The Fantasy of Arming Secular Syrian Dissidents

A consistent argument made by critics of the Obama Administration is that the Administration should have somehow identified, trained and armed secular, western-friendly factions in Syria, and that this would have changed the balance of power in that nation's civil war. The concepts for what the outcome might be seem to vary with the person making the argument, and perhaps also with the time of day. The pure fantasists seem to believe that the western-backed factions could have defeated Assad's government, crushed Islamist factions, and instituted a secular, pro-western government in Syria. A more moderate argument is that these secular factions would have fared so well in battle that they would have forced both the Assad government and the radical factions to the negotiating table where they would hash out an agreement for a new, more inclusive Syrian government, also more friendly to the west. There's also the nebulous argument that boils down to, "I have no idea what would have happened, but we should have done it anyway", or perhaps, "Whatever choice the Obama Administration makes, I'm going to argue that it should have done something else."

Do you recall how last year, John McCain went to Syria and met with various groups that he ostensibly would have had the U.S. arm and back in an effort to defeat the Assad regime? How well did that go, again? Yes, McCain had lots of excuses and regrets over meeting terrorists and kidnappers -- but ISIS appears to view McCain's visit as a propaganda coup. I guess his position is that the U.S. would have done a much better job of identifying western-friendly factions than he did, and would have avoided arming the very factions with which he posed for photos, so as to by now have defeated those factions? Could any part of McCain's Syria policy survive outside of the realm of fantasy?

One thing I don't hear much about is who these secular, pro-western Syrian fighters are, how many there are, how we know that they are truly committed to a more balanced view of the west, why we believe that arming and training them will actually shift the balance in the Syrian civil war, and how they will unite a post-war Syria. Which is to say, the argument for arming these factions is made without addressing any of the relevant concerns. One of the huge concerns held by western nations and Israel is that arms given to factions believed to be friendly to the U.S. could end up in the hands of factions that are hostile to U.S. interests -- just as happened when ISIS fighters went into Iraq and confronted that nation's army. Whatever we make of the incompetence of Iraq's Maliki administration, if the best trained army in the region turns tail and runs from a few thousand ISIS fighters, why are we to believe that the unidentified and as-of-yet untrained Syrian dissident factions would have stood, fought, and defeated ISIS?

The essence of the fantasy is that we could have identified so many pro-western factions, and trained and armed them so effectively, that they would have crushed groups like ISIS. That argument defies logic. ISIS was active in Iraq, under its former name, before essentially withdrawing to Syria following the last outbreak of civil war. Why should we believe that they would remain in Syria and fight to the last man, rather than figuring out that they had much more friendly and more fertile ground for their activities back in Iraq? The position that they would have stayed in Syrian until they were wiped out defies not only basic logic, but the experience of what terrorist organizations do when they face too much pressure in one location. It's reasonable to infer that under that particular fantasy scenario, at best ISIS would have withdrawn to a third country, and at worst they would have gone into Iraq albeit possibly on a different schedule.

Other than as a tool to criticize the Obama Administration, where is the evidence that arming dissident groups. beyond those efforts actually made over the past three years, could have made a difference in Syria or Iraq?

Dennis Ross: A "No" Vote on Syria Makes a Military Strike on Iran Both Less Likely and Almost Inevitable

Dennis Ross, the man who helped engineer the catastrophic failure of President Clinton's last ditch efforts to secure an Israel-Palestine peace deal, was given space in the Washington Post to bring the same special brand of help to the crisis in Syria. His central thesis is that if Congress blocks the President from bombing Syria, it becomes more likely that military action will be taken against Iran. He thus urges Congress to abandon its concerns over whether the bombing would accomplish anything constructive, whether it would suck the U.S. into a protracted conflict, or consider the extent to which U.S. interests are implicated by events in Syria, and authorize military action.

After telling Congress to ignore the slippery slope argument, in which military action in Syria "suck[s] us into a conflict that we cannot win", Ross offers a slippery slope of his own:

President Obama and Secretary Kerry have pointed out that there will be a great cost to international norms that prohibit the use of terror weapons such as chemical weapons. And surely they are right that if Bashar al-Assad can gas his own people and elicit only harsh words but no punitive action, he will use the weapons again. The price in Syria and the potential for spillover in the region are certain to be high. Additionally, other rogue actors may also draw the conclusion that chemical weapons are not only usable but that there are no circumstances, no outrages, no genocidal actions that would trigger a meaningful reaction from the so-called civilized world.

I think that's utter nonsense. First, in relation to Syria, Assad has repeatedly denied using chemical weapons, and the few nations that back him are hanging their hats on that denial. If Assad were to now announce, "Hah! Now that Congress has voted, I admit it - it was me!", it would be extremely difficult for him to avoid a Security Council resolution authorizing use of force. Putin may be a stubborn man, but after making repeated denials about Assad's involvement in the attack, it is difficult to believe he would have much interest in protecting Assad by vetoing the resolution. Second, were Assad to engage in additional attacks, any plausible deniability that remains from the prior incident would evaporate. It is difficult to believe that Congress would vote against military action, and even more difficult to believe that the President would sit and wait for approval from Congress if he believed it would not be immediately forthcoming. I don't think Ross believes what he suggests.

Second, in relation to the rest of the world, Ross is pushing the nonsensical idea that despots are eager to use chemical weapons against their own populations, but are held back by fear of military reprisal by the world's powers. With a whopping two significant uses of chemical weapons since World War II, the first (and more significant) use being the repeated use of chemical weapons by Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, and the second being this attack by Assad, it's difficult to see why Ross would imagine that despots are in fear of reprisal. If Syria is not attacked, that would be in keeping with the precedent seen in Iraq. Also, if despots are so eager to use chemical weapons, why weren't they emboldened by Hussein's use of those weapons? Perhaps Ross seriously believes that despots around the world would respond to a military strike by thinking, "Dang, just as I was about to add chemical weapons to my use of torture, imprisonment without trial, summary execution, military strikes, collective punishments, internment camps, starvation, and occasional genocide, the world has made clear that I can't use them. Now I have no choice but to stick with my tried and true methods of perpetuating my regime," but again I doubt that he believes a word of what he said.

After mocking those who emphasize that military strikes should be used only against "threats that are immediate and directly affect us" as regarding other concerns as "abstractions", Ross introduces his argument about Iran:

Leaving aside the argument that when the threats become immediate, we will be far more likely to have to use our military in a bigger way and under worse conditions, there is another argument to consider: should opponents block authorization and should the president then feel he cannot employ military strikes against Syria, this will almost certainly guarantee that there will be no diplomatic outcome to our conflict with Iran over its nuclear weapons.

Note his use of language: "...over its nuclear weapons." Iran has no nuclear weapons.

I say this for two reasons. First, Iran’s President Rouhani, who continues to send signals that he wants to make a deal on the nuclear program, will inevitably be weakened once it becomes clear that the U.S. cannot use force against Syria. At that point, paradoxically, the hard-liners in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and around the Supreme Leader will be able to claim that there is only an economic cost to pursuing nuclear weapons but no military danger. Their argument will be: Once Iran has nuclear weapons, it will build its leverage in the region; its deterrent will be enhanced; and, most importantly, the rest of the world will see that sanctions have failed, and that it is time to come to terms with Iran.

First, President Rouhani has been in office for what? A month ago? Yet we are to believe that it is his voice of reason that keeps Iran from developing nuclear weapons? Does Ross want us to believe, then, that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad urged similar restraint and that it was his calming influence that prevented Iran from developing nuclear weapons during his eight years in office? That Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is going to suddenly declare, "I know I've been arguing for years that nuclear weapons are a sin, are forbidden in Islam, and should be eliminated from the planet, but I've changed my mind!"

Ross then argues, without explanation, that "Under those circumstances, the sanctions will wither". Why would he believe that? I don't think he does believe that and, once again, he feels no need to substantiate the claim. He instead insists that if the U.S. is blocked from using force in Syria, a different country involving different facts and different weapons, Iran will decide it will never be attacked and acquire nuclear weapons. He then contradicts himself,

Israel, however, is not prepared to accept such an eventuality, and that is the second reason that not authorizing strikes against Syria will likely result in the use of force against Iran. Indeed, Israel will feel that it has no reason to wait, no reason to give diplomacy a chance and no reason to believe that the United States will take care of the problem.

As should be needless to say, if a military strike becomes more likely if the U.S. votes "no" on striking Syria, the government of Iran is not going to conclude that it is not going to be attacked and forge ahead, full speed, with its nuclear weapons program.

