As it happens, I agree with the Corner-ites’ opposition to Graham’s proposal, if not their hysteria about the ongoing Islamization of the West. But it’s worth looking a little more closely at the logic of Graham’s proposal. Graham and his close ally John McCain have frequently tried to cast themselves as a “vital center” on issues of torture and civil liberties, but in fact they have proved themselves to be reliably right-wing on these issues; in particular, Graham has been a vocal opponent of civilian trials for terror suspects and of accountability for Bush-era officials involved in the torture of detainees. His belief that the First Amendment might have to be sacrificed in the name of the war on terror is not some out-of-character lapse of cultural confidence; rather, it’s of a piece with his generally stated view that fighting terror should take precedence over civil liberties at home.

Steyn and McCarthy profess to be shocked — shocked! — that the Bill of Rights might be abridged for American citizens as a result of what’s going on “over there.” But in fact, Graham’s proposal is rather mild compared to the views of, say, John Yoo, who suggested in a notorious October 2001 memo [PDF] that the President during wartime can override the Fourth Amendment — and by implication, the entirety of the Bill of Rights — at will, provided he deems it necessary for the war effort. (Graham at least seemed to be proposing that the First Amendment should be restricted through legislation rather than presidential fiat.) Of course, Yoo’s analysis has since been repudiated by the Justice Department, and he was later reprimanded by an internal Justice Department report investigating his conduct during the Bush years. But since leaving the Bush administration he’s been welcomed with open arms by the American right — not least, National Review, which has brought him on board as a contributor along with Steyn, McCarthy, and Stuttaford. If Steyn and McCarthy, at least, have expressed any misgivings about Yoo’s analysis, I haven’t seen them. (Stuttaford is more reliably libertarian.)

Like much of the American right, Steyn and McCarthy seem to have no objection to rescinding the constitutional rights of American citizens provided it only happens to “them” (brown people with funny names) and not to “us” (nice, patriotic white people). They might want to consider, however, whether this is really a tenable line — or whether, as Graham’s proposal suggests, the slope is more slippery than they would allow.

[Cross-posted at Lobelog.]

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In this context, the new memo provides more insight into Israeli decision-making. Dated Aug. 29, 2008 (about two months after the beginning of the Tahdiya, and four months before the beginning of Cast Lead), it notes (emphasis added):

Regarding the Tahdiya, Hacham said Barak stressed that while it was not permanent, for the time being it was holding. There have been a number of violations of the ceasefire on the Gaza side, but Palestinian factions other than Hamas were responsible. Hacham said the Israelis assess that Hamas is making a serious effort to convince the other factions not to launch rockets or mortars. Israel remains concerned by Hamas’ ongoing efforts to use the Tahdiya to increase their strength, and at some point, military action will have to be put back on the table. The Israelis reluctantly admit that the Tahdiya has served to further consolidate Hamas’ grip on Gaza, but it has brought a large measure of peace and quiet to Israeli communities near Gaza.

Note the wording of the bolded sentence. The memo does not say that the Israelis believe “military action will have to be put back on the table” because at some point Hamas will break the ceasefire, but rather because Hamas would like to maintain the ceasefire to strengthen its position. Thus if the memo accurately reflects the Israeli government’s thinking, it would appear that the Israelis were, from relatively early on, contemplating breaking the ceasefire in order to cut Hamas off at the knees. While the memo simply confirms what many had already suspected, it provides yet another reason to be highly skeptical of the decision to initiate Cast Lead.

[Cross-posted at Lobelog.]

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While the poll deals with the American rather than the European context, it is a reminder that Islamophobia and anti-Semitism have typically gone hand in hand. This is worth remembering when looking at the rise of European far-right leaders like Jean-Marie Le Pen of France and the late Jorg Haider of Austria. Hostility to Muslim immigrants forms the centerpiece of their political stance, but their parties have also tended to espouse anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial — a reminder of their neo-fascist roots.

But this anti-Semitism has quite naturally prevented them from making common cause with neoconservatives and other right-wing Zionists in America, whose militant stance towards “Islamism” (very broadly defined) would otherwise make them natural allies of the European far right. Hence we have seen in recent years that the savvier of the European far right leaders — such as Filip Dewinter of the Flemish separatist party Vlaams Belang (VB) — have dropped the explicitly anti-Semitic elements of their platforms and doubled down on Islamophobia. They realize that by portraying themselves as staunch supporters of Israel and allies in the war against Islamofascism, they can acquire a new set of influential and well-connected supporters in America — the likes of Daniel Pipes, Mark Steyn, Frank Gaffney, etc. (Eli Clifton and I wrote about the connections between Wilders, his U.S. supporters, and the VB this past February.)

