and the community amazing things happen. to me, that's the membership effect. good morning from new york, i'm chris hayes, utah republican senator, orrin hatch was forced into runoff in june after failing to get more than 60% of the vote in last night's primary against tea party candidate dan la lind quest. an iranian general says iran is building its own spy drone. we'll be talking about iran a little later today. and today's earth day, and while the world's governments fail to take significant action to stop global warming. in you're in washington, you can attend an earth day concert on the national mall, featuring cheap trick.

we have peter beinart, author of "the crisis of zionism." and author legala gentlemjabril. and çco-co-director of the nonprofit afghan women's mission. and contributor to the daily beast quorum. 2012 has been a public relations disaster for the american military in afghanistan. a video of u.s. soldiers urinating on afghan corpses korans by military personnel. and a few weeks later, more than half of americans surveyed still thought things were going fairly well in afghanistan. today only 38% of americans feel that way. the pew poll was conducted a month after staff sergeant robert bales was thought to have shot and killed 17 afghan civilians. and coordinated attacks on

american and german embassies and the "l.a. times" published photos of u.s. militaries from 2010 posing with body parts of afghan fighters. >> that behavior that was depicted in those photos absolutely violates both our regulations and more importantly, our core values. this is war, and i know that war is ugly. and it's violent. and i know that young people sometimes caught up in the moment make some very foolish decisions. i'm not excusing that. that'sings i'm not excusing that behavior. but neither do i want these images to bring further injury to our peerp or to our relationship with the afghanç people. >> hamid karzai had some words

about it as well. saying essentially this was further evidence the u.s. had to accelerate the handing over the reins to the afghan government. and the taliban issued a statement about the photos. what trikes me about the photos is afghanistan is unbelievable, the degree to which it's not part of the national conversation. 90,000 troops there. and if you said if you saided question, i think to a well-informed citizen, someone who reads the paper every day, what is our afghanistan policy. i don't think most citizens would be able to answer that question. what happens is something happens over there, and we get news for a few days, the bales incident, this incident and it sort of fade off and it's unclear where this is going. the second thing, and eli i would be curious as someone who reported on national security

counterinsurgents, counterinsurgency, there's a breakdown happening in terms of discipline. there's a breakdown happening in terms of the length of deployments and the number of deployments where incidents like this are happening with more frequency or at least being publicized more. the photos are from 2010. do you think that's a danger? >> i think the main issue right now is that this isó?tñi the fi war in iraq i guess as well that you're seeing fought in the era of smartphones. so i think that part of this is just the fact that we have a technology that every ground troop soldier can take these photographs. i would imagine you're going to see more. i would imagine you would have seen similar behavior in other wars, we didn't have the abilit% to take photos and broadcast them all around the world. that's the first thing. the second thing is that there's a lot of frustration that i've come across at the ground truth level where the, there's just not a lot of faith, like there was in iraq, that the afghan national security forces are up to snuff, willing to fight. that they're seen as very

corrupt and the karzai government is seen as very corrupt. the question is, what are we doing fighting their war for them? the view a think of a lot of soldiers is the united states wans to win against the taliban more than the government that they're effectively fighting for. >> suneil, you're in constant contact with women on the ground in afghanistan. one of the things i think is really interesting is, i thought when the bales incident happened, i think a lot of americans thought, there would be massive uprising in afghanistan. the details were so horrifying and i thought about if someone, if a foreign soldier did that in the u.s., although it's a difficult counterfactual, right, because we occupy, you could imagine what would happen. there didn't seen toem be a uproar and part of what i came to understand, the depressing truth is it's so routine that civilians are dieing in afghanistan. it's shocking to us. but not on the ground there. >> first of all, one of the

things we should remember is there are protests happening on the ground, particularly nonviolent protests, they don't get reported on very much. they are by students, by peace-loving men, political parties that are underground. what gets reported on are the mobs, when there's riots and violence. the other thing is you're çrig, it does become routine. the fact that this man went out and deliberately killed these people is not that much different from when our soldiers conduct night raids, kick down doors, round up men and boys, hog-tie them, detain and torture them and sometimes kill them. what is amazing to me is that afghans for the most part still distinguish, ordinary afghans distinguish between the government policies and ordinary americans. because they realize this war is unpopular here. >> i'm sorry, it's massively different. a man who goes out and randomly

massacres civilians is categorically and enormously different than a night raid against a suspected taliban outpost. we may have situations where those people are killed in night raids or drone attacks. >> but to somebody whose family is killed, it makes little difference if somebody kills you in cold blood versus bombs falling from the sky. that's just as deliberate and it doesn't make the death of your father, mother, husband, brother, any less horrific if they're killed by a drone bomb as opposed to a guy who shoots you. >> when the united states is, is trying to, enact a counterinsurgency campaign against the tall want. i think the intent is different. the larger question for me is, does the counterinsurgency campaign at this point have any realistic chance of success whatsoever. once you reach the point where virtually nobody in the american foreign policy believes that really we have any chance in the long term of shaping the future of afghanistan in a significant way any more, then i think you

go back to the question that eli raised in the beginning, is what's the point of all thisç this point? >> i think what she's trying to do, there's increasing casualties. there's a lot of civilians that are being killed. and you know, you cannot hide this. when barack obama was elected, he send more troops. and actually the violence, the level of violence decreased for a certain while. then something happened and they needed to withdraw the troops. but there's something that we're not discussing here and i'm sorry to bring this up. but the behavior of the soldiers, there's a pattern about the behafl of the soldiers that is repeating itself. it's not about technology. we've been having cell phones for a long time. this war started ten years ago. these pictures are coming up now in the last years and it's january, february, march, you have the burning of the koran, urinating on the bodies, humiliating people publicly. and you know, putting as a trophy, their bodies, part of their bodies. it's something that says about

our troops, i'm sorry. not only the discipline of regular soldiers and single episodes, the command, what are they teaching them, what they are telling them to do. how they are training them. and are we really on a peace-keeping mission. >> i'm asking you a serious question, do we really know this. do you know that u.s. commanders are allowing this? >> i'm not saying that they're allowing this. >> well that seems to be the implication. >> you're changing my words. please don't change my words and keep it cool. >> i'm keeping it cool. >> good for you. >> what i'm saying here is very simple. what i'm saying there's something -- when you have mistake once or twice, you can even think that okay, it's a mistake and you can forgive that. but when it's happening regularly. we need really to question our ethics and -- >> that is the çquestion, righ. >> are we sending them on a combat mission? or we are sending them to handle people and winning their hearts and minds. it's a big difference. >> let me just sort of draw a conceptual distinction between

two issues. one is weather there is something conceptually rotten to the core of the entire project of counterinsurgency, right. which is even if the strategic aim is to win hearts and minds, it's still fundamentally an occupation. and occupation has a power differential which has fundamentally occupations chafe at. a night raid into someone's house, no one comes into the my house in the middle of the night with guns. that's a fact of being an american. >> you're also not a member of the taliban. >> you're saying that every house -- >> when people conduct night raids, there's a reason why that -- >> but i'm saying -- >> that target is chosen. it's not at random. >> of course not, but if you happen to be one of the mistakes and i think you would admit there are mistakes. i've talked to soldiers myself who talk about going into night raids, in which there isn't the taliban. there's a conceptual question about the nature of counterinsurgency, and whether it can work about whether it's fundamentally managing an

