In an interview with Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney attacked President Obama’s foreign policy record. Obama’s “failures internationally will have perhaps even longer- lasting implications for America and the world than even his failures domestically,” said Romney. Pressed by O’Reilly to name specific failures, Romney brought up Iran’s nuclear program, which he called “probably the greatest threat to the security of the world.”

“[T]he president had an opportunity to really put pressure on Iran,” said Romney. “Had he gotten Russia to agree to impose tough, crippling sanctions on Iran, we could have put a lot more pressure on Iran.”

In June 2010, Russia voted for U.N. Security Council Resolution 1929, which imposed a fourth round of sanctions — the toughest yet — on Iran because of it’s failure to comply with earlier resolutions demanding an end to nuclear enrichment. In May, a U.N. experts panel on the sanctions concluded that the new measures “are constraining Iran’s procurement of items related to prohibited nuclear and ballistic missile activity and thus slowing development of these programs.”

Romney then discussed what he would do about Iran:

O’REILLY: What would you very specifically do?

ROMNEY: Well, several years ago I spoke at the Herzliya conference in Tel Aviv and laid out seven steps. I’ll try and be brief. But No. 1 was making sure that we put in place crippling sanctions.

No. 2 was communicating on the ground in Iran what the cost means to them of becoming a nuclear nation. They would be in a circle of suspects if either nuclear device were being tested or to be applied anywhere in the world. Number — I’ll get to the last one. No. 7 is you have to have a credible military threat. … You have to have credible options that Iran has to know that, if they pursue nuclear folly, that there is the potential that there will be an effort on the part of the United States to remove that threat. [...]

[Obama] hasn’t put together the kind of military credibility in terms of planning or communications that would suggest to them that it’s anything but a hollow threat.

Watch the whole exchange:

It’s true that Russia and China blocked more harsh economic sanctions in the Security Council, but the U.S. continued to impose strict economic and human rights sanctions on companies and individuals, which the administration continues to augment with a long string of executive orders. These sanctions are extraterritorial, meaning that international companies and individuals working with Iranian sanctioned companies and individuals can be punished by the U.S.

What’s more, as far as military “planning,” Obama has pledged to keep all options all the table. At his confirmation hearing before the Senate to be Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta said such planning was actually going on: “In line with the president’s statement that we should keep all options on the table, that would obviously require appropriate planning.”

And that doesn’t even begin to account for the covert actions taken by the U.S. to thwart the Iranian nuclear program. What we know — that the U.S. and Israel worked together to develop and deploy the Stuxnet computer virus that crippled Iran’s nuclear centrifuges — is likely only the tip of the iceberg.

The Obama administration, in other words, is doing exactly the things Romney says it is not. As for the public bluster about all of it, Iranian dissidents have praised Obama for setting that rhetoric aside, crediting the move with creating the political space that allowed for the rise of the Green opposition movement. One wonders what the Green Movement might think of Romney, whose foreign policy adviser has advocated for the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), a group considered terrorists by the U.S. and hated by the the Greens.

The “Arab Spring” has overturned three Arab dictators and offered the possibility of democratic reforms in the Middle East and North Africa at a pace far exceeding what many observers had predicted before the beginning of demonstrations and protests in December 2010. But the rapid transitions in the region have given way to frequent mistreatment of religious and ethnic minorities according to the State Departments annual “International Religious Freedom Report.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, speaking at the report’s launch yesterday, said:

In the Middle East and North Africa, the transitions to democracy have inspired the world, but they have also exposed ethnic and religious minorities to new dangers. People have been killed by their own neighbors because of their ethnicity or their faith. In other places, we’ve seen governments stand by while sectarian violence, inflamed by religious animosities, tears communities apart. Now, the people of the region have taken exciting first steps toward democracy—but if they hope to consolidate their gains, they cannot trade one form of repression for another.

In February, Coptic Christians and Muslims offered a united front in Tahrir square, demanding that Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak step down. But the show of unity has been short-lived, according to the report, which highlighted attacks against Copts, Egypt’s Christian minority, and condemned the Egyptian government’s failure to prosecute crimes against Copts or redress laws that discriminate against Christians.