While focusing on Islamophobia rather than anti-Semitism is certainly a savvy move, whether it is sincere is another question. The VB, for example, is a successor to the Vlaams Blok, which disbanded in 2004 after being convicted of “repeated incitement to discrimination”; its fall was precipated by top VB official Roeland Raes’s widely-publicized Holocaust denial on Dutch television. Despite the VB’s claims to have cleaned up its act since the Raes scandal, the Belgian Jewish community isn’t buying it. They maintain that, regardless of whatever philo-Semitic noises the top leadership makes in public, the group has a clear pattern of associating with anti-Semitic and neo-fascist elements. (Right-wing apostate Charles Johnson has in recent years provided the most thorough coverage of the devil’s bargain that the American Islamophobic right has made with the European far right.) Similarly, although Wilders himself does not come from the neo-fascist milieu, there can be little doubt that his base of popular support contains many of the same elements as Le Pen’s and Haider’s.

All this is to say that Daniel Pipes and his compatriots are playing with fire when they embrace Wilders and other European Islamophobes. While the European far right has proven increasingly willing to say the right things about Jews for tactical reasons, all indications are that hatred of Muslims frequently goes hand-in-hand with hatred of Jews.

[Cross-posted in modified form on Lobelog.]

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It is not terribly surprising that the leading apologists for the Bush-Cheney torture regime — the likes of Marc Thiessen, Thomas Joscelyn, and so on — have refused to respond to Horton’s piece. What is more surprising, however, is that the major U.S. papers have paid little attention as well. After remaining silent all day, the New York Times and Washington Post finally posted an AP wire story on the revelations this evening, but it is nowhere to be found on their main pages. The Los Angeles Times still appears to have nothing whatsoever on the story.

By contrast, the major British papers (with the exception of Rupert Murdoch’s Times) have all followed up on Horton’s piece. It is by now a depressingly familiar pattern that the British media exhibit far more interest in the abuses of the Bush/Blair years than their American counterparts. Still, one would think that a possible triple homicide of detainees in U.S. custody, and the subsequent cover-up by both the Bush and Obama administrations, would merit some U.S. news coverage — even given the almost exclusive focus on Haiti and Massachusetts at the moment.

[Cross-posted at Lobelog.]

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He [Balawi's brother] described Mr. Balawi as a “very good brother” and a “brilliant doctor,” saying that the family knew nothing of Mr. Balawi’s writings under a pseudonym on jihadi Web sites. He said, however, that his brother had been “changed” by last year’s three-week-long Israeli offensive in Gaza, which killed about 1,300 Palestinians.

The brother said that Mr. Balawi was arrested by the Jordanian authorities after volunteering with medical organizations to treat wounded Palestinians in Gaza. The family is itself of Palestinian origin, from a tribe in the Beersheba region.

While hawkish supporters of Israel in the U.S. often urge us to “let Israel decide on Israel’s security needs,” this story is yet another reminder that Israel’s actions do not have consequences for Israel alone. It is depressing to think about how many Muslims are being turned against the U.S. at this very moment by the belief (a correct belief, as it happens) that the Obama administration is complicit in the siege of Gaza.

[Cross-posted at Lobelog .]

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Even these more finely targeted sanctions appear to be more than the Iranian opposition desires. Spencer Ackerman, in his useful discussion of the Green Movement’s position on sanctions, notes that some elements of the opposition have come to view sanctions that specifically target the Revolutionary Guards in a more favorable light, but it appears that most continue to oppose sanctions in any form. (And of course, it appears that virtually no one in the Green Movement supports refined petroleum sanctions, which opposition leaders have repeatedly denounced.)

But targeted sanctions are evidently not gratuitously destructive enough to satisfy the “bomb Iran” crowd. Thus we see Commentary ‘s Jennifer Rubin complaining that such sanctions reflect the administration’s misguided desire to “avoid being too harsh, too effective, or inflict too much damage”. Instead of genuinely “crippling sanctions,” the weak-kneed administration “[doesn't] want to topple the regime nor inflict much damage, just target those ‘elements’ they think are the really bad guys.”

