Earlier this month, Bloomberg reported that Koch Industries had been flouting U.S. sanctions with Iran when the company sold millions of dollars of petrochemical equipment to the Islamic Republic over several years. But the powerful pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC — which has for years been one of the most vocal proponents of tougher sanctions on Iran — has given the conservative mega-corporation a pass for dealing with the country.

As Politico’s Ben Smith reports, in a memo AIPAC sent to members of Congress with suggested questions for Obama administration officials, the Israel lobby suggests it is uninterested in holding Koch accountable (the memo presents questions lawmakers could use, so “I” represents the congressman):

Last week, the Bloomberg Markets Magazine ran a story titled, “Koch Brothers Flout Law Getting Richer With Secret Iran Sales.” The article alleges that a foreign subsidiary of the U.S.company, Koch Industries Inc., sold petrochemical equipment to Iran. My concern today is not with the Koch Brothers. That company did the right thing in 2007 and voluntarily ended all of its subsidiary’s business in Iran. However, I am concerned that other American companies continue to use foreign subsidiaries to profit from sales to Iran, and it is completely legal. [...]

Do you know which American companies have foreign subsidiaries conducting business with Iran that would be illegal for their parent companies to do? Do you do anything to discourage this practice?

“Every single chance they had to do business with Iran, or anyone else, they did,” said George Bentu, a former employee of Koch-Glitsch, a German Koch subsidiary which did much of the company’s business with Iran. The company “took elaborate steps” to sidestep the sanctions, Bloomberg reported.

But apparently to AIPAC, Koch is off the hook because they stopped trading with terror-sponsor Iran in 2007. This seems a little disingenuous, since U.S. companies have been banned from trading with Iran since 1995. One would think AIPAC would condemn any company that did business with Iran, especially after elements of the country’s government have been tied to a potential assassination plot against Israeli and Saudi officials, instead of going out of their way to defend them.

Our guest bloggers are Sarah Margon, associate director for Sustainable Security at the Center for American Progress, and John Bradshaw, Executive Director for the Enough Project.

Although the initial media reaction to President Obama’s announcement that he was deploying “a small number of combat-equipped U.S. forces…to central Africa to provide assistance to regional forces working toward the removal of Joseph Kony from the battlefield” was one of shock, in fact there’s a strategic method to all this madness.

Joseph Kony is the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, or LRA, a vicious rebel group originally based in northern Uganda that now operates in the often lawless and ungoverned expanses of eastern Congo, the Central African Republic, and South Sudan. The LRA has a long, sordid history as one of the most brutal guerrilla groups on the planet, and it has abducted thousands of civilians to serve as child soldiers, porters, and concubines. Although Kony, and other senior LRA leaders, have been indicted by the International Criminal Court, they remain at large and continue their ruthless reign of terror.

The deployment of U.S. military advisers is certainly not going to solve the LRA problem but it will make an important contribution. Military solutions can’t suffice when it comes to ending wars, conflicts or other kinds of kinetic operations, but there are instances when certain kinds of military engagement can play a constructive role — especially when combined with other critical elements like enhanced diplomatic engagement, scaled up development, and better intelligence sharing. Indeed, this most recent move by the Obama administration is part of a wider and more comprehensive strategy focusing on the range of action that can be taken — by the U.S. and by our partners to bring the LRA to an end. It is also an indication of a growing global commitment to the goal of civilian protection.

The deployment of these advisers will help fill some remarkable gaps that enable the LRA to continuing committing horrific atrocities in remote areas throughout already difficult terrain. Armed with high-tech communications equipment, U.S. military advisers will be able to keep in regular touch with headquarters and ensure the right intelligence gets into the hands of those who need it most. This will help generate a quicker response to LRA attacks on civilian populations, encourage greater and more effective collaboration between regional militaries, and hold these militaries to a higher civilian protection standard.

The regional militaries involved in LRA operations — primarily Uganda, with some assistance from Congo and South Sudan — suffer from a lack of technical capacity and insufficient resources. If we’re honest, they have also suffered from discipline problems — which makes partnering with them tricky business, a dilemma of which the administration is well aware.

Importantly, the military component is part of a larger and more comprehensive plan — the initial push for which is rooted in the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act of 2009, which was signed into law in 2011. Underpinning this strategy, laid out in this 2010 report by White House, is increasing opportunities for civilian protection throughout the region — the very essence of what local communities need and have repeatedly asked for. But other prongs include encouraging and facilitating defections from rank and file LRA, building cell phone towers to enhance communication and information sharing, and providing ongoing humanitarian and development relief to affected areas.

