Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton endorsed Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh as “preferable to anarchy” in a Fox News appearance this morning. Bolton argued that Saleh — despite clinging to power for three decades, refusing to implement democratic reforms and overseeing a violent crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators — is the key to preventing Al-Qaeda from sweeping from across Yemen. He said:

I think Saleh’s return is quite significant. For month’s people had been saying the Saudis were trying to talk him out of power — him and his family — and when he was wounded in that attempted assasination and had to go to Saudi Arabia for treatment, I think many people thought that was the easy way out, in effect, and he would never go back. And he obviously didn’t leave Saudi Arabia without their concurrence. So my guess is the Saudis have put more weight on stability in Yemen than perhaps we’re willing to. But in light of the killing of Awlaki, I think we have to look again at whether Saleh might not be preferable to anarchy, certaintly preferable to Al-Qaeda.

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But Bolton’s apparent endorsement of Saleh’s iron-fisted rule as means to containing Al Qaeda isn’t backed up by the reported facts on the ground. Indeed, Saleh cooperated with U.S. efforts to pressure al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) but AQAP appears to have suffered a major setback with the death of Anwar al-Awlaki. The main coalition of opposition groups in Yemen have shown little sympathy for AQAP and claim that Saleh used al Qaeda’s presence as an excuse for harsh tactics against pro-democracy activists and his political opponents.

Last year, Senate Republicans blocked career diplomat Robert Ford’s confirmation to become the next U.S. ambassador to Syria because they thought sending a top envoy to Damascus would be a “reward” to President Bashar al-Assad for bad behavior. A number of Ford’s detractors have since changed their minds — including some senators who opposed Ford’s confirmation and the neoconservative Foreign Policy Initiative — and are now calling on the Senate to confirm Ford, whose recess appointment expires at the end of the year.

But has Ford’s presence in Syria, particularly since the pro-democracy movement began, been particularly rewarding for Assad and his regime? Yesterday, a pro-government group tried to attack Ford and his American delegation as they traveled to a meeting with an opposition leader. A State Department spokesperson said, “The mob was violent” and “seriously” damaged the delegation’s vehicles.

Indeed, the incident indicates the level at which Ford has become a thorn in the Assad regime’s side. He has defied travel bans to meet with opposition leaders throughout Syria, made unannounced trips to Syrian cities that have been hotbeds of unrest, and even attended the funeral of a “high-profile” Syrian human rights activist who died in custody (see video of Ford’s appearance here. Syrian security forces attacked the funeral shortly after the ambassador departed). Ford regularly takes his on-the-ground experiences in Syria to Facebook where he lashes out at the regime for its violent crackdown on protesters (he wrote today about yesterday’s attack).

Referring to Ford as America’s “am-badass-ador” in Syria last night on MSNBC, host Rachel Maddow wondered what the Senate Republicans are waiting for:

MADDOW: After all this guy’s been through, after all this guy has done, after everything he’s doing in Syria — Republicans in the United States Senate have not been able to bring themselves to allow him to be confirmed. Seriously? No, really? Seriously? Come on!

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But apparently, some Senate Republicans still find Ford’s activity in Syria rewarding to Assad. An aide to Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), the senator who placed the hold on Ford’s confirmation last year, said that he still “continues to stand by the concerns” he had then about sending an ambassador to Damascus. Coburn’s office has ignored repeated inquiries into whether he plans to again place a hold on Ford given that his confirmation now has widespread conservative support. “You could potentially anticipate a number of senators putting holds on Ford,” a GOP Senate aide said earlier this month.

Ford himself urged the Senate to confirm. “Lower level diplomats are great, but they don’t carry the weight, they don’t carry the prestige of the president’s personal representative,” he said last week. “I think we owe it to [Syrians] to remain supportive and it try to build that support wisely, carefully but to build that support,” Ford said in his Senate hearing last month.

With deteriorating relations between Turkey and Israel, some of Israel’s staunchest backers in the U.S. have seized on the diplomatic crisis to push for the U.S. to abandon its partnership with Turkey — including kicking the strategically-located Eurasian country out of the NATO alliance. The campaign, spearheaded by neoconservatives, ramped up this week with attacks demonizing Turkey from several Islamophobic commentators. Over the past few weeks, these Islamophobes have been accusing Turkey of trying to create an Islamist empire, one that would put Turkey at odds with the West and make it an enemy of the U.S.

On Tuesday, Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum wrote that he “see(s) a rogue Turkey as the region’s greatest threat”:

A second republic headed by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Islamist colleagues of the AK Party (AKP) began that day. The military safely under their control, AKP ideologues now enjoy can pursue their ambitions to create an Islamic order.

Investigative Project chief Steven Emerson wrote yesterday:

The struggle against Israel is one facet of the Muslim nation’s new Islamist foreign policy under the leadership of Erdoğan and his AKP party. Turkey has distanced itself from membership in the European Union, a former goal of the nation, in order to pursue better ties with terror-supporting nations like Syria and Iran.

Also Thursday, Atlas Shrugs blogger Pam Geller wrote:

Turkey has reverted (no pun intended), and dreams Ottoman domination and Islamic imperialism.

On Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch blog, Joseph Zaalishvili wrote Wednesday:

After Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan openly began the Islamization of Turkey, the jihadists found fertile ground there. Turkey appeared ambitious to become the leader of Islam in the region.

