Our guest blogger is Sarah Margon, Deputy Washington Director at Human Rights Watch

In May 2011, President Obama spoke publicly about the importance of supporting reform — and individual reformers — across the Middle East. He noted “the chance to show that America values the dignity of the street vendor in Tunisia more than the raw power of the dictator” and that the United States “supports a set of universal rights…[including] free speech, the freedom of peaceful assembly, the freedom of religion, equality for men and women under the rule of law, and the right to choose your own leaders.”

But in Bahrain, where massive nonviolent protests against the current regime began in early 2011, critical underlying issues have yet to be resolved and the U.S.’s support for such reform has been halfhearted.

Nabeel Rajab, president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, is in many ways a victim of the administration’s feeble push for greater reform. Nabeel recently spent three months in jail for a “tweet” calling on the Bahraini prime minister to resign. An appeals court overturned this conviction, but by that time Nabeel had been handed an additional three-year sentence for “illegal gatherings.” So he has been in jail since July 9, first for speaking out and now for exercising his right to peaceful assembly.

While the State Department appears committed to the fervent wish that Bahrain will actually reform, an August 1 hearing on Bahrain before the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission illustrated that at least some Members of Congress are less sanguine. Co-chairman Jim McGovern (D-MA) brought up Nabeel’s case a few times, as did Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN). In both cases, Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner refused to call for his release.

The U.S.-Bahraini partnership is one of great strategic importance for both countries, due in part to Bahrain’s concern for its more powerful neighbors and its willingness to provide a key base for the U.S. Navy. But as recent political changes throughout the region have shown — and as President Obama himself has stated — such an alliance should not be at the expense of our commitment to universal human rights norms and principles.

The Al-Khalifa ruling family in Bahrain remains fundamentally averse to genuine reform — a position tacitly endorsed by the administration’s downplaying of ongoing abuses, its renewal of arms sales to Bahrain, and echoing of hollow reassurances that abuses have ended and reforms instituted — when it knows very well this is not the case. The U.S. response to Nabeel’s detention is only the latest in a string of insufficient responses from the Obama administration. And it is not likely to be the last.

When it comes to Bahrain, it is long past time for the administration to stop undermining its own commitment to genuine reform throughout the Middle East. By using its leverage to encourage implementation of changes to which the government says it has committed, the administration could help reverse what is a steadily worsening situation. If it doesn’t, the opportunity for peaceful reform in Bahrain may be lost.

Mitt Romney’s speech to the Republican National Convention on Thursday night was riddled with misleading claims and critical omissions. In no section was this more true than Romney’s discussion of foreign policy. The GOP presidential nominee devoted only 202 words to national security and while his speech completely ignored the war in Afghanistan and any homage to American servicemembers, it contained a shocking number of misstatements and false and baseless attacks on President Obama:

1. Obama and America: “I will begin my presidency with a jobs tour. President Obama began with an apology tour. America, he said, had dictated to other nations. No Mr. President, America has freed other nations from dictators.”

THE FACTS: The notion that Obama went on an “apology tour” has been repeatedly and conclusively debunked, though it remains a staple of Romney’s post-truth campaign. The “dictated” line is likely of a similar provenance, but there’s an irony to the second half of that sentence — Obama has “freed other nations from dictators,” as he helped form and lead an international coalition that toppled Muammar Qaddafi in Libya. Romney’s position on the Libya intervention, by contrast, was something of an incoherent muddle.

2. Iran: “Every American was relieved the day President Obama gave the order, and Seal Team Six took out Osama bin Laden. But on another front, every American is less secure today because he has failed to slow Iran’s nuclear threat. In his first TV interview as president, he said we should talk to Iran. We’re still talking, and Iran’s centrifuges are still spinning.”

THE FACTS: There’s a reason the President decided to talk to Iran — the Obama administration is quite aware of the consequences of a nuclear weapons-equipped Iran, if its leaders decide to go that route, and has determined that diplomacy presents the “best and most permanent” means of resolving the crisis. Moreover, the diplomatic approach has produced concrete dividends. While Iran hasn’t capitulated, signalling that America was willing to talk to Iran helped build international support for significantly stepped-up sanctions. Contra Romney, the new sanctions imposed by Obama’s coalition have unequivocally slowed Iran’s nuclear progress by limiting its ability to acquire critical materiel, according to the U.N. and the Pentagon. Perhaps that’s why, when they’re not hinting at starting a devastating war, Romney advisers and surrogates have been unable to differentiate their candidate’s policy from the status quo.

