Former Bush administration officials are eager to attribute Obama’s foreign policy successes to the previous administration. But on Fox News this morning, Karl Rove distilled this viewpoint down to a few broad, if at times grossly inaccurate, generalizations:

Where president Obama has embraced the Bush world view things have gone well. Where Obama has not embraced the Bush worldview, it has not gone as well.

Watch it:

But the reality is that Bush actually embraced Obama’s view on Iraq, and the current president has had many foreign policy successes when doing the exact opposite of what Bush did.

While Rove attacks Obama for failing to reach an agreement for an extension of the Status Of Forces Agreement (SOFA), and a lengthier U.S. troop presence in Iraq, it was the Bush administration that set the withdrawal deadline for the end of 2011. And at that time, it was then-Senator Obama who was campaigning for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. So Bush was actually embracing Obama’s view.

Libya, which Rove fails to address, stands as a striking departure from the Bush administration’s propensity for military action and ground troops. Over the course of 227 days, the U.S., along with an international coalition, implemented U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973 imposing a no-fly zone over Libya. The multilateral military campaign proved successful in unseating Libyan strongman Muammar Qaddafi and no U.S. military service personnel were killed.

While GOP hawks continue to complain that the White House should have committed more military forces sooner, the Obama administration was successful in Libya without endangering U.S. soldiers or damaging relationships with allies. Rove would find it difficult to argue that Obama’s Libya strategy was either an extension of Bush administration policy or a failure.

Fox’s Brian Kilmeade does admit that Obama “has some headlines” with his successes in Libya and killing Osama Bin Laden, but Rove chooses to overlook the number of instances in which Obama’s successful policy dramatically differed from the Bush administration’s. Indeed, Bush had publicly stated in 2006 that capturing or killing Bin Laden was “not a top priority use of American resources.” Obama had made the capture or killing of Bin Laden a top priority and ordered intelligence resources dedicated to tracking the Al Qaeda leader.

The arguments expressed by Rove will, no doubt, be repeated in the days leading up to the Republican Presidential Primary debate on November 12. But Rove’s selective list of Obama’s foreign policy accomplishments underscores the administration’s relative success in foreign policy compared to the George W. Bush administration’s mismanagement of two wars and inability to capture Bin Laden.

New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief Ethan Bronner has drawn controversy for recent speaking engagements but the announcement that he would appear on a Clarion Fund panel — first reported by ThinkProgress — may have brought more criticism than he could handle. Politico’s Ben Smith reports that Bronner had second thoughts about his participation in the Islamophobic group’s event at the 92nd Street Y.

Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy tells Smith:

Ethan was invited by the 92nd Street Y, where he has appeared before, to be on a panel. He dealt only with the Y and was not aware of involvement by any outside group (in fact, he had never heard of the Clarion Fund before this). He did not select the panel members. When he learned of the makeup of the panel, he suggested to organizers at the 92nd Street Y that a broader spectrum would make for a better discussion. When the Y was unable to add more voices to the panel, Ethan decided to withdraw.

In his public appearances, as in his Times articles, Ethan sticks to impartial reporting and analysis, and avoids editorial judgments.

Bronner’s decision to withdraw from the event comes after ThinkProgress reported that he would be appearing on a panel to promote the bomb-Iran documentary Iranium. The Clarion Fund, which produced the film, features prominently in the Center for American Progress’ Islamophobia report, “Fear, Inc.,” and rose to notoriety for its distirbution of the anti-Muslim documentary Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against The West to 28 million swing state voters before the 2008 presidential election.

Clarion is closely tied to Aish Hatorah, an evangelist, far-right, Israeli ultra-orthodox organization, and Alex Traiman, the film’s director and moderator of the panel, lives in an ideological West Bank settlement.

On the same day that the right-wing Weekly Standard produced yet another post intimating that the whole of the 99 Percent movement is anti-Semitic, a group of Jewish-American leaders denounced smears against the movement.

In the Standard post, a dark video shows a handful of protesters apparently in Lower Manhattan at the site of Occupy Wall Street spouting 9/11 truther conspiracy theories and, in two cases, expressing anti-Semitic sentiments. The post was promoted by the hedge-fund bankrolled, Bill Kristol-led Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI). It was ECI that initially set off a feeding frenzy of right-wing blogs with an ad released on the Internet showing three people expressing anti-Semitism but suggesting the sentiment was pervasive at 99 Percent protests. Absurd accusations followed, like one blog’s contention that the Twitter “hashtag” symbol was a stand-in for a Swastika.

Now, though, a group of eminent Jewish-Americans are pushing back against the smears. In a release today, 15 leaders from the community are putting their foot down against the likes of Kristol and his lackeys at ECI and the Standard:

We are publicly engaged American Jews who support both Israel and the ideas behind Occupy Wall Street and who also strongly oppose right-wing attempts to smear that movement with false charges of anti-Semitism.

It’s an old, discredited tactic: find a couple of unrepresentative people in a large movement and then conflate the oddity with the cause. One black swan means that all swans are black…

All of us irrespective of party or position should expose and denounce anti-Semitism where ever it occurs, but not tar hundreds of thousands of protestors nationwide because a handful of hateful people show up with offensive signs that can’t be taken down in a public park open to all.

