Incoming Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) said in a press release, “I am deeply disappointed that the President decided to make such a major concession to the Syrian regime. Using this Congressional recess to make an appointment that has far-reaching policy implications despite Congressional objections and concerns is regrettable.”

Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) called the appointment of James Cole — whose nomination was previously held by Republicans due to a 2002 report he wrote voicing support for civilian trials for terror suspects — as deputy attorney general “absolutely shocking.”

There’s nothing unusual about recess appointments — they are allowed under Article Two of the Constitution. President Obama has made 28 recess appointments, while President George W. Bush had made 23 at a comparable time in his presidency. Their terms will expire — if the Senate does not confirm them — after the end of the next session of the Senate, which would be December 2011.

President Barack Obama on Wednesday (epa/ZUMApress.com)

A year after President Obama’s speech in Cairo vowing to reset relations with the Muslim world, Muslims worldwide are telling pollsters about their disillusionment with what they consider unfulfilled expectations.

According to the Pew Center’s new survey of global attitudes (PDF), released Thursday morning, citizens of Muslim nations report disproportionate antipathy to Obama’s foreign policy. With the exception of Indonesia, where Obama spent a portion of his childhood, Muslims are the exceptions to the Pew poll’s findings that eighteen months of the Obama administration have seen a surge of international support for the United States after the public-opinion troughs of the Bush administration.

[Security1] “The Pew results reflect growing dissatisfaction with Obama’s policies, as many Arabs and Muslims are disappointed that Obama has not lived up to his promises, especially on the Arab-Israeli conflict,” said Marc Lynch, a George Washington University professor and the co-author of a recent Center for a New American Security report measuring Obama’s global engagement efforts. “They don’t see his actions matching his words, and until they do then it isn’t likely that there will be a sustained recovery in America’s image.”

In Jordan, the U.S. approval rating has fallen to 21 percent. It’s at 17 percent, the lowest of any countries Pew surveyed, in Turkey, Egypt and Pakistan. And this comes after the Obama administration has presided over the largest non-military aid package to Pakistan — the $7.5 billion, five-year Kerry-Lugar-Berman bill — in history.

“Opposition to key elements of U.S. foreign policy remains pervasive,” Pew analyzes, “and many continue to perceive the U.S. as a potential military threat to their countries.”

The news is not universally negative. Nigerian Muslims give Obama a 70 percent approval rating, up from 61 percent in 2009. But they’re the outliers. In Egypt and Lebanon, Obama’s ascendance — and the departure of George W. Bush — elevated Muslim attitudes toward the U.S. somewhat: 25 percent of Egyptians reported favorable opinions of the U.S. in 2009, up from 20 percent a year earlier; Lebanese Muslims in 2008 had given the U.S. a 34 percent favorability rating, which rose to 47 percent in 2008. Now Egyptian Muslims have reverted to their pre-Obama 20 percent favorability rating. Lebanese Muslims have settled into a 39 percent favorability rating.

More ominous from the perspective of Obama’s Cairo speech, Muslims express a sentiment directly opposite the speech’s offer of partnership: They fear that the U.S. will attack them. Majorities, and sometimes large ones, of respondents in Egypt (56 percent), Lebanon (56 percent), Indonesia (76 percent), Pakistan (65 percent), Jordan (52 percent) and Turkey (56 percent) believe the U.S. is a potential military threat. That shouldn’t be surprising: Pakistan, despite being a Major Non-NATO Ally of the U.S., is currently battered in its tribal areas by CIA drone strikes, a step the U.S. has taken in response to what it considers insufficient Pakistani military action against al-Qaeda-aligned extremist groups. In Cairo, Obama pledged that the U.S. “is not, and never will be, at war with Islam,” but many Muslims worldwide believe that the U.S. still has them in its crosshairs.

Support for the Afghanistan war and U.S. counterterrorism efforts in Muslim countries is also anemic. Lebanon is the only Muslim country surveyed by Pew where even 20 percent believe that the U.S. should keep fighting in Afghanistan. (Neighboring Pakistan? Seven percent.) While support for U.S. counterterrorism efforts have grown in non-Muslim countries since Obama took office, it’s at 18 percent in Egypt, 12 percent in Jordan, and 47 percent among Nigerian Muslims.

