Oh me of little influence– I saw the significance of Trita Parsi's book Treacherous Alliance 18 months ago. Well Laura Rozen at Foreign Policy says that the book's sales have spiked lately because of Roger Cohen's superb endorsement in the Times of the book's idea that Israel is hyping the Iranian nuclear threat because it has been, surprise, engaged in a regional power struggle with Iran since time immemorial. Rozen says there's evidence that Parsi's book has made it to Obama's inner circle.
Another sign of Cohen's influence: the American Jewish Committee has responded to his columns angrily. Here is the press release to which I referred yesterday, in which an AJC official named Eran Lerman uses his 17-year-old daughter as a guide, because she "sees, in the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the embodiment of a design to have her dead." That's calm reasoning, for you.
And speaking of Parsi's growing influence, I can't wait for the press to get to Parsi's most unsettling idea, this quotation he got from an Israeli intelligence official about Israel's efforts to manipulate American opinion/policy going back to the '90s:
relations with the U.S. were cooling and we needed some new glue for
the alliance… And the new glue… was radical Islam. And Iran was
radical Islam."
From Israel's lips to the ears of the neocons.