occupation and whether an occupation can be sustained and turned into something that isn't fundamentally corrupt. >> we have this impression and americans think we're actually fighting a war against the taliban. but that's not true. we have been trying to negotiate and make peace with the taliban for a long time. we've been for almost ten years, actually funded both sides of the war. there's a new book that was just written by douglas swissenç called -- "funding the enemy." documentation after documentation about how road construction projects have been built into them a major major cuts that are given to the taliban as protection money. we've paid the taliban. we don't address what the role of pakistan is and why pakistan is even concerned. we're planning our withdrawal as if we just want to wash our hands of the afghanistan war. and for years now, we have not exerted our influence over a biggest ally, who is pakistan. whose major concern in afghanistan is its rival,

india's influence over the central government. we never talk about that. >> the last episodes, the last attack, there were several attacks in various area. there were directly commanded by the haqqani network who are situated actually in the north waziristan. and controlled and they have ties, direct ties with the secret service of pakistan. this is a country that takes, receive aid in the united states. and receive huge amount of political support. >> and leverage over them -- leverage over them is incredibly questionable. hold on one second, i want you to hold that thought. i want to come back to this after we take a very quick break. % more cash? ugh, the baby. huh! and then the baby bear said, "i want 50% more cash in my bed!" phhht! 50% more cash is good ri... what's that. ♪ you can spell. [ male announcer ] the capital one cash rewards card. the card for people who want 50% more cash.

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all right. we're back, i was just saying that sometimes i cut someone off to go to break and i say i'm going to come back to them and i don't come back and the astute viewer at home will wrap my

knuckles. sonali i wanted to come to you in terms of the complicated relationship the u.s. has in terms of who we are funding and how -- when you say you were making the point we're not, it's not quite right to say we're conducting a war on the taliban. because we've also been trying to get them to negotiate. and ryan crocker, the ambassador, after these photos came out when he was talking about them. said these photos don't reflect our troops, et cetera. then he said, the taliban still has to make a choice whether they want to be part of the new order -- but here's my question to you as someone who has wnbked with women's groups on the ground in afghanistan. you know, at one level it does seem that the, there is no way to avoid the taliban being part of some future order in afghanistan. just as a realize he can assessment of how much power they have. sat the same level, it seems like it would be a horrible tragedy at the end of all this, we go back to girls having acid thrown in their faces.

>> in 2001, this was the situation, you had 90% of the country controlleded by the taliban, the misogynist, repressive regime. the women i work with were working so hard to get the world to pay attention to what was happening there. >> i remember getting emails. >> they were the ones who shot the undercover video of the women being executed in kabul stadium. the mainstream media did not want to touch that video. only after 9/11 were they interested in airing it. it became important to demonize the taliban. their position from the stant was even when the bombs began falling, they were against the war, they said liberation cannot come from outside. they wanted the international community to help them get rid of the warlords that the u.s. had empowered during the soviet occupation. ha did we do? we went in and decided to work with the warlords, these criminals who had blood on their hands, killed tens of thousands of people, were drug lords. we gave them cash to help us y and ruwa said right from the

start, this is the wrong strategy, do not work with the northern alliance, it has proven to be the worst mistake. if we leave, we're going to leave afghanistan with the same people in power, except maybe with more power. with the power dynamic even more chaotic than in 2001. >> whether it's through the international community, helping them create some kind of war crimes tribunal. that's what ruwa wants, they want the weapons out of afghanistan. they don't want political or military power in the hands of fundamentalist criminals who have proven they're the enemies of not just women, but of the people. >> there's an argument you hear from liberals and the sort of

neocolonial feminist argument about the need to stay in -- i didn't like that term. but about exactly what you're saying. it sounds like what you're saying, we're going to leave and we're going to leave to cast the fates of afghan women -- >> they continue to support the war, this is not happened today. but they didn't list ton the women on the ground. afghan women were saying, you cannot have liberation from outside. help us, don't make our jobs harder. we made their jobs harder. >> amazon army. >> i really think afghanistan doesn't need any more weapons. >> how do we, if you the united states pulls its military out, what, i mean we could send aid but the government will be controlled by the same criminals. >> thanks to us. take the weapons away. take the money away. disarm these çpeople.

control the taliban through pakistan. >> how is it thanks to us? before the intervention, the taliban ran afghanistan, as you said. how is it thanks to us? >> okay. the u.s., because of the men that we chose to work with during the soviet occupation, we put billions of dollars of weapons into the most misogynist, fundamentalist criminals, they controlled afghanistan. they plunged it into war. in comes with pakistan with a stabilizing force. pakistan are our alley. three countries in the world considered the taliban the formal representatives of afghanistan. saudi arabia, the united arab emirates and pakistan. all three u.s. allies, all three u.s. weapons buyers, we didn't care until 9/11. >> to clarify your view, no one should have messed with the soviet occupation of afghanistan? >> the afghans were fighting the soviets on the ground and that was a very legitimate fight and the u.s. could have chosen to work with moderates. the u.s. could have helped, of course the u.s.'s own interests are at stake. but if the u.s. would have

wanted, they could have worked with ordinary afghans. >> this is a point, i think -- >> let me just -- >> facing one of the most challenges for not only the troops, but for the credibility of statutes, of the government. and millions of people that are looking around, of how to pull this mission together. and i think what happened in 2009, electing karzai for the second time was a huge mistake. we knew that his government was corrupt, we knew he was inefficient. we knew about the fact that he was not really, not only start real national building. he will not0stay there once we leave. because the taliban, he will be the first victim. the second victim will be women, probably, because his government -- >> let me ask two things, when we have these discussions, it sounds like we're looking at the decision tree and the set of counterfactuals.

we made this bad decision, this bad decision. when it seems to me, the fundamental project was doomed to failure from the beginning. the second question is everyone at the table would say, we're getting out. i don't think anyone -- and if we, if we -- i'm not certainly no afghan effort. if i know that, than certainly the taliban knows it. >> they're waiting. >> we have this situation on the ground where everyone understands we're getting out. it's a question of when. >> it's eerily similar to vietnam. the north vietnamese knew all they needed to do was wait and american public opinion is going to force us out. it's exactly the same situation we're facing where our own government didn't want to be part of the fight and the u.s. soldiers ended up doing terrible, terrible things. not because they're bad people, they're good people, but this is what happens in every single war. that's why the standard for going to war needs to be really, really high. and unfortunately, barack obama decided to plunge us further into the war at a point, if you

look at woodward's book, he himself did not really believe we had a significant chance of success. >> we had 30,000 troops announced in the surge. that will end by the end of 2012 and the current sort of projections that will get our troops out by 2014. but a lot will hinge on the election. because mitt romney has been -- >> let me throw out a difficult. >> i want to you do that after we take a break. i want to talk about theç romn doctrine and what it will look like if it becomes president. i went to a small high school. the teacher that comes to mind for me is my high school math teacher, dr. gilmore. i mean he could teach. he was there for us, even if we needed him in college. you could call him, you had his phone number. he was just focused on making sure we were gonna be successful. he would never give up on any of us.