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Weekly Standard editor and influential right-wing foreign policy voice Bill Kristol criticized Mitt Romney for ignoring the war in Afghanistan and the military in his speech to the Republican National Convention last night. In a short, scathing piece Kristol put up on the Standard’s website shortly after the speech, the neocon don scolded Romney for not uttering “a word of appreciation” to American troops fighting in Afghanistan:

The United States has some 68,000 troops fighting in Afghanistan. Over two thousand Americans have died in the more than ten years of that war, a war Mitt Romney has supported. Yet in his speech accepting his party’s nomination to be commander in chief, Mitt Romney said not a word about the war in Afghanistan. Nor did he utter a word of appreciation to the troops fighting there, or to those who have fought there. Nor for that matter were there thanks for those who fought in Iraq, another conflict that went unmentioned.

Leave aside the question of the political wisdom of Romney’s silence, and the opportunities it opens up for President Obama next week. What about the civic propriety of a presidential nominee failing even to mention, in his acceptance speech, a war we’re fighting and our young men and women who are fighting it? Has it ever happened that we’ve been at war and a presidential nominee has ignored, in this kind of major and formal speech, the war and our warriors?

Perhaps Romney didn’t mention Afghanistan because he has no plan. Back in July, the then-presumptive GOP presidential nominee had a chance talk about his Afghanistan policy in a major foreign policy speech but Romney offered no specifics, saying his goal would be to withdraw U.S. troops by 2014 — which is exactly what President Obama is going to do. In fact, Romney’s own advisers don’t know what Romney’s Afghanistan policy is.

And maybe Romney ignored the military and veterans in his speech last night because he has no plan to address those issues either. “We haven’t … heard any specific plans yet from Governor Romney or his campaign,” a VFW official said recently.

Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey told reporters in London on Thursday that an Israeli attack on Iran would “clearly delay but probably not destroy Iran’s nuclear programme.” Dempsey — America’s highest ranking military officer — also sought to distance the U.S. from any premature attack, adding, “I don’t want to be complicit if they [Israel] choose to do it.”

Dempsey explained that he did not know whether Iran intends to build nuclear weapons — the IAEA and U.S. and Israeli intelligence all agree that Iran has not made that decision — but that a premature attack could dismantle the international coalition President Obama has assembled to confront and isolate Iran over its disputed nuclear program, the Guardian reports:

Dempsey said he did not know Iran’s nuclear intentions, as intelligence did not reveal intentions. What was clear, he said, was that the “international coalition” applying pressure on Iran “could be undone if [Iran] was attacked prematurely”. Sanctions against Iran were having an effect, and they should be given a reasonable opportunity to succeed.

Dempsey’s assessment is shared by numerous American and Israeli officials, including former Mossad chief Meir Dagan, who has also warned that a premature attack would “accelerate the procurement of the bomb” and “galvanize Iranian society behind the leadership and create unity around the nuclear issue.”

The comments come on the heals of the IAEA’s new report on Iran’s nuclear program, which found the Islamic Republic has increased its stockpile of enriched uranium and its production capacity. Yet the Obama administration and outside experts still believe there is “time and space” for a diplomatic solution. “The president has made clear frequently he is determined to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said when asked about the IAEA report.

“They can’t do it right without us,” a former adviser to Obama told the New York Times recently, referring to a unilateral Israeli strike on Iran. “And we’re trying to persuade them that a strike that just drives the program more underground isn’t a solution; it’s a bigger problem.”

Indeed, the Obama administration is aware, not only of the threat an Iranian nuclear weapon poses, but also the potential negative consequences of a military attack on Iran. And that, coupled with U.N., U.S. and Israeli assessments that Iran has not yet decided on whether to build a nuclear weapon, leads the administration to pursue a diplomatic solution with Iran, a track the it deems the “best and most permanent way” to solve the nuclear crisis.

Mitt Romney campaign co-chair and former Wisconsin governor Tim Pawlenty told Foreign Policy Magazine that he would support Congress authorizing war with Iran. Elliot Abrams, a former Bush administration official and now top foreign policy adviser to GOP vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan, floated this idea last week and Pawlenty said it might be “a good idea.” “I don’t know that it would be dispositive, but it couldn’t hurt and it probably would help,” he said.

While Pawlenty did say that he wasn’t sure an attack on Iran would have great success, it’s worth noting perhaps where Abrams is coming from. Back in 2009, he took a “they’ll greet us as liberators” approach to an American attack on Iran:

We are not talking about the Americans killing civilians, bombing cities, destroying mosques, hospitals, schools. No, no, no – weʹre talking about nuclear facilities which most Iranians know very little about, have not seen, will not see, some quite well hidden.

