Relatives in Istanbul mourn on the coffins of victims of Israel's raid of ships bound for Gaza. (Zuma)

On Thursday, the world learned that one of the activists killed this week by Israeli commandos was a U.S. citizen. On Capitol Hill, the news seemed to raise no eyebrows at all.

Furkan Dogan, a New York-born student living in Turkey, was one of nine activists killed, according to numerous reports, when Israeli soldiers on Monday boarded the Turkish-flagged Mavi Marmara, a ship carrying aid supplies to the Gaza Strip in defiance of an Israeli blockade. The 19-year-old had been shot five times — including four shots to the head.

[Congress1] The raid has stirred a storm of criticism in much of Europe and the Middle East, not least because the soldiers had boarded the vessel — and five smaller ships — in international waters. Yet since news of Dogan’s identity and U.S. citizenship made headlines, the reaction from Washington lawmakers has been mostly silence — an odd response in the wake of such a high-profile episode.

Indeed, while a few Democratic leaders responded earlier in the week to the initial raid — most either defending Israel or cautiously urging an investigation into the incident — none reacted to the more recent news of Dogan’s death. Instead, congressional leaders seem ready to let the White House handle the thorny diplomacy of confronting the ally that’s just killed an American.

Calls to the offices of a number of Democratic leaders — including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.), Senate Foreign Relations Chairman John Kerry (Mass.) and House Foreign Affairs Chairman Howard Berman (Calif.) — were not returned Thursday.

The episode highlights the delicacy of Washington’s relationship with Israel, the only recognized democracy in the Middle East, and one that the United States supports with billions of dollars in military aid each year. It also creates a dilemma for the Obama administration, which is now forced to walk a thin line between the domestic pro-Israel crowd — which holds tremendous sway (and lobbies with millions of dollars) in Washington — and foreign allies calling for a more concrete condemnation of the deadly attack.

Obama on Thursday continued to approach the issue gingerly, telling CNN’s Larry King that the episode was “tragic” and the deaths “unnecessary.” But the president also stopped short of condemning Israel, instead reiterating his previous call for the country to cooperate in an investigation.

“I think the Israelis are going to agree to that — an investigation of international standards — because they recognize that this can’t be good for Israel’s long-term security,” Obama said.

Earlier in the day, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs had dodged questions about whether the news of Dogan’s death alters the administration’s diplomatic position. Still, the death of a U.S. citizen likely puts a greater pressure on Washington’s political leaders to take a stand at some point — a dynamic not unlike that surrounding the 2003 death of Rachel Corrie, an American human rights activist killed in Gaza by an Israeli bulldozer as she protested the demolition of a Palestinian’s home.

Meanwhile, Israeli leaders have adamantly defended Monday’s raid as a necessary move to uphold the blockade and ensure that no weapons were smuggled into Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas, an Islamic group that advocates for the elimination of Israel. As for the shootings, Israeli officials contend that the soldiers were simply acting in self defense after being attacked by activists on the Mavi Marmara.

It’s an argument being echoed by Israeli’s staunchest backers on Capitol Hill.

“I strongly support Israel’s right to defend itself, and the right of Israel’s naval commandos, who were executing a legal mission, to defend themselves by using force when they were brutally attacked,” Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-N.Y.) said this week. “I strongly condemn the action of those who assaulted the Israeli troops and made the use of violence by Israeli troops necessary in self-defense.”

Yet those participating in the aid flotilla have a different tale to tell. And Dogan wasn’t the only American taking part. Also aboard the ships were Hedy Epstein, a St. Louis-based author and Holocaust survivor; Ann Wright, a 29-year veteran of the U.S. Army; and Edward Peck, former U.S. ambassador to Mauritania and deputy director of the White House anti-terror task force under the Reagan administration.

In an interview with Salon on Thursday, Peck argued that those claiming the Israeli soldiers were simply acting in self defense have “got it backwards.”

“There are civilians, men and woman, on a Turkish-flagged vessel, in international waters. And here comes a group of heavily armed … guys who are going to take over the ship by force and then take it to Israel, where the passengers don’t want to go,” Peck said. “And so they pick up deck chairs and other things to fight off these heavily armed — and by the way, masked — commandos, and somehow they become the attackers.

“So that,” Peck said, “depresses me a little bit.”

