The news is reported by the Associated Press.
It was announced by the Syrian state-run news agency. And confirmed by “Palestinian officials.”
A’jad will meet with Bashar Assad, the object of President Obama’s courtship.
The man whom Hillary last week basically called the military dictator of Iran will also confer with top guns from Hezbollah and Hamas. I’m sure that their topic will be the road to peace.
Really, I don’t care if there is an American ambassador in Damascus. It’s true, given the environment, that he might be shot by terrorists. But, otherwise, why not? We had U.S. diplomats in Tokyo, Berlin and Rome until just after Pearl Harbor. Of course, they did no good. But probably, they also did no harm—except prolonging the illusion that America was at peace with the host countries.
Why doesn't the administration just say that we are returning to our embassy in Syria because Syria is a player in the Middle East? Basta!
If you’re a journalist, chances are you’ve had some pretty low moments in the last few years, as your industry has imploded all around you. But, in your darkest hours, you were always able to console yourself with one thought: At least I’m not Tucker Carlson.
Not long ago, Andrew Sullivan had ultra-hawkish views on Israel and the Middle East. The problem as he saw it, was very simple: The Muslim world was anti-Semitic and wanted to kill all the Jews. Naive Western governments pushed innocent Israelis to make peace, when the only answer was force. Here are some excerpts from an August 2001 column he wrote:
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“Trying to explain the doctrine of the Trinity to readers of The New Republic is not easy.” On June 2, 1944, W.H. Auden penned that sentence in a letter to Ursula Niebuhr. On January 26, 2010, Andrew Sullivan posted it as the “quote for the day” on his blog. Displaced and unglossed quotations are always in some way mordant, and bristle smugly with implications. Let us see what this one implies.
United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, against which I warned long ago, passed unanimously on August 11, 2006. Two days later, the Israeli cabinet approved the motion 24-0--but with one astute minister abstaining. For whatever it is worth, I thought (and wrote) that the restrictions on Hezbollah (and, more than inferentially, on both Syria and Iran) meant less than nothing.
“The cruel God of the Jews has you beaten too.”--Racine
The German Mujahid
By Boualem Sansal
Translated by Frank Wynne
(Europa Editions, 240 pp., $15)
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And they are Abbas Milani, Nader Mousavizadeh, a few others, amongst whom there is the controversial but very insightful Michael Ledeen
I haven't seen anything by Tom Friedman or Fareed Zakaria about Dubai. But who knows? Maybe they are confiding to their diaries, although I don't think their type enjoys diaries. (I don't like them either, except the diaries of others.) Anyway, there's nothing good to say about Dubai, and Tom and Fareed don't like to displease their friends. Unless they are no longer their friends.
Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations
By Avi Shlaim
(Verso, 392 pp., $34.95)
Avi Shlaim burst upon the scene of Middle Eastern history in 1988, with the publication of Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine. Before that, as a young lecturer at Reading University in England, he had produced two books, British Foreign Secretaries Since 1945 (1977) and The United States and the Berlin Blockade, 1948–1949 (1983), and several revealing essays on modern Middle Eastern historical issues in academic journals. But it was Collusion Across the Jordan, with its 676 pages of solid and well-written research, that thrust him into the academic limelight.
I.
In 2000, I was asked by the Israel Defense Forces to join a group of philosophers, lawyers, and generals for the purpose of drafting the army’s ethics code. Since then, I have been deeply involved in the analysis of the moral issues that Israel faces in its war on terrorism. I have spent many hours in discussions with soldiers and officers in order to better grasp the dilemmas that they tackle in the field, and in an attempt to help facilitate the internalization of the code of ethics in war. It was no wonder that, when the Goldstone Report on the Gaza war was published, I was keen to read it, with some hope of getting a perspective on Israeli successes or failures in this effort to comprehend war, and to fight it, morally. Unlike many who responded to the report, in praise or in blame, I gave this immensely long document a careful reading.
The Israeli reactions to the Goldstone report on the Gaza war of January 2009 have focused, understandably, on its outrageous omissions and distortions and one-sided judgments, as well as on the moral corruption of the report's sponsor, the UN's Human Rights Commission. But the far-reaching strategic implications of the Goldstone report require no less urgent consideration.