Does Ross believe that Iran has never heard of Israel? That Iran is unaware of Israel's military power? That Iran is unaware of Israel's position on other nations developing nuclear weapons? That it somehow passed beneath Iran's notice that Israel has launched military strikes against nuclear facilities in both Iraq and Syria when it decided those nations were too close to developing nuclear weapons? Apparently so, given his expressed certitude on how Iran would react to a "no" vote in Congress on the use of force in Syria.

Ross makes a cryptic statement,

Ironically, if these opponent [sic] succeed, they may prevent a conflict that President Obama has been determined to keep limited and has the means to do so.

Is Ross speaking about Congressional opponents of a military strike - those are the only people otherwise described in Ross's editorial as "opponents"? If so, and their "no" vote prevents a conflict that the President is trying to limit, wouldn't that be a good thing? Or is it that Ross thinks the President is wrong to want to keep that conflict limited? Based upon his next statement,

After all, even after Israel acted militarily to enforce its red line and prevent Syria’s transfer of advanced weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon, Assad, Iran and Hezbollah have been careful to avoid responding. They have little interest in provoking Israeli attacks that would weaken Syrian forces and make them vulnerable to the opposition.

Perhaps Ross means to suggest that if no strike is made against Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah will continue to show restraint rather than trying to widen the conflict? Does Ross believe that those factions would respond to a U.S. strike by engaging in acts that would invite a massive U.S. or Israeli military response? If Ross seriously believes that Hamas and Hezbollah will launch attacks in Lebanon, Israel and perhaps around the world in response to a strike on Assad, isn't that a solid argument for restraint? Ross undermines any such suggestion, admitting, "the Syrian and Iranian interest in an escalation with the United States is also limited". He continues,

Can the same be said if Israel feels that it has no choice but to attack the Iranian nuclear infrastructure? Maybe the Iranians will seek to keep that conflict limited; maybe they won’t. Maybe an Israeli strike against the Iranian nuclear program will not inevitably involve the United States, but maybe it will — and maybe it should.

Maybe Ross will attempt to do more than toss out mutually inconsistent alternative scenarios about what the future might hold; maybe he won't. Maybe Ross will provide a coherent, logical argument; maybe he won't - but maybe he should.

To summarize... If the U.S. doesn't strike Syria, Iran will conclude that the U.S. won't strike it's nuclear facilities, demolishing the credibility of the new Iranian president who has spent a full month advocating a diplomatic resolution of the controversy over its nuclear program, and inspiring Iran's Supreme Leader to abandon his stated views on Islamic law and seek to immediately acquire nuclear weapons. This will happen even though Israel, a nation with a decades-long history of using espionage and military strikes (and is rumored to have used assassinations) to stop other nations in the region from developing nuclear weapons, will almost certainly strike Iran's nuclear facilities if it senses that Iran has not abandoned its nuclear weapons program. This will result in a regional conflict that may or may not involve the United States, but that Ross apparently believes should involve the United States.

And this argument is supposed to... convince Members of Congress to support a strike?

Thomas Friedman Pulls His Asbestos Undershorts Out of Storage

In simple terms, following the 1967 war between Israel and its Arab neighbors, three positions emerged on what should happen in the Palestinian lands Israel captured during the war:

1. "Get Out Now" - the position taken by then-M.K. Uri Avnery, that Israel should resist the temptation to try to significantly adjust its borders and settle the territories, and end its occupation as quickly as possible, lest it be drawn into a long-term occupation from which it would become increasingly difficult to extract itself.

2. "We All Know What Will Happen" - the position taken by much of the world, that the length of the occupation was a distraction and that eventually the two sides would reach an agreement creating a Palestinian state on most or all of the occupied territories, with some amount of border adjustment and land swapping.

3. "Dig In" - the position taken by certain Israeli politicians and generals, that they should set up a context for annexation of great swaths of the occupied territories, and to make it politically difficult for future leaders to agree to any borders approximating the Green Line, or perhaps to any concession of land at all.

During the years leading up to the second Intifada with its associated rash of Palestinian suicide bombings, Thomas Friedman fell into camp #2. He had a tendency to lecture both sides about the outcome that he viewed as inevitable, while hewing to a form of centrism that both sides in the conflict seemed to view as insufficiently sensitive to their concerns. It was a big picture view, one that avoided the need to address the complexity of actually getting to a final resolution. Following the collapse of peace talks, and more so 9/11, it's not so much that Friedman fell into a different camp, so much as he backed off his prior tendency to lecture Israel.

Prior to his retreat from the issue, Friedman's suggestion that Israel was not offering enough, that trying to change facts on the ground was a fool's errand, that the two sides should put aside feelings and history and accept the invevitable, earned him the enmity of people who disagreed with him. Needless to say, as you move toward people who hold more extremist views the reaction to Friedman became correspondingly shrill and hostile. Over the interim, open hostility toward Friedman seemed to diminish, but his critics have long memories. With this reengagement of the conflict, it's time once again for the asbestos undershorts.

I was thus a bit surprised to see Friedman be this direct:

Israeli friends have been asking me whether a re-elected President Obama will take revenge on Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu for the way he and Sheldon Adelson, his foolhardy financier, openly backed Mitt Romney. My answer to Israelis is this: You should be so lucky.

Ever since Jimmy Carter brokered the Camp David Accord between Israel and Egypt, there has been a sense that presidents have an obligation to try to mitigate or end what was once deemed the Middle East crisis, to help Israel maintain its democracy, borders and Jewish character while ending years, turning into decades, of Israeli military occupation of Palestinian lands. Friedman correctly states that the American public is demanding that the President focus on domestic concerns, as well as international conflicts that directly involve or threaten the U.S., and correctly states that in this context (as in pretty much any other) negotiations work best when the participants in a negotiation invite a mediator to help them polish off an agreement as opposed to when the mediator is asked to start negotiations by dragging the two sides to the table.

But I think Friedman misses some important components relating to why the issue has diminished in the minds of the U.S. public, and why pressing for negotiations is not a priority for the president. First and foremost, U.S. domestic concern about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was driven in large part by intensive news coverage. During the 1980's, it was not at all atypical for the evening news to sound like this: "Now news from the Middle East. A riot broke out in Ramallah when..." ar "a bomb exploded in a Jerusalem café...." Between Israel's security measures, changes in Palestinian leadership, and the significant number of other Middle East crises, conflicts and wars, that's no longer what Americans hear. Israel-Palestine has dropped considerably from the top spot of Middle East crises that the Americans want to resolve.¹

On the other side of the equation, a persistent effort to depict Muslims as irrational actors with whom you cannot negotiate, and who can't be trusted to follow a deal to which they agree, has eroded support for negotiations among factions that might otherwise press the President to become more involved. If, as certain Israeli leaders have argued, there's no one to talk to and no way to reach a meaningful agreement, why go there? Some raise similar arguments about Israel and leaders like Netanyahu - if there's no reason to believe that Netanyahu has the will or that he could get the authority to carry out an agreement involving the evacuation of Israeli settlements, why pretend that there can be a real negotiation - the gulf between what he can offer and what a Palestinian leader might accept may be too broad to bridge. Also, while Clinton might have been persuaded to provide funds to help Israel compensate Israeli settlers who had to leave their homes as part of a final deal, the present economic situation makes it highly unlikely that Congress would presently provide such a subsidy.

The conflict has reached a point at which there's little upside for a President in seriously engaging settlement. George W. Bush created a model of non-serious engagement, window dressing, and President Obama was not helped by his early effort to restart negotiations. If I were Obama and Netanyahu proposed that I attempt to mediate the conflict, and invitation I doubt Netanyahu is at all inclined to offer, and Abbas was willing to participate, my response would be simple. "No problem. Send me your maps of your proposed final borders and we'll start from there." Negotiations with no maps? What do they say about trying the same thing over and over again, while expecting a different result?
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1. David Ignatius wrote a recent column outlining what he sees as the President's foreign policy priorities - China, Iran, Afghanistan, then "the Middle East" which he subdivides into "the metastasizing Syrian civil war, solidifying democracy in Egypt and rehabilitating a broken Israeli-Palestinian peace process". I'll grant that Afghanistan is in South Asia, albeit bordering the Middle East, but last I checked Iran was part of the Middle East. By Ignatius's measure, that would make Israel... a distant number four on the list of Middle East priorities, and number six on his global list?

Ignatius suggests that in the Israel-Palestinian conflict Obama should engage in "a round of secret contacts to build up the local players who can be America’s partners for peace". Putting aside for the moment that if Ignatius knew about them, they wouldn't be secret, is he serious? These secret contacts would presumably be on the Palestinian side, so... is he talking about Hamas? Is Ignatius offering a plan or a fantasy?

