Richard Falk, the UN rapporteur for human rights in the Palestinian territories, was sharply admonished by Ambassador Susan Rice and UN Chief Ban Ki Moon after he posted a blog questioning the “official explanations” for the Sept. 11 attacks. Falk responded by defending his comments, and claimed that they were “not connected with my UN role.”

But today, UN Watch released audio of Falk expressing doubts about the “official version” of what happened on Sept. 11 during an appearance on the conspiracy-theorist radio show Truth Jihad. On the show, Falk spoke briefly about his role at the UN. Read More

According to the Washington Post, in a briefing for reporters traveling with President Obama in South America, National Security Adviser Thomas E. Donilon said that command of the Libyan conflict would be transferred, possibly to NATO, in “days, not weeks,” and described the goal of the first phase of the mission as “crystal clear.”

“The focus right now was on a direct threat to citizens” of Libya, he said, “in response to requests” from Arab governments and under last week’s UN resolution authorizing member states to take “all necessary measures” to protect civilians. “This is a limited-in-scope-duration-and-task operation,” Donilon said of the U.S. role. U.S. forces will quickly move into the background, he said, providing jamming of Libyan government communications, surveillance and intelligence, and refueling for coalition aircraft.

Then we read this:

Donilon and [Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike] Mullen said that while the short-term goal was to remove the threat to Libyan civilians, other efforts would bring about Gaddafi’s increasing international isolation, including previously adopted economic sanctions, an arms embargo, and a travel ban on members of his family and government, and help persuade his remaining supporters in Libya to abandon him.

But they stressed that while Obama has called for Gaddafi to step down, unseating him is not an objective of the military operation.

This whole account is problematic. Read More

When Muammar Qaddafi began to re-conquer Libya it briefly appeared that only the moderate and nominally “pro-American” dictatorships in the Middle East were at risk, but the hard and violent anti-American regimes aren’t yet in the clear. The region-wide revolt is now hitting Syria and will almost certainly grow.

In the southern city of Daraa, along the border with Jordan, regime opponents set fire to the local Baath Party headquarters, a courthouse, and two government-run phone company offices. Police officers fired live rounds into crowds of demonstrators, but Bashar al-Assad also dispatched government officials in the hopes of making some kind of amends.

If Libyans are willing to stand up to the ruthlessness of Qaddafi, and if the West is willing to back them, Syria’s tyrant should be deathly afraid. And here is a country where we don’t need to worry quite so much about what might replace the regime if it falls. Read More

From the folks at HBO who brought us the absurdly skewed dramatization of the 2000 election, comes a new miniseries detailing the political career of the left’s favorite villain, Vice President Dick Cheney:

The mini, which will be based on the bestselling book [Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency] and the Frontline documentary The Dark Side, tells the story of Richard Bruce Cheney from his early days as Donald Rumsfeld’s protégé in the Nixon administration, to the nation’s youngest Chief of Staff under President Ford, to serving as Secretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush, through two controversial terms as Vice President under President George W. Bush.

And from the looks of the production team, there’s little hope that this will be halfway impartial. The book that it will be based on, Barton Gellman’s Angler, portrays the former vice president as the ruthless puppet-master of the Bush administration. According to Gellman, his book exposed “a man of deep conviction and remorseless will who reshaped his office and his times.”

The book is the subject of a takedown by Christopher Willcox at the Weekly Standard, who wrote, “Angler is most notable for is its obvious animus and its disregard for the traditional newsman’s separation of church (editorial opinion) and state (fact-based reporting).”

The series, which is still in the development stages, may be worth watching just for the sheer entertainment value. Deadspin also notes that the Cheney film will be the “second HBO longform project about prominent Republican party figures announced in the past few weeks. The pay cable network also has greenlit Game Change, a Jay Roach-directed movie, which follows John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign from his selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate to their ultimate defeat in the general election.”

What Deadspin doesn’t mention is that Game Change also portrays President Obama’s candidacy in a less-than-flattering light at times. Based on its previous political films, HBO has shown that it’s willing to depict high-profile Republicans in a gratuitously unfavorable way, so it will be interesting to see if it does the same for prominent Democrats.

