Today seems to be the day for presenting three scenarios. Tony Karon, writing at Time.com, presents three scenarios under which the Gaza War might end.

The first scenario is regime change in Gaza:

Given Israel’s long-term goal of ousting Hamas in Gaza, some key military and political leaders have urged that it expand the goals of its current operation, and use its momentum to take control of Gaza City and decapitate Hamas. Most vocal in advocating this option is Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu, the hawkish front-runner in the race for prime minister, who will portray any outcome that leaves Hamas intact in Gaza as a failure — bad news for his chief rivals, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni.

But the “regime-change” option is even reported to have support from Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who sees it as a way to restore the control over all Palestinian territories of his peace partner, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

The second scenario presented is a long-term cease fire:

Israel has insisted that a cease-fire be “sustainable,” by ensuring that Hamas is unable to rearm itself. An actual disarming of Hamas’ current militias is unlikely without a full-scale reoccupation of Gaza, which would involve tens of thousands more Israeli troops over many months. Anything less will see Hamas continue to be the dominant security presence inside Gaza. So, Israel’s priority will be to choke off the supply of rockets and mortar shells, which have been smuggled through tunnels from Gaza and fired at Israel.

Considering that none of the principals in this scenario want anything to do with it, this one seems pretty unlikely.

Under the last scenario presented major hostilities end without a formal resolution:

If the offensive cannot deal Hamas a death blow, Israel may see benefit in holding its fire, in line with the first phase of the Egyptian plan but not necessarily concluding a comprehensive cease-fire. It would simply maintain the halt to hostilities and even withdraw its forces on an open-ended basis. Israeli leaders saw Operation Cast Lead as an opportunity to restore Israel’s “deterrent” power, which it believed had been damaged when it was fought to a draw by Hizballah in Lebanon in 2006. But the Gaza operation, with its almost 100-to-1 ratio of Palestinian to Israeli casualties, has issued a painful reminder of Israel’s capacity and willingness to abandon restraints and rain devastation on the heads of all challengers.

By simply stopping its operation without a formal truce, Israel can claim to have reestablished its “deterrent” on future rocket fire without “recognizing” Hamas’ authority in Gaza.

I found Mr. Karon’s analysis admirable in that he recognizes that the hostilities being carried out in Gaza are political acts and their resolution will be a consequence of domestic politics even as it shapes it. However, I wish he’d devoted more space to the political implications of various scenarios from the Palestinian side. The Israelis aren’t the only parties to what’s going on in Gaza and the political consequences for Hamas need to be considered before we’ve exhausted the possible scenarios which are almost certainly not limited to these three.

From the Toronto Star:

OTTAWA–Canada stood alone before a United Nations human rights council yesterday, the only one among 47 nations to oppose a motion condemning the Israeli military offensive in Gaza.

The vote before the Geneva-based body shows the Stephen Harper government has abandoned a more even-handed approach to the Middle East in favour of unalloyed support of Israel, according to some long-time observers.

Thirty-three countries voted for the strongly worded motion, which called for an investigation into “grave” human rights violations by Israeli forces, while 13 nations, mostly European, abstained.

The United States, regarded as Israel’s greatest ally, is not a member of the council.

Marius Grinius, Canada’s representative on the council, said the language of the motion, which accused Israel of sparking a humanitarian crisis, was “unnecessary, unhelpful and inflammatory.”

He said the text failed to “clearly recognize” that Hamas rocket attacks on Israel triggered the crisis.

Canada’s being an oil-exporting country probably helped them vote their conscience.

This is another confirmation that the United Nations Human Rights Council has become absurd.

Very nearly since the beginning of the hostilities between Israel and Hamas that flared up two weeks ago and are ongoing critics have been saying that, not unlike the Israel-Hezbollah War in 2006, Israel was fighting towards a tactical victory and a strategic loss in Gaza. In a short piece for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the knowledgeable Anthony Cordesman made precisely that point a couple of days ago:

It is also far from clear that the tactical gains are worth the political and strategic cost to Israel. At least to date, the reporting from within Gaza indicates that each new Israeli air strike or advance on the ground has increased popular support for Hamas and anger against Israel in Gaza. The same is true in the West Bank and the Islamic world. Iran and Hezbollah are capitalizing on the conflict. Anti-American demonstrations over the fighting have taken place in areas as “remote” as Kabul. Even friends of Israel like Turkey see the war as unjust. The Egyptian government comes under greater pressure with every casualty. The US is seen as having done virtually nothing, focusing only on the threat from Hamas, and the President elect is getting as much blame as the President who still serves.