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talking about afghanistan, in the wake of the photos being published in the l.a. times this week and also more broadly about what, what, what we're doing there now and where this is all headed. eli, i went to break as you were about to say something. >> something to complicate the factor here is that there are supposed to be 352,000 afghan national security forces trained by july. if the united states pulls out,

this is a country that has half of its gdp is based on foreign aid. there's no way they can sustain a force of that size. so the counterinsurgency strategy that obama adopted in 2009 helped basically arm the next afghan civil war. that's a very serious question. there's no way that the government is going to be able to sustain the military that is supposedly trained to prevent this kind of violence. >> the point being you're now going to have a lot of people with guns. >> guns and some degree of military training. >> and the picture in the "l.a. times" published, did you notice there were not only american american soldiers, there were afghan trainees being trained. whey meant before eli and what i meant for everyone, what we train them to do is not to combat only. we train them to do is how to deal with civilians in an area like afghanistan. how to respect human rights, how can we treat, how can we teach

them that once we leave, they should behave in a certain way with fighters, with women? i mean if you don't -- >> there's no way? >> there's no way that that's, we're fooling ourselves if we think that the afghan military, when we leave is going to live up to the first world standards. >> i mean -- >> that is exactly what people who opposed the obama surge were saying at very time. which is to say that ç countersurgecy could not work in afghanistan. and the obama administration went forward with it, anyway, even though i think many inside the white house believed it was going to end up exactly where we are. >> can we pivot to romney for a second? it seems to me that barack obama on the campaign trail, was fairly hawkish, i hate the word hawkish. >> muscular. >> that also has all sorts of loaded -- semantics to it. he said very clearly that we

were going to you know, redouble our efforts in afghanistan, send more troops. he conducted this big policy review, they ended up sending 30,000 troops. now mitt romney has been on the campaign trail and he has been very critical of obama's foreign policy in a way that i think has become quite standard. it's basically he's saying the president is weak, he's indecisive. he's not sufficiently muscular. here a little bit to give you the flavor of mitt romney's foreign policy critique. here he is talking about foreign policy. >> a strong america is the best ally of peace. >> there's no price which is worth an iranian nuclear weapon. >> in an american century, america has the strongest economy and the strongest military in the world. in an american century, america leads the free world and the free world leads the entire world. >> what we're talking about here is the failure on the part of the president to lead with strength. >> god did not create this country to be a nation of

followers. >> that's, that's mitt romney, sounding i would say sort of toeing the neocon line. the american currency is anb)qqp that -- >> i don't know if it's neocon. >> i'm an american, i don't sound like that, i'll respectfully dissent from that as being category cal. >> there's a tremendous division of continuity, robert kagan who wrote an essay about the myth of the american decline, the sort of brain trust out of which springs this american century idea. >> barack obama according to you -- >> the essay as well -- >> so, that's the question, there has been i think more continuity than discontinuity in foreign policy between the bush administration and obama.

were mitt romney to be elected, it's unclear that mitt romney is actually proposing much does continuity in terms of afghanistan. >> yes, obama continued the policy. obama was the one that killed bin laden, used drones. he not only looked muscular to the rest of the world. maybe not to the americans, maybe not to mitt romney and to the republicans. but to the rest of the world he was decisive. the way he led from behind from n front, whatever. libya. look at the way he's hammering the, iranians. the sanctions. i mean, the guy has, has been very aggressive on each issue. on each issue. the only thing that he's doing, he's doing it smiling. that's the only way. he go to cairo and make a beautiful speak about democracy and freedom. and when theyç protest, he support them. he said, you know what, mubarak, you've been a great ally, but step out of the way, because we want to change. romney, he will continue, but he

will piss off everybody. the first time he talk about china, he said-a-chinese, the first thing i will do when i will be a president, i will label china as a currency manipulator. >> here's the question -- your thesis is that essentially the difference essentially is in rhetoric, they'll be equally muscular. >> obama do it with more charm. >> you've done a lot of reporting about the nature of republican consensus on foreign policy in the wake of neocon ascendency during george w. bush. it seems to me like they're still ascendant. that's still the main line in the republican party. >> in a very important sense, if you count this as n neoconservative, you might count this as a petraeus counterinsurgency. there's one view that in afghanistan you have to stay and be a huge presence and train you will the forces and have the patience over time. thasd totally lost out as we've just discussed, as to what might be associated with joe biden's

view, counterterrorism, mowing the grass, night raids with no plan to try to build up the indigenous forces to try to keep the peace. there's are important military differences, they exist within the obama administration and within the republican tent. i would say so that it's less ideological in a sense and it really is a difference that also is in the military right now. you have, you had the rise of petraeus and counterinsurgency, we thought there was going to be a counterinsurgency in 2008. that's not what happened. the budget forç the next ten years is a drone cyberarmy. >> we pay too much attention to the advisers and to which party. if you look at the history of american foreign policy. what determine as president's foreign policy more than anything else is the cards they're dealt and the strepgts they face. the fundamental reality is the united states does not have the money any more to continue of kind of very, very expensive on-the-ground foreign policy we've been waging. that's going to be true no matser who is president. and either president is going to

have to respond by the reality by scaling back. >> we have to do did in a smart way like libya. you spend $1 million in libya and trillions of dollars in afghanistan and iraq. you do it in a very smart way, including the international community. that's the way. >> i think we keep forgetting about what ordinary afghans are going through in all of this. we're just talking about what the power players need and what will work for our foreign policy. but no one is talking about what ordinary afghan people are going through and what they actually want. >> it seems like in this there's a confluence in interest in saying that the u.s. from a strategic perspective is going to get out and you think ultimately what is best for afghanistan g-- >> who are we leaving in power? not ordinary afghanistans. >> i want to turn our attention to the other big for policy issue on the table, there's a lot more difference, i think in rhetoric on iran between mitt romney and barack obama after this break. what do you smell? takes me outdoors.

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you were making the point as we went to break that we lose sight, this is one of the problems about the discourse around imperial management, if i can sound like a grad student for a moment. which is that the perspective is all from sort of great power strategy, u.s. interest. and we do lose sight, partly because it's i think normal and natural i don't talk to a lot of afghans, i'm not in afghanistan. i think about our conversation gets very driven by u.s. interests. and you're saying we lose sight of what the fate of afghans on the ground will be and what they want, what their agency is. my question to you, as you thinç about the u.s. election, that's the terms in which we're talking about this debate, does it matter to people if afghanistan whether mitt romney or barack obama win? >> absolutely not. sadly, it doesn't matter. mostly because afghans knew right from the start, when president obama, when candidate obama was running for office, he ran on the policy of escalating the war in afghanistan. it came as no surprise. it shouldn't have come as any

surprise to the anti-war movement to people here in the u.s. that the war was escalated. and that's something that bush in fact, he escalated what bush was doing. and so you know, i think it makes, it's very going to make very little difference. because the women of rawa understand that the policies of america are driven by american interests, not afghan interests. >> does it make very little different for this reason, because we're getting out anyway, 0or does it make little difference because it's going to perpetuate it? is it the case that continuity at this point means a slide towards inevitable withdrawal. or are we going to see the ball kicked down the road again and again, like we have seen already. >> i doubt that mitt romney is going to keep kicking the ball down the road. given public opinion and given even his reluctance to overtly say that he wants to extend the war, i really doubt that's going to happen. afghans know we're going to pull out. they're trying to find out how many afghans have to die before we decide it's time to pull out.

