I speculated last week that, notwithstanding the American public’s rather obvious war wariness,  making the public case for military action against Iran wouldn’t be all that difficult given the three decades of antipathy between the United States and the Islamic Republic that started with the Iranian Hostage Crisis. A new poll from The Hill would seem to confirm that suspicion:

Nearly half of likely voters think the United States should be willing to use military force to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, according to this week’s The Hill Poll.

Forty-nine percent said military force should be used, while 31 percent said it should not and 20 percent were not sure.

Sixty-two percent of likely voters said they were somewhat or very concerned about Iran making a terrorist strike on the United States, while 37 percent said they were not very concerned or not at all concerned about it.

As Ed Morrissey notes, support for the idea of military action against Iran is at majority or near-majority levels across nearly all reported demographic groups:

Among the youngest voting set that would have to disproportionately contribute to that effort (18-39YOs), support is almost exactly equal to the overall survey, 49/30.  In fact, there is almost no difference between any of the three age demos.  Income demos are all in favor of it by majorities or large pluralities; the most supportive are the under-$20K demo (53/32) and $40-60K demo (56/27).  There is no real difference between those with children at home (50/28) and those without (49/32).  Democrats narrowly support the idea (41/37) although self-described liberals (32/42) do not.  In fact, the only real partisan difference in the entire poll comes on those who approve of Barack Obama’s performance.  The more people approve of it, the less likely they are to support the idea of attacking Iran to stop the nuclear weapon.

Of course, if the President making the case for military action at some point in the near future happens to be Barack Obama that last group is likely to come along with everyone else. There will be dissenters, of course, but what numbers like this suggest to me is that the idea of military action against Iran is already so engrained in the American psyche that it’s unlikely that any future President would have to worry about the legacy of the unpopular wars in Iraq or Afghanistan in making their case to the American public for action in Iran.

With the attacks on Syrian civilians seemingly getting worse by the day, the United Nations Security Council took up a resolution that would back efforts by the Arab League to bring an end to the crackdown, an effort that collapsed in failure as both Russia and China exercised their veto power:

UNITED NATIONS — A United Nations Security Council effort to end the violence in Syria collapsed in acrimony and a veto by Russia and China on Saturday, hours after the Syrian military attacked the ravaged city of Homs in what opposition leaders described as the bloodiest government assault in the nearly 11-month-old uprising.

The Security Council voted 13 to 2 in favor of a resolution backing an Arab League peace plan for Syria, but the measure was blocked by Russia and China, which opposed what they saw as a potential violation of Syria’s sovereignty.

Pressure had mounted on the Security Council to act as Syrian opposition leaders said more than 200 people were killed in the attack in Homs, and the White House accused Syria of having “murdered hundreds of Syrian citizens, including women and children.”

While the casualties were impossible to confirm, and were denied by Syria, reports of the bloodshed drew widespread international condemnation, and moved the Security Council toward a vote on an Arab League peace plan, despite new objections by Russia.

President Obama condemned what he called “the Syrian government’s unspeakable assault against the people of Homs,” saying in a statement that President Bashar al-Assad “has no right to lead Syria, and has lost all legitimacy with his people and the international community.”

The French foreign minister, Alain Juppé, said, “The massacre in Homs is a crime against humanity, and those responsible will have to answer for it.”

Protests broke out Saturday at Syrian embassies around the world, including in Egypt, Germany, Greece and Kuwait, and Tunisia expelled Syria’s ambassador there.

Security Council members met Saturday morning to try to resolve disagreements with Russia, Syria’s main ally, which had promised to veto any resolution that could open the way to foreign military intervention or insist on Mr. Assad’s removal.

But the resolution’s sponsors pushed the measure to a vote anyway, virtually daring Russia to exercise its veto and risk mounting international opprobrium for preventing action to stanch the escalating death toll in Syria. In the end, both Russia and China exercised vetoes.

Russia’s last-minute changes appeared to be another attempt to create equivalency between the Syrian government and the armed elements in the opposition, including by removing all the wording that detailed human rights violations by the Assad government.

Arab and Western ambassadors said they had compromised enough to meet the demands of Russia and other skeptics. The resolution that was defeated said that the Council “fully supports” the Arab League plan, which calls for Mr. Assad to cede power to his vice president and a unity government to lead Syria to democratic elections. But specific references to Mr. Assad’s ceding power and calls for a voluntary arms embargo and sanctions had been deleted from the Security Council resolution, and language barring outside military intervention was added.

Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said that Moscow still had two objections to the latest revised resolution: that it did not place sufficient blame for the violence on the opposition, and that it unrealistically demanded that the government withdraw its military forces back to their barracks.

If nothing else, this vote makes it plain that international action of any kind in Syria is not going to be nearly as easy to pull of as the Libyan operation was. In that case, the U.S. was able to get Russia and China to abstain from voting rather than exercising their vetoes. That’s clearly not going to happen this time.

Of course, the other side of the equation is what should happen in Syria, or at least what the West should do. International intervention along the lines of what happened in Libya wouldn’t seem to be the answer, especially considering that the Syrians don’t seem to be using air power against civilians and rebelling military elements the way the Libyans did. Instead, they’re engaging in large scale urban warfare in the cities that have been sympathetic to the rebels. That’s likely to be far more difficult to combat from the air, and I seriously doubt that there’s any nation on Earth that would be willing to send ground troops into Syria at this point. Then there’s the unknown factor of how Syria’s terrorist allies in Lebanon might react to outside intervention in Syria. In the long run, the Assad regime is clearly doomed, the question is how long they’re going to be able to hang on and how much damage they’ll be able to do on the way down.

Hardly a day goes by it seems without a news article, column, or statement from a prominent leader on the likelihood of war with Iran. Yesterday’s example was this column by David Ignatius:

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has a lot on his mind these days, from cutting the defense budget to managing the drawdown of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. But his biggest worry is the growing possibility that Israel will attack Iran over the next few months.

Panetta believes there is a strong likelihood that Israel will strike Iran in April, May or June — before Iran enters what Israelis described as a “zone of immunity” to commence building a nuclear bomb. Very soon, the Israelis fear, the Iranians will have stored enough enriched uranium in deep underground facilities to make a weapon — and only the United States could then stop them militarily.

Mr. Ignatius is an opinion writer (it says so right below his name). His column does not offer an explicit opinion, an odd choice for an opinion writer. I do not know whether he has an opinion on the subject or has some reason to avoid taking a stand.

In the months before the U. S. invasion of Iraq, there were complaints, too few, unfortunately, of a “drumbeat to war”. I believe that columns of this sort are just that sort of drumbeat. By not taking an explicit position against a U. S. attack on Iran, a column like this renders the idea more acceptable, part of the prevailing wisdom. As I read Mr. Ignatius’s columns, he is the doyen of the prevailing wisdom.

I do have an opinion. I do not believe that, in the absence of a direct attack by Iran on the U. S. or U. S. interests, the U. S. should bomb or invade Iran. I know of no evidence that Iran is preparing to attack the United States. An attack by the U. S. in the absence of such evidence such an attack would be preventive in nature. Preventive war is immoral.

Furthermore, our on-the-ground intelligence in Iran is notoriously bad. I find it highly unlikely that limited strikes against presumed nuclear weapons development sites will do more than slow a nuclear weapons development program by more than a few years and it will certainly incentivize such a program. It also might rally the people to the present regime, very much the opposite of what we might wish to happen.

