It is said that, to Washington’s neoconservative pundits, every problem looks a nail, and they have just the hammer: military force. Washington Post columnist and Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer nicely encapsulated this concept last night on Bill O’Reilly’s show when he said that the U.S. should have sent “weaponry” to the pro-democracy movement that erupted in Iran after the fraudulent presidential elections of June 2009.

Krauthammer said that President Obama should have ramped up rhetoric against Iran during the brutal crackdown on the Green Movement — the distinctly non-violent protest movement born out of Mir Hossien Moussavi’s failed 2009 presidential campaign. And when O’Reilly asked what else Obama could have done, Krauthammer said he should have armed the protesters and order a covert war against Iran:

O’REILLY: But what else could he have done except rhetoric?

KRAUTHAMMER: Weaponry — he could have done a lot of things. Rhetoric is one thing and not to support the legitimacy of the regime. Clandestine operations. Why do we have $50 billion in secret operations in the CIA if not for an opportunity like this? He was hands off. He did nothing and we lost one of the great opportunities in history.

Watch the video:

Presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney and his ideological comrades have made President Obama’s reaction to the 2009 post-election Iranian government crackdown on Green Movement demonstrators a centerpiece of their criticisms. Romney’s campaign issue page for Iran says Obama “refrained from supporting the nascent Green Movement.” In a Washington Post op-ed, Romney wrote that he would “speak out on behalf of the cause of democracy in Iran and support Iranian dissidents who are fighting for their freedom.”

In reality, Obama didn’t, as Krauthammer put it, “support the legitimacy of the [Iranian] regime.” Daniel Larison has pointed out that, when failed presidential candidate Rick Santorum made the same charge, that unlike many world governments, Obama never recognized the elections. Furthermore, Obama condemned the abuses against demonstrators that June.

But more to the point, one hopes that Romney does not conflate symbolic “fighting” for freedom with literal fighting. Unlike in Syria and Libya, the Green Movement in Iran never took up arms. As Ardeshir Amirarjmand, a top adviser to Moussavi now in exile in France, told an audience at MIT last year, “We do not have any other choice than a nonviolent path toward democracy.” Or, as University of Toronto professor Ramin Jahanbegloo put it, “The Green Movement faces a troubling situation, but it is banking on its strategy of nonviolence as moral capital.” Iranian human rights lawyer and Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi — who, like Iranian civil society as a whole, opposes attacking Iran — told ThinkProgress in 2010 that she disagreed with critics who said that Obama should have spoken more forcefully in support of the Green movement in June 2009.

Krauthammer worries that Obama is not doing enough to support Iran’s democracy movement. But it’s perfectly clear that the Green Movement doesn’t want the kind of support — weapons and covert war — that Krauthammer is offering.

Analyzing Tuesday’s surprise announcement of a national unity government in Israel, Charles Krauthammer suggests a parallel to 1967, in which Israel formed a unity government shortly before launching a pre-emptive strike on the massed forces of Egypt.

“Everyone understood why,” Krauthammer writes. “You do not undertake a supremely risky preemptive war without the full participation of a broad coalition representing a national consensus“:

Because for Israelis today, it is May ’67. The dread is not quite as acute: The mood is not despair, just foreboding. Time is running out, but not quite as fast. War is not four days away, but it looms. Israelis today face the greatest threat to their existence — nuclear weapons in the hands of apocalyptic mullahs publicly pledged to Israel’s annihilation — since May ’67. The world is again telling Israelis to do nothing as it looks for a way out. But if such a way is not found — as in ’67 — Israelis know that they will once again have to defend themselves, by themselves.

“Nuclear weapons in the hands of apocalyptic mullahs publicly pledged to Israel’s annihilation” would obviously represent a serious threat to Israel, but it’s worth unpacking this statement and examining each of its three claims.

First, with regard to an Iranian nuclear weapon, while Iran still has yet to answer key questions from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) about the nature of its nuclear work, the current position of both U.S. and Israeli intelligence is that the Iranian government has not yet made a decision to obtain a nuclear weapon. In an interview last month, Israeli Defense Forces Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz said Iran “is going step by step to the place where it will be able to decide whether to manufacture a nuclear bomb. It hasn’t yet decided whether to go the extra mile.” Surveying the enormous pressure being brought to bear on Iran, Gantz continued, “I believe he [Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei] would be making an enormous mistake” by manufacturing a nuclear bomb, “and I don’t think he will want to go the extra mile.”