So they wake up in the morning and find out that the United States if attacking those facilities and, presumably with some good messaging about why weʹre doing it and why we are not against the people of Iran.

Itʹs not clear to me that the reaction letʹs go to war with the Americans, but rather, perhaps, how did we get into this mess? Why did those guys, the very unpopular ayatollahs in a country 70 percent of whose population is under the age of 30, why did those old guys get us into this mess.

So Abrams thinks that if the U.S. attacks Iran, ordinary Iranians will rally around the Americans. As Matt Yglesias observed at the time: “If Iranian agents were to blow up an American military base, I don’t think the American public would just say ‘well, fair enough.’” Indeed, as former top American and Israeli officials have said, an attack on Iran is likely to “galvanize Iranian society behind the leadership and create unity around the nuclear issue” and “guarantee that which we are trying to prevent — an Iran that will spare nothing to build a nuclear weapon.”

A Romney adviser recently told the National Journal that the campaign isn’t having many conversations about a diplomatic approach to the Iranian nuclear crisis. And in his interview with Foreign Policy, Pawlenty seemed to reinforce that thinking. “Options would include concluding the negotiations are not working, that the Iranians aren’t taking them seriously, bringing them to a temporary or permanent end, and start the clock ticking on other alternatives and letting the Iranians know that,” Pawlenty said.

As for the Obama administration, it is aware, not only of the threat an Iranian nuclear weapon poses, but also the potential negative consequences of a military attack on Iran. And that, coupled with U.N., U.S. and Israeli assessments that Iran has not yet decided on whether to build a nuclear weapon, leads the administration to pursue a diplomatic solution with Iran, a track the it deems the “best and most permanent way” to solve the nuclear crisis.

The International Atomic Energy Agency released a report on Iran’s nuclear activities today which finds that the Islamic Republic doubled its capacity to produce enriched uranium at the Fordo nuclear facility buried deep underground. However, less than half of those centrifuges are in operation.

The IAEA also said that Iranian authorities continue a pattern of non-cooperation on its nuclear program and thus, the report states, “the Agency is unable to provide credible assurance about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran, and therefore to conclude that all nuclear material in Iran is in peaceful activities.”

The IAEA also expressed concern about Iran’s Parchin site, reporting that after the IAEA notified Iran that it suspected nuclear weapons related activity there, satellite imagery showed “extensive activities”:

Satellite imagery available to the Agency for the period from February 2005 to January 2012 shows virtually no activity at or near the building housing the [large explosives containment vessel in which to conduct hydrodynamic experiments]. However, since the Agency’s first request for access to this location, satellite imagery shows that extensive activities and resultant changes have taken place at this location. [...]

In light of these extensive activities, the Agency’s ability to verify the information on which its concerns are based has been adversely affected and, when the Agency gains access to the location, its ability to conduct effective verification will have been significantly hampered.

The Institute for Science and International Security has said that it suspects the Iranians have been engaged in an extensive clean up operation at Parchin.

The U.N. announced yesterday a special Task Force to investigate Iran’s nuclear program.

TAMPA, Florida — Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R), a top surrogate for Mitt Romney, laid into those in the Republican Party who wanted to get rid of foreign aid funding, calling the idea “directionally not correct.”

The only problem? At a Republican primary debate in November last year, Romney joined the call for eliminating U.S. foreign aid commitments. “[O]ne of the things we have to do with our foreign aid commitments, the ongoing foreign aid commitments, I agree with Governor Perry,” said Romney. “You start everything at zero.”

Speaking at The Tampa Club with Bill Kristol, Pawlenty criticized the “isolationist wing” of his party that is “very hostile towards foreign aid and development monies.” Noting the modest amount that America actually spends on foreign aid — it makes up less than one percent of the federal budget — Pawlenty broke with his party’s presidential candidate, calling it “important to preserve and maintain that commitment.”

PAWLENTY: First of all, my party has a wing or a portion of it that is trending towards isolationism and is trending towards being very hostile towards foreign aid and development monies. I think my personal view of that is that is directionally not correct. For the modest amount of money that is on the table — doesn’t mean it can’t be reformed and we can’t scrutinize it — but for the modest amount of money we’re talking about and the important role that it plays in terms of America’s position and role in the world, I think it’s important to preserve and maintain that commitment.

Watch it:

Others in the Republican Party are also pushing back against the call to eliminate foreign aid as well. In a speech earlier this year, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) ridiculed the proposition, calling it “outrightly foolish” and “un-Christian.”