Finally, Iran is not Afghanistan or Iraq. Remember what Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: if you strike at a king you must kill him.

I invite my colleagues at OTB to update this post with their own opinions on the subject. Commenters, weigh in in the comments. Please keep your remarks as succinct and dispassionate as I have attempted to keep mine.

UPDATE (James Joyner): Longtime readers will know that I oppose military intervention in Iran to prevent their acquisition of a nuclear weapon. Given the regime’s enmity toward the United States and history of promulgating terrorist violence  against the United States and its allies, I have no moral objections to doing so. Rather, I think there are no politically acceptable military solutions to the problem. Further, I’m not entirely convinced that an Iranian regime with a handful of nuclear weapons even constitutes a particularly significant threat to the United States.

Among people whose views on the matter I respect, few think we can significantly disrupt Iran’s nuclear drive from the air. The most notable exception is Chuck Wald, who made his case in an August 2009 WSJ op-ed. But even he allows that it would set of a perpetual game of cat and mouse rather than being a permanent solution.

We could, of course, follow an air attack with a ground invasion, decapitate the regime, and establish a long term occupation aimed at dismantling the nuclear program and installing a more friendly government. That option, however, is not only not politically viable at home but would almost surely create ripple effects in the region that would leave us less secure than we’d be if we just let Iran alone.

Finally, the notion that a nuclear Iran would pose some sort of existential threat to the United States–or even Israel–seems far-fetched. While the notion that the ayatollahs are a bunch of madmen eager for martyrdom may have been plausible 30 years ago, they’ve certainly demonstrated in the interim that they’re rational actors interested in long term survival. Frankly,  we’ve had some really bad actors in charge of significant nuclear arsenals over the years. Joe Stalin. Mao Zedong. Kim Jong Il. Not to mention the unstable morass that is Pakistan. None has ever launched a nuclear attack on their enemies.

Indeed, while my strong preference would be that Iran not get nukes, there’s an argument to be made that being a possessor nation would actually make them less threatening simply because they’d feel less threatened. Right now, they have to live under the constant specter of an Israeli, American, or Arab attack. As North Korea demonstrated, it’s better to be the nuclear end of the axis of evil than the non-nuclear end. And, as Libya demonstrated, it’s probably not a good idea to give up your nuclear program for a bag of magic beans.

Update (Doug Mataconis): I generally agree with James and Dave on this issue. Absent an attack or direct threat to the United States, or vital American interests, I see no justification for military action against Iran. Not only should our experiences in Iraq  and elsewhere educate us on this regard, but the rather obvious potential consequences of war should cause anyone in the “Bomb Iran” crowd to pause before pumping their fist in victory. Increased terrorism, threats to shipping in the Persian Gulf, and a massive oil spike are only the most obvious unintended consequences of military action, any one of which would turn an “easy” military strike into something that has long term consequences for the region and the world.

There are three dangers that we need to be aware of as we get closer to what seems like a final decision point. First, the antipathy toward Iran in the United States that goes back some three decades makes it far too easy for pro-war advocates to whip up war fervor among the public. Second, Iran itself seems intent on acting in a manner that provokes its enemies. Barring inspectors, war games in the Straits of Hormuz, and apparently plotting terrorism inside the United States are just a few of the actions we’ve seen most recently that seem guaranteed to help raise tensions to a tripwire level very quickly. Finally, this decision may not be entirely in our control. Israel is likely to strike out if it feels it has no other choice, and that is likely to lead to a wider conflict. So far, we’ve been successfully in convincing the Israelis to calm down vis a vis Iran but we may be nearing the point where those assurances aren’t going to be good enough. At that point, we may have war whether we want it or not.

During Thursday’s debate’s in Florida, Mitt Romney had this to say about the relationship between the United States and Israel:

(UNKNOWN): Abraham Hassel (ph) from Jacksonville, Florida.

How would a Republican administration help bring peace to Palestine and Israel when most candidates barely recognize the existence of Palestine or its people? As a Palestinian-American Republican, I’m here to tell you we do exist.

BLITZER: All right. Let’s ask Governor Romney, first of all.

What would you say to Abraham?

ROMNEY: Well, the reason that there’s not peace between the Palestinians and Israel is because there is — in the leadership of the Palestinian people are Hamas and others who think like Hamas, who have as their intent the elimination of Israel. And whether it’s in school books that teach how to kill Jews, or whether it’s in the political discourse that is spoken either from Fatah or from Hamas, there is a belief that the Jewish people do not have a right to have a Jewish state.

There are some people who say, should we have a two-state solution? And the Israelis would be happy to have a two-state solution. It’s the Palestinians who don’t want a two-state solution. They want to eliminate the state of Israel.

And I believe America must say — and the best way to have peace in the Middle East is not for us to vacillate and to appease, but is to say, we stand with our friend Israel. We are committed to a Jewish state in Israel. We will not have an inch of difference between ourselves and our ally, Israel.

This president went before the United Nations and castigated Israel for building settlements. He said nothing about thousands of rockets being rained in on Israel from the Gaza Strip. This president threw –

(APPLAUSE)

ROMNEY: I think he threw Israel under the bus with regards to defining the ’67 borders as a starting point of negotiations. I think he disrespected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

I think he has time and time again shown distance from Israel, and that has created, in my view, a greater sense of aggression on the part of the Palestinians. I will stand with our friend, Israel.

The first point to deal with here, of course, is Romney’s assertion that the President “threw Israel under the bus.” The comment refers to a speech that President Obama made last May regarding Middle East peace in which he said the following:

So while the core issues of the conflict must be negotiated, the basis of those negotiations is clear: a viable Palestine, and a secure Israel. The United States believes that negotiations should result in two states, with permanent Palestinian borders with Israel, Jordan, and Egypt, and permanent Israeli borders with Palestine. The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states. The Palestinian people must have the right to govern themselves, and reach their potential, in a sovereign and contiguous state.

As I noted at the  time, this caused an eruption of outrage on the right despite the fact that Obama was merely restating a position that the United States had taken regarding the Israeli/Palestinian issue going back to at least 1999, if not earlier.  That part of the speech is just partisan nonsense, though. It’s standard Republican fare when it comes to Obama’s policy toward Israel that’s aimed both at attracting the support of Evangelical voters who seem to have a loyalty to the State of Israel based largely on the Book or Revelation, as well as the naive idea that mouthing these words is going to cause significant numbers of Jewish voters to suddenly decide that they are Republicans.

The more alarming part of Romney’s statement though, and one that I doubt any of the candidate’s on the stage other than Ron Paul would disagree with, is Romney’s assertion that there should be “not an inch of difference” between the United States and Israel.” In fact, you can take Israel out of that statement and insert the name of any of our other allies, including our longest-standing and arguably still most important, ally the United Kingdom. No matter which nation it is that you’re talking about, there often are differences of opinion between allies, sometimes over issues that one of the parties finds incredibly important. The idea that Romney suggests, that an alliance means complete support at all times under all circumstances, is simply absurd. Such a position would lock the United States into taking action even when it isn’t in our national interests.  It was precisely that kind of trip-wire approach to alliances and treaty obligations that led Europe to march of to war in 1914 over what was really nothing more than a dispute between a decaying Austria-Hungary and the growing power of Serbian nationalists. Because one man got off a lucky shot on a street in Sarajevo, the entire continent of Europe was plunged into war. There’s very little about that kind of worldview that seems rational.  Every nation has its own interests, even allies, and they don’t always intersect. ‘Israel (or Britain or Germany) right or wrong’ is not a rational foreign policy, it’s a campaign slogan designed to garner votes that shows signs of a candidate who isn’t serious about foreign policy.

