How cynical is Arlen Specter? I know. That is sort of like asking how deep the ocean is or how high the moon. But sometimes, following the twists and turns of the five-term turncoat senator’s position on the issues can take the breath away from even those most used to his shenanigans. Take Afghanistan. Once a supporter of both the war in Iraq and the one in Afghanistan, the newly minted Democrat from Pennsylvania no longer sees the fight against the Taliban “as central to our national security” as Tim Fernholz reports in his blog at the American Prospect.

Specter switched parties because he knew he didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of beating Pat Toomey, former congressman, in a Republican primary next year. But because he is now facing a significant challenge for his new party’s nomination from longtime congressman and Iraq war opponent Joe Sestak, Specter has decided to go the former Navy admiral one better and come out against the war in Afghanistan. Cynical liberals spent the 2006 and 2008 campaigns saying that they opposed the war in Iraq because it took troops and effort away from the “good” war in Afghanistan, but those same people want to bug out of the latter conflict now that Obama is safely elected and they don’t have to pretend to take the war against Islamist terror seriously. Specter’s willingness to change positions on a dime outstrips even that record. He not only backed Bush (who saved Specter’s hide by backing him in a tight primary race against Toomey in 2004) but also enthusiastically backed both wars. But that didn’t stop him in a conference call with reporters this week from blasting Sestak for the congressman’s support of the request for more troops to bolster the allied effort in Afghanistan.

So give Sestak points for sincerity because, apparently unlike our president, he was actually telling the truth when he said in previous election years that he wanted to divert resources from Iraq to Afghanistan. The only question here is whether Democratic primary voters in Pennsylvania will fall for the Specter’s incredible anti-war makeover. The latest (Oct. 28) Franklin & Marshall poll of the Democratic primary shows the incumbent senator with a 30-18 percent lead over Sestak. Specter has a big lead in money raised (according to Philadelphia’s Jewish Exponent, Specter has $8.7 million in the bank while Sestak has $4.7 million and Toomey, just $1.8 million). But given the enormous imbalance in name recognition between the two, such numbers can hardly comfort Specter. Interestingly, the same survey shows a Toomey-Sestak matchup next November as a 28-20 Toomey advantage, while Specter leads Toomey in a general election rematch of the 2004 GOP primary by only 33-31.

No matter how you slice it, the mendacious Specter’s prospects look a bit shaky; as do the Democrats’ chances of holding onto this seat in an otherwise increasingly blue Pennsylvania.

Representatives of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany met today to discuss the fact that Iran is making fools out of them. But the results of this meeting will give no comfort to a world worried about Tehran’s march toward nuclear capability. According to the Associated Press, the West is “disappointed” about Iran’s decision to renege on a UN-brokered deal that could have defused the crisis. But despite the clear signals from the rogue Islamist regime that it has absolutely no interest in re-negotiating the pact even under more terms still more favorable to them, “no new sanctions were discussed during the meeting, according to an EU source.”

The anonymous EU official said that “there was no mention of imposing further sanctions against Iran at the meeting. These things are a matter of timing, and this was not the right time for it.”

When will be the right time? “The Western officials said they would hold a follow-up meeting around Christmas.”

And for those wondering whether the UN’s chief nuclear watchdog was doing his bit to raise the alarm about this imminent threat, how about this:

“In Berlin, Mohamed El-Baradei, the UN nuclear watchdog agency chief, pressed Iran to work with the international community. ‘I would hate to see that we are moving back to sanctions,’ El-Baradei said. ‘Because sanctions, at the end of the day … really don’t resolve issues.’”

No, they don’t. Especially when they aren’t actually being agreed upon or implemented.

Right now, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad must be laughing themselves silly at this toothless response from the West. While President Obama circles the globe in a fruitless effort to find support for the sort of sanctions that might force the Iranians to reconsider their position, the Islamist regime continues to delay even the hope of negotiations to buy more time for their program. Obama’s feckless campaign of “engagement” has rightly earned their scorn. After this performance, who could blame the Iranians for believing that the West isn’t serious about stopping them?

Days after the ADL pandered to its liberal adherents with a report that attempted in part to link mainstream conservative critics of the Obama administration with extremists, the venerable watchdog group tilted in the other direction with a blast aimed at J Street, the leftist lobby that seeks to undermine the pro-Israel consensus in Washington. According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, ADL national director Abe Foxman called up the wire service last night to condemn J Street for its attack on Sarah Palin’s recent statement opposing Obama’s stand on Jewish settlements. JTA’s Capital J blog said Foxman termed J Street’s statement “over the line” and wondered whether the group should be calling itself “pro-Israel.”

Palin had expressed support for the settlement movement in a Barbra Walters interview, though her explanation of the need for allowing existing settlements to expand was a bit off the mark. She said it was because “more and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead.” That is more than anybody in Israel knows about the possibility of an increase in aliyah. The argument for settlement expansion has to do with Israel’s rights to the land and its security as well as the needs of the existing Jewish population. This is, alas, another example of the former vice-presidential candidate sometimes having a correct opinion but not knowing the right reason for having it. But in a week when Obama personally blasted Israel for building new apartments in the southern Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo, this is not a moment to quibble about the statements of those who are trying to help Israel rather than cut it off at the knees, as the administration seems intent on doing.

Which is why Foxman was absolutely right to point out that J Street was way out of line. Capital J claims that Foxman asserted that J Street’s refusal to support Israel’s invasion of Gaza, its opposition to new Iran sanctions, its failure to support last month’s congressional resolution condemning the Goldstone Report, and the reaction to the Palin statement raise a “question mark” about the group’s own “pro-Israel” bona fides.

J Street’s willingness to use the settlements issue to jump on Palin, a popular liberal punching bag, illustrates again that its primary reason for being has nothing to do with a desire to back Israel or a peace process that is dead in the water due to a complete lack of interest in making peace on the part of the Palestinians. J Street’s only purpose is to pursue the political agenda of the Left with no concern for the need to maintain a bipartisan pro-Israel coalition. But as much as Foxman’s anger at J Street was on target, we’d have a little more respect for the ADL’s own judgment had the full force of its efforts not otherwise been similarly aimed at delegitimizing anti-Obama and largely pro-Israel conservatives earlier in the week.

Amid the media gang tackle of Sarah Palin as she flogs her book, the refrain that she was — and is — unworthy of respect as a policy cipher and ignoramus is heard again around the land. Liberal pundits still wax indignant about the chutzpah of the Republicans in nominating a person for the vice presidency who lacked experience and good judgment. And yet even as the focus on Palin reached a crescendo this week, the inexperienced person whom the Democrats put at the top of their ticket took his show on the road in Asia, and the negative reviews of his astonishingly bad performance while abroad are still coming in.

As a “news analysis” that appeared in yesterday’s New York Times noted, “with the novelty of a visit as America’s first black president having given way to the reality of having to plow through intractable issues like monetary policy (China), trade (Singapore, China, South Korea), security (Japan) and the 800-pound gorilla on the continent (China), Mr. Obama’s Asia trip has been, in many ways, a long, uphill slog.”

The media did not miss the way the Chinese leadership handled Obama. Even such a purveyor of the conventional wisdom as David Gergen wrote on CNN.com to compare Obama’s poor performance with that of another young and inexperienced president, John F. Kennedy, whose disastrous 1961 meeting with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gave the Russians the impression that the Americans didn’t know what they were doing and that they could be pushed around. That led to the nearly catastrophic showdown over missiles in Cuba a year later.

“Why bring up that story now, as President Obama comes home from Asia?” Gergen asks. “Because it has considerable relevance to his meetings in China with President Hu. Obama went into those sessions like Kennedy: with great hope that his charm and appeal to reason — qualities so admired in the United States — would work well with Hu. By numerous accounts, that is not at all what happened: reports from correspondents on the scene are replete with statements that Hu stiffed the President.”

