(Updated below - Update II - Update III - Update IV - Update V - Update VI)

The Office of Legal Counsel, inside the Justice Department, is probably the most consequential federal government office that remains relatively obscure.  The legal opinions which it issues become, more or less automatically, the official legal position of the Executive Branch.  It was from that office that John Yoo, Jay Bybee and others did so much damage, issuing now-infamous memoranda that established the regime of lawlessness that has dominated our political institutions over the last eight years.  Other than Attorney General-designate Eric Holder and Obama himself, there is probably no official who will have a more significant role in determining the extent to which the Obama administration really does reverse the lawlessness and legal radicalism of the Bush years.

Today, as The Boston Globe just reported, Barack Obama announced several new appointments to key DOJ posts, including Dawn Johnsen to head the OLC.  Johnsen is a Professor of Law at Indiana University, a former OLC official in the Clinton administration (as well as a former ACLU counsel), and a graduate of Yale Law School.  She's become a true expert on executive power and, specifically, the role and obligation of the OLC in restricting presidential decisions to their lawful scope.

There are several striking pieces of evidence that suggest this appointment may be Obama's best yet, perhaps by far.  Consider, first, this rather emphatic Slate article authored by Johnsen in the wake of the disclosure, last April, of the 81-page John Yoo Memo which declared that the President's power to torture detainees is virtually limitless.  Her article is notable at least as much for its tone as for its substance (emphasis added):

I want to second Dahlia's frustration with those who don't see the newly released Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) torture memo as a big deal. Where is the outrage, the public outcry?! The shockingly flawed content of this memo, the deficient processes that led to its issuance, the horrific acts it encouraged, the fact that it was kept secret for years and that the Bush administration continues to withhold other memos like it--all demand our outrage. Yes, we've seen much of it before. And yes, we are counting down the remaining months. But we must regain our ability to feel outrage whenever our government acts lawlessly and devises bogus constitutional arguments for outlandishly expansive presidential power. Otherwise, our own deep cynicism, about the possibility for a President and presidential lawyers to respect legal constraints, itself will threaten the rule of law--and not just for the remaining nine months of this administration, but for years and administrations to come. OLC, the office entrusted with making sure the President obeys the law instead here told the President that in fighting the war on terror, he is not bound by the laws Congress has enacted. That Congress lacks the authority to regulate the interrogation and treatment of enemy combatants. . . . John Yoo, the memo's author, has the gall to continue to defend the legal reasoning in this memo, in the face even of Bush administration OLC head Jack Goldsmith's harsh criticism--and withdrawal--of the memo. Not only that, Yoo attempts to spin the memo's advice on presidential power as "near boilerplate" . . .  I know (many of us know) Yoo's statement to be false. And not merely false, but irresponsibly and dangerously false in a way that impugns OLC's integrity over time and threatens to undermine public faith in the possibility that any administration can be expected to adhere to the rule of law. Far from "near boilerplate," recall that the last President who took the view that "when the President does it that means that it is not illegal" was forced to resign in disgrace. . . . Is it possible John Yoo alone merits our outrage, as some kind of rogue legal advisor? Of course not. As Dahlia points out, Bush has not fired anyone responsible for devising the legal arguments that have allowed the Bush administration to act contrary to federal statutes with close to immunity--or for breaking the laws. In fact, the ones at Justice who didn't last are the officials (like Goldsmith) who dared to say "no" to the President-which, by the way, is OLC's core job description. . . . The correct response to all this? Marty has several good suggestions to start. And outrage. Directed where it belongs: at President Bush, as well as his lawyers.

A couple of weeks before that, she wrote a short piece for Slate lambasting the Bush administration for violating FISA in secret (with the approval of then-OLC head Jack Goldsmith) and for manipulating the New York Times into concealing the story for a full year.  There, she wrote (emphasis added):

I'm afraid we are growing immune to just how outrageous and destructive it is, in a democracy, for the President to violate federal statutes in secret. Remember that much of what we know about the Bush administration's violations of statutes (and yes, I realize they claim not to be violating statutes) came first only because of leaks and news coverage. Incredibly, we still don't know the full extent of our government's illegal surveillance or illegal interrogations (and who knows what else)-despite Congress's failed efforts to get to the bottom of it. Congress instead resorted to enacting new legislation on both issues largely in the dark.

Perhaps most importantly -- and most impressively -- of all, this is what she wrote in Slate on March 18, regarding what the next administration must do about Bush's serial lawbreaking:

I felt the sense of shame and responsibility for my government's behavior especially acutely in the summer of 2004, with the leaking of the infamous and outrageous Bush administration Office of Legal Counsel Torture Memo. . . . The same question, of what we are to do in the face of national dishonor, also occurred to me a few weeks ago, as I listened to President Bush describe his visit to a Rwandan memorial to the 1994 genocide there. . . . But President Bush spoke there, too, of the power of the reminder the memorial provides and the need to protect against recurrences there, or elsewhere. That brought to mind that whenever any government or people act lawlessly, on whatever scale, questions of atonement and remedy and prevention must be confronted. And fundamental to any meaningful answer is transparency about the wrong committed. . . .
The question how we restore our nation's honor takes on new urgency and promise as we approach the end of this administration. We must resist Bush administration efforts to hide evidence of its wrongdoing through demands for retroactive immunity, assertions of state privilege, and implausible claims that openness will empower terrorists. . . . Here is a partial answer to my own question of how should we behave, directed especially to the next president and members of his or her administration but also to all of use who will be relieved by the change: We must avoid any temptation simply to move on. We must instead be honest with ourselves and the world as we condemn our nation's past transgressions and reject Bush's corruption of our American ideals. Our constitutional democracy cannot survive with a government shrouded in secrecy, nor can our nation's honor be restored without full disclosure.

I first read these posts of Johnsen's a few weeks ago when a reporter asked me about my reaction to the possibility that she might be appointed to head the OLC.  Beyond these articles, I don't know all that much about her, but anyone who can write this, in this unapologetic, euphemism-free and even impolitic tone, warning that the problem isn't merely John Yoo but Bush himself, repeatedly demanding "outrage," criticizing the Democratic Congress for legalizing Bush's surveillance program, arguing that we cannot merely "move on" if we are to restore our national honor, stating the OLC's "core job description" is to "say 'no' to the President," all while emphasizing that the danger is unchecked power not just for the Bush administration but "for years and administrations to come" -- and to do so in the middle of an election year when she knows she has a good chance to be appointed to a high-level position if the Democratic candidate won and yet nonetheless eschewed standard, obfuscating Beltway politesse about these matters -- is someone whose appointment to such an important post is almost certainly a positive sign.  No praise is due Obama until he actually does things that merit praise, but it's hard not to consider this encouraging. 

UPDATE: Here is an excerpt of Johnsen, in October, 2007, at a panel discussion of the American Constitution Society, discussing what she called the "corrupt" legal advice of the Bush OLC and explaining the proper role of that office, with "independence" as the centerpiece: "OLC and the Attorney General have to be prepared to tell the President 'no'; that's what the law requires" (h/t Jim White):

UPDATE II: A bit more good news today was Obama's announcement of his selection for CIA Director:  former Clinton White House Chief of Staff (and Congressman) Leon Panetta.  I don't have any particular thoughts, one way or the other, about Panetta himself, but -- particularly in the wake of the Brennan controversy -- it does seem clear that the Obama team was serious about avoiding anyone who had any connection at all to the Bush torture, surveillance and detention programs.  Not only did they want to avoid anyone with any formal connection, but also anyone who (like Brennan) advocated or supported those programs, as The New York Times reported today:

Members of Mr. Obama’s transition also raised concerns about other candidates, even some Democratic lawmakers with intelligence experience. Representative Jane Harman of California, formerly the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, had hoped to get the job, but she was ruled out as a candidate in part because of her early support for some Bush administration programs like the domestic eavesdropping program.

Good.  Supporting Bush's illegal NSA program -- as Harman did, repeatedly and explicitly -- should be disqualifying for the position of CIA Director.  Panetta may have many flaws -- who doesn't after years and years in Washington? -- but Obama's apparent determination to avoid anyone "tainted" by the CIA's last eight years is commendable.  Like the Johnsen appointment, it doesn't, standing alone, prove anything -- only actions will do that -- but it's still a positive step. 