Daniel Lairson comments:

Consider the absurdity that the presidential nominating contest of the more American nationalist of the two major parties has been filled with candidates that cannot and will not distinguish between Israeli and U.S. interests. Their own words confirm that this is how they think about the bilateral relationship. Not only are these candidates mistakenly identifying the interests of the two states in a misguided expression of solidarity, but they are shouting it from the rooftops and implicitly finding fault with anyone who doesn’t conflate the interests of the two states as completely as they do.

Indeed, it is not uncommon to find anyone who disagrees with the conservative orthodoxy when it comes to Middle East policy condemned as “anti-Israeli,” or even anti-Semitic.  It’s an excellent way to shut down debate, and a tactic that comes right out of the Saul Alinsky playbook that conservatives condemn so much.

Ed Kilgore comments on the oddity of rhetoric like this coming from Republican candidates:

Isn’t it a bit odd, even somewhat unprecedented, for a prospective U.S. president to announce in advance that he is giving an ally a blank check to control U.S. policy in a major region of the world?

(…)

it’s one thing to suggest that the U.S. will naturally favor its historic ally in intractable disputes. It’s another thing altogether to outsource your policies unconditionally to a foreign government whose positions on matters of war and peace are more than a little controversial to its own people, particularly if your represent the supposedly hard-core U.S. nationalist party that claims it doesn’t trust anybody or anything other than naked self-interest and military power. Perhaps the refusal of contemporary conservatives to see allies anywhere else in the world—certainly not among those debt-ridden socialists of Europe—has made them hold Israel all the closer. But an awful lot of Israelis would tell you that giving this sort of total leverage over the United States to Bibi Netanyahu is not an act to be taken lightly. He will not hesitate to use it.

That, of course, is the danger of Romney’s comments. Give an ally a blank check and you end up creating a situation where you drag your country into a conflict that it neither wants nor needs. It’s fairly well established, for example, that the United States has dissuaded Israel from directly attacking Iran since the Bush Administration. Romney, however, would give them a blank check to go to war against Tehran despite the rather obvious consequences of such an action. That’s not only insane, it’s a policy that essentially says that the national interests of the United States must take a back seat to the national interests of Israel. For the Prime Minister of Israel, perhaps, that is the correct policy. For the President of the United States, it’s a dereliction of duty.

As a final point, I’d note that Romney didn’t even bother to address the concerns of the Palestinian-American Republican who asked the question that he was responding to on Thursday. But, then again, how many votes would that get him?

CAIRO — The Egyptian authorities have blocked the son of a United States cabinet member and at least five other American employees of two Washington-backed nongovernmental organizations from leaving Egypt in an apparent escalation of a politically charged criminal investigation into foreign-financed groups promoting democracy.

Officials of the group, the International Republican Institute, said the Egyptian authorities had blocked its Cairo chief, Sam LaHood, from boarding a flight at the airport several days ago. His father is Ray LaHood, the transportation secretary and a former Republican congressman from Illinois. Officials of the group said Egyptian legal authorities told them four others, including two other Americans, had been barred from travel outside the country as well.

Officials of its sister organization, the National Democratic Institute, also said on Thursday that six of its employees had been banned from traveling, including three American citizens. It was unclear how many other Americans working at similar groups may also be banned from travel.

The episode comes at a tense moment in relations between Washington and Cairo. A year after a council of generals took power after the ouster of former President Hosni Mubarak, Washington has begun publicly urging them to turn over authority to civilians as soon as possible. And legislators have begun agitating to put new conditions about the transition to democracy on the more than $1.3 billion a year in military aid that the United States sends Egypt, although the Obama administration has shown no inclination to allow such a move.

Egypt’s ruling military council, in turn, has been suggesting for months that the United States may have been financing nonprofit human-rights groups and democracy-building groups with an agenda to destabilize Egypt, part of a growing drumbeat of anti-Americanism that has emanated from the military-led government. The generals have often sought to blame outbursts of violence in the streets on such foreign interference.

The military council has also kept in place Mubarak-era laws requiring any foreign financing of Egyptian nonprofit organizations to pass through the government and go only to licensed groups. The government rarely issues licenses to genuinely independent civil society groups, ensuring that almost all of them remain in a kind of legal twilight and vulnerable to prosecution — including the American-backed groups.

Since the ouster of Mr. Mubarak a year ago, the American government has begun providing some financing more directly to Egyptian nonprofit groups without going through the Egyptian government, acting in the expectation that Egypt’s political transition meant a more open policy toward civil society groups.

But several months ago, the military-led government began a formal legal investigation into foreign financing of Egyptian nonprofits, and it culminated recently in raids by armed police squads who confiscated files, computers and money from four such groups, including the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute. The institutes have close ties to the Congressional leadership and work to promote the practice of electoral democracy in countries around the world.

Lorne W. Craner, president of the International Republican Institute, expressed concern over the investigation and the Egyptian government’s refusal to abide by promises to end the case and return documents, computers and cash seized from his organizations and the others.

“Here we are all these weeks later and all these assurances later, and things are getting worse,” Mr. Craner said in Washington.

So it would seem. I suppose that it is fortunate in some sense that the son of a prominent American official is among the group in question. Otherwise, who knows what would happen to them.

It was one year ago today that protesters first started gathering in Tahrir Square, inspired by the recent events in Tunisia, to protest the 30 year old authoritarian dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak. Within a month, Mubarak was out of power and Egypt was being run by a military junta that was promising to return power to the people as soon as possible. To mark that anniversary, and note the fact that things have not changed as much as hoped, protesters returned today to the place where it all started:

CAIRO — Egyptians gathered in Tahrir Square, the crucible of their revolution, on Wednesday in a mixture of celebration and agitation to mark the first anniversary of the protests that forced out Hosni Mubarak, the former president.

By midmorning, tens of thousands of people had packed the square here, smiling, cheering and waving Egyptian flags, but it was already evident that the spirit that unified last year’s uprising had been replaced by new tensions between Egyptian political factions over their view of the military rulers who took power when Mr. Mubarak was ousted.

The Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist movement that won nearly half the seats in the newly elected Parliament, sent many of its followers to the square.

The Brotherhood’s leaders have endorsed the military’s timetable for a handover to an elected president by the end of June, and they sent thousands of their members out to ensure that a spirit of celebration prevailed, erecting soundstages and setting up security checks at each entrance to the square. An abundance of Brotherhood flags, buttons and disposable plastic hats filled the crowd.

There were reports that Brotherhood followers had drowned out chants attacking the ruling military council with their own tributes to the revolution.

Groups of ultraconservative Islamists known as Salafis, political rivals to the Brotherhood who won about a quarter of the seats in the new Parliament, said they would also turn out to help secure the square and keep the day peaceful, and there were plenty of men with the Salafis’ trademark long beards mingling in the crowd.