Clinton also noted mistreatment in Iraq, where she said the “hateful, senseless” Monday attack on Shiite pilgrims had “no aim other than to undermine the fabric of a peaceful society,” and Libya, where there have been attacks on sub-Saharan African and Egyptian migrants.

While Middle East and North African countries received special attention due to the recent pro-democracy movements and the steps towards more inclusive governance in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, the “countries of particular concern” in the State Department’s report are Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Uzbekistan.

All of the countries “of particular concern” have been sanctioned by the U.S. except Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan.

Last week, ThinkProgress reported on Rep. Joe Walsh’s (R-IL) introduction of a resolution supporting Israel’s annexation of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. As I remarked on Twitter, “Shorter Rep Joe Walsh (R-IL): I support a one-state solution for Israel-Palestine.”

Well, as of today there’s no “shorter” necessary. Speaking to the Washington Jewish Week’s Adam Kredo, Walsh came clean on his support of one state:

Walsh asserted that “there is no such thing as a two-state solution, and no such thing as land for peace. The ultimate peace is going to come through annexation, through Israel having sovereignty over the whole land, from the Mediterranean to Jordan.”

Walsh did not specify whether Palestinians remaining within the borders of the new, greater Israel would be granted full political and civil rights, but we can safely assume that, as a supporter of American democratic values, his answer would be yes. Can’t we?

Yesterday, Republican Bob Turner defeated Democrat David Weprin in the race to replace former Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY). A number of right-wing commentators have claimed that the election was a result of Jewish voters punishing President Obama for being insufficiently supportive of Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Washington Post’s Jen Rubin even went as far as to say that Obama has a “Jewish Problem.”

Indeed, there is some evidence that some voters in the district were voting against the Democrat for this reason. A poll conducted by Public Policy Polling in the run-up to the election found that 54 percent of all voters and 68 percent of Jewish voters were opposed to Obama’s position on Israel and 37 percent of voters and 58 percent of Jewish voters said Obama’s position on the country was “very important” in deciding their vote.

Yet there is robust evidence showing that the district’s voters are outliers among both Americans and Jewish Americans. A poll released last week by the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) found that Americans actually overwhelmingly want the U.S. government to take an even-handed approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while only slightly more than a quarter want policy to lean towards Israel. As Lobelog’s Jim Lobe notes, even self-identified Republicans are “equally divided” on whether the U.S. should lean towards Israel:

Six in ten (61%) said they believe the U.S. should be even-handed in its approach to the Israel-Palestinian conflict — another example of how the views of the general public are not translated into policy — while 27 percent said it should lean toward Israel and 5% toward the Palestinians. These percentages are broadly consistent with other surveys taken over the last couple of years. There are major partisan differences, however. An average of 69 percent of Democrats and independents say they prefer an even-handed approach, while Republicans are about equally divided on the question.

Additionally, polling conducted by the progressive pro-Israel group J-Street last year found that most Jewish Americans also favor a balanced approach that brings all parties together for a just resolution as well. Seventy-one percent of poll respondents supported the U.S. “exerting pressure” on both Israel and the Palestinians to reach a peace agreement, and only 29 percent opposed such pressure. Fifty-two percent said they supported the U.S. publicly disagreeing with Israel. And as an issue itself, most Jewish Americans said that Israel was not even one of the top issues they were voting about — it ranked seventh among concerns for their votes in 2010.

Given this polling data, it seems that most Americans are not ready to rush to the polls to vote against Obama and the Democrats over the issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If the issue of Israel did play a major role in yesterday’s election in New York, it seems like the district was an outlier in both American public opinion and American Jewish public opinion. There is no more reason for Democrats to move to the right on this issue as a result of the NY-9 election than there would be them to become more socially conservative because a Democrat lost over a social issue in the Bible Belt.

Our guest blogger is John Norris, Executive Director of the Sustainable Security and Peacebuilding Initiative at the Center for American Progress.

