Where Is Jeffrey Goldberg Now That Feith Needs Him?

I have some limited sympathy for Doug Feith as a guy who’s been abruptly marginalized; it’s hard to imagine a more precipitous farewell. It reminds me of seeing former Cheney aide David Wurmser speaking at a New York law firm this spring. Small crowd, Wurmser had the slightly-hysterical edge of the complete outsider.

Why hasn’t Jeffrey Goldberg reviewed Feith’s book? Three years ago Goldberg was kind to Feith in a New Yorker profile. And in his new book, Feith returns the favor, quoting long sections of a Goldberg piece in The New Yorker from March 2002 purporting to show connections between Iraq and Al-Qaeda– a central claim in Feith’s efforts at rehabilitation. The same Goldberg piece is now quoted in the latest Commentary–a piece not online, by Arthur Herman, arguing that war with Iraq was “inevitable.” It’s no favor to Goldberg, actually, to bring this reporting up; it reminds us that he helped to promote this disastrous war. Goldberg’s protean; I bet he’s trying to put his Feith chapter behind him. Yes, I want to have a Zionist conversation with all these guys. Goldberg once served in the Israeli army, Feith worked for the maximalist Netanyahu. They have surely each believed at times that the west wasn’t a safe place for Jews. Happily, Joe Klein is nudging this conversation into the mainstream.

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