UPDATE III: The New York Times' Eric Lichtblau, writing today about the Johnsen appointment, says that OLC "has become controversial because of its legal defense of practices bordering on torture."  Most of the civilized world -- which once included the United States -- has long recognized those "practices" as torture, but it's nice that the Times has cleared this up.  Waterboarding and the like merely "border on torture."  Someone should alert the numerous waterboarding Japanese leaders and soliders whom we convicted of torture in post-World War II war crimes trials -- among many others who were punished for similar offenses -- that what they did merely "bordered on torture." 

UPDATE IV: In comments, a few people have cited the standard excuse offered by Obama loyalists in the past when it came to far worse Obama appointments:  namely, that appointments don't really matter because it's Obama who will make the decisions. Applying that reasoning to the Johnsen appointment, these commenters contend, means there is no reason to consider it a positive sign because Obama is just free to ignore any and all advice she gives.  

But that argument misapprehends the role and power of the OLC.  That office does far more than merely dispense "advice" which Obama is free to disregard at will.  See here for elaboration on why that is. 

UPDATE V: Atrios points to an Op-Ed written by Leon Panetta earlier this year in which he aggressively criticizes the Bush administration for exploiting "fear" to justify torture, illegal eavesdropping and general presidential lawlessness.  Panetta's rhetoric is a bit restrained given the extremism he's condemning -- he's no Dawn Johnsen -- but, as Atrios says:  "not bad for the Village."

UPDATE VI:  Spencer Ackerman reports that Sen. Dianne Feinstein is upset with the selection of Panetta, petulantly complaining that she wasn't consulted in advance and that it would be best to have an "intelligence professional" in that position.  CQ's Tim Starks reports that Sen. Jay Rockefeller is making very similar noises about this selection.  Few things could reflect better on Panetta's selection than the fact that Feinstein and Rockefeller -- two of the most Bush-enabling Senators -- are unhappy with it.

(updated below)

Former McCain-Palin campaign spokesman and current Weekly Standard editor Michael Goldfarb notes that Israel, a couple of days ago, dropped a 2,000-pound bomb on a Gazan home which killed a top Hamas leader . . . in addition to 18 others, including his four wives and nine of his children.  About the killing of those innocent civilians, Goldfarb writes (h/t John Cole via email):

The fight against Islamic radicals always seems to come around to whether or not they can, in fact, be deterred, because it's not clear that they are rational, at least not like us. But to wipe out a man's entire family, it's hard to imagine that doesn't give his colleagues at least a moment's pause. Perhaps it will make the leadership of Hamas rethink the wisdom of sparking an open confrontation with Israel under the current conditions.

That, of course, is just a slightly less profane version of Marty Peretz's chest-beating proclamation that the great value of the attack on Gaza is to teach those Arabs a lesson:  "do not fuck with the Jews."

There are few concepts more elastic and subject to exploitation than "Terrorism," the all-purpose justifying and fear-mongering term.  But if it means anything, it means exactly the mindset which Goldfarb is expressing:  slaughtering innocent civilians in order to "send a message," to "deter" political actors by making them fear that continuing on the same course will result in the deaths of civilians and -- best of all, from the Terrorist's perspective -- even their own children and other family members.

To the Terrorist, by definition, that innocent civilians and even children are killed isn't a regrettable cost of taking military action.  It's not a cost at all.  It's a benefit.   It has strategic value.  Goldfarb explicitly says this:  "to wipe out a man's entire family, it's hard to imagine that doesn't give his colleagues at least a moment's pause." 

That, of course, is the very same logic that leads Hamas to send suicide bombers to slaughter Israeli teenagers in pizza parlors and on buses and to shoot rockets into their homes.  It's the logic that leads Al Qaeda to fly civilian-filled airplanes into civilian-filled office buildings.  And it's the logic that leads infinitely weak and deranged people like Goldfarb and Peretz to find value in the killing of innocent Palestinians, including -- one might say, at least in Goldfarb's case:  especially -- children.

* * * * *

One should be clear that this sociopathic indifference to (or even celebration over) the deaths of Palestinian civilians isn't representative of all supporters of the Israeli attack on Gaza.  It's unfair to use the Goldfarb/Peretz pathology to impugn all supporters of the Israeli attack.  It's certainly possible to support the Israeli offensive despite the deaths of these civilians, to truly lament the suffering of innocent Palestinians but still find the war, on balance, to be justifiable.

Those who favor the attack on Gaza due to that calculus are certainly misguided about the likely outcome.  And many war supporters who fall into this more benign category are guilty of insufficiently weighing the deaths of Palestinian innocents and, relatedly, of such overwhelming emotional and cultural attachment to Israel and Israelis that they long ago ceased viewing this conflict with any remnant of objectivity.  

I can't express how many emails I've received in the last week from people identifying themselves as "liberals" (and, overwhelmingly, American Jews); telling me that they agree with my views in almost all areas other than Israel; and then self-righteously insisting that I imagine what it's like to live in Southern Israel with incoming rocket fire from Hamas, as though that will change my views on the Israel/Gaza war.  Obviously, it's not difficult to imagine the understandable rage that Israelis feel when learning of another attack on Israeli civilians, in exactly the way that American rage over the 9/11 attacks was understandable.  But just as that American anger didn't justify anything and everything that followed, the fact that there are indefensible attacks on Israeli civilians doesn't render the (far more lethal) attacks on Gaza either wise or just -- as numerous Jewish residents of Sderot themselves are courageously arguing in opposing the Israeli attack. 

More to the point:  for those who insist that others put themselves in the position of a resident of Sderot -- as though that will, by itself, prove the justifiability of the Israeli attack -- the idea literally never occurs to them that they ought to imagine what it's like to live under foreign occupation for 4 decades (and, despite the 2005 "withdrawal from Gaza," Israel continues to occupy and expand its settlements on Palestinian land and to control and severely restrict many key aspects of Gazan life).  No thought is given to what it is like, what emotions it generates, what horrible acts start to appear justifiable, when you have a hostile foreign army control your borders and airspace and internal affairs for 40 years, one which builds walls around you, imposes the most intensely humiliating conditions on your daily life, blockades your land so that you're barred from exiting and prevented from accessing basic nutrition and medical needs for your children to the point where a substantial portion of the underage population suffers from stunted growth. 

So extreme is their emotional identification with one side (Israel) that it literally never occurs to them to give any thought to any of that, to imagine what it's like to live in those circumstances.  Nor does this thought occur to them:

I was trained from an early age to view this group as my group, to identify with them emotionally, culturally, religiously.  Maybe that -- and not an objective assessment of these events -- is why I continuously side with that group and see everything from its perspective and justify whatever it does, why I find the Dick Cheney/Weekly Standard/neoconservative worldview repellent in every situation except when it comes to Israel, when I suddenly find it wise and vigorously embrace it.

Those who defend American actions in every case, or who find justification in attacks on Israeli civilians, or who find simplistic moral clarity in a whole range of other complex and protracted disputes where all sides share infinite blame, are often guilty of the same refusal/inability to at least try to minimize this sort of ingrained tribalistic blindness.

* * * * *

Still, there is a substantial difference between, on the one hand, basically well-intentioned people who are guilty of excessive emotional and cultural identification with one side of the dispute and, on the other, those who adopt the Goldfarb/Peretz psychopathic derangement of belittling rage over widespread civilian deaths as mere "whining" or even something to view as a strategic asset.  The latter group is a subset of war supporters and evinces every defining attribute of the Terrorist.

Those who giddily support not just civilian deaths in Gaza but every actual and proposed attack on Arab/Muslim countries -- from the war in Iraq to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon to the proposed attacks on Iran and Syria and even continued escalation in Afghanistan -- are able to do so because they don't really see the Muslims they want to kill as being fully human.  For obvious reasons, one typically finds this full-scale version of sociopathic indifference -- this perception of brutal war as a blood-pumping and exciting instrument for feeling vicarious sensations of power and strength from a safe distance -- in the society's weakest, most frightened, and most insecure individuals.  

Here's right-wing blogger (and law professor) Glenn Reynolds revealing that wretched mindset for all to see:

“Cycles of violence” continue until one side wins decisively.  Personally, I’d rather that were the Israelis, since they’re civilized people and not barbarians.

Or, as Goldfarb put it:  "it's not clear that they are rational, at least not like us."

If you see Palestinians as something less than civilized human beings:  as "barbarians" -- just as if you see Americans as infidels warring with God or Jews as sub-human rats -- then it naturally follows that civilian deaths are irrelevant, perhaps even something to cheer.  For people who think that way, arguments about "proportionality" won't even begin to resonate -- such concepts can't even be understood -- because the core premise, that excessive civilian deaths are horrible and should be avoided at all costs, isn't accepted.  Why should a superior, civilized, peaceful society allow the welfare of violent, hateful barbarians to interfere with its objectives?  How can the deaths or suffering of thousands of barbarians ever be weighed against the death of even a single civilized person?