Gergen is right. Though the most embarrassing moment of the trip was Obama’s obsequious deep bow to the Japanese emperor — which was duly noted by American bloggers and dismissed by the liberal punditry as well as by the White House — the real damage done to the national interest by Obama’s travels is the way he has come across to America’s rivals and foes, not to our allies. The Chinese, like the Iranians and the Russians, all think they have the measure of Barack Obama. He strikes them as a weak man more interested in trying to please and to evoke applause than in standing up for principles such as human rights or even the danger of nuclear proliferation. The occasional tough talk that has come from Obama has been undermined by his relentless devotion to engagement, which has convinced these countries that he is a leader to be trifled with. That is the only explanation for the disrespect that the Iranians have shown to his diplomatic outreach as well as for the harsh way in which the Chinese demonstrated their disdain for the president.

Gergen believes that Obama must treat this as a moment for a “wake up call” to revive his foreign policy. “For the President, the challenge is whether he will start approaching international affairs with a greater measure of toughness, standing up more firmly and assertively for American interests.”

We will soon see whether Obama is capable of doing that or whether his blind faith in engagement as well as his unbounded desire for adulation will lead to similar or worse fiascoes in the future. The problem, as the Kennedy example highlights, is that the country’s margin for error on dangerous foreign-policy issues is limited. Obama’s ongoing failure to act to halt Iran’s nuclear program is evidence of the price the country is paying for the president’s on-the-job education. Those laughing hardest at Sarah Palin’s antics may be enjoying themselves as her media circus rules the 24/7 news cycle. But Obama’s weakness, a fault rooted deeply in his inexperience in foreign affairs as well as in his overweening vanity, has become a major liability for the United States, the price of which has yet to be fully assessed.

Apologists for the Obama administration have been arguing that there is no real difference between his stand opposing Jewish settlements and that of George W. Bush. There was some truth to this when it came to settlements in the West Bank, though this assertion ignores the fact that the Bush administration publicly acknowledged that some of the larger settlement blocs would be retained by Israel in any peace agreement and that building within them was not really an issue. But even the most ardent fans of Obama must understand that there is a major difference between the two presidents when it comes to Jerusalem. Granted, the United States has never formally recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital or formally accepted the unification of the city that was made possible by the Six-Day War. As much as the U.S. routinely protested settlement-building in the West Bank, it never made a stink about building homes in Jerusalem. And that’s where Obama parts company with his predecessors.

Though the administration has backed off a bit on its determination to pressure Israel into a total settlement freeze — a policy that only incited Palestinians to be even more intransigent than before — Obama made a point of personally opposing the construction of 900 new apartment units in the southern Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo. Obama condemned the new housing in an interview with Fox News during which he stated that the apartments could embitter Palestinians in a way that was “very dangerous.”

The president’s decision to speak as if this part of Jerusalem was a “settlement” where Jews had no right to live and build is not just a provocative escalation of the administration’s hostile attitude toward Israel. It also gives the Palestinian terrorists who made the apartment complexes in this neighborhood their personal shooting gallery throughout the second intifada an unexpected boost. Palestinian Authority–backed snipers based in the neighboring Arab village of Beit Jala regularly shot into Gilo during that conflict. Gilo also became more than just a middle-class Jerusalem neighborhood. It assumed the role of a symbol of Israeli tenacity and courage, and the area became a regular stop for visitors to the city. At the time, the United States condemned the attacks on Gilo. The presence of Jewish homes there was not an issue. Even media outlets that were far from supportive of Israel, such as the New York Times, were wont to describe it as a Jerusalem neighborhood, as this report from 2001 by Clyde Haberman during the height of the fighting illustrates. The word settlement is never used once in the article. Today, however, the Times used that word to describe Gilo in the headline of the story about Obama’s broadside.

Though I doubt the White House even thought of it in this context, Obama’s decision to treat as illegitimate Gilo’s existence as a Jewish community is, in a very real sense, a moral victory for those al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade killers whose goal was to make the neighborhood a place where Jews could no longer live. So just as visitors who wanted to bear witness to the determination of Israelis to not yield to terror needed to go to Gilo in 2001, anyone wishing to see just how far the United States has drifted from a position of support for the Jewish state must today go to the same place.

The findings of a report released today from the International Atomic Energy Agency’s inspectors about their survey of a previously secret underground nuclear-enrichment plant have apparently led the group to suspect that Iran may be concealing other nuclear factories. Surprise. Surprise. The unfinished facility near the holy city of Qom was built to accommodate enough centrifuges to produce a couple of nuclear weapons a year, but is, in fact, too small to be useful for civilian uses of nuclear power. That gives the lie to Iran’s protests that its nuclear program is for only peaceful intents, but it’s not as if anyone, either in Iran or elsewhere, actually believed that to begin with. But the point of the report is that this newly discovered plant only makes sense if it were part of a network of covert nuclear facilities that could feed it with “raw nuclear fuel.”

But anyone who is shocked about any of this hasn’t been paying attention to this issue for years. Only two years after the United States issued a ridiculous National Intelligence Estimate denying the reality of the Iranian program, even international bodies like the IAEA are no longer prepared to hedge their bets about Iranian intentions. The reality of the imminence of a nuclear Iran cannot be denied any longer, even by those who would prefer to ignore the peril this development poses to U.S. strategic interests as well as world peace. Experts differ as to the exact time line, but there’s little doubt that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may be in a position to announce that an Iranian nuclear device will be ready sometime within the next few years at the latest.

This also brings into perspective President Obama’s diplomacy on Iran. Having both campaigned on negotiations with Tehran without preconditions and downplayed the human-rights disaster in that country in the wake of a stolen presidential election, Obama seemed to believe he could make a deal with the ayatollahs. But the Iranians rightly sensed weakness and have exploited Obama’s desire for talks at any price. They negotiated a pact to transport their enriched uranium to Russia for safekeeping and then renounced it within weeks without an explanation and have refused Obama’s desperate pleas for them to consider an even sweeter deal. With egg left on his face, Obama has been forced to go cap in hand to Russia and now China to beg them for support for sanctions on the recalcitrant Iranians. The Russians played along, to a certain extent, by expressing their unhappiness with Iran. But you have to forget everything we’ve learned about Vladimir Putin and his foreign-policy priorities in order to believe that the Russians will repudiate their Iranian trading partners to accommodate a prime U.S. strategic interest. Optimism about Chinese help is equally fantastic.

Obama’s amateur diplomacy of apologies and bows can take the U.S. just so far when it comes to manufacturing an international coalition behind the sorts of sanctions that could bring Iran to its knees. Having gambled on a losing diplomatic hand with Iran, the president is now scrambling to resurrect a policy that is clearly sinking under the weight of his naïveté. The latest UN report illustrates just how fast the clock is ticking toward a confrontation that the president seems ill equipped to handle.

Over at the New Republic, Steven A. Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations speaks a few truths about Palestinian politics that aren’t often mentioned. His “The Third Intifada” discusses the likelihood of the current diplomatic standoff between Israel and the Palestinians resulting in a new round of violence. But rather than going the route of conventional wisdom and blaming it all on the hard-hearted Israelis, who won’t make enough concessions to appease their antagonists, Cook goes straight to the heart of Palestinian political culture when he notes that, as in the not-so-distant past, their leaders will resort to bloodshed as a way out of the corner into which they have painted themselves and as a means to bolster their credibility with constituencies that seem only to respect violence.

Another intifada makes no sense for the Palestinians. Another campaign of attacks on Israeli targets has little chance of success and it would, without doubt, cost far more Palestinian than Israeli lives. It would also ruin, as the first and second intifadas did, the economic progress Palestinians have made in recent years and inflict a new round of misery on them. But, as Cook points out, none of that will matter because “if history is any guide, the Palestinian leadership of the West Bank — whether it includes Mahmoud Abbas or not — may again look to a violence to improve its sagging domestic popularity. Throughout contemporary Palestinian history, spilling Israeli blood has often been the best way for competing political factions to burnish their nationalist credentials.”

