Former Bush adviser Karl Rove took to the Wall Street Journal op-ed pages today to try to push back against President Obama’s new campaign video “The Road We Traveled” narrated by Tom Hanks, which documents some of the more important decisions the president has made in his first term.

Rove took issue with Hanks’ assertion in the video that Obama’s order to kill Osama bin Laden showed the “ultimate test of leadership”:

As for the killing of Osama bin Laden, Mr. Obama did what virtually any commander in chief would have done in the same situation. Even President Bill Clinton says in the film “that’s the call I would have made.” For this to be portrayed as the epic achievement of the first term tells you how bare the White House cupboards are.

As Obama’s former top adviser David Axelrod pointed out on Twitter today, Rove completely mischaracterized Clinton’s quote from the film. The former president actually said of the bin Laden raid: “When I saw what had happened, I thought to myself, I hope that is the call I would have made.”

And former Defense Secretary Robert Gates — himself a Republican who has served numerous presidents in security related roles — doesn’t quite see it the same way as the former president’s chief political operative. “I’ve worked for a lot of these guys,” Gates said on 60 Minutes last year, “and this is one of the most courageous calls — decisions — that I think I’ve ever seen a president make.”

So why this blatant dishonesty from Rove? Given the difficulty with which to assign any political liability to the president for ordering the death of history’s most notorious terrorist, the Republicans’ strategy in this campaign season has been to either downplay Obama’s role in nabbing bin Laden or to pretend that he didn’t have anything to do with it.

But Rove is also probably trying to run interference. Rove said Obama “did what virtually any commander in chief would have done” in ordering the bin Laden raid — virtually any commander-in-chief that is, except his former boss President Bush. Bush famously said of bin Laden in 2002: “I really just don’t spend that much time on him” and in 2006, he reportedly said the al Qaeda leader was “not a top priority use of American resources.” In 2005, Bush shut down the CIA unit that was dedicated to finding bin Laden’s whereabouts and the New York Times reported that Bush and then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld abandoned a plan to capture senior al Qaeda members in early 2005 because they “decided it was too risky and could jeopardize relations with Pakistan.”

So it turns out that “virtually” everything in Rove’s op-ed about Obama, Clinton and bin Laden isn’t true.

Yesterday, a mutiny among the ranks of the Malian military seized power in the capitol, Bamako. Intially blockading the presidential palace and taking over the state broadcaster, and today closed the country’s borders in the face of international condemnation.

Once established at the broadcast center, the Malian troops, calling themselves the “CNRDR” or National Committee for the Restoration of Democracy and State, announced that they’d seized control and suspended the consitution.

Watch a video of the coup announcement:

Soldiers’ celebratory gunfire reportedly rang out in the capitol through this morning, apparently defying orders. Reports emerged of looting at the presidential palace. An initial report that the president, Amadou Toumani Touré, took refuge at the U.S. embassy is in dispute.

International condemnation came swiftly. The African Union condemned the coup, as did the European Union.

The U.S. State Department — whose websites’s Mali country profile lauds “excellent and expanding” relations “based on shared goals of strengthening democracy and reducing poverty” — released a statement condemning the military moves and calling for a swift return to constitutional rule:

The United States condemns the military seizure of power in Mali…. We call for calm and the restoration of the civilian government under constitutional rule without delay, so that elections can proceed as scheduled. We stand with the legitimately elected government of President Amadou Toumani Touré.

An American in Mali reports on his blog that the embassy there sent out warning SMS messages. The blogger, anthropologist Bruce Whitehouse, wrote:

Three SMS messages from the US Embassy just received: “continue to shelter in place,” and “please prepare for possible service outages: water, electricity, internet”. Another announces that the airport has been closed.

Touré was expected to step down before elections late next month. Tensions rose between the civilian government and the military over supply levels to battle the Touareg rebellion in the country’s north, and general management of that crisis and a protest movement in the south.

Blogger Alex Thurston, an Africa scholar, analyzed some initial reports, makes comparisons and puts the coup in context. “Looking forward,” he wrote, “the fate of the elections and the fate of the war in the north will be paramount concerns. How will the new leaders (or Toure, if he stays) shift the government’s political strategy in the north?”

Iran hawks and the GOP presidential candidates like Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney have been slow to acknowledge the inherent dangers of U.S. and/or Israeli military strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities while members of President Obama’s cabinet have made the case that sanctions and diplomatic pressure are the best strategy for deterring Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon.

But in remarks delivered last week at the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates — himself a Republican — delivered a stern warning to those who push for the “military option” against Iran.

“If you think the war in Iraq was hard, an attack on Iran would, in my opinion, be a catastrophe,” said Gates, as reported by the Jewish Exponent. Gates, who served as Defense Secretary in both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, warned that Iran’s nuclear facilities would be difficult to destroy and an attack would lead Iranians to “rally behind their mullahs.”

Gates’ comments concurred with U.S., Israeli and IAEA intelligence findings on Iran’s nuclear program. “I have long been convinced that Iran is determined to develop a nuclear-weapons capability,” said the former Defense Secretary. Indeed, the intelligence reports agree that Iran is moving towards a nuclear weapons capability but that Tehran has not yet made a decision about whether to acquire nuclear weapons.

Yesterday, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) warned that Iran may have “hundreds” of Hezbollah agents in the U.S. but Gates, in his remarks last week, largely disregarded the possibility of an Iranian retaliation within the U.S. if the U.S. or Israel launch a military strike on nuclear sites in Iran. “[T]he Iranian ability to attack us militarily here at home is virtually non-existent for now,” said Gates.

But retaliatory escalation from such a strike would still have a devastating impact on the U.S. and its regional allies. “[Iranian] capacity to wage a series of terror attacks across the Middle East aimed at us and our friends, and dramatically worsen the situation in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and elsewhere is hard to overestimate,” Gates said.

The Obama administration has ruled out a policy of containing a nuclear-armed Iran but, in views concurrent with those expressed by Gates, has emphasized that a diplomatic solution is “the best and most permanent way” to relieve mounting tensions over Iran’s nuclear program.

As French police laid siege yesterday to the house of suspected Toulouse killer Mohammed Merah, eventually driving him to jump to his own death this morning, the Palestinian prime minister spoke out against the crimes and the reported justification Merah gave for killing 7 people — including a rabbi and three children at a Jewish school.

Merah reportedly claimed to police that he was affiliated with Al Qaeda, and he was seeking revenge for Palestinian children killed in the Gaza Strip. But Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad denounced the “cowardly” attack yesterday. “This terrorist crime is condemned in the strongest terms by the Palestinian people and our children,” he said. “No Palestinian child can accept crimes against innocent people.” Fayyad went on:

It is time for these criminals to stop exploiting the name of Palestine through their terrorist actions, and to stop pretending to stand up for Palestinian children, who only seek a decent life for themselves and for all children of the world.

The missions of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the U.N. cultural agency UNESCO to France also issued a joint statement condemning the attack, noting that “the murderer is driven by a multi-faceted racist hatred.” The move was welcome despite some standing criticisms that Palestinians don’t do enough to discourage violence.