So many of these conflicts -- one might say almost all of them -- end up shaped by the same virtually universal deficiency:  excessive tribalistic identification (i.e.:  the group with which I was trained to identify is right and good and just and my group's enemy is bad and wrong and violent), which causes people to view the world only from the perspective of their side, to believe that X is good when they do it and evil when it's done to them.  X can be torture, or the killing of civilians in order to "send a message" (i.e., Terrorism), or invading and occupying other people's land, or using massive lethal force against defenseless populations, or seeing one's own side as composed of real humans and the other side as sub-human, evil barbarians.  As George Orwell wrote in Notes on Nationalism -- with perfect prescience to today's endless conflicts (h/t Hume's Ghost):

All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side ... The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them

For those who evaluate moral questions from that blindingly self-regarding perspective, anything and everything becomes easily justifiable.

UPDATE:  The Israeli Supreme Court several days ago ordered the Government to allow reporters into Gaza, yet Israel continues to block all journalists from entering.  The reason, as casual_observer notes in comments, is clear:

The reason Israel has done this must be that they will do whatever they must--including ignoring their own high court--to limit evidence that Gazans are indeed human beings and that they are suffering the horrors that occur when war is unleashed on densely-packed urban civilians. Israel knows full well that reporting from Gaza turns Gazans from vague abstractions to suffering human beings. And they will not allow that reality to be communicated to the world.

Especially in the American media, there is a constant focus on the effects on civilians from the rocket attacks on Southern Israelis -- as well there should be, since that is an important part of the debate.  But everyone should also be permitted to view the devastating effects on actual human beings from these Israeli bombing and artillery raids in Gaza.  This truly horrific video -- purportedly of a recent Israeli bombing of a civilian Gazan market -- has been widely cited.  I can't and don't vouch for its authenticity (UPDATE:  there's good reason to believe it's not from an Israeli attack), but it's certainly reflective of the carnage in Gaza.  It's much easier to undervalue the suffering imposed on The Other when you don't have to see it.

(updated below - Update II - Update III)

This Rasmussen Reports poll -- the first to survey American public opinion specifically regarding the Israeli attack on Gaza -- strongly bolsters the severe disconnect I documented the other day between (a) American public opinion on U.S. policy towards Israel and (b) the consensus views expressed by America's political leadership.  Not only does Rasmussen find that Americans generally "are closely divided over whether the Jewish state should be taking military action against militants in the Gaza Strip" (44-41%, with 15% undecided), but Democratic voters overwhelmingly oppose the Israeli offensive -- by a 24-point margin (31-55%).  By stark constrast, Republicans, as one would expect (in light of their history of supporting virtually any proposed attack on Arabs and Muslims), overwhelmingly support the Israeli bombing campaign (62-27%).

It's not at all surprising, then, that Republican leaders -- from Dick Cheney and John Bolton to virtually all appendages of the right-wing noise machine, from talk radio and Fox News to right-wing blogs and neoconservative journals -- are unquestioning supporters of the Israeli attack.  After all, they're expressing the core ideology of the overwhelming majority of their voters and audience. 

Much more notable is the fact that Democratic Party leaders -- including Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi -- are just as lockstep in their blind, uncritical support for the Israeli attack, in their absolute refusal to utter a word of criticism of, or even reservations about, Israeli actions.  While some Democratic politicians who are marginalized by the party's leadership are willing to express the views which Democratic voters overwhelmingly embrace, the suffocating, fully bipartisan orthodoxy which typically predominates in America when it comes to Israel -- thou shalt not speak ill of Israel, thou shalt support all actions it takes -- is in full force with this latest conflict.

Is there any other significant issue in American political life, besides Israel, where (a) citizens split almost evenly in their views, yet (b) the leaders of both parties adopt identical lockstep positions which leave half of the citizenry with no real voice?  More notably still, is there any other position, besides Israel, where (a) a party's voters overwhelmingly embrace one position (Israel should not have attacked Gaza) but (b) that party's leadership unanimously embraces the exact opposite position (Israel was absolutely right to attack Gaza and the U.S. must support Israel unequivocally)?  Does that happen with any other issue?

Equally noteworthy is that the factional breakdown regarding Israel-Gaza mirrors quite closely the factional alliances that arose with regard to the Iraq War.  Just as was true with Iraq, one finds vigorous pro-war sentiment among the Dick Cheney/National Review/neoconservative/hard-core-GOP crowd, joined (as was true for Iraq) by some American liberals who typically oppose that faction yet eagerly join with them when it comes to Israel.  Meanwhile, most of the rest of the world -- Europe, South America, Asia, the Middle East, the U.N. leadership -- opposes and condemns the attack, all to no avail.  The parties with the superior military might (the U.S. and Israel) dismiss world opinion as essentially irrelevant.  Even the pro-war rhetorical tactics are the same (just as those who opposed the Iraq War were demonized as being "pro-Saddam," those who oppose the Israeli attack on Gaza are now "pro-Hamas").

Substantively, there are certainly meaningful differences between the U.S. attack on Iraq and the Israeli attack on Gaza (most notably the fact that Hamas really does shoot rockets into Israel and has killed Israeli civilians and Israel really is blockading and occupying Palestinian land, whereas Iraq did not attack and could not attack the U.S. as the U.S. was sanctioning them and controlling their airspace).  But the underlying logic of both wars are far more similar than different:  military attacks,  invasions and occupations will end rather than exacerbate terrorism; the Muslim world only understands brute force; the root causes of the disputes are irrelevant; diplomacy and the U.N. are largely worthless.  It's therefore entirely unsurprising that the sides split along the same general lines.  What's actually somewhat remarkable is that there is even more lockstep consensus among America's political leadership supporting the Israeli attack on Gaza than there was supporting the U.S.'s own attack on Iraq (at least a few Democratic Congressional leaders opposed the war on Iraq, unlike for Israel's bombing of Gaza, where they virtually all unequivocally support it).

* * * * *

Ultimately, what is most notable about the "debate" in the U.S. over Israel-Gaza is that virtually all of it occurs from the perspective of Israeli interests but almost none of it is conducted from the perspective of American interests.  There is endless debate over whether Israel's security is enhanced or undermined by the attack on Gaza and whether the 40-year-old Israeli occupation, expanding West Bank settlements and recent devastating blockade or Hamas militancy and attacks on Israeli civilians bear more of the blame.  American opinion-making elites march forward to opine on the historical rights and wrongs of the endless Israeli-Palestinian territorial conflict with such fervor and fixation that it's often easy to forget that the U.S. is not actually a direct party to this dispute. 

Though the ins-and-outs of Israeli grievances and strategic considerations are endlessly examined, there is virtually no debate over whether the U.S. should continue to play such an active, one-sided role in this dispute.  It's the American taxpayer, with their incredibly consequential yet never-debated multi-billion-dollar aid packages to Israel, who are vital in funding this costly Israeli assault on Gaza.  Just as was true for Israel's bombing of Lebanon, it's American bombs that -- with the whole world watching -- are blowing up children and mosques, along with Hamas militants, in Gaza.  And it's the American veto power that, time and again, blocks any U.N. action to stop these wars. 

For those reasons, the pervasive opposition and anger around the world from the Israeli assault on Gaza is not only directed to Israel but -- quite rationally and understandably -- to America as well.  Virtually the entire world, other than large segments of the American public, see Israeli actions as American actions.  The attack on Gaza thus harms not only Israel's reputation and credibility, but America's reputation and credibility as well.

And for what?  Even for those Americans who, for whatever their reasons, want endlessly to fixate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, who care deeply and passionately about whether the Israelis or the Palestinians control this or that West Bank hill or village and want to spend the rest of their days arguing about who did what to whom in 1948 and 1967, what possible interests do Americans generally have in any of that, sufficient to involve ourselves so directly and vigorously on one side, and thereby subject ourselves to the significant costs -- financial, reputational, diplomatic and security -- from doing so?

It's one thing to argue that Israel is being both wise and just by bombing the densely populated Gaza Strip.  It's another thing entirely to argue that the U.S. should use all of its resources to support Israel as it does so.  Those are two entirely separate questions.  Arguments insisting that the Gaza attack is good and right for Israel don't mean that they are good and right for the U.S.  Yet unstinting, unquestioning American support for whatever Israel does is just tacitly assumed in most of these discussions. The core assumption is that if it can be established that this is the right thing for Israel to do, then it must be the right thing for the U.S. to support it.  The notion that the two countries may have separate interests -- that this may be good for Israel to do but not for the U.S. to support -- is the one issue that, above all else, may never be examined.