Earlier this month, Center for Security Policy (CSP) head Frank Gaffney wrote about the “increasingly overtly hostile posture towards Israel being taken by Turkey under its Islamist prime minister, Recep Erdogan.” His colleague at CSP, Caroline Glick, wrote in the Jerusalem Post:

[W]e need to recognize that what we are experiencing now is the beginning, not the end, of Turkey’s slide into the enemy camp. Erdogan is openly taking steps to transform Turkey into an Islamic state along the lines of Iran.

Erdoğan is not actually an Islamist, as demonstrated by his call last week for Egypt to become a secular state, drawing warnings from Egypt’s actual Islamists, the Muslim Brotherhood, for Erdoğan to butt out.

And while Turkey has indeed tried to end regional strife and avoid conflagration through diplomacy, its partnership with the U.S. and NATO are clearly valuable to Erdoğan’s government. Just this month, Turkey agreed to host a NATO radar system, part of a missile defense system designed to guard against Iranian weapons advances (the move drew criticism from Iran).

That this network of Islamophobes are all taking the same line should come as no surprise. As detailed in CAP’s “Fear, Inc.” report about America’s Islamophobia industry, they come from a small cadre of so-called “experts” and “scholars” who form organizations that fuel Islamophobia in the U.S.

Moments ago, speaking at the retirement ceremony for Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, President Obama said American-born radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki took the lead in “planning efforts to murder innocent Americans” as head of external operations for al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Obama said it was a “major blow” to al Qaeda.

Former Bush U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, however, tried his hardest to downplay the significance of the Obama administration’s killing of Al-Awlaki in Yemen today, telling Fox News that we shouldn’t “read more into it than there is”:

BOLTON: At the same time, I think it’s important as individual Al Qaeda figures and other terrorists are killed that we not read more into it than there is. Consider this analogy if you were around in the 1920s and somebody said, my God, Vladimir Lenin is dead. The Bolsheviks will never recover from this. [...]

So while Al-Awlaki death is significant, I would not read cosmic consequences into it.

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Bolton’s analogy is rather flawed, as Lenin died of natural causes after a period of of semi-retirement from politics, while Al-Awlaki was at the height of his power. Al-Awlaki had a hand in almost all of the high-profile terror attempts in recent years — he helped recruit Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the “underwear bomber,” exchanged emails with Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Hasan, communicated with failed Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad, and directed the attempted bombing of cargo planes last year.

But as NBC News’ First Read noted this morning, “no president” in over 20 years “has had more foreign-policy successes happen under his watch than President Obama.” Yet, he’s “getting almost no credit from the American public.” Despite the killing of Osama Bin Laden and nearly two dozen other top terrorist, the dismantling of Al Qaeda, and the ouster of Muammar Gaddafi polls show the public still gives Republicans the edge on combating terrorism. That after President Bush failed to capture Bin Laden or even pursue him with much alacrity.

This is likely because conservative media personalities and Republican lawmakers consistently mislead the public on Obama’s foreign policy, suggesting he is weak on terror and maligning his stance as “leading from behind.” There has never been any basis in reality to their attacks, and even less so after the killing of Al-Awlaki. But Bolton’s performance on Fox this morning suggests that even this latest incident won’t make conservatives acknowledge reality.

This week, the FBI arrested and charged 26-year-old suspected terrorist Rezwan Ferdaus with plotting to use remote-controlled planes filled with plastic explosives to attack the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol. The Massachusetts man began plotting a “violent jihad” against the U.S. early last year “with the goal of terrorizing the United States, decapitating its ‘military center’ and killing as many ‘kafirs,’ i.e., an Arabic term meaning non-believers, as possible.”

Not only did Ferdaus’ radical views tip off the FBI, they got him expelled from his local mosque in Roxbury, Massachusetts. Last year, the Islamic Sosciety of Boston Cultural Center asked Ferdaus to leave because of his radical Islamic views, hostility towards women, and his suspected support of al Qaeda. “I can’t think of a mosque where he was welcome,” said the mosque’s director:

Rezwan Ferdaus was said to revere the terrorist organization [al Qaeda], and he criticized the mosque’s participation in interfaith efforts and in politics. He also disapproved of the mosque’s liberal policies that allowed men and women to eat and drink together in its cafe and was hostile toward women he thought dressed inappropriately or who had conversations with men, the official said.

“We said, ‘Look, that’s not going to work here,’ ’’ said Atif Harden, director of institutional advancement at the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center. “I can’t think of a mosque where he was welcome. He was clearly way out of step with the rest of the Muslim community . . . very disaffected, very disturbed. Just a bitter, angry guy.’’

Another mosque attendee Ricardo Maestre noted that Ferdaus “would really be disrespectful to the sisters who go here and say really stupid things, talk about jihad.” Noting the importance for Muslims to speak against extremism in Islam, Maestre added, “Some Muslims are afraid to speak out against that…I’m not.”

Mosques and Muslim communities have been instrumental in the fight against homegrown terrorism. As Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) has noted, “About a third of all foiled al-Qaida related plots in the U.S. relied on support or information provided by members of the Muslim community. Indeed, the father of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab — the man who tried to bomb a plane over Detroit last year — actually alerted authorities about his son’s “extreme radical views” months before the attempted attack.

What’s more, a Duke University study found that “many mosque leaders had put significant effort into countering extremism by building youth programs, sponsoring antiviolence forums and scrutinizing teachers and texts.” “This is one reason that Muslim-American terrorism has resulting in fewer than three dozen of the 136,000 murders committed in the United States since 9/11,” the study concluded.

In the era of extreme Islamophobia, the role of Muslim Americans in fighting terrorism often get papered over, ignored, or completely reversed to fit a political agenda. Despite the consistent distortion and hatred directed at Muslim Americans, they continue to play a fundamental part in our national security.