Romney on the Middle East

Mitt Romney penned an editorial for he Wall Street Journal, criticizing the President's Middle East policy and pretending to offer an alternative.

OK, so what do we have here? America needs to support our partners. We need to restore our credibility with Iran, by making them believe that we really, really don't want them to have nuclear weapons. We need to place no daylight between ourselves and Israel. And we need to encourage liberty and opportunity. That line about "the dignity of work" is a little odd—maybe the problem they have in the Middle East is too many 47 percenters? So where's the new policy again?

But in the next paragraph, he says he's going to give us "a very different set of policies." So here it comes, right? The answer is ... "American strength in all its dimensions." Ah yes. Strength. Resolve. If you ask "How, precisely, will you achieve these goals?" then you're obviously a weakling who can't grasp the full majesty of Mitt Romney's chin, which when jutted in the direction of our adversaries will make them quake before us and submit to our demands.

Ed Kilgore provides a more detailed analysis.

Put aside for a moment the arguments about Iran’s ultimate intentions and its alleged historically unique indifference to nuclear deterrence, or about the actual balance of military power in the Middle East. Forget if you can the calamitous consequences, not only to regional peace and stability, but to the U.S. and global economies, of war with Iran.

Think about this: Mitt Romney is running for president on a platform of indistinguishable and conjoined exceptionalism for the U.S. and Israel. And because Israel faces a vastly greater military threat, this means America would abandon its own independence of action and consign its fate to Bibi Netanyahu, a man whose views on peace and security are highly controversial in Israel itself.

The problem is not so much that Romney wants to eliminate daylight between the U.S. and Israel - it's that he cannot actually articulate a policy reason to do so, and if he knows anything of the region (and I suspect he knows very little) he has to understand that a U.S. embrace of Netanyahu's policies and of its stance on Iran is not going to help us work with the region's nascent democracies or endear us to the man on the street.

Good gravy, does Romney believe this in relation to the Middle East?

The first step is to understand how we got here. Since World War II, America has been the leader of the Free World. We're unique in having earned that role not through conquest but through promoting human rights, free markets and the rule of law. We ally ourselves with like-minded countries, expand prosperity through trade and keep the peace by maintaining a military second to none.

Which of our close relationships in the Middle East does Romney believe demonstrates our promotion of human rights, free markets and the rule of law? With the exception of Israel, where our lack of support for Palestinian rights has done anything but endear us to the rest of the Middle East, the best we can point to is Egypt, with the successive dictatorships of Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak and a mediocre human rights record, and the monarchy in Jordan. We used to have the Shah of Iran, for what that's worth - was he one of the "like-minded" leaders Romney has in mind. We have the monarchs of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. We really don't want to spend much time talking about Iran, Syria, Lebanon.... So, no, we don't have a good track record in the Middle East, we're not viewed by the Arab and Persian populations of the Middle East as champions of human rights, and our notions of governance and the rule of law remain alien to the day-to-day lives of most of the region's populations.

Given that Romney feigns umbrage (from Rush Limgaugh's mouth to Romney's ear) about the President's off-the-cuff statement that Israel is "one of our closest allies" in the region, I would be interested to hear Romney explain our alliances with key nations in the region, most specifically how our alliance with Israel compares to our treaty-based alliance with Turkey. I would also like to hear him explain how he would have avoided the mistakes of the Bush era and created a government in Iraq that he would comfortably include as "one of our best allies in the region", or how he would have kept a post-dictatorship Egypt within that category.

If Romney truly believes that the path to good relations with the nations of the Middle East lies in more than bellicosity toward Iran, involves supporting "governments and individuals who share our values" and requires asserting influence through "our economic strength, our military strength and the strength of our values", I would be interested to hear him explain in concrete terms how his proposed actions won't constitute a setback for our Middle East efforts, what governments other than Israel's he believes to share our values, and the concrete steps he plans to take to improve our standing and increase our influence with the people and governments of the region.

Obviously I won't be holding my breath.

An Israeli Settler's Facepalm Column

For reasons I'm not sure that I want them to explain, the New York Times editorial board thought it would be a good idea to publish a whinge from an Israeli settler, Dani Dayan, who, after sharing with us a self-serving history of the conflict and complaining how unfair it would be to make settlers leave the occupied Palestinian territories, sputters about a "two state solution". That he, an immigrant from Argentina, has a greater legal and moral claim to the land upon which he lives than those whose families have been on that same land, without interruption, for thousands of years.

Moreover, the Palestinians have repeatedly refused to implement a negotiated two-state solution. The American government and its European allies should abandon this failed formula once and for all and accept that the Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria are not going anywhere.

It's entirely the fault of the Palestinians, you see, that they have not implemented a settlement that does not exist and has never existed. One wonders, was Dayan chuckling when he wrote that line? He has to know that the primary purpose of constructing settlements throughout the occupied West Bank was to frustrate the peace process and to prevent a two-state solution. Dayan admits, "In the areas targeted for evacuation most of us are ideologically motivated and do not live here for economic reasons." Yet now he purports that a one-state outcome he has actively pursued for decades is somehow the "fault" of the Palestinians and gloat that the settlement enterprise he helps lead is now so entrenched and enormous that it's functionally impossible to remove? Yes, he does, and the New York Times blithely publishes his calumny.

Worse, the author feigns ignorance about why pretty much everybody other than his community of settlers prefers a two-state solution. While he has fevered dreams of "The influx of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees from Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and elsewhere [that] would convert the new state into a hotbed of extremism", with the dismally poor and underdeveloped West Bank imagined to be a huge magnet for immigration, paranoia is not a good substitute for common sense.

Why look to how Palestinians live in Jordan, next door to the West Bank, when out from under the thumb of occupation, when you can instead paint a video game fantasy. And as always, a fair retort to "We would have to reoccupy", rather unlikely given the terms and placement of peacekeepers in association with any settlement, is "If that were to actually become true, no one will be able to question the legitimacy of Israel's action." A Palestinian land would be no more dangerous to Israel than is Lebanon, which isn't to say that such a situation would be ideal but it would be manageable.

There are two good reasons to support a two-state solution, and they're interrelated. The first is that we are talking about two people with two different cultures, different religions and very different interpretations of the same modern history. The logistics of integrating those two populations into a single nation state are complicated. Sorry Robert Frost, good fences don't always make good neighbors. It's reasonable to infer that Dayan has no interest in having Palestinian neighbors, at least living any closer than the ones he might see through the scope on a sniper's rifle.

Second, the complexity of a one-state solution that preserves a good outcome for both peoples cannot be underestimated. Israel would combine itself with the occupied territories into a state that has a significant demographic problem - an inevitable Palestinian Muslim majority. If peace brings the immediate right of return to Palestinian refugees - a right that advocates of the two-state solution would limit to the new Palestinian state, the demographic shift from Jewish majority to Palestinian majority could be almost immediate.

Demographics were the impetus for Ariel Sharon's withdrawal of settlements from the Gaza Strip - he hoped to be able to argue that Gaza was no longer under Israeli occupation such that he could subtract its population from the number of Palestinians living under occupation. But once you declare a single state, you can no longer resort to the conceit that "They're on their own lands." You're stuck with either making the Palestinian people citizens, somehow forcing them to leave or formally adopting a system of Apartheid.

The strongest arguments against a one state solution come from people who are concerned for the future of Israel - who don't want it to cease being a Jewish State, but who see that as inevitable under a one state solution that does not actively embrace Apartheid, either refusing citizenship to Palestinians or giving them a second class status that amounts to the same thing.

Opponents of a peaceful settlement and two state solution, including those behind the settlement of the occupied territories, have a point. They have created facts on the ground that will make it extremely difficult to implement a two state solution. It's not unreasonable for Dayan to declare victory. But rather than pointing fingers at the Palestinians and trying to make it their fault that he moved onto their land, as part of an admitted effort to keep them from having a state of their own, it's time for him to acknowledge the price of that victory.

Once you accept Dayan's declaration of victory, the road by which we reached this point becomes a distraction. If we are to drop all pretense that the two lands and peoples can be separated, we must create a plan for their integration. What type of single state does Dayan want Israel to become? The three choices for Dayan are ethnic cleansing, Apartheid and democracy.

The question to Dayan becomes, "Now that you've declared victory, what's your plan for physically integrating Israel and the occupied territories, and for creating a democratic system which protects the religious rights and freedoms of both peoples once they have all been granted the right to vote and be represented in the Knesset? If he doesn't have an answer, it surely cannot be because the issue has never occurred to him. It's a front and center concern for those who advocate and oppose the one-state solution. If he's unwilling to explain how he would integrate the state, the reasonable inference is that he opposes a democratic solution.