As I said above, the piece is short and worthwhile. I recommend you read it in full.

A few days ago James touched on much the same point and was answered by a hail of insults which, intellectually, amounted to “Oh, yeah?”

If you believe strongly that Israel is achieving a strategic victory in Gaza, I’d ask two things of you. First, remember that both the Israelis and the Palestinians plan to be in that neighborhood for a long time. Second, produce evidence for your claims. For example, if you think the solution is for Egypt to re-assert control over Gaza, please present evidence that Egypt is willing to do so. So far I’ve seen nothing to suggest that Egypt is willing to do that.

It may well be that Israel has no choice either politically or tactically but to respond as they have and I completely agree that it was Israel’s right to respond in self-defense to the rocket and mortar attacks that have bedevilled them increasingly since Hamas took control of Gaza. That they had no choice is not synonymous with the hostilities advancing Israel’s strategic objectives.

The picture above is of a statue of Pyrrhus of Epirus.

In a short New Atlanticist piece on “Hamas’ War Crimes,” I remind people that, while Israel isn’t the only party in the ongoing conflict in Gaza whose conduct deserves scrutiny.

By flouting rules designed to protect noncombatants from the ravages of war, they themselves are making it more probable that their own people will be killed. From their perspective, that’s a feature rather than a bug, in that the Israelis will get most of the blame and thus more funding and recruits will come in Hamas’ direction.

Ever since the Israeli attacks on Gaza began, some of the more hawkish elements among the punditry, such as Robert Kagan, have been claiming that Israel is not attacking Hamas so much as it is attacking Iran. Kagan states:

Israel has just embarked on a land invasion of the Gaza Strip after a week of aerial bombing. Gaza is bordered by Egypt, and was under Egyptian military control from 1949 through 1967. And yet in a startling rebuke to geography and recent history—and in testimony to the sheer power of audacity and of ideas—the mullahs in Teheran hold more sway in Gaza today than does the tired, Brezhnevite regime of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt.

I’m not terribly surprised that Egypt doesn’t hold much sway in the Palestinian territories, given the history of the region. However, I was interested to see exactly what evidence that Kagan offered to demonstrate that Iran and Hamas were collaborating on strategy and policy.

Of course, no such evidence was provided.

That’s because, as far as I can determine from researching online, no such collaboration appears to exist. The best I could come up with is that Iran does provide some funding for Hamas, but that funding level is at a paltry $3 million per year. Saudi Arabia and Syria are much bigger funders of Hamas, and some Hamas leaders operate out of Syria.

Even at that, though, it’s pretty clear that Hamas is pretty much a home-grown Palestinian organization. They may accept funding and support from other countries, but there’s not much evidence that they act as a “proxy” for any of them.

As no doubt everyone knows by now, the IDF has moved tanks and troops into Gaza to attack Hamas directly.

Israeli tanks and troops launched a ground offensive in the Gaza Strip Saturday night with officials saying they expected a lengthy fight with Hamas militants in the densely populated territory after eight days of punishing airstrikes failed to halt rocket attacks on Israel.
Hamas vowed that Gaza would be a “graveyard” for Israelis forces.

“This will not be easy and it will not be short,” Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said soon after the ground invasion began.

The incursion was preceded by several hours of heavy artillery fire after dark, igniting flames in the night sky. Machine gun fire rattled as bright tracer rounds flashed through the darkness and the crash of hundreds of shells sent up streaks of fire.

I suppose that, given the quantum mechanical nature of the universe, it is within the realm of possibility that this action will cause lasting damage to Hamas and turn the Palestinian people against them. However, this is not the way to bet. Given the history of this conflict and human nature in general, I suspect that this will rally the Palestinians even further into the Hamas camp and Israel will withdraw within a few weeks, causing both Hamas and Israel to claim “victory.”

In the comments thread to James’s post about the recent Israeli offensive against Hamas in Gaza, a commenter wondered if that were the crisis that VP-Elect Joe Biden warned about. No, it isn’t.

Foreign policy has a way of overwhelming most American presidencies. Our constitution is written that way and Barack Obama’s presidency is very unlikely to escape from foreign policy however pressing domestic matters may be. We have fifty governors, 435 Congressional representatives, and 100 senators but only one president who’s tasked with the responsibility of being both Commander-in-Chief and Diplomat-in-Chief. Domestic policy is likely to be left to the tender mercies of Congress, the governors, and our state legislatures.

