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.