Author: Daniel Luban

Reuters reports:

Colombian President Alvaro Uribe stepped closer to re-election on Tuesday when a congressional committee approved a bill aimed at allowing him to run for a third term next May, but a tough vote looms in the full House. The measure, calling for a referendum to change the constitution, had been stalled for weeks in the committee but the government has launched an all-out lobbying effort. Congress already changed the constitution once to allow Uribe, a U.S.-backed conservative, to stand for re-election in 2006.

Although the committee’s approval of the bill on Tuesday was not decisive — as Reuters notes, the real test will be the full House vote — the right’s silence throughout Uribe’s campaign against term limits has been striking. None of the self-styled champions of Latin American democracy in the U.S. — the Wall Street Journal editorial page, The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, and so forth — have seen fit to criticize Uribe’s move.

Compare the reaction when Uribe’s left-wing colleagues made similar efforts. In February, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez won a referendum striking down term limits and permitting him to run for office again in 2012. The move was roundly denounced on the right as proof of Chavez’s dictatorial tendencies. “Like his idol, Fidel Castro, who reigned in Cuba for a half-century, Mr. Chávez can now move toward his goal of becoming President for life,” the Wall Street Journal editorialized. Chavez’s previous attempt to abolish term limits was similarly depicted in the press as a “president-for-life bid.”

In June, Honduran president Manuel Zelaya’s attempts to hold a referendum on a constitutional amendment to end term limits — this one non-binding, and thus with no concrete political ramifications — were used to justify the military coup that deposed him. National Review opined that the referendum “would set [Honduras] on the path to Chávez-style authoritarianism” and that the “soldiers who escorted Pres. Manuel Zelaya from his home on Sunday were acting to protect their country’s democracy, not to trample it.” When Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega called for the abolition of term limits in July, Costa Rican rightist Jaime Darenblum took to the Weekly Standard to accuse Ortega of “following the Chavez playbook” and moving “one step closer to creating an autocracy.”

These critics denied any partisan motive, insisting that their only concern was for democratic institutions and constitutional procedure. Mary Anastasia O’Grady, the Wall Street Journal editorial writer who has been the most ardent American defender of the Honduran coup, proclaimed in its wake that “The struggle against chavismo has never been about left-right politics. It is about defending the independence of institutions that keep presidents from becoming dictators.”

But when Uribe takes identical steps? Not a peep. The message is clear: the term-limits issue is fair game when it can be used to foster hysteria about chavismo and paint every left-of-center Latin American leader as a would-be totalitarian. When the leader in question is a right-wing U.S. ally, however, there is no need to worry about such procedural niceties. An enemy of Hugo Chavez is a friend of ours, regardless of how he stays in power.

The hypocrisy on display is noteworthy, if not particularly surprising. Although they may wax rhapsodic about democracy promotion, American hawks have never really gotten over their soft spot for right-wing Latin American authoritarians. (Recall that the neoconservatives cut their teeth in the 1980s as supporters of Pinochet, the Contras, and any number of other murderous military juntas.) Still, if rightists want their denunciations of Chavez and his allies to be taken seriously, they should try to exercise a little more consistency.

[Cross-posted in slightly expanded form at The Faster Times.]

Former Forward editor in chief J.J. Goldberg has a fairly positive reputation among progressive Jews, and although he has never been a radical about Israel or the Middle East, neither is he a reflexive hawk or neoconservative. Hence it is particularly disappointing to read his recent hit piece on Roger Cohen in the Forward, a piece that is long on condescension and sanctimony but short on any real engagement with the issues. Goldberg’s thesis is that Cohen is cynical, or naive, or both – that his writing on Iran has been motivated fundamentally by a careerist desire to “sound provocative,” but that he is an amateur “in over his head.” It is not clear whether this analysis applies equally to anyone else fighting back against the alarmism of the “bomb Iran” crowd. Does he feel that Cohen’s anatagonists – the Abe Foxmans and Jeffrey Goldbergs of the world – are models of subtlety and expertise? Last I checked Foxman was defending East Jerusalem settlements and (Jeffrey) Goldberg was arguing that Iran is the new Amalek.

