Last Thursday, NBC News reported that the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), an exiled Iranian opposition group designated a “foreign terrorist organization” by the State Department, conducted a series of assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists.

Former CIA official and visiting Georgetown professor Paul Pillar, citing the U.S. government’s definition of terrorism, observed that “with or without confirmation of details of this story, the assassinations are terrorism.” But numerous right-wing pundits and politicians here in the United States — many of whom regularly decry the use of terrorism as a means to political ends — have celebrated the MEK’s alleged attacks.

Appearing on Fox News on Sunday, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani declared that the MEK should be the Time Magazine “person of the year” if they were behind assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists.

An editorial in Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post said on Friday that the MEK deserves a Nobel Peace Prize:

Let’s be frank: Were the MeK to play the critical role in derailing an Iranian bomb, it would be far more deserving of a Nobel Peace Prize than a certain president of the United States we could mention.

And Commentary’s Jonathan Tobin justified the MEK’s action and Israel’s alleged role in financing, arming and training the group:

To those who say it is immoral to use those who have employed terrorism, the only reply can be that it would be far worse for Israel’s government to allow such scruples to prevent them from carrying out actions that might stop the Iranians from going nuclear.

Noticeably, the MEK’s defenders chose not to address the NBC report’s other major disclosure. The MEK reportedly worked with Ramzi Yousef, the terrorist behind the first attack on the World Trade Center, to bomb an Iranian shrine, killing at least 26 people.

The NBC report did not go on to substantiate any direct links between the Israeli government and the assassination campaign, and the MEK denied any involvement in the attacks.

Indeed, the MEK’s American supporters find themselves in the increasingly difficult position of lobbying to remove the organization from the State Department’s terror list while openly celebrating the group’s involvement in terrorist attacks.

Commentary’s Abe Greenwald has written a long piece examining “What We Got Right in the War on Terror” over the last 10 years. It’s worth reading, if only to understand how the George W. Bush boosters are still very much committed to creating their own reality.

To take one example, here’s Greenwald giving Bush credit for the Arab awakening:

It was the Freedom Agenda of the George W. Bush administration—delineated and formulated as a conscious alternative to jihadism—that showed the way. Indeed, the costly American nation-building in Iraq has now led to the creation of the world’s first and only functioning democratic Arab state. One popular indictment of Bush maintains that he settled on the Freedom Agenda as justification for war after U.S. forces and inspectors found no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The record shows otherwise. “A free Iraq can be a source of hope for all the Middle East,” he said before the invasion, in February 2003. “Iraq can be an example of progress and prosperity in a region that needs both.”

And something of the kind has come to pass. “One despot fell in 2003,” [Fouad] Ajami has said. “We decapitated him. Two despots, in Tunisia and Egypt, fell, and there is absolutely a direct connection between what happened in Iraq in 2003 and what’s happening today throughout the rest of the Arab world.”

It’s probably a devastating enough rebuttal just to note that that quote from Fouad Ajami, one of the Iraq war’s most committed cheerleaders, constitutes the entirety of Greenwald’s evidence that the Iraq war spurred the democracy movements throughout the Arab world.

This is understandable, as there is no real evidence for the claim. Arabs themselves clearly don’t agree, as all available polling shows the war to be overwhelmingly unpopular in the region. An April 2010 RAND study also concluded that, rather than encouraging reform, “Iraq’s instability has become a convenient scarecrow neighboring regimes can use to delay political reform by asserting that democratization inevitably leads to insecurity.”

Examining the claim in an article back in July, the Council on Foreign Relations’ Steven Cook concluded, “It is time to put the Bush boosters’ arguments where they belong: in the trash heap of discredited ideas”:

There is no connection between the invasion of Iraq and Arab efforts to throw off generations of dictatorship. Other than helping to shape the Middle East’s discourse about political change, the effects of the Freedom Agenda are inconclusive at best. It is entirely possible that the uprisings would have happened without George W. Bush, or if he had been more like his father. Bush 41 placed a premium on international order rather than democratic change and, let’s not forget, presided over massive pro-democratic change anyway.

Back to Greenwald:

Meanwhile, as the noble call for representative government continues to be heard by Muslims around the region, let us not forget that the one existing democratic country among them is the successful American project in Mesopotamia.

