Pentagon policy chief and Undersecretary of Defense Jim Miller told Foreign Policy’s E-Ring blog that the United States’ position and policy on Iran has not changed despite public blistering from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“The timeline, from our perspective, includes the question of how long it takes to enrich, and then how long it would take to go from a certain level of enrichment to weapons grade, and other steps in that process,” Miller said. “And so, as we look at that potential timeline we certainly believe, as I said, that we have time.”

Netanyahu has been publicly pressuring the Obama administration to set so-called “red lines” that would trigger an American military response to Iran’s growing nuclear program. And the prime minister kicked his campaign into overdrive after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s publicly rebuked his request. “Those in the international community who refuse to put red lines before Iran don’t have a moral right to place a red light before Israel,” Netanyahu said last week in response to Clinton. And after President Obama rebuffed him on Iran red lines last week, Netanyahu took his case to the Sunday political talk shows here in the U.S.

It turns out that Netanyahu’s campaign isn’t having a lasting impression on Israelis either. The Wall Street Journal reports that a plurality of Israelis polled (41 percent verses 39 percent — and 20 percent who “don’t know”) in a new survey said their prime minister is mishandling relations with the United States on the issue of Iran’s nuclear program.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has echoed Miller, saying last week that the United States would know if Iran decides to push for a nuclear weapon and in that case, there would be time for an appropriate response. The Obama administration has said that it takes no option off the table in its effort to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, including military force.

But also, the Obama administration has repeatedly said that the United States is committed to Israel’s security, evidenced in economic, diplomatic and military assistance. Indeed, Israel’s leaders, including Netanyahu himself, have said this publicly. “President Obama spoke about his ironclad commitment to Israel’s security,” Netanyahu said last year. “He rightly said that our security cooperation is unprecedented.” Israel’s president and defense minister have echoed that sentiment, as recently as July.

“To fully appreciate the audacity of Netanyahu’s demand for still more open-ended American security assurances,” Notre Dame fellow and professor of political science Michael C. Desch said in Foreign Affairs this week referring to Netanyahu’s “red lines” campaign, “it is crucial to recognize just how committed to Israel’s security the United States already is.”

President Obama has said that he won’t allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon. 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, such as those outlined in a new bipartisan expert report released last week. 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, as Miler told Foreign Policy, to pursue a diplomatic solution with Iran, a track the it deems the “best and most permanent way” to solve the nuclear crisis.

A Republican congressional nominee laid the blame for turmoil in the Middle East on “girly men” in the White House.

North Carolina State Sen. David Rouzer (R), the GOP nominee in the state’s 7th congressional district, levied the charge during a speech at a Tea Party Express rally in Wilmington on Sunday. If Romney is elected, Rouzer said, those perpetrating recent violence in the Middle East are going to “cut it out a little bit [...] because now we have real men in the White House.” An audience member shouted “No girly men!” prompting Rouzer’s approval: “That’s right, no girly men.”

ROUZER: When we get [Romney and Ryan] in you are going to see a big change, you’re going to see number one that America is going to be respected again around the world. You’re going to see all this turmoil that’s taking place, you’re going to see them look up and say guess what, the American people have spoken and maybe we need to cut it out a little bit, maybe we need to tone it down a little bit, because now we have real men in the White House.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: No girly men!

ROUZER: That’s right, no girly men.

Watch it:

When President Obama was asked by reporters in December about GOP charges that his foreign policy isn’t tough enough, he responded curtly, “Ask Osama bin Laden and the 22 out of 30 top al-Qaeda leaders who’ve been taken off the field whether I engage in appeasement.”

Rouzer first earned notoriety in June when he pushed a bill through the North Carolina Senate that banned the state from using scientific predictions of upcoming sea-level rise. Stephen Colbert lauded the move in a Colbert Report segment: “If your science gives you a result you don’t like, pass a law saying the result is illegal. Problem solved.”

Mother Jones is out with a new video from a high-dollar fundraiser for Mitt Romney in which Romney says he believes a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is “unthinkable” and that his policy will be to “kick the can down the the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it.”

Romney’s comments came at the same fundraiser in which Romney said he’s not concerned about 47 percent of Americans “who are dependent upon the government” and believe they’re entitled to food and shelter.

Romney has previously said he supports a two-state solution but in the video uncovered by Mother Jones, the GOP presidential nominee indicates he has no interest in actively pursuing peace:

ROMNEY: I’m torn by two perspectives in this regard. One is the one which I’ve had for some time, which is that the Palestinians have no interest whatsoever in establishing peace, and that the pathway to peace is almost unthinkable to accomplish. Now why do I say that? Some might say, let’s see the Palestinians have the West Bank, and have security and set up a separate nation for the Palestinians. And then come a couple of thorny questions. [...]

And I look at the Palestinians not wanting to see peace anyway, for political purposes, committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel, and these thorny issues, and I say, “There’s just no way.” And so what you do is you say, “You move things along the best way you can.” You hope for some degree of stability, but you recognize that this is going to remain an unsolved problem. We live with it in China and Taiwan. All right, we have a potentially volatile situation but we sort of live with it, and we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it. We don’t go to war to try and resolve it imminently.