Rubin is rather vague about fleshing out what kind of “damage” she is hoping for. This is hardly surprising, since the unpleasant truth underlying all the chest-beating talk about “crippling” sanctions is that their primary effect would be to inflict suffering upon precisely the civilians on whose behalf she claims to speak. The logic endorsed by sanctions proponents dictates that once the civilian population is sufficiently ravaged and impoverished, they will rise up in earnest and overthrow the regime. A far more likely outcome, however, is that crude sanctions like the refined petroleum bills will merely inflict gratuitous suffering on the population without harming the regime itself — as we saw in Iraq, where “crippling” sanctions killed hundreds of thousands of civilians (at the very least) without weakening Saddam Hussein’s hold on power.

Of course, the fact that she is calling for innocent civilians to be starved and immiserated does not prevent Rubin from engaging in pompous and self-congratulatory rhetoric about her great devotion to “the Iranian people, who are risking life and limb against a regime they know all to [sic] well is evil.” It would be hard to think of a better example of the profound dishonesty underlying what Glenn Greenwald has aptly called “the ‘bomb Iran’ contingent’s newfound concern for The Iranian People”.

[Cross-posted at Lobelog.]

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Still, the protests have helped drive home the message that the logic of the democracy issue is distinct from the logic of the nuclear issue. While hawks in the U.S. and Israel have been more than happy to clothe themselves in the moral legitimacy of the protesters to build support for taking a harder line with Tehran, all indications are that their ultimate goal — a military attack against Iranian nuclear facilities — would prove disastrous for the nascent democracy movement.

Jeffrey Goldberg notes that there are “two clocks” governing the democracy and nuclear issues, writing: “It would be best for everyone if the people of Iran could triumph over their oppressors before the regime goes definitively nuclear. The peace of the world may depend on this.” What he fails to note, however, is that these clocks do not exist in a vacuum. The path that the West takes on the nuclear issue has enormous ramifications for the success or failure of the protesters.

Moreover, the really salient “nuclear clock” does not concern Iran’s march to the bomb — U.S. intelligence estimates that Iran would not have the capacity to produce highly enriched uranium until at least 2013, if it even chose to do so — but rather the West’s march to war. In the next few months, the Obama administration is sure to come under enormous pressure either to launch a military attack or to acquiesce to an Israeli attack; such an attack would be likely to set back the “democracy clock” significantly, and perhaps even snuff out the Green Movement entirely. Our capacity to harm the protesters, in other words, seems to be far greater than our capacity to aid them. And the disjuncture between the “two clocks” has rarely been as striking as at the present — for just as the democracy protests appear to be cresting, the push for war in the U.S. is escalating significantly in its own right.

As noted, it is difficult to judge the democracy clock with any accuracy, and the Green Movement’s prospects seem to vary on a daily (and even hourly) basis. While I would like to believe that we are witnessing the regime’s death throes, any such optimism must be tempered by the knowledge that the regime’s ability to maintain its power by force might long outlast its popular legitimacy. The protesters’ strength is by all indications much greater than it was even a few days ago. But it also possible that the end result for the near future will be neither all-out victory or defeat, but rather periodic and recurring cycles of unrest and repression.

The Washington clock, however, has been advancing more steadily and inexorably. The hawks’ plan, from the time Obama took office, has been to set a firm deadline for diplomacy (the end of the year or before) at which point the U.S. would move to sanctions. When sanctions failed to show results within a few months (as nearly everyone agrees is likely), the push for war would begin in earnest.

This is the strategy codified in last year’s Bipartisan Policy Center report “Meeting The Challenge,” which Jim Lobe aptly described as a “roadmap to war.” The report — signed onto by Dennis Ross, now the Obama administration’s National Security Council point man on Iran — was notable for its apparent insistence that both diplomacy and sanctions were likely to fail, and were therefore worth trying chiefly in order to build international support for an inevitable military attack.

So far, events in Washington have been roughly conforming to the script. Michael Rubin (one of the chief drafters of the BPC report) recently wrote that “over the last year…[the report] seems to be a play-by-play of U.S. strategy toward Iran.” December saw the passage in the House of the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act (IRPSA), the sanctions bill targeting Iran’s refined petroleum sector that has been the top priority of AIPAC and other hawkish lobby groups. A parallel Senate bill was recently delayed, but appears to be on track for passage early in the new year.

