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Bush called Krauthammer and Kristol ‘bomber boys’

The best line from the Jeffrey Goldberg piece in the Atlantic, picked up by Think Progress.

Bush would sometimes mock those aides and commentators who advocated an attack on Iran, even referring to the conservative columnists Charles Krauthammer and William Kristol as “the bomber boys,” according to two people I spoke with who overheard this.

Yes, and when will the American Jewish community reckon with the prestige it has granted crazed neoconservatives, who see no problem with the Israeli occupation?

Meantime, Steve Clemons has a sober read of the piece and concludes that the case for military action is weak, that Iran is a rational player, that Israel is dominated by Zionists who believe (wrongly) that Israel is the safe refuge for the Jews of the world, and that, once again, everything comes down to Palestine as the radicalizer of the region, which the State Department predicted 62 years ago and which Goldberg fails to note, typically. Clemons: 

The obvious question is why – if Iran is posing a true existential threat in the minds of Israelis and that there is so much doubt in Obama’s reliability on Iran as Goldberg lays out – Israel doesn’t deliver on an Arab-Israel peace deal that gives Palestinians a state and normalizes Israeli relations with 57 other Arab and Muslim-dominant nations. This