>> do you agree, eli, that that is essentially the end point of this? >> i would echo, i think the point that peter made, which is that the financial realities are that you can't sustain a massive presence in afghanistan. and unfortunately, afghan government can't sustain a massive afghan military, which was the mainç activity of the last surge. >> given that, the amazing thing is, look, i speak, eli knows this, i supported the iraq war and the afghan war. both in retrospect were massive mistakes. if you look at romney's advisers, there has been especially in the republican party, but even, there are been no reckoning with this fact whatsoever. we have exactly the same people there. >> why did you support these wars? >> i -- >> he's written books about it. i wrote essentially for my sins, i wrote two books trying to explain the evolution of american policy as i saw it through the 1990s and why i think the role of the use of force became something that i -- >> wait a second. i want to apply those lessons,

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nothing gets me in the mood to talk more than nuclear catastrophe better than bismarck. there were standoffs on opposite sides of the iran leaders. they said they were making progress on talks. and a prominent iranian cleric praised the good acheeskments of the summit, including an agreement to meet again. israeli prime minister dismisseded talks at a press conference last sunday. >> my initial impression is iran has been given a freebie.

>> president obama issued a sharp rejoineder at a press conference later that day. >> the clock is ticking5 and yo know, i've been very clear to iran and to our negotiating partners that we're not going to have these talks just drag out in a stalling process. the notion that somehow we've given something away, orç a freebie, would indicate that iran has gotten something. in fact they've got some of the toughest sanctions that they're going to be facing coming up in just a few months if they don't take advantage of, of these talks. >> joining us to discuss the iran/israeli standoff is the author of "the ayatollah's democracy." great to have you here. how are you? >> very well, thanks. >> let's talk about the negotiations. the sort of arc here is that there's been a kind of, one way

you could look at it as a good cop/bad cop sim beyoes is in the u.s. in terms of dealing with the iranian nuclear program. there is a definitely a nuclear program. they are building reactors,. >> there's going to be a preemptive strike on the facilities unless the u.s. steps up. the u.s. has been cautionary, chiding anonymously or on the record this drum beat to war. what it's resulted in is a toughening of sanctions and there will be tough sanctions that go into effect july 1 in terms of limitations on european's ability to purchase iranian oil. constraints on the iranian central bank, which will have profound economic consequence and it's resulted in talks restarting again. has this been essentially a victory, a triumph of sort of american foreign policy and

diplomacy in sort of using all this to get back to the negotiating table? >> it depends on how you look at it. if you believe that the sanctions what has gotten the iranians back to the table or to the table, then yes, clearly it has been. obama's victory here is preventing war so far. i think. more than anything else. or delaying at least any kind of potential military action. but the iranian, if you look at it from the iranian point of view, the iranians have always been willing to negotiate. we did it in may of 2010 with turks and brazilians who told us they had the approval of president obama. obama rejected it. that's what they'll say, they're always ready. they'll say the sanctions aren't what is bringing us back to the table. >> is it true? >> it is true in may of 2010 they did a deal. >> it can be true and the fact that the sanctions are having an effect. >> there's no question that the sanctions are having an effect. the iranians admit that. they don't admit it officially. but you hear iranian in the leadership.

people saying things that, even the president mahmoud ahmadinejad said the sanctions are hurting. you can see how here hurting the people in iran. there's no question that iran would like to see the sanctions lifted. they would like to see them lifted as soon as possible. or not even instituted, the ones in july or end of june on the central bank. it's hard to say what the victory is at this point. as far as the israelis are concerned, i don't think there's any kind of deal that the u.s. can make with iran, that iran would accept. >> that seems to be the issue here, that the netanyahu government has drawn is not one that -- you could conceive of ways, not to get too technical, a lot of it has to do with the earn rich of uranium to be weapons grade. the threshold for weapons grade is 20%. there's a sort of pilot project that the iranians have been pursuing toç enrich uranium to 20%. >> it's not a pilot project, 20% for their tehran reactor. americans don't know the history of why they're enriching to 20%.

in the summer of 2009, which is when the green movement exploded in iran, all the anti-regime demonstrations, at that point the iran knew that the tehran reactor was running out of fuel. the tehran reactor is an operator that the americans built before the revolution and it creates medical isotopes for cancer patients, they did what they have to do, they went to the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, to which they are a signatory. >> the iaea, they say find somebody to sell it to us. the last time they bought it was from argentina. this time the iaea goes out and says who is willing to sell fuel rods to iran for their reactor. the answer came back, no one. the obama administration created this plan, you give us your 3.5% enriched uranium, we'll give you fuel rods, in return for the uranium you've enriched to 3.5. that deal fell apart an was

revived by the turks and brazilians. that's when iran says look, nobody is giving us this fuel. we're going to make our own. it's not a pilot program, they've made the 20% fuel. >> the concern as articulated by israel and the u.s. is part of it has to do with the way that the nuclear nonproliferation treaty is designed. iran is a setting torrey, israel is not a signatory. in which it's possible to essentially be in compliance with the nuclear nonproliferation treaty until the day that you are no longer in compliance, when you can weaponizedç next day -- >> not the next day, six months. >> a short window. i want to talk about where this is going after this break. everything that i've gained in life has been because of the teachers and the education that i had. they're just part of who i am. she convinced me that there was no limit to what we could learn. i don't think i'd be here today had i not had a wonderful science teacher. a teacher can make a huge difference in a child's life.

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we're talking about the negotiations that happen, between the p 5 plus one, a variety of countries, including the u.s., china, russia, theç . in istanbul with iran over the

iran nuclear program. eli, you have, i think a different perspective and you've done some reporting on this in terms of the intentions on this. my question to you is is there a possible end-point, is there a realistic possible end-point to negotiations that would satisfy the current israeli government? >> well sure, i think that if you had monitoring in all of the places that the iaea has been denied access to now for several years, and you've answered all the questions of the inspectors about laboratory and other sort of programs that you know, the head of the iaea said could be used for a nuclear weapon and remain all of these outstanding questions and you had a essential that the entire program was disclosed, which no one ever has, because the two main facilities were only disclosed after they were essentially outed. and those were the facility in kom, and the facility in etans. when you have a history so much deception and everyone who wants to build a nuclear weapon in the

modern age, after the u.s. has deceived people about it from you know, the russians, the chinese, the israelis, the pakistanis, it's not unique to iran they would be lying about their program. but the idea that something short of this kind of full disclosure, which i do think would require a new set of people in power, you know, i think would shouldn't, it's not just israel. it shouldn't satisfy anyone. >> it's plausible that a new people in power would want to pursue the nuclear program. >> i think they would be more of a, more trust, i think if you saw, you know, listen, these guys stole the election in 2009. the nuclear program, the reason people are so wary aboutç iran getting a nuclear program, they're the leadi ining support of terrorism. they are terrible to their own population, and it's, it's a country that would, the world would be much better off if the regime was not -- >> the tension that we are creating and this animosity with

iran and the israeli talks about war and strife, is uniting everybody you know, with this government. >> the green movement is disappearing, moussaoui is at house arrest for a while and nobody is talking about it. the green movement is actually hammered because nobody is talking about what they are doing. and the daily struggle. we're talking about should we bump them or not bump them. >> the threats and the sanctions is definitely hurting civil society in iran. there's no question about that. i spent a year there last year. >> so is the government. >> you can keep saying that. >> nobody is denying that. but you also just listed a whole litany of accusations against iran. that most iranians don't agree with. it's easy to say, they're the biggest state sponsor of terrorism and a lot of iranians say, well no. i'm not talking about the regime. i'm talking about iranians, saying if we support

palestinians, that's semantics. the idea of them lying about this -- >> i'm cutting you of mid sentence because i want to talk about this and talk about an israeli/iranian solidarity movement that's gone viral. eat good fats. avoid bad. don't go over 2000... 1200 calories a day. carbs are bad. carbs are good. the story keeps changing. so i'm not listening... to anyone but myself. i know better nutrition when i see it: great grains. great grains cereal starts whole and stays whole. see the seam? more processed flakes look nothing like natural grains. you can't argue with nutrition you can see. great grains. search great grains and see for yourself. for multi grain flakes that are an excellent source of fiber try great grains banana nut crunch and cranberry almond crunch.