Whatever his preferences might be, whatever the circumstances at hand might be, and whatever the preferences of the governors and members of Congress might be the president will be stuck with foreign policy and it will occupy a great deal of his time.

Indeed, President Obama would be extraordinarily fortunate if he only had one world crisis to deal with during his first term. It’s far more likely that he’ll have a dozen and neither he, nor his advisors, nor we can imagine what they’re likely to be.

Smoke rises over the main Hamas security complex following an Israel air strike in Gaza December 28, 2008. Israel launched air strikes on Gaza for a second successive day on Sunday, piling pressure on Hamas after 229 people were killed in one of the bloodiest 24 hours for Palestinians in 60 years of conflict with the Jewish state. (Reuters)

Not surprisingly, the massive Israeli strikes into Gaza are the prime topic of conversation in the blogosphere.

The basic facts, as reported by the NYT:

Waves of Israeli airstrikes destroyed Hamas security facilities in Gaza on Saturday in a crushing response to the group’s rocket fire, killing more than 225 — the highest one-day toll in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in decades.

Israeli military officials said the airstrikes, which went on into the night, were the start of what could be days or even months of an effort to force Hamas to end its rocket barrages into southern Israel. The operation could include ground forces, a senior Israeli security official said.

Palestinian officials said that most of the dead were security officers for Hamas, including two senior commanders, and that at least 600 people had been wounded in the attacks.

(That straightforward report was initially headlined provocatively as “Israeli Attack Kills Scores Across Gaza.”  It’s now simply “Israelis Say Strikes Against Hamas Will Continue.”)

Haaretz correspondent Barak Ravid has an interesting piece called “Disinformation, secrecy and lies: How the Gaza offensive came about” that leaves more questions unanswered than it answers.

Long-term preparation, careful gathering of information, secret discussions, operational deception and the misleading of the public – all these stood behind the Israel Defense Forces “Cast Lead” operation against Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip, which began Saturday morning.

The disinformation effort, according to defense officials, took Hamas by surprise and served to significantly increase the number of its casualties in the strike.

Sources in the defense establishment said Defense Minister Ehud Barak instructed the Israel Defense Forces to prepare for the operation over six months ago, even as Israel was beginning to negotiate a ceasefire agreement with Hamas. According to the sources, Barak maintained that although the lull would allow Hamas to prepare for a showdown with Israel, the Israeli army needed time to prepare, as well.

A similar report by Roni Sofer at Ynetnews, titled “How Israel led Hamas into false sense of security,” sheds additional light.

The Israel government reportedly employed several measures in order to lead Hamas into a false sense of security and ensure the operation against the Islamist group would take the organization by complete surprise.  The tactic called for Defense Minister Ehud Barak to allow trucks carrying humanitarian aid into the Gaza, despite the ongoing rocket fire on the western Negev.

[...]

“Hamas pulled its people out of hiding and resumed normal operations,” said the sources. “It would seem that Hamas believes the Israeli media, and thought it had a few more days before Israel launched an operation… once the tactical opportunity presented itself, the prime minister called Barak and Livni to his home on Friday night and they made the decision.”

Putting two and two together, I wonder if the humanitarian aid convoys that have gone back and forth over the past six months — during which the operation was being planned — were used as the major source of intelligence recounted in Ravid’s piece?  Not exactly kosher, if so, but smart.  As Meryl Yourish puts it, “You see what happens when you create an army out of smart Jews? They tend out outthink the enemy, adapt their tactics as needed, and ultimately, win.”

Sean Rayment, writing at the Telegraph, titles his piece “Israel is addicted to violence.”

Slaughtering 155 civilians, many of whom are women and children, can not be justified.

Every nation state has the right to defend itself against terrorism and wanton aggresion but this attack is both disgraceful and disproportionate, and Israel, a nation which has endured much suffering in its relatively short history, should recognise this. Imagine the international response if the UK committed such an act in today in Afghanistan.

At TPM Cafe, M.J. Rosenberg uses perhaps the last un-ironic “I Blame Bush” we’ll see:

It is not like Israel wasn’t provoked. It was. Hamas’s suicidal addiction to bombing innocents borders on the insane. But Israel is far from innocent. It wanted no violence from Gaza but it also maintained a blockade on Gaza that turned it into hell on earth.

Who do I blame other than Hamas and the Israelis? The Bush administration. It forced the election that brought Hamas to power against the strong urgings of the Palestinians and the Israelis. It insisted on democratic elections and then, when it didn’t like the result, authorized Israel to do whatever it could to destroy the victors.