The crowd in the square on Wednesday morning was overwhelmingly male, with very few women in sight.

Youth groups and other activists — including many of the leaders of the original uprising — were determined to make the day a huge demonstration calling for an immediate end to military rule, urging Egyptians to gather at mosques, churches and other strategic locations around the city for marches to the square that would arrive by midafternoon.

The plan resembled the convergence of marches that set off the Tahrir Square protests last January, but this time each was named for a “martyr” killed over the last year by the security forces of the military-led government trying to suppress challenges to its power. More than 80 people have been killed in clashes with security forces since October.

The military rulers have endorsed the calls for an anniversary celebration and have made the day a national holiday. Some activists accuse them of trying to co-opt the occasion.

There was no visible presence of soldiers or the police. But most Egyptians seemed to expect that Brotherhood members, known for their discipline and organization, would keep the peace.

After a year of protests and crackdowns, many note a pattern: the conflicts with security forces never begin on the days when crowds fill the streets but only days later when the authorities move in to clear out the stragglers.

One year after the tumultuous events that marked a watershed in the so-called Arab Spring, Egypt is still under martial law, with the ruling military council acting as the highest authority.

With the military cracking down, the Islamists pushing their own agenda, and the economy threatening to cause the progress of the past year to unravel amid financial chaos, it’s not surprising that the activists who were at the heart of the protests consider their revolution unfinished:

The activists, Gigi Ibrahim, 23, and Mosa’ab Elshamy, 21, are both bloggers who helped document last year’s protests in Cairo by posting video, photographs and text updates on social n

etworks as events unfolded.

Ms. Ibrahim, who first spoke to The Lede last January, two days into the uprising — and minutes before Egyptian authorities shut down the Internet in a desperate attempt to stifle the protests — says now that she is frustrated by the lack of fundamental change.

“Really, what we have achieved,” she says, “was only just to topple Mubarak; we have Mubarak’s generals running the country — the SCAF, the military council, the 19 generals who are still killing and are leading counterrevolution. We want them to step out of power, but we understand that they are not going to go out of power easily.”

(…)

Mr. Elshamy, who was arrested at a protest in May and given a year’s suspended sentence by a military court, agrees that there is still work to be done. He also intends to spend Wednesday marching to Tahrir Square, in part, he says, because “what I saw in prison made me feel more determined.”

Unlike Ms. Ibrahim, Mr. Elshamy did not boycott the parliamentary elections organized by the military council in November. Even though the elections were “extremely late” and imperfectly run, he says, the vote was “an extremely important” step in the right direction. All in all, Mr. Elshamy concludes, “I definitely think things, even though they are not much, much better, definitely are not worse.”

Eric Trager, who was in Cairo when the protests started a year ago, is more sanguine about the whole affair:

It is tempting to believe that things might have turned out differently had Washington worked harder to bolster the young revolutionaries who seemingly exemplified America’s own liberal values when they took to the streets last January. These brave activists, after all, had won America’s hearts to the tune of an 82-percent approval rating at the height of the revolt, and their photogenicfaces carried the promise of a more democratic, friendly Egypt.

But the activists were never who we hoped they were. Far from being liberal, their ranks were largely comprised of Nasserists, revolutionary socialists, and Muslim Brotherhood youths—an alliance of convenience for opposing Mubarak and, later, for denouncing the U.S.

Thus, when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Egypt in March 2011, a group of leading activists refused to meet with her. They also turned out to be intolerant conspiracy theorists: When classically Cairoesque rumors that a “Jewish Masonic” ceremony was to be held at the pyramids on November 11, the April 6th Youth Movement’s Democratic Front declared that this non-existent event should be prohibited. “We are committed to the achievements of the revolution, which emphasized freedom,” they said in a statement. “But freedom is not absolute freedom, and … it is constrained by the regulations and beliefs of the Egyptian people, who do not accept that these celebrations be protected in the wake of the revolution.”

Not that the revolutionaries were the horse to bet on anyway. Their continued reliance on street protests following Mubarak’s ouster angered the wider Egyptian public, which desperately wanted a return to normalcy. In late October—only one day before the registration deadline—they finally formed an electoral coalition, the Revolution Continues Alliance (RCA), to compete in parliamentary elections, but it was too late. The RCA won merely 2.35 percent of the parliamentary seats, and will play a minimal role in shaping Egypt’s political future. Meanwhile, Islamist parties captured nearly 70 percent of the vote by tapping into the Egyptian public’s religious sentiments and using their well-established social services networks to turn out supporters.

I’m not sure that it this is all that surprising. After all, it wasn’t so much the protests that led to the end of the Mubarak regime as it was the fact that the military finally turned on him and forced him to leave. Mubarak’s downfall wasn’t the triumph of popular protest, it was a military coup. Having done that, they have spent the last year consolidating their power while allowing at most the rudimentary appearance of democratic institutions. Since the days of Nasser the Egyptian military has been the constant in Egyptian politics and society, it’s difficult to believe that they would give that position up easily now.

Trager also points out that the situation in Egypt poses problems for the United States, which first quite naturally backed the military government in its decision to overthrow Mubarak and supported its promises of a gradual transition to democracy but which has since lost credibility with the people as it has cracked down on an increasingly dissatisfied populace. As a result, Washington is turning its eye to a potential partner that doesn’t seem reliable at all:

As the SCAF’s repressive rule has undermined its legitimacy both within Egypt and abroad, the Obama administration has looked increasingly to the Muslim Brotherhood as a potential partner. Thus, administration’s policy of “limited contacts” with the Muslim Brotherhood, which it announced in June, expanded to diplomatic meetings with the organization in October, and Deputy Secretary of State William Burns met with the Brotherhood’s political leaders in January. The Brotherhood, the thinking goes, won a 47 percent plurality in the recent parliamentary elections, and Washington’s interests are hardly served by having hostile relations with Egypt’s legitimately elected leaders. This argument, however, is only half right: While Washington should maintain open lines of communication with the Brotherhood, it should have no illusions about the Brotherhood’s willingness to act as a partner on key American interests.

In this vein, the Brotherhood’s leaders have said repeatedly that the organization intends to put the Camp David Accords to a referendum—a strategy that it apparently believes will enable it to sink Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel while escaping the blame. Brotherhood leaders have additionally called for banning bikinis, beach bathing, and alcohol despite the fact that these are essential elements to Egypt’s tourism industry, which comprises roughly ten percent of Egypt’s stagnating economy. The organization also supports new legislation that would limit foreign funding of NGOs, thereby undercutting Washington’s ability to aid pro-democratic organizations. Finally, and perhaps most consequentially, the Brotherhood intends to establish the sharia as the principal source of Egyptian legislation and criminalize criticism of Islamic law, thereby rendering Christians and secularists unequal citizens.

In all honesty, I’m not sure what options there are at this point, or what options we ever had. As I’ve noted before, the situation in Egypt a year ago was largely out of our hand to begin with and that seems to be even more the case today. if this comes down to a confrontation between the military and Brotherhood, though, my guess is that you’ll see the advent of another repressive military regime in Egypt. And the people of Egypt will still be screwed.

The United States is sending a warning to Iran not to play games with the Straits Of Hormuz:

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is relying on a secret channel of communication to warn Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that closing the Strait of Hormuz is a “red line” that would provoke an American response, according to United States government officials.