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wow! that really works! ...all taking losses. it looks like mr. clean has won everything. the cleaning games are finished? and so are we. okay, but i just took a mortgage out on the cabinet. [ male announcer ] clean more, work less, with the mr. clean magic eraser extra power. from new york, i'm chris hayes, with me i have peter beinart, author of "the crisis of zionism," author rula jabreal, hooman majj, and eli lake, who has turned off his iphone, busted, we're talking aboutç the negotiations over iran's nuclear program. hooman, you were making a point about domestic opinion within iran and the effect of the them

being in the a spotlight in this way and i cut you off mid sentence, please continue. >> i was going to talk about this issue of whether they're lying or not. it's a very easy for us to say, the iranians are lying. it's very easy for us to say, co-man khamen khamenei, talking about the fatwa, and it's part of the deception and ehud barak or one of the israeli leaders was talking on cnn saying it's part of islam, you can lie in islam. it's not that simple. it's very difficult to reverse a fatwa and it's very difficult to be, it's very difficult to not just reverse a fatwa, but the circumstance under which you can lie in islam, is really only to do with faith. and that's within the shiite faith, where if -- >> if they were discovered, is the tradition here which is a sort of -- a kind of protective lying to say that you are

actually sunni, which is the majority -- >> otherwise you could be behended. >> if only there was an international agency that could actually determine the answer to these questions, we wouldn't have to rely on the utterances of supreme leaders. >> there is an -- >> they have not. they have all the outstanding questions. and the iranians have kept access to these things -- >> which one, which one? you're talking about çparchim. >> you're talking about more than that. >> there's a list of these places. >> i love how people in america can just make these up. >> i can quote the iaea direct-general. >> if you're talking -- >> wait, let's make sure everybody everyone is tracking. there are facilities that are under iaea monitoring, right? >> nuclear facilities which iran has to allow access. >> and there's cameras in there and they're going 24 hours and someone is monitoring it.

and there's other facilities not monitored by iaea. >> military facilities which were inspected in 2005, parchin, which is one thing that i presume eli is talking about and there's scientific laboratories that the iaea has occasionally, they have inspected some and they haven't inspected others. it's like any inspection regime. you can say i want to inspect your house. and you can say no, you can't inspect my house. iran doesn't have to under the mpt, doesn't have to allow them to inspect anything they want. >> it also could be -- it could be the case that they are doing things -- >> it could be. >> yes, yes, of course. >> according to secret service -- >> there's a key point -- >> that the -- >> i didn't interrupt you, let me finish, what's wrong with you here. >> according to secret service in israel -- >> intelligence service. >> intelligence service, there's dozens of these sites and we all

agree that iran is trying to become a regional power. there's one thing ha happened. i know that american doesn't have miss tore cal memory. let's look at 2003. 2003 was aç defining moment fo the world. george w. bush made the famous speech, the axis of evil, iran, iraq and north korea. north korea had the weapon and they dealt with it in terms of aid. and they had the weapon. iraq didn't have the weapon. and it was destroyed. so if i was an iranian and somebody, probably the iranian regime was sitting there thinking you know what, what is the rational course to pursue in order to be protected. and they start running with their program. and probably they are enriching uranium. they want to reach the level where they have the capability. but they don't turn it into a weapon. >> i think it's an important point to get in here the libya example. which again gadhafi, one of the big sort of disarmament, nonproliferation victories of the bush administration would talk about is the fact that gadhafi had a program which was not very far along and he had a lot of sort of junky equipment. but there was -- >> he gave it up.

>> he gave it up and look what happened to gadhafi. so in terms of the rational course to pursue -- >> the supreme leader brought up the libyan issue. he didn't say gadhafi gave up his nuclear weapons, he said gadhafi gave up his nuclear technology. >> we're talking about rational actors. iranians are not gadhafi, who was really a nut case, with all due respect to him and to his family. >> why due respect? >> a man should be respected, even though whatever he was. >> i want to move the conversation. >> i want to move the conversation because from the sort of details to the nuclear facility, to the kind of red ririt rhetoric tiqt's been building up. >> the oil prices. >> there's been a sort of really interesting grassroots movement that started in israel that sort of caught my attention on

facebook. i thought it was an interesting manifestation of the civil society that you're talking about. it's called israel loves iran. it was an attempt at sort of person-to-person communication between israeli citizens and iranian citizens while their governments were talking about the standoff that was happening. i want to play a short tape, the israeli who started this, here he is explaining the undertaking. >> to the iranian people, to our father, mothers, children, brothers and sisters, for there to be a war between us, first we must be afraid one of the other. we must hate. i'm not afraid of you. i don't hate you. i don't even know you. know iranian ever did me no harm. i never met any iranian, just one in paris, in a museum, nice dude. i see sometime here on tv an iranian, he's talking about war, i assure he does not represent

all of the people of iran. if you see someone on your tv talking about bombing you, be sure, he does not represent all of the people of israel. >> joining us from london is deemi raider an israeli journalist and co-founder of "972 magazine." >> hi, good to be on the show. >> i want to talk about israel loves iran project and its origins and how broadly, how niche this is in terms of where israeli public opinion is right now on a possible confrontation or military action with iran. >> well i mean it started, it started about aç month ago. iranian is partner uploaded pictures of themselves and of their friends and kids, with the very simple message, iran, we we'll never bomb your country. and the first response was very cynical and very niche. and it was mostly from fellow graphic designers who started uploading parody versions, cl g cling clingons, we love your planet, we'll never bomb you. and trojans, we love your city,

with pictures of a great wooden horse, but then to people's intense surprise, the iranians began to respond. >> it started with messages showing various historical sites, various quotes from historical documents, showing the link between persians and jews. and slowly people started posting their own pictures, sometimes doing it at great risk. a lot of pictures were coming from iranians abroad. but some were coming from iran and you would see someone's hand outstretched hand or someone's smile without the whole face, because obviously for them it's considerably more risky. hundreds of people uploaded pictures. tens of thousands shared them on facebook. and it's really picked up. >> is, in terms of where israeli national popular sentiment is, i've seen different polling and a lot of it depends on how the question is phrased and it seems to depend on what has happened

that week and how intense people feel. the threat is or may be. how, how is the netanyahu's rhetoric about iran playing in terms of his domestic political popularity? well i thinkç that most peoplen israel, if anything, they're mostly apprehensive. they are obviously aware of the possibility iran might acquire a nuclear bomb, they're not very happy with it but they're not also eager to go to war. i think most people are alarmed about the repercussions of conventional war in the near future, than the possibility of an unconventional war, a nuclear war in the far future. you can see that like you said, it depends on how you phrase the question. but when asked whether they support a unilateral israeli attack on iran without assistance from the united states and the world community, most people are against it. >> deemi raider in london.