In an important point often overlooked by apologists for Abbas, Cook also believes that “faith” in the ability or willingness of the new Palestinian Authority security forces to stop anti-Israel terror in the future “seems misguided.” Those forces have been the subject of much positive comment from both Jerusalem and Washington, but Cook understands that in order to maintain their credibility among Palestinians these units will have to turn their guns on their erstwhile Israeli partners if push comes to shove. Since this is exactly what happened in 2000 when the second intifada broke out — when Palestinian policeman who had also received U.S. training joined mobs attacking Israeli positions rather than try to restrain them — why should anyone doubt that another intifada will produce the same result?

But lest anyone conclude that the only alternative to another intifada is a more forthcoming Israeli negotiating position, it is important to remember a few points that go unmentioned in Cook’s article. Far from a lack of diplomatic progress providing a spur to Palestinian violence, it is the Palestinian leadership’s unwillingness to make peace that is the root cause of the problem. Having rejected a state in the West Bank and Gaza in exchange for recognizing Israel’s legitimacy both in 2000 and 2008, it is more than obvious that their real fear doesn’t stem from the unlikelihood of peace but rather from the certainty of a deal if they should actually seriously pursue one. Though Barack Obama gave them a new excuse for dragging their feet this year by trying to make a settlement freeze a precondition for talks, Abbas must follow Arafat’s precedent and choose war over peace because anything less would result in his destruction.

Whether or not Israelis build new homes in their own capital, a point that Cook wrongly acknowledges as a seeming justification for Palestinian unhappiness, rejection of Israel’s existence and belief in the inherent legitimacy of anti-Israel violence is still the core of Palestinian political identity. Unless and until that changes, all we can expect is an endless stream of intifadas undertaken not out of frustration but as a way to avoid making peace.

Rahm Emanuel’s statement today that “no one should allow the issue of settlements to distract from the goal of a lasting peace between Israel, the Palestinians, and the Arab world” may be interpreted in a couple of different ways. Some may see it as a jibe at Israel to give in on the issue so as to enable peace talks to proceed. But the truth is, if anyone has been distracted by the settlements to the detriment of peace, it would be Emanuel and his master in the Oval Office.

Some feared that the White House chief of staff’s speech to the General Assembly of the United Jewish Communities today in Washington might be the latest in a series of tit-for-tat ripostes between the Obama administration and the Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu. However, it appears that Netanyahu’s determined effort to pretend — at least in public — that all is well between the two bickering allies has resulted in the administration’s deciding that increasing the tension between the two isn’t in their interest. Thus, although Emanuel’s talk sought to defend his boss’s feckless pursuit of popularity in the Arab world by distancing himself from Israel at every opportunity, it appears as though he passed on the chance to take any direct shots at Netanyahu.

As for his line about letting settlements “distract” anyone from the goal of peace, if anyone has done that, it has been Obama and his minions, whose recklessness on this issue has led to no end of Middle East mischief in recent months. Obama was determined to end what he termed the George W. Bush policy of allowing “no daylight” between the countries (which was hardly true, as Bush’s secretary of state spent her last two years in office trying to push the Israelis into more concessions to the Palestinians). His decision to pick a fight with the newly elected Netanyahu over a settlement freeze in Jerusalem and the territories was as foolish as it was pointless. The Palestinian Authority and its leader, Mahmoud Abbas, had just turned down yet another generous peace offer from Netanyahu’s predecessor Ehud Olmert. And the administration’s settlement stand merely encouraged the Palestinians to dig in their heels and refuse to talk until Netanyahu bowed to a demand that no Israeli government would ever agree to.

The result is that Obama’s settlement distraction helped further undermine the already weak Abbas and strengthened the hand of his Hamas rivals. With Abbas threatening resignation, there is now a chance that the Palestinians will opt, as they always have whenever they have been faced with a serious policy choice in the past, for an escalation of violence in the hope that more bloodshed will result in greater pressure on Israel. Obama and his hatchet man Emanuel have been chastened by the Israeli public’s strong support for Netanyahu’s refusal to bow to American pressure, and they appear to be adopting a more realistic policy on settlements these days. But their resentment of Netanyahu, who they thought they might topple a few months ago, has done nothing to advance the cause of peace, let alone regional stability. Let’s hope they take that line about distractions more seriously in the future.

It should also be noted that in the same speech Emanuel claimed that the administration has made some sort of progress on stopping Iran’s nuclear program since “thanks to the work of the president, there is strong and international consensus against a nuclear-armed Iran.” Sorry, Rahm, but that consensus existed long before Obama arrived in Washington. The problem today is whether the United States and its allies (who have taken a much tougher stand on Iran than Obama has) will draw the right conclusions from America’s failed attempt at nuclear diplomacy with Iran. On Iran, as well as on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Obama’s first initiatives have been fiascoes. What’s needed now is not rhetoric aimed at reassuring American Jews that Obama cares about Israel but rather a dramatic policy overhaul that recognizes and seeks to correct the dramatic mistakes that have been made in the last ten months.

The defeat of Conservative-party candidate Douglas Hoffman in the special election for New York’s 23rd congressional district was the only bright spot for the Democrats on a night when the governor’s races in both New Jersey and Virginia (states that Barack Obama won last year) were swept by the Republicans. So we can expect the Dems to tout their capture of a seat that had been in the hands of the Republicans for over a century as a rejoinder to those who will say this election is a harbinger of a GOP revival in 2010.

The main talking Democratic point about this race, both before and after the voting, was that the collapse of the campaign of the liberal Republican who had been tapped by the state party to try and hold the seat was due to the intolerance of a radical-Right fringe bent on purging the party of any but the most rabid conservatives. In this way Dede Scozzafava, the Republican candidate who dropped out of the race over the weekend and then endorsed Democrat Bill Owens, was elevated from an inept candidate whose positions were largely indistinguishable from that of the Democrats and who was heading for inevitable defeat, to a martyr for the lost cause of liberal Republicanism. The narrative portrays the Republican grassroots, aided and abetted by national conservative personalities such as Sarah Palin and Dick Armey, as bullies who can’t abide the presence of a pro-choice woman in their ranks and would rather lose an election with a conservative than win with a “moderate.”

The loss of this seat ought to cast a shadow on what was otherwise a big night for Republicans. But the villains here aren’t the tea-party rabble-rousers who sunk Scozzafava, but a local and state Republican leadership that imposed an incompetent candidate on a Republican electorate eager for leaders who could offer an alternative to the Democrats, not someone who would be a halfhearted supporter of Obama’s agenda. The victory of Chris Christie in New Jersey illustrates that there is room in the GOP for Blue State candidates who wouldn’t pass the muster of the conservative rank and file in more conservative states. But the decision to foist Scozzafava on Upstate New York Republicans was a cynical ploy that was always destined to fail even if a credible Conservative-party alternative hadn’t emerged. It is one thing to seek to open up parties to candidates who are not ideological purists. It is quite another to nominate a person whose positions put her on the side of the Democrats on virtually every major issue that Republicans care about. Scozzafava’s candidacy may have seemed like a good idea to GOP big shots, but since she refused to take up any issues that might have rallied the Republican faithful to her side and lacked the ability to appeal to the dissatisfied independent voters that deserted the Democrats elsewhere this fall, what possible chance did she ever have of winning?

The lesson here is not the danger that the right poses to the future of the Republicans but rather that a party leadership that is insensible to the interests of its voters is doomed to defeat. Had the Republicans chosen a candidate who could have counted on the support of the party’s base to start with, the seat could have been held despite the changing demographics in the district. It was Scozzafava’s dismal campaign that lost the seat, not the fact that it was impossible to convince most Republicans that they had no reason to support her.

