory? Do people remember the MAD theory? Mutually assured destruction, that was the kind of understanding that we had between the United States and the Soviet Union. That’s out the window with Iran. If they get a device, they’ve already said that what they’re intentions are, the first place that that’s gonna go is to Israel.

Watch it:

As CAP’s Matt Duss has noted, Iran armed with nuclear weapons is obviously not a desired or ideal outcome, but the claim that the Iranians are crazy, irrational actors hellbent on attacking Israel or anyone else with nukes “will have to be continually knocked down.”

“The martyr state view rests on bold, even radical claims about Iran’s goals and behavior that defy conventional expectations of states’ actions,” former CAP nuclear nonproliferation expert Andy Grotto wrote in 2009, “but no government in recorded history has willfully pursued policies it knows will proximately cause its own destruction.”

Paul Pillar over at the National Interest wrote last week, “Whatever else you may think about Paul and his candidacy, there is no refuting three truths he stated regarding the hysteria-inducing subject of Iran and its nuclear program”:

One, as Iranians look at what is surrounding them in their own neighborhood, they have good and understandable reasons to be interested in nuclear weapons. Two, even if they were to acquire a nuke, any capability they then had would pale in comparison with what the United States faced in the form of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, or China for that matter. Third, as U.S. dealings with the Soviets demonstrated, an adversary’s nuclear capability does not constitute a reason to stop talking and start making a war.

“Paul’s plain speaking, of course,” Pillar adds, “clashed with the orthodoxy in this country according to which unthinking absolutism is considered the proper response to any mention of Iran and nukes.”

It’s no secret that most of the Republicans running for president are trying to paint President Obama as Israel’s enemy. During the Fox News debate last week, former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty — who has since dropped out of the race — said Obama “repeatedly sticks his thumb in Israel’s eye.”

It’s important to remember that while the Obama-hates-Israel lines get good applause from the far right, this notion has no basis in reality. Take for example Obama’s statement last May that “the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps.” Despite the fact that the president was merely reiterating settled U.S. policy, right-wing hawks cried foul, saying Obama had sold out Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also initially fussed about Obama’s 1967 borders statement, but he has since agreed to peace talks based on Obama’s policy and Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD) said last week that Netanyahu told him that he and Obama “were in agreement” on the issue.

Yet the facts don’t seem to be getting in the way of a good attack line. Announcing his candidacy for president over the weekend, Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) continued this trend, falsely claiming that Obama is trying to dictate “new borders” for Israel:

America’s standing in the world is in peril, not only because of disastrous economic policies, but from the incoherent muddle that they call foreign policy. Our president has insulted our friends and he’s encouraged our enemies, thumbing his nose at traditional allies like Israel. He seeks to dictate new borders for the Middle East and the oldest democracy there, Israel, while he is an abject failure in his constitutional duty to protect our borders in the United States.

“The idea that the President would make this statement about going back to the ’67 borders sent a chill down all of my friends’ back and certainly mine,” Perry said in an interview with Time last week. But it’s unclear why Obama’s 1967 borders statement should worry Perry and his pals. It doesn’t worry Netanyahu, Israel’s opposition leader, and most Israelis and Palestinians. “I should tell you honestly that the president didn’t say that Israel should go back to the borders of ’67,” said Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak last week, who added, “I can hardly remember a better period of support, American support” for Israel.

Of course then, attacking Obama on Israel seems to serve one purpose for these GOP presidential candidates: rallying the base and filling campaign coffers. Indeed, one former McCain presidential campaign flack said recently of Perry, “He’s a cowboy. You have to assume he’d shoot first and ask questions later — which would be nice after four years of a leading from behind, too little too late foreign policy.”