Media watcher Howard Kurtz is generally a keen observer of how the media works, but his piece in Newsweek about National Public Radio’s troubles shows that for all of his smarts, the longtime Washington Post/CNN figure is still too far inside the Beltway to understand why the network is viewed as a government-funded jobs program for liberal journalists.

According to Kurtz, NPR’s problems can be put down to bad, inarticulate management that has wrongly allowed it to be put on the defensive. All the talk about the liberal bias of the network is just so much hooey, says Kurtz who approvingly quotes a number of hardworking NPR journalists claiming that they are accused of being too conservative as often as they are called liberals. That may be true but it just shows that a lot of those who listen to the left-leaning NPR would probably be comfortable with the even more radical Radio Pacifica and other far left outlets that do, in fact, make NPR look fairly moderate. The fact that a liberal stalwart like Congressman Henry Waxman thinks NPR is “objective” illustrates how off-kilter the network’s political compass really is. Read More

Yemeni domestic politics are such a Mulligan stew that it’s hard to identify “sides” or predict outcomes. Iran provides support to at least one ethnic rebel group (the Houthi Zaidi Shias of the northwestern province), and al Qaeda works with some of Yemen’s homegrown Sunni extremists. It would be optimistic to identify a unified Yemeni opposition with a true political agenda. The neighboring Saudis and Omanis have relied on the Ali Abdullah Saleh regime to impose order on the fractured nation. U.S. prosecution of the war on terror depends heavily on cooperation from the Saleh government. The multinational coalition against piracy is increasingly relying on such cooperation as well.

So it’s not the best of news that Monday saw the defection of several of Saleh’s most senior military commanders to the opposition. Some media reports indicate that Saleh’s senior tank commander has deployed armored forces against the government loyalists in Sanaa. These moves are especially significant because of the geographic commands involved: the Northwestern Military District, where Sanaa is located, and the Eastern Military District, which Saleh has little hope of holding with the forces that remain loyal. Two lower-ranking generals who command forces in smaller areas have also thrown in with the opposition. Read More

One Libya narrative that’s been gaining traction is that the female members of the Obama foreign policy team – Clinton, Rice, and Power – were the ones who finally pushed the president to take military action. While this is an interesting piece of trivia, it’s not particularly significant. After all, it doesn’t make much of a difference whether the more hawkish members of the administration are men or women.

But for some reason (macho insecurity? Pride? Self-aggrandizement?), the media meme appears to have particularly irked Obama. Mike Allen reports in the Playbook this morning:

The White House is pushing back hard against a narrative that started in the blogosphere, was echoed in weekend papers, and culminated on the front page of today’s Times of London, with the tease, “The three women who persuaded the President to take action,” and photos of Secretary Clinton; Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations; and Samantha Power, the senior director for multilateral affairs on the National Security Staff. Top aides insist that it was Obama who exerted decisive leadership throughout the debate, making calls behind the scenes to “nudge” allies, expressing impatience when he wasn’t given options responsive to events on the ground, and forcing his team back to the drawing board.

A senior administration official griped to Allen that “this notion of a gender split is just totally fabricated.”

“I know of male staff that were in favor of action; I know female staff that were not,” said the official. “At the end of the day, what mattered to the president was 1) the clear information that indicated Qaddafi would create a humanitarian crisis in Benghazi, and the message that would send Libya’s neighbors and the world, and 2) that there was a true international coalition.”

The most amusing part of this story is that Obama is apparently so concerned about the perception that his foreign policy was driven by a bunch of women that he felt the need to “push back hard” against the narrative. If anything, you’d think he’d embrace this story, but instead he seems to be almost embarrassed by it.

Mark Levin has offered a long rebuttal to my post about about the Bush record. Herewith, my counterpoints:

1. Mark says, “[W]hen Pete says that Bush never supported amnesty, he’s incorrect. Bush supported massive amnesty, but was loath to admit it, and he did so without learning from Reagan’s experience.”That statement is false. “Amnesty” means, by definition, to exempt from penalty. The Bush position was that illegal immigrants who have roots in our country and want to stay should have to pay a meaningful penalty for breaking the law, including (a) paying a fine, (b) making good on back taxes, (c) learning English and (d) working in a job for a number of years. People who met those conditions would be able to apply for citizenship — but approval would not be automatic. In addition, they would have to wait in line behind those who played by the rules and followed the law.

