There’s a joke that’s been developing over the past several years that you know someone is running for president when they start regularly bringing up the U.S.-Israel alliance. Republican presidential hopeful and Texas governor Rick Perry embodies the joke. Way back in 2009, Perry, during a campaign to hold his governor’s seat but amid early hints of a presidential run, took a trip to Washington and talked Israel with the Weekly Standard‘s Michael Goldfarb. His fealty to the Jewish state was nothing short of religious devotion: “My faith requires me to support Israel,” he said.

On Friday, Perry dropped two op-eds — well, actually, he dropped the same op-ed twice, in the Wall Street Journal and Israel’s Jerusalem Post — attacking President Obama’s robust support for the Jewish state as insufficiently pro-Israel. That the piece’s themes are picked straight from neoconservative talking points and appear in neocon op-ed pages and that neocons love it is no surprise: Perry’s reportedly been getting foreign policy advice from the “stupidest guy on the face of the earth” and arch-neocon Doug Feith, whose book featured a Mideast map that did not distinguish between Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

But Perry, unlike some of the evangelical Christian figures he appeared beside at the Response rally, seemed to be open, in a Time magazine interview this week at least, to the idea of negotiations toward a two-state solution.

Perry’s Israel op-ed, though, hit a note that’s become a neocon calling card: cherry-picking information to make a case. In its opening paragraph, and perhaps most head-scratch-inducing moment, Perry wrote:

Historian T.R. Fehrenbach once observed that my home state of Texas and Israel share the experience of “civilized men and women thrown into new and harsh conditions, beset by enemies.”

Journalist Max Blumenthal picked up on the Fehrenbach reference, and noted its strangeness because of the historian’s work, including writing “an authoritative book on the ethnic cleansing of the Comanche Indians by the Anglo settlers of Texas.” Blumenthal pulled Fehrenbach’s “Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans” from his shelf and checked out Perry’s reference. The full quote, which Perry cherry-picked, reads:

The Texan’s attitudes, his inherent chauvinism and the seeds of his belligerence, sprouted from his conscious effort to take and hold his land. It was the reaction of essentially civilized men and women thrown into new and harsh conditions, beset by enemies they despised. The closest 20th-century counterpart is the State of Israel, born in blood in another primordial land.

Blumenthal thinks the Texas-Israel comparison is still valid, but with almost the opposite meaning that Perry’s cherry-picked quote conveyed:

Fehrenbach would have agreed with Perry that Texas shared values with Israel. But unlike Perry, he thought that those values were all the wrong ones: hatred of the other, a reliance on violence to seize land, and a legacy of ethnic cleansing. According to Fehrenbach, what Israel did to the Palestinians in 1947 and ‘48 — and continues to do — is analogous to the Texans’ treatment of the Comanches and Mexicans during the 19th century.

With neoconservatives making apologia for evicting Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem, perhaps Perry was keenly aware of the full Fehrenbach quote and changed it for a wider audience while trying to establish closeness to the neoconservative movement.

Commentary editor Jonathan Tobin responds to my post on Maen Areikat by mischaracterizing my first point, and then demonstrating my second.

Tobin characterizes my view as “the dustup over Maen Areikat’s remarks is just a neocon canard.” Untrue. Not only did I criticize Areikat’s comments, as “troubling,” (and the previous day as “ridiculous”) I actually located and linked to the original source of the comments. I think the concern over the remarks is entirely warranted and legitimate (which is why it’s good to see the Palestinians clarifying today that “The future Palestinian state will be open to all its citizens, regardless of their religion.”) The canard, which we can almost certainly expect Tobin and others to keep repeating, is the claim that the Palestinian leadership is actively planning a “Judenrein” state.

Responding to my comparison between Areikat’s comments and Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s proposed plan to transfer Palestinian Israelis out of the country, Tobin argues that, “Areikat’s views are not, as could be said of the opinions of radical right Israeli settlers or even the more mainstream hard line views of Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, the opinions of a minority faction.”

Leaving aside the fact that Lieberman is himself a right-wing Israeli settler, Tobin’s argument that a PLO diplomat speaks for all Palestinians, while Israel’s foreign minister — that is, the boss of all of Israel’s diplomats — represents only “the opinions of a minority faction” is not one I find convincing.

Tobin takes serous issue, however, with my pointing out the hypocrisy of Areikat’s critics who’ve never had anything bad to say about Israel’s ongoing efforts to seize Palestinian property (the latest evidence of which we have this morning):

[F]or Duss to compare a promise to evict all Jews from a Palestinian state to property disputes in Jerusalem (in which some Arabs lost court cases in which Jews held the title to the land or houses in question) is an absurdity. Whether or not you believe Palestinians who have squatted on other people’s property in Jerusalem ought not to be forced to move, to compare Israel’s record on this with a Judenrein Palestine makes no sense. Duss seems to forget Israeli Arabs have full citizenship rights, serve in the Knesset and have redress to independent courts.