How much has the world spent on Somalia since 1991? A new report released today by the Center for American Progress — Twenty Years of Collapse: The Cost of Failure in Somalia — tried to figure out just that. Using both official statistics and some educated guess work, we estimate that the world spent more than $55 billion on Somalia since 1991. Yet, for all that spending, consider some of the truly appalling statistics that we also compiled:

– Odds that a child in Somalia will die before his or her fifth birthday: 1 in 7.4

– Difference in life expectancy between a citizen of Japan and Somalia: 32.2 years

– Number of refugees fleeing Somalia daily in July 2011: 3,500

– Number of Somalis who needed humanitarian assistance in 2010: 3.2 million

There is also a 25 percent chance that a Somali will either be a refugee or an internally placed person. See the report’s chart on Somali refugees in the region:

Indeed, Somalia is currently suffering the worst famine the world has seen in more than two decades and its civil war rages on unabated. So why has so much spending yielded so little? In large part because many of the international interventions in Somalia were so badly planned and implemented that they actually made the overall situation worse in the long run.

The world has been willing to spend billions on arms transfers, counter-terrorism efforts and military approaches, but sensible diplomacy and working at the local level to build durable peace agreements have usually been an afterthought. The United States and the international community needs to be much more principled and effective in delivering aid in order to help shape a functioning central government in Somalia that enjoys the faith and support of its own people.

As the date approaches for the Palestinians’ bid for United Nations membership, one of the strongest counter arguments coming from Israeli officials and their closest stateside allies is that U.N. recognition of Palestinian statehood — even as a “non-member observer state” — would be able to gain access to the International Criminal Court (ICC). Access to the international body, which prosecutes war crimes, is often listed as one of the few concrete gains for Palestinians if their bid succeeds, even if just in the less powerful General Assembly.

Israeli and American officials have both said that for Palestine to push charges against Israelis at the ICC, also known as “the Hague,” would be crossing a “red line.” U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice named Palestinian access to the ICC as one of the “real-world implications” of the Palestinian statehood bid.

But the Israeli figures have been most outspoken against Palestinian access to the ICC. If the Palestinians press charges against Israelis — which could be for armed actions or even possibly for the settlers that accompany Israel’s military occupation of the Palestinian West Bank — Israeli officials have said they would break off all diplomacy with the Palestinian Authority. Last month, Israel’s right-wing foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman said:

You cannot have security coordination [with Israel] while you are also trying IDF soldiers at The Hague.

In late August, Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren, threatening to end agreements with the Palestinians, echoed this point in an interview with Foreign Policy.

But the Israeli objection to Palestinian statehood recognition by the U.N. is a red herring: Palestinian access to the ICC is not a feature of U.N. recognition, but of Palestinians statehood. If, for example, the George W. Bush “Road Map” for Middle East peace had proceeded according to its suggested timeline and created a Palestinian state in 2005, Palestinians would have had six years of access to the ICC by now. Since ICC access is a feature of statehood, those opposed to statehood recognition by the U.N. seem to be less opposed to the “U.N. recognition” aspect, and more opposed to the “statehood” part.

Furthermore, Palestinian access to the ICC is not as drastic a scenario as Israel and its allies are painting it to be. A new report (PDF) from the International Crisis Group outlines all the issues that are often overlooked in the heated debates on the issue:

Put aside the incongruity of seeking to immunise any party from the reach of international law at a time when the international tribunal is considered a perfectly appropriate forum for others – Colonel Qaddafi the latest in line. Put aside the myriad obstacles Palestinians would need to overcome before a case could make it before the ICC. And put aside the fact that some Palestinians also could be hauled before the court if they are accused of war crimes – as they were during the last Gaza war. Still, this clearly is a major cause for anxiety and could prompt Israel to initiate severe moves in reprisal.

In other words, just because Palestinians gain access to the ICC does not mean they can use it to, as one one neocon put it, “renew attacks on Israel in the International Criminal Court.”

One expert told Foreign Policy that if Israel is really worried about Palestinians taking them to the Hague for war crimes, they should negotiate an exemption from prosecutions as part of a deal with Palestinians “before it’s too late. That alone counsels for a more serious attempt at resuming peace talks.”

Instead, Israel and its allies are displaying their fear not of what they often mistakenly called a “unilateral declaration” of Palestinian statehood, but of Palestinian statehood at all.