The New York Times’s Roger Cohen is still obsessing over the fact that the nice Iran he puffed up in a series of controversial and utterly misleading columns last winter was exposed as a lie in July when a ruthless regime stole an election and then brutally repressed those who dared to challenge it. In his latest online column, Cohen ponders why some nasty regimes fall while others survive. It’s a fascinating question but one that Cohen clearly does not understand.

Cohen recalls the way the Communist government of East Germany collapsed when a border guard in Berlin opened the gate to the West. That was a moment in which a tangible crack in the Iron Curtain became a symbolic step that sent the infamous wall and then the entire Soviet evil empire crashing down in ruins. In contrast to that glorious victory for freedom, Chinese Red Army troops obeyed orders to mow down the Tiananmen Square freedom protesters in Beijing that same year. To the dismay of Cohen and the rest of the world, the same thing happened in Tehran this past July when government forces refused to break ranks with their Islamist masters and the leaders of the protest movement lacked the will to directly confront it as anti-Communist dissidents, such as the Czech playwright and future president Vaclav Havel, did in 1989.

Cohen doesn’t know why these different outcomes happened and seems to put it down to an unkind fate he is sure will someday be reversed, at least in Iran if not China. I share that hope, but it’s not very difficult to understand why tyrants fall in some countries and survive in others.

The most important reason is that history teaches us that repressive regimes only collapse when they embrace measures that loosen their hold on the reins of power, not when they are their most brutal. The Soviet Union collapsed not when it was at its most insanely totalitarian under Stalin or Brezhnev but when it was led by a man who hoped he could put a human face on the inhuman ideology of Communism. So long as China’s leadership as well as the Islamist mullahs of Tehran have no scruples about using force to hold on to power, it isn’t likely they will be ousted.

But part of the process by which these regimes lose their will to fight for their own preservation is accomplished via moral pressure. When the cause of freedom in such places is treated as a priority for the West, it can, when combined with the inevitable economic difficulties that such regimes find themselves in, create a loss of confidence in the regime. The willingness of the West to speak up in support of Soviet dissidents as well as protest movements in its satellite states, such as Poland’s Solidarity, helped isolate these regimes and deprive them of legitimacy. But when protesters are ignored by the West (as has been the fate of Chinese dissidents) or let down by the United States (as was the case with President Obama’s soft-pedaling the outrages in Tehran this year), those movements can be dismissed as irrelevant. Would East German guard Harald Jaeger, whom Cohen celebrates, have acted as he did in 1989 had not the protesters been emboldened and his Communist masters weakened by the willingness of the West to speak up against Communism?

Those who serve such regimes will only abandon them when they feel that tyranny is going under, a state of mind that cannot be encouraged when the president of the United States runs to engage and appease their leaders. Those in the West who bolster the legitimacy of despotic regimes via diplomacy should not be surprised when they observe that people who live in these countries and especially those who guard the tyrants conclude from such behavior that the time is not right to take a stand for freedom.

The collapse of President Obama’s daft strategy for “engaging” with the tyrants of Tehran has left his cheering section with some terrible questions. After spending months soft-pedaling Iran’s stolen election, abuse of dissidents, as well as the danger from its funding of terrorists and, of course, the threat from its drive for nuclear weapons, the administration thought it had fixed the problem with the deal it negotiated to have the Iranians ship their enriched uranium out of the country for processing. It was doubtful that the deal would have worked or that the Iranians wouldn’t have cheated. But Tehran’s rejection of the pact that its representatives had negotiated has the Obama camp thoroughly perplexed. Read the rest of this entry »

If Hillary Clinton is unhappy about the abuse she is taking from the Arab world over her equivocal attitude toward Israel, then she should blame President Obama and those of his foreign-policy advisers who urged him to make picking a fight with the Jewish state over settlements one of their top priorities once they took office. Clinton is taking flack for her comment that Israel’s offer to “restrain” the building of housing in Jewish settlements in the West Bank was “unprecedented.”

She’s right, in that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has gone a long way toward trying to mollify the Obama administration on this issue. But having spent much of the past year hounding Netanyahu over settlements in a futile attempt to undermine the Israeli’s hold on power (in fact, Netanyahu’s popularity has grown as a result of his refusal to bow to Obama, while the Israeli public has lost all faith in the U.S. president’s goodwill), the Americans have raised Arab expectations to the point where any Israeli gesture on the issue is considered insignificant. Even more, when the United States reacts to such Israeli gestures with anything but complete contempt, it is interpreted by the Arabs as American acquiescence with the entire settlement enterprise. The Arab world was wrongly encouraged by months of Washington skirmishing with Jerusalem to think that the administration intended to completely ditch the U.S.-Israel alliance. Anything less than a break with Israel winds up being seen as a betrayal of those unrealistic hopes that were engendered by Obama’s ill-advised strategy.

So what does Clinton say in her defense in response to Arab criticisms? All she can do is repeat past rhetoric that attacks Israel on settlements, which does nothing to ameliorate Arab hard feelings. Allowing more “daylight” between Israel and the United States has turned out to be dead end from which the administration cannot extract itself.

But let’s go back to the basics about this whole dispute. The settlements argument was utterly pointless, because even if Israel continued to build everywhere at a breakneck pace, it wouldn’t mean that they couldn’t or wouldn’t surrender territory if a real peace deal was in the offing. But it isn’t. In fact, the Palestinians still have no interest in negotiating with Israel for reasons that have everything to do with the toxic nature of Palestinian nationalism and their refusal to accept a Jewish state within any borders and nothing to do with any gestures the Israelis have or have not made. So the argument with Israel accomplished nothing to undermine America’s standing on both sides of the argument, which is, when you think about, quite a trick.

The bottom line of Obama’s and Clinton’s first 10 months in office is worsened relations with both Israel and the Arab world, with peace just as far off as it was under Bush. All of which should leave us wondering just how much worse off another year of Obama’s foreign-policy incompetence will leave the Middle East.

Should the latest polls that show Chris Christie holding a small lead over incumbent Jon Corzine in the New Jersey gubernatorial race be vindicated by a victory for the Republican in tomorrow’s vote, we can expect Democrats to attribute it to the cycle of scandal and reform rather than as a referendum on their party. But as anyone who has spent much time in the state in the last few weeks can attest, New Jersey provides a test case for the Democrats’ strategy of running as if it were still 2008. Though Corzine’s nasty attacks on Christie’s weight and other purely negative tactics have drawn the most attention, a dominant theme has been the attempt to tie Christie to George W. Bush and Corzine to Barack Obama, a point reinforced by the president’s campaign swing through the state over the weekend. The image of George Bush looming above Christie and another showing Obama and Christie together was omnipresent.

Just as with so much of the national debate about the economy or even foreign policy, the Democrats appear to believe that the mere invocation of Bush and Obama effectively decides any argument. That was the case a year ago, as revulsion against an administration that was widely and not completely unfairly perceived as incompetent in many respects combined with enthusiasm for Obama to sweep the nation. But sooner or later, the Democrats are going to have to stop pretending that anything that goes wrong in 2009 is the fault of Bush and the Republicans. The question is when do we reach the tipping point when a still stagnant economy, a perilous situation in Afghanistan, and failed diplomacy on Iran can no longer be blamed on George W. Bush?

While local political issues and Corzine’s indifferent record are the main reasons Christie has a chance in an overwhelmingly Democratic state, if he does prevail tomorrow, it may also be time for Democrats to finally turn the page in their calendars and stop pretending as if it’s still 2008. While I don’t doubt that there will be races in next year’s midterm elections where Democrats will try the same trick, tomorrow’s New Jersey results may be the moment when they start to realize that voters understand that the party currently in power owns the problems afflicting the nation.

Political bias is never far below the surface in the New York Times. But the Grey Lady’s penchant for inserting its not-so-subtle partisan agendas into even the most arcane subjects must sometimes leave readers scratching their heads. For example, just read today’s Times International section, which is led off by what, at first glance, would appear to be a soft feature about an academic controversy over the Battle of Agincourt, whose 594th anniversary is celebrated today. The conceit of the piece centers on whether the English, led by Shakespearean hero King Henry V, were really as outnumbered by the French as historians as well as the bard have insisted. Did the French have a 5-to-1 numerical advantage, or merely a 2-1 edge before they charged the original “Band of Brothers” and were slaughtered in one of history’s most one-sided battles? Revisionist historians, both French and English, have been trying to debunk the “myth” that England’s warrior king did the impossible in vanquishing — and virtually exterminating — the flower of French knighthood in the narrow field between the villages of Agincourt and Tramecourt on St. Crispin’s Day, Oct. 25, 1415.

But rather than stick to that fascinating subject — fascinating, that is, for students of military history as well as lovers of Shakespeare’s great history play — the Times can’t help trying to inject the debate over Afghanistan into the story. To do that, the author James Glanz attempts to link the Agincourt revisionists with Gen. David Petraeus, the authors of the United States Army’s “Counterinsurgency Field Manual,” and the question of whether more troops are needed for American and Allied forces to win in Afghanistan. This historical flight of fancy leads Glanz to attempt analogizing our current dilemma in the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban to Henry V’s campaign in Normandy, when “France was on the verge of a civil war with factions called the Burgundians and the Armagnacs at loggerheads. Henry would eventually forge an alliance with the Burgundians, who in today’s terms would become his ‘local security forces’ in Normandy, and he cultivated the support of local merchants and clerics, all practices that would have been heartily endorsed by the counterinsurgency manual.” The piece then goes on to claim that the English were eventually defeated in the Hundred Years War because Henry’s alliances drove his allies’ enemies into his foes camp.

This is, of course, a vast distortion of history. Unlike the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, which seeks to defeat terrorists and establish in those two countries stable and hopefully democratic governments that will not be a threat to their neighbors or to the West, Henry just wanted to own as much of France as he could. The English king already had ancestral rights to Normandy and Calais and, through some complex genealogy, contrived to make a claim for the French throne (“Cheerly to sea, the signs of war advance, no king of England if not king of France.”) Far from facing a popular insurgency, his duel with the French king Charles VI was a conflict between two armies that despoiled and oppressed the peasantry with impunity. A decade after Henry’s victory and after his untimely death only a few years after Agincourt, Joan of Arc would help to inspire feelings of French nationalism that would eventually help sink the English cause. But fatigue and misgovernment by the nobles who ruled in the name of Henry’s infant successor led to civil war at home and the eventual English defeat in France, which Glanz clearly is seeking to link to current American efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. So the obvious point here is that even brilliant American victories in the field will eventually give way to defeat on foreign shores.

This concept gives us very little insight into Agincourt (for a better understanding of the battle there is no substitute for historian John Keegan’s classic account in his “Face of Battle”) or Henry V. But perhaps the Times has a point when it comes to the principle of leadership. Glanz’s example should perhaps deter us all from following him into the tangle of historical analogies (“once more into the breach dear friends”) but one cannot but notice that England prevailed in 1415 because of a skilled veteran army led by a young man who had risen above the shame of a misspent youth to become a brilliant national leader. He was followed in office by a sovereign who lacked his father’s marshal virtues and decisiveness and whose character was best remembered for a desire to please everyone. George W. Bush was hardly the reincarnation of Henry V, at least not the Shakespearean hero, though their behavior as the sons of famous fathers is strikingly similar. Yet let us pray that the dithering and the indecisiveness that characterizes the war leadership of the Barack Obama administration does not lead to the same results in the vital battles against our Islamist foes as the ones Henry VI’s forces achieved in France. One needn’t have Shakespeare’s “muse of fire” to understand that victory in war does not depend on apologies.

For most of the past few years, liberals who claim to care about human rights have pointed to the disaster in the Darfur region of Sudan as the prime example of the failure of the international system to act against genocide. The Bush administration’s halting efforts to isolate Sudan were consistently branded as insufficiently militant despite the rhetorical lip service that Washington paid to the need to do something about stopping the killing there during this period. Sanctions were enacted, but making it difficult for Sudan’s threadbare economy to interact with the West did not constitute much leverage. Sudan retained the support and the patronage of the Muslim world. In the absence of a real threat to the regime from either the West or concerned African nations, Sudan had no reason to worry.

But now the chief liberal icon of the moment has taken his philosophy of “engagement” with dictators to the next level by a policy of outreach to the government that the United States has accused of genocide in Darfur. On Monday, after months of internal arguments about the best way to deal with Sudan, the administration announced it would reward the country’s murderous dictator, President Omar Hassan al-Bashir — a man currently under indictment by the International Criminal Court for his role in directing the murder of hundreds of thousands of people — with economic incentives to try and bribe him to stop behaving in such a beastly fashion.

The idea of appeasing al-Bashir was enough to give even the Obama cheerleading squad at the New York Times editorial page pause; it demurred from its usual unflinching support to express a degree of skepticism about the idea that lifting sanctions will change the behavior of this rogue regime or cause it to no longer grant safe haven for terrorists. While this switch from sanctions to engagement fits in with the Obama foreign-policy template, can the same people who were appalled by Bush’s failure to act be persuaded that al-Bashir can be charmed into abandoning genocide?

Apparently the American Jewish World Service, an advocacy group that has ridden the Darfur issue for all it’s worth and that has, to its credit, done a lot to raise awareness about the issue, thinks so. Ruth Messinger, the former New York mayoral candidate who has pursued a successful second career running the AJWS, had nothing but praise for Obama, stating, “With an administration that is unified in its commitment to these priorities and to leading the international community in active engagement on all of these fronts, we believe that lasting peace in Sudan is well within reach.”

Unlike Messinger, the Times’s editorial board is not so besotted with Obama that it isn’t worried about a secret plan to pay off a killer to stop murdering people, and rightly concludes by warning that Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “must be held to account if it fails.” But don’t expect the same liberal groups that railed against Bush to take to the streets to do that. When it comes to Obama, even a human-rights group that has dedicated itself to the Darfur issue is prepared to swallow a policy of appeasement.

The latest celebration of Barack Obama’s celebrity Nobel Prize came from a predictable source: a celebrity philanthropist. The Irish pop singer Bono, who is the front man not so much for a band these days but for Western guilt about third-world poverty, weighed in with a lengthy paean to the greatness of Obama in Sunday’s New York Times.

Much of this is the usual pap about how “the virtual Obama is the real Obama” who “might deserve the hype” because he represents the America of “King, M.L., Jr., and Dylan, Bob,” as opposed to the bad America that Obama swept away last November. Bono is all for a “rebrand, restart, reboot” of this country, by which he means in no small part the “administration’s approach to fighting nuclear proliferation and climate change, improving relations in the Middle East,” though, for all intents and purposes, the former is nothing more than an ineffectual attempt to appease Iran, and the latter is a policy that has alienated and isolated the state of Israel.

Yet in the midst of an anecdote in the piece that was meant to impress readers with the author’s importance, Bono undermines his rebranding argument. While informing us that Gen. James Jones called him for advice after leaving NATO and before joining the Obama administration, he lets drop that the model of “smarter aid” that he supports was actually a program championed by the president that his Nobel-laureate hero uses as the template for everything that was wrong about America. That’s right, according to Bono, the one concrete example of something good that America is doing was “President George W. Bush’s Emergency Program for AIDS Relief and the Millennium Challenge Corporation,” which was, according to the singer, “beginning to save lives and change the game for many countries.” He goes on to explain that “this was a moment when America couldn’t get its cigarette lighted in polite European nations like Norway; but even then, in the developing world, the United States was still seen as a positive, even transformative, presence.” He neglects to add that if this is the case, perhaps the fact that the good burghers of Oslo don’t like Bush’s America has more to do with their own ideological baggage than our actual shortcomings.

The point is, the bad America that Europe and professional do-gooders like Bono — who for all of his championing of “smart” aid here exemplifies the drive to pump traditional dumb aid to the third world, which does nothing to aid the people or the economies of those nations but does enrich local elites while allowing Western elites who support such measures to feel better about themselves — despise was actually good for the third world.

Bono repeats the usual claptrap that in an age of counterinsurgency conflict in which American “might doesn’t make right,” it is Obama’s celebrity power that will keep us safe. But he forgets that it was American military power that stopped the genocide of Muslims in the Balkans and liberated Afghanistan from the rule of the Taliban (a victory that may be thrown away if Obama listens to Joe Biden), not multilateral diplomacy. And it is the absence of American will to use that power to stop genocide in Sudan (as was the case in Rwanda in the 1990s) that allows genocide in the third world to continue, not an insufficient amount of American apologies or appeasement of Islamist sensibilities that has the world so upbeat about Obama.

Bono is right that America remains a powerful symbol of good for the rest of the world. But the power of the idea of America is one that is based on its being a beacon of political and economic liberty, not a nation that defers to Europeans who mistake appeasement and shameless appeals for popularity for principle.

The New York Times’s online columnist Roger Cohen has had some distractions this year, but he hasn’t let it deter him from his idée fixe about the State of Israel. Having started the year by claiming that a few interviews with a few no-doubt terrified representatives of the remnants of Iranian Jewry justified his view that Iran’s Islamic Republic was run by people who were not the vicious tyrants that Israelis and American conservatives claimed they were, events overwhelmed his thesis. Cohen’s reporting from Iran conjured up memories of his Times predecessor Walter Duranty (whose whitewashes of Stalin earned him a Pulitzer Prize) here and the disgust of observers across the political spectrum, but even he was forced to notice that the Khamenei-Ahmadinejad regime was not so nice after they stole an election and brutally repressed dissent.

But Cohen was and is undeterred, because the point of his bouquets thrown in the path of the mullahs was not so much a desire to make them look good but to make Israel look bad. His worry all along was that the justified concerns of both Israelis and Americans about Iran’s nuclear-weapons program would distract the world from what he thinks ought to be its priority: pressuring the Israelis to make concessions to Palestinians who don’t want to make peace with it and making sure that virtually every measure of Israeli self-defense is falsely branded as excessive or a war crime. Even after personally witnessing the horror enacted on the streets of Tehran by Ahmadinejad’s goon squads, what really gets Cohen’s goat is the sight of a leader of Israel standing up for his country and trying to draw the attention of the world to the barbarism that threatens its existence.

Thus, while Cohen’s column in today’s Times resurrects his familiar tropes about the leaders of Iran being “rational” and “proud” (phrases that were put in storage while the memories of this summer’s outrages were fresh in the public mind), his anger is reserved for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his speech that opened the current session of the Knesset this week in which he outlined the threats to his nation. Cohen is offended by Netanyahu’s invocation of the Holocaust even though slaughter of the Jews and extinction of their state remains the goal of its Islamist foes. He’s also particularly offended by what he considers to be “Israeli exceptionalism” — the idea that the Jewish state is an isolated outpost of democracy and civilization surrounded by hostile neighbors and terrorist organizations and states that want to turn back the clock to the Middle Ages. That’s too dramatic for Cohen’s taste. Though he can’t claim that Netanyahu’s statements are false, he still feels that its Arab and Islamic enemies aren’t so bad and that the Israelis aren’t so good. What he wants from Israel is what he thinks Barack Obama is doing for the United States, so perhaps he thinks Netanyahu should go on an apology tour, during which he can say how sorry the Jews are for persisting in their effort to survive.

Not unsurprisingly, Cohen concludes with praise for Richard Goldstone, another South African Jew who, like the columnist, has been enlisted in the service of those who wish to destroy the Jewish state. Though Goldstone’s United Nations–sponsored report about Israel’s counteroffensive in Gaza last winter to halt the terrorist missile attacks has been rejected as a biased farrago of Palestinian propaganda by Israelis from across the political spectrum as well as by the United States, Cohen accepts it without question. Indeed, Cohen thinks the chutzpah of Israelis in refusing to acquiesce to lies about its justified attempt to defend its people is, in Cohen’s formulation, symbolic of their refusal to think of themselves as a normal nation. But, of course, the opposite is true. Normality is exactly what Israelis want. And like any normal nation, they think they have a right to use force to stop terrorists from shelling their southern towns and villages, as well as a right to live without the threat of nuclear attack or blackmail from Islamist radicals. But that’s the sort of Israel that Roger Cohen just can’t stand.

Over at New York magazine’s Daily Intel blog, Peter Keating is wondering why the full force of organized American Jewry hasn’t been deployed to demonize critics of the Obama administration.

Keating lists a few instances in which right-wing critics of Obama and especially of his plans to change America’s health-care system compared the president to Hitler and his programs to Nazism. Such comparisons are, of course, not merely over-the-top insults but also vile. Say what you will about the faults of ObamaCare as well as the absurd cult of personality that has grown around the president, but neither he nor his party can or should be compared to the Nazis. Obama is a preening puffed-up poseur who is in love with himself and is pioneering some very bad ideas, but he is no totalitarian. Nor is he a mass-murderer like Hitler. Any comparison between the two or between liberal Democrats and Nazis in general says everything about the people who make such comparisons and nothing about Obama. The simple rule for rational politics is that anyone who invokes Hitler loses the debate as well the respect of right-thinking citizens.

The promiscuous use of the word Holocaust to describe anything bad has gotten out of hand. (I knew we were in trouble several years ago when an episode of the X-Files had one of the heroes saying that a mysterious happening in a lake that killed amphibians was a “frog holocaust.”) Indeed, Keating notes that a Democratic member of Congress recently decried our current system of health care as a “Holocaust in America.”

But what liberal polemicists like Keating and other members of the Obama cheerleading squad want from Jewish groups aren’t merely news releases or the usual attempts at education and outreach in response to such offenses. What they desire is a full-court press of the entire organized Jewish world, whose aim should be to take down Obama’s critics and effectively tar all such dissenters from our Nobel-laureate leader’s plans with the brush of extremism, if not anti-Semitism. The goal is to intimidate all those who take the name of Obama in vain, not just people who foolishly circulate goofy e-mails about his place of birth or religion.

But if Jewish groups — which are, contrary to the myths propagated by the anti-Israel Left, mostly populated by mainstream liberals and not conservatives — are reluctant to do so, they have good reason.

The most obvious reason is that, although liberals say with outrage that criticism against the president entailing the use of Nazi analogies is something new, it isn’t. In fact, for the entire eight years of the administration of George W. Bush, such invective was commonplace. There is virtually nothing nasty put about by the nuts on the Right about Obama that wasn’t already spewed by the Left about Bush and Cheney. Liberals pretend there is something particularly dangerous about right-wingers getting up at town-hall meetings and ranting about the expanding powers of the federal government. But what exactly is the difference between such persons and many antiwar protesters who often used intemperate and insulting rhetoric against Bush all the while displaying contempt for the right of others to free speech?

Liberals chose not to notice the excesses of Code Pink provocateurs or the nonsense spouted by the Moveon.org crowd when the latter was portraying Bush and Cheney as totalitarians extinguishing the flame of American liberty. But when right-wingers behave badly, it isn’t merely a case of protesters losing perspective but the thin edge of a new wave of racism and anti-Semitism. (The irony that the demonization of the state of Israel is primarily a left-wing phenomenon is lost on those who make such accusations.)

Keating is right when he says that “injecting Hitler analogies into subjects like Medicare reimbursement rates renders the Holocaust mundane, as though Nazis simply supported big government, rather than genocide.” But that was just as true when liberals were trying to compare Bush’s successful counterterrorism tactics against al-Qaeda and other Islamists to those of Hitler’s Gestapo. Both sides of the political divide are guilty at times of hypocritically judging their opponents more harshly than their allies. While Jewish groups have an obligation to hold those who employ Holocaust analogies accountable, they would do well to stay out of the sort of partisan crossfire into which Obama’s foot soldiers would like to fling them.