For a response to this, I spoke to Danny Seidemann, an Israeli lawyer with the organization Terrestrial Jerusalem, and considered one of the world’s leading experts on Israeli policy in Jerusalem. “Sure, the courts almost always rule in favor of the settlers,” Seidemann said, “because the law discriminates. Under Israeli law, Jews who lost property in East Jerusalem [in] 1948 may recover their properties. The Palestinians there are ‘squatters’. Those Palestinians who lost property in West Jerusalem [in 1948] may NOT recover their properties. The Israelis who live in these are ‘homeowners’, not ‘squatters’.”

Seidemann also corrected Tobin on the status of Jerusalem’s Palestinians. Apart from about 13,000 out of about 290,000 total, Seidemann said, “The Palestinians of East Jerusalem are not ‘full citizens’ of Israel, but rather permanent residents. They may not vote in national elections, get elected to the Knesset, serve as judges, become mayor or get an Israeli passport.”

As Israeli human rights groups like B’Tselem, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, and Ir Amim have rigorously documented, there exists in Israel a system of laws designed specifically to divest Palestinians of their property and put it under Jewish control. A 2009 European Union report “accused both the Israeli government and the Jerusalem municipality of working deliberately to alter the city’s demographic balance and sever East Jerusalem from the West Bank.” If that sounds ugly, that’s because it is ugly, for none more than the Palestinian families who suffer under it.

It’s quite true that this is not the same as planning a “Judenrein” Palestine, but it is nevertheless incredibly inhumane, not to mention entirely illegal under international human rights law. It’s also a highly provocative attempt to predetermine Jerusalem’s future status, which is why both the United States and the United Nations have condemned such evictions. But, for the committed apologist, all of this can be dismissed as merely a “property dispute.”

Mitt Romney continued his attack on the Obama administration’s Iran policy yesterday evening in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. Romney, once again, falsely claimed the Obama administration has taken the “military option” off the table and claimed he would impose “crippling sanctions” on Iran’s nuclear program. Blitzer asked Romney about his Iran policy:

BLITZER: How far would go to stop Iran from building a nuclear bomb?

ROMNEY: Well Iran has to be convinced that we would go all the way, we would take military action, and that military action is on the table. I think our president has communicated in various subtle ways that there is not a military option that we would consider. I think that’s a mistake. I think you have to have crippling sanctions against Iran. I think you have to have covert action in Iran to convince the people there of the folly of becoming a nuclear nation. But I think the Iranians have to believe as well, and particularly their leadership believe, that America is would considering taking military option [sic]. That has to be on the table and plans have to be in place and that’s clearly something that you have to consider.

Watch it:

It’s unclear what “subtle ways” the White House indicated that the “military option” was off the table but Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, when asked about military contingencies for attacking Iran during his Senate confirmation hearing, said that such planning was occurring.

Romney’s claims that the administration failed to successfully use covert action or sanctions to slow Iran’s nuclear program would also appear to be politically motivated, yet factually baseless, charges. Covert action, such as the Stuxnet computer virus, and sanctions appear to have had the intended effect of slowing the Iranian nuclear program. Indeed, IAEA reports would indicate that the nuclear program is moving much more slowly than either Tehran or Washington’s Iran hawks would care to mention.

But Romney’s baseless attacks on Obama’s Iran policy appear to have become a go-to talking point in the GOP presidential hopeful’s interviews. What’s even more interesting is that, so far, no interviewer has called him out on the blatantly false statements he is making about the U.S.’s efforts to slow Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.

With a Democratic president in office, a group of Washington neoconservative pundits, with little policy recourse other than whipping up public opinion, get together under the aegis of Bill Kristol and write open letters to the administration pushing hawkish policies on Iraq. That’s what happened in the 1990s when Kristol founded the Project For The New American Century (PNAC), a so-called “letterhead organization” that pushed for the U.S. to remove Saddam Hussein from power by force. Neoconservatives, of course, then dotted the halls of power when George W. Bush took the presidency. Within three years, the U.S. military moved into Iraq.

Now, with another Democrat — President Obama — in the oval office, Kristol et al are undertaking a similar venture. Only this time, it’s not about invading Iraq, but about staying there for an indefinite period. That’s what happened when Kristol’s new “letterhead organization” — the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) — released a letter yesterday about the Obama administration’s reported plan to drop troop levels in Iraq to a mere several thousand.

After lauding U.S. efforts in Iraq so far, the FPI letter, signed by 40 mostly-neoconservative analysts, said:

We are thus gravely concerned about recent news reports suggesting that the White House is considering leaving only a residual force of 4,000 or fewer U.S. troops in Iraq after the end of this year. This number is significantly smaller than what U.S. military commanders on the ground have reportedly recommended and would limit our ability to ensure that Iraq remains stable and free from significant foreign influence in the years to come.

From the get-go, the letter seems premature. At Inter Press Service, Jim Lobe points out that the letter presumes two significant factors that have yet to come about:

The letter was released despite the fact that the administration has not publicly announced how many troops it would like to leave behind in Iraq, presuming that the Nouri al-Maliki government, which itself is reportedly deeply divided on the issue, agrees to permit an extension.

