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.
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
Many religions practice self-flagellation rituals. Even today. Catholics in Latin America, the Iberian Peninsula, the Philippines, and ultramontane Roman Catholics of the Opus Dei conviction flagellate themselves on Good Friday in fraternity with the suffering of Jesus. Among Sunnis, it is forbidden. Not so among the Shi'a, where there is no actual uniformity of belief and certainly not in practice.
Islamabad, Pakistan
Geopolitical realities force Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri to visit Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, who probably orchestrated a massive car bomb that killed Hariri's father in 2005.
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.
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.
All dictators, from Creon onwards, are victims. --Gabriel García Márquez
I.
Many years later, in the course of writing his memoirs, Gabriel García Márquez was to remember that distant afternoon in Aracataca, in Colombia, when his grandfather set a dictionary in his lap and said, "Not only does this book know everything, it’s the only one that’s never wrong." The boy asked, "How many words are in it?" "All of them," his grandfather replied.
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.
The Venice Film Festival is the oldest celluloid gala in the world. Not as vaunted and haunted by the publicity machines but intellectually more serious than Cannes. The Mostra Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica di Venezia, a most prestigious element of the Venice Biennale, bestowed its Golden Lion award, its top honor, on an Israeli film called Lebanon. It is a relentlessly honest film about war itself but also specifically about Israel's first real war in Lebanon. (There had been skirmishes before, especially in 1978, and more than skirmishes since, as in 2006.) Read about this motion picture in The Jerusalem Post and Ha'aretz.
I have not yet seen Lebanon. But I know what it is, given the characteristically (and thank God) self-conscious and self-critical disposition of all of Israel's arts. Yes, they fight heroically but they also ponder. Would that there were even a bit of this doubt or even detachment among Arab intellectuals and artists. Alas, there isn't. The Arab dissident has left for the West or is silent.
The Venice Film Festival is the oldest celluloid gala in the world. Not as vaunted and haunted by the publicity machines but intellectually more serious than Cannes. The Mostra Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica di Venezia, a most prestigious element of the Venice Biennale, bestowed its Golden Lion award, its top honor, on an Israeli film called Lebanon. It is a relentlessly honest film about war itself but also specifically about Israel's first real war in Lebanon. (There had been skirmishes before, especially in 1978, and more than skirmishes since, as in 2006.) Read about this motion picture in The Jerusalem Post and Ha'aretz.
I have not yet seen Lebanon. But I know what it is, given the characteristically (and thank God) self-conscious and self-critical disposition of all of Israel's arts. Yes, they fight heroically but they also ponder. Would that there were even a bit of this doubt or even detachment among Arab intellectuals and artists. Alas, there isn't. The Arab dissident has left for the West or is silent.
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.
Why care about what happens in Iran? There's the prospect of a nuclear arms race in the region--and of Israel initiating a war with Iran to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons. There's also Iran's major role in Iraq and somewhat less important but still significant role in Afghanistan. Iran could be a force for stability or instability in the most volatile region in the world stretching from Israel and Lebanon on the west to Afghanistan and Pakistan in the east. So what happens there matters.
"I mean, in a way, Obama's standing above the country, above--above the world, he's sort of God." These drug-addicted words come from Evan Thomas, a longtime editor at Newsweek. He uttered them on Chris Matthews's MSNBC show. Such words would wreak havoc on any person's ego, even Barack Obama's. It also would enrage his enemies.
After all, the president has told us that he is a mere student of history, and that he is.
'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.
The Jerusalem theater lights came on, and no man between the ages of 25 and 35 moved. We had just watched Waltz With Bashir, Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman's animated documentary about Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the subsequent Sabra and Chatila massacre. The film deals with Folman's struggle with the surreal trauma that many veterans of that conflict retain.
The good news about Ehud Olmert is that he is not a willful murderer of Israeli soldiers. The bad news is that he is the most inept and arrogant Israeli prime minister in the country's history.
CONFRONTING IRAN:
THE FAILURE OF AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY AND THE NEXT GREAT CONFLICT IN THE MIDDLE EAST By Ali M.
"Let me begin," says White House aide David Dreyer, "by contesting the premises of your question." It's a windless evening in November, and Dreyer is in his West Wing office, listening to a new recording of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier and defending the role of Tony Coelho, for whom Dreyer once worked, in the Democrats' electoral debacle. "First," he says, "Tony was not the party chair. He was never, to my knowledge, actually in the dnc building. Second, the role of party chair in a midterm election is relatively unimportant anyhow.
