Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent exercise in arrant knavery has received a gratifying amount of pushback, thanks to Fareed Zakaria, Roger Cohen, and Daniel Larison, among others. As Zakaria emphasizes, the current imbroglio is the result of the Bush Administration’s decision, back in 2005, to torpedo an earlier agreement that would have limited the Iranian…
Tag: Middle East follies
The Mysterious Rand Paul: What is his secret?
How does Rand Paul do it? How does he say things that would sink any other politician and get away with it? Politico’s Sam Youngman is the latest intrepid journalist to explore this baffling mystery, ultimately confessing, like so many before him, that it’s just a damn enigma, but that, surely, surely, wise-guy Rand will…
Obama, losing credibility in order to gain it
“He kept us out of Syria!” sounds like faint praise indeed for an American president, but it’s an encomium one can no longer utter in good conscience regarding Barack “the Disappointer” Obama. The only pleasure one can take in this latest administration folly—and it’s grim indeed—is how gracelessly the administration has gone about announcing and…
Why Can’t Prominence Equal Competence?
David Aaron Miller has a weekly column in Foreign Affairs, which may be half the problem. He is vice president for new initiatives and a distinguished scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. But this week’s “Reality Check,” with the omniscient title “Why Obama Failed in the Middle East,” reads like it was…
Jeffrey to Bibi: Nice Jeffrey, Bibi!
On Sunday, Jeffrey Goldberg took Israeli Prime Minister Bib Netanyahu to task for “three mistakes and one achievement”: In re: Prime Minister Netanyahu’s handling of the Iran crisis: 1) Netanyahu shouldn’t have waved around that cartoonish drawing on the podium of the United Nations. It made him look unserious, and a man in his position…