I won’t try to respond to (J.J.) Goldberg’s arguments, principally because he does not see fit to make many actual arguments as opposed to ad hominem dismissals. I would, however, just like to highlight one passage that was immediately picked up by some of the usual suspects, in which he discusses Cohen’s treatment of Obama Middle East advisor Dennis Ross, known as the administration’s foremost Iran hawk:

Ross’s role in the administration raises many questions in Cohen’s mind, but the one that comes up over and over throughout the article, “a recurrent issue with Ross, who embraced his Jewish faith after being raised in a non-religious home by a Jewish mother and a Catholic stepfather, has been whether he is too close to the American Jewish community and Israel to be an honest broker with Iran or Arabs.” In the crisis atmosphere following the Iranian election, “Can this baggage-encumbered veteran… overcome ingrained habits and sympathies?” Indeed, “Will the Iranians be prepared to meet with Ross?” – a “reasonable question given Ross’s well-known ties with the American Jewish community.”

That, in effect, is the dilemma facing American policy toward Iran at this pivotal moment: Is there too much Jewish influence? We’ve heard the question before in Hamas sermons, in Al Qaeda videos and on some left-wing blogs. Now it’s been incorporated into the nation’s newspaper of record.

Of course, Roger Cohen is far from the first person to question whether Dennis Ross is too closely associated with Israel to be an effective Middle East policymaker. It was Aaron David Miller, Ross’s former colleague on the Clinton administration peace process team, who famously claimed that the U.S. had been acting as “Israel’s lawyer” under Ross’s leadership. Another Clinton administration colleague, former ambassador to Israel Dan Kurtzer, published a book containing complaints from both American and Arab participants in the peace process that Ross was “biased towards Israel and not ‘an honest broker'” (as Time magazine put it).

Are Aaron David Miller and Dan Kurtzer fomenting propaganda cribbed from “Hamas sermons” and “al Qaeda videos”? Could Miller and Kurtzer be closet al Qaeda sympathizers? Goldberg is off in Commentary/ZOA territory here, and it is beneath him.

On Wednesday, Ha’aretz reported on the Netanyahu government’s latest spin in its clash with the U.S. and the international community over planned settlement construction in East Jerusalem: change the subject to the Nazis.

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has ordered diplomats to use an old photograph of a former Palestinian religious leader meeting Adolf Hitler to counter world criticism of a Jewish building plan for East Jerusalem.

Israeli officials said on Wednesday that Lieberman told Israeli ambassadors to circulate the 1941 shot in Berlin of the Nazi leader seated next to Haj Amin al-Husseini, the late mufti or top Muslim religious leader in Jerusalem.

One official said Lieberman, an ultranationalist, hoped the photo would “embarrass” Western countries into ceasing to demand that Israel halt the project on land owned by the mufti’s family in a predominantly Arab neighbourhood in East Jerusalem.

Lieberman’s transparent attempt to divert attention from the East Jerusalem controversy was widely derided across the political spectrum. It is, of course, a complete non sequitur — why would the mufti’s Nazi ties have anything to do with the status of Jerusalem under a peace deal? (Al-Husseini died in 1974.) As with Netanyahu’s implied accusation that Obama wants to make the West Bank “Judenrein,” the operative political strategy seems to be “when in doubt, bring up the Nazis.” Even among hardliners, few seemed inclined to take Lieberman’s ploy seriously.

Few, that is, except for the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the powerful and hardline Washington group whose policies generally track those of the Israeli right. Earlier this week, Conference of Presidents chairman Alan Solow and executive vice-president Malcolm Hoenlein issued a statement defending Netanyahu and calling the Obama administration’s objections to the proposed building project “disturbing”. It included this key paragraph:

It is particularly significant that the structure in question formerly was the house of the infamous Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseni who spent the war years in Berlin as a close ally of Hitler, aiding and abetting the Nazi extermination of Jews. He was also linked to the 1929 massacre in Hebron and other acts of incitement that resulted in deaths and destruction in what was then Palestine. There has been an expressed desire by some Palestinians to preserve the building as a tribute to Husseini.

