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The pseudonymous Abu Aardvark has an important essay today about the Bush administration's criticisms of the Arab media. It's crucial to note that many of the Arab media stations that are most helpful for promoting reform throughout the Middle East—like Al Jazeerah—are usually the ones targeted by the United States for expressing "anti-American" views. Of course, the whole point of free and healthy dialogue is that sometimes unpopular things get said, but that point seems to be lost on the White House.

At any rate, Abu Aardvark notes that the net effect of such criticism is that, paradoxically, it promotes the essentially anti-democratic media voices that are largely controlled by Arab despots:

The vast majority of the Arab media remains in state hands… and those regimes will probably do what America tells them and clamp down on their own media. Most of the Arab satellite television stations… are becoming copies of [the American-sponsored] Al Hurra - indeed, he argues, "we do not exaggerate if we say that the margin of freedom on al Hurra is wider than in most of its Arab counterparts." The American ambassadors in Arab capitals are becoming the real censors and editorial advisers for most of the Arab media, he argues, pointing out how American embassies have filed complaints when these stations have hosted guests who expressed anti-American views…

Atwan [an editorial writer] continues with these troubling words: America "is rivaling the dictators of the Arab world in its repression of competing opinions, and in its financing of television stations to distort the truth, and in funding propaganda and false news reports."

Rest assured, people in the Middle East are noticing, and the whole affair ends up blunting the effect of all that pro-democracy rhetoric tossed around by the White House. This isn't something that can be fixed simply by trotting out a better public relations campaign; the actual policies at work here—not to mention our hazy understanding of Arab media—are the primary problem.

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Small-but-important news item: Afghanistan is delaying its parliamentary elections once again, this time until September:

The government and its international backers have also argued for a delay to allow for more time to disarm irregular militias and reduce the influence of the so-called jihadi, or Islamic militant, parties and of powerful regional commanders. International peacekeepers from the 5,000-strong, NATO-led International Security Assistance Force ruled out elections in July or August, when there will be a change of command.

Afghanistan's initial presidential election went smoothly, mainly because there was a good deal of shrewd horse-trading among the country's various warlords, and a wide consensus cropped up around current president Hamid Karzai. As a result, minor discrepancies in the polls didn't really matter all that much—it wasn't like Karzai's victory was ever in serious doubt.

The parliamentary elections, by contrast, should be far, far more contentious, since every vote counts, and many observers worry that they'll only grant legitimacy to the regional rule of the various Afghan warlords, who will be much better organized and able to influence the election than anyone else. Understandably, then, the government wants to disarm those militias before they enter politics and cement their rule once and for all, but the catch is that disarmament hasn't gone well thus far. (Polls show that Afghans consider the still-feuding warlords a greater threat to peace than the now-marginalized Taliban.)

Meanwhile, this was a while ago, but it's worth noting that Afghanistan envoy Zalmay Khalilzad is moving to Iraq, where he'll replace Ambassador John Negroponte. Odd move, since by all accounts Khalilzad has done very well in Afghanistan, though he's been criticized for meddling too heavily in Afghan affairs. Meanwhile, I've heard it suggested that Iraqis will sniff at receiving an envoy from a "less-important" country like Afghanistan, but whether they'll actually feel disrespected is anyone's guess. More significantly, though, Khalilzad had the ear of the White House, and was fairly adept at getting people to pay more attention to Afghanistan. Perhaps not the best of moves at a time when Afghanistan's future still remains quite precarious.

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ABC's The Note reports that the AFL-CIO, the large umbrella group for organized labor, is using its clout to push financial service firms away from phasing out Social Security:

Previous AFL-CIO protests led two firms, Waddell and Reed and Edwards Jones, to drop out of the Alliance for Worker Retirement Security, which is linked closely with the Business Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce's efforts to promote personal retirement accounts. AWRS is funded in part by the Security Industries Association.

This is to some extent of course a publicity stunt, but it will probably be somewhat effective because these companies don't like the publicity and take pains already to distance themselves from endorsing any particular Social Security reform legislation.

AFL-CIO's biggest targets are Wachovia, with its millions of every-day customers, and Charles Schwab with its legions of small investors. They hope that by linking Schwab's name with Social Security privatization in the press, Schwab will disaffiliate from AWRS. Same thing with Wachovia. The marches will also target the credit card company MBNA and insurances companies who aren't part of the coalition but who have expressed support for personal accounts, like Cigna, MetLife and Prudential. …

The AFL-CIO's clout here is somewhat unusual for an organization in decline, but the President's allies haven't found a way to combat this particular tactic yet.

Indeed, one of the most remarkable things about the Social Security battle is that, unlike in any number of other battles, the Republicans don't have a populist group ready to battle hard for phase-out. This New York Times article yesterday claimed that "both sides" were planning "extensive grassroots efforts," but I didn't see mention of anything substantive from the phase-out side of the debate, besides a few groups planning immature smear campaigns against seniors.

Evangelical groups have never been particularly keen on doing away with the program, and the larger business groups would just as soon not draw attention to themselves. As best I can tell, this website is the GOP clearing-house for grassroots efforts, and it's not any more impressive than MoveOn.org or other progressive "netroots" movements. On the other side, the unions and AARP have been doing very impressive work of late.

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As was widely noted last week, the Bush administration has decided to yank the US out of the optional protocol to the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. The convention guarantees that when states arrest one another's nationals, they notify one another and inform the arrested person of the right to contact a consulate; the optional protocol requires that disputes between nations under the convention be resolved by the International Court of Justice in The Hague, and it makes the decisions of that court binding upon the signatory states. By withdrawing from the protocol, the United States refuses to be bound by ICJ rulings related to the convention.

At the time, the decision seemed rather out of the blue. After all, just in February, Paul D. Clement, Bush's pick for solicitor general, wrote a brief to the Supreme Court announcing that the administration would accept a 2004 ICJ ruling that found the US in breach of the Vienna convention. The specific case at issue involved a Mexican man being held in Texas who argues that his death sentence is invalid because American officials failed to notify the Mexican consulate of his arrest and sentencing in the United States.

Turns out we shouldn't be surprised. The folks over at SCOTUSblog gave the brief a close reading and found that, in it, Clement actually hints that the US was planning to junk the protocol. "Even if a Nation decides to comply with the decision in a particular case," he wrote, "it retains the option of protecting itself from further decisions based on the legal principles of that case by withdrawing from the Optional Protocol." And so it was done (though there is still debate as to whether the withdrawal is either legal or effective immediately).

You may recall Clement from previous cases such as Padilla, Moussaoui, and Hamdi; he's one of the lead lawyers behind the administration's tricky legal strategy in the "war on terror." As Federal Public Defender Frank Dunham Jr. recently put it, "[Clement] can make the unreasonable sound reasonable" -- a skill that should serve him well -- from the government's point of view -- in his new job as the administration's top advocate in the Supreme Court.

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