Jeffrey to Bibi: Nice Jeffrey, Bibi!

On Sunday, Jeffrey Goldberg took Israeli Prime Minister Bib Netanyahu to task for “three mistakes and one achievement”:

So, Jeff’s sayin’ that Bibi’s lookin’ a little lame? Well, not really:

So, apparently, what Jeff is saying is that, even though Bibi has fallen, three times, hard on his ass, he’s still the man, the man with the plan, who has done what needed to be done. Back in March, Jeff wrote an article offering the suspicion, the suggestion, the possibility—and, mind you, only the possibility—that when Bibi had been talking so loudly about the necessity for Israel to take out Iran’s nuclear facilities in the very near future, well, he was only bluffing, just playing bad cop to Obama’s good cop. At that point, about a million people and I on the Internet pointed out that El Jefo had, several years before, written a cover article for the Atlantic promising that it was a done deal for Israel to bomb the shit out of Iran, absolutely no fooling, which, again to a lot of people including me, sounded like a damn lie on Jeff’s part, and which, he seemed now to be saying, well, maybe so maybe no, but if it was a lie it was pretty damn clever, wasn’t it?

And so now we’re getting the same thing again, with variations—yeah, Bibi may act like an ass sometimes, get carried away and all, but the important thing is he’s got everyone focused on Iran, taking Iran seriously, doing his bidding.

Which, sadly, is largely true. Virtually the entire foreign policy apparatus of the United States has bought into the entirely false premise that Iran is serious threat to world stability and world peace. We went through exactly the same routine with Iraq—the endless sanctions, which do nothing but cause hardship and resentment among the people we are supposedly helping, the endless “deadlines,” and, soon, the endless agitation for “regime change,” which will, of course, give us everything we want without bloodshed, or at least not a lot of bloodshed. No one in the State Department, or the Defense Department, or the CIA wants a war with Iran, but no one has the nerve to call a halt to the endless shoving and bullying that have no purpose but to back Iran into a corner, which would have the inevitable result of backing us into a corner as well. We have to attack! Our credibility is at stake!

Both Netanyahu and his Iranian counterpart, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, feed on crisis and chest-thumping as an alternative to actually governing. The Republican Party has a similar appetite for irresponsibility as a way of life, and the Democratic Party’s basis for foreign policy when it comes to the Middle East is to be 97 percent as stupid as the Republican Party. Anyone see a happy ending for this one? Don’t hold your breath.

Afterwords
If there is a star of hope anywhere in all of this, it is in the fact that the American voting public simply does not want to hear about foreign affairs in this election. Mitt Romney is dishing out nothing more than “muffled platitudes” and “boring pabulum,” according to an exasperated Jennifer Rubin, suggesting that his advisors believe that that is exactly what Americans want to hear. Yet the GOP is wedded, or rather welded, to a gigantic and ever expanding defense budget, not to mention an hysterical worship of all things military. The Tea Party crowd, which is, after all, the ground troops of the GOP, are thoroughly xenophobic and compulsively confrontational. Yet, when it comes to actual fightin’, they don’t seem all that interested. The GOP may not be willing to confront its repeated and massive foreign policy disasters, but, for the time being at least, they don’t seem to be in too much of a hurry to repeat them.