Now one may believe the penalties Bush recommended should have been more punitive. But Mark’s assertion that Bush’s position constitutes amnesty, no matter how often he repeats it, is incorrect. President Reagan, on the other hand, provided illegal immigrants with blanket amnesty and defended the idea in principle in his 1984 debate with Walter Mondale.  Read More

Sarah Palin has said and done a lot of the wrong things in the last several months. But today she made no missteps. The former Alaska governor is in Israel today, wondering why Israelis (and American Jews) are so defensive about asserting their rights (especially in Jerusalem) and taking on their critics.

Palin’s right about that, though one imagines that the discussion about her comments will center solely on her presidential ambitions. Her trip to the Jewish state does have some of the flavor of the traditional New York mayoral candidate tour that used to include mandatory visits to the three “I’s” — Ireland, Italy ,and Israel. As I’ve written before, showing respect for the sensibilities of the voters may be put down as pandering but it is also a manifestation of how democracy works in that it forces some politicians to at least pay lip service if not more to issues that they don’t actually care about. Those seeking examples of such a trip would do well to cite Haley Barbour’s visit to Israel, not to mention Barack Obama’s mandatory excursion during the 2008 presidential race intended to convince Jewish Democrats that, in spite of everything he had previously said and done, the candidate actually harbored positive feelings about Israel.

But to put down Palin’s Israel sojourn exclusively in that context would be unfair to her. Palin’s concern for Israel seems to have predated her parachuting into national politics in 2008 and is based as much if not more in her evangelical faith than in any delusion that she will attract many Jewish votes should she actually run for president. Indeed, that is part, though by no means all, of the reason why so many Jews distrust and dislike Palin. She has always worn her faith on her sleeve and her strong conservative Christian views have made her anathema to liberals even as those views have also been at the core of her down-the-line backing for the Jewish state. While it is not clear that she would be in Israel (after a stop in India) were she not a potential presidential candidate, she has enough of a record of pro-Israel statements that she is entitled to be taken at her word when she speaks of her affection for that nation.

Max and Abe make good points. Strategists talk about the DIME paradigm: Every cohesive strategy should have diplomatic, information, military, and economic components. By trying to treat the military component in isolation, the Obama administration is proving it does not understand the psychological aspect of war. By telegraphing that Qaddafi could remain, the White House simply tells the Libyan leader that he should hunker down and outlast the airstrikes.

It is essential that the State Department recognize a provisional government in Benghazi now. The White House recognizes the probability that Qaddafi will use terrorists to extract revenge. The Libyans have used diplomats as terrorists before. Why give him the benefit of a diplomatic pouch or give Libyan terrorists the use of diplomatic passports?

Likewise, the Kremlin has yet to get the message that President Obama’s rhetoric has reset relations. If Obama’s interest is humanitarian protection, Russian realists have more monetary motives. Libyan money can corrupt. It led the British government to free the Lockerbie bomber, and it led Assistant Secretary of State David Welch to cash in on his Libyan connections. International oil and infrastructure firms will think twice about reinvesting in Qaddafi, however, if a competing Libyan government can dispute Qaddafi’s contracts. That Qaddafi continues to control most Libyan territory is irrelevant: After all, the international community—with the exception of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Pakistan—recognized Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance, even though the Taliban controlled 90 percent of the country. Likewise, the United Nations recognizes a Somali government that controls even less territory than did Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance.

Ordering military action is the end of the beginning, not the beginning of the end. Alas, it seems that Obama is on vacation in more ways than one.

As Ross Douthat points out in today’s New York Times, our intervention in Libya is more or less a “clinic in the liberal way of waging war.” Which is to say that it’s multilateral, blessed by the United Nations, humanitarian in intent, tangential to the national interest and conducted in a somewhat half-hearted manner without a clear goal such as victory.