The signatory list included a few rabbis, progressive Jewish group leader Jeremy Ben Ami, former New York Gov. Elliot Spitzer (who was targeted in the ECI ad), union leader Randi Weingarten, and others.

Picking up a push-back on the smear last week from Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, the signatories cited the anti-Semitism watchdog Anti-Defamation League (ADL), commenting that there’s no evidence that the views outlined by the right “are representative of the larger movement or that they are gaining traction with other participants.”

Both the signatories and the ADL are right: In a survey of the evidence right-wing pressure groups and blogs give against the 99 Percent, there are only a handful — perhaps as many as eight — total protesters who have been documented expressing anti-Semitism, yet videos and photos of them are perpetually re-circulated. That’s perhaps eight out of hundreds of thousands that have taken to the streets and shown support for the 99 Percent.

In a sharp exchange yesterday at the press room in Foggy Bottom, a reporter stumped State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland on the negative consequences of Palestinian membership in UNESCO, the U.N.’s cultural body, which caused the U.S. to cut off its funding to the organization.

The questioning built off Nuland’s introductory remarks that the vote to give Palestine a seat at UNESCO was “regrettable, premature, and undermines our shared goal of a comprehensive, just, and lasting peace in the Middle East.” The vote was a landslide, with only 13 other countries out of 172 UNESCO members voting against the Palestinians, leading AP reporter Matt Lee to wonder why such an overwhelming number didn’t vote with the U.S. when, as the U.S. posited, the outcome ran contra a “shared goal.”

Lee asked Nuland about what exactly was so “detrimental” about Palestinian UNESCO membership — other than Israeli discontent and triggering the U.S. law to cut off funds — and she responded that it “could exacerbate the environment” in which the U.S. is trying to bring parties together for talks. Lee then dug for more specific consequences:

LEE: How exactly does it exacerbate the environment if it changes nothing on the ground, unlike say, construction of settlements? It changes nothing on the ground. It gives Palestine membership in UNESCO, which is a body that the U.S. didn’t — was so unconcerned about for many years that it just wasn’t even a member.

NULAND: Well, I think you know that this Administration is committed to UNESCO, rejoined UNESCO, wants to see UNESCO’s work go forward –

LEE: Well, actually, it was the last Administration that rejoined UNESCO, not this one. But the – I need to have some kind of clarity on how this undermines the peace process other than the fact that it upsets Israel.

NULAND: Again, we are trying to get both of these parties back to the table. That’s what we’ve been doing all along… So, in that context, we have been trying to improve the relationship between these parties, improve the environment between them, and we are concerned that we exacerbate tensions with this, and it makes it harder to get the parties back to the table.

Watch the video:

Lee then went on, noting that the parties have not been in talks, to ask rhetorically: “So how can things get worse than they already are?” (HT: SM Palestine)

The headlines about Condoleezza Rice’s new memoir have mostly focused on the tit-for-tat between the former Secretary of State and former Vice President Dick Cheney, whom Rice called naive and said claims about her in Cheney’s memoir were an “attack on my integrity.” But the reality is that Cheney and Rice see eye-to-eye on some big issues too. Talking with USA Today about the book, Rice, like Cheney, credited President Bush for the Arab Spring:

The demise of repressive governments in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere during this year’s “Arab spring,” she says, stemmed in part from Bush’s “freedom agenda,” which promoted democracy in the Middle East. “The change in the conversation about the Middle East, where people now routinely talk about democratization is something that I’m very grateful for and I think we had a role in that,” Rice says.

Indeed, Cheney had a similar take. When asked about the Arab Spring in August, Cheney replied, “I think that what happened in Iraq, the fact that we brought democracy, if you will, and freedom to Iraq, has had a ripple effect on some of those other countries.” And of course, according to Rice, the only to get rid of Saddam Hussein was to invade militarily:

“It would be a mistake to make the leap of faith that this [Arab Spring] would somehow have worked in Iraq,” she says in her first newspaper interview about her memoir, No Higher Honor. [...]

“Gadhafi … wasn’t Saddam Hussein in terms of his reach and capacity,” she says. “I do think that an Arab spring in Iraq would have been unthinkable under Saddam Hussein.”

There isn’t any real evidence of this claim that Bush’s democracy promotion in the Middle East (i.e. invasion of Iraq) had something to do with the Arab Spring. And this claim also ignores the agency of Arab citizens themselves in their collective action to rise up against social and economic injustices.

A 2010 RAND report found that “Iraq’s instability has become a convenient scarecrow neighboring regimes can use to delay political reform by asserting that democratization inevitably leads to insecurity.” And now, ironically, the Iraqi government is “offering key moral and financial support” to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in his violent crackdown on pro-democracy activists there.

The Council on Foreign Relations’ Steven Cook addressed this question back in July. “It is time to put the Bush boosters’ arguments where they belong: in the trash heap of discredited ideas,” he said, adding, “There is no connection between the invasion of Iraq and Arab efforts to throw off generations of dictatorship.” (HT: The Hill)