The officials declined to describe the unusual contact between the two governments, and whether there had been an Iranian reply. Senior Obama administration officials have said publicly that Iran would cross a “red line” if it made good on recent threats to close the strait, a strategically crucial waterway connecting the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman, where 16 million barrels of oil — about a fifth of the world’s daily oil trade — flow through every day.

Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said this past weekend that the United States would “take action and reopen the strait,” which could be accomplished only by military means, including minesweepers, warship escorts and potentially airstrikes. Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta told troops in Texas on Thursday that the United States would not tolerate Iran’s closing of the strait.

The secret communications channel was chosen to underscore privately to Iran the depth of American concern about rising tensions over the strait, where American naval officials say their biggest fear is that an overzealous Revolutionary Guards naval captain could do something provocative on his own, setting off a larger crisis.

“If you ask me what keeps me awake at night, it’s the Strait of Hormuz and the business going on in the Arabian Gulf,” Adm. Jonathan W. Greenert, the chief of naval operations, said in Washington this week.

Administration officials and Iran analysts said they continued to believe that Iran’s threats to close the strait, coming amid deep frictions over Iran’s nuclear program and possible sanctions, were bluster and an attempt to drive up the price of oil. Blocking the route for the vast majority of Iran’s petroleum exports — and for its food and consumer imports — would amount to economic suicide.

“They would basically be taking a vow of poverty with themselves,” said Dennis B. Ross, who until last month was one of President Obama’s most influential advisers on Iran. “I don’t think they’re in such a mood of self sacrifice.”

But Pentagon officials, who plan for every contingency, said that, however unlikely, Iran does have the military capability to close the strait. Although Iran’s naval forces are hardly a match for those of the United States, for two decades Iran has been investing in the weaponry of “asymmetric warfare” — mines, fleets of heavily armed speed boats and antiship cruise missiles hidden along Iran’s 1,000 miles of Persian Gulf coastline — which have become a threat to the world’s most powerful navy.

“The simple answer is yes, they can block it,” General Dempsey said on CBS on Sunday.

While U.S. naval and air superiority would leave the ultimate outcome in little doubt, the Iranians could inflict serious damages on civilian and naval shipping in the meantime:

The Revolutionary Guards navy has been steadily building and buying faster missile boats and stockpiling what American experts say are at least 2,000 naval mines. Many are relatively primitive, about the size of an American garbage can, and easy to slip into the water. “Iran’s credible mining threat can be an effective deterrent to potential enemy forces,” an unclassified report by the Office of Naval Intelligence, the American Navy’s intelligence arm, concluded in 2009. “The Strait of Hormuz is a narrow chokepoint that could be mined effectively in a relatively short amount of time” — with disruptions within hours and more serious blockage in place over days.

Although the United States would respond with minesweepers, analysts said American naval forces might encounter layers of simultaneous attacks. The Iranians could launch antiship missiles from their coastline, islands or oil platforms and at the same time surround any American ship with missile-armed speedboats. “The immediate issue is to get the mines,” Mr. Connell said. “But they’re going to have to deal with the antiship cruise missiles and you’ll have small boats swarming and it’s all going to be happening at the same time.”

The United States could take out the antiship missile launchers with strikes from fighter jets or missiles, but analysts said it could take time to do so because the launchers on shore are mobile and often camouflaged.

The tight squeeze of the strait, which is less than 35 miles wide at its narrowest point, offers little maneuvering room for warships. “It would be like a knife fight in a phone booth,” said a senior Navy officer. The strait’s shipping lanes are even narrower: both the inbound and outbound lanes are two miles wide, with only a two-mile-wide stretch separating them.

In the end, though, if the Iranians took the provocative action of closing the straits we would have no choice but to take action. Even not taking into account the American military presence in the area, the impact that closing the straits would have on worldwide oil prices would be catastrophic. By some estimates, the price of oil could spike to $150/barrel or more if such an event happened. Additionally, the U.S. Navy is the only force out there capable of guaranteeing freedom of the seas in such a crucial part of the world. So, like it or not, if something happens we’ll have no choice but to go in and take care of it.

At the same time, though, one has to wonder how much if this bluster from Teheran is real. As the article notes, cutting off trade would be economic suicide for a nation that is, by all reports, already bearing the brunt of years of economic sanctions. Those sanctions may not be hurting the government very much but I doubt they’d want the public to feel much more pain for fear of reviving the protest movement that bloomed in 2009. Of course, if the United States and/or Israel take action against Iran the odds of Iranian action against shipping in the Straits of Hormuz should not be discounted.

Given the increasing tensions between the United States and Iran in the Straits of Hormuz, this is good to see:

(CNN) — U.S. sailors from a carrier strike group whose recent presence in the Persian Gulf drew the ire of Iranian military officials have rescued 13 of the Middle Eastern country’s sailors from a hijacked fishing boat, a military spokesman said Friday.

The destroyer USS Kidd came to the aid of the ship Thursday in the North Arabian sea, near the crucial Strait of Hormuz, according to the Navy.

The rescue prompted the captain of the freed ship to offer his “sincere gratitude,” according to Josh Schminky, a Navy Criminal Investigative Service agent aboard the Kidd.

“He was afraid that without our help, they could have been there for months,” Schminky said.

(…)

According to the Navy, a helicopter from the Kidd spotted a suspect pirate boat alongside the Iranian vessel. At the same time, the Kidd received a distress call from the captain of ship, the Al Molai, saying he and his crew were being held captive by pirates.

A team from the Kidd boarded the Al Molai, took 15 suspected pirates into custody and freed 13 Iranian hostages, the Navy said.

The suspected pirates, mostly Somalis, were taken to the Stennis to be held until a decision is made about prosecution, Pentagon spokesman Capt. John Kirby said Friday.

Pirates hijacked the Al Molai 40 to 45 days ago, U.S. Naval Forces Central Command said in a statement. The crew was “held hostage, with limited rations and we believe were forced against their will to assist the pirates with other piracy operations,” according to the statement.

Even the Iranian government, which has recently made threatening comments about the return of the USS John Stennis and its battle group to the Gulf, expressed gratitude for the rescue:

Iran on Saturday welcomed the rescue of 13 Iranian sailors by a U.S. Navy ship, calling it a “humanitarian act.”

The sailors were on a fishing boat that had been hijacked by pirates in the Arabian Sea, near the Strait of Hormuz.

(…)

A spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, Ramin Mehmanparast, had positive words about the rescue when he spoke Saturday to the Arabic news network Al-Alam.

“Rescuing Iranian sailors by the U.S. was a humanitarian act and we welcome such acts,” he said. “The Iranian Navy also engages in such rescue operations. It is the responsibility of all nations to rescue nationals from other countries from pirates.”

A small positive development, but positive nonetheless, and the irony that it was ships from the Stennis Battle Group that conducted the rescue is quite apparent.

UK defense secretary Philip Hammond addressed the Atlantic Council this morning in advance of a meeting with his US counterpart, Leon Panetta. I’ve written two longish posts on his speech at the New Atlanticist blog, which I’ll highlight for you here.

UK Defense Secretary: No Preemptive Strike on Iran

While declaring “We would not be in favor of a preemptive strike on Iran,” UK defense secretary Philip Hammond vowed that any attempt to disrupt the flow of oil through Straits of Hormuz “would be illegal and unsuccessful.”