These concerns are well founded and the month of dithering before the air strikes began made the task a lot more difficult. The precedents set by similar U.S. interventions, such as the 1999 air war with Serbia over Kosovo ought to worry everyone, especially since, as Douthat notes, the ultimate result there, ethnic cleansing and yet another small unviable ethnic Balkan state wasn’t what Americans set out to accomplish.

But that doesn’t mean that President Obama’s ultimate decision to commit U.S. forces to the fight wasn’t right. The war that we have put ourselves in the middle of may be a lot messier than Obama thought but ending Muammar Qaddafi’s rule of terror is an eminently defensible policy. And if American and other international forces are properly used to achieve that end, then Obama will have, almost in spite of his own distrust of American power and disbelief in his country as a force for good, done the right thing. Read More

Max is correct. A great public mystery is descending on events in Libya: Why is America there? Is it strictly to protect rebels from Muammar Qaddafi or to topple his regime altogether? Weeks ago, President Obama said, “Let me just be very unambiguous about this. Colonel Qaddafi needs to step down from power and leave…. It is good for his people. It’s the right thing to do. It’s time for Qaddafi to go.” Today, ambiguity reigns. Over the weekend, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked on Meet the Press if Qaddafi could retain his rule when all is said and done. “That’s certainly potentially one outcome,” he said. At the same time, reports were streaming in with news of the leader’s compound in Tripoli being targeted by allied missiles.

One gets the sense the Obama administration has confused mission constraint with mission murk.  Americans want to know we won’t be bogged down endlessly in Libya. They are not reassured to hear we are engaged there for an ill-defined purpose. Once the U.S. commits to military action, all options cannot remain on the table.

There is one outcome that would constitute success: Qaddafi’s exit from the world stage. As Max writes in the Weekly Standard, “[Qaddafi] has already threatened to retaliate against ‘all air and maritime traffic in the Mediterranean Sea.’ That is no idle threat, given that in the past he has been responsible for numerous acts of terrorism, including the midair bombing of Pan Am flight 103 in 1988.” Moreover, without getting rid of Qaddafi, the mission becomes exactly what the administration fears most: an open-ended, resource-draining patrol operation. If Qaddafi stays, the protection of Libyans becomes a perennial obligation.

The source of confusion is the White House’s reluctance to wield traditional American power. The president acts as if tentativeness is a virtue that serves to keep leaders grounded and realistic. It isn’t and it doesn’t.  We’ve seen the results of this muddle before. In December 2009, Barack Obama announced in one breath both a troop surge to Afghanistan and an exit date for all troops in the country. Confusion and frustration among our commanders and allies led to the near disaster of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s resignation and Hamid Karzai’s threatening to join up with the Taliban.

The American public will not tolerate the framing of differing mission objectives as a false choice. Obama needs to resolve this confusion quickly and decisively by explaining what is at stake in Libya and leading the effort to rid the world of the man President Ronald Reagan rightly called the “mad dog of the Middle East.” The lesson of Afghanistan and Iraq is, let’s do these things right and thoroughly or not do them at all. Somehow Obama has taken away the opposite message: Let’s be quick and confusing so no one can call us bad guys.  If our commander in chief does not begin to lead this effort with clarity and conviction, he will soon find that being thought of as inconsiderate is the least of a president’s worries.

In a special message for the Persian New Year Nowruz, President Obama listed the names of Iranian political prisoners for the first time since he took office.

“The world has watched these unjust actions with alarm,” said Obama, in a filmed message posted on the White House website. “We’ve seen Nasrin Sotoudeh, jailed for defending human rights. Jafar Panahi, imprisoned and unable to make his films. Abdul Reza Tajik, thrown in jail for being a journalist. The Bahai community, Sufi Muslims punished for their faith. Mohammad Valian, a young student sentenced to death for throwing three stones. These choices do not demonstrate strength; they show fear. For it’s telling when a government is so afraid of its own citizens that it won’t even allow them the freedom to access information, or to communicate with each other.”

Obama’s message came just a few days after the Iranian government ruled that several political prisoners would not be allowed the customary temporary leave for the Nowruz holiday. Last year, high profile political prisoners were permitted to spend New Year’s eve with their families, after posting up to $960,000 in bail.