When Will Israel Attack Iran

The question keeps being asked, but I think the answer remains pretty much the same: Israel is not going to attack Iran. If it were going to do so, we would be having the same sort of after-the-fact discussion we had when Israel bombed Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor back in 1981, or Syria's under-construction reactor in 2007. Instead we are seeing an odd form of lobbying and advocacy - to the effect of, "We're going to bomb Iran soon, perhaps within weeks or even days, but we'll refrain from bombing Iran if you (the U.S.) promise to do the job for us at a fixed point in time in the future."

Let's also recall that we've been warned that Iran is only a few years away from developing nuclear weapons for roughly twenty years - by the same guy who's presently pressing for war. Let's also remember that an attack means at best a delay of two, three, five years before we're either back to war or confronting a nuclear-armed Iran. That is, assuming everything goes perfectly, the day after we successfully obliterate Iran's entire nuclear weapons program it will remain accurate to say that Iran could have nuclear weapons in two or three years. And things won't go perfectly.

So far, President Obama appears to have outmaneuvered Netanyahu, imposing sanctions that (like most sanctions) are probably counter-productive but make it look like the west is "doing something", engineering a probable new round of negotiations with Iran with a possibility of weapons inspections, giving Israel some new bunker-busters (again) that it can use should it decide to bomb Iran (and work out the logistics of getting its jets there and back - easier said than done), and made the Republican candidates' demagoguery sound pretty childish. (Unilateral sanctions, anyone?) Perhaps, though, it's more accurate to say that Obama has outmaneuvered the voices in the Republican Party and his own that are pushing for yet another war, with Netanyahu being more of the spokesperson for that mindset than the driving force behind the "war now" crowd.

Pat Buchanan cynically imagines that an October showdown or war with Iran that "will mean the nation rallies around [President Obama] and he wins a second term". I think it's pretty obvious that's not either how the President sees things, nor is it consistent with reality. Again, if we were talking Syria in 2007 or Iraq in 1981, this would be a done deal. We're talking instead about a nation that could cause real problems for the U.S. in its continuing missions in the Middle East, and could cause problems for Israel around the globe. The last thing the President needs is for gas prices to spike and the economy to tank, right before an election, even if he could thump his chest and say "We're at war." Any showdown short of war will look pretty much like the status quo.

Two big issues that don't seem to get enough attention in the coverage of the push for war are what the war would look like, and what would be the likely result or benefit. If we assume that Iran's nuclear program could be mostly eliminated exclusively through a sustained bombing campaign, I suspect that we would be hitting enough nuclear and nuclear-related sites in civilian centers that the pictures of collateral damage coming out of Iran would be highly inflammatory and harmful to U.S. interests. A land war? Some may want it, but given recent history I don't think that there's a high probability of that type of multi-trillion dollar war of choice. I've heard a number of accounts suggesting that there is strong opposition to an attack on Iran from within the U.S. military - and I can't say I find that surprising. National security writer Thomas Ricks shares his perspective,

A nuclear Iran is not good, and not preferable, but it is not the end of the world. To bomb makes little sense and may be the policy equivalent of committing suicide out of the fear of death.

Ricks compares containment to what we face with Pakistan and North Korea, but I suspect that it would actually be easier to contain Iran, as it's my impression that Iran's goal is to be at the point that it can assemble and test a nuclear weapon at any time it chooses, but that it does not actually intend to do so (for religious and practical reasons) unless its hand is forced. Before Iran is a meaningful threat to the region it not only needs to successfully test a nuclear device, it needs to have a viable means of delivering that device into another nation's territory. Iran knows that there's a substantial chance that a successful nuclear test will trigger an immediate war with the U.S., whereas being the turn of a key away from producing a weapon would allow it to demonstrate a nuclear deterrent should a foreign nation start to mobilize for attack.

Tom Engelhardt sees the President's position as unduly hawkish,

The president had offered a new definition of “aggression” against this country and a new war doctrine to go with it. He would, he insisted, take the U.S. to war not to stop another nation from attacking us or even threatening to do so, but simply to stop it from building a nuclear weapon - and he would act even if that country were incapable of targeting the United States. That should have been news.

But it's not news, because the same thing has been implied for the past twenty years. Also, I expect that the U.S. would (continue to) justify its actions under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, and would push hard for UN approval of any military action. Beyond that, rhetoric about nations that are "our enemies" has been at times over-the-top pretty much since the time we started to have Presidents.

Our Enemies Are Crazy... Our Allies?

One of the pretty constant lines of rhetorical attack you see, often from people who would prefer to shift from words to military action, is that the enemy state is "crazy". Its leaders are irrational, cannot be reasoned with, and will do terrible, apocalyptic things if we don't take dramatic action. Within this context, "crazy" often means "Behaves in pretty much the same manner as other despots and tyrants, but isn't on our team." The Shah of Iran treated his people terribly, reminiscent of Saddam Hussein, and lusted for western military weapons including nuclear weapons, and that was fine with us. Then Iran had a revolution, its new government was overtly hostile to the U.S., and Saddam Hussein seemed like somebody we could work with. Then the war he started with Iran came to an end, he invaded Kuwait, and... nutty as a fruitcake. Moammar Gadhafi was a terrible man, sponsoring terrorism, hostile to western interests, then he became a supposed "victory" in the "war on terror" by renouncing his "WMD programs", but after a few years of posing for pictures with world leaders who, no doubt, now regret the documentary evidence of their claims that he had reformed, he once again became a crazy enemy.

The point isn't that these tyrants aren't, to one extent or another, crazy. It's that "crazy" is rarely considered to be a significant issue until our nations' leaders decide it's a problem, and all of the quirks and bad acts that aren't worthy of notice or mention suddenly become evidence of irredeemable insanity. (Sort of irredeemable - as previously mentioned, Gadahfi, one of the nuttier despots of our time, did enjoy a few years of "redemption".)

One of the better aspects of democracy is that when elected leaders do prove to be nutty, they typically either don't rise to the highest offices or don't stay there for line. We may treat our Presidents and Prime Ministers as if they're monarchs, granting them mansions, gourmet personal chefs, personal jets, huge staffs... but we require an element of humility, the willingness for a peaceful transition at the end of the elected official's term of office. Some of our leaders do engage in over-the-top rhetoric about foreign states and leaders, but the leaders of "enemy states" generally take their anti-western rhetoric to a much higher level - volume, frequency and intensity all turned up to 11.

One of the over-the-top claims about Iran is that, if they are able to develop a nuclear weapon, they will immediately be itching to use it against another state. We're told that, unlike any other nuclear state in the world, Iran's leadership is so crazy that they won't be deterred by the fact that any nuclear attack that can be laid at their feet would trigger the annihilation of their nation. We don't talk that way about our allies. At least, most people don't.

Former Bush Administration official Bennett Ramberg is actually using an "Israel is nuts" argument to support... who knows? Invading Iran to stop it from developing nuclear weapons?

If Jerusalem really believes that a nuclear-armed Tehran poses an existential threat — and cannot be contained by a conventional military attack, sanctions, deterrence or regime change — there remains one option to end the threat that people fear to talk about: Israel’s use of nuclear weapons.

At any level, Ramberg's analysis would place Israel's government somewhere between "irrational" and "insane". I'll give him enough credit to assume that he's imagining a future in which Iran is not invaded, develops nuclear weapons, and can use small arsenal to deter any land-based invasion. Does Ramberg believe that Iran would keep all of its weapons and production facilities in one nice, consolidated, non-fortified location, far away from its civilian population such that Israel could swoop in with a nuke or two and eliminate the entire program? He couldn't possibly be that ignorant. So really, what he's proposing is that if Iran has any nuclear capacity, Israel will perceive as its only option a massive nuclear attack against Iran, devastating its urban centers and murdering tens of millions of civilians. There's an ugly word for that type of military action. And you know what? If Iran did have a few small nukes it could be counted on to try to launch them against Israel. So Ramberg is literally telling us that Israel's leadership is irrational, genocidal and willing to risk the annihilation of its own people in order to wipe an enemy off of the map. Which is pretty much exactly what other people in the "we must invade Iran" camp say about a nuclear Iran.