The "change" that many anticipate (or, more accurately, hope) that Obama will bring about is often invoked as a substance-free mantra, a feel-good political slogan.  But to the extent it means anything specific, at the very least it has to entail that there will be a substantial shift in how America is perceived in the world, the role that we in fact play, the civil-liberties-erosions and militarized culture that inevitably arise from endlessly involving ourselves in numerous, hate-fueled military conflicts around the world.  Our blind support for Israel, our eagerness to make all of its disputes our own disputes, our refusal to acknowledge any divergence of interests between us and that other country, our active impeding rather than facilitating of diplomatic resolutions between it and its neighbors are major impediments to any meaningful progress in those areas.

UPDATE:  One related point:  I have little appreciation for those who believe, one way or the other, that they can reliably predict what Obama is going to do -- either on this issue or others.  That requires a clairvoyance which I believe people lack.

Some argue that Obama has filled key positions with politicians who have a history of virtually absolute support for Israeli actions -- Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Rahm Emanuel -- because Obama intends to continue, more or less, the Bush policy of blind support for Israel.  Others argue the opposite:  that those appointments are necessary to vest the Obama administration with the credibility to take a more active role in pushing the Israelis to a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians, and that in particular, Clinton would not have left her Senate seat unless she believed she could finish Bill Clinton's work and obtain for herself the legacy-building accomplishment of forging an agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians (this morning's NYT hints at that scenario).

I personally find the latter theory marginally more persuasive, but there is simply no way to know until Obama is inaugurated.  Whatever else is true, the more domestic political pressure is exerted demanding that the U.S. play a more even-handed and constructive role in facilitating a diplomatic resolution, the more likely it is that this will happen.

UPDATE II:  Donna Edwards, the newly elected, netroots-supported Democratic Congresswoman from Maryland, who removed the standard establishment Democratic incumbent Al Wynn from office this year, has the following to say about Israel/Gaza:

I am deeply disturbed by this week's escalation of hostilities in the Gaza Strip, as I have been by the ongoing rocket fire into southern Israel. To support Israel and to ease the humanitarian crisis facing the people of Gaza, the United States must work actively for an immediate ceasefire that ends the violence, stops the rockets, and removes the blockade of Gaza.

That's much further than most national Democrats have been willing to go.  And it illustrates that primary challenges can -- slowly but meaningfully -- change the face of the Democratic Party.

UPDATE III:  An abridged version of this post was published in today's Chicago Sun-Times, here.

(updated below - Update II - Update III)

While fiercely loyal establishment spokespeople such as The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus continue to insist that prosecutions are only appropriate for common criminals ("someone breaking into your house") but not our glorious political leaders when they break the law (by, say, systematically torturing people), the Bush administration has righteously decided that torture is such a grotesque and intolerable crime that political leaders who order it simply must be punished in American courts to the fullest extent of the law . . . . if they're from Liberia:

MIAMI (AP) -- U.S. prosecutors want a Miami judge to sentence the son of former Liberian President Charles Taylor to 147 years in prison for torturing people when he was chief of a brutal paramilitary unit during his father's reign. Charles McArthur Emmanuel, also known as Charles "Chuckie" Taylor Jr. is scheduled to be sentenced Jan. 9 by U.S. District Judge Cecilia M. Altonaga. His conviction was the first use of a 1994 law allowing prosecution in the U.S. for acts of torture committed overseas.

Even in the U.S., it's hard to believe that federal prosecutors who work for the Bush DOJ were able to convey the following words with a straight face:

A recent Justice Department court filing describes torture - which the U.S. has been accused of in the war on terror - as a "flagrant and pernicious abuse of power and authority" that warrants severe punishment of Taylor. "It undermines respect for and trust in authority, government and a rule of law," wrote Assistant U.S. Attorney Caroline Heck Miller in last week's filing. "The gravity of the offense of torture is beyond dispute."

The AP article which reported on these proceedings, by Curt Anderson, is almost as illustrative an exhibit of how our country operates as the trial itself is.  Marvel at this passage:

Emmanuel had argued in previous court papers that he was being unfairly prosecuted for acts similar to those committed by U.S. personnel in Iraq and elsewhere. The administration of President George W. Bush has been criticized by some around the world and in Congress for using aggressive interrogation techniques. Justice Department memos were seen as providing legal underpinnings for some of the techniques. However, administration officials have blamed abuses at places such as Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison on a small number of soldiers or agents and insisted there has been no systematic mistreatment of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan or the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Acts which, when ordered by Liberians, are "criminal torture" meriting life imprisonment magically become, when ordered by Americans, mere "aggressive interrogation techniques."   And while not all of the "techniques" used by the Liberians were authorized by Bush officials ("hot clothes irons" and "biting ants shoveled onto people's bodies"), many of the authorized American techniques are classic torture tactics and resulted in the deaths of many detainees and the total insanity of many more.

Worse, AP -- with canine-like subservience -- mindlessly recites the Bush administration's excuses (Abu Ghraib was due to low-level rogue bad apples and "there has been no systematic mistreatment of detainees") without even mentioning the ample evidence proving how false those government claims are.  That's standard American "journalism" for you:  "Our Government says X, and even if it's false and even if it's intensely disputed, we'll just leave it at that."  Doing anything more -- as NBC News' David Gregory pointed out -- is "not their role."

There's something beautifully illustrative about this torture prosecution.  Apparently, it's not just appropriate, but necessary and urgent, for American courts to be used to prosecute the leaders of small African nations who order torture exclusively in their own land.  Doing that is necessary to uphold what the Bush DOJ calls "respect for and trust in authority, government and a rule of law."  

But -- say Bush loyalists and our pliant political class in unison -- the one thing that we cannot tolerate is for American courts to be used to impose accountability on American leaders who authorized illegal torture.  And, of course, the only thing worse than doing that would be to subject them to prosecution by another country or, creepier still, an international tribunal.  That would be an intolerable infringement of our sovereignty, we say as we prosecute the son of Liberia's President for acts he undertook exclusively inside Liberia.

In Liberia, the Taylor regime, for many years, was genuinely threatened by numerous rebels and revolutionary factions -- ones supported by other countries -- seeking to overthrow the Liberian government.  The torture which Taylor, Jr. was accused of ordering occurred during a brutal civil war. 

Liberia undoubtedly has its own Jack Goldsmiths and Stuart Taylors who insist that the torture which the Taylors ordered -- though perhaps "crossing a line or two" -- was done for the Good and Safety of the Liberian People and to defend the Government against these foreign and domestic threats.  The Taylors undoubtedly have their loyalists who echo our own Cass Sunsteins and Ruth Marcuses, urging that it would be so much better for the country if everyone just let bygones be bygones and looked to the pretty future and the challenges Liberians face and not get distracted by litigating the unpleasant and partisan fights of the past.

But, like most of the alleged principles to which our political elite professes allegiance, America and its leaders are entitled to a different set of standards and better treatment.  Thus, Charles Taylor belongs at the Hague, being prosecuted as a war criminal.  His son belongs in an American criminal court being prosecuted by the Bush DOJ for torture.  And George Bush and Dick Cheney belong on their "ranches," enjoying full-scale immunity for the crimes they committed and a rich and comfortable retirement, treated as the esteemed and well-intentioned (even if sometimes misguided) dignitaries that they are.  Virtually the only people in the world who fail to recognize this self-evident, ludicrous and disgusting hypocrisy are America's political and media elites and those who are misled by them.

UPDATE:  Michael Mukasey, who refuses even to say whether waterboarding is torture and has repeatedly acted to protect Bush officials from prosecution, appeared two weeks ago at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and actually spoke these words (h/t sysprog):

It serves as a daily reminder to the leaders of the free world, and to the many visitors to our nation’s capital, that law without conscience is no guarantee of freedom; that even the seemingly most advanced of nations can be led down the path of evil; and that we must confront horror with action and vigilance, not lethargy and cowardice. . . . Just as the Museum has focused on present-day mass killings such as those in Rwanda or Darfur, we at the Department are doing what we can to ensure that those responsible for such atrocities are brought to justice. We have provided support to the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia; to the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and to the Iraqi High Tribunal. And where we can, we are bringing our own cases. Both the Office of Special Investigations and the Domestic Security Section – parts of the Department’s Criminal Division – are pursuing cases against perpetrators of those international atrocities who find their way into our country. The most prominent example of those efforts is the recent conviction of Chuckie Taylor Jr., the son of the former President of Liberia, who was convicted of torturing his countrymen. His conviction – the first in history under our criminal anti-torture statute – provides a measure of justice to those who were victimized by his reprehensible acts, and it sends a powerful message to human rights violators around the world that, when we can, we will hold them accountable for their crimes.