Anticipating these sort of attacks, Haaretz correspondent Bradley Burston responds in advance to “The worst anti-Israel charges you’ll hear in wartime.”  A sampling:

Leftist 5: The world overwhelmingly sympathizes with the Palestinians against Israel, and unreservedly backs their struggle for independence.

In an era of global revulsion against radical Islamic terror, Hamas’ protracted program of suicide bombings, drive-by murders and shelling of civilian populations, coupled with its refusal to renounce violence, recognize Israel, or accept past peace agreements, coupled with its ideology of militant jihad, have drained the Palestinians of international sympathy and have, in fact, legitimized Israeli arguments of military self-defense.

Nothing has been more instrumental in harming the cause of Palestinian independence than Hamas, with its brutal take-over of Gaza in a war with brother Palestinians, and its frank efforts to build a large-scale regular army force in the Strip.

Jerusalem Post columnist David Horovitz provides a must-read matter-of-fact analysis of the events that got us to this point (”Fighting Hamas in the shadow of 2006’s mistakes“) and the goals of the Israeli government.   He’s almost certainly right in this analysis:

No matter how effectively Israel articulates its narrative, however, it would only take one misdirected attack, with heavy civilian casualties, to ensure a replication of the dramatic shift in international opinion that occurred early in the war against Hizbullah. After civilians were killed in the basement of a building hit by Israel, adjacent to a Katyusha launch zone in south Lebanon, a previously relatively supportive international community turned bitterly critical in an instant.

The longer the military operation goes on, the more strident the international criticism will become. Hamas, whose indifference to the deaths of fellow Palestinians was manifest when it killed many of them in seizing power in Gaza 18 months ago, will not easily succumb to Israel’s demands. Will Israel succumb to those of the international community?

From a U.S. perspective, WaPo staff writer Michael Abramowitz has an editorial-disguised-as-a-news-article entitled “Israeli Airstrikes on Gaza Strip Imperil Obama’s Peace Chances.”  Perhaps this is so obvious — indeed, tautological — that it’s jumps past commentary and becomes analysis.

There is little doubt, however, that if the situation escalates, it could hand yet another crisis to Obama, who will already be inheriting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and an unstable situation in Pakistan. If the past is any guidance, the United States will probably come under great pressure to restrain Israel if the tit-for-tat violence grows.

One senior Bush administration official said he thinks the Israelis acted in Gaza “because they want it to be over before the next administration comes in.” Although Bush has largely been supportive of almost any Israeli action taken in the name of self-defense, the official pointed out: “They can’t predict how the next administration will handle it. And this is not the way they want to start with the new administration.”

From the Department of Bold Predictions:

But other U.S. analysts were skeptical the Israeli offensive would succeed in intimidating Hamas. “By now Israel should have realized that [this kind of attack] rarely has any decisive effect,” said Anthony H. Cordesman, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “At best you get another faltering cease-fire, and then the whole thing begins again. Both sides have been escalating to nowhere.”

Betting on continued violence in this perennial conflict is about as close to a sure thing it gets.

On January 23, 1980 President Jimmy Carter enunciated what became known as the Carter Doctrine. He stated, “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” To give this commitment meaning, the United States began a military buildup in the region that ultimately led to the creation of Central Command, which now has responsibility for fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Carter Doctrine came about during the period of the “Big Red Arrow” Soviet threat. Readers of a certain age will remember seeing scary maps back then. A big red arrow originating in Soviet Central Asia, plunging through Afghanistan and toward Iran. A second red arrow originated in Ethiopia and shot up into South Yemen, aimed at Saudi Arabia. This was the context of the significant increase in American military presence in the Middle East.

This transformation was significant. Traditionally, the United States had been pretty hands off in the Middle East. Though the United States recognized Israel immediately after its founding, Israel received more aid from other countries for a generation. Massive financial aid to Israel and Egypt only began following the Camp David Accord during the Carter Administration. Otherwise, the United States had always been willing to remain at arm’s length from developments.

Nearly 30 years later, by a combination of inertia, mission creep, and ill-considered friendships, the United States now finds itself deeply enmeshed in politics throughout the Middle East and South Asia. It is time to reverse that trend. Fundamentally, we have made a key mistake in our relations with the Middle East — we have overstated the benefits of deep involvement and the costs of disengagement while systematically underestimating the risks associated with playing such a visible role in a politically unstable region. Challenging the Soviet threat was a credible basis for a greater role, the hodge-podge of half-considered issues we face today is not.