Turkey, which has the unique distinction of being Syria’s neighbor and a NATO member, is escalating its call for international involvement in the Syrian crisis. Though it had previously been involved in training and arming the rebels (who use their territory as a base), it today reiterated its call for international intervention inside Syrian borders:

Turkey urged the United Nations on Wednesday to protect displaced Syrians inside their country but President Bashar al-Assad, battling rebels determined to overthrow him, dismissed talk of a buffer zone on Syrian territory.

Ankara fears a mass influx such as the flight of half a million Iraqi Kurds into Turkey after the 1991 Gulf War, and has floated the idea of a “safe zone” under foreign protection within Syria for civilians fleeing intensifying violence.

“We expect the United Nations to engage on the topic of protecting refugees inside Syria and if possible sheltering them in camps there,” Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said.

France has supported Turkey’s call for a safe zone in Syria, and pressure for action increased after the United Nations refugee agency said on Tuesday Syria’s refugee exodus was accelerating. Up to 200,000 people could settle in Turkey alone if the conflict worsens, the UNHCR said.

While Turkey frames the issue as refugee protection, it’s very clear this would be a significant military operation — the notion of “safe zones” inside Syrian territory have been the key policy advocated by supporters of intervention against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Turkey’s principal concern is most likely limiting refugee flows into its own territory, which have escalated significantly in recent months as the conflict has:

The waves of refugees fleeing Dara’a, the Damascus suburbs, Aleppo and the Idlib region near Turkey in recent days have provided a barometer of the escalating violence in the 18-month-old conflict, in which neither the government of President Bashar al-Assad nor the opposition seems capable of striking a decisive blow.

[A U.N. spokesperson] said the number of refugees escaping to Turkey had multiplied to 5,000 a day from 400 or 500 daily several weeks ago. In the past 24 hours, she said, 3,000 people had entered Turkey, with 10,000 more waiting.

In Turkey, which had said it would not accept more than 100,000 refugees, officials said they had revised the number to 120,000, and were preparing contingency plans for more.

Speaking about the conflict, Assad told his state run TV station today that “[the army] definitely needs time to bring it to a decisive end. But I can sum it up in one sentence: we’re heading forward.” Meanwhile, his air force has stepped up strikes against rebel forces without much regard for civilian casualties.

Today on CBS’s morning show, former Bush administration Secretary of State and top Mitt Romney surrogate Condoleezza Rice could not offer any specific foreign policy failures made by President Obama. Romney’s allies, led by Rice and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), are expected to attack Obama on national security grounds tonight in at the Republican National Convention in Tampa.

But when asked to offer specifics this morning on CBS, all Rice could come up with was some vague attack on Obama’s Syria policy, which, host Norah O’Donnell noted, the president himself might agree with:

O’DONNELL: Can you be specific about somewhere where you think President Obama has failed on foreign policy.

RICE: What we should do tonight, is talk about what a President Romney would mean for America. It’s not a time to look back, it’s a time to look forward. We have real challenges out there, in the Middle East, in Asia, in Europe, with our allies.

O’DONNELL: But if President Obama isn’t doing anything wrong, then why change things?

RICE: It’s a question of what a President Romney would do and there is no doubt that the United States’ voice has been muted and when the United States’ voice is muted the world is a more dangerous place.

O’DONNELL: How is the United States’ voice muted?

RICE: Just look at the situation in Syria for instance. We have a circumstance in which Assad is butchering his people. The Iranians are helping him to do so. The United States seems to be mired in the Security Council. The Russians and the Chinese say no, no, no and we don’t have an answer. When that is the case, it’s a dangerous place. …

O’DONNELL: But I think the president agrees with that as well. Having covered the White House, the question is whether … a President Romney would be willing to advocate and commit American troops, American lives, in a place like Syria right now.

Watch the clip:

So despite the fact that the GOP plans to attack Obama’s foreign policy, Rice has no interest in “looking back.” Instead, she said, she wants to “look forward,” yet she doesn’t have any idea what Romney’s international agenda is either. And on Syria, it turns out that the policy Romney has articulated thus far isn’t much different from the Obama administration’s.

But as far as attacking Obama on foreign policy grounds goes, the Republicans are going to have a tough time. Poll after poll shows that Americans favor Obama over Romney in handling international issues. And the Wall Street Journal noted today that their recent poll “found 54% of voters approve of Mr. Obama’s handling of foreign policy, his highest score in more than a year and far better than what either George W. Bush or Bill Clinton fetched as they sought re-election.”