Second, while Twelver Shia theology does speak of an End Times scenario (as do other faiths), there’s no evidence that a desire to trigger the apocalypse is driving Iranian policy. In the same interview, echoing former Mossad chief Meir Dagan, Lt. Gen. Gantz said, “I think the Iranian leadership is composed of very rational people.” This isn’t to diminish Iran’s various aggressive actions, such as its continuing support for terrorism, only to point out that the evidence strongly suggests that Iran’s leaders are very much focused on the here and now, and not the afterlife.

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The Los Angeles Times yesterday published photos from nearly two years ago of U.S. troops posing with body parts of dead insurgents in Afghanistan. Top U.S. officials immediately condemned their actions. “The behavior depicted absolutely violates our regulations and, more importantly, our core values,” Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said. A Pentagon spokesman called the conduct “inhuman,” while White House press secretary Jay Carney yesterday said the troops behavior was “reprehensible.”

But conservative foreign policy chieftain Charles Krauthammer has a different take. Last night on Fox News, he downplayed — but made sure not to excuse — the incident, saying it’s not as bad as people are saying because some of the dead insurgents were suicide attackers and “did not treat their own bodies with respect”:

KRAUTHAMMER: Look, let’s start by stipulating that nobody should treat the body of a dead person with disrespect. However, this is a strange case because the victims themselves, suicide attackers, are people who did not treat their own bodies with respect. They deliberately destroy their own bodies and turn themselves into body parts.

So here we have soldier soldiers in war abusing what is left of the suicide attackers. I find it slightly different from had they been abusing the body of those who died in combat or who died accidentally. It doesn’t excuse them, but I think there is a disconnect here, because suicide attackers are the most criminal of all the war criminals, abusing all the laws of war and generally speaking attacking helpless and unaware civilians.

Watch the clip:

While the soldiers actions are inexcusable, the New York Times reports today that the incident highlights concerns about the breakdown of discipline at lower levels in the chain of command, mainly due to exhaustion and the so-called “stress on the force” from 10 years of war there.

Charles Krauthammer

Deploying probably the single most overworked accusation in the conservative lexicon, Charles Krauthammer condemns the Obama administration’s Iran policy as "appeasement":

[President Obama] began his presidency apologetically acknowledging U.S. involvement in a coup that happened more than 50 years ago. He then offered bilateral negotiations that, predictably, failed miserably. Most egregiously, he adopted a studied and scandalous neutrality during the popular revolution of 2009, a near-miraculous opportunity — now lost — for regime change.

Obama imagined that his silver tongue and exquisite sensitivity to Islam would persuade the mullahs to give up their weapons program. Amazingly, they resisted his charms, choosing instead to become a nuclear power. The negotiations did nothing but confer legitimacy on the regime at its point of maximum vulnerability (and savagery), as well as give it time for further uranium enrichment and bomb development.

No, actually, the negotiations have been a force multiplier for the administration’s efforts to put pressure on Iran over its nuclear program. As one Israeli defense official told me for an article Meir Javedanfar and I wrote about this, the Israelis were initially quite skeptical that engagement with Iran would have any benefit, but now recognize that the effort "contributed to building international consensus" around the problem. Negotiations actually did the opposite of conferring legitimacy on the Iranian regime: they made clear to the world, and to the Iranian people, that the regime, not the U.S., was the recalcitrant party.

As for the idea that we could have had regime change in Iran in 2009 if only President Obama had sided more forcefully with the protesters, I know this has become something of an article of faith for conservatives, but the next person to describe a plausible scenario in which President Obama’s speaking out more explicitly in favor of the Green Movement in 2009 results in the regime’s collapse will be the first.

One can disagree with the Obama administration’s two track approach of engagement and pressure. But to describe that approach — which includes the adoption of some of the most stringent multilateral sanctions ever, successfully supporting the appointment of a special UN human rights monitor for Iran, and unprecedented defense cooperation with regional allies — as "appeasement" is to declare oneself desperately in need of a dictionary.

Cross-posted from Middle East Progress.