Still, the message of this war game seems to be to discourage the sorts of sanctions packages moving through Congress in favor of the Obama administration’s planned multilateral sanctions. Gary Sick, a Columbia professor and longtime Iran scholar, participated in the war game and said that the path to those multilateral sanctions is fraught with peril:

The US team went to work with a vengeance to get a consensus on sanctions. This didn’t bother the Iran team in the least. We didn’t think they could put together a package that would hurt us in any serious way, and that proved to be true. But more important, in the process they managed to offend all of their ostensible allies and wasted so much time and effort that Iran was better off at the end than they had been at the beginning. Since this represents a version of actual US strategy (and its results) over now three administrations, I think there is a lesson there that is ignored at our peril.

The biggest chunk of the funds, $3.5 billion spread over five years, will go to “high impact, high visibility infrastructure programs,” according to the report, focusing on the energy and agricultural sectors — “programs that Pakistani citizens can see.”

Another $2 billion will be directed to “focused humanitarian and social services,” which includes extending the reach of the Pakistani government to areas where extremists now operate. Of that pot, $500 million will be earmarked for immediate post-crisis and humanitarian assistance, with the rest going to improving the quality and access to health and education.

The remaining $2 billion will go to building up the Pakistani government both at the national and local levels. The money will be split between funding actual government entities and improving the security and legal infrastructure overall.

As Josh puts it, this is much broader than immediate-impact projects. It looks a lot more like the “broadening” of the U.S.-Pakistan relationship that Holbrooke discussed at the Council on Foreign Relations. And it was greeted with a resounding thud in the Pakistani press.

The Obama administration’s emerging contention is that a year’s worth of public pressure on the Pakistanis to take Action X in Region Y against Terrorist Organization Z is just counterproductive. Pakistan needs some assurance of long-term U.S. assistance on the diplomatic, economic and security concerns it has before it can turn its attention to the security concerns the U.S. has. Perhaps. But Congress considers Pakistan to be a pretty obstinate — if not intransigent — ally, and it may not approve another funding request unless it gets some kind of assurance that Pakistan is going to move on U.S. priorities.

Those discussions are based on a letter from Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg to Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman John Kerry, D-MA. In the letter, State asked Kerry to delay the Senate bill until next year so that the administration would have more time to prep for the “pressure track” and also to secure some changes to the legislation.

Kerry has sounded cautious notes on Iran sanctions for awhile. On the day that Iran’s hidden Qom enrichment facility was revealed, Kerry’s Foreign Relations Committee released a statement urging calm and deliberation before going the sanctions route: “We need to ensure that our unilateral efforts do not undermine the prospect for achieving tougher multilateral sanctions that will be most effective in bringing pressure to bear on Iran.” Members of the administration have told me the same thing, but they’ve never come out and opposed any of the congressional sanctions bills.

But Rogin reports that other senators — Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) — want the administration to clarify its concerns:

The bill as it stands gives the president the right to waive sanctions against third-party countries that are cooperating with U.S. efforts to confront Iran’s nuclear program. The administration wants those countries to be exempted from the start and then have sanctions applied only when necessary.

“The administration has not made a compelling argument as to why the waiver isn’t sufficient for them to avoid doing diplomatic harm to allies, in the case where companies within their jurisdictions are doing things that may become sanctionable,” the aide said. “That’s what the waiver is there for.”

Amb. Richard Holbooke speaks at the Council on Foreign Relations on Tuesday. (c-span.org)

Congress may have appropriated the first installment of a $7.5 billion aid package for Pakistan, but Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, urged an even greater increase in assistance to “broaden out” the U.S. relationship with a nation he called crucial to the U.S.’s national security.

[Security1]“We will not be able to succeed in Afghanistan unless our policy in Pakistan is equally successful,” Holbrooke said Tuesday evening in remarks to the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. It was his first major public address since President Obama announced a troop increase for Afghanistan on Dec. 1.

U.S. aid to Pakistan is controversial in both countries. In Pakistan, the recent U.S. funding package, known as the Kerry-Lugar-Berman bill, was denounced by members the Pakistani military as an intrusion of Pakistani sovereignty — though its congressional architects, Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) and Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.), insisted that it contained “no conditions on Pakistan attached” to any aspect of its aid to the Pakistani government. And in the United States, controversy has swirled over the reluctance of the Pakistanis to confront the leadership of the Afghan Taliban, believed to be hiding in the Baluchistan province of Pakistan. “It would be very helpful if additional pressure could be put [by Pakistan] on the leadership elements that are causing problems in Afghanistan,” Holbrooke’s military counterpart, Gen. David Petraeus, commander of all U.S. forces in the Middle East and South Asia, said on Sunday.