I have argued for a the United States to maintain a dramatically smaller “footprint” on the ground in the Middle East while actively seeking to reduce our “fingerprints” on policy developments in the region. The U.S. military is too active and too visible. American Embassies are too large. And in general, our role in region is too overwhelming. Poll after poll shows the same thing — The United States is blamed for many of the misfortunes of the region and is considered an aggressive, hostile, imperialist power. At this point, our active involvement is self-defeating.

If we were to limit our involvement, this would impact three issues directly: Radicalism, Oil, and Israel. Let me discuss each in turn.

The big issue for the United States today is the threat posed by radical and violent Islamist movements. I would argue that in this area we would reap the greatest benefits of a more detached policy. Simply put, during the Cold War we accepted a quid pro quo with “moderate” Arab rulers. In return for consistent anti-Communism we would allow them to scapegoat us for domestic repression largely aimed at Islamist groups. That policy worked all too well as over the past two decades the biggest change in the Islamist movement has been increased focus on the “far enemy” (i.e. the United States) and less on the “near enemy” (i.e. corrupt rulers at home). It was a bad bargain during the Cold War, and is an even worse one today. The United States simply can no longer allow hatred of us to serve a steam valve to reduce pressure on Middle Eastern rulers. If we are going to be closely associated with regimes in the region, we have to insist that they forthrightly and consistently defend that relationship with their own people. No more message segmenting. No more blame shifting.

On the reverse side, some argue that we cannot reduce our presence because that is what our enemies want. In short, they believe that to spite groups like al Qaeda we have to go against our own interests. As a matter of strategy, it is tremendously dangerous to allow your enemies to define your interests for you. If we allow al Qaeda to pick the time and place of our confrontations, we cede to them the initiative and choice of terrain. Just because AQ might consider Iraq or Afghanistan a central front does not mean we have to. Yes, they may indeed claim victory if we do retrench. But we cannot make American policy in response to AQ press releases. Reducing the visibility of the American role will reduce the viability of anti-American movements and do more to undermine groups like al Qaeda than anything else, even if it gives them the theme for a crowing video.

The second issue is oil. The U.S. presence in the Middle East does serve to reduce some of the risks associated with the Western world’s reliances on Middle Eastern oil. It does not lower the cost necessarily, but it may reduce some potential for volatility in supply. But the cost of this risk mitigation is tremendous. We pay for lowering the supply risk with increased risk of terrorist attacks, greater hostility from the Arab population, and the costs of men and materiel associated with military commitments. Are there other ways to reduce those risks? Of course there are. They include investments in alternative energy, oil exporation at home, better fuel efficiency from cars. Certainly those are costly measures in the short-run, but so is deep involvement in a volatile region. In the long-run, the calculus is easy. Energy independence is a strategic imperative.

The third issue is Israel. There are some in the United States who believe it is in America’s interests to play “whack-a-mole” against an ever-shifting set of potential enemies of Israel. Yesterday Iraq, today Iran, tomorrow Syria. Ultimately, though, Israel has nuclear weapons and is unlikely to be attacked by any state actor. Certainly, the United States has an interest — as does the entire international community — in preventing terrorist groups from acquiring nuclear weapons, but pursuing a non-proliferation agenda does not require unilateral commitment to the region. The other part of the Israel issue is the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Here, I am more pessimistic than most. As long as the Israeli political system is fractured — there are 18 parties represented in the Knesset and the largest party has fewer than one quarter of the seats — and Palestinian political power is split between Fatah and Hamas and even factions within those movements — it is simply impossible to conceive of a lasting, broadly accepted peace. The more visible the American role in brokering such a broken peace, the more resentful enemies we are likely to see emerge. Israeli land-grabs will become American land-grabs in frustrated Palestinian perceptions. Palestinian corruption and violence become American corruption and violence in the minds of angry Israelis. Genuine peace is a fantasy, and before you can visualize hope, you need to recognize reality.

In short, the benefits we believe accrue from deep engagement are largely illusory, and the costs associated with retrenchment are smaller than most fear.

Image by Flickr user Stewf under Creative Commons license.

The Mahdi Army might soon be the Iraqi equivalent of the Salvation Army, Gina Chon reports for the Wall Street Journal.

Anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr — long a thorn in the side of the U.S. military and Iraqi government — intends to disarm his once-dominant Mahdi Army militia and remake it as a social-services organization.