Mukasey actually had the audacity to approvingly quote from Robert Jackson's addresses to the Nuremberg Trials, at which this central proposition of Western justice -- now explicitly renounced by America's political and media establishment -- was ostensibly established:

The common sense of mankind demands that law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people. It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power . . . .

Unsurprisingly, Mukasey neglected to mention that Jackson, in his opening remarks to the tribunal, called "aggressive war" the "greatest menace of our times," and in his summation, Jackson observed that "the plot for aggressive wars" is "the central crime in this pattern of crimes, the kingpin which holds them all together."

The glaring contradictions in Mukasey's words are too self-evident to warrant explanation.  Ponder, instead, the opinion which Mukasey -- by uttering such brazen statements in public and knowing he can do with impunity -- is implicitly expressing about how broken is our establishment media and how distorted is our political discourse.

UPDATE II:  Alberto Gonzales gave a painfully self-pitying interview to The Wall St. Journal this week and announced that the real victims aren't the detainees who were tortured in our secret and not-so-secret prison camps, nor the millions of dead or displaced Iraqis, nor the Americans whose communications were illegally spied upon without warrants.  No, the Real Victims of the last eight years are Bush officials like him who face criticism for what they did:

I am portrayed as the one who is evil in formulating policies that people disagree with. I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror.

Here we find the predominant -- virtually unanimous -- Beltway mentality:  when high American officials break our laws, it's nothing more than "formulating policies that people disagree with."  Gonzales cried out:  "What is it that I did that is so fundamentally wrong, that deserves this kind of response to my service?"  The answers are obvious to anyone paying even minimal attention.  Steve Benen points out just some of them here.

UPDATE III:  I have a year-end piece for Salon up today -- here -- reviewing 2008 from the perspective of the Constitution and civil liberties.

(updated below - Update II)

University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes -- July 1, 2008:

A new WorldPublicOpinion.org poll of 18 countries finds that in 14 of them people mostly say their government should not take sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Just three countries favor taking the Palestinian side (Egypt, Iran, and Turkey) and one is divided (India). No country favors taking Israel's side, including the United States, where 71 percent favor taking neither side.

CQ Politics, yesterday:

Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle rallied to Israel’s cause Monday as it pressed forward with large-scale air attacks against Islamic militants in the Gaza Strip. . . . “I strongly support Israel’s right to defend its citizens against rocket and mortar attacks from Hamas-controlled Gaza, which have killed and injured Israeli citizens, and to restore security to its residents,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid , D-Nev. . . . His view was echoed by leaders of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “Israel has a right, indeed a duty, to defend itself in response to the hundreds of rockets and mortars fired from Gaza over the past week,” Howard L. Berman , D-Calif., chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, the ranking Republican on the House committee, also expressed support for the Israeli offensive. . . . The White House on Monday also took Israel’s side in the fighting, demanding that Hamas halt its rocket fire into Israel and agree to a last ceasefire.

Earlier this week, Nancy Pelosi issued an identical statement, and yesterday Democratic House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer did the same. 

There sure is a lot of agreeing going on -- one might describe it as "absolute."  The degree of mandated orthodoxy on the Israel question among America's political elites is so great that if one took the statements on Gaza from George Bush, Pelosi, Hoyer, Berman, Ros-Lehtinen, and randomly chosen Bill Kristol-acolytes and redacted their names, it would be impossible to know which statements came from whom.  They're all identical:  what Israel does is absolutely right.  The U.S. must fully and unconditionally support Israel.  Israel does not merit an iota of criticism for what it is doing.  It bears none of the blame for this conflict.  No questioning even of the wisdom of its decisions -- let alone the justifiability -- is uttered.  No deviation from that script takes place.

By itself, the degree of full-fledged, absolute agreement -- down to the syllable -- among America's political leaders is striking, even when one acknowledges the constant convergence between the leadership of both parties.  But it becomes even more striking in light of the bizarre fact that the consensus view -- that America must unquestioningly stand on Israel's side and support it, not just in this conflict but in all of Israel's various wars -- is a view which 7 out of 10 Americans reject.  Conversely, the view which 70% of Americans embrace -- that the U.S. should be neutral and even-handed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict generally -- is one that no mainstream politician would dare express.

In a democracy, one could expect that politicians would be afraid to express a view that 70% of the citizens oppose.  Yet here we have the exact opposite situation:  no mainstream politician would dare express the view that 70% of Americans support; instead, the universal piety is the one that only a small minority accept.  Isn't that fairly compelling evidence of the complete disconnect between our political elites and the people they purportedly represent?  

There is, of course, other evidence for that proposition:  the fact that overwhelming majorities of Americans have long wanted to withdraw from Iraq was completely dismissed and ignored by our bipartisan political class, which continued to fund the war indefinitely and with no conditions.  But at least there, Democratic leaders paid lip service to the idea that they agreed with that position and some Democrats went beyond rhetoric and actually tried to stop or at least limit the war.  But in the case of Israel, not even that symbolic nod to American public opinion occurs among the political leadership.

The other striking aspect of this lockstep American consensus is that the Gaza situation is very complex, and a wide range of opinions fall within the realm of what is reasonable.  Even many who believe that Israel's attack is morally and legally justifiable as a response to Hamas rockets and who generally side with Israel -- such as J Street -- nonetheless oppose this attack on strictly pragmatic grounds:  that it won't achieve anything positive, that it will exacerbate the problem, that it makes less likely a diplomatic resolution, that there is no military solution to the rocket attacks.  Others condemn Hamas rocket attacks but also condemn the devastating Israeli blockade and expanding settlements.  Others still who may be supportive of Israel's right to attack at least express horror over the level of Palestinian suffering and urge greater restraint.

Anyone minimally objective and well-intentioned finds Hamas rocket attacks on random Israeli civilians to be highly objectionable and wrong, but even among those who do, one finds a wide range of views regarding the Israeli offensive.  But not among America's political leadership.  There, one finds total, lockstep uniformity almost more unyielding than what one finds among Israeli leaders themselves -- as though Israel's wars are, by definition, America's wars; its enemies are our enemies; its disputes and conflicts and interests are, inherently, ours; and America's only duty when Israel fights is to support it uncritically. 

* * * * *

All of that underscores one vital point I want to emphasize with regard to the commentary I've written on Israel and Gaza the last couple of days.  Yesterday, George Mason Law Professor David Bernstein wrote another thoroughly childish response to something I wrote, and it merits very little attention [he continues to insist that I let him pay for me to vacation in Sderot so that I will see the light on the justifiability of Israel's assault on Gaza, which is exactly the same type of "argument" as if I offered to sponsor an online fundraiser to pay for him and his family tomorrow to travel to and vacation in Gaza City so he can blog from there about how restrained and justified and necessary the Israeli strikes and blockade are, which -- one would have thought (wrongly) -- anyone above the age of 12 would recognize as a juvenile and emotionally manipulative means of argumentation].

Bernstein's mentality is echoed by The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, who defends Israel's actions by approvingly quoting Barack Obama's statement that "If someone was sending rockets on my house where my daughters were sleeping at night, I would do everything to stop it, and I would expect Israelis to do the same thing."  But that mindset justifies any and all actions by any group with a legitimate grievance, as in:  "if my family and I were forced to live under a 4-decade foreign occupation and had our land blockaded and were not allowed to exit and my children couldn't access basic nutrition or medical treatment, I would do everything to stop it, and I would expect Palestinians to do the same thing."   That happens also to be the same mentality that was used to justify the 9/11 attacks ("if my family and I were forced to live in a region in which a foreign superpower dominated our politics and propped up brutal dictators for its own ends, I would do everything to stop it, and I would expect Muslims to do the same thing").

But -- just like those who insist that American Torture is different because American leaders use it for noble ends -- this is nothing more elevated than an adolescent refusal to view the world through any prism other than complete self-centeredness, where one's own side merits infinite empathy and the "other side" merits none.  When it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute -- like most intractable, bloody, hate-driven, decades-long wars -- there is endless blame to go around to countless parties.  Commentary which fails to recognize that, or, worse, which insists it's not true, is almost certainly the by-product of this blind self-regard.