But in his remarks to the Council, Holbrooke specifically declined an invitation from Michael Gordon of The New York Times, the event’s moderator, to join Petraeus in publicly pressuring the Pakistanis to go after the Afghan Taliban. “Obviously, we want them do as much as they will do,” Holbrooke said, appearing to be sensitive to Pakistani concerns about the U.S. issuing orders to Islamabad. “But I’m not going to sit here and demand of a sovereign country what they have to do.”

Instead, Holbrooke said, the U.S. sought to “broaden out our attention to Pakistan” in an attempt to look beyond terrorism and toward a long-term relationship. Several administration officials have said in recent background discussions that convincing Pakistan to take action against the Afghan Taliban and the associated network of Jalaluddin Haqqani and his son Sirajuddin — proxies cultivated by the Pakistanis in the 1980s and 1990s — first requires demonstrating to the Pakistanis that the Obama administration is attentive to Pakistan’s broader diplomatic, economic and security concerns. President Obama, in his Dec. 1 address at West Point, notably made few demands of the Pakistanis.

Accordingly, Holbrooke discussed Pakistan’s ongoing economic problems, such as large textile mills shuttered by the global economic crisis and other economic unrest that “creat[es] instability.” He said that U.S. aid in the Kerry-Lugar-Berman bill was designed to assist the Pakistanis with “large projects” in sectors like energy, water, education and health care. “My own personal view is we ought to increase the aid to Pakistan,” Holbrooke said, including to the Pakistani military. He praised the military for its “considerable progress this year” against extremists in the Swat Valley and in South Waziristan.

It is unclear whether Congress will be receptive to another funding request. In addition to the Kerry-Berman-Lugar bill, the administration received $400 million from Congress this year for assistance to the Pakistani military’s counterinsurgency operations. And in testimony last week, the civilian and military ground commanders of the Afghanistan war, Amb. Karl Eikenberry and Gen. Stanley McChrystal, indicated that the administration would seek additional money to help fund the Afghanistan troop increase and associated build-up of civilian officials. Spokespeople for Kerry and Berman, the chairs of the Senate and House foreign affairs committees, did not comment by press time.

There has been Washington chatter in recent months that Holbrooke’s place in the administration has been uncertain, particularly after Kerry, and not Holbrooke, brokered a way out of the summer’s Afghan electoral impasse with President Hamid Karzai. The well-attended event on Tuesday night appeared to be designed to dispel any impression of Holbrooke’s diminished stature, as the ambassador made repeated references to his upcoming travel schedule on behalf of the administration’s Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy.

One regional expert who has met with Holbrooke recently said that the special representative was focused on coordinating the civilian efforts of the vast U.S. national security bureaucracy in support of the war effort. “He’s got a huge team over there,” said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. “He prides himself these days with forging ahead with a revolution in bureaucracy, to get things like the Agriculture Department and USAID in sync.” Indeed, at the Council, Holbrooke asked seventeen members of his staff from across the different federal agencies to stand up and introduce themselves.

The last time Holbrooke issued a major Washington address was in August, also an event designed to showcase his interagency team. But that address was overshadowed by his admission that success in Afghanistan was amorphous. “We’ll know it when we see it,” Holbrooke said in August.

This time, he didn’t touch the subject of how the U.S. would recognize success, and even brushed aside a question about the administration’s list of metrics and benchmarks to measure its progress. “Quite honestly, they’re pretty technical,” Holbrooke said, adding that to “go into them now would be diversionary.”

“I think the actions of Iran and the regime over the last six months are the single biggest vote-getter we got,” Berman said in a post-vote press conference. “A year ago, everyone talked about Iran rising; America’s strategy seemed a fairly isolated one.” But after the June elections fiasco and Green uprising, “Iran is isolated and I think this administration’s strategy is starting to fall into place. … I view this legislation as a component of that strategy.” The administration “didn’t tell me to go ahead, but they also didn’t tell me not to go ahead.” Berman specified that his preference is for a multilateral approach — whether through the United Nations Security Council or otherwise — rather than what he has often called “crippling sanctions.”

Berman said he viewed the bill as a way of getting the administration to rally together an international coalition. The House passage of his legislation “empowers the administration to point out, ‘Here’s a way a lot of people in Congress want to go. We think there’s a better way, but this issue will not go away,’” he said. Sanctioning the importation of “refined petroleum products” would have “the single biggest effect [on] the Iranian economy” but added that he was “always open” to an alternative that would  “change [Iranian] behavior, in other words, to stop the enrichment.”