Jeffrey Herf is one of the pre-eminent intellectual historians of totalitarianism. He is a frequent contributor to The New Republic. See, for example, his last few contributions here, here, and here. You can also find a TNR review of one of his books, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys, here.
In the current issue of The American Interest, Herf makes a highly convincing argument that radical Islam today is in fact a totalitarian movement with totalitarian ideology and totalitarian methods. No, it is not Nazism or Communism. And, though its ideas are rather more primitive (my word, not his) than either of the reigning doctrines of the twentieth century and though its weapons are also more primitive, it partakes of contemporary methods--and, increasingly, technological methods--in the mobilization of masses of people.
Please read this essay and read it carefully...
Roger Cohen has the Times beat in Iran. Well, not exactly. No one has the Times beat in Iran. I don't know how many Western newspapers have their own journalists in the country. I do know that the FT does but it is an Iranian who holds it. Anyway, the datelines from Iran are commonly from Arab capitals, mostly Beirut.
But Cohen is a special case. He wrote several pieces from Iran early this year, and anybody reading them would be hard-put to call them other than suck-ups. All of this was before the electoral calamity that befell the country in what Cohen anticipated would be a reaffirmation of the country's "old-itch for representative government, evident in the 1906 Constitutional Revolution." One fact is apparent: this man does his research in Wikipedia. Better than writing from total ignorance, I suppose. Or maybe not. By the way, this column was reprinted by Hezbollah with a macabre cartoon at its side.
"I'm convinced," wrote Cohen in a prior Times column, that "the 'Mad Mullah' caricature of Iran and likening any compromise with it to Munich 1938 ... is misleading and dangerous." Maybe it is. (But it has never been made in this space or any space adjoining.) Still, what's wrong with the Munich analogy? Dachau was opened in March 1933, soon after the Nazis entered the government. Buchenwald welcomed all comers already in 1937.
Cohen's standards for an evil regime are quite specific and tough. He will not judge Tehran harshly until it murders many many Jews. Not that he's especially sensitive about Jews. What he won't contemplate is that Dr. Ahmadinejad is quite serious about with his menacing of Israel. And he hasn't weighed--he will not weigh--the heavy valence of the Iranian president's denial of the Jewish catastrophe.
It is three years since the second Lebanon war began and nearly three years since it was supposedly ended. Formally, the finale came with the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, which was the handicraft of Condi Rice in her panic to have some kind of achievement to her name. President Bush played along with the charade, maybe because Israeli politics itself had made continuing the conflict untenable.
In any case, I warned time and again, during the war and long after, that 1701 was a fraud. The first objection was that the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, UNIFIL, had accomplished nothing--not, by the way, next to nothing--and was still "interim." Yet the truce was put into its hands. This would be a joke if human life were not at stake in the operations of the blue helmets. But human life is, and not only the soldiers soldiers killed when Hezbollah crossed into Israel on July 13, 2006. Then there were the two kidnapped soldiers in the operation--Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev--who were subsequently murdered. And, of course, the cross-border carnage from and to both sides.
About ten days after the start of Iran's insurrection, I asked a senior administration official what, if anything, the White House knew about the people behind the demonstrations. His reply: "I think it is fair to say senior administration officials are busily trying to understand how the opposition is generated and where it came from." In other words, there's a lot about the protesters we still don't know.
'Yes, sometimes I go into the room with my advisers and I start shouting. And then they say, 'And then what?'" The question hangs in the perfectly cooled air in Sa'ad Hariri's marble-floored sitting room, where Beirut appears as a sunlit abstraction visible at a distance through thick windows. Hariri's father, the former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, martyr of the Cedar Revolution, arches his black eyebrows from a giant poster near the sofa, looking out at his son with a sidelong, mischievous glance. "It hasn't been a joyful trip," Sa'ad Hariri is saying.
Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert announced today that he will resign his post after his party elects a new leader in September. We asked TNR contributing editor Yossi Klein Halevi for his take from Jerusalem:
