J Street’s condemnation of Sarah Palin for her position on Israeli settlements was predictable — it is what a pro-Obama, pro-Left organization would do. It is the vehemence of the attack on her that was perhaps noteworthy. J Street accused her of “pandering” with a “glaring ignorance” of facts and a “callous disregard” of U.S. policy on settlements.

Since J Street did not specify the nature of Palin’s “glaring” ignorance, nor explain why disagreement with the Obama administration’s obsession with settlements is “callous,” it is difficult to respond to its criticism on the merits. It may suffice to note that adjectives are not analysis.

But the adjectives were probably the point — which was to try to place Palin outside the pale of respectable thinking. This morning, in contrast, J Street responded to Abe Foxman’s strong criticism of its Palin pronouncement by issuing a “why-can’t-all-we-pro-Israel-organizations-just-get-along” type response.

In dealing with the ADL, J Street poses as just another pro-Israel organization; in dealing with Sarah Palin, it exposes its inner Robert Gibbs.

The New York Times reported yesterday that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, speaking of declaring a Palestinian state unilaterally, announced:

“We feel we are in a very difficult situation,” Mr. Abbas said. “What is the solution for us? To remain suspended like this, not in peace? That is why I took this step.” Aides have said that Mr. Abbas, who said recently that he did not wish to run again for the Palestinian leadership, is dispirited by the lack of movement in the peace process.

Dispirited by the lack of movement in the peace process?

Six months ago, lack of movement was not cause for concern but part of the plan. After Abbas met with President Obama on May 28, the Washington Post reported the new strategy: wait for things that Abbas knew would never happen.

Abbas and his team fully expect that Netanyahu will never agree to the full settlement freeze. … So they plan to sit back and watch while U.S. pressure slowly squeezes the Israeli prime minister from office. “It will take a couple of years,” one official breezily predicted. …

Instead, [Abbas] says, he will remain passive. “I will wait for Hamas to accept international commitments. I will wait for Israel to freeze settlements,” he said. “Until then, in the West Bank we have a good reality . . . the people are living a normal life.”

The current “difficult situation” is not the result of any deterioration in the good life in the West Bank. On the contrary, that situation has improved since May, as the Netanyahu government has dismantled checkpoints and administrative barriers to economic activity. The difficult situation is rather the result of an Obama diplomatic process that will be studied for years as a lesson in self-propelled hoisting.

Here is how Robert Satloff, in a perceptive presentation for the Washington Institute, describes what happened:

Where Bush was willing to reach quiet, practical, de facto, but very real understandings with Israel on settlement activity, Obama would deny that such understandings ever existed and demand something that no Israeli government could deliver (and, as a result, what no Palestinian leader since the years of the Oslo Accords had ever insisted on): an absolute, 100 percent, not-one-brick freeze on construction in any non-Arab site in either the West Bank or Jerusalem.

* * *

What Netanyahu offered the United States on settlements was certainly constructive and helpful but probably did not merit the accolade “unprecedented,” as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in Jerusalem. Here, the failing was the administration’s unwillingness to accept the original understandings on settlement activity reached by Ariel Sharon and George W. Bush. If those understandings had not existed, then Bibi’s offer would have been, in a sense, unprecedented, but everyone — Israelis, Palestinians, other Arabs — knew that the Sharon-Bush understandings did exist. Washington was caught in a web of its own making.

Lessons for future Diplomacy 101 students: (1) do not renege on understandings with another country, even though they were reached before you took office; (2) do not deny that an understanding existed when everyone knows it existed; (3) try to build on what your predecessor achieved, instead of denying he achieved anything; and (4) do not slowly squeeze allies (save that for adversaries).

One other tip: do not start your peace process by reneging, denying, and squeezing one side while giving the other side the impression that all it needs to do is sit back and watch you do it. It will create a difficult situation.

Noah, as you note, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs’s statement that the administration is “dismayed” at the construction of more housing in the Gilo neighborhood of Jerusalem — because “neither party should unilaterally preempt negotiations” – is a non-sequitur.  Last May, Benjamin Netanyahu arrived at the White House for his first meeting as prime minister with President Obama and announced he wanted to commence negotiations “immediately,” without preconditions, which has been his position ever since.

What unilaterally preempted negotiations was the Obama/Abbas precondition of a settlement “freeze” that (1) was not previously demanded in any prior negotiations, (2) contradicted a six-year understanding about the meaning of a “freeze” (no new settlements, no expansion of existing settlement borders, and no financial incentives for new settlers), (3) could not be defined in practical terms even by George Mitchell, and (4) was not a condition that any Israeli government, Left or Right, could accept.

There was a little comedy silver at the State Department press conference yesterday, as spokesman Ian Kelly repeated the notion that the expansion of housing in Gilo was “dismaying” because it could “unilaterally” preempt negotiations. One of the reporters asked Kelly if he could “give us just a brief synopsis of the progress that Senator Mitchell has made in his months on the job” — to which Kelly responded that the administration had gotten both sides to agree on a goal:

QUESTION: But previous Israeli administration — previous Israeli governments had agreed to that already.

MR. KELLY: Okay, all right.

QUESTION: So in other words, the bottom line is that, in the list of accomplishments that Mitchell has come up with or established since he started, is zero.

MR. KELLY: I wouldn’t say zero.

QUESTION: Well, then what would you say it is?

MR. KELLY: Well, I would say that we’ve gotten both sides to commit to this goal. They have — we have — we’ve had a [sic] intensive round or rounds of negotiations, the President brought the two leaders together in New York. Look –

QUESTION: But wait, hold on. You haven’t had any intense –

MR. KELLY: Obviously –

QUESTION: There haven’t been any negotiations.

MR. KELLY: Obviously, we’re not even in the red zone yet, okay.

QUESTION: Thank you.

MR. KELLY: I mean, we’re not — but it’s — we are less than a year into this Administration, and I think we’ve accomplished more over the last year than the previous administration did in eight years.

QUESTION: Well, I — really, because the previous administration actually had them sitting down talking to each other. You guys can’t even get that far.

MR. KELLY: All right.

In the last year of the Bush administration, the U.S. convened an international conference at Annapolis to launch final-status negotiations, devoted its secretary of state to trip after trip to the Middle East to push the negotiations, produced a new Israeli offer of a Palestinian state on effectively all the West Bank (after land swaps) with a shared Jerusalem, and watched the Palestinians take the opportunity to miss another of their famous opportunities.

In the first year of the Obama administration, the U.S. has not been able to start negotiations, even after the president made it his first foreign-policy priority, and even after Israel announced it wanted to start them immediately without preconditions.

The proper response to this extraordinary display of diplomatic incompetence should not be dismay at Israel — and certainly not the inaccurate claim of accomplishing eight years’ worth of peace-processing in one year — but rather serious self-reflection. As Jonathan properly notes, the treatment of Gilo by the Obama administration as if it were a “settlement” is a serious change in the tone and substance of the U.S. position (contradicting, among other things, the 2004 Bush Letter given in exchange for Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, and encouraging further Palestinian intransigence), one that puts peace even further away.

Peter, your post “Alice in Wonderland Justice” reminds me of the old Marx Brothers routine in which Chico is standing trial and discovers that Groucho will be the judge, prosecutor, and defense lawyer. Chico asks how there can be such a procedure, and Groucho answers: “That way we can prosecute you to the fullest extent of the law.”

The Obama administration is presumably bringing terrorists to trial in New York on an assumption that not only is there proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but also that even if the defendants were acquitted, or the jury hung, or subpoenaed Bush administration officials refused to testify, or a judge ruled that the trial cannot continue after the prosecution refuses to disclose national-security secrets, the defendants will still not be allowed to go free — hence Democratic Sen. Jack Reed’s confident assertion that “international law” will permit the defendants’ continued detention after trial, regardless of its result.

If the trial turns into a soap box — with a worldwide megaphone — to castigate the Bush administration for its wartime detention policies, or to illustrate the dark night of America before Obama, it will be a fringe benefit (or perhaps even the main purpose) of the fail-safe legal proceeding — an opportunity effectively to place officials of the Bush administration in the dock and to apologize again for what came before Hope and Change.

It will be a (Groucho) Marxist procedure for the defendants (because they will not go free no matter what the verdict) and a show trial for Obama’s political opponents, conducted in order to satisfy his “base.” It will be cynical political process masquerading as the fullest extent of the law.

Anthony, we cannot rule out your theory that some Frenchman from the Future may have been behind the halt to the quixotic quest to find the “God particle” — even if you got the information from CNN. The scientist in the video you cited says $10 billion has been spent so far to find that particle, before the Large Hadron Collider up and (to use your quasi-scientific terminology) “went phfffff.”

My own theory is there may be an invisible soccer ball and an invisible ref, who may have called “time” on this particular game (although not the entire season).

The invisible soccer ball (although not necessarily the invisible ref) is the metaphor used by Leon Lederman and Dick Teresi in their 1993 book The God Particle, which sought to explain particle physics’ search for the ultimate explanation. They asked readers to imagine superintelligent visitors from another planet, able to see everything except black and white — and for whom zebras, NFL refs, and soccer balls are all invisible. They watch a soccer game and cannot understand it. People run back and forth and in circles, kicking the air every so often and falling down, and once in a while the person at one end or another of the field dives, the crowd cheers, and a point goes up on the board.

Totally inexplicable, completely meaningless — until one of them comes up with a theory: assume a ball. By positing a ball, all of a sudden everything works, the game makes sense, and it can be appreciated by the human mind — although another lesson may be that we should be respectful of what we don’t know, and may never know, even as we continue to seek it.

That ball is the equal possession of both religion and science: both posit a set of laws that govern the universe, even though the critical part of the game is invisible and not totally explicable. Both share a faith (since there is no actual proof) that the sun will come up tomorrow.

The book ends with a scene from an imagined movie. A scientist is standing on the beach at night, shouting at the universe that is the product of his mind: “It is I who provide you with reason, with purpose, with beauty. Of what use are you but for my consciousness and my constructions, which have revealed you?”  At that point:

A fuzzy swirling light appears in the sky, and a beam of radiance illuminates our man-on-the-beach. To the solemn and climactic chords of the Bach B Minor Mass, or perhaps the piccolo solo of Stravinsky’s “Rites,” the light in the sky slowly configures itself into Her Face, smiling, but with an expression of infinite sweet sadness.

It is unfortunate that so many years, and so much money, have been spent chasing a particle that has now apparently hidden itself (if CNN and a scientist we can barely understand are correct). But perhaps we should have mixed, even contradictory, emotions about this.  The proper response to this news may be a feeling of infinite sweet sadness.

November 9 — the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall — was a slow day at the White House. (How slow? Look at the Picture of the Day posted on the White House website for that day.) The main events were a brief afternoon reception and an evening meeting with a foreign leader, neither of which had been on the calendar 48 hours before.

President Obama might have used the relatively slow day to give the speech he had planned to give on November 10 to the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America (considered one of the most important meetings of the year for the organized Jewish community, with several thousand in attendance, meeting less than three miles from the White House), since he’d had to cancel his November 10 appearance to travel to Fort Hood.

But proceeding with that speech would undoubtedly have invited comparison to his 2008 “Let Me Be Clear” speech to AIPAC — the one in which he had said he would use “all elements of American power” to pressure Iran:

I will do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. That starts with aggressive, principled diplomacy without self-defeating preconditions, but with a clear-eyed understanding of our interests. We have no time to waste. …

We will open up lines of communication, build an agenda, coordinate closely with our allies, and evaluate the potential for progress. Contrary to the claims of some, I have no interest in sitting down with our adversaries just for the sake of talking. But as President of the United States, I would be willing to lead tough and principled diplomacy with the appropriate Iranian leader at a time and place of my choosing. …

Finally, let there be no doubt: I will always keep the threat of military action on the table to defend our security and our ally Israel. …

I will make known to allies and adversaries alike [a pledge] that America maintains an unwavering friendship with Israel, and an unshakeable commitment to its security.

Does anyone think that Obama’s diplomacy with Iran has been “aggressive,” “tough,” and “principled”? Or that he was the one who chose the time and place it started? Or that an agenda was built before it commenced? Or that the threat of military action remains on the table? Or that America’s friendship with Israel under his administration is unwavering?

Or that the reason he chose not to give his speech to the General Assembly a day early was that he could not fit it into his schedule?

President Obama’s decision to send a video of himself to Berlin on the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, in which he said that “few would have foreseen [on that day in 1989] that . . . their American ally would be led by a man of African descent,” is not the first time he assigned that world-historical event a bit part in his own saga. The Wall also played a walk-on role in his election-night victory speech, included in a long litany of “Yes We Can” paragraphs (“A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination”). He mentioned it in his Berlin citizens-of-the-world speech, attributing the fall to the world standing as one.

Benjamin Kerstein has written an eloquent reminder that the fall of Communism was not the result of the world standing as one, but of the long and often despairing efforts of certain people to fight a future to which much of the world was resigned:

This anniversary, this triumph, this vindication, does not belong to all of us. It belongs to the anti-communists of all countries and all parties who fought for it, sometimes at great cost to reputation, family, friendship, sanity, and often life and limb. …

Some, like Solzhenitsyn, Natan Sharansky, and many, many others, had to face prison, expulsion, harassment, and the constant threat of death in order to make their plight known to the world. …

[The Hungarian and Czech uprisings were] ignored as the march of history supposedly passed them by … until the wall came down, and even the most dedicated apologists had to admit that the Czechs, the Hungarians, and their supporters had been the wave of the future all along.

In America, presidents of both parties pressed policies on their fellow citizens designed to keep the world standing as two. Richard Nixon brought forth “détente.” Jimmy Carter lectured us about our “inordinate fear of communism.” When Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” elite opinion considered it unforgivably rude.

“Tear down this wall” has entered the lexicon of great presidential utterances, but the president who uttered it went unmentioned this week by President Obama. Undoubtedly, as huge numbers of people rushed to freedom 20 years ago, few of them would have foreseen that Obama would become president of the United States. Even fewer would have foreseen that one day an American president would decline to join his fellow heads of state in Berlin to celebrate what happened that day.

Last summer, Berlin served as a backdrop for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, as he gave his citizen-of-the-world speech that began by noting that he did not “look like the Americans who’ve previously spoken in this great city.” His speech referred to Berlin as a place “where a wall came down,” without describing how that happened (other than through a world that “stands as one”) — and without mentioning the names of the prior U.S. presidents whose Berlin speeches were part of the reason the wall eventually came down.

Yesterday, the heads of state of Germany, France, England, and Russia stood as one in Berlin, marking one of the most historic days of the 20th century. President Obama chose not to attend and sent a two-minute video instead. In it, he noted that “few would have foreseen [on that day in 1989] that a united Germany would be led by a woman from Brandenburg or that their American ally would be led by a man of African descent.”

There used to be a newscaster in Los Angeles whose legendary self-regard generated an oft-repeated description: he thought “the news was there to bring you him.” The fall of the Berlin Wall apparently played a similar role in the history of Barack Obama.

Both Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu will be addressing several thousand people next week in Washington at the General Assembly of the United Jewish Communities, and there has been an assumption that the two leaders would meet during Netanyahu’s visit. But the Jerusalem Post reports that several American Jewish leaders say their optimism about a meeting is waning as Netanyahu’s arrival approaches with no meeting announced. Haaretz has a similar report.

The Jewish leaders told the Post that “the White House wanted to be assured it would be receiving something from Netanyahu in return.” Meetings without preconditions are apparently for adversaries, not allies.

Holding a meeting with the prime minister of Israel would be a useful signal to Iran, as the latter continues its rope-a-dope strategy of precondition-less meetings with Obama, that U.S. patience is waning. The signal would be even clearer if it were accompanied by leaks that the longest discussion was devoted to Iran.

But smart diplomacy may not be that smart.

In Honduras, there are T-shirts being sold on the streets that read “The Little Country That Could.” The San Francisco Examiner editorializes that the denouement there represents “the culmination of the administration’s mystifying diplomacy”:

Even if Zelaya returns to power for a meaningless month, Micheletti has won the battle. . . . [Micheletti] deprived Zelaya of power for five critical months and thus blocked his illegal attempt to seek another term, something that is definitively banned by the Honduran Constitution. Micheletti also guaranteed that constitutional elections will be held to replace Zelaya, no matter who is interim president. . . . Still, this happy ending in no way justifies Obama’s bone-headed interference in Honduran internal affairs, which destabilized that nation’s political institutions and caused totally unnecessary violence and deaths.

Obama converted the attempt by the Honduran Supreme Court and Honduran Congress to enforce the Honduran constitution into a “crisis” by declaring — less than 24 hours after it happened — that it was a “military coup.” But military coups rarely leave civilians in control, much less ones chosen by a democratically elected Congress. Even less often do such coups proceed with previously scheduled elections between candidates chosen prior to the “coup.”

The State Department lawyers, to their credit, found they could not conclude that there was a “military coup” in Honduras, and Hillary Clinton was left to announce that it was a “coup” of some undetermined kind. One of the “Senior Administration Officials” who briefed the press asserted that there were all kinds of coups. Asked for an example of a non-military one, he said he thought there had been a “legislative” coup back in Panama in the 1990s.

The Examiner argues that Obama did not understand that the threat to Latin American democracy these days emerges not from the guerrillas or generals but from presidents elected under one-term constitutional limits who then try to make themselves presidents for life. But the problem may rather have been a breakdown in the Obama administration foreign-policy decision-making system, which allowed the president to make an ill-informed judgment in 24 hours and then permitted him to stick with it months after it was apparent that it had been wrong.

It is the same system that allowed him to base his Middle East peace process on reneging on a six-year understanding with Israel and to continue in that vein for months after the entire Israeli public had been alienated. It is the same system that allowed him to continue with his Iran policy months after it became apparent that Iran had been hiding secret nuclear facilities and secretly shipping massive amounts of weaponry while he “engages.” It is the same system that is now approaching 100 days of seminars reviewing the “comprehensive new policy” for Afghanistan he announced on March 27 and no longer likes. It is the same system that treats allies as adversaries, or vice versa, and substitutes videos, buttons, private messages, feel-good speeches, and other emblems of goodwill for serious policy.

There is a very serious problem with the American foreign-policy decision-making process, and it needs to be corrected soon.

Today in Cairo, Hillary Clinton held a joint news conference with Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Ali Aboul Gheit, in which she was asked about the “shape of the Palestinian state in the U.S. opinion.” Here is the first part of her response:

Well, I can repeat to you what President Obama said in his speech at the United Nations and what he said here in Cairo — that the United States believes that we need a state that is based on the territory that has been occupied since 1967. And we believe that that is the appropriate approach. It is what has been discussed when my husband was president with Yasser Arafat, and it is what has been discussed between the Israelis and the Palestinians and the Bush Administration when President Abbas has been there. [Emphasis added.]

In fact, that was not the position of either the Clinton or the Bush administration. On the contrary, both administrations provided Israel with explicit written statements (in 1997 in a letter from Secretary of State Christopher, and in 2004 in a letter from President Bush) that the peace process must provide Israel with “defensible borders” — which no one can reasonably argue means the 1967 ones.

Hillary is aware, or should be, that the words “the territory” or “all of the territories” are loaded diplomatic phrases. They are the phrases the Soviet Union unsuccessfully attempted to insert in UN Resolution 242 in 1967, which the U.S. explicitly rejected.

The U.S. insisted that the resolution refer only to a withdrawal from an unspecified portion of “territories.” Immediately after the Six-Day War, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had drawn up for President Johnson a map of defensible borders for Israel — with a memorandum describing why, from a military standpoint, Israel would need to retain the “commanding terrain” and other “key terrain” east of the 1967 borders. No rational state would trade strategic military land for a paper promise of peace, particularly when that land has been used multiple times to launch a war against it.

Today the Egyptian Foreign Minister capitalized on Hillary’s answer, immediately asking if he could “follow up” on what she had just stated:

… this position that was just stated by Secretary Clinton — we say that we approve it and we are in agreement totally with it. We support it fully, we support fully this U.S. position because it reflects a conviction that — of a Palestinian state that is capable, that will be on all of the territories that were occupied in 1967 and that will be a hundred percent of those territories, because a hundred percent of those territories goes to the Palestinians despite the (inaudible) that would happen.

And with this, also East Jerusalem is for the Palestinians. With this, this is clear and with this such position, we support the U.S. fully. [Emphasis added.]

Hillary did not seek to clarify or modify Gheit’s summary of the U.S. position.

An Israeli withdrawal from “all of the territories” on the West Bank is inconsistent with the governing document of the peace process, inconsistent with the policies of prior U.S. administrations, inconsistent with written assurances those administrations provided Israel, and inconsistent with President Obama’s frequent pledges of “unwavering support” for Israeli security.

In his 2008 “Let Me Be Clear” speech to AIPAC, Obama said that “any agreement” with the Palestinian people must provide Israel with “defensible borders.” It will be important to hear what he has to say about this subject (among others) when he addresses several thousand Jewish activists next week at the General Assembly.

Henry Siegman asserts in “Israel and Obama” in this morning’s New York Times that President Obama’s “unqualified commitment to Israel’s security” is real. Indeed Siegman alleges that the White House is “about to set a new record” for reassuring Israel. But Siegman opposes a campaign to ingratiate Obama with the Israeli public, because the “unprecedented Israeli hostility” springs from Israel’s “pathological” rejection of a “return to the 1967 pre-conflict borders.”

At the risk of being accused of mental illness for doubting Obama’s unqualified commitment (and Siegman’s assertion that the 1967 borders were “pre-conflict” ones), here is an easy test to determine the quality of President Obama’s commitment: Does he stand by the 2004 Bush Letter to Israel, which reiterated the following “steadfast commitment:”

The United States reiterates its steadfast commitment to Israel’s security, including secure, defensible borders, and to preserve and strengthen Israel’s capability to deter and defend itself, by itself, against any threat or possible combination of threats. [Emphasis added.]

No responsible Israeli or American military person considers the 1967 borders “defensible.” It was their indefensible nature that led Arab states to prepare for what they announced in May 1967 would be a “total war which will put an end to Israel.” Israel’s ability to deter and defend itself, by itself, also depends on preservation of its ultimate deterrent — which the words “by itself” in the Bush Letter were intended to reaffirm.

The Obama State Department has declined, no less than 21 times, to pass this test. The administration’s continued silence about it leads to a certain amount of doubt about Obama’s commitment — a doubt increased by Hillary Clinton’s BBC interview on Friday. Asked about Israel’s settlements, she said this:

We continue to have very serious questions about the legitimacy of the settlements that Israel has promoted. We understand that to a large extent, it has to do with their security needs and fears about trying to have a defensible perimeter around Israel.

But we also are committed to a two-state solution. And as President Obama said, that two-state solution will take place in the territory occupied by Israel since 1967. The question is how we get to it. And that’s what we’re trying to achieve.

The paragraph-long “But” that follows Hillary’s asserted understanding of the need for a defensible perimeter undermines Obama’s allegedly “unqualified” commitment — particularly given the structure of her answer, which sets Israel’s desire for such a perimeter against what Obama is “trying to achieve.”

President Obama will speak next week to the General Assembly of the United Jewish Communities, undoubtedly to assure Israel and American Jews once again of his “unwavering commitment” to Israeli security. But his speech will be simply rhetorical unless he uses it to end his administration’s silence about the Bush Letter. Without knowing whether Obama supports secure, defensible borders for Israel and its ability to deter and defend itself, by itself, we will not know if his commitment is unqualified. We will not even know what his commitment means.

In a roundtable today with Pakistani editors, Hillary Clinton responded to a question about the Israeli-Palestinian issue with the now-familiar Obama administration litany: the problems are hard, they were inherited, they were ignored by the prior administration:

I think that, look, we all know that the Israeli-Palestinian issue is one that is a very serious and difficult problem that we are working hard also to try to resolve. We inherited a lot of problems. If you remember, when my husband left office, we were very close to an agreement because he worked on it all the time. The next administration did not make it a priority and did not really do much until toward the end. And unfortunately, we are trying to make up for some lost time, in my opinion.

Hillary forgets that the Bush administration in 2001 inherited an even more difficult problem — the new Palestinian terror war that concluded the eight-year Clinton peace process. During the next eight years, the Bush administration nevertheless did the following:

Adopted a new policy officially endorsing a Palestinian state if the Palestinian Authority renounced terrorism and elected new leaders (2002);

Produced a three-phase roadmap to achieve a Palestinian state — and got the UN, EU, Russia, Israel and the PA all to endorse it (2003);

Entered into a deal with Israel to turn over all of Gaza to the PA to enable it to demonstrate its ability to “live side by side in peace and security” (2004);

Arranged a Palestinian election to choose a “moderate” successor to Yasser Arafat (2005);

Arranged another election to give the Palestinians a choice between their new PA and their premier terrorist group (2006);

“Accelerated” the Roadmap to move straight to final status negotiations in the Annapolis Process (2007); and

Dedicated the secretary of state (not just an envoy) to trip after trip, and meeting after meeting, for more than a year, to push a final settlement (2007-2008).

The results of the eight-year Bush administration’s peace process were the same as those of the Clinton one: another offer of a Palestinian state, another Palestinian rejection, and another war, as Israel was finally forced to act against the continuous rockets that came from Gaza.

Two peace processes, two formal offers of a state, and two wars. Even a cursory knowledge of the last sixteen years would suggest the problem is not the absence of attention, nor the absence of effort. But in the tenth month of the Obama administration’s own failures in the “peace process,” it is easier to bash Bush on foreign soil than to give a serious answer.

As the serial seminars continue, the front-page headline yesterday on the New York Times was “Brother of Afghan Leader Said to Be Paid by CIA.” The article did not waste any time getting to its point: the news “raises significant questions about America’s war strategy.”

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry issued a press release stating it was news to him and raised “serious questions”:

“After reading press accounts which allege that Mr. Karzai has been on the payroll of the CIA, one of the agencies gathering intelligence about narcotics trafficking in Afghanistan, I have serious questions about the information that Congress is receiving. On questions this serious, it is imperative that we receive reliable, current and accurate information. …

The appropriate congressional committees must be immediately provided with the most comprehensive and untainted information about his alleged entanglements.”

Over at the State Department, there was this comedy-silver exchange with Spokesman Ian Kelly:

QUESTION: Ian, quite apart from any report that may have appeared today or in the recent past, what does the Administration think about President Karzai’s brother?

MR. KELLY: What do we think about his brother? I don’t know that we necessarily have a view on his brother. I mean, we support the government of President Karzai, and our views are very well known on that.

QUESTION: Well, what do you think of the influence his brother might wield?

MR. KELLY: I don’t think I necessarily have that kind of information.

QUESTION: Okay. Perhaps then maybe you can [give] the guidance you have for the question that you were expecting.

MR. KELLY: You’ve got to ask me the question before I read the guidance. I’m happy to read the guidance, if you’ll ask me the question.

QUESTION: All right.

QUESTION: What about reports that President Karzai’s brother is being paid by the CIA for various activities?

MR. KELLY: We don’t comment on intelligence matters.

One would have thought the serious questions had been resolved long ago. On March 27, President Obama announced his “comprehensive, new strategy” after a “careful policy review … ordered as soon as I took office” that reflected input from “our military commanders, as well as our diplomats” and consultations with Afghanistan, Pakistan, NATO allies, and international organizations working “closely” with members of Congress.

According to Rahm Emanuel, Obama is now asking “the questions that have never been asked on the civilian side, the political side, the military side and the strategic side.” Obama’s current review of his own comprehensive new strategy has now taken him longer than it took him to adopt the strategy in the first place.

Last week, the Associated Press reported that the “heavily politicized” Supreme Court of Nicaragua overturned a ban on Sandinista President Daniel Ortega’s running for re-election, in a ruling issued by Sandinista justices while opposing justices were absent (which was promptly declared “non-appealable” by Ortega). The State Department issued a press release stating it was “very concerned”:

Attempts to short circuit constitutional authority, regardless of ideology or country, threaten democratic governance and are of concern to all members of the Organization of American States.

The “regardless of ideology or country” was an obvious reference to Honduras, where the State Department has consistently described as a “coup” the enforcement by that country’s Supreme Court of an unambiguous constitutional provision that prohibits a sitting president from proposing “directly or indirectly” a change in the presidential term limit and requires anyone proposing such a change to “immediately cease in their functions.”

The State Department is unlikely to revoke the visas of the Nicaragua Supreme Court, much less mobilize the OAS (which has been silent about the constitutional end-run in Nicaragua). The department is “very concerned,” but its concern has no operational significance. It is simply an opportunity to issue a press release to make it appear it is evenhandedly supporting “democratic governance” in Nicaragua and Honduras.

But the situations in the two countries are precisely the opposite: in Nicaragua, the constitutional provision has been ignored, while in Honduras it has been enforced, over the strenuous objections of the State Department. The first requirement of “democratic governance” is that the constitution establishing it must be respected. As the Wall Street Journal editorializes this morning, in Honduras “their action against Mr. Zelaya may well have saved them from Nicaragua’s fate.” And from Venezuela’s.

But not from another fatuous State Department press release.

At the Washington Institute’s Weinberg Founders Conference on October 18, Gen. (Ret.) Charles Wald, former deputy commander of the U.S. European Command, participated in a keynote debate on preventive military action against Iran. (The video is here; the excerpts below are from the Federal News Service transcript.)

Asked directly if such action is feasible, Wald responded in part as follows:

Yeah, I think it is. I mean, I think it would be very difficult. I think the consequences would be problematic to a certain extent. It wouldn’t be easy. It wouldn’t be one strike. …

On the other hand, for people that think just because there isn’t one single target that somebody could go after – frankly the United States – that it’s undoable is false. And I think for us to allow that belief to perpetuate is a dangerous thing. …

And certainly I think people here believe it’s possible they could have [a nuclear weapon] by next summer. And in military terms, something that’s possible that could happen has to be considered as something that’s going to occur. You can’t just kind of put it aside.

Wald later expressed concern about the limited time frame for resolving this issue:

My concern – and I’m not in the military anymore and don’t speak for the administration or the United States military, but as a U.S. citizen and a former military person, my concern is that the Israelis consider this an existential threat, which if I were in Israel I would worry about this. …

So I know there’s a lot of discussions going on with our great ally, Israel, but the pressures are going to mount over the next six months to a year.

Asked if diplomacy can work, Wald endorsed it but said, “You have to have all the different tools all at once”:

I mean, nobody wants to start another front, let’s say, in the Middle East. And the Iranians know this. The Iranians know the American public has quite a bit of [war] fatigue. …

But [the Iranians] need to believe that [they could be subject to military action], and it should be true too. So I think Iran needs to know there are other tools that could be used. … Sanctions are a nice thing but an embargo or potentially a blockade – a blockade is an act of war so you’d need to be ready to go. …

And the other thing, I think Iran – and we should say this in public – is Iran needs to realize – and you can have your opinion about Iraq or Afghanistan or any of those things, but in 2001, our presence was basically in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia to a certain extent, some ships in the North Arabian Sea, the Persian Gulf, and that was it.

Today we have a presence in Iraq. We have a presence in Afghanistan. We have a presence in the Gulf. And if we’re smart we would have a presence in Azerbaijan as well. If I’m Iran, I’m getting a little nervous about the fact that the U.S. has a presence there. We should take advantage of that.

The reference to the U.S. presence in Afghanistan is a reminder that as Iran considers its nuclear-weapons program, its evaluation of the American commander in chief will be affected by his coming decision on Afghanistan: to follow the advice of Gen. Stanley McChrystal or that of Gen. J.R. Biden Jr. or to vote “present” by sending 10,000 to 20,000 troops (enough to neither win nor lose). It is not only the Taliban and al-Qaeda that are watching Obama in his third month of self-reflection about his self-declared war of necessity. Iran is watching as well.

The present and past chairs of Human Rights Watch (HRW) wrote to the New York Times this week, criticizing the founder of their organization, Robert L. Bernstein, for allegedly arguing that Israel should be judged by a different human-rights standard than the rest of the world.

This was, as Jeffrey Goldberg noted, a gross distortion of Bernstein’s views; Bernstein had written that HRW’s original mission was “to pry open closed societies” by supporting dissidents such as Andrei Sakharov and Natan Sharansky. Open societies could correct themselves — through public debate, an adversarial press, an independent judiciary, a politically active academia, and multiple political parties — all especially evident in Israel and conspicuously absent in the “authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records” around it. Bernstein wrote that to ignore the distinction between open and closed societies is to be taken into a “moral equivalence game.”

No one has described the corruption of that game better than Sharansky himself, recounting in The Case for Democracy the respect he lost for Amnesty International (AI) after he read its annual report:

I immediately noticed that something was terribly wrong.  There were pages and pages of material about human rights abuses in my new country Israel, and very little on the nondemocratic states that surrounded us.  It appeared as though Israel was a bigger violator of human rights than Saudi Arabia, a country where there was no freedom of speech, no freedom of the press, and no freedom of religion.

At the time, Sharansky offered what he thought was a constructive suggestion:

Why not divide the report into three sections:  one for totalitarian regimes, one for authoritarian regimes, and one for democracies?  Without those categories, Amnesty was creating a dangerous moral equivalence between countries where human rights are sometimes abused and countries where they are always abused.

His suggestion was rejected out of hand; AI would not “label” countries; it would not “support or oppose any political system”; it would concern itself only with the “impartial” protection of human rights. To which Sharansky responded: “How can a human rights organization be impartial about political systems that are inherently hostile to human rights?”

Israel is the proverbial canary in the coal mine, but now the noxious fumes come from the “human rights organizations” themselves. If HRW were worthy of its name (and its history), it would elevate Gildad Shalit to the status it once gave Sharansky. It would use Shalit not simply to condemn holding a prisoner incommunicado but also to mobilize the moral authority of the free world against a terrorist regime that holds its entire population captive, that caused a war through relentless rockets fired on neighboring civilians, and that used its own civilians as human shields when the inevitable reaction finally came.

Bernstein’s important article demonstrates that HRW once understood the moral stakes involved between open and closed societies before it descended into the game of moral equivalence that has turned it into a part of the problem instead of the solution. It has reduced itself to writing to the Times to distort the argument its own founder now makes against it.

Jennifer, the article you cited, “Biden Asks Eastern Europe to Spread Democracy,” ends with Biden’s exhortation to the students in his audience:

“You were present at the creation of a new Europe, a new security, a new era of peace because you were bold enough to seize that moment,” Mr. Biden told an audience of over 200 university students at the Bucharest library. “Be like those in ’89. Be bold. Exercise your leadership. You have a history and you have a tradition. You can make a gigantic difference, and we’ll stand with you.”

After Biden left, the students perhaps reflected on Biden’s track record. He had proposed withdrawing from Iraq and leaving the nascent democracy there to fend for itself; he is urging the administration to reject the request for sufficient troops to stand by Afghanistan; on this trip, he will not visit Georgia, where Russian troops remain after splitting an American ally in two; and he will be too busy, like his running mate, to travel to Berlin on November 9 to participate in the 20-year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

It is a shame that one of the students did not get the opportunity to suggest to Biden that “stand with you” does not mean what he thinks it does.

President Obama has reportedly informed the German government that he will not travel to Berlin on November 9 to participate in the 20th-anniversary celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is an unfortunate decision on multiple counts.

First, it is another slight to another European ally — one that is going all-out to celebrate the event. The invitation to Obama was extended personally by Chancellor Angela Merkel last June.

Second, it is a failure to correct the historical misstatement of his citizen-of-the-world address last year in Berlin, when he credited the fall of the wall to the “world standing as one” and failed even to mention the names of John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.

Third, it is an embarrassment for the United States not to be represented at the highest level for the commemoration of an event of this magnitude. As Matt Welch writes in the November issue of Reason magazine, November 1989 was “the most liberating month of arguably the most liberating year in human history” — the end of the Soviet Union and communism in Europe and a 50-year Cold War that was a worldwide ideological battle. It was battle led by America.

Fourth, it is an opportunity for Obama to give a speech in which he does not apologize for his country but celebrates the triumph of freedom that has been the driving force of American history from its beginning through his own election. As a former president eloquently said, the power of liberty is one that “brought settlers on perilous journeys, inspired colonies to rebellion, ended the sin of slavery, and set our nation against the tyrannies of the 20th century.” The American president should be in Berlin on November 9 to celebrate a moment that was a triumph for America as well as Germany.

There is still time for Obama to reverse his decision. If he cannot bring himself to see the importance of this issue on the merits, perhaps his political advisers will consider the optics of his ending his first year in office with (1) a trip to Copenhagen on behalf of his hometown, (2) a trip to Oslo to pick up a prize he admits he does not deserve, and (3) a failure to take a trip to Berlin to help celebrate his country’s historic accomplishment. History will notice his absence, and the electorate may as well.

Jennifer and Peter, your concerns about the “seminar presidency” that the Obama administration has become are not likely to be assuaged by the discourse on smart power that Hillary Clinton gave at the town-hall meeting at Moscow State University — just before she left empty-handed from the latest “smart power” exercise.

In response to a question, Clinton gave a 700-word description of smart power that began with its underlying rationale: “avoiding the use of hard power whenever possible, using diplomacy and other approaches to try to prevent having to use military force.”

In the course of her comments, she provided this example of trying to “be smarter than our past”:

Some of you may have seen in the press that we are making an in-depth review of our policy in Afghanistan. There were some things that we inherited from the prior administration that we are (inaudible). But we are committed. Our goal is to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaida and their extremist allies. But who exactly are (inaudible)? Who is really part of the sort of global jihadist movement, and who may be fighting for some other reason?

Here was her concluding description of what “smart power” means:

So that’s what smart power means — take nothing for granted, ask all the questions you can possibly have, come up with the best answer that’s humanly possible, (inaudible) knowing that (inaudible) may not get 100 percent right, and then make the best decisions you can to implement them. So we are very committed to engaging in this smart power approach and doing everything we can to work with our partners around the world on (inaudible).

Smart power is, of course, smart (by definition), and coming up with the best answer humanly possible seems like a good approach. But adversaries are likely to be unimpressed with statements about tough diplomacy or crippling sanctions, especially when they know you are focused on avoiding hard power — and watching you respond to a recommended troop increase by holding a seminar on who really is part of “the sort of global jihadist movement” and seeing you trade missile-defense systems in Eastern Europe for magic smart-power beans. Adversaries know that such sanctions have yet to work in Cuba or North Korea (and actually turned a profit for Saddam Hussein) and that smart power will always permit extended talks before resorting to them.

Hillary ended her discourse by assuring her audience that the U.S. is “very committed to engaging in this smart power approach.” The irony is that smart power may have a chance of success only if adversaries think there is a likelihood that hard power will be applied if it fails.

Writing in the NYR Blog, Jonathan Freedland notes that Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize was awarded by a committee of five liberal politicians from a country whose population is half the size of London, reflecting a “Norwegian consensus” that “favors multilateralism, yearns for nuclear disarmament, and believes in international institutions, revering the United Nations above all.” The speculation in Oslo is that what clinched the award for Obama was chairing a UN meeting and “using that body as the vehicle for his disarmament ambitions.”

Freedland concludes that the prize can be considered a “bouquet” from Norway, although one with an exhortatory purpose: “making it harder for the President, as a Peace Prize laureate, to take military action against Iran or escalate in Afghanistan” and “bind[ing] him into further action on nuclear arms and to keep faith with the UN.”

The prize may have been a farce, an award Obama did not seek and admitted he did not deserve, but his acceptance speech in December will reflect his considered views on war and peace. It will be delivered against the background of critical decisions he will have recently made, or need to make shortly thereafter, regarding both Afghanistan and Iran.

In preparing his address, Obama may want to review the Nobel acceptance speech Theodore Roosevelt delivered on May 10, 1910, which recognized that peace is a relative value:

Peace is generally good in itself, but it is never the highest good unless it comes as the handmaid of righteousness; and it becomes a very evil thing if it serves merely as a mask for cowardice and sloth, or as an instrument to further the ends of despotism or anarchy. We despise and abhor the bully, the brawler, the oppressor, whether in private or public life, but we despise no less the coward and the voluptuary. . . . No nation deserves to exist if it permits itself to lose the stern and virile virtues; and this without regard to whether the loss is due to the growth of a heartless and all-absorbing commercialism, to prolonged indulgence in luxury and soft, effortless ease, or to the deification of a warped and twisted sentimentality.

TR did not live to see all seven wars the U.S. would fight during the 100 years following his speech: World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Iraq War I, the Afghanistan War, and Iraq War II. But if he were giving his speech this year, he would probably note that hundreds of millions of people are free today because of them, and that it is an exceptional country that would fight them and not claim a single inch of territory as a result. He would probably endorse speaking softly but carrying a big stick.

And he might conclude his speech with his same words from 1910, warning against the deification of sentimentality, particularly the use of the prize as a bouquet to a sort of god.

Perhaps October 9 should be designated as national Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Day, so each year we can commemorate the day almost all Americans had the same reaction on learning who won the Nobel Peace Prize. Even the winner said he did not deserve it. The prize comes with a lot of money, which he will give away, but also with the opportunity to make a formal acceptance speech, which he will take.

It has been widely noted that the prize was awarded for words, rather than deeds. But it is more correct to say it was awarded for eliminating certain words from public discourse, especially war. Obama may not yet have ended a war; nor decided to properly resource another one; nor disarmed a country threatening an even bigger one. But he has succeeded in removing war from the official vocabulary, along with terrorism. We are now engaged in police actions against man-caused disasterism.

Obama’s remarks about the prize included a strangely worded sentence, reflecting a mindset that regards war only as something that must be ended, not something fought for a larger purpose. The sentence read as follows:

I am the Commander-in-Chief of a country that’s responsible for ending a war and working in another theater to confront a ruthless adversary that directly threatens the American people and our allies.

For Obama, Iraq is a war America is “responsible for ending” — not an achievement that removed a vile dictator (whom every government’s intelligence service thought had WMDs) and then protected the representative government that replaced him from relentless man-caused disasters. Afghanistan is simply a “theater” in which he is “working,” presaging a coming effort to assure us that winning or losing the war is a false choice: it is necessary only to define the enemy down and turn the theater over to General J.R. Biden Jr.

When you remove war from your vocabulary (except for talking about ending it), you qualify for a Nobel Peace Prize, or at least what the prize has become. Later this year, unless Obama unexpectedly takes the advice of Thomas Friedman and the New York Sun, we will witness in Oslo the leader of the free world walking down Project Runway, amid great applause, dressed only in rhetoric.

George Mitchell met yesterday with Israeli President Shimon Peres, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. He is meeting separately today with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Mahmoud Abbas. Tomorrow he will meet with Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. But there is no expectation of a breakthrough — “breakthrough” being defined these days as simply an agreement to start negotiations again over a Palestinian state, to see if the parties can agree on one.

The Obama administration once had higher hopes. In fact, all the heavy lifting was supposed to have been done by now. Unlike George Bush, who had allegedly been uninvolved in the process and waited too long, Barack Obama would start immediately and be personally engaged. George Mitchell was appointed on January 22 and once thought that by the end of July he would wrap up his meetings, obtain a complete cessation of all Israeli settlement activity, get some steps toward normalization from Arab states, and announce a U.S. peace plan — with negotiations following to implement it. It hasn’t all quite worked out.

At the State Department press conference yesterday, spokesman Ian Kelly indicated that the grand plan has been put off in favor of trying simply to get talks started:

QUESTION: . . . When you said we think it’s time to get to the negotiations, is it fair to say that you are, if not giving up, at least putting on the back burner the idea of putting together a package before getting to negotiations?

MR. KELLY: Yeah. I – as I said before, I mean, you’ve seen what the President has said, that it’s – the time has come for both sides to agree to just cut right through all of this and get back to peace talks. And this is something that the two sides have to work out. I think too much emphasis has been on our role in this. And I’m glad that we’ve been able to play a helpful role. But it’s really – it’s between really the two sides to work out the kind of package that you’re referring to.

That answer prompted a colloquy about who had previously put too much emphasis on the U.S. role:

QUESTION: You were the one who put the emphasis on it. It wasn’t us. It wasn’t anyone else. I mean, the Administration came in the first or second day, and it was like, here he is, our special envoy.

MR. KELLY: Right.

QUESTION: And this is going to be our top priority.

MR. KELLY: It still is.

QUESTION: So what do you mean, too much emphasis has been placed on your role?

MR. KELLY: Well, I just think that for this to succeed, it’s going to have to be the two sides, first of all, agreeing to sit down and talk, and second of all, coming up with a comprehensive peace proposal.

So the current plan has two steps: (1) have the two sides agree to sit down and talk; and (2) have them come up with a comprehensive peace proposal. Call it Annapolis Process II.

Benjamin Kerstein has a 3,500-word essay entitled “Obama and Israel: Betrayal in the Broken Places” that is essential reading. It is a portrait of Obama as a dangerous combination of hubris and ineptitude, and a description of the process by which he “lost the Israelis, possibly for good,” with “no one to blame but himself.”

Obama centered his policy on an unrealistic call for complete cessation of all settlement-building, violating longstanding understandings with Israel underlying the “peace process.” But if it had been handled differently, it might not have had such disastrous consequences:

Had Obama proved flexible on Jerusalem and its nearby “consensus” settlements, which most Israelis consider essential to their security and want to retain in any peace agreement, some sort of modus vivendi might have been reached early enough to avoid a serious breach. In his insistence on a total freeze, however, Obama was demanding something that was both too much for most Israelis to swallow and Netanyahu simply could not deliver. . . . Obama may have hoped for precisely that, believing that a new, more pliable government led by Livni would replace Netanyahu. If so, it was a horrendous miscalculation.

But it was not the push for a total, uncompromising settlement freeze, however, that was the key moment. That moment was, ironically, the one Obama considered one of his triumphs: the Cairo “address to the Muslim world”:

Taken as a whole, the speech was simply a craven embarrassment; but the references it made to Israel could not have been more alienating and insulting had they been calculated for the purpose. How Obama’s speechwriters and advisors became convinced that equating the Holocaust with the Palestinian nakba . . . comparing Israeli treatment of the Palestinians to segregation in the United States, and pointing to the Jewish people’s “tragic history” as the sole justification for Israel’s existence would assuage Israeli concerns about the new administration must remain a question for history to answer. There is no doubt, however, that this single speech (which everyone in Israel watched) did more to demolish Obama’s credibility in Israeli eyes than any of his demands on Netanyahu ever could have.

The Cairo speech, with its emphasis on the Holocaust as the justification for Israel (to the exclusion of thousands of years of Jewish civilization and historical claims to the Land predating by centuries the birth of Islam and extending through the 20th century in the Balfour Declaration) revealed a “glaring ignorance of Israeli history and sensibilities,” as did the reference to segregation, which recalled the 1975 UN resolution equating Zionism with racism.

But the worst was Obama’s moral equivalence between Nazi genocide and the Arab displacement in 1948, occasioned by a war the Arabs started after rejecting — not for the first or last time — a two-state solution:

It is true that 1948 was a catastrophe for the Palestinians, and many thousands of them were displaced — voluntarily and involuntarily — as a result of the war; but for many Jews (and many non-Jews) the equation of this to the Holocaust was not only morally appalling but served to minimize a genocide that is still within living memory, and did so in front of an audience that often claims it never happened at all.

Watching Obama, Israelis recognized something they have seen before in the violent and unstable Middle East: idealistic incompetence. That judgment was confirmed by Obama’s failure, also glaringly obvious, to obtain any steps toward normalization to accompany any new settlement freeze, and his passive encouragement of maximalist Palestinian claims even after the most pliant prime minister in Israeli history had spent a year in the Annapolis Process unsuccessfully offering the Palestinians a state.

The result is that “[Obama’s] relationship with the Israelis is now so damaged that Netanyahu probably could not sell further concessions to the Israeli public even if he wanted to (which he most certainly does not).”

The portrait of Obama that emerges in Kerstein’s article has ramifications beyond the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Obama’s idealistic but unrealistic belief that speeches, videos, reset buttons, bows, unclenched fists, and other gestures of goodwill are the key to resolving international disputes is now well-known. His combination of extreme self-regard and absence of actual accomplishments (both before and after he became president) reflects a mindset that is, in Abe Greenwald’s perceptive phrase, anti-decisive (since it is easier to protect a self-portrait by merely voting “present”). He is tough on small allies (Israel, Honduras, Georgia), or those deemed inconsequential (Poland, the Czech Republic, the UK), but endlessly patient and non-confrontational with adversaries. It is not a very presidential picture.

The respected Pew Research Center released a national survey yesterday finding that Americans: (a) approve of negotiating with Iran (61-28); (b) think such talks will fail (64-22); (c) favor tougher economic sanctions (78-12); (d) believe such sanctions will not get Iran to drop its nuclear program (56-32); and (e) think it is more important to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, even if it means taking military action against Iran, than it is to avoid a military conflict (61-24).

Over at the New Republic, Michael Crowley’s reaction was “Woah.” He found the poll “very surprising, and frankly even a little hard to believe”:

At first I wondered if this was a result of responses from people who haven’t been paying much attention, and thus may not appreciate the consequences of attacking Iran. But no: The poll also finds that “comparable majorities of those who have heard a lot about the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program (64%), and those have heard little or nothing about this (59%), say it is more important to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, even if it means using military force.”

At Hot Air, Ed Morrissey summarized the “rather remarkable consensus”:

Direct talks, tougher negotiations, and the use of force all get relatively consistent support from Americans regardless of political affiliation. It shows a rather remarkable consensus that supports Barack Obama on the question of diplomacy, but opposes the use of appeasement and shows far less optimism than the administration has thus far shown for its attempts to open Iran to talks.

The Pew poll tracks similar results recently found by Fox News (finding majorities for U.S. military action among Republicans, Independents, and Democrats) and by the American Jewish Committee (finding 56 percent support among American Jews).

The American people seem to have a more sophisticated strategic and tactical understanding than the administration. They would be pleased if the problem of Iran could be solved by “talks” or by “sanctions,” but are unimpressed by the arsenal of adjectives used to accompany such solutions (with talks always described as “tough and direct” and sanctions always described as “crippling” in order to give the content-less nouns a rhetorical force they do not have on their own).

The public is realistic about the prospects for the “tough” talks and “crippling” sanctions solving anything and unwilling to see the process end with a nuclear-armed Iran. Ironically, if Iran believed that the Obama administration might actually entertain military action, talks might work. But as long as the Iranians believe the talks are motivated by Obama’s increasingly obvious desire to avoid fighting even a self-declared “war of necessity” if it would interfere with health care, climate change, and other issues closer to his heart, the chances for talks succeeding are nil.