I asked Berman what the effect would be on the Iranian people, as opposed to the regime, of the sanctions his bill authorizes. “I find this distinction interesting,” Berman replied. “The notion that you are going to have effective sanctions that don’t impact on the Iranian people, I don’t understand what that means.” His sanctions would be less harmful than “the financial sanctions developed by the Treasury Department,” he continued. But he derided the idea that the sanctions would harm the Iranian dissident movement. “Here you have courageous people in the street, some of them being executed in the street, … speaking out, these are not people [who say] ‘Oh my God, there’s an effort to weaken the regime that we detest, but that little economic sacrifice that we might be paying, we’re going to turn from opponents of the regime into supporters of the regime.’ I don’t believe that.”

When I pointed out that dissident leaders Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Kerroubi oppose sanctions, Berman replied, “I am aware of their position. I don’t think they distinguish between our sanctions and other sanctions. There are a lot of different reasons why they might have said that.” He didn’t specify what those might be — or why he did not take their positions at face value — but he added, “The Iranian people want us to keep the pressure on the regime.”

J Street, the progressive American Jewish lobby, favors the Berman bill. Americans for Peace Now, another progressive American Jewish lobby group, opposes it. And the Israel Project, more-hawkish American Jewish lobby group, favors additional sanctions on Iran generally, but many signatures on its most recent petition on sanctioning Iran were inauthentic.

Our petition now has more than 90,000 supporters, which you can see by clicking here and here. We are asking you again, before it is too late, to do all you can to stop this imminent threat and avoid war.

But clicking through that link to take a closer look at those signatories raises substantial questions about their authenticity. For instance, signatories 84,854 through 85,071 are all named “Vince Vince” — although the Israel Project claims that all those different Vince Vinces are from different states. Well, sort of. Some of them are from states listed by recognizable acronyms like MN or AZ or PA. Others, however, are from the great states of GU and AA and XX.

Click to enlarge

Nor does the curious reader even have to examine the list that far down. Signatory number five is listed as Comfylovely ……. — and no, those aren’t ellipses I’ve placed in for dramatic effect; that’s Comfylovely’s listed last name — from the proud city of Davao in the historic state of XX.

That’s not even the most disturbing part of the signatories. The Israel Project lists the following as enthusiastic supporters of sanctioning Iran: Viagra Kaufen Viagra Kaufen, London, N.Y. (signatory #84,570); Porn Sex Video from London, N.Y. (signatory #62,751-62,756); Stupidwhiteman V, who declined to list an address (signatory #83,780); and Xbox 360 accessories — that’s a first and last name — from New York, N.Y. (signatory #90,046).

When I called Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, the Israel Project’s founder and president, she told me that the group “emailed people who support our issues” and asked them to sign; those people then recruited contacts and colleagues to do the same. Asked if the Project took any measures to verify that the names on the petition were genuine, Mizrahi replied, “They’re activists and they go through a secure thing. We have 140,000 activists who work with us, so yes. A lot of them have similar names, because they’re related.”

But when I read Mizrahi some of the dirtier signatories listed on her petition, she replied, “Oh yuck,” and said, “I didn’t personally go through all of them, but they go through the system, so if they got in like that with that kind of email name, that’s pretty horrible.” She elaborated, “It’s not like we called every person and verified ‘are you the person.’ But we emailed it through our usual activists.” Asked what this suggests about the Israel Project’s vetting procedures, she replied, “It suggests this is America and that in any country, there are always some people who are inappropriate.”

Mizrahi subsequently emailed and called me to say that the Israel Project “accidentally posted the wrong file” and is in the process of replacing it with the correct one. A bright spot for the organization? Mizrahi added that the petition itself has yet to be physically released to elected officials and religious leaders — the press release announcing the petition’s large volume of signatories was sent first. She thanked TWI for alerting her to the error.

Rachel Rose Hartman and Hannah Dreier provided research assistance for this post.

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), the ranking Republican on the panel, also said she wanted to drill down on the “civilian surge.” (Deputy Secretary of State Jack Lew said yesterday to expect a “20 to 30 percent” increase next year above the 974 civilians who will be serving in Afghanistan by January.) She said “claims of failure” over the “past eight years” was an “affront” to the military and not, say, the Bush administration, which she doesn’t specifically reference. Ros-Lehtinen ran the gamut of conservative concerns about the strategy: the July 2011 date for security transitions; whether McChrystal has enough troops; whether the mission is sufficiently broad. And she added a new one: whether McChrystal’s rules of engagement — designed to prevent Afghan civilian casualties — are sufficient to “permanently repel and eliminate the Taliban as a threat.”