I disagree with Ramberg's analysis. They're at least as self-serving and prone to demagoguery as the leaders of any other nation and, yes, Israel's form of democracy results in some pretty extreme members within the Knesset. And like every other military power they tend to overestimate what they can accomplish through force and underestimate the benefits of resolving conflicts through negotiation - a peril of democracy: when times are good, voters don't want to change anything, and when times are bad, voters don't want to give anything to "the enemy". But they're not insane, they're not genocidal, and they're not going to kill tens of millions of people and send a cloud of radioactive fallout around the globe if Iran successfully tests a nuclear weapon, even if they believe the losses on their own side would be "acceptable".

I don't think Ramberg believes his own argument. If he actually believed that Israel, a nation that has shown past restraint with its nuclear weapons when faced with an actual land invasion, has joined the ranks of nations with "insane" leaders who can't be trusted with nuclear weapons, he should be advocating for the west to join Iran's proposal for a completely nuclear-free Middle East, backed up with thorough inspections of both Iran and Israel to ensure compliance. The most charitable explanation I can offer is that he's tossing this scenario out either as one more reason the west "has to" invade Iran and remove its leadership, or in the hope that over-the-top rhetoric about "crazy Israel" will somehow lead to a cowed and pliant Iran, and thus doesn't care that his argument is detached from reality.

Spinning On An Axis

Michael Tomasky is concerned about developments in the Middle East, and not without cause:

The news broke two days ago across the region about Syria supplying Hezbollah with Scud missiles. Syria denies but it seems to be true, and if true it raises the stakes there considerably, because Scuds have a longer range than anything Hezbollah is now assumed to have. What that statement really means, boiled down to its essence, is that they can reach Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

The issue thus becoming, will Israel attack Lebanon to try to eliminate the Scuds, effectively proving that Hezbollah with Scuds is no more capable of deterring an attack than was Hezbollah without Scuds? In which case, what's the point of the Scuds?

With regard to Syria, the administration's attempted engagement with Assad has so far been one of its genuine failures. If US overtures to the country are met with responses like this, they're pretty clearly not working. And it gives Syria more influence in Lebanon, which breaks explicit promises Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton made in early visits to Beirut. The poor Lebanese are used to this, alas, and their country typically bears the brunt of these failures -- a war will likely scar its landscape more than Israel's or Syria's.

In fairness to the President, the well was poisoned before he got there. We can imagine alternative histories in which one of Israel's past Prime Ministers sprouted a backbone, stood up to the settlers and negotiated a resolution of the conflict with Syria. We can similarly imagine worlds in which the U.S. embraced the death of Hafez al-Assad as an opportunity to inspire his son, Bashar, to turn away from Iran and embrace modernity. Unfortunately instead we got Bush's foreign policy ineptitude, quickly followed by "Axis of Evil" rhetoric that contributed to Bashar's rejection of sensible measure would have been Syria's best option, using 9/11 as an opportunity to break with its past, negotiate the resolution of its conflict with Israel, and inviting western aid and development.

Tomasky points to Simon Tisdall's theories about why Syria might be interested in giving Scuds to Hezbollah... insurance against another Israeli attack, disappointment that President Obama hasn't "rebooted" the peace process (especially in relation to the Golan Heights), closer collaboration with Hezbollah as part of an effort to re-establish Syrian influence in Lebanon, and highlighting the double standard that Israel can have a huge nuclear arsenal, and for that matter a gargantuan arsenal of conventional arms, rockets and missiles, while most its neighbors are expected to have no appreciable offensive or defensive capacity. But I think he's focusing on the wrong country.

I can't imagine Syria exporting Scuds to Lebanon without the blessing of Iran. This suggests that Iran wants to increase the deterrent effect of attacks from Lebanon that might follow an Israeli attack on Iran, something Israel's been threatening for years. And while it makes little sense for Syria to draw itself into another war in Lebanon, Iran may look at the Israeli invasion and occupation of that nation as "the good old days" - with the U.S. bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Israel again occupying Lebanon, Iran's need to worry about any concerted military action against its territory will plummet. No doubt other people lose, but from the perspective of Iran the consequences for Lebanon do not appear to be a concern - whether the Scuds increase deterrence or lure Israel into a costly war and occupation, it seems like a win for the mullahs.

Tomasky also links to Blake Hounshell's aptly named article, The dumbest country in the Middle East. With all due respect to Tisdall's speculation on how Syria might benefit from Scuds in Lebanon, Hounshell's perspective seems more accurate to me. The best outcome for Syria in an armed conflict with Israel is that it only gets its nose bloodied. Hounshell speculates that the pressure for the deal is coming from Iran, "to show the West that any strike on its nuclear facilities would be extremely costly for the United States and its allies." Yeah, but what a way to treat those allies.

Is...what?

Not a mistake I would have historically expected from the Globe and Mail.

What's perhaps even more interesting is that a moderator cleaned up some of the comments, but left (presumably lacking authority to edit) the headline. I suspect this is a continuation of the modern media's focus on immediacy crossed with budget cuts for professional editing staff.

Feeling "Snubbed" By President Obama

Ah, it seems like only yesterday we were in the age when "old Europe" no longer mattered, Congress was snacking on "Freedom Fries" and "Freedom Toast", and people like Robert Kagan were attempting to persuade us that our differences French were not based upon their being "cheese-eating surrender monkeys", but on an irreconcilable difference in world view:

Europe is turning away from power, or to put it a little differently, it is moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation. It is entering a post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity, the realization of Kant’s “Perpetual Peace.” The United States, meanwhile, remains mired in history, exercising power in the anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable and where true security and the defense and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might. That is why on major strategic and international questions today, Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus: They agree on little and understand one another less and less. And this state of affairs is not transitory — the product of one American election or one catastrophic event. The reasons for the transatlantic divide are deep, long in development, and likely to endure. When it comes to setting national priorities, determining threats, defining challenges, and fashioning and implementing foreign and defense policies, the United States and Europe have parted ways.

That was then, this is now. As Dan Larison recently observed, Kagan personifies a particular type of critic of the Obama Administration:

Hawkish critics of Obama want to make two contradictory arguments against the administration. On the one hand, they say that he is too accommodating and too willing to believe that there are common interests among major powers that will lead to cooperation on supposedly “global” issues. This is one of the standard complaints against the administration by Robert Kagan in any one of a half-dozen articles and op-eds in the last year. The complaint goes something like this: “Doesn’t Obama realize that states have divergent interests? How can he be so naive as to expect cooperation from other great powers?”

To take their criticism seriously, we would have to believe that his critics accept the reality and inevitability of multipolarity, and we would have to believe that they also accept the relative decline in American power that this entails. Of course, they don’t really accept either of these things. For the most part, they do not acknowledge the structural political reasons for resistance to Obama’s initiatives, and they recoil from any suggestion that America needs to adjust to a changing world. They locate the fault for any American decline entirely with Obama, because he fails to be sufficiently strong in championing U.S. interests....

At the same time, they obsessively ridicule Obama’s supposed conceit that all of America’s international problems were going to start disappearing once he became President, and they are always ready to point out that Obama has not somehow magically eliminated the divergent state interests that prevent him from succeeding in his foreign policy initiatives. They insist Obama is blind to structural barriers and divergent state interests, and in the next breath they mock him for not having dissolved them through force of personality.

As if on cue, along comes Kagan to tell us that our allies feel "snubbed" by President Obama because, surprise, he hasn't made all of Europe love us again by sheer force of personality. He adds the silly complaint that President Obama has devoted too much energy to trying to diplomatically resolve international problems with countries like Iran, neglecting to note that this is a continuation of the Bush Administration's approach and that the alternatives to diplomacy aren't exactly good. He whines that the Obama Administration is working too hard to improve relations with Russia and China, without noting that we can't get the Security Council to approve sanctions on nations like Iran or North Korea over the vetoes of those other two permanent members.

Kagan argues,

This administration pays lip-service to "multilateralism," but it is a multilateralism of accommodating autocratic rivals, not of solidifying relations with longtime democratic allies.

Back in 2002 he observed that the Bush Administration was contemptuous of Europe, but argued that the problems were structural:

Europeans have complained about President Bush’s “unilateralism,” but they are coming to the deeper realization that the problem is not Bush or any American president. It is systemic. And it is incurable.

Kagan also argued that the principal solution to this problem was for Europe to "build up its military capabilities, even if only marginally" and for the U.S. to get over the idea that it was constrained by Europe:

Rather than viewing the United States as a Gulliver tied down by Lilliputian threads, American leaders should realize that they are hardly constrained at all, that Europe is not really capable of constraining the United States. If the United States could move past the anxiety engendered by this inaccurate sense of constraint, it could begin to show more understanding for the sensibilities of others, a little generosity of spirit. It could pay its respects to multilateralism and the rule of law and try to build some international political capital for those moments when multilateralism is impossible and unilateral action unavoidable.