Speaking at the Atlantic Council on NATO and the Case for Collective Defense in the 21st Century, Hammond reinforced transatlantic doctrine dating back to the Carter administration when he stated, “It is in all our interests that the arteries of global trade are kept free, open and running. Disruption to the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz would threaten regional and global economic growth.”

So, while his government would prefer to avoid the use of force, it would do so if necessary.

He observed, “Our joint naval presence in the Arabian Gulf, something our regional partners appreciate, is key to keeping the Strait of Hormuz open for international trade” and added, “The Royal Navy will continue to play a substantial role as part of the Combined Maritime Forces, both at the headquarters in Bahrain, and through our mine counter-measure vessels which help maintain freedom of navigation in the Gulf.”

Of course, the reason Iran is threatening to close off the Strait of Hormuz is because the regime is feeling squeezed by tightening US and European sanctions in response to intransigence on its nuclear program. Asked about that in Q&A, Hammond was blunt: “My working assumption is that they are working flat out” on building a nuclear weapon.

UK Defense Secretary: Europe Failing to Meet Responsibilities

Philip Hammond blasted his fellow Europeans for “failing to meet their financial responsibilities to NATO, and so failing to maintain appropriate and proportionate capabilities.”

Hammond declared, “Without strong economies and stable public finances it is impossible to build and sustain, in the long-term, the military capability required to project power and maintain defense.” Echoing former US Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen, he added, “That is why today the debt crisis should be considered the greatest strategic threat to the future security of our nations. The fact is, in this era of austerity not even the United States can afford the astronomical resource commitment required to deal with every threat from every source.”

[...]
Yet, despite the obviousness of this fact, many allies are not following through. “Libya and Afghanistan have highlighted the significant difficulties we face in ensuring NATO continues to serve the needs of collective security,” Hammond observed. Then, echoing former US defense secretary Bob Gates, he charged, “Too many countries are failing to meet their financial responsibilities to NATO, and so failing to maintain appropriate and proportionate capabilities. Too many are opting out of operations, or contributing but a fraction of what they should be capable of.”

Cutting to the chase, he pointed out, “This is a European problem, not an American one. And it is a political problem, not a military one.”

It was a very powerful speech. I offer substantial commentary in both posts, especially the latter. Highlights:

It would seem obviously in the interests of all concerned to avoid war in Iran. Despite a lot of saber rattling and talk about a nuclear Iran being “unacceptable,” the military option has been only theoretically on the table during the years of tensions over the issue.

One hopes that the Iranian regime receives Hammond’s message that this forbearance has its limits. A standoff over the Strait of Hormuz would almost certainly lead to shots being fired. Containment becomes quite difficult, indeed, once that happens.

And:

There was surely little disagreement with any of that in an Atlantic Council audience. The frustrations of NATO allies not pulling their weight, even to the point of meeting the minimum two percent of GDP spending level that all agree to as a condition of Alliance membership, are so long standing that mentioning them amounts to throat clearing.

Yes, the problem is primarily political. But it appears absolutely entrenched. Simply put, most Europeans see little real threat to their security on the horizon; meanwhile, their economies are in dire trouble and the cradle to grave government support system most have become accustomed to is in danger of collapsing.

I’m thus left in the odd position of quoting Donald Rumsfeld in successive posts—or, in this case, Rumsfeld quoting Shimon Peres: “If a problem has no solution, it may not be a problem, but a fact, not to be solved, but to be coped with over time.” The bottom line is that, whatever cathartic benefit comes from lambasting the Germans and others for not doing as much as we would like on the security front, it’s simply a fact that we are going to have to cope with over time.

More at the links.

Newt Gingrich raised eyebrows while he was rising in the polls in December when he made the bizarre, mostly irrelevant, comment that the Palestinians were “an invented people.” Rick Santorum, however, has gone one step further and declared that the Palestinians don’t exist at all:

“There are no Palestinians,” he told a questioner at a campaign event in Iowa. …..

“All the people who live in the West Bank are Israelis.  There are no Palestinians.  This is Israeli land,” the former Pennsylvania senator said.

“The West Bank is part of Israel,” which won it as “part of an aggressive attack by Jordan and others” in 1967.  Israel doesn’t have to give it back any more than the United States has to give New Mexico and Texas to Mexico, which were gotten “through a war,” he said.

The radical nature of Santorum’s statement cannot be understated. Even the current government of Israel has accepted the idea of a two-state solution to the Israel/Palestinian dispute, the only question is how the parties are going to be able to get to the negotiating table to make that a possibility. Only the most radical advocates of a so-called “Greater Israel” hold on to the idea that Israel should hold on to all the territory acquired by the 1967 war despite the rather obvious desire of the people who live their for independence.

In fact, one wonders why Santorum would advocate such a policy given his supposed support for the State of Israel. If the Arabs living in the West Bank and Gaza are in fact Israelis, then that means they have the right to vote. Given that the birth rate among this population is far higher than among Israel’s Jewish population, there would come a time where the Arab community in Israel would outnumber the Jewish population, and the idea of Israel as a “Jewish State” would cease to exist. The only way to stop that, of course, would be to deny the Arab community the right to participate in their own governance, but that’s merely a strategy designed to create resentment, rebellion, and terrorism.  The other side of the coin, of course, is that it is simply inappropriate for the United States to take a position on an issue like this. This is something that can only be decided by the Israelis and the Palestinians themselves.

If nothing else, this seems to indicate the extent to which Santorum’s foreign policy vision is influenced more by religious fervor that demands absolute loyalty to Israel than by acting in the interests of the United States.

Bernard Finel makes an excellent point about why the hawks have the upper hand in the “war with Iran” debate. While he’s specifically taking to task recent columns by Stephen Walt, the argument applies equally to those, like myself, who have been arguing the folly of military action against Iran’s nukes:

[T]he ship has sailed on this. It sailed in 1979, and has been sailing in the same direction for 30 years. If you are relying on convincing the public and decision-makers that Iran is not a threat, you are going to lose the debate. If you are arguing, in effect, that we should just ignore them and rely on deterrence, that is also going to lose the debate.

The reason the neocons won the debate on Iraq was precisely because they were proposing a solution to a widely recognized problem. It may have been the wrong solution, and the problem was not as severe as they claimed. But the reality is that in policy debates, those able to credibly argue for a “winning” strategy to a problem will always have the upper hand over those proposing muddling through or living with risk.

Like Walt, I think the risk of a nuclear Iran is vastly oversold. Given that Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, Kim Jong-Il, and several successive Pakistan governments have managed to possess and not use nuclear weapons over the years, I see no reason why the Iranian mullahs would be any different. They’re no crazier than Kim, certainly; indeed, they’ve demonstrated constantly over the last three decades that they’re rational, calculating actors.

But Bernard’s right that this is a losing argument. Americans expect their leaders to take action to prevent risks and, while the probability of a nuclear Iran doing something foolish may be quite low, the cost of being wrong on that one is pretty high. (Indeed, that was ultimately what caused me to switch from vehement opposition to reluctant support for invasion of Iraq in 2003.)

Given this, Bernard proposes several “winning” alternatives that address these fears by means other than war–not necessarily because he thinks any of them are actually good policies but because they’ll avert war.  Absent that, he predicts,

If the debate turns into one where one side proposes war as a solution to the Iranian problem and the other simply denies there is a problem in the first place, the result will be war. Why? Because it will be too easy to paint the deniers as naive, particularly since the idea of an Iranian threat is so deeply embedded in American political culture.