New York Times reporter Alison Smale confided to her readers today that the purpose of an interview she conducted with Vaclav Havel was for a piece on the 20th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, in which the famous dissident playwright helped overthrow the puppet government of the Soviets in Prague. But, she writes, before he would speak about that or the current state of affairs in Europe, Havel had a question for her: “Was it true that President Obama had refused to meet the Dalai Lama in Washington?”

The Obama administration has placed concern for human rights on the back burner as it pursues engagement with antidemocratic regimes around the globe. But as a man who spent time in prison for speaking out against tyranny in his own country before becoming the first president of a free post–Cold War Czech Republic, Havel does not see human rights as a minor concern. Indeed, as Smale notes, the Dalai Lama was among the first visitors to Prague Castle (the site of the government) after Havel took office; in fact, he has a picture of the Tibetan exile in his current office.

Smale says that she told Havel, who claims to have been a fan of the American president, that Obama has announced that he would meet the Dalai Lama after a visit to China next month. But Havel was not impressed. “It is only a minor compromise. But exactly with these minor compromises start the big and dangerous ones, the real problems.”

Indeed, Havel said he resented the non-reception of the Tibetan even more than Obama’s betrayal of our Czech and Polish allies by bowing to the Russians’ demands and backing off on installing missile-defense systems there. Perhaps this keen observer of both the human condition and the realities of power politics seems to understand that such actions show that beneath Obama’s pose of moral superiority lies merely a shallow desire for applause, as well as a lack of resolve and principle.

As Havel rightly supposes, there is something profoundly troubling about a leader who is willing to slight moral heroes such as the Dalai Lama as well as staunch allies such as the Czechs and the Israelis while kowtowing to autocrats in Moscow and Beijing. At a moment in time when flattery of Barack Obama’s colossal vanity seems to be the height of fashion in Europe, Vaclav Havel’s contrarian instincts have served him well in pointing out our current idol’s feet of clay.

President Obama’s initial attempts to take a moderate stand on some social issues deeply offended many of his left-wing fans, but they remain hopeful that he will return to the fold. One case in point is his February executive order on the White House office for religion-based and neighborhood programs, which left in place presidential directives allowing religious programs that receive federal funding to continue hiring and firing employees on religious grounds. Left-wing critics are particularly exorcised by a 2007 ruling, according to which the government cannot order religious groups to not discriminate in this manner as a condition of public financing.

Today, the New York Times editorial page weighed in on this issue in a piece titled “Faith-Based Discrimination,” which demanded that Attorney General Holder bow to the wishes of a left-wing coalition that wants him to trash the rulings. Those opinions handed down by the Bush Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel were, the Times wrote, based on a “far-fetched interpretation” of the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). But far from being outlandish, the existing policies are very much in the spirit of RFRA, which purposed to restrain government policies that discriminated against religious groups. Congress clearly intended to prevent laws that substantially burden the free exercise of religious faith. The point here isn’t to prevent “religious discrimination” but to force religious groups to operate as if they were purely secular organizations.

The problem with revamping the directives is two-fold. One is that one outcome, which the RFRA hoped to prevent, would be setting up a standard that will discriminate against religious entities. Second, and more to the point in terms of the impact on public policy, is that it is precisely religious organizations that tend to be most effective in dealing with social problems. Any effort to aid local programs dealing with substance abuse or other social pathologies would be ludicrous if it effectively excluded faith-based institutions. Given that private and religious social programs of every sort have become increasingly dependent on government largesse, any such decision that could potentially ban faith-based groups would have a devastating impact on the delivery of social services.

What is truly “far-fetched” is the extreme separationist interpretation of the Constitution that would sweep religious groups and religious speech from the public square. RFRA and the White House orders properly banned the government from weeding out faith-based programs from funding. Though some purists would be happier if all federal funding of any religious institution were banned, common sense demands that if the government is going to support local programs, it cannot place faith beyond the pale.

What was the bottom line of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov? America’s punting on a request for sanctions on Iran, as the Washington Post reported (and Jennifer discussed)? Or was it instead a case of “Russia Resists U.S. on Iran Sanctions,” as the Associated Press reported? Of course, both amount to the same thing. Clinton’s statement that it wasn’t yet time for sanctions on Iran to pressure it to stop its nuclear program is merely an admission that the administration’s plan to gain international support for restraining Iran is dead in the water. Russia may not be entirely pleased with the notion of a nuclear Iran, but its main foreign-policy goal since Vladimir Putin took power has been to thwart the United States and inflate Russia’s importance on the world stage. Because Iran’s nukes threaten America’s allies in the region, such as Israel, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, and the destabilization of the Middle East undermines American interests, stopping Tehran does not interest Moscow.

Of course, Russia’s indifference to the threat of a nuclear Iran is not news. The Russians have been making it clear for years that neither they nor their allies-of-convenience on this issue in Beijing will allow the West to use the UN to orchestrate the sort of “crippling sanctions” that have a chance to bring the Khamenei/Ahmadinejad regime to heel. Our Nobel-laureate president and his secretary of state have made diplomacy and “engagement” with Iran the centerpiece of their foreign policy, but they have also maintained that such a stance will serve American interests because, by eschewing the “cowboy diplomacy” of the Bush administration (an ironic accusation, since W. outsourced diplomacy on Iran to the French and Germans with predictable results), they will be able to pursue a multilateral approach to all the world’s problems.

This charade may have earned Obama a great deal of applause as well as a certain peace prize. But the Russian refusal to play along has painted the administration into a corner. Though the United States has already betrayed its Eastern European allies by unilaterally abandoning strategic missile-defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic at Russia’s behest, Hillary’s meeting with Lavrov confirms that Iran will be allowed to continue to prevaricate while its nuclear program progresses with no real threat of international punishment. Though the administration continues to speak of deadlines — albeit constantly shifting them — for Tehran today’s comedy skit in Moscow illustrates just how empty America’s demands are. The only winners in this exchange are Russia and Iran. Israelis and others who rightly fear the consequences of an America content to let the Iranian nuclear program proceed while they talk about talking can only regard these latest developments with horror.

While the rest of the world still stumbles for an adequate reaction to Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize, the president’s envoy to the Middle East met Sunday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Palestinian Authority’s Mahmoud Abbas, following an equally fruitless stop in Cairo.

Obama’s peace prize has launched a thousand parodies as well as lickspittle tributes from his political allies on the left like J Street. But Israelis — who have rightly pegged the president as anything but a friend of the Jewish state — have good reason to fear the award will encourage him to devote even more effort to ginning up a peace process with no chance of success. They know that more peace processing means only thing: more pressure for Israeli concessions, on top of all those already made, to appease Palestinian leaders who actually have little or no interest in real negotiations.

Abbas and the P.A. are locked in a desperate duel for the allegiance of their people with the Islamists of Hamas. That means that even if Abbas were truly interested in accepting a two-state solution with Israel, which is doubtful, there is no deal he can sign that Hamas will not paint as a betrayal of Palestinian nationalism. That is why Abbas refused Ehud Olmert’s offer of a state including parts of Jerusalem and virtually all the West Bank and Gaza in 2008. His predecessor Yasir Arafat did the same eight years earlier.

Abbas continued his race to the bottom with Hamas by reversing his previous stand; he called for the United Nations to take up the bogus Goldstone Commission’s accusations of war crimes over Israel’s counterattack against Hamas terrorists in Gaza last December. Playing off the latest riot-sparking lies about Israeli threats to Muslim shrines in Jerusalem, Abbas also said in Ramallah on Sunday: “There will be no Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty until the occupation of Jerusalem ends. We are determined to safeguard the Aksa Mosque and Jerusalem.”