Another missing element needed for a fully successful strategy includes helping to develop more capable and disciplined regional forces that are bolstered by greater intelligence and logistical capacity. Additionally, the U.S. should ramp up its diplomatic efforts to get regional governments and institutions, including the African Union, to cooperate more effectively.

After the LRA abandoned peace talks in 2007, it became obvious that negotiations alone would not end the scourge the rebel group. If we’re going to see the LRA disbanded, the child soldiers go home, and the affected areas return to at least some level of normalcy, the military component is an important part — one part — of a larger strategy. The affected populations of central Africa have suffered far too long; they deserve an opportunity to return to their homes and rebuild their lives. Shouldn’t we employ a full range of options to help them do so?

Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren gave a defense of Israeli policies in the Washington Post this morning. Oren’s op-ed came off as extraordinarily defensive, the upshot of the piece being that “Israel, in fact, is significantly less isolated than at many times in its history.” Nonetheless, Oren offered a sort of even-if-we-were-isolated defense of Israel: “Isolation, of course, is not automatically symptomatic of bad policies.”

One such “bad polic(y),” as considered by the U.S. government and international law, is the settlement project whereby Israelis move into Palestinian territories with the full backing of (and sometimes financial subsidies from) the state. On the same day when Israel announced (for the first time since 1997) the construction of an entirely new settlement outside Jerusalem, Oren wrote in defense of the broader project by noting that the settlement issue was not at the heart of the wider Arab-Israeli conflict or the Israeli-Palestinian one:

The settlements are not the core of the conflict… As [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud] Abbas wrote in the New York Times in May, the Palestinian attempt to declare a state without making peace with Israel was about “internationalization of the conflict…to pursue claims against Israel” in the United Nations, not about settlements.

The link in the Abbas quote comes from Oren’s article (as printed on the Washington Post website) and goes to Abbas’ May op-ed in the New York Times. You’d think that since either Oren or Washington Post editors must’ve sought out the link and placed it in the article, someone would have bothered to read the Palestinian leader’s original piece. In it, they would have seen Abbas explicitly state that one of the reasons he would press forward with the Palestinian bid for U.N. recognition was the failure of Israel (or American pressure on Israel) to halt settlement expansion:

We go to the United Nations now to secure the right to live free in the remaining 22 percent of our historic homeland because we have been negotiating with the State of Israel for 20 years without coming any closer to realizing a state of our own. We cannot wait indefinitely while Israel continues to send more settlers to the occupied West Bank and denies Palestinians access to most of our land and holy places, particularly in Jerusalem. Neither political pressure nor promises of rewards by the United States have stopped Israel’s settlement program.

Oren is more than entitled to his opinions about the relative isolation of Israel or the international importance of its ongoing settlement project, but he’s not entitled to present falsehoods about a piece of writing in the public record. And it’s becoming something of a pattern: He’s played fast and loose with the facts before in the pages of the Washington Post.

When I interviewed Washington Post opinion page editor Fred Hiatt last year (for a separate article), he told me that the news pages and the opinion pages adhere to the same standards for errors. “When we make mistakes, we aim to correct them as quickly as possible. That applies to everyone,” he wrote in an e-mail. (Hiatt did not respond to an inquiry for this article by press time.) If that’s the case, the Post should apologize to Abbas for allowing this blatant misrepresentation of his explicitly-stated views, and append an official correction to Oren’s op-ed.

Republicans in Congress want to defund the United Nations. And at the same time, they also want to get tough with Iran. A senior State Department official advised them today that the former would undermine the latter. “Quite frankly, we should not unfund the U.N.,” said Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman when pressed for concrete steps Congress should take to pressure Iran. Sherman, responding to a question from Rep. Connie Mack (R-FL) while testifying at the House Foreign Affairs Committee, defended the work of the IAEA and multilateral sanctions in bringing pressure on Tehran for its alleged nuclear weapons program.

While Democratic and Republican lawmakers on the committee were adamant that tougher measures were required against Iran following the allegations that the Iranian government was linked to a convoluted plot to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador in a D.C. restaurant, Sherman found herself defending the administration’s efforts to bring tighter multilateral sanctions on Iran.

The committee was quick to call for harsher measures against Iran and repeatedly criticized the Obama administration’s efforts to utilize multilateral bodies, such as the U.N., to bring pressure on Tehran.

“The little fellow from the desert — Ahmadinejad — has to be replaced by his own people,” said Rep. Ted Poe, (R-TX), and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) warned that efforts to get countries like Russia and China to support new sanctions in the U.N. Security Council is “foolhardy and dangerous.”