I’ve already gone on record predicting that we’ll get through the year without going to war with Iran or, indeed, anyone else new. I think Iran will ratchet up the tensions just enough to satisfy their domestic audience without crossing a red line that would force us to ratchet things up beyond a token strike. I believe that, like President Bush before him, President Obama has no desire to get us into a shooting war with Iran that could evolve into a regional conflagration.

But Bernard’s road map is likely the best insurance against the heated rhetoric of the campaign from forcing his hand.

Bruce Kesler has an article in City Journal titled “Cal State’s Chutzpah” and the curious subtitle “A hypocritical university goes silent while a math professor spouts anti-Israeli politics.” The intro:

Spend any time on a university campus, and the official culture will become obvious in short order. Bigotry and prejudice against blacks, gays, or women simply isn’t tolerated. Even a hint of racism or sexism is met with quick and decisive punishment. But anti-Israel rants on California’s public-college campuses seem to be tolerated, politely ignored, or even tacitly condoned by the powers that be.

Now, I’m dubious of the degree to which political correctness and speech codes are enforced on some campuses, fearing that a stifling of the exchange of legitimate ideas in violation of the fundamental notion of academic freedom is a natural result. But prejudice based on immutable traits is simply different from vehement disagreement with the policy views of a country. Indeed, even if one is “anti-Israel” to the extreme degree of arguing that they have no right to exist as a political entity, that’s a very different thing than spouting hateful rhetoric against Jewish people.

Consider the case of David Klein, a math professor at California State University, Northridge (CSUN). Klein maintains a page on the university’s web server having nothing to do with mathematical physics, teacher education, or standardized testing, his main areas of research. Rather, the page is devoted to the evils of the state of Israel. Students and other members of the university can learn that “Israel is the most racist state in the world at this time” and that the Jewish state engages in “ethnic cleansing.” Visitors can discover, furthermore, that the answer to the question “Aren’t Palestinians equally responsible for the violence?” is an emphatic “No.” Klein provides links to an assortment of Israel haters and, of course, calls for a boycott of Israeli products and U.S. companies that do business with Israel.

Now, I don’t think universities should house pages where their employees spout personal opinions about controversial matters outside their expertise. In the early days of the blog, I wrote quite a bit about the nature of academic freedom and staked out the position that it only extends to scholarly endeavors within one’s field. A mathematician spouting off on things having nothing whatsoever to do with his discipline just comes across as a crank.

That said, Kesler’s description of Klein’s pages–I haven’t examined them in any detail–isn’t particularly damning. Given that Israel exists as a “Jewish state” and imposes significant political limitations on non-Jews, once could construct a plausible argument that it’s a “racist state.” I don’t happen to think “racist” is the right word for it and think plenty of other states, including some in the immediate neighborhood, are more worthy contenders for the world championship; but it’s not an outrageous enough position to merit a stern talking to, much less banishment from the academic community. And, certainly, the positions that Israel engages in ethnic cleaning and that Likud policy are the proximate cause of most of the recent violence are mainstream, if not majority, positions in the field of Middle East studies.

It isn’t hard to imagine what would happen to a professor who used the university’s website to post content opposed, say, to illegal immigration or legal abortion, especially if the subject was outside his academic field.

Actually, it’s pretty easy to imagine: Not a blessed thing.

Administrators would demand that the pages disappear, and they’d cite the university’s policies, chapter and verse. We know university administrators would loudly condemn a professor who maintained a website off campus that had a “deleterious effect on the university’s reputation.” That’s what happened in 2010, when CSUN erupted in outrage over economics professor Kenneth Ng’s personal site, Bigbabykenny.com—which, his critics claimed, promoted illegal sex tourism in Thailand.

Yes, because promoting illegal, immoral activity is exactly the same as stating unpopular political views.

Both the Gender and Women’s Studies Department and the Asian-American Studies Department publicly denounced Ng, and several students and faculty demanded that he take the site down or lose his job. But while university officials blasted the site, they stopped short of forcing Ng to take it down. Ng removed the site anyway, after weeks of public pressure. “I think he realized he’s putting the university in an awkward position,” CSUN provost Harold Hellenbrand told the campus newspaper, adding, “We expect that [faculty] act at a higher level than their profession requires.”

So . . . even in the extreme example cited, the university didn’t do what Kesler proposes be done in this instance? Doesn’t that completely undermine his argument? Yes. Yes it does.

Yet no one within the CSUN community has condemned Klein, and his webpage remains active—though it clearly violates university policies, which state that “use of computers, networks, and computing facilities for activities other than academic purposes or University business is not permitted.”

But that’s entirely subjective. While I believe math professors ought to stick to subjects relating to math, one can certainly make the argument that lively discussion of controversial issues is an academic purpose and a core business of a university.

The university also prohibits associating its name with boycotts and other politically motivated activity.

Again, subjective. Does the mere use of the university’s domain to publish one’s views constitute associating its name? And, generally, “politically motivated activity” relates to domestic partisan politics. A professor using the university website to raise money for President Obama’s re-election would surely get a cease-and-desist order the moment administrators discovered it was happening. Calling for a boycott of Israeli products? Meh.

CSUN further retains the right to remove “any defamatory, offensive, infringing, or illegal materials” from its website at any time.

Reserving the right doesn’t mean that every possible instance will be invoked. We at OTB reserve the right to delete comments and ban commenters who violate certain site policies; we tend to exercise that right only in extreme cases. Further, it’s not clear that Klein is in violation. No evidence has been offered that he’s used infringing or illegal materials. Presumably, Kessler finds them defamatory and/or offensive; but he’s not the ruling authority in this case.

A recent administrative review, however, cleared Klein of any violations. “The University does uphold and preserve the principles of academic freedom—and Professor Klein’s right to express his views,” CSUN president Jolene Koester said in a statement. “Our review affirmed that this right extends to the use of an individual’s web pages, as part of the University website, as a vehicle for expression.”

Well, there you go.

Again, in my ideal formulation, mathematicians would stick to engaging in matters where their expertise sheds useful light. Given the elasticity of that discipline, it should be easy enough to do. Let political scientists, philosophers, historians, and regional specialists tackle Middle East policy. But if the university has a broader conception of the nature of scholarship than that, I don’t begrudge it.

Kesler closes:

Contrary to Koester’s claims, the David Klein matter has nothing to do with academic freedom and everything to do with official hypocrisy. A professor has the right to speak on his own behalf, but not to use a public university’s resources to smear Israel as a murderous oppressor. In the private sector, such conduct would be grounds for censure or termination.

That depends entirely on the nature of one’s employment. Indeed, the vast majority of workers are perfectly free to speak out on anything they please. Granted, most of them aren’t provided server space by their employers; but if the employer wants to give employees web space to promote the free exchange of ideas, it would be absurd to censure or terminate employees who use it for that purpose.

It’s true that many companies would fire high level employees for posting this sort of thing. Not because they find it immoral, offensive, or illegal but because they hate controversy. (See, for example, the recent case of the Lowe’s home improvement chain pulling its ads from a controversial television program after receiving modest criticism.) But universities are precisely not in the business of avoiding controversy; their mandate is to take controversy head on.