But the conceit of the peace processers is that a new round of Israeli generosity will always sweep away the realities of Palestinian politics. Such delusions have destroyed the Israeli political Left. But elsewhere, the realism informing Israeli voters is viewed as intransigence. The Nobel Committee believed that Obama was deserving of their prize specifically because of his Cairo speech, which espoused a moral equivalence between Israel and its enemies and which picked a fight with America’s only democratic ally in the Middle East. There is little doubt that Obama’s undeserved prize will motivate him to continue along the same path. Obama and Mitchell know there is little or nothing they can do to sway the Palestinians, so their only option will be more pressure on Israel. That was the logic of the pointless dispute between Washington and Jerusalem over settlements earlier this year. And with the president now endowed with the halo that the Nobel grants him and with a faithful cheering section of left-wing American Jews to encourage him, more such pressure is surely on the way.

To do proper justice to an event as ridiculous as President Barack Obama’s winning of the Nobel Peace Prize would seem to require satire at the level of Jonathan Swift or at least H.L. Mencken. Though I’m sure some of our contemporary humorists will come forward on this topic, the idea of a man who has only been in office for nine months and who has done little to nothing to lessen the dangers to world peace that threaten the globe (and nothing on this score before reaching his nation’s highest office) receiving such a prize is staggering and beyond the ability of most common scribblers to properly characterize. While we already knew that the president’s vanity was virtually limitless, who could have thought that even the fools who cook up these prizes would be willing to pander to him with such shameless cynicism?

Peace is further off in the Middle East, a nuclear Iran is a virtual certainty, and victory in Afghanistan over the Taliban is more doubtful than ever under Obama’s watch. So since he can point to no actual achievements, Obama’s worthiness for this honor would seem to consist merely of gracing the world stage with his presence. As such, his peace prize is, perhaps, like all those medals that kings and dictators wear on their dress uniforms when they are trotted out for public display. Indeed, if Obama is already worthy of the peace prize, then surely other equally unlikely honors are soon to follow so that other sectors of society can pay homage to him for just being Barack.

By this I don’t mean the sort of plaques that any famous person can get, such as honorary doctorates from universities. No, if this is the standard by which the president must be flattered, then I’m afraid Joe Mauer and Albert Pujols may be disappointed to learn later this year that Obama will be voted the Most Valuable Player Award for both the American and National Leagues for 2009 just because of his inspiring stint throwing out the ceremonial first pitch at the All-Star Game.

But rather than dismissing the Nobel Committee as being merely besotted with the president’s persona, we must not ignore the fact that their purpose is not just to add to Obama’s legend but to actually reward him for what they think he has done. And that is no laughing matter.

The award citation includes the following: “His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.”

What are those values and attitudes? In his Cairo speech in June, Obama articulated his belief in a moral equivalence between Western democracy and the authoritarianism and tyranny under which almost all the Arab and Muslim world labors. In Cairo he lauded the right of Muslim women to choose to wear veils but said nothing about the fact that the societies he means to engage seek to compel the wearing of such headgear on all women, as well as to impose their beliefs on everyone. To the applause of America’s detractors and enemies, he has eschewed the spread of democracy and freedom, apologized for rather than expressed pride in his own nation, and preferred instead to “engage” vile dictators who mock the values and attitudes upon which American liberty is based.

As absurd as this prize may be, it is no joke. Obama has won the applause of the Nobel Committee honestly by appealing to their contempt for democracy and their desire for more appeasement of tyrants. On that score, the president surely won this award fair and square.

In today’s New York Times arts section, film industry correspondent Brooks Barnes analyzes Hollywood’s attitude to fugitive sex predator/Oscar-winning director Roman Polanski.

Most prominent artists have lined up behind the push to let the famed director off the hook for having drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl over 30 years ago. Polanski fled the country to avoid sentencing after he plead guilty to the lesser charge of unlawful sex with a minor and has since lived in a cushy exile in Europe. After his recent arrest, Polanski is currently sitting in a Swiss jail awaiting possible extradition to the United States.

The fact that Harvey Weinstein, David Lynch, Martin Scorsese, and Woody Allen (at least the latter is no hypocrite given his own past actions) are calling Polanski’s arrest an outrage shows how disconnected the film industry is from the rest of the country when it comes to morality. However, according to Barnes, Hollywood’s main problem with Polanski is that few of his films have made money recently. “Hollywood has most assuredly become a chillier place for Mr. Polanski over the last decade,” Barnes reports. “It’s a judgment that this guy is no longer readily commercial.”

But in an attempt to understand what he describes as the industry’s mixed feelings about the director, Barnes draws an absurd analogy between the fugitive rapist and Elia Kazan, the famed theater and film director who testified about secret Communists before the House Un-American Activities Committee. “The closest equivalent is Elia Kazan. In some film circles, Mr. Kazan was forever a pariah for his friendly testimony in 1952 before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Others finally looked beyond his McCarthy-era behavior to focus on his outsize directing talent.”

Thus, according to Barnes, telling the truth to Congress about the influence of active Communist-party members who supported Stalin in the film industry but who pretended to be merely liberal supporters of civil liberties is the moral equivalent of raping a 13-year-old!

Of course, not everyone in the industry who talked to Barnes has completely lost their moral compass:

“I’m kind of appalled,” said Alison Arngrim, an actress who is best known for her work in ‘Little House on the Prairie’ and who has spoken publicly in the past about having been sexually molested as a child. “If Roman Polanski were a Catholic priest or a Republican senator, would these people feel the same way?”

Not likely.

Along with the leaders of Britain and France, President Obama was forced today to take time out of the G-8 Summit to react to the announcement that Iran has been building a secret underground plant to manufacture nuclear fuel. What followed was the announcement that Iran had a deadline of two months to comply with international demands to halt its nuclear program or it would face sanctions. This makes it sound as if real pressure is about to be ratcheted up on Tehran. Supposedly, this means that unless the Iranians allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to conduct an immediate inspection of the facility, the West will press for new, tougher sanctions on Iran. Obama hopes that his recent appeasement of Russia by breaking faith with Poland and the Czech Republic on missile defense will mean that the Putin/Medvedev regime will finally play along on sanctions and drag the Chinese with them.

It’s a nice theory, but Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, fresh off another vile Holocaust-denying speech at the United Nations, may not exactly be shaking in his boots about the prospect of Western resolve. Years of feckless Western diplomacy (outsourced by the Bush administration to France and Germany) did nothing but convince the Iranians that no one outside of Israel was serious about stopping them. And after months of outreach from the Obama administration, including an astonishingly weak response to their brazen theft of a presidential election and brutal crackdown on dissidents, it’s not clear that the threat of sanctions is one the Iranians take seriously.

As for what would happen after the two months if the deadline is not adhered to, Tehran understands all too well that the negotiations between the United States, its Western allies, and Iran’s erstwhile friends in Moscow and Beijing would be long, tedious, and likely to produce something short of the draconian measures necessary to produce significant leverage.

Just as important is that the two-month deadline, though seemingly indicative of some spine on behalf of the West, is hardly the sort of ultimatum likely to spur panic among the leaders of the Islamist regime. It is, in fact, not the first multi-month deadline Iran has recently received. When U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was in Israel over the summer, he attempted to placate his anxious hosts by saying that America had given Tehran only until the United Nations General Assembly to respond to Obama’s overtures before the clock would start on stronger sanctions. So, far from being the harbinger of a new era of resolve on the issue, the new two-month deadline is in effect an extension on the previous demand placed on Iran. This must lead Ahmadinejad to reason that no matter what his government does or doesn’t do between now and the end of November, it may be a reasonable bet that this date will be merely the beginning of a new period during which Washington will say diplomacy must be given just one more chance.

We may hope that Obama’s rhetoric today is the beginning of a new era of American seriousness about the threat from Iranian nukes. But when seen in the context of what has recently preceded it, and the clear preference on the part of the president and our allies for “engagement” rather than action on the issue, optimism in Tehran about their chances of further successful defiance of international opinion may well be justified.