Like with the invasion itself, what Iraqis think — other than small cohort of self-serving exiles close to the Bush administration who fed it faulty intelligence to justify the U.S. attack — is irrelevant. The current Status Of Forces Agreement (SOFA) between Iraq and the U.S. — which FPI curiously acknowledges as a “so-called ‘security agreement’” in its website intro — says that all U.S. troops must be out of Iraq by the end of the year unless Iraqis agree to an extension. When Bush signed the SOFA in 2008, critics complained that it would tie the next president’s hands. FPI holds up the new “democratic Iraq,” but doesn’t seem to care what it thinks.

But there are other problems with the FPI letter. Surely the “foreign influence” FPI decries at the top of the letter is not the United States and, sure enough, further down it gets into the meat and potatoes of the argument:

In recent months, Iran has increased its attempts to expand its influence in Iraq, including through the killing of American forces and support to Iraqi political parties. Maintaining a robust American presence in-country would blunt these efforts, and help ensure Iraq remains oriented away from Iran and a long-term ally of the United States.

But Leif Babin, a decorated former Navy SEAL officer who did three tours in Iraq and now thinks the U.S. should pull all its troops out, acknowledged in a Wall Street Journal op-ed this week what many Iraq observers already know: Iran, a fellow Shia Mulsim country that shares a long border with Iraq, has been an influence on Iraq’s government since the now-ruling parties were in exile in Iran before Hussein’s fall:

The fact is that the U.S. footprint in Iraq emboldens Iran. [...]

Many fear that Iran will gain significant influence in Iraq after a complete U.S. withdrawal. But Iran already has significant influence there. From 1980 to 2003, Iraq’s ruling Dawa Party was based partly in Iran (and partly in Syria), and it maintains strong ties with the Iranian regime.

Hope of limiting Iranian influence in Iraq grew following the narrow victory of Ayad Allawi’s secular party in the Iraqi national elections of March 2010. Yet the U.S. presence in Iraq remains a catalyst empowering Iranian influence through Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric who drums up popular support based on opposition to the U.S. “occupation.” Thus the U.S. presence subtracts credibility from the government of Iraq and empowers anti-American, pro-Iranian forces.

FPI’s letter also relies on what has become a classic conservative trope: That Obama should blindly follow the advice of “U.S. military commanders on the ground.” Leaving aside that this elides the chain-of-command that ensures civilian control of the military — something the generals themselves seem keenly aware of — in the case of Iraq it’s also a false talking point. This week, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Adm. Mike Mullen said he was “pleased” with the current drawdown schedule that has all U.S. troops out of Iraq by the end of this year. And the former top U.S. commander in Iraq and now Army Chief of Staff Ray Odierno said earlier this month that the U.S. has “to be careful about leaving too many people in Iraq.”

The letter was signed by, among others, Kristol, Gary Bauer, John Podhoretz, Fred and Robert Kagan, Max Boot, Cliff May, Reuel Marc Gerecht, Paul Woflowitz and Randy Scheunemann. Some of the signatories served in key positions during the Bush administration and many were PNAC letter signatories. The lessons of the push for war with Iraq, it seems, are completely lost on those who effectuated it.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has been trying to do everything he can to convince the deficit reduction super committee to spare military spending when it decides how to arrive at $1.5 trillion in cuts. He began last month by using fearmongering techniques, claiming that $1 trillion in military spending cuts over the next decade would be “devastating” and “dangerous.” However, Panetta has yet to offer any specifics on these claims (in fact, experts have identified how the U.S. can cut $1 trillion and still maintain military superiority). Panetta’s allies soon piled on, defending the status quo spending with similar fearmongering and false and misleading arguments.

Now, the Defense Department is turning to another disingenuous argument: jobs. Reuters reports:

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is warning members of Congress that threatened defense cuts in the order of $1 trillion over the next decade would add 1 percentage point to the U.S. unemployment rate. [...]

“What we’re talking about there is in the neighborhood of about a trillion dollars of defense cuts,” Pentagon spokesman George Little told reporters flying with Panetta to Washington after talks with Australia in San Francisco.

“We believe that would result in job cuts that would add potentially 1 (percentage point) to the national unemployment rate.”

But the reality is that, diverting federal dollars to defense and other military spending actually results in a net job-loss. The War Costs project points to a 2009 study from economics professors at the University of Massachusetts to make that case. And this week, one of the study’s co-authors noted that “the relevant measure is how many jobs [military spending] creates per dollar of spending relative to various alternative spending targets,” he said, adding:

“By this standard, military spending does very poorly. It creates about 12,000 jobs per $1 billion in spending, compared with 17,000 for the green economy, 20,000 for health care and 29,000 for education. This means that when we spend $1 billion on the military rather than green investments, health care or education we are forfeiting between 5,000 and 17,000 jobs. Creating more job opportunities in this country therefore means moving money out of the military and into socially beneficial domestic spending.”

Center for Economic and Policy Research co-director Dean Baker said that economic modeling firm Global Insight came to a similar conclusion in a 2009 study. “Global Insight’s model projected that after 20 years the economy would be about 0.6 percentage points smaller as a result of the additional defense spending,” Baker said, “Slower growth would imply a loss of almost 700,000 jobs compared to a situation in which defense spending had not been increased.”