The Conference of Presidents is perfectly free to side with Netanyahu over the U.S. government if they so desire — although in that case they should stop claiming to speak for all their member organizations, not all of which agree with their pro-settlement stance. But regardless, shouldn’t the group at least make an effort to pretend that it isn’t cribbing its talking points straight from Avigdor Lieberman?

[Cross-posted at The Faster Times.]

National Review’s Rich Lowry:

A major irony in Bush’s policy is that Iran appears to be much better primed than Iraq for a transition to democratic government (although Iraq is managing it anyway). It hasn’t been devastated by sanctions and war the way Iraq was; its faux elections let people at least exercise their democratic muscles; and the country has a relatively well-developed civil society. [my emphasis]

Just give it some time, Rich!

More seriously, Lowry’s comment does cut to the core contradiction of the neocon position on Iran. The same people who so self-righteously hold themselves up as champions of the slain Neda and protectors of innocent Iranians want nothing more than to ramp up sanctions (which, as Fred Kagan forthrightly admitted, will have the immediate effect of killing innocent Iranians) followed in all likelihood by military strikes (the destructive effects of which should need no explanation.) The fact that war with Iran would likely consolidate the hardliners’ power and snuff out the opposition similarly does not seem to factor into the thinking of these courageous defenders of the Iranian people.

Daniel Halper writes in The Weekly Standard today:

On “The Early Show” this morning, Obama said that “what we can do is bear witness and say–to the world that the, you know, incredible demonstrations that we’ve seen is a testimony to–I think what Dr. King called the–the arc of the moral universe. It’s long but it bends towards justice.”

Perhaps this is so, but Martin Luther King didn’t “bear witness” to the civil rights movement in America–he was a courageous participant. Obama now has a choice: Will he be a courageous participant or a weak witness? Will he declare that the elections in Iran were rigged, or will he continue to say that he does not know?

As Halper is probably aware, there is one fairly significant difference between King’s relation to the civil rights movement and Obama’s relation to the current protests in Iran. King was, indeed, a “courageous participant” in the civil rights movement, but he was an American and a leader of the movement itself. Obama, by contrast, is neither an Iranian nor a leader of the Iranian protest movement — rather, he is the leader of a rival power that has a fraught history with Iran.

It is fairly obvious that the level of “participation” that would be desirable, or effective, for a homegrown civil society leader would be different from that of a rival foreign leader. But to illustrate this obvious fact more sharply, consider the following thought experiment. In 1963, as King delivers his famous speech to the March on Washington, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev delivers a public message of his own to the protesters. “We would like to tell these brave voices of freedom,” Khrushchev says, “that they have the full support and solidarity of the USSR. The Soviet Union and the United States Communist Party are ready and willing to perform any measures within our power to help our American brothers and sisters obtain their rights from this oppressive regime. And although Dr. King pretends that he holds no hostility toward the American capitalist system of government itself, and wishes only to secure the ideals of the American founding for all of its citizens, we all know that he and his supporters really yearn for complete regime change in Washington. We in Moscow will do whatever it takes to help you achieve this goal.”

Let us ignore the question of Khrushchev’s intentions here: whether he is motivated by genuine sympathy and desire to aid the civil rights marchers, or a more cynical hope of destabilizing a rival government, or a narcissistic and self-righteous wish to take credit for the marchers’ achievement in order to feel better about himself and appease his domestic critics. (And before anyone gets up in arms about “moral equivalence,” let me note than I am not equating Obama’s America and Khrushchev’s Russia, merely noting that Obama and Khrushchev occupy structurally similar positions as leaders of distrusted rival powers.)

Let us focus only on a simple tactical question: would Khrushchev’s statement aid the civil rights movement? Would it be welcomed by King and his associates? Why or why not?