Several counterterrorism experts believe the U.S.’s counterterrorism efforts will ultimately be hobbled if they run into a headwind of Muslim antipathy. Malcolm Nance, a retired veteran military intelligence officer who served in Iraq, Afghanistan and throughout the Middle East, argues in a new book that rather than attempt to change Muslim attitudes, a more productive strategy would involve moving the conversation to al-Qaeda’s apostasy. Nance code-names this approach CIRCUIT BREAKER, and writes in “An End to Al-Qaeda” that subjecting al-Qaeda to a “deep analytical dissection of their religious motives” can provide a path to “a new era for reconciliation and cooperation with the Muslim street.” It would also provide a platform for popular acquiescence to military or intelligence action against al-Qaeda — or at least limit blowback from it.

The administration appears to be attentive to the challenges, even if it hasn’t figured out a programmatic way to overcome them. Last month, the Pentagon quietly established a new office to ensure that military efforts don’t inadvertently undermine the administration’s broader promotion of the rule of law around the world.

Lynch, who also recently evaluated Obama’s counterterrorism efforts for CNAS partially through the prism of Muslim acquiescence, disputed that the Pew numbers demonstrate that Obama’s outreach to the Muslim world was in vain. “It’s more that he said he would do things, but thus far hasn’t delivered,” Lynch said, “so the words lose their meaning. It’s a real problem for the broader counterterrorism strategy, since winning over mainstream support is absolutely key to the strategy.”

So why’s he releasing this tape now? Because for weeks, Pakistan has been saying that it’s on the verge of expanding its fight against the Taliban to the tribal areas that birthed it (and where Zawahiri and his friends are believed to be). But according to Bill Roggio, the coming offensive in the tribal areas won’t be a test of the Pakistani military’s emerging counterinsurgency capability, but rather a “punitive” campaign of air strikes.

“The South Waziristan operation is punitive in nature,” one [U.S. intelligence] official told The Long War Journal. “You won’t see COIN there, ” the official continued, referring to the counterinsurgency techniques of driving out insurgents, holding territory, and securing the local population.

“They think they can win this via the air, like the Israelis thought they could beat Hezbollah [in Lebanon in 2006],” the official observed.

A different official tells Roggio that the Pakistanis insist the Taliban will collapse as soon as leader Beitullah Mehsud is killed. Pretty much every painful lesson of counterinsurgency that the United States has learned over the last eight years in Iraq and Afghanistan is that insurgent movements are designed to survive in the event of decapitation. Removing the root causes of the insurgency is the only way to backstop the military action necessary to fracture it. Pakistan shows few signs of moving in that direction. And Zawahiri’s tape is designed to broaden the critique that the Taliban is making.

One thing that unites all factions is that each will publicly say that they don’t want to exclude the others. The Army’s big catchphrase these days is “full-spectrum operations,” which both the counterinsurgents and their critics favor. (As Gen. David Petraeus told me last year, “I’m persuaded by the logic of the concept of full-spectrum operations.”) After all, no one wants to be the one to say he or she knows for certain what the next threat to national security looks like, and no one wants to say the military shouldn’t be prepared for a particular species of conflict. That just means you have to watch which way everyone leans to cut or preserve a favored program that radiates one or another such color in the spectrum.

Here’s Geoff Morrell, spokesman for Gates, talking about the budget to Jaffe:

“This budget moves the needle closer to irregular warfare and counterinsurgency,” Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said. “It is not an abandonment of the need to prepare for conventional conflicts. But even moving that needle is a revolutionary thing in this building.”

I personally incline toward the counterinsurgents’ view that theirs best captures the sort of wars the United States will most need to prepare for in the future, although there’s a lot that remains unclear about that view. For instance, will the United States be fighting these wars, or, after Iraq and Afghanistan, will it be supporting warfighters, as with the Pakistani Frontier Corps’ counterinsurgency against al-Qaeda and the Afghan and Pakistani Talibans in western Pakistan? If the latter, the biggest and most important change that the U.S. Army can make would be to embrace John Nagl’s proposal for a standing corps of soldiers to train and mentor foreign military partners. But people don’t really like the idea of a military service that’s not entirely used just to fight and win the nation’s wars. Check out Galrahn’s opposition to a recent statement from Vice Adm. John Bird that the “purpose of the Navy is not to fight.”