The transformation would represent a significant turnabout for a group that, as recently as earlier this year, was seen as one of the most destabilizing anti-American forces in Iraq. For much of the past several years, the Mahdi Army, headed by Mr. Sadr, a Shiite cleric, controlled sizable chunks of Baghdad and other cities. Its brand of pro-Shiite activism had the side effect of pitting Iraqis against each other, helping to stir worries of civil war.

Recently, however, the group has been hit by a largely successful Iraqi military crackdown against militia members operating as criminal gangs. At the same time, Mr. Sadr’s popular support is dwindling: Residents who once viewed the Mahdi Army as champions of the poor became alienated by what they saw as its thuggish behavior.

A new brochure, obtained by The Wall Street Journal and confirmed by Mr. Sadr’s chief spokesman, Sheik Salah al-Obeidi, states that the Mahdi Army will now be guided by Shiite spirituality instead of anti-American militancy. The group will focus on education, religion and social justice, according to the brochure, which is aimed at Mr. Sadr’s followers. The brochure also states that it “is not allowed to use arms at all.”

This would be a wonderful development if true.  I fear, however, that this will be merely one arm of a larger organization, following a model successfully pioneered by the likes of Hamas.

Spencer Ackerman agrees. Noting that we’ve seen predictions of Sadr’s demise before, he writes, “An alternative explanation would hold that Sadr is making yet another of his endless tactical retrenchments and is embedding his movement ever deeper within the fiber of Shiite Iraqi society, establishing an alternative infrastructure to Maliki’s failed governance, and retaining his military option for future use.”

AllahPundit is skeptical too, asking, “[W]hat’s a jihadi to do when he can’t wage jihad? Simple. Wage inner jihad.”  He continues, “Sounds like they’re playing nice for now and rebuilding their popular/religious legitimacy while they build a Hezbollah off-premises, presumably for a surge of their own when conditions allow.”

Could well be.  Or, just perhaps, he’s decided that he doesn’t need violent means to achieve his political aims at this stage.  Maybe he figures he can run as a candidate in the next election — whenever it turns out to be — and win the thing.

And, as Ackerman notes, he wouldn’t have to give up anything. So long as he’s got followers, he can pull out the guns whenever he wants.

AP Photo/Alaa al-Marjani

A bureaucratic SNAFU almost cost seven Palestinian students their ability to study abroad on prestigious Fulbright scholarships.

The U.S. has reinstated the Fulbright scholarships of seven Gaza Strip students blocked by Israel from leaving the Hamas-ruled territory, the State Department said Monday. The students were informed Thursday that their scholarships for the upcoming academic year would be deferred because they couldn’t get out of Gaza, which Israel blockaded after the Islamic militants seized power a year ago.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the U.S. reversal came on orders from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who first heard about the scholarship snafu on Friday. “She wasn’t pleased,” McCormack said.

Israel and the United States have tried not to point fingers in public over the scholarship incident, but each government clearly thinks the other made mistakes early on. Israeli officials say U.S. diplomats didn’t ask for special exemptions for the Fulbright students, while U.S. officials say Israel should have recognized immediately that these were a special case. U.S. officials also blame themselves.

McCormack appeared to blame lower-level U.S. diplomats or support staff for the decision to yank the scholarships without discussing the implications with enough higher-ups. “On our side there was some decision-making that in retrospect we wouldn’t have taken,” he said. “The secretary is just pleased that it’s been fixed, or will be fixed.”

David Siegel, spokesman at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, defended Israel’s Gaza closure policy. “Hamas exploits every opportunity to send terrorists and weapons across the border, including under the guise of humanitarian cases,” Siegel said. “Israel has a strong interest in the emergence of a moderate and educated Palestinian leadership.”

One understands the Israeli trepidation about young Palestinians crossing into their territory. But even hard-liners recognize that hand selected students engaged in cross-cultural education are the last people one wants to keep out.

Thankfully, that understanding is apparently reflexive at the top of both chains of command even if there was some overzealous misapplication of regulations a few rungs down. Bureaucracies screw these kinds of things up all the time, thus the “N” in SNAFU. What’s unusual is fixing the problem so quickly.

Dunkin’ Donuts has pulled an ad spot featuring Rachael Ray wearing a scarf around her neck because some thought it was a subtle nod of support to Palestinians.