From Saturday’s New York Times:

As leaders in the Arab world and other countries condemn President Bashar al-Assad’s violent crackdown on demonstrators in Syria, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq has struck a far friendlier tone, urging the protesters not to “sabotage” the state and hosting an official Syrian delegation.

Mr. Maliki’s support for Mr. Assad has illustrated how much Iraq’s position in the Middle East has shifted toward an axis led by Iran. And it has also aggravated the fault line between Iraq’s Shiite majority, whose leaders have accepted Mr. Assad’s account that Al Qaeda is behind the uprising, and the Sunni minority, whose leaders have condemned the Syrian crackdown.

Today’s Los Angeles Times:

A series of blasts and gunshots ripped across Iraq on Monday, killing at least 70 people and wounding more than 300 in a spasm of bloodshed that raised fresh concerns that the nation’s security forces might be overwhelmed by insurgents when American soldiers withdraw later this year. [...] It appeared Iraq was in a time warp, a nation still struggling with terrorists, sectarian gangs and militias at a time much of the Arab world is moving to replace extremism through revolutions for democracy.

As my colleagues and I wrote in our May 2010 report, The Iraq War Ledger, there is simply no conceivable calculus by which Operation Iraqi Freedom can be judged to have been a successful or worthwhile policy. The war was intended to show the extent of America’s power. It succeeded only in showing its limits. We’ll be dealing with the implications of that for many years to come, regardless of whether the war’s advocates can bring themselves to face it.

Cross-posted from Middle East Progress.

Neoconservative bloggers have yet to come up with a single name of a major Jewish Democratic donor who says that he or she intends to abandon President Obama — or even other Democrats — because of the (mis)perception that Obama’s forceful push for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict is either anti-Israel or a major policy shift.

As Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent points out, the right-wing meme started to ramp up after a CNBC interview with Democratic donor Haim Saban, who supported Hillary Clinton in the last election primaries and then didn’t give to Obama after he emerged as the party’s candidate. This fact, however, didn’t stop Alana Goodman at the neoconservative flagship Commentary from claiming that Saban “decided to break with the president” — implying that Saban once financially supported Obama.

As ThinkProgress has extensively reported, this sounded an awful lot like an attempt by neoconservatives to gin up a controversy about Obama and Jewish donors in order to use a false premise to set off a chain reaction. Goodman responded to ThinkProgress’s reporting by basically admitting that’s what was happening (and using the term “breaking” again):

[T]he fact that he’s breaking with his party’s candidate over Israel is something that will be widely noted in the Jewish community.

Today, Sargent interviewed the major Democratic donor in question — billionaire  Haim Saban — and confirmed that Saban would still be willing to give money to Obama if the campaign asks despite minor criticisms of the administration:

“If solicited, I will absolutely write a check to the level allowed by law,” Saban said. “I don’t agree that he’s anti-Israel.”

The first part of this statement echoes almost exactly Saban’s comments toward the bottom of his interview with CNBC, raising again the question of whether Commentary was simply seeing whatever it wanted in Saban’s interview. “Will I donate if I am solicited? I will donate,” Saban told CNBC.

Saban does predict that Jewish donations to Obama will fall off. But if, as Commentary claimed, the billionaire is a “bellwether for Jewish voters and donors,” then the status quo of Jewish support for Obama — like Saban’s positions — are likely to hold steady.

What’s more, Sargent reports that Saban himself sees right through the right wing’s ploy of distorting Obama’s positions — as revealed by Emergency Committee For Israel executive director Noah Pollak‘s support for Obama’s big Middle East speech just weeks before his organization came out and blasted it. Sargent writes:

Saban said Obama’s right wing critics were painting Obama as anti-Israel and misrepresenting his positions for political reasons.

“They are twisting his words,” Saban said. “They want to move Jewish votes from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party.”

That’s exactly why Democratic organizers and fund-raisers are already defending Obama against the smears — oh, and, according to Ron Kampeas of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, that includes a fundraiser hosted by two former AIPAC heads in the next two weeks that is expected to raise $1 million in a single night. This is in addition to other major Jewish donors that have already pledged fealty to Obama in the coming election cycle.

So, which way exactly are the Jewish donors breaking again?