The tone and substance of the message also indicate an important shift in the administration’s policy toward Iran. After the uprisings across the Middle East, Obama is making it clear that the Iranian government can no longer avoid human rights reforms. It looks like the administration may be taking a page from Bush’s freedom agenda, by beginning to make human rights and democratic reforms a stronger focus of its foreign policy.

There is nothing wrong with wars fought for limited ends–in some circumstances. The Korean War was still a success even if we didn’t reunite the peninsula. More recently the involvements in Bosnia and Kosovo were triumphs even though NATO troops did not march on Belgrade. Likewise there is nothing intrinsically wrong with redefining objectives as a war goes along–starting with one set of ends in mind and then winding up with something else. That’s what the Union did during the Civil War, which started as simply an effort to restore the status quo ante bellum and wound up with a more ambitious goal of eradicating slavery.

All that said, I would be a lot more sanguine about the outcome in Libya if the Obama administration and our allies had done a better job of defining its objectives–and did so in more sweeping terms than we have so far heard. Although Obama and other heads of state have talked about how desirable it would be for Qaddafi to go, his departure has not been made a formal objective of the international coalition. On TV yesterday, Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, even said that the war could conclude with Qaddafi still in power.

As I argue in a Weekly Standard editorial, that doesn’t make any sense–allowing Qaddafi to remain in power would consign us to a costly stalemate. A limited objective makes sense in places like Bosnia and Kosovo where the rebels seek autonomy or independence from the central government–objectives that can be achieved without toppling the central government. But the rebels in Libya are not fighting to carve out a Republic of Eastern Libya. They want to change the government in Tripoli. As long as Qaddafi continues to rule over any part of Libyan territory, the war will go on–and with it a drain on American military resources which are in short supply these days.

To quote Lincoln: “I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.” The sooner Obama and other coalition heads of state recognize that, the better. Then perhaps they will make the commitment necessary to help the rebels toss out Qaddafi.

Beyond that, it is imperative that we also make plans for a post-Qaddafi world. To ensure that Libya does not slip into chaos, we should begin planning now for the dispatch of a peacekeeping force, preferably under the joint auspices of NATO, the UN, and the Arab League. America’s presence should be kept to a minimum on the ground, because our troops tend to be a lightning rod, but we need to make sure that there is not a vacuum of authority after Qaddafi’s eventual departure.  I only hope that the necessary planning is taking place behind closed doors at the Pentagon and Africom (African Command) despite the administration’s troubling failure to articulate clear war aims in public.

Mood swings within political parties are commonplace and notoriously wide, and right now there’s a fair amount of pessimism among Republicans about their prospects for beating Barack Obama in 2012. But there’s a figure in the most recent Gallup Poll that should encourage the GOP and conservatives of every stripe: When asked whether they think President Obama is doing a good job or a poor job at making America prosperous, 55 percent of Americans said a poor job while 36 percent said a good job. To have a 19-point gap on an issue of this salience cannot be good news for the White House; and if gas prices continue to rise, the recovery remains anemic, and the housing market remains weak, both Obama and his party may be looking back wistfully at the 2010 mid-term elections.

There’s a lot of time between now and the next presidential election, of course, and we have yet to see a single GOP candidate formally announce his candidacy. The individual Obama will face matters a great deal — but so do the conditions in the country and the public’s perception of things. And right now, neither is particularly good.

Robert Bernstein – the founder of Human Rights Watch who publicly criticized the group last year for its unhealthy obsession with Israel – is forming a new human-rights organization that will focus on authoritarian countries without freedom of speech.

At the Huffington Post, Ben Cohen compares Bernstein’s new group to Helsinki Watch, a Reagan-era NGO, which held that human rights begins “with the individual person, and not a nation, or a social class, or a religious faith.”

“That a significant segment of the human rights community has lost sight of the original purpose of human rights advocacy can be explained, at least in part, by the resurgence of ‘anti-imperialist’ rhetoric in the years since the 9/11 atrocities,” notes Cohen. In contrast, he writes, Bernstein’s new group Advancing Human Rights “is explicit that its focus will be, in the spirit of Helsinki Watch, upon ‘authoritarian countries without free speech or corrective mechanisms.’”