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okay, okay, deemi, i want to go to peter. on this question. which is whether the role, the sort of american sort of pro israel and i put those in quotation marks, because that's obviously a contested term about who and what is pro israel, the sort of establishment has played in ramping up rhetoric about war and the rhetoric about the nuclear threat of iran in terms

of aiding netanyahu's self-professed quest to insure that there's no nuclear capability in terms of iran. >> pro israeli organizations in the united states have pushed tough sanctions against iran. i don't think that's necessarily in and of itself a bad thing. the problem is if you have sanctions without a diplomatic alternative. the sanctions have to be pushing iran towards aç diplomatic solution. if you think that the military option is a very bad option. as it turns out most of the military leadership in both israel and the united states seem to believe. i think the real question here is is the political climate in the united states -- and i think the republicans here are especially, the republican in congress will be key -- will the republicans in congress support any plausible diplomatic deal that we could cut with iran. if they don't, then our only choices are essentially iran going full speed towards at least nuclear capability or military action. >> deemi, is there groundwork in israeli public opinion or civil society, to, for a diplomatic

solution? is there a way for that to happen without that being seen as losing face? >> i think if you know, if there is any kind of credible scaling down and eventual stop to any nuclear weapons program the iranians might have, i don't think israelis will see it as losing face. in fact most of them have, have been shown to understand that even the nuclear -- sorry, god forbid, even the military attack on iran would only stop the program for a while. then it will resume. so you know, anything that will slow it down will be seen as i think just a good result as that of an attack. >> you're referring to the fact. >> much less costly to israelis. >> there's a practical consequence to the question, when you game out what a strike would look like. something there's been a lot of reporting on. whether the degree to which it would essentially just set the clock back a year or 18 months, and could, it seems that the consensus, as far as i understand it from the what i've been reading -- and i'm not an

intelligence reporter -- is that it would be very hard, given how the dispersal of the targets,ço actually wipe out the program, right? is that the general sense, eli? >> yeah, i mean i think that the policy for bush and for netanyahu and for obama and everybody else has been a combination of clandestine sabotage at times it gets to the point of killing scientists for i guess the israeli side. sanctions to try to pressure the regime. and then you know, the natural result is that you pressure a regime, you give them the opportunity to pull a gadhafi. and to do that. and so, the fact that they're in negotiations at the moment when their central bank could be cut off from the world economy shouldn't surprise anybody. that's exactly what the policy is the question is do you think this regime will respond to pressure on its citizenry. and that seems to me to be an open question. >> i think that's an interesting question. because i think that, this is something you've written an entire book about, which is the structure of the iranian government and the fact that it is a complicated mix of, it is

not north korea in the sense, in terms of the degree to which public opinion does not matter at all, right? there is a democratic component of it and there's a manifestly undemocratic portion of it. >> absolutely. yeah. >> there was a very telling photograph this week, of ayatollah rafsanjani who came out in favor of the green movement in 2009 and has been a sharp critic of ahmadinejad. for them to both at the ex-ped yency council meeting this week, which means that the regime is coming together a little bit more under these threats. exactly the opposite of what the intention might be, that we want to see the regime be at odds with each other. i think that's also natural.ç >> it brings the regime together. >> i should say in terms of

bellicose rhetoric, it comes from both sides. it obviously gets reported all the time. there was the famous comment about ahmadinejad about wiping israel off the map. a question about what the persian translation was. >> in "the new york times" this weekend. yes. >> it is clearly the case that the iranian government's rhetoric, their posture has been incredibly hostile, incredibly militant towards the state of israel. >> that's true. and it has been since the revolution. i mean you know, one thing we do forget is whether killing scientists is illegal under international law. whether bombing iran is illegal. whether this would be a preemptive war. ha does preemptive mean? preemptive means if somebody is about to attack you, pearl harbor, you prevent it. >> even if it's a preventing war, what are you preventing? are you preventing an attack from iran? right now nobody has any evidence -- nobody, israeli, moss mossad, nobody has any evidence. >> there's a shadow war between

iran and israel and iran and the west and iran particularly and the united states. the iranians are responsible for killing a lot of americans in iraq and now unfortunately, afghanistan. making common cause i might add with their ideological or at least theological enemies in the taliban at times to just kill american soldiers. so -- >> that's not proven, but -- >> it's not proven. >> i'll take the word of four-star generals over you, no offense. >> okay, well -- >> my point is there is a low-level shadow war that is going onúbltween iran and the west. it's gone on for some time. you could argue since even though there's an algiers accord in the early 1980s, since the hostage-taking crisis. the question is, will it become a hot war. but there is a war. >> dimi radar. israeli journalist and co-founder of "972 magazine." . and thanks to hooman majd. and the crisis of zionism, peter

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a little peaceful music to lower the temperature at the table. sunday morning, we have sonalikolhatkar back on the table, host of "uprising" on pacific radio in los angeles. good to have you back here. all right. i want to talk, peter about your book. it's called "the crisis of zionism" this is what it looks like. it's front noted by bill clinton. it's a phenomenony well-written book, soulful and careful and it's really excellent. i have that kind of twinge of writerly jealousy while reading because it's really well done.

why did you write the book? it's about essentially, well here's the first question. what is the crisis of zionism? >> the crisis of zionism is that for me, the miracle of the creation of the state of israel, the reason that my 6-year-old son has an israeli flag on his wall is that 1948, with the stench of jewish death still hanging over europe, with israel fielding an army full of people who had numbers tattooed on their arms from the concentration çcamps. israel wrote a constitution that promised complete social and economic rights. the crisis is when you control the west bank for 44 years, a place where jews have citizenship and the right to vote and live under civil law and palestinians are noncitizens, don't have the right to vote, live under military law, have their movement radically restricted, you desecrate israel's founding principles and you put into question the issue whether zionism can remain a democracy for the long term.