But unsurprisingly, the imposition of sanctions seems only to have whetted, not sated, the hawks’ appetite for war. Alan Kuperman’s long New York Times op-ed from last week urging military strikes (which Jim Lobe has already discussed in more depth) was a warning shot, and we can expect more of the same in the months to come. As Marc Lynch writes, “one of the great foreign policy challenges of 2010 is going to be to push back on this mad campaign for another pointless, counter-productive war for the sake of war.”

All this means that 2010 is shaping up to be a very tense year for the Green Movement; it may have to worry not only about the Iranian regime, but also about overenthusiastic or disingenuous “supporters” in Washington and Jerusalem. The democracy clock and nuclear clock have diverged sharply in recent months, and the real question is not whether the Green Movement can triumph before Iran gains a nuclear capability, but whether it can do so before these Western “supporters” deal it a potentially fatal blow.

[Cross-posted at Lobelog.]

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For a comprehensive overview of why this is such bad news, see this post by Lara Friedman of Americans for Peace Now (APN). She includes a very thorough table summarizing all the flaws with the bill and recommendations for how it could be improved. The upshot, she writes, is that the Berman bill “leads to the very problematic conclusion that the US is seeking to inflict widespread suffering on the Iranian people in order to force them to put pressure on their government.”

Sanctions proponents’ reasoning is based on the rather dubious belief that if the U.S. starves the Iranian civilian population of resources they will blame their own government rather than ours. It is much the same logic that has led Israel to blockade Gaza for the past two and a half years, only to see Hamas become stronger than ever as a result; similarly, sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s killed hundreds of thousands of civilians (by the most conservative estimates) while doing nothing to weaken Saddam Hussein’s hold on power.

Of course, the overwhelming evidence suggests that unilateral sanctions will prove ineffectual in any case. In recent years the Iranian government has moved to decrease its reliance on refined petroleum imports in anticipation of sanctions, and without Russian and Chinese cooperation the measure likely to have virtually no bite. But since “effective” sanctions would mean in practice “successful in inflicting hardship on the Iranian civilian population,” then “ineffectual” would seem to be the best that we can hope for — better ineffectual than actively pernicious. Of course, best of all would be to do no harm in the first place. While some seem to be calculating that acquiescing on sanctions is necessary to stave off war, it is hard to see what positive result could possibly come from the deeply misguided Berman bill.

[Cross-posted at LobeLog.]

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But in the meantime, Rubin seems to be doubling down on her accusations, writing a paranoid post that accuses me, Andrew Sullivan, Spencer Ackerman, Matthew Yglesias, and Glenn Greenwald of secretly coordinating with the PR firm Brown Lloyd James (which I confess I had never heard of before) to defend NIAC — and by extension, presumably, to further Tehran’s interests in Washington. Noting that the five of us (along with virtually every other commentator outside the neocon fringe) were not overly impressed with Eli Lake’s attempted expose of NIAC, and that we pointed out NIAC’s record of taking stands against the Iranian regime, she intones ominously that “that sort of smooth-running rebuttal doesn’t just happen on its own.”

While I don’t want to get in the way of a good theory, I would suggest that Rubin could benefit from the judicious use of Occam’s Razor. It is indeed possible, I suppose, that every commentator who has disputed the charge that NIAC lobbies for the Iranian regime has only done so because they are receiving talking points and unmarked cash-filled envelopes from Brown Lloyd James. But let me venture what I think is a simpler explanation: commentators from across the political spectrum have argued that NIAC is not a tool of the Iranian regime because, well, it is utterly obvious that NIAC is not a tool of the Iranian regime.

Obvious, at least, to anyone who closely followed the post-electoral turmoil in Iran this summer — during which NIAC strongly condemned the regime’s violence against demonstrators, demanded new independently-monitored elections, urged the Obama administration to put human rights issues on the diplomatic agenda, called for engagement itself to be shelved so as not to handicap the opposition, and used its blog to disseminate evidence of the regime’s human rights abuses. The NIAC-haters have never adequately explained, or even attempted to address, how these actions are consistent with a desire to further the regime’s interests.

So I have to ask: were Rubin and her ideological comrades even aware of these things? Did they actually pay much attention to the events of this summer? Or were they too busy trying to think of ways that the brutality could be spun to justify killing even more innocent Iranians?

[Cross-posted at LobeLog.]

