“Thanks, Tom Cotton. You Just Got Us a Hard-line Supreme Leader,” snipes the highly intelligent Mehdi Khalaji, writing in Politico Magazine. In their controversial letter to “the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton and 46 other Republican senators suggested that even if Washington comes to a nuclear deal with President…
Tag: Iran
Time is Running Out! Again!
Time is running out, Secretary of State John Kerry writes, in the June 30 Washington Post: July 20, the deadline to negotiate a comprehensive agreement on Iran’s nuclear program, is fast approaching. All along, these negotiations have been about a choice for Iran’s leaders. They can agree to the steps necessary to assure the world…
Beirut and Benghazi: A Tale of Two Administrations
On April 18, 1983, a truck carrying 2,000 pounds of explosives crashed into the American Embassy in West Beirut, killing 63 people. On October 23, 1983, 241 American Marines and 48 French soldiers stationed in Beruit were killed by two truck bombs. A day later, both American and French intelligence felt they had hard evidence…
Memo to Joe: They don’t “love” us
Time magazine’s Joe Klein appeared on NBC’s “Morning Joe” yesterday and lowered the boom on Bibi Netanyahu (video here, courtesy of Bob Wright at the Atlantic): I don’t think I’ve ever, in the 40 years I’ve been doing this, have heard of another of an American ally trying to push us into war as blatantly…
The Obama Wars
President Obama ran for office promising “to end a war.” The artful use of the indefinite article, especially when coming from a Harvard man, should have been a tip-off that ending a war didn’t mean, you know, “peace.” The President has ended the war in Iraq, pretty much, if you ignore our Baghdad “embassy,” a…
The Silence of Sully
If you can cast your mind way, way back in time, to about a month ago, you may remember Jeffrey Goldberg writing an article in the Atlantic—“Point of No Return”—in which he declared that, relying on absolutely unimpeachable sources, it was clear that the leaders of Israel were absolutely fed up with this nuclear stuff…
The Washington Post, searching for purpose
Why are we in Iraq? Good question! Damned good question! Originally, it was stop Saddam from attacking us with “weapons of mass destruction,” nukes in particular, or at least that dreadful yellow cake. There was no chance that Saddam would attack us, of course—he wasn’t that dumb—but the mere fact that he had those WMD…