Along those lines, here’s a preliminary bit of opposition from Kori Schake at Shadow Government to Gates’ budget. And here’s Jason Sigger’s agnosticism.

In an interview Tuesday, Ambassador Gabriela Shalev said Israel’s main goal is to “destroy completely” what she called a “terrorist gang.”

I truly truly hope this is empty rhetoric. Because the evidence is accumulating that Israel is determined to escalate its bombardment of Gaza in the most astrategic ways. Hamas is not the sort of thing that Israel can “destroy completely,” no more than it could wipe out the PLO in 1982 or Hezbollah in 2006. How’d those turn out again?

What Israel can easily do instead is drive Palestinians into Hamas’ hands through collective punishment. These sorts of civilian-casualty heavy overreactions are precisely what jihadist organizations feed on. Israel feels like its deterrent was shaken by its 2006 blunder in Lebanon. Escalating in Gaza will just make that worse.

This is the unforgiving reality of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency. We have seen this movie spool out again and again and again, in Israel, in the West Bank, in Lebanon, in Iraq and now in Gaza. Via Laura Rozen, Zvi Barel has no patience for its ending:

According to the government, Israel has full legitimacy to take action against those who threaten its citizens. That is the reason the state was created and no other country would tolerate such attacks on its towns. It’s a nice slogan, identical to that of Hamas: Why should Gazan citizens tolerate such a long and severe siege for so long? Can its leadership tolerate a succession of targeted killing against its leaders? And what of the killing of innocent civilians in air strikes? Hamas agreed to a cease-fire to end the violent dialogue.

It should be remembered that Israel chanted the same slogans when the Second Lebanon War began, from which it came back badly bruised. The optimistic scenario did not materialize then and it is hard to believe it will now in Gaza. The legitimacy of the Lebanon war triumphed just as the war was lost.

Israel needs to step back from the brink. There is no chance, as long as George W. Bush has almost a month left in office, that the United States will compel it to do so.

One passage really caught my eye,  because I attended the same small-town Obama event in southwestern Virginia that Bai describes. Pardon the long excerpt, but Bai does some great storytelling:

If you want to get to Lebanon, a town of about 3,200, the easiest way is to fly into the Tri-City Airport on the Tennessee side of the Appalachians, then drive about 45 minutes northeast through some of the most gorgeous hill country in America. The back road that leads to Lebanon High School is lined with trailer-size houses on the edge of collapse, their front porches buckling in the sun. But then, as you approach the school, you see a few neat rows of brand new town houses, with prices in the high $200,000s — the unmistakable landscape of the new economy. Lebanon is slowly becoming a symbol of hope for towns all over the region that dream of turning southwestern Virginia, with its abundant land and cheap labor, into the next high-tech hub. Local counties have raised up a half-dozen “shell buildings” — essentially empty warehouses already connected to sewers and broadband lines — to attract businesses looking for ready-made space. Inspired by the influx of tech jobs, officials in the area have started what they call the Return to Roots program, in which they aggressively seek out qualified graduates who have moved away for other jobs and try to lure them back home.

Barack Obama came to Lebanon High for a town-hall meeting with voters on the Tuesday after Labor Day, marking the first time any presidential candidate stepped foot in the area since Jimmy Carter came to nearby Castlewood in 1976. The campaign made tickets available to its local offices a few days before the event, and a lot of the roughly 2,400 attendees waited in line to get them. As a result, most of the voters in the school gymnasium seemed to be committed Obama backers already.

Sen. Barack Obama at a townhall meeting in Lebanon, Va. (flickr)

The program opened with the validators. This is a critical part of Obama’s small-town strategy — getting respected surrogates to stand up and say that Obama is a guy you can trust. The first person on stage was Ralph Stanley, the 81-year-old legendary bluegrass musician, who was born in nearby Stratton and makes his home in Dickenson County. He unfolded a piece of paper and read, in a shaky voice: “I want to endorse Barack Obama as the next president of the United States. Thank you very much!” The gymnasium exploded. (When the candidate met Stanley backstage, Obama told him that he had some of Stanley’s banjo music on his iPod. Stanley nodded appreciatively, but a few minutes later he turned to a friend and asked, “What’s an iPod?”)

Stanley was followed by Cecil Roberts, the white-bearded president of the mineworkers’ union, who preached as if he were at a revival, putting Obama’s early years into a framework that southwestern Virginians could understand. “Moses was a community organizer!” Roberts thundered. “And yes, Jesus was a community organizer!” Then came Rick Boucher, the owlish congressman who represents Lebanon and its surrounding counties in Washington. “Senator Obama is a friend of coal and the thousands of jobs it brings to southwestern Virginia,” Boucher assured the crowd. In fact, he repeated this line — “Barack Obama is a friend of coal” — no less than five times in 10 minutes.

Obama finally bounded onstage to an ovation that rocked the bleachers. He delivered a newly sharpened version of his basic rally speech, pacing the stage as he spoke, his pitch rising as he punctuated each point in a long list of indictments against the Bush years and John McCain. He stressed his own American story — the mother on food stamps, the grandfather who fought in “Patton’s army,” the father-in-law who worked a shift job with multiple sclerosis and never missed a day. The speech wasn’t appreciably different from one he would have given at an arena packed with 20,000 people in Philadelphia or St. Louis.

It was only after the speech, prompted by questions from the audience, that Obama tried to reassure the crowd — without ever referring to the “bitter” comment, of course — that he was not some San Francisco liberal who pitied rural people for their religiosity and their pastimes. One man wanted to know what Obama thought of those who looked down on Sarah Palin because she was evangelical. No doubt thinking of the persistent rumors still flying around the Internet that say he is a closet Muslim, Obama reiterated, for about the seven millionth time this year, that he, too, is a practicing Christian. “This is a nation of believers,” he said, “and I’m one of them.”

A teenage girl asked Obama what he might do specifically for rural America. I found it odd that Obama had to be prompted to address this question, but he warmed to it immediately, ticking off a list of public investments that his administration could bring to the region: broadband lines, school financing, the development of biodiesel fuels. He talked about creating more jobs for local students, “so when they graduate from college those kids can stay here and live in Lebanon instead of having to go and work someplace else.”

Having finished that thought, Obama suddenly straightened up, as if something else important had just occurred to him. “One thing I want to make clear while we’re on this topic of rural America,” he said, looking around the gym. “There are a lot of folks who come up to me and say, ‘You know, Barack, I like your economic plan, and I’m tired of George Bush, but you know, I got my N.R.A. mailing, and I’m worried you’re gonna take my gun away.’ ” Obama likes to do this — to momentarily inhabit the mind of some composite character and act out his side of the conversation — and he was met with knowing chuckles.

“I just want to be absolutely clear, O.K.? I just don’t want any misunderstanding when you all go home and you talk with your buddies, and they say, ‘Oh, he wants to take my gun away.’ You heard it here, and I’m on television, so everybody knows. I believe in the Second Amendment. I believe in people’s lawful right to bear arms. I will not take your shotgun away. I will not take your rifle away. I won’t take your handgun away.

“So if you want to find an excuse not to vote for me, don’t use that one!” Obama said, eliciting laughter and cheers from the crowd. “It just ain’t true!”

This truly captures Obama’s afternoon stop at that gym, and how the “validators” worked the red-state crowd.  After you attend enough of these events, it’s challenging to figure out what’s distinct about them and then convey that in a meaningful way. I remember trying to quickly capture Lebanon in a piece that day, (Obama Tours ‘God’s Country,’ Va.), but Bai does it so much better and deeper.  But I’m not flagging this just to give a writer props.

If you were following the news during the Lebanon event, you would not know a thing about all the details reported above. But you would have read headlines like this about Obama’s appearance:

JOHN MCCAIN, SARAH PALIN ARE LIKE LIPSTICK ON PIG – OBAMA

It was not a one-day story, of course. Over the following week, there were 723 news reports quoting Obama’s cliched reference to “lipstick on a pig,” (according to a Westlaw news search).

Now those articles seem even more out of touch, knowing the nation was weeks away from a grave financial crisis.  Given the dispopriotionate attention on Joe the Plumber, however, it doesn’t seem like many campaign reporters have learned the lesson.