Watch the video:

But when asked recently if he supported the two-state solution by the Israeli paper Haaretz, Romney said:

“I believe in a two-state solution which suggests there will be two states, including a Jewish state. I respect Israel’s right to remain a Jewish state. The question is not whether the people of the region believe that there should be a Palestinian state. The question is if they believe there should be an Israeli state, a Jewish state.”

While Romney does pay lip service to the two-state solution, publicly, his rhetoric at the fundraiser mirrors much of what he’s been saying throughout the campaign. The “Israel” issue page on his campaign website makes no reference to a “two-state solution” or a “Palestinian” state. He said earlier this year that now is not to the time to be talking about a peace process between the Israelis and Palestinians. So Romney has never really been interested in a two-state solution, he was just more up front about it at his fundraiser.

During an appearance on CNN’s Starting Point on Monday, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) could not explain when President Obama “apologized” for the United States, despite repeatedly claiming that he went on an “apology tour” across the Middle East shortly after becoming president.

Since violence broke out across the region, Republicans have charged that Obama’s “defeatist” policies have caused the unrest and contributed to the death of Libyan ambassador Christopher Stevens. But pressed to detail where Obama has apologized for America by CNN host Soledad O’Brien, King came up short:

O’BRIEN: Never once in that speech, as you know, which I have the speech right here. that was — he never once used the word “apology.” He never once said “I’m sorry.”

KING: Didn’t have to. The logical — any logical reading of that speech or the speech he gave in France where he basically said that the United States can be too aggressive. [...]

O’BRIEN: Everybody keeps talking about this apology tour and apologies from the President. I’m trying to find the words ‘I’m sorry, I apologize’ in any of those speeches. Which I have the text of all those speeches in front of me. None of those speeches at all, if you go to factcheck.org which we check in a lot, they all say the same thing. They fact check this and they say this whole theory of apologies…

KING: I don’t care what fact check says.

O’BRIEN: There are fact checks. You may not care, but they’re a fact checker.

KING: No. Soledad. Any commonsense interpretation of those speeches, the president’s apologizing for the American position. That’s the apology tour. That’s the way it’s interpreted in the Middle East. If I go over and say that the U.S. has violated its principles, that the United States has not shown respect for islam, that’s an apology. How else can it be interpreted?

O’BRIEN: I think plenty of people are interpreting it as a nuanced approach to diplomacy is how some people are interpreting it. So I don’t think that everybody agrees it’s apology.

Watch it:

As the Washington Post put it, “the apology tour never happened.” Rather, shortly after becoming president, Obama traveled to the world introducing himself and differentiating his foreign policy from that of President Bush. “This is typical of many new presidents,” including Bush himself, who “quickly broke with Clinton administration policy on dealings with North Korea, the Kyoto climate change treaty and the international criminal court.”

The manufactured attack, which Republicans kicked off in 2009, “feeds into a subterranean narrative that Obama, with his exotic, mixed-race background, is not really American in the first place.”

Fox News on Friday hosted Paul Wolfowitz, a key architect of the war in Iraq, to discuss an alleged “failure of the Obama doctrine in the Middle East,” as host Megyn Kelly described it. Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer made the (bogus) charge yesterday on Fox, and Kelly, without any sense of irony, asked Wolfowitz to respond. Krauthammer “is exactly right,” the former Bush administration official said.

Yet Wolfowitz later backhandedly praised Obama’s Middle East policy, lamenting that the successes of the new democracy in Libya (of which President Obama’s Middle East policy helped bring about) don’t get much media attention:

HOST MEGYN KELLY: Your thoughts on Charles Krauthammer’s assertion that this is — what we are witnessing now is the failure of the Obama doctrine in the Middle East.

WOLFOWITZ: I believe that what Charles Krauthammer said is exactly right about the apologetic posture that Obama has taken with the Muslim world, in particular the Arab world. [...]

In Libya it’s very important to emphasize that your viewers may not know because this doesn’t get covered but back in July they had an election. The Libyan people voted freely and fairly for the first time in over forty years and the Muslim Brotherhood came in a distant second and these extremists who seem to be behind the attacks … didn’t even show. ….

Watch the segment:

So things are going relatively well in Libya, but Obama’s Middle East policy is a failure. Got it.

“Our viewers may not know that you were one of the people who believed that we needed to go to war in Iraq,” Kelly told Wolfowitz. Believed? Try: Paul Wolfowitz was a high ranking Bush administration official who pushed this country into a needless war that wound up costing trillions of dollars, thousands of American lives, and tens of thousands wounded — not to mention the cost in Iraqi lives and treasure.

And Wolfowitz was the one who rebuked a high ranking U.S. military officer who said (rightly as it turned out) the United States would need hundreds of thousands of troops to go to war in Iraq. “The notion that it will take several hundred thousand U.S. troops to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq, are wildly off the mark,” Wolfowitz said in February 2003.

“When weighing [the] possible benefits against the costs of the Iraq intervention,” CAP’s Matt Duss once observed, “there is simply no conceivable calculus by which Operation Iraqi Freedom can be judged to have been a successful or worthwhile policy.” And Fox hosts Wolfowitz to talk about some fantasy about the failure of the current president’s Middle East doctrine? Very rich indeed.

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.