* * * * *

The real point here is that none of these intractable disputes between Israel and its various neighbors should be a focal point of American policy at all.  Yet the above-documented orthodoxy has ensured that it is.  And -- at least in the U.S. -- that is the real issue, the reason why the Israeli attack merits so much discussion in the U.S. even among those who would just as soon refrain from having any involvement.  In his reply yesterday, Bernstein wrote:

I find it rather amusing that Greenwald refers to me as an "Israel-obsessive." I blog a fair amount about Israel, not least because I'm there twice a year and my wife is Israeli. Greenwald, meanwhile, blogs far more about Israel, without similar ties. What does that make him?

Bernstein obviously has absolutely no idea what "ties" to Israel I do or don't have; he simply fabricated that claim.  But (other than for those interested in Bernstein's honesty -- and I'm not one of them), that point is entirely irrelevant.  The reason Americans need to be interested in what Israel does is obvious, and it has nothing to do with one's "ties" to that country.

As I wrote on Saturday regarding Israel's varied wars, walls and blockades:  "since we fund a huge bulk of it and supply the weapons used for much of it and use our veto power at the U.N. to enable all of it, we are connected to it -- intimately -- and bear responsibility for all of Israel's various wars, including the current overwhelming assault on Gaza, as much as Israelis themselves."  With our bipartisan policy of blind and absolute support for Israel -- not just rhetorical but military and material as well -- our political leadership has inextricably (and foolishly) tied American interests to Israel's interests.

Matt Yglesias made a similar point yesterday:

Jonathan Zasloff offers the futility argument with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: All those who insist that the United States should “solve” the problem should explain how. And if they can’t do that, then maybe they should take some quiet time. I think that would be an appealing solution to a lot of people who have no real desire to try to sit in delicate judgment weighing the moral balance between a Hamas movement that seems indifferent to human life, and an Israeli government that’s lashing out brutally as part of a domestic political drama. But as long as Israel is by far the largest recipient of US foreign assistance funds and by an even larger margin the largest per capita recipient of US foreign assistance funds, then I don’t see how “quiet time” is a realistic option. 

Americans shouldn't be in the position of endlessly debating Israel's security situation and its endless religious and territorial conflicts with its neighbors.  That should be for Israeli citizens to do, not for Americans.  But that distinction -- between the U.S. and Israel -- barely exists because our political leaders have all but eliminated it, and have thus imposed on U.S. citizens responsibility for the acts of Israel.

In doing so, they have systematically ignored the unbelievably prescient warnings issued by George Washington in his 1796 Farewell Address, and have thereby provoked exactly the dangers he decried:

Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all. Religion and morality enjoin this conduct; and can it be, that good policy does not equally enjoin it? . . . . . In the execution of such a plan, nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest. . . . So likewise, a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld. And it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation), facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; gilding, with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation.

Uncritical support for someone's destructive behavior isn't "friendship"; it is, as Washington said, slavishness, and it does no good either for the party lending the blind support nor the party receiving it.  It's hard to overstate the good that would be achieved if the U.S. simply adhered to those basic and self-evidently compelling principles of George Washington, who actually knew a thing or two about the perils of war.

* * * * * 

If someone asked me to recommend just one must-read article on the Israeli-Gaza conflict, I would select this column from yesterday in The Guardian by Israeli-American journalist Nir Rosen.  I disagree with several of his points, particularly some of the specific ones about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but his generalized explanation about how the concept of "terrorism" is distorted and exploited by stronger countries can't be emphasized enough.

UPDATE:  To underscore the point:  during the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war, the Bush administration purposely expedited shipments of bombs to Israel to enable Israel to drop those bombs on Lebanon.  We fed Israel the bombs they used on the Lebanese.  A similar American action seems to have occurred with regard to the bombs that the Israelis are now dropping on Gaza.

UPDATE II:  Polls taken in the U.S. during the 2006 Israeli incursion into Lebanon bolster the above point regarding American public opinion.  A USA Today/Gallup poll (.pdf) asked:  "In the current conflict, do you think the United States should take Israel's side, take the side of Hezbollah, or not take either side?"  A large majority (65%) answered "neither," while only 31% wanted to take Israel's side. 

A Washington Post poll actually found that a plurality of Americans (46%) blamed "both sides equally" (Israel and Hezbollah) for the war and believed (48%) that Israel's claimed "bombing [of] rocket launchers and other Hezbollah targets located in civilian areas" was "not justified."  The lockstep, uncritical support for everything Israel does in the political class is completely unrepresentative of American public opinion.

(updated below - Update II - Update III)

Several months before he was named as moderator of Meet the Press, David Gregory went on MSNBC to categorically reject Scott McClellan's accusations that the American media failed to scrutinize the Bush administration's pre-war claims.  Gregory vigorously praised the job which he and his "journalistic" colleagues did in the run-up to the Iraq War -- the period which Salon's Gary Kamiya called "one of the greatest collapses in the history of the American media."  Proclaimed Gregory, with a straight face:  "Questions were asked. I think we pushed.  I think we prodded.  I think we challenged the President.  Not only those of us in the White House Press Corps did that, but others in the media landscape did that."  Most revealingly of all, Gregory said:

I think there are a lot of critics who think that . . . . if we did not stand up and say this is bogus, and you're a liar, and why are you doing this, that we didn't do our job.  I respectfully disagree.  It's not our role.

Indeed.  Perish the thought that a reporter should point out when government officials are making "bogus" claims and are lying a country into a war.  That is "not their role," says the New Tim Russert (and, unsurprisingly, the Old Tim Russert wholeheartedly agreed).  I don't know whether Gregory's public advocacy for a meek and polite press corps that would never be so rude as to point out when government leaders are lying is what sealed the deal for his new promotion to Meet the Press -- a show which centrally depends on having powerful politicians know that they can come on and, as Dick Cheney's top communications aide put it, "control the message."  But I'm quite sure that it didn't hurt.

To see what Cheney aide Cathie Martin meant when she explained that Cheney knew he could go on Meet the Press and "control the message" -- and to see in action David Gregory's model of sycophantic, unchallenging "journalism" -- one could do no better than to examine Gregory's embarrassingly deferential "interview" yesterday with Israel's Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni.  It's a perfect template for how our American press corps (with some rare exceptions) functions.

Whatever one's views are on Israel's attack on Gaza -- pro, con or otherwise -- there's no denying that it's an extremely controversial matter -- at least it is in the world that exists outside of mainstream American political discourse.  Even within Israel, there are scathing criticisms of what the Israeli Government is doing -- on both strategic and moral grounds.  Yet none of those objections made their way into David Gregory's interview of Livni.  He didn't present her with a single argument against the Israeli attack.  He didn't challenge a single word she uttered.  He was even more sycophantic with her than the average American journalist is with the average American political leader. 

Here, in unedited and verbatim form, are all of the "questions" asked by Gregory of a top political official of a country that just launched a brutal and highly controversial military assault -- one which, given the integral U.S. support for Israel, will have a profound effect on American interests:

• How long will the offensive last?
•  
• A lot of people are watching what's playing out, this air assault, and wondering why now?
•  
• What is Israel's goal right now? Is it to re-establish the cease-fire, or is it to invade Gaza and remove Hamas from power?
•  
• Foreign Minister, aren't you making the case for pushing Hamas from power? The cease-fire, according to Israel, simply hasn't worked. It hasn't stopped the bombing of Sderot and Israel in the southern areas. So only the replacement of Hamas by Fatah, by more moderate leaders, appears to be the only answer.
•  
• Is it acceptable to Israel for Hamas to remain in power in Gaza?
•  
• I know you were in Egypt this past week, you met with Hosni Mubarak. What did you hear in the course of those meetings--the foreign minister of Egypt has criticized Hamas--and what is your message to the Arab world this morning?
•  
• The Bush administration has been supportive of the campaign so far in Gaza but has warned Israel about avoiding civilian causalities. What kinds of consultations have you had with Secretary of State Rice?
•  
• But if the goal is to change realities on the ground, to change the behavior of Hamas, how much international condemnation is Israel prepared to accept and at what level of civilian casualties?
•  
• Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, thank you very much for your time.

Actually, the only time Gregory challenged her at all was, in essence, to demand that Israel take even more aggressive action than they're talking already.  He was essentially pushing her into invading Gaza and deposing its democratically elected government  ("Aren't you making the case for pushing Hamas from power? . . . . only the replacement of Hamas by Fatah, by more moderate leaders, appears to be the only answer").  It was almost as though his goal were to make Israel appear excessively restrained and pacifistic.