>> you write in the book about how there's a tension, i think an interesting thing to wrestle with, between when you call yourself a liberal zionist. a tension between the two ideas, it gross out of a seed bed of continental nationalism, and at the same time, liberalism is fundamentally universalistic in its vision. how do you resolve that tension? >> i, but i argue that there are tensions, there can be tension between two valid principles, you can have tension between national security and civil liberties, environmental protection and economic development. i believe there's a tension between a state that is designated to safeguard the jewish people and a state that offers whose declaration of independence promises complete equality. i believe given jewish history, that in fact jews do have a right and need for a state dedicated to their protection. i'm young enough to remember when it was only the state of israel who was wé'pájjt to go ad scoop up the ethiopian jews that

no one else cared about. i believe that israel has to do more to try to live out its own principles and move closer towards -- britain has an anglican queen and a cross on its flag and yet it still does a petty good job of providingç equality. i think israel could go much further towards meeting the needs of its own arab citizens and eventually and hopefully ending the occupation of the west bank. >> the question of why, the role that the u.s. and the jewish community in the u.s., i think the most controversial parts of the book, the parts that seem to strike a nerve are about the dynamic between the sort of institutional structure of american jewry and israel and the occupation and the sort of way those three things are bound together. you make this really fascinating point, i want you to elaborate on. which is at a certain point there's a period of time in american life in which jews were pushed out of main stream establishment institutions and things like the american jewish congress were essentially these sort of parallel shadow

institutions at the time when there were still quotas in the ivy league for how many jews they would let in. as jewish life in america became more intermixed with the establishment of america, the sort of central institutions, you didn't have to join a jewish version of some national organization, you could just join the organization and be part of its leadership. it changed the character of what distinctly jewish organizations were. talk about that a little bit. >> the dominant focus of american jewish organizational life in the mid 20th century was civil rights. jews saw if african-americans achieve full equality that will help to make sure we do as well. by the 1970s, that had been achieved. and jews were moving out of jewish organizations, because they were assimilating into american life. i think the smaller group of people who still wanted to play in the jewish organizational world, essentially turned these organizations into organizations that would be focused on defendingç the policies of the israeli government. partly because of the huge

upsurge in attachment to israel that followed the 1967 war and the very bitter attack by the left, unfair attack i would say in many ways, on israel following the 1973 war and the '67 war. and i think unfortunately these jewish organizations now define being pro israel usually as supporting the israeli government rather than supporting the principles of israel's declaration of independence. >> you also one of the things you, you talk about is that essentially, this is a dynamic that i've thought a lot about in other contexts, that there's a gap between the leadership of the organizations that are, that speak for american jewry, sort of broadly put, and the actual opinions of, and the political disposition world view, attitudes, voting behavior even, of american jewish citizens. >> yeah, look, american jews are not far left on israel. but 78% of them voted for barack obama, even though it was pretty clear that much of the american organized jewish leadership preferred john mccain and distrusted barack obama.

that's bartley because american jews vote on domestic issues and partly because a lot of american jews don't think the policies of subsidizing people to move to the west bank as israel does, is in fact the interests of the state of israel. >> i want to talk more about the crisis of zionism and involve the rest of you in this conversation after this break. [ gong ] strawberry banana! [ male announcer ] for a smoothie with real fruit plus veggie nutrition new v8 v-fusion smoothie. could've had a v8. how math and science kind of makes the world work. in high school, i had a physics teacher by the name of mr. davies. he made physics more than theoretical, he made it real for me. we built a guitar, we did things with electronics and mother boards. that's where the interest in engineering came from. so now, as an engineer, i have a career that speaks to that passion. thank you, mr. davies.

woo want to open up the conversation about "the crisis of zionism" one of the things is that becomes problematic about american foreign policy as it pertains to the middle east is how hemmed in it ends up being by the conversation with israel and the internal politics of the jewish community's relationship with israel. where you feel like you don't, myself as a goy, that i don't have, that in some ways it's a conversation that it's like a family dispute that i shouldn't inject myself in the matter is it's a public policy matter. afghanistan is a public policy matter. i think it's important to push that, resist that, because it

ends up cramping, i think making our conversation about"áj @&h(% deficient and it also ends up being that you have this conversation that happens, where you know, the relationship to israel comes up in the narrow confines of the things that you're talking about in terms of american institutional jewry and so forth. >> and in fact i think actually we as american jews have a responsibility to make it very clear, that all americans have the right to have strong opinions about this. they can even be stupid and wrong opinions about without being called antisemites. that's one of the major things, actually. and i should say that peter, thank you for writing this book and only a jew could have wrote this book. any other person would have been destroyed. the truth is, a weaker democracy doesn't make a better, better or more secure country. the president of the israeli parliament in 2003, he wrote a public letter saying if we will

continue with this path, of building more settlements, and subsidizing jews to go to the west bank, we will destroy our chance to have a real democracy. because we will have a democracy only for jews and the majority of the arabs that will be living there will be in apartheid. that letter just was not paid attention to. but this issue is coming up more and more. and especially now more than ever. that the dictating the national agenda and they are holding this cabinet of netanyahu into their own interests. >> there's a basic demographic fact which is as the settlements grow, there's more voters who are living outside the green line. that's a basic self-interest, right? and the more the settlements grow, the more that you vote on the national election in israel. >> we have to choose today what

and that's not an issue that's brought up very much. >> eli, do you feel that there is a gap between the opinions oç the sort of world view perspectives of the people that sit atop the institutions that make up the kind of pillar institutions in this space? and the massive american jews? >> in some ways i think it's not really a relevant question. because i think a lot of american jews like a lot of americans are tuned out on the intricacies of the debate. if i could challenge a minor point. i think if you would go to the american universities, the

united nations, the arab league, lots of criticism of israel. one place where there's less criticism of israel and is in the united states congress. that's because there is a -- >> there is essentially -- >> there's a very strong lobby that lobbies congress, and this is not true for the executive branch, that's pro israel. and i would argue, i mean it's not even really so much a critique of your book, peter. i would say zionism in 1948 was an idea that was very comfortable on the left. it was a country that being built of collective farms. >> kibbutzes. >> and the idea of zionism that's very comfortable on the right. if you believe that islamic fundamentalism is one of the major threats to world peace, you probably like israel. if you are hindu nationalist in india and you think that islams in your country have gotten a free pass or pakistani terrorism is terrible, you probably admire

israel. if you are a kenyan orthodox, a fundamentalist christian in kenya and you see the advance, you probably like israel. >> wait a second -- >> as a palestinian, i admire, you know what, what iç admire about israel? i admire that every israeli, every citizen can say whatever they want to their government and they will not be punished. but you know what, i also think? i also think there's is something very simple, if that declaration of independence, the way peter said it, you know what, freedom for each citizen, whether he was white or black, male or female, muslim or -- if you don't respect that declaration of independence, then what is the soul? what is really, what israel stands for today? >> peter, i want you to respond to the question, the interesting point of switching the veil of israel in terms of the political spectrum after this break. [ male announcer ] this is the at&t network. a living, breathing intelligence

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before i went to break, eli lake made an interesting provocative point about the sort of trajectory of the political veilance of the zionist project from its inception until now and being fundamentally alive with the left because of its socialist roots and now being fundamentally aligned with the right partly because of its opposition to islamic fundamentalism. peter, you want to respond to that? >> i think the problem is not that eli is wrong in saying that there are real threats from the islamic world towards israel. i think there really are when you talk about hezbollah. the question is what's the smart way to deal with them? it's undermining groups by hezbollah and hamas by empowering the people in the arab world and palestinian who is are willing, maybe reluctantly, to accept israel's right to exist.