Does Dunkin’ Donuts really think its customers could mistake Rachael Ray for a terrorist sympathizer? The Canton-based company has abruptly canceled an ad in which the domestic diva wears a scarf that looks like a keffiyeh, a traditional headdress worn by Arab men.
more stories like this

Some observers, including ultra-conservative Fox News commentator Michelle Malkin, were so incensed by the ad that there was even talk of a Dunkin’ Donuts boycott. ‘‘The keffiyeh, for the clueless, is the traditional scarf of Arab men that has come to symbolize murderous Palestinian jihad,’’ Malkin yowls in her syndicated column. ‘‘Popularized by Yasser Arafat and a regular adornment of Muslim terrorists appearing in beheading and hostage-taking videos, the apparel has been mainstreamed by both ignorant and not-so-ignorant fashion designers, celebrities, and left-wing icons.’’

The company at first pooh-poohed the complaints, claiming the black-and-white wrap was not a keffiyeh. But the right-wing drumbeat on the blogosphere continued and by yesterday, Dunkin’ Donuts decided it’d be easier just to yank the ad.

Said the suits in a statement: ‘‘In a recent online ad, Rachael Ray is wearing a black-and-white silk scarf with a paisley design. It was selected by her stylist for the advertising shoot. Absolutely no symbolism was intended. However, given the possibility of misperception, we are no longer using the commercial.’’

The terrorists have won. Or maybe we’ve just gone collectively insane.

I was blissfully unaware of both the commercial and the the controversy surrounding it until seeing a link on memeorandum this morning. But, seriously?

It’s true that wearing the keffiyah as a fashion symbol has been a recurring trend among Palestinian sympathizers and various hipsters over the years. But Ray’s scarf doesn’t look anything like Yasser Arafat’s.

Further, the terrorists wear headdresses because that’s how men throughout the Middle East and North Africa dress. It’s a protective covering for the head in brutally hot climates. In any case, none of them are paisley.

The iconic “spider-web” black-and-white keffiyeh is often displayed symbolically by members of Arafat’s Fatah party (which more generally uses yellow as its party colour), although it has never been able to expropriate it as their exclusive symbol. The zig zag style of stitching is sometimes described as symbolic of their historic struggle and their inability to progress towards their objectives without having to avoid obsticles. This is in contrast to how many members of the radical leftist PLO factions (such as PFLP, PFLP-GC DFLP) prefer the checkered red keffieyhs — red being both the traditional colour of the workers’ movement and the red scarf supposedly more indicative of a bedouin and rural (thus poorer, more popular) background. The Islamist factions, such as Hamas, use green — representative of the Islamic faith — as a party color, but for keffiyehs they stick to the traditional black-and-white or red variants, with no particular preference evident. While widely known, this color symbolism is by no means universally accepted by all Palestinians, and its importance should not be overstated — red or black-and-white scarves are used by Palestinians of all political stripes, as well as by those with no particular political sympathies.

But, just to be safe, we should assume that every white chick wearing a scarf is a terrorist or terrorist sympathizer. Ray’s lucky her ad’s just been canceled and she hasn’t been hauled off to Gitmo for questioning.

UPDATE: Via Steven Taylor, I see that Tom Grant has discovered a much more egregious example of terror chic:

These fiends are everywhere. (While Taylor is reminded of an old Monty Python sketch about communists, it seems more to me like Ray Stevens’ “Santa Claus is Watching You.”)

Meanwhile, Doug Mataconis thinks sympathy for Arafat is the least of Ray’s crimes.

(And while we’re on the subject, what’s with the extraneous “a” in Ray’s first name? Perhaps another homage to Arafat? Or . . . Al Qaeda?)

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin has even caught Meghan McCain — daughter of Juan McCain, hero of the Reconquista — wearing a purple plaid scarf keffiyah! Gawker has the photographic evidence. Nick Denton’s terrorist loving staff thinks it’s funny. They won’t think it’s funny, though, when the Straight Talk Express rams into Gawker HQ and explodes!

Prosecutors in Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s ongoing corrpution case have added taking cash bribes from a U.S. businessman to Olmert’s ever-expanding list of allegations:

State Prosecutor Moshe Lador, speaking at a Supreme Court hearing, said investigators suspected New York businessman Morris Talansky had given Olmert “dollars, in cash and in envelopes, during brief meetings from time to time”.

Olmert’s attorneys were petitioning the Supreme Court to reverse a lower court’s decision to hear preliminary testimony from Talansky, currently visiting Israel, before he returns to the United States.

[...]

Police have said Olmert is suspected of taking “significant sums of money from a foreigner or a number of foreign individuals over an extended period of time”.