Apparently he meant to say, "the problem is not Bush or any American president" as long as the president is Republican.

Kagan isn't really writing about strained relationships with Europe. He is throwing up that cloud around his actual concern, the possibility that the Obama Administration might pressure Israel to start working toward a genuine resolution of its forty-plus year occupation of Palestinian territories. Returning to Larison, who recently capsulized the issue,

Despite dire warnings that the embarrassment of a visiting U.S. vice president will damage U.S.-Israel relations, nothing substantive will follow recent displays of indignation by Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The combination of blunt words and inaction invites the worst of all consequences for the Obama administration, which will be attacked by hawks for “undermining” an ally, mocked by foreign policy realists for ineptitude, and derided by doves for caving in the face of Israeli intransigence. As for the Israelis, the only thing Netanyahu’s ministers will likely do differently next time is to exercise more discretion when thumbing their noses at President Obama.

* * *

Washington created the conditions for its own embarrassment by creating a bilateral relationship defined by dependence and warped by unaccountability. If it is unwilling to place conditions on the support it provides to Israel, and unwilling to enforce them when it does, Washington will continue to find its pronouncements ignored and its efforts in the Near East frustrated.

If Kagan were to approach the issue honestly, he would note that it's not just the Arab world but also our European allies and, more recently, the leadership of our nation's military, that would like us to be more firm with Israel. President Obama could do a lot of fence-mending with political leaders around the world by taking measures that would help effect a resolution of the conflict. It's reasonable to infer, both from his 2002 piece and from his deliberate omissions, that Kagan does not actually desire any such thing. Instead he wants to minimize the seriousness of Israel's continued intransigence, and to claim that it's somehow a fault of the Obama Administration to even take notice that Israel continues to actively and deliberately undermine the prospects for peace.

Meanwhile, a few clicks away, Fred Hiatt offers up an unsigned editorial that takes a similar view, whining that if the Obama Administration criticizes Israel the Palestinians and Arab nations will increase their demands on Israel. Apparently the only thing to do is for the Obama Administration to ignore Israel's misconduct - that, of course, sends a message to the rest of the world that the Obama Administration has no backbone on the issue, and will not take any measures to advance a viable Palestinian state, but that's a message Hiatt and his crew can live with.

A larger question concerns Mr. Obama's quickness to bludgeon the Israeli government. He is not the first president to do so; in fact, he is not even the first to be hard on Mr. Netanyahu. But tough tactics don't always work: Last year Israelis rallied behind Mr. Netanyahu, while Mr. Obama's poll ratings in Israel plunged to the single digits.

This takes us back to Reihan Salam's forgetfulness. President Obama isn't running for office in Israel. When his generals come to him and say "Israel's actions are putting our troops in danger," it shouldn't matter at all that his demand to Israel to take corrective action won't be popular in that country. Moreover, it's deliberately misleading to characterize a few appropriately harsh words, so far not backed up by any action, as "bludgeoning". This is the same paper that habitually criticizes President Obama for being too soft on Iran? By this definition of the word "bludgeon", the Obama Administration has already beaten Iran to a bloody pulp.

Does Anne Applebaum Own a Map?

Seriously, Anne Applebaum posits the following:

The defining moment of [Barack Obama's] presidency may well come at 2 a.m. some day when he picks up the phone and is told that the Israeli prime minister is on the line: Israel has just carried out a raid on Iranian nuclear sites. What then?

Well, if his next move isn't to fire a whole lot of people who didn't wake him up sooner, I'm not sure what it would be. Seriously, is Applebaum picturing a Middle East with a vastly different geographic layout than the one she might find if she looked at a map, and also imagining an alternative history where the U.S. has no military presence in the Middle East or Persian Gulf?

Does Applebaum imagine that the Israeli bombers would get permission from Turkey to fly through its airspace for the bombing run, without the U.S. learning of the plan? Does she imagine fighter jets trying to fly to the north of Turkey, over the Black Sea, without the Russians noticing and with the permission of... say, Greece, Bulgaria, Russia, Georgia and Azerbaijan... again securing the consent of those nations and without the U.S. finding out? Does she imagine that they'll fly over Jordan or Saudi Arabia, without the consent of those nations, then through Iraq, without the massive U.S. military force in Iraq looking up in the sky and saying, "Hey, those aren't our jets!" I can almost picture the pillow talk at the Applebaum mansion.

"Radoslaw, honey, is it realistic that Israel could bomb multiple targets in Iran, with the President not being able to do anything about it and not finding out until after the fact?"

"Anne, sweetie, that would be impossible - a neocon fantasy."

"I'm going to run with it anyway. Good thing that I write for the Washington Post editorial page."

Also, while I acknowledge that it's fun to imagine that every crisis in the world happens at 2:00 AM, Eastern Standard Time, you would think that by now Applebaum would be cognizant of the fact that the world has more than one time zone. Operation Opera, Israel's 1981 attack on Iraq's nuclear facility, was launched at 8:55 AM EST, allowing President Reagan ample time to finish his breakfast and coffee before getting "the call".

No, the tough decision for the President would be to determine what U.S. fighter jets, scrambled to intercept Israel's bombers, should do.

It's fair to note that Applebaum isn't entirely ignorant of the 1981 raid, noting that Israel "had no qualms about sending eight jets to take out Saddam Hussein's nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981". That, for what amounted to an unobstructed raid on a single, highly visible facility. How many fighter jets does she imagine Israel will deploy to strike only the most significant Iranian targets (that we know about) to bring about a significant setback in Iran's nuclear ambitions?

Good grief, if it were as simple as taking out a single, effectively undefended site in pre-war Iraq or Syria, with the worst consequence being a public lecture, it would be done already. Instead, again, take a look at that map. To Iran's immediate east, one country in which we're at war. To Iran's immediate west, another country with which we're at war. Applebaum is not so clueless that she doesn't hint at the consequence to the U.S. of an Israeli attack.

If that ever happened, then the 2 a.m. phone call would be followed by retaliation, some of which would be directed at us, our troops in Iraq, our ships at sea. I don't want this to happen - but I do want us to be prepared if it does.

So... she wants the U.S. fighter jets, scrambled in response to Israel's massive bombing run - probably half or more of Israel's air force overflying a NATO country or U.S.-controlled airspace without permission - to shoot down Israel's bombers? Or is she calling for a resigned acceptance - "If Israel sends 80 or more fighters and bombers across U.S.-controlled airspace, we have to let them through, even though it will severely undermine all of our diplomatic and military actions in the region, so let's plan for the post-attack world in which Iran is arming insurgent groups in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, is turning a blind eye to cross-border raids that severely strain or break the supply lines we use to support our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the possibility of other retaliation against U.S. targets around the world and the likelihood of having to invade Iran." No, what Applebaum appears to want is for the U.S. to first permit the attack and then to follow up by invading Iran.

But I do hope that this administration is ready, militarily and psychologically, not for a war of choice but for an unwanted war of necessity.

It's fair to ask, if Applebaum imagines that the invasion of Iran, which would be ruinous for our current war efforts and for the U.S. economy, is an inevitable consequence of what she admits will be a hit-or-miss Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear sites, what world does she live in where Israel's attack could be regarded as sane?

Meanwhile, a few column inches to the left, Richard Cohen ponders his navel lint and asks, "Is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad crazy like Adolf Hitler, or is he crazy like, of all people, Richard Nixon?" Typical of people who are either ignorant of Iran or who are dishonest about Iran, Cohen implies that Ahmadinejad somehow has his finger on a nuclear trigger - never mind that Iran does not yet have nuclear weapons or that Ahmadinejad has no control over the military. Since we're talking about Richard Cohen, I'm going to assume ignorance.

Let's skip right past the fact that the U.S. routinely attempts to paint as "crazy" the leaders of foreign nations that it wants to depose, or would otherwise prefer to be deposed. Which is not to say that we don't occasionally encounter world leaders who exhibit signs of mental illness or megalomania. Heck - over the centuries we've elected a few. Let's ignore the fact that there are politicians in this country, right now, who attempt to make political hay out of threats to attack Iran, and that Iranians could reasonably ask, "Was that old man, standing on a stage and signing 'bomb bomb bomb Iran' crazy, or merely pretending to be crazy?" What's his conclusion to his ramble on "Iran and the crazy factor"?

I have no idea whether Ahmadinejad merely acts crazy or is crazy.

Then why the [bleep] are you writing a column on the issue, rather than leaving the subject to somebody who actually knows something about Iran?