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty this week that he thinks the chances are “high” that Iran will face military attack if the regime in Tehran doesn’t change course on its nuclear program. In that event, Lieberman said he’ll “hope and pray” the regime falls:

“I think we have the capability either to eliminate the Iranian nuclear weapons program or to disable it in a way that it will be delayed for enough years that we may hope and pray that there will be a regime change and that there will be a more democratic and friendly regime.”

Watch the clip:

Lieberman pushed a resolution earlier this year ruling out containing a nuclear armed Iran and loosened the threshold for military action to an Iranian nuclear weapons “capability” — a position that some have observed would make a diplomatic solution to the crisis more difficult.

But while Lieberman would hope and pray the Iranian regime falls in the aftermath of a military attack, others, like former Israeli spy chief Meir Dagan, have warned that it would have the opposite effect of rallying Iranians around the regime, as well as sparking a regional war and “accelerat[ing] the procurement of the bomb.”

Meir Dagan, the formidable former head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, in a new interview with the New Yorker, continued his campaign to warn against a hasty rush to war with Iran over its nuclear program:

“An Israeli bombing would lead to a regional war and solve the internal problems of the Islamic Republic of Iran. It would galvanize Iranian society behind the leadership and create unity around the nuclear issue. And it would justify Iran in rebuilding its nuclear project and saying, ‘Look, see, we were attacked by the Zionist enemy and we clearly need to have it.’ A bombing would be considered an act of war and there would be an unpredictable counterattack against us.” [...]

I have no doubt that the Iranians are moving on their nuclear program, but I don’t share the point of view that they are speeding there,” he said. “The Iranian nuclear issue is not an Iran-Israel issue, it is more related to the entire region and to the international community.”

Dagan began speaking out against war with Iran last year after he stepped down as director of the Mossad, saying that an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities is “the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” And since then, Dagan has promoted a diplomatic track with Iran and has pushed back on many pro-war talking points.

Iranian society is currently internally fractured, particularly after the rise of the Green Movement after the country’s disputed 2009 presidential election and distress from Western-imposed economic sanctions. But many pushing toward war with Iran often ignore the consequences of an attack, particularly Dagan’s point to the New Yorker, which he has touched on before, that it would rally the Iranian public in support of the regime. Indeed, when ThinkProgress asked prominent Iran hawk Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) late last year what an attack on Iran would do to the Green Movement, the Arizona Republican said, “That’s a good question,” adding, “they might be supportive.”

The Obama administration is aware, not only of the threat an Iranian nuclear weapon poses, but also the potential negative consequences of a military attack on Iran. And that, coupled with U.N., U.S. and Israeli assessments that Iran has not yet decided on whether to build a nuclear weapon, leads the administration to pursue a diplomatic solution with Iran, a track the it deems the “best and most permanent way” to solve the nuclear crisis.

Mitt Romney and his campaign foreign policy advisers have had a hard time trying to differentiate the presumptive GOP nominee’s Iran policy from President Obama’s. But at the same time, they’ve been offering clues that a President Romney would lean more toward the military option in dealing with Iran’s nuclear program.

An anonymous Romney foreign policy adviser recently reinforced that view, telling the National Journal in an article published today that there isn’t much discussion among Romney’s team about diplomacy with Iran:

Meanwhile, however, the Israelis—who are engaged in their own intense debate about whether to strike—hear a cacophony of voices in the Romney camp. “We’ve got a very big tent. You’ve got a lot of different voices,” concedes another Romney adviser. “The debate isn’t ‘Gee, can we live with an Iranian nuclear weapon,’ it’s how you structure a response.” Even so, with Romney playing to his conservative base, “there hasn’t been a big conversation of how much would he put back into a diplomatic effort” with Iran, the first adviser says.

And if there hasn’t been much talk about diplomacy with Iran inside the campaign, there certainly hasn’t been any discussion outside of it either. Instead, the Romney campaign regularly accuses Obama of not sufficiently threatening military action against Iran (despite the fact that the president ordered a second aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf and often says no option is off the table).

Romney’s advisers are also ratcheting up the war rhetoric — whether it’s lowering the threshold for war, downplaying the effects of sanctions or criticizing discussion of the consequences of an attack. Indeed, one top Romney adviser even cheered for diplomacy to fail.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration is aware, not only of the threat an Iranian nuclear weapon poses, but also the potential negative consequences of a military attack on Iran. And that, coupled with U.N., U.S. and Israeli assessments that Iran has not yet decided on whether to build a nuclear weapon, leads the administration to pursue a diplomatic solution with Iran, a track the it deems the “best and most permanent way” to solve the nuclear crisis.