Sherman’s defense of U.S. participation in the U.N. comes one day after the House Foreign Affairs Committee, under the leadership of Ros-Lehtinen defunded the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), a program which delivers aid to children around the world. Here’s the exchange between Mack and Sherman:

MACK: We don’t hear any concrete steps that you’re asking the Congress to do. What tools do you need to really have an impact with Iran?

SHERMAN: [...] Quite frankly, we should not unfund the U.N. because we need the oversight bodies to know where facilities are, to monitor what’s going on, to be able to act when we need to act.

MACK: So you would rather us be part of an organization that works against our own interests at times?

SHERMAN: I understand that it doesn’t do everything we want them to do but the IAEA has been a valuable tool in our ability to stop nuclear proliferation.

Watch it:

Carrying on his kitchen sink strategy to prevent any more military spending cuts, Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-CA) took to the op-ed page in the Wall Street Journal today, trying to scare Americans into believing that scaling back America’s defense budget would amount to “shooting ourselves in the head,” as McKeon quoted Defense Secretary Leon Panetta saying.

Aside from the typical baseless fear mongering, McKeon tried to take on the compelling argument that — despite all the other obvious reasons the United States needs to cut military spending — DOD can afford to cut back because it spends more than other big military spending nations:

Armchair budgeteers often point out that the U.S. spends more on defense than the next several nations combined. This clumsy argument lacks critical nuance. It costs exponentially more money to sustain a U.S. service member than to keep a Chinese, Iranian or North Korean soldier under arms. And it costs money to sustain an all-volunteer force, which must compete with the private sector to attract quality recruits.

McKeon is right. U.S. military spending represents 43 percent of the world’s total and is more than the next 14 nations combined (of which include NATO allies Turkey, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Canada and Germany). But McKeon says pointing this out as a reason to cut military spending is “clumsy” because it doesn’t take into account that the U.S. spends more per troop than, as he said, China, North Korea, and Iran.

But McKeon’s argument is the one lacking nuance. The United States spends roughly $500 billion more on its military than those three countries combined. And according to McKeon, all that money is needed to for personnel costs. But according to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis, DOD set aside $139 billion in military personnel discretionary spending for FY2011.

Moreover, if McKeon is really worried about the cost of sustaining U.S. troops, he’d consider pushing to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to the same CSBA report, it cost just over $1 million per year to deploy one American soldier to either of those two wars.

So perhaps McKeon may want to reconsider which arguments he’s saying are “clumsy” and who he’s calling an “armchair budgeteer.”

Under the leadership of right-wing Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), the House Foreign Affairs Committee yesterday defunded United Nations aid to children across the globe.

On a party-line 23 to 15 vote, the committee passed a bill restricting funds for the U.N. that would likely forbid the U.S. from giving any money to the 55-year old United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). It’s unclear when the legislation will come before the full House.

Yesterday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned that the bill endangered U.S. troop withdrawals from Afghanistan and Iraq, and urged President Obama to veto it. The legislation would cut the U.S. contribution to the U.N. by half — from $500 billion to $250 billion — unless the world body submitted to a system where most of its programs were voluntarily funded.

Mark Leon Goldberg of U.N. Dispatch checked out the fine print and found a provision in the bill that would put such onerous demands on U.N. agencies that they’d be unlikely or even unable to meet them:

Several UN agencies like UNICEF and the World Food Program are already funded on a voluntary basis. In other words, donors pay what they can, when they can. Presumably this legislation would not touch these popular UN agencies. And after all, it would be deeply immoral and politically un-savvy to take food out of the mouths of starving children, right?

Or at least that’s what I thought until I read the fine print.

In fact, there is provision tucked into the United Nations Transparency, Accountability and Reform Act of 2011 which would effectively end all American contributions to UNICEF. Section 202 reads “no funds made available for use as a United States Contribution to any United Nations Entity may be obligated or expended if—(1) the intended United Nations Entity recipient has not provided to the Comptroller General within the preceding year a Transparency Certification.”

A “transparency certification” would guarantee access for Congress and the GAO to the nuts-and-bolts business of each agency. But, Goldberg writes, “neither UNICEF, nor any UN agency would ever agree to such a provision. Once you start privileging one country, other countries are going to want the same level of access and treatment.”

According the Associated Press, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is also against the legislation, probably because he knows it could drive the U.N. right out of New York. Earlier this yeah, Ros-Lehtinen took a similarly provocative step when she proposed the U.S. break some of its hosting treaty obligations to the U.N.