I do know, though, that Iran seems intent on getting nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them. I also know that nothing the United States and its allies have done has dissuaded Ahmadinejad (or the mullahs or the Revolutionary Guard Corps) from his goal.

If you bypass Cohen's confusion about the power structure in Iran, his keen gift for stating the obvious shines through, once again. Yes, Iran is intent upon getting a nuclear weapon. Their investment in their nuclear program, and the manner in which they've spread the program out among numerous hardened sites, should clue pretty much anybody in to that fact. The most we can accomplish without going to war is to convince Iran not to have an overt nuclear weapons program - but they will continue their "nuclear energy" program and even a lawful, peaceful program will lead to a point where they're able to produce weapons grade uranium pretty much at will.

It's also obvious that two successive U.S. administrations have looked at the costs and benefits and have decided that the cost of a military intervention sufficient to stop Iran's nuclear weapons program vastly outweighs the benefit of such an attack. Cohen and Applebaum ask us to see the situation through Israeli eyes. Fair enough. But the U.S. and Israel are different countries with different goals for the region. It's easy for Cohen to sneer out an insult at those who recognize that fact:

Former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski even suggested that if Israel tried such a thing, the United States might have to back it down with force. The Brzezinski Doctrine is refreshing in its perverse boldness: We shoot our friends to defend our enemies.

Good grief, Richard, talk to your colleague. Is Cohen so stupid that he believes the U.S. is better served by potentially being drawn into a third war in the Middle East, against a much stronger enemy than we face in either Iraq or Afghanistan, with the likely consequence being that a decade of military and diplomatic efforts in the Middle East are wasted, than by making it clear to Israel that it won't permit an attack that could bring about that consequence? Because the only significant distinction between what Brzezinski suggests and what Applebaum concludes is that Brzezinski recognizes that the U.S. could prevent the Israeli attack, whereas Applebaum prefers to pretend that it could not while recognizing the parade of horribles that could easily follow the attack. Of the three, only Brzezinski addresses the reality of the situation. No, Richard, you moron: It's not about "shoot[ing] our friends to defend our enemies" - it's about forcing a friend to stand down when the consequence of its actions would be devastating to our military and diplomatic goals for the region, and potentially crippling to our economy if Applebaum is correct about the inevitability of expanding the Iraq and Afghanistan wars into Iran.
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Update: Brzezinski responds to Cohen:

I hope that Richard Cohen's characterization of my opposition to Israel's use of U.S.-controlled airspace over Iraq as a policy of "we shoot our friends to defend our enemies" is a case of unintentional or exuberant distortion. What I have said repeatedly is that an Israeli attack on Iran through U.S.-controlled airspace would make the United States complicit, and the United States would then become the target of Iranian retaliation.

That is why the United States should make it clear that its airspace is not available for a unilateral Israeli attack, and that a violation of it could lead to an incident reminiscent of the attack on the USS Liberty, about which I added "it is nothing to be wished for."

Exuberance would be an odd explanation. But unintentional? If there's an error, it would be in Cohen's reading of Brzezinski as suggesting that the U.S. might have a military alternative to allowing an Israeli attack to proceed, unimpeded, leading to his taking great offense at the U.S.S. Liberty reference.

The reference to the U.S.S. Liberty is unambiguously about a possible U.S.-Israel military confrontation - given the history of that incident, I don't see that any other interpretation is possible. It's possible that Brzezinski was worrying about what the U.S. might do if Israeli fighters lock radar on U.S. jets sent to intercept their bombers - does the U.S. stand down or do things potentially escalate into shooting. But the possibility of shooting appears to be what inspires his conclusion "it is nothing to be wished for."

This part could also be applied to Applebaum:

One should not lose sight of the larger issue involved in loose advocacy of an Israeli attack on Iran that would implicate the United States in an act of war. Those advocating such an attack not only overlook the fact that such an incident might be designed to draw the United States into war with Iran but, even worse, the fact that U.S. acquiescence would mean nothing less than abdicating to Israel the decision on whether to go to war. Such an abdication is hardly in America's interest, and it is not the way that decisions involving American lives should be made.

Obama's President of What Nation, Again?

According to Michael Gerson, it's not good enough that the President of the United States evaluate the intelligence provided by U.S. intelligence agencies, consult with U.S. military leaders, and form a U.S. foreign and military policy based upon U.S. goals and interests.

Here is a paradox for President Obama to ponder while traversing the Iranian minefield: If the Israelis were confident that America would act decisively against the Iranian nuclear threat in the greatest extremity, they would be far less likely to act themselves. Lacking that confidence, they may conclude, once again, that delaying the threat is good enough.

No, here's a fact of life. President Obama, like President Bush, is entitled to conclude that a military attack on Iran would not be sufficiently effective to stop a nuclear power program, would not bring about a delay in that program that is significant to justify military intervention, would potentially cause blowback and complication of the U.S. missions in Iraq and Afghanistan (not to mention complicating the situations in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories), and would otherwise be contrary to U.S. foreign policy interests. Israel is a sovereign nation, is entitled to disagree, and is entitled to form its own military policy.

There's no "paradox" on the U.S. side. If Israel chooses to exercise its right as a sovereign nation to attack Iran, despite having been instructed by two consecutive Presidents that the U.S. opposes any such attack, that is their right. We don't owe them a promise that there will be no consequences for such an attack, let alone insinuating that we might carry out an attack so that they "don't have to". Gerson wants to get us into something that could end up like Georgia, round II - a U.S.-backed political leader takes provocative military action in anticipation that the U.S. will back him militarily if that action provokes a strong response. I'll again emphasize, Iran's response could be to complicate or jeopardize the U.S. missions in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Gerson offers this understatement:

If Israeli planes were to fly over Iraq, the reaction against America in that country could get ugly. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas would probably be forced to step away from talks with Israel. Iran could escalate the crisis, with missile launches against Israel and attacks from terrorist proxies such as Hezbollah.

Does Gerson have even the slightest idea of what would happen if Iran's border suddenly became porous, whether due to a real or contrived redirection of Iranian military forces to actions other than border defense, enabling hit-and-run attacks against U.S. military supply lines?

If Gerson or certain hawkish Israeli leaders see this, or the Administration's other efforts to advance U.S. military and foreign policy interests in the region, as "inject[ing] considerable suspicion into the American-Israeli relationship", that's really not Obama's problem. Sometimes our goals will conflict with those of even our most reliable allies, and yet we pursue them anyway.

As Gerson admits, his beloved former master, President Bush, held the same position as Obama on military strikes against Iran, and followed "the same basic approach" in dealing with Iran. Moreover, it seemed to be a point of pride for Bush to thumb his nose at the warnings and skepticism of our nation's historic allies. Perhaps Gerson should instead be contemplating how Bush's war of choice in Iraq likely both accelerated nuclear weapons programs in nations like Iran and North Korea, and has painted us into a corner in regard to Iran.

It's Brinksmanship

When heads of state clash over big issues, the question usually becomes "who blinks first?" Jackson Diehl whines that the Obama Administration took a maximalist position when negotiating with Israel over its expansion of settlements in the Palestinian territories:

Pressuring Israel made sense, at first. The administration correctly understood that Netanyahu, a right-winger who took office with the clear intention of indefinitely postponing any Israeli-Palestinian settlement, needed to feel some public heat from Washington to change his position -- and that the show of muscle would add credibility to the administration's demands that Arab leaders offer their own gestures. But, starting with a statement by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in May, the administration made the mistake of insisting that an Israeli settlement "freeze" -- a term the past three administrations agreed to define loosely -- must mean a total stop to all construction in the West Bank and even East Jerusalem.

Diehl complains that expecting Israel to freeze its settlements doesn't demand enough of the Palestinians (er... demands on the Palestinians are a separate issue), that it's unobtainable due to Israel's internal political issues, and that he believes it to be unnecessary. Yet (although I grant, a temporary freeze is pretty meaningless) look who's blinking first:

Israel would be open to a complete freeze of settlement building in the West Bank for three to six months as part of a broad Middle East peace endeavor that included a Palestinian agreement to negotiate an end to the conflict and confidence-building steps by major Arab nations, senior Israeli officials said Sunday.

Odds are Obama will work with that short-term freeze (or perhaps even one that's broader), and use the six months to try to build a larger deal.

Persistent criticisms of Obama from the left are that he's often reluctant to draw a line in the sand, and that he appears too eager for bipartisan solutions and is willing to negotiate pretty much anything. But as far as I can see, since he took office, there's not yet been a time when Obama drew a solid line where he turned out to be the guy who blinked. Obama doesn't pick fights unless he expects to win.