To find out, I spoke with J Street’s executive director, Jeremy Ben-Ami. An edited transcript of our conversation follows.

The Washington Independent: Why in the world is J Street supporting the Berman bill? Hasn’t the experience of the last three decades shown that unilateral sanctions only benefit the Iranian regime?

Jeremy Ben-Ami: The reluctance and the unwillingness of the Iranian regime to engage in any diplomacy and to accept — or at least begin negotiations on the basis of the offer that has been made — can’t go unanswered. We’ve said all along that our position on the Berman bill was simply a question of timing. This need to follow, first, the diplomatic engagement. And even then the president said, that we can’t go on with [the outreach] indefinitely. So this gives the president this tool, this additional tool, to work with in trying to convince the Iranians that there’s no time.

TWI: Aren’t unilateral sanctions inferior to multilateral sanctions?

Ben-Ami: Absolutely. And this bill doesn’t rule out [multilateral sanctions]. As Berman himself has said, the hierarchy of preference is first, resolve thiss diplomatically; second, resolve this multilaterally through the UN; third, resolve this multilaterally through a non-UN regime by putting a coalition together, and last, calls for the unilateral route. But this doesn’t rule out [multilateral sanctions]. Our preference is still, absolutely, to make this as broad an international coalition as possible.

TWI: What do you say to groups like Americans for Peace Now who’ve come out against the Berman bill because of the harm sanctions can do to the Iranian people without damaging the regime, or to some in the Green revolution in Iran who’ve warned that a new sanctions regime — unilateral or multilateral for that matter — is going to basically preempt any space they’re trying to open up to dislodge the regime or drastically change the character of the Iranian regime?

Ben-Ami: There might be a better bill that one could construct, but this is the one that’s there. And this is the tool that we’re giving to the president. There are very few other routes that are open and lots of the things that prompted the deliberations have been put in place. This is in conjunction with all of the diplomacy that the United States is going to pursue and it’s in conjunction with all of the outreach from the international community. It’s not a standalone policy. It fits into the broader approach that the Obama administration has taken.

TWI: What about its possible impact on the Iranian people?

Ben-Ami: Well, there’s no question that the sanctions ultimately does hurt people. This is also important in putting a real squeeze on the government. The petroleum sector is vital to the economy of the country as a whole. And so this is going to put pressure on the government and its going to put constraints on their economic growth generally. And it’s maybe one more incentive to them hopefully, to abandon this [nuclear] course and to come back to the table and accept what, in our opinion, is a very fair offer related to the fair enrichment.

TWI: What do you say to those who think that this is a capitulation by J Street to those — particularly on some of the American Jewish right — that have been attacking your credibility and your authenticity as a Jewish organization and your bona fides as a pro-Israel organization?

Ben-Ami: They haven’t been listening to us. We have said from the very first day that J Street was created that we’re very seriously concerned about the threat of Iran getting a nuclear weapon. That we really believe that diplomacy is the right approach, but that diplomacy can’t be open-ended. Every one of our statements says we are not opposed to sanctions per se. Back in June, when Berman introduced this particular bill we said that we supported the bill, but we agreed with him that the time wasn’t right to move it. So this is completely consistent with everything we’ve ever said. We are ardently opposed to military action. We are deeply supportive of the diplomatic route. But if the diplomatic route is completely disregarded and the offer [rejected] — after probably ten or 20 warnings, they’re practically beyond saying no. They’re sticking a finger in the eye of the world. The U.S. has really tried to find a way to offer them a path to full engagement. There have to be consequences. We can’t just allow that kind of disregard of the international community.

TWI: Is it too wily to think that you’re doing this in order to basically signal your stand with the rest of the pro-Israel community in this country while saving the harder battles for things like Jerusalem, the two-state solution and so forth?

Ben-Ami: Well look, those are issues where we are definitely not in line with most of the other organizations. For us, we’ve always said that is the issue. The real existential threat to a Jewish democratic Israel is the failure to reach a two-state solution. There is a threat from a nuclear-armed Iran. But the real existential threat that we’re focused on is that we have got to reach a two-state solution now or else we’re going to lose Israel.