A judicial source said the sums involved totalled hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Really, the only question that serious foreign policy thinkers should bring up about this case is: Why are the Israeli prosecutors so anti-Israel? Don’t they know that if they bring down the Prime Minister, then that will bring about a media frenzy that will embolden Hamas, weaken the Israeli public’s resolve and allow Iran to take over the whole Middle East?

I’ll bet they don’t wear flag pins, either.

Jamie Rubin, formerly Bill Clinton’s State Department spokesman, takes to the pages of the Washington Post to call out John McCain for hypocrisy in claiming that Barack Obama wants to “appease” Hamas. Riffing on John Kerry’s famous gaffe, the piece is subtitled, “McCain Was for Talking Before He Was Against It.”

McCain is the last politician who should be attacking Obama. Two years ago, just after Hamas won the Palestinian parliamentary elections, I interviewed McCain for the British network Sky News’s “World News Tonight” program. Here is the crucial part of our exchange:

I asked: “Do you think that American diplomats should be operating the way they have in the past, working with the Palestinian government if Hamas is now in charge?”

McCain answered: “They’re the government; sooner or later we are going to have to deal with them, one way or another, and I understand why this administration and previous administrations had such antipathy towards Hamas because of their dedication to violence and the things that they not only espouse but practice, so . . . but it’s a new reality in the Middle East. I think the lesson is people want security and a decent life and decent future, that they want democracy. Fatah was not giving them that.”

For some Europeans in Davos, Switzerland, where the interview took place, that’s a perfectly reasonable answer. But it is an unusual if not unique response for an American politician from either party. And it is most certainly not how the newly conservative presumptive Republican nominee would reply today.

Given that exchange, the new John McCain might say that Hamas should be rooting for the old John McCain to win the presidential election. The old John McCain, it appears, was ready to do business with a Hamas-led government, while both Clinton and Obama have said that Hamas must change its policies toward Israel and terrorism before it can have diplomatic relations with the United States.

The comments from both McCain and President Bush about Obama wanting to “appease” Hamas are, at best, rather silly. Using words of praise from Hamas leaders against Obama is within the bounds of political give and take but it’s not helpful in illuminating policy differences.

In McCain’s defense, though, the facts on the ground have changed rather dramatically, making the “hypocrisy” charges questionable. Mahmoud Abbas dismissed the Hamas-led government last June. Thus, the premise of McCain’s 2006 comments — that we simply have to deal with the Palestinian government, like it or not — has been obviated.

Of course, one could apply that same argument to Iran and Cuba and McCain doesn’t take the logic that far.

UPDATE: Much more from Jim Geraghty who correctly notes that even McCain’s 2006 statements on the subject were much more nuanced than Rubin suggests.

Sean Hackbarth reports on a recent weblogger conference with John McCain. I don’t know if my colleague James participated in this one, though I know that he has in the past. What Hackbarth highlighted from the conference, and no doubt everyone else will, too, is this:

Jennifer Rubin asked if Obama has given an unhelpful signal to Hamas? McCain responded that it’s clear who Hamas wants to be President. So does Daniel Ortega. “I will be Hamas’ worst nightmare,” said McCain.

Lovely. Of course, these types of sound bites rarely hurt a candidate in America. But they are worrisome. Let’s not forget that Hamas is, for better or for worse, the elected government of the Palestinian Authority. So as long as the United States feels the need to meddle in affairs in the Middle East, they’re going to need to sit down with Hamas for any workable solution, and rhetoric stolen from bad Sylvester Stallone movies isn’t exactly going to incline them to help out. I’m not saying that it’s necessary to kowtow to them, but one would assume that a basic level of politeness isn’t too much to expect from a presidential candidate.

Additionally, it’s worth pointing out that Hamas has not engaged in any violence outside of Israel and the Palestinian territories, nor have they ever attacked any American targets. Hamas may be a loathesome group, but they are not necessarily enemies of the United States. Indeed, when members of the miliatry wing of Hamas called for attacks on the United States, the leadership at the top quickly shut them down. So why does an American Presidential candidate feel the need to be their “worst nightmare”?

UPDATE (James Joyner): I missed this one, I’m afraid. I was invited and accepted but got tied up with work.

The problem we have here is the same that the Brits had with Sein Fein and the Israelis long had with Fatah: the difficulty of separating a terrorist group’s paramilitary wing from its political wing.

Any American president, especially these days, wants to be an enemy of the former. But, as Alex says, he also needs to face the reality of the latter. That’s easier said than done, since the distinction generally amounts to a legal fiction.