That behavior is quite redolent of the way in which Gregory "challenged" George Bush before the Iraq War.  As Oliver Willis pointed out after Gregory proudly heralded the "tough questions" the media asked of Bush in the run-up to the war, here was the initial and follow-up questions Gregory asked of Bush at the March 6, 2003 Press Conference -- a highly scripted and deferential affair that was held less than two weeks before the U.S. attacked Iraq:

Q Mr. President, good evening.  If you order war, can any military operation be considered a success if the United States does not capture Saddam Hussein, as you once said, dead or alive? Q Sir, I’m sorry, is success contingent upon capturing or killing Saddam Hussein, in your mind?

In other words:  are you going to get or kill Saddam?  Don't you have to?  Those are the tough questions which Gregory posed to Bush at his Press Conference immediately before the American attack on Iraq.  As pitiful as those "questions" were, they actually look adversarial compared to the reverent, P.R.-hack-like chat which Gregory yesterday hosted with Livni.

There are good reasons why the media's reverent 2003 treatment of Bush matches its 2008 deference to Israeli claims.  In 2003, claims about Iraq from the Bush administration  -- just like claims from Israel now -- were not aggressively challenged or disputed in good company; their pronouncements were mandated orthodoxy, pieties of the highest order.  And the one thing our media stars are good at doing -- what, above all else, they're programmed to do -- is to amplify and pay homage to prevailing establishment pieties.  To do otherwise, as Gregory revealingly explained, "is not their role."

UPDATE:  Do you think David Halberstam would have done this?

On a mostly unrelated note, this sort of emotionally manipulative nonsequitur from George Mason University Law Professor (and Israel obsessive) David Bernstein -- "Boy, am I already getting tired of hearing [complaints about Israel's 'disproportionate' response] . . . Hell, I'll personally pay for Glenn Greewald's Sderot vacation" -- is the kind of irrational swill that typifies discussions of Israel.  That "argument" is the same as saying to someone who objects to Hamas' suicide bombs or rockets:  "I'll personally pay for your Ramallah or Gaza City vacation, so you can see what it's like to live imprisoned by walls, under a 40-year foreign occupation, with blockades that cause your children's growth to stunt and to be denied basic nutritional and medical needs."

The fact that the people of Location X are suffering doesn't mean that anything and everything their government directs to the general vicinity of those inflicting the suffering is justified.  Haven't we learned that lesson over the last eight years?  Conversely, to object to the actions taken by a government (e.g.: torture, warrantless eavesdropping, attack on Iraq) is not to deny the legitimacy of the original grievance in response to which those measures are ostensibly undertaken (e.g.:  the 9/11 attacks).  Isn't that basic by now?  Those who haven't learned that lesson have no basis ever for objecting to war criminality, or excessive or reckless military actions, or any other means employed by those with legitimate grievances.

UPDATE II:  Many of our nation's most grizzled super-tough-guy cheerleader/warriors -- the ones who insatiably crave those sensations of vicarious power from play-acting the role of warriors from a nice, safe distance -- are responding to my post of yesterday by beating their chests, swaggering around, and citing General Sherman to explain (in their best John Wayne voices) that War is Hell.  All good warriors (like them) know that anything and everything done to those who "start a war" is justified.

Of course, if you ask Hamas why they blow themselves up in pizza parlors and shoot rockets at homes in Southern Israel as a response to the 40-year Israeli occupation and recent blockade, they'll tell you the same thing. If you ask Hezbollah why they kidnap Israeli soldiers and lob rockets into Israel in response to Israeli incursions into Lebanon, they'll make the same claim. If you ask Al Qaeda why they fly civilian-filled airplanes into civilian-filled buildings in response to American hegemony (and endless military actions) in their region of the world, they'll explain that jihad is hell and anything done to advance it is justified. You'll hear the same thing if you ask Russians why they destroyed Chechnyan residential blocks, or if you ask Serbian leaders about their genocide, or if you inquire with Rwandan tribal leaders about the brutality of their attacks, or if you ask virtually any other war criminal why they had to resort to such extremes.

In comments, sysprog points out that Professor Bernstein is either ignorant of or "pretending not to know the difference between jus ad bellum (justifiable war) and jus in bello (just action in war)."  That distinction, at least since Nuremberg, has ostensibly been central to Western justice.  But just like Hamas and Al Qaeda, many blindly loyal cheerleaders for any American and/or Israeli war -- as the last eight years conclusively demonstrated -- simply don't believe in it.  It's clarifying of them to say so this explicitly.

UPDATE III:  Jane Hamsher has some interesting observations about how (and why) the rules inside the U.S. for discussing Israel are changing.  Philip Weiss, who has been writing for years about the role of Israel in American politics, largely agrees with Jane's views.

(updated below - Update II)

Opinions about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute are so entrenched that any single outbreak of violence is automatically evaluated through a pre-existing lens, shaped by one's typically immovable beliefs about which side bears most of the blame for the conflict generally or "who started it."  Still, any minimally decent human being -- even those who view the world through the most blindingly pro-Israeli lens possible, the ones who justify anything and everything Israel does, and who discuss these events with a bottomless emphasis on the primitive (though dangerous) rockets lobbed by Hamas into Southern Israel but without even mentioning the ongoing four-decades brutal occupation or the recent, grotesquely inhumane blockade of Gaza -- would find the slaughter of scores of innocent Palestinians to be a horrible and deeply lamentable event.

But not The New Republic's Marty Peretz.  Here is his uniquely despicable view of the events of the last couple of days:

So at 11:30 on Saturday morning, according to both the Jerusalem Post and Ha'aretz, as well as the New York Times, 50 fighter jets and attack helicopters demolished some 40 to 50 sites in just about three minutes, maybe five. Message: do not fuck with the Jews.

"Do not fuck with the Jews."  And what of the several hundred Palestinian dead -- including numerous children -- and many hundreds more seriously wounded?  

Israeli intelligence reported 225 people dead, mostly Hamas military leaders with some functionaries, besides, and perhaps 400 wounded. The Palestinians announced 300 dead, probably as a reflex in order to begin their whining about disproportionate Israeli acts of war. And 600 wounded.

Objections to the Israeli attack are just "whining."  Those are the words of a psychopath.  And what to do now?  

Frankly, I am up to my gullet with this reflex criticism of Israel as going beyond proportionality in its responses to war waged against its population with the undisguised intention of putting an end to the political expression of the Jewish nation. . . . The current warfare will go on a bit longer. If there is a pause and if I were giving advice to the Israelis, this is what I would say to Hamas and to the people of Gaza: "If a rocket or missile is launched against us, if you take captive one of our soldiers (as you have held one for two and a half years), if you raise a new Intifada against us, there will be an immediate response. And it will be very disproportionate. Proportion does not work."

This super-tough-guy warrior -- whose prime accomplishment in life was marrying an heiress and then using her family's money to buy himself The New Republic -- beats his chest and threatens that even a single Palestinian act in response to this bombing campaign will provoke still more massive retaliation in the form of collective punishment (which, not that anyone cares, happens to be a clear violation of the Geneva Conventions, as are Hamas' far less harmful rocket attacks on Israeli civilians).

It may be true that, as Eric Alterman put it in his seminal article on Marty Pertez (quoting Ezra Klein), "Peretz is rarely held to account, largely because there's an odd, tacit understanding that he's a cartoonish character and everyone knows it."  But how unusual are Peretz's views, revolting as they are, in the American political mainstream?  He certainly expresses anti-Arab hatred and bigotry more bluntly than most, but this reflexive support for anything and everything Israel does is anything but unique in our political debates.

Here, as but one illustrative example, is Caroline Kennedy -- who, in order to win her Senate seat, is self-consciously trying to turn herself into a Barack Obama clone -- responding recently to a question about Israel from Politico:

QUESTION 8: Do you think Israel should negotiate with Hamas? Do you agree with Israel's Gaza Strip embargo? Would you support an Israeli airstrike on Iran if they felt Tehran's nuclear program represented a threat to their survival? ANSWER: "Caroline Kennedy strongly supports a safe and secure Israel. She believe Israel's security decisions should be left to Israel."

What could be more absurd than that?  Apparently, not only should we continue to feed Israel billions of dollars a year of American taxpayer money and massive amounts of weapons -- thereby ensuring that the world, quite accurately, perceives their actions as American actions -- but we should then take the position that they are free to do anything they want with it, no matter how extreme or destructive to our interests, and our only view on all of it should be that we blindly support whatever they do.  Or, as Clinton aide Ann Lewis put it during the primaries, in response to Obama's observation that he needn't have a "Likud view in order to be pro-Israel":

The role of the president of the United States is to support the decisions that are made by the people of Israel. It is not up to us to pick and choose from among the political parties. 

Yesterday, the Bush administration applied this mindset, naturally, by expressing unequivocal support for Israel and heaped all blame on Hamas.  And, needless to say, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi echoed the administration's view:

Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi issued a statement concerning the Israeli operation in Gaza in which she wrote that "When Israel is attacked, the United States must continue to stand strongly with its friend and democratic ally." According to Pelosi, "Peace between Israelis and Palestinians cannot result from daily barrages of rocket and mortar fire from Hamas-controlled Gaza. Hamas and its supporters must understand that Gaza cannot and will not be allowed to be a sanctuary for attacks on Israel."

Not a word of condemnation of the Israeli blockade -- which has caused extreme suffering and deprivation in Gaza -- or of the massively disproportionate response or the ongoing and ever-expanding Israeli occupation.  It is all one-sided support for whatever Israel does from our political class, and one-sided condemnation of Israel's enemies (who are, ipso facto, American enemies) -- all of it, as usual, sharply divergent from the consensus in much of the rest of the world.

It would be nice if U.S. citizens weren't connected to and responsible for every Israeli military action, so that we really could and should take the attitude that what the Israeli Government does -- or what is done to it -- is not our responsibility.  That's how it should be. 

Instead, since we fund a huge bulk of it and supply the weapons used for much of it and use our veto power at the U.N. to enable all of it, we are connected to it -- intimately -- and bear responsibility for all of Israel's various wars, including the current overwhelming assault on Gaza, as much as Israelis themselves.  Blind support for whatever they do -- the consensus view in American political life in both parties -- is therefore a total abdication of our responsibility.  

It remains to be seen if Barack Obama intends to deviate even a small amount from what has been decades of excessively loyal U.S. support for Israel -- which, over the last eight years, transformed into truly blind and absolute support for anything they do.  It's impossible to know for sure until Obama is inaugurated, but the bipartisan, purely "pro-Israel" statements issued by his allies -- such as Caroline Kennedy and Nancy Pelosi -- don't bode well, nor do the statements which Obama himself made during the campaign, as compiled yesterday by Salon's Mark Schone:

The first job of any nation state is to protect its citizens. And so I can assure you that if -- I don't even care if I was a politician -- if somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect Israelis to do the same thing.

Can't the exact same mentality be deployed to justify everything Hamas has done and is doing, to wit:  "if a foreign power were brutally occupying my country for four decades -- or blockading my country and denying my children medical needs and nutrition and the ability even to exit -- I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that.  And I would expect Palestinians to do the same thing"?  But the last thing that our political class ever extends is reciprocal, two-sided analysis to this dispute.

The suffocating bipartisan orthodoxies in the U.S. regarding Israel thus make virtually impossible what the new Jewish-American group, J Street -- in condemning the attack (even while calling it "justifiable") because it "will deepen the cycle of violence in the region" -- urges:  "immediate, strong diplomatic intervention by the United States, the Quartet and allies in the region to negotiate a resumption of the ceasefire."  Most of our political elites know enough to avoid the ugly language of Marty Peretz, but the ultimate policy positions aren't much different.

UPDATE:  Without necessarily endorsing all of it, I want to recommend very highly this column by Israeli Gideon Levy in Haaretz, entitled "The neighborhood bully strikes again."  What's most striking about it is that this scathing criticism of Israel's behavior can -- and does -- appear in one of Israel's leading newspapers, but not a paragraph of it could ever be uttered by any American politician, in either party, of any national prominence.

UPDATE II:  Here's Rep. Howard Berman, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and a Democrat, echoing Nancy Pelosi, George Bush and virtually every other key American political official:

Israel has a right, indeed a duty, to defend itself in response to the hundreds of rockets and mortars fired from Gaza over the past week. No government in the world would sit by and allow its citizens to be subjected to this kind of indiscriminate bombardment. The loss of innocent life is a terrible tragedy, and the blame for that tragedy lies with Hamas.

One can travel from the farthest right fringe of the GOP to the heart of the Democratic Party leadership and hear exactly the same thing:  Israel is always right.  Israel must not be criticized.  Israel never bears any blame.  Any action taken by Israel is justified.  No matter the situation, that just gets repeated over and over like some hypnotic bipartisan mantra.  Meanwhile, American citizens overwhelmingly -- 71% -- want their Government to be "even-handed" in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  Yet that view is simply ignored, disregarded, not even viable for any American mainstream political leader to express.

Politico's media reporter, Michael Calderone, does an unintentionally superb job of conveying the vapid, wretched soul of the American political media, with his list of what he calls -- without any irony at all -- "The Top Ten Political Scoops of 2008":

(1) Katie Couric's interview of Sarah Palin (CBS) (2) McCain can't say how many homes he owns (Politico) (3) Obama's "bitter" comment (Huffington Post) (4) Sarah Palin's shopping spree (Politico) (5) Turmoil in the Clinton camp (Washington Post and Atlantic -- "The behind-the-scenes tension was captured by the reporters in one memorable exchange: '[Expletive] you!' Ickes shouted. '[Expletive] you!' Penn replied. '[Expletive] you!' Ickes shouted again.") (6) Jeremiah Wright tapes (ABC News) (7) The Pentagon's military analyst program (NY Times) (8) Bickering in the McCain camp (NY Times Magazine) (9) John Edwards' affair (National Enquirer) (10) Powell endorses Obama (Meet the Press)

It's genuinely disappointing that the intense controversy over Barack Obama's anemic bowling score and lapel pin, the riveting analysis of Hillary Clinton's laugh and her cleavage displays, and Brian Ross' groundbreaking  work in analyzing Hillary's White House schedules in order to determine where exactly she was at the moment when Bill was with Monica Lewinsky, failed to at least merit an Honorable Mention by Politico.

Most notably, the only story on Politico's list that actually mattered in any meaningful way and to which one can apply the term "scoop" with a straight face -- namely:  David Barstow's superb exposé on the Pentagon's domestic propaganda program -- was the only story of the 10 that didn't receive endless attention from our nation's television journalists.  To the contrary, it was blackballed entirely.  There's the central axiom driving coverage by our American media:  the more significant a matter it is, the less attention it receives (if one wants to be generous, one could also include the Couric-Palin interview as a marginally meaningful story).

Having assembled this soap-opera-worthy list of "journalistic scoops," Calderone can barely suppress his giddy excitement over the last twelve months and, more perversely still, can barely contain how impressed he is with the probing diligence of his journalistic colleagues:  

As the curtain comes down on 2008, it’s hard to let go. Political junkies couldn’t have asked for a better year — even news veteran David Broder dubbed the 2008 election the best he ever covered.

Indeed.  For a politically engaged person, it is truly difficult to conceive of how any year could ever be more satisfying than one marked by riveting scandals over shopping sprees, bickering among campaign operatives, and an extramarital affair of someone who, at the time of disclosure, held no political office and was running for absolutely nothing.  Anyone surveying this mountain-high pile of Pulitzer-worthy investigations can do nothing more than echo the observation of Newsweek's legendary Senior White House Correspondent, Richard Wolffe, who famously gushed:  "the press here does a fantastic job of adhering to journalistic standards and covering politics in general."  Who could review Calderone's glorious list of the year's top "scoops" and disagree with that?

In fairness to Calderone and his comrades in the political press, our media currently covers a country that has very few substantial problems and an administration that is renowned around the world for being competent, honest, conventional and quite uncontroversial.  In general, countries which enjoy great tranquility, prosperity, and stability -- such as the U.S. today -- can afford the luxury of fixating on the types of fun and trivial stories which comprise the list of top "scoops" heralded by Politico.  I made a similar point in defense of our political media last April, when I criticized those tiresome, humorless scolds who -- at the time -- were complaining and complaining that three straight weeks of unbroken coverage of Jeremiah Wright videos might be a bit excessive given their relative importance:

I think the most important thing to note about the Jeremiah Wright Story is that we're a Nation plagued by exceedingly few significant problems; blessed with a quite healthy political culture and very trusted political and media institutions; composed of a citizenry that is peacefully content with its Government and secure and confident about their future; endowed with a supremely sturdy economic foundation free of debt and other grave economic afflictions; vested with the ability