BAGHDAD — A wave of coordinated explosions ripped across Baghdad early on Thursday, killing at least 63 people, wounding more than 180 and jolting a country already unsettled by a deepening political crisis and the absence of American troops.

Using car bombs and improvised explosive devices, insurgents attacked markets, grocery stores, schools and government buildings in a dozen neighborhoods in central and eastern part of the capital.

The attacks marked the most significant violence in Iraq since the last American troops pulled out of the country earlier this week. So far, the withdrawal and the bitter fighting between Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a Shiite, and his political foes in Parliament have not been accompanied by a rise in violence. But Thursday’s attacks raised the specter that the crisis inside the government could spill into the streets.

The attacks came a day after Mr. Maliki threatened to abandon an American-backed power-sharing government created a year ago. The prime minister’s words at a televised news conference on Wednesday threw a fragile democracy into further turmoil after the departure of American troops, potentially tarnishing what has been cast as a major foreign policy achievement for President Obama.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attacks on Thursday but they appeared similar to others conducted by the insurgent group, Al Qaeda in Iraq, which has tried to plunge the country back into a sectarian war by pitting Sunnis and Shiites against each other.

“This has nothing to do with the American withdrawal,” said Abdul Kareem Thirib, the head of the security committee for Baghdad’s provincial council. “When they were here, there were also explosions. We were the ones in control of the streets when the Americans were here. I think there will be more cowardly attacks in the coming days but we will face them and everything will be under control.”

He added, “They are trying to send a message to say that ‘we are still here.’”

The attacks began around 6:30 a.m. as Iraqis were leaving for work and blasted apart stores just as shopkeepers were opening their metal gates.

The most deadly attack occurred in the bustling neighborhood of Karada where a car bomb aimed at offices for the government’s integrity committee killed 13 people and wounded 36. Medics and volunteers at the scene did not have enough stretchers for the wounded and dead so they slung bleeding bodies into blankets. Nearby apartment buildings were ripped apart and store windows were shattered as far as 10 blocks from the blast site.

One woman hobbled to the hospital on bloodied legs. When a man assisting her urged her into an ambulance, she said, “I don’t want anything from the government.”

A woman who had been searching for her son in the rubble of one blast learned of his death at the Ibn al-nafiz hospital in Karada. “My God, my God,” she screamed, running out of the emergency room.

Ali Suhail, 43, was opening his gleaming new electronics shop for the very first time when the explosion hurled him to the ground and destroyed an investment years in the making.

“Everybody has a dream — you need to open a store to achieve it,” he said, standing on a heap of broken glass. “Now I have a new dream: to leave this country.”

If this is the New Iraq, then one thinks Mr. Suhail won’t be the only person having that thought.

It didn’t take very long after the removal of American troops, for Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Malaki to begin trying to consolidate power:

BAGHDAD (AP) — Iraq’s Sunni vice president denied charges he ran a hit squad that killed government officials during the nation’s wave of sectarian bloodletting, accusing the Shiite-led government Tuesday of waging a campaign of persecution.

Acting just a day after American forces completed their withdrawal, the government issued an arrest warrant Monday for Tariq al-Hashemi, the country’s highest-ranking Sunni official. The step risks tearing at the same sectarian fault lines that pushed Iraq to the edge of civil war just a few years ago — a prospect that is all the more dire with no U.S. forces on the ground.

Responding to the accusations, al-Hashemi told a televised news conference Tuesday that he has not committed any “sin” against Iraq and described the charges as “fabricated.” He accused the Shiite prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, of being behind a plot to smear him and declared that efforts at national reconciliation had been blown apart.

“I’m shocked by all these things,” al-Hashemi told reporters in the northern city of Irbil. “I swear to God that al-Hashemi didn’t commit any sin or do anything wrong against any Iraqi either today or tomorrow and this is my pledge to God.”

He said the arrest warrant was a campaign to “embarrass” him. He blamed al-Maliki, although he did not say specifically what he believed the Shiite premier had done.

“Al-Maliki is behind the whole issue. The country is in the hands of al-Maliki. All the efforts that have been exerted to reach national reconciliation and to unite Iraq are now gone. So yes, I blame al-Maliki,” he said.

The Iraqi prime minister effectively runs the Interior Ministry, where the charges originated.

If this is an indication of how unstable Iraq really is, then all I can say is that I’m glad we got the heck out when we did.

The Christian Science Monitor is out with a story that Iranian engineers are claiming that they were actually able to electronically take control of the RQ-170 drone captured last week:

Iran guided the CIA’s “lost” stealth drone to an intact landing inside hostile territory by exploiting a navigational weakness long-known to the US military, according to an Iranian engineer now working on the captured drone’s systems inside Iran.

Iranian electronic warfare specialists were able to cut off communications links of the American bat-wing RQ-170 Sentinel, says the engineer, who works for one of many Iranian military and civilian teams currently trying to unravel the drone’s stealth and intelligence secrets, and who could not be named for his safety.

Using knowledge gleaned from previous downed American drones and a technique proudly claimed by Iranian commanders in September, the Iranian specialists then reconfigured the drone’s GPS coordinates to make it land in Iran at what the drone thought was its actual home base in Afghanistan.

“The GPS navigation is the weakest point,” the Iranian engineer told the Monitor, giving the most detailed description yet published of Iran’s “electronic ambush” of the highly classified US drone. “By putting noise [jamming] on the communications, you force the bird into autopilot. This is where the bird loses its brain.”

The “spoofing” technique that the Iranians used – which took into account precise landing altitudes, as well as latitudinal and longitudinal data – made the drone “land on its own where we wanted it to, without having to crack the remote-control signals and communications” from the US control center, says the engineer.

The revelations about Iran’s apparent electronic prowess come as the US, Israel, and some European nations appear to be engaged in an ever-widening covert war with Iran, which has seen assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists, explosions at Iran’s missile and industrial facilities, and the Stuxnet computer virus that set back Iran’s nuclear program.

Now this engineer’s account of how Iran took over one of America’s most sophisticated drones suggests Tehran has found a way to hit back. The techniques were developed from reverse-engineering several less sophisticated American drones captured or shot down in recent years, the engineer says, and by taking advantage of weak, easily manipulated GPS signals, which calculate location and speed from multiple satellites.

Western military experts and a number of published papers on GPS spoofing indicate that the scenario described by the Iranian engineer is plausible.

“Even modern combat-grade GPS [is] very susceptible” to manipulation, says former US Navy electronic warfare specialist Robert Densmore, adding that it is “certainly possible” to recalibrate the GPS on a drone so that it flies on a different course. “I wouldn’t say it’s easy, but the technology is there.”

If true, this would explain why the drone displayed by the Iranians seems to be in such relatively good shape, which one would not expect if the vehicle had crashed somewhere or been downed by enemy fire. This is also the second time we’ve heard about possible electronic vulnerabilities in the U.S. drone fleet. Just a few months ago, it was reported that Predator Drone’s had been infected by a virus in their control software. This would also answer the question of why an auto-destruct mechanism was not activated, assuming the drone actually has one. And, finally, it would indicate why a mission to retrieve or destroy the craft was not feasible. From the article, it seems clear that the Iranians were able to guide the RQ-170 to a landing in an area they controlled.

Needless to say, this isn’t a good development.