Many of the most prominent NGOs, like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, spend an excessive amount of time and energy focused on human-rights issues in democratic countries, such as Israel and the United States. In doing so, they ignore or downplay many of the abuses that take place in autocratic, closed societies. The formation of Advancing Human Rights is a welcome development, since it sounds like it will break with the status quo.

After briefly taking down its links to “dossiers” of conservatives, PBS Frontline has returned them, with a note that argued, “We find that the biographies on the Right Web site are not at all fake or fabricated, and seem to be well-sourced.” That the editors at PBS Frontline are unable to differentiate between assertions of opinion on hard-left blogs and fact-checked news sources suggests an unfortunate lack of judgment and professionalism and an organization undeserving of tax-payer subsidy. Let’s take a look at that. PBS Frontline, for example, links to a Right Web dossier on “Office of Special Plans.”

• Right Web sources to Robert Dreyfuss, who was a correspondent for Lyndon LaRouche’s magazine, and dedicated his first book to the discredited conspiracy theorist. In hindsight and with the declassification of documents, most of his allegations turned out to be false and, in some cases, fabricated.
• Right Web sources to Karen Kwiatkowski, who, after writing numerous anonymous articles about The Office of Special Plans (OSP), was called by Congressional investigators to testify on the topic. They discovered she had never been a part of OSP, nor did she have direct knowledge about the subject; she was a fabricator.
• Right Web sources to Seymour Hersh, who allowed personal animus toward the Bush administration to supplant fact-checking, much to the embarrassment of the New Yorker.
• Of course,the charge that OSP “provided the White House with inaccurate, skewed intelligence linking Iraq and al-Qaida that was used to justify the March 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq,” is not accurate. The editors at Right Web did not provide a link to support their statement for good reason: The Inspector General’s report found, “The actual Office of Special Plans had no responsibility and did not perform any of the activities examined in this review.” As for Douglas Feith, the report found he did not act in an “illegal or unauthorized” way.
• Perhaps PBS Frontline might find a source other than Right Web to support the assertion that Harold Rhode worked in the Office of Special Plans? He retired after many years in the Office of Net Assessment, a different office. Does anyone fact-check at PBS Frontline?
• Let’s hope that the editors of PBS Frontline never fact-check the editor of Right Web’s claim that he has published in the Washington Post because neither LEXIS-NEXIS nor WashingtonPost.com seem to have any record of any such article.

If PBS Frontline wants, I can continue to deconstruct the Right Web dossiers, which its editors embrace.  Going back to the sources and determining what’s cherry-picked and what is simply made up is fun to do. PBS Frontline has in the past produced excellent reporting but when PBS plays these political games, it does a disservice to its brand and raises legitimate questions about its judgment and bias.

After assuring both Libyans and Turks that Turkey was not involved in airstrikes on Libya, Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç, of Turkey, said, “We wish that the United Nations had made such resolutions and countries had taken action in the face of incidents in Gaza, Palestine and the other regions.” While Namik Tan, Turkey’s ambassador to the United States, tries to assure Jewish groups that his government really isn’t anti-Semitic and anti-Israel, someone might want to ask him why his boss is calling for airstrikes on the Jewish state?

And perhaps Senators Levin and McCain on the Senate Armed Service Committee might finally want to ask some tough questions about why the United States plans to give Turkey the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter replete with its stealth technology?

Here’s a link to a moving interview with, and story about, a 12-year-old Australian boy, Casey Heynes, who was picked on by a bully, fought back and won, and (thanks to the Internet) became a symbol of courage. 

Casey talks about how hard his life has been as the object of years of cruel bullying (Casey talks about contemplating suicide). There’s also a very touching element to this story. Casey seems like a good kid (his sister, who has defended him, is wonderful); and his willingness to fight back has transformed a boy who had been ridiculed and abandoned by his friends into a hero of sorts.

The popularity of the original video of the fight tells us something socially significant. It appeals to moral sentiments that are deep within us — a hatred for bullies, identification with the underdog, wanting to see justice done. 

Sometimes the good guys do win; and when they do, it’s something we like to celebrate.