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Massoud Khodabandeh, former MEK member who is now a leading expert on and critic of the group: “I can say without doubt that Hassan Daioleslam is a member of what I call for accuracy ‘the Rajavi cult’ [referring to MEK leaders Massoud and Maryam Rajavi]. In this respect he is obedient to the Rajavi leadership and would not act in a way inconsistent with their requirements and certainly not without their knowledge or consent (if not to say actual order). The term ‘membership’ describes his relationship to the Rajavis. The MKO, just like Al Qaida, does not have ‘membership cards’. But I doubt very much the MKO would deny that he is a member, just as they never have denied that Alireza Jafarzadeh is a member. Daioleslam’s writing is on the MKO websites. They do not publish just anyone’s writing. Only those obeying organisational constraints.”

Mohammad Hussein Sobhani, former high-ranking MEK member who the group held in solitary confinement for over eight years and then turned over to Saddam Hussein’s security forces for his dissent from offical MEK policies: “Hassan Daioleslam, who is also considered as a member of the Mojahedin Khalq Organisation (Rajavi Cult) had been under harsh criticism for a long time by the cult leader Massoud Rajavi because he would not leave the USA and join the cult under the rule of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. But now, in the new circumstances in which the remnants of the Rajavi cult after the fall of Saddam Hussein find themselves in western countries, Hassan’s social position and his ability to speak English has grabbed the attention of Rajavi. He seems to be next in line to be consumed [for the group's interests].” (Taken from a 2007 article by Sobhani; read the whole thing for a fuller description of the Daioleslam family’s deep involvement with the MEK. Daioleslam’s brother Hossein and sister Fatemeh are both leading MEK members.)

Mehdi Noorbaksh, professor of international affairs at Harrisburg University: “I know Daioleslam very closely and personally. He is not a journalist but a perfume merchant. He was a former member of MKO who was critical of the organization for many years. He was living in Europe for several years until he moved to the United States in Phoenix, Arizona. He was re-bought by MKO one more time and he is now active in selling and defending the positions of this terrorist organization. Those who know him know well that his commitment to MKO is opportunistic.”

Other knowledgeable parties have also spoken privately to me about Daioleslam’s MEK ties; anyone with further information they would like to share publicly should feel free to contact me.

For more background on the MKO, see the State Department’s description of the group on its terrorism page. Human Rights Watch also released a report in 2005 detailing the group’s record of subjecting dissident members to torture and solitary confinement.

Founded as a militant group with an ideology combining aspects of Islam and Marxism, the group is frequently described today as “cult-like,” built around a personality cult centered on leader Maryam Rajavi. The State Department notes that members are “required to undertake a vow of ‘eternal divorce’ and participate in weekly ‘ideological cleansings,’” and that “children are reportedly separated from parents at a young age.” After Rajavi was arrested in France in 2003 on suspicions of plotting terrorism, MKO members throughout Europe protested by setting themselves on fire; two of them died.

The group’s hatred of the Islamic Republic led it to ally with Saddam Hussein, and it fought on the Iraqi side of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. Following the Gulf War, “the group reportedly assisted in the Iraqi Republican Guard’s bloody crackdown on Iraqi Shia and Kurds who rose up against Saddam Hussein’s regime; press reports cite MEK leader Maryam Rajavi encouraging MEK members to ‘take the Kurds under your tanks,’” according to the State Department. The group’s alliance with Saddam made it widely despised among the Iranian community at large, as it remains to this day.

However, its militant anti-Iranian stance has made it a favorite of hawks in Washington. Several of them — most notably Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) — participated in a 2005 Washington conference in support of the group. The same year also saw the founding of the pro-MEK Iran Policy Committee , headed by Raymond Tanter of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP). The MEK’s neoconservative supporters continue to push for it to be taken off the State Department terror list, which it has been on since 1997. One of the many ironies about the MEK is that, for all the groundless allegations that hawks made about Saddam Hussein’s connections to terrorist groups during the runup to the Iraq war, the terrorist group with perhaps the closest links to Saddam was one that the hawks themselves supported.

So it seems that the neoconservatives who have gotten in bed with Daioleslam may have some explaining to do. If he is indeed an MEK operative, as the evidence strongly suggests, then he is, to say the least, a rather unlikely standard-bearer for the cause of democracy and human rights in Iran.

[Cross-posted on LobeLog.]

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