How... Nice For Him

Just when you thought Joe's fifteen minutes were over, we get another dose of tragi-comic relief:

Is he scared that one of the Hamas rockets might have his name on it? Not really. After all, as he explained, he's a Christian so God will keep him safe.

"Being a Christian I'm pretty well protected by God I believe," he said.

So basically, we'll see "Joe the Plumber" follow up on stories of tragedy and loss by asking, "Have you considered converting to Christianity so you, too, can be protected by G-d's magic umbrella?"

Do you think that Joe will stop by Bethlehem for a few "man on the street" interviews with the local Christians? (Do you suspect, as I do, that Joe doesn't even know where Bethlehem is located?)

Why Am I Skeptical....

John Hagee wants our sympathy:

What has been disappointing has been to see my life's work - the great passion of my life ? mischaracterized and attacked. I have dedicated my life to combating anti-Semitism and supporting the State of Israel. In taking a stand for Israel I have received death threats from anti-Semites and neo-Nazis, and I've had the windows of my car blown out beneath the windows of the rooms in which my children slept. To hear people who know nothing about me or my life's work claim that I somehow excuse the Holocaust is simply heartbreaking.

You would think there would be a huge paper trail relating to these threats, with intense investigations by the local police and perhaps the FBI. Yet Hagee suggest that the FBI didn't investigate his report of these various anonymous threats and acts, all of which apparently date back to 1981. And what of the way he tells the story?

Later, he related a story of a similar event in 1981 at his church where a bomb threat was called in. When he informed the attendees of the threat, the Christians in the audience left the building quickly, but the Jews in attendance stayed put "as if I had said there would be kosher hot dogs available afterward."

Such a funny man.

But that's bypassing the central question. Hagee's "support" for Israel grows out of his religious belief, that God wants all of the world's Jews to congregate in Israel where, in the "end of days", they will either perish in the "sea of fire" or convert to Christianity. In Hagee's words, "Today Israel is back in the land and they are at Ezekiel 37 and 8. They are physically alive but they're not spiritually alive." Hagee's views in a literal sense may constitute "support for Israel", but it takes a great deal of imagination to construe them as also supportive of Jews.

Fear Of Paper Tigers

What does it take to get an opportunity to run an editorial in the Times these days? The standards seem pretty low.

IN his inaugural address, President John F. Kennedy expressed in two eloquent sentences, often invoked by Barack Obama, a policy that turned out to be one of his presidency’s — indeed one of the cold war’s — most consequential: “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.” Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Kennedy’s special assistant, called those sentences “the distinctive note” of the inaugural.

They have also been a distinctive note in Senator Obama’s campaign, and were made even more prominent last week when President Bush, in a speech to Israel’s Parliament, disparaged a willingness to negotiate with America’s adversaries as appeasement.

Now here, one would think a responsible analysis would point out that it is not appeasement to talk to your enemies, or even to negotiate with your enemies. But Bush gets a free pass for his prevarication. Call it foreshadowing if you will, as you know the quality of analysis is going to get worse from this point forward.

Senior American statesmen like George Kennan advised Kennedy not to rush into a high-level meeting, arguing that Khrushchev had engaged in anti-American propaganda and that the issues at hand could as well be addressed by lower-level diplomats. Kennedy’s own secretary of state, Dean Rusk, had argued much the same in a Foreign Affairs article the previous year....

But Kennedy went ahead, and for two days he was pummeled by the Soviet leader. Despite his eloquence, Kennedy was no match as a sparring partner, and offered only token resistance as Khrushchev lectured him on the hypocrisy of American foreign policy, cautioned America against supporting “old, moribund, reactionary regimes” and asserted that the United States, which had valiantly risen against the British, now stood “against other peoples following its suit.” Khrushchev used the opportunity of a face-to-face meeting to warn Kennedy that his country could not be intimidated and that it was “very unwise” for the United States to surround the Soviet Union with military bases.

Kennedy’s aides convinced the press at the time that behind closed doors the president was performing well, but American diplomats in attendance, including the ambassador to the Soviet Union, later said they were shocked that Kennedy had taken so much abuse. Paul Nitze, the assistant secretary of defense, said the meeting was “just a disaster.” Khrushchev’s aide, after the first day, said the American president seemed “very inexperienced, even immature.” Khrushchev agreed, noting that the youthful Kennedy was “too intelligent and too weak.” The Soviet leader left Vienna elated — and with a very low opinion of the leader of the free world.

Okay... So we have the typical exaggerated representation of Obama's willingness to meet with "enemies" of the United States, representing the naivete of... a John McCain or Defense Secretary Gates. Should we expect a lecture about how weak Israel is for seeing to reopen peace negotiations with Syria?

But why not be more concrete? What world leader has, through Bush's tenure, been the closest analog to Kruschev? Could it be... Vladimir Putin? What happens when a President who will not at any time during his lifetime be described as "too intelligent" meets with Kruschev's modern counterpart?

Mr Bush described their meeting as straightforward and effective.

He said it was time to move beyond Cold War attitudes, away from mutually assured destruction towards mutually earned respect.

"I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straight forward and trustworthy and we had a very good dialogue.

"I was able to get a sense of his soul.

I know we're supposed to buy into the author's right-wing talking point that the penny ante dictators Obama will supposedly make his first term priority are the equivalent of Kruschev, but... if you're not a heavy crack smoker that one's probably not very convincing. You want to talk failures of perception? Incompetence at a first meeting resulting in incredible loss of leverage with a dictatorial nuclear power? Do you think Putin walked away from that meeting awed by G.W.'s "strength and somewhat ordinary level of intelligence," or that he was quietly chuckling to himself. And let's not forget the Bush Administration's on-again, off-again love affair with Ahmed Chalabi.

And yes, I love the way the authors glom onto this notion that Kennedy was "too intelligent", as if we're better served by having Presidents of more modest intelligence - G.W. or, the apparent preference of the authors of the editorial, John McCain. I'm not sure that McCain would be flattered, but at least the authors make up for insulting his intelligence by implying that he would be "strong". But what good does that do us if his self-lauded years of experience leave him unable to distinguish Shia from Sunni, believing that Iran is backing Al Qaeda, or proudly clueless about the power hierarchy in Iran? If his childish rhetoric against diplomacy leaves him afraid to approach or be approached by leaders of "our enemies", "rogue states", whatever you want to call them, under circumstances that could aid us or our allies? Using examples cited earlier, the type of negotiations with Syria that could lead to a severe diminishment of tensions between Israel and Syria, weaken Hezbollah in Lebanon, and may even result in Syria's formal recognition of Israel? You know, the sort of negotiation Israel deems to be in its own self-interest, even if our "strong leaders of somewhat ordinary intelligence" don't see the wisdom.

Of course I'm giving the editorial far more credit than it is due. It's an amateurish argument from anecdote. You find one example of the point you want to make, depict it in the least flattering light to your target, then suggest that there could be no other outcome at any time in future history. Perhaps the Ph.D. student who contributed is so focused on this one incident (for his thesis?) that he isn't aware that history can offer counter-examples. I'm not sure what the other guy's excuse might be, other than preventing Middle East diplomacy of any sort. If you read his other work (here attacking Reagan's record), he seems to fall into the category of people who think that Arab and Muslim nations are incapable of responding to anything but fear of annihilation. Perhaps right now he's furiously scribbling out a screed against Israel's attempts to finally achieve peace with Syria, lamenting how its past leaders were duped and outsmarted in their peace negotiations with Jordan and Egypt.

I am not surprised when right-wingers of various sorts try to depict nations like Iran or Syria as the modern equivalents of Kruschev's Russia. Some don't know better, and the others who favor the argument will say whatever it takes to defeat the Democratic nominee. But is it not reasonable to be surprised when the New York Times agrees to print it? Is honoring this type of straw man argument somehow justified by the fact that it is embraced by McCain? Oh, it's so nice to see McCain threaten to stonewall the al-Qaeda supporting insurgent-supporting, Sunni Shiite nation of Iran, a nation that we are not presently prepared to occupy but could otherwise crush under the heel of our boot at any time. Or how tough he's going to be on Cuba, as if Kruschev is still alive and trying to put nuclear missiles on Cuban soil. But is it unreasonable to expect a major national newspaper to devote a few column inches to tearing down McCain's paper tigers, or burning through these straw men, rather than turning over the editorial page to people who want to advance these essentially dishonest arguments?

Because When You're Winning....

The smears keep coming. Daniel Larison takes on the latest round of "Obama hates Israel" smears.
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Update: And on it goes.