and in fact, what you do when you continue settlement growth is you make people like mahmoud abbas look like fools when they think they can do security operations -- >> mahmoud hamas is running the palestinian authority in the west bank, and he said we will build the institutions of the palestinian state and that will lead us toç a palestinian stat and there's a lot of unrest -- >> arabs, 2003, king abdullah of the saudi, he called on israel and he said 57 arab countries are willing to acknowledge israel, recognize israel. the only thing we ask you as a government to withdraw from the west bank and give the palestinian the 22% that you signed as israel in the peace agreement in oslo. >> and they mentioned that. >> again they repeated that in 2007, twice. the whole arab countries, the arab league. you know, asked israel twice, saying we are willing to recognize you. as governments, recognize the

government and the only thing we ask you again to give the palestinians a little bit of land and -- >> that would mean -- never accepted. >> jerusalem, a red line. >> not ehud barak. >> you brought up how there's this lobby that affects congress, but not so much the executive branch and if zionism is more allied with the right, where does the president of united states stand, where does barack obama stand who today does take verbally positions on settlements and is seen by some in the right as being completely anti-israel, but is still lock-step with israeli policies. >> the never forgive the arab world. i traveled last year to tunisia, qatar, they always tell me, we always had so much admiration of the president. then one day we see prime minister putting his finger in the face of the president like

this. telling him, you don't say the '67 border. you remember when netanyahu didç that? he humiliated the president of the united states. publicly and that sent a terrible message. after that, united states vetoed everything in -- >> peter, on obama, what is your sort of feeling on this? >> i think obama realized that the political, first he was dealing with an israeli government that wasn't interested in the negotiations that its predecessor had, around the '67 lines. i think he found the political costs of trying to do this was too high. my wore i is we will never return to an american-led peace process, because the credibility is so low. >> what you should know about the week ahead after this on permanent marker. elsewhere against dirt, it was a sweep, with scuffed sports equipment... had it coming. grungy phones... oh! super dirty! and grimy car rims... wow! that really works! ...all taking losses. it looks like mr. clean has won everything. the cleaning games are finished? and so are we.

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what should you know for the week coming? the u.n. security council voted yesterday to increase the number of observers in syria from 30 to 300 after syrian president, bashar al assad, was accused of by secretary-general, ban ki-moon of violating the cease-fire there after less than a week. you should know this is the first time the u.s. has sent

unarmed observers into an active war zone. and talked to iran about the nuclear program proceed, the regime has appeared to take a softer line with the ayatollah, secretary of the guardian council as referring to talks of success in progress, a sign to some that iran is hoping to reach a deal on uranium enrichment. you should know there are five republican primaries on tuesday, connecticut, delaware, new york, pennsylvania and rhode island and newt gingrich improbably remains in the race, though at this point his campaign finances are in shambles, his campaign is $4.3 million in debt, including a $270,000 loan gingrich made from his personal fortune to the campaign. and ron paul remains in the race and shows no signs of getting out and has almost $2 million cash on hand and no debt. on wednesday the supreme court will hear oral arguments challenging arizona's extreme and controversial immigration law. the obama administration sued arizona to enjoin them from putting the law into effect. and will be arguing that

arizona's law conflicts with federal law. you should know that five other states have followed in arizona's wake, with similarly restrictive laws and you should t-u should know whatever mitt immigration, chris kobak serves as advisor to romney's campaign on immigration issues. and a staggering number of veterans returning from war zones from ptsd, trauma and other health challenges. the wait time for nonemergency mental health issues within 14 days, but the inspector general is expected to report significantly longer wait times. the v.a. says rate of veteran suicides approximately 18 every day. back with my guests to see what they think we should know. what should folks know, peter

b beinart. >> one of the reasons gas prices are going down is the negotiations between the united states and iran. people want gas prices down and they know that a cooling of relations with iran is doing that, and that could create more potential for progress here. >> a really interesting move. we talked about sanctions and the pressure happening on iran, but higher gas prices create their own political domestic pressures here in the u.s. raul rehe is, what should folks know? >> we should watch what's happening afghanistan, especially with militaries. training these kids is not only training them to combat. how to train them to deal with a society with women. how to train them to deal with afghanis and others that come up next. how to respect the rules. the rules within war. you çknow, when you go in a wa zone, you don't forget your values, your core values and you apply them over and over, and supervisors need to watch that,

and need to keep that in mind always. what you do once these pictures are out, you don't criticize journalists, you go back to your unit and control what they are doing and this is what we really should focus on. son ali kolhatkar, what should people know? >> the u.s. is getting ready to sign the strategic partnership with afghanistan with karzai, a group called afghan peace volunteers has called on americans to take to the streets which they are going to do, but maybe not in time to effect this agreement. in early may, major protests in chicago and my organization, afghanwomen's mission is bringing one of the leading voices against the war to these protests to speak with americans about it. >> can you explain the agreement is, briefly. >> how the u.s. and nato would leave their troops and exactly what circumstances, how much money the u.s. would and nato would contribute to the afghan government, et cetera. and how karzai felt he wants $

billion a year, no strings attached and ordinary afghans would like to know what's going on and are concerned that the taliban and current warlords will be essentially handed power. that is happening as we speak. people should definitely know that and because i'm a journalist, people shouldu kno i'm from l.a. april 29th, the 20th anniversary of the l.a. riots and may day a couple days after that, mass protests around this country will come to shut down the country in the wake of -- or the spirit of the occupy wall street movement. >> next weeke'll spend some time talking about the history of may day. >> may day, worker's day. >> it comes from a general strike that happened in the u.s. that's been completely lost to history. we'll talk about it. eli lake, what should people know. >> people should know it costs $6 billion a yore to maintain the current structure for the afghan national security forces and they should also know that leaders of the afghan defense ministry have caught more than cutting more than 100,000 of

those troops and read a very good piece from a couple of days ago from spencer ackerman's in wired's danger room. read that in general and get the sort of point. we are finishing training, a total waste for people about to be cut. if with you worried about what happens after the united states leaves, you have to watch what happens with these security forces. >> we spent all the money training and arming and they will get laid off. we saw all of the things in iraq that went wrong. >> afghanistan went wrong from the beginning. >> one of the big lessons was the decision to disband sadam's army. all have you do is have a bunch of unemployed, frustrated armed men with guns that don't have other options. >> a soldier without an army is a fight. >> thank you to my guests. peter beinart "the crisis of zioni zionism" son ali kolhatkar, host

of uprising on pacific radio. i willi lake and rula jebreal. back next weekend,ç saturday a sunday 8:00 eastern time. we will have the author of "why nations fail," a book i'm obsessed with. the product of 15 years of research, and i think it's really fascinating. stay up to date on info about next week's show, check us out online. up.msncb.com. up next, melissa harris-per harris-perry. >> this morning, we'll talk about even if you really love polar bears, saving polar bears should not be our top agenda on earth day. we're also going to be attacking the fundamental war in our military, the disturbing rate of sexual assault among troops.

and i'll talk with a former marine and victim of assault who is currently suing the pentagon. and finally, we'll see whatever happened to the tea party. >> what did happen to the tea party? i'll be checking that out. and the sexual assault issue is really important. i'll be tuning in for that. up next, we'll see you next week here on "up." [ male announcer ] we put a week's worth of bad odors in a home. some aerosols may just mix with them. can febreze really remove it. we asked real people what they thought. [ moderator ] take a deep breath for me. describe the smell. it's very pleasant. fresh. some kind of flower maybe? [ moderator ] remove the blindfold... awww, oh yuck! i didn't smell any of that! [ male announcer ] febreze air effects doesn't mix, it actually removes odors. [ laughs ] wow, that's incredible. [ male announcer ] so you can breathe happy. guaranteed.

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this morning, it's earth day. and we're about to bring a whole new meaning to peace on earth. and why for some soldiers, the biggest threat comes from within the military. plus, is a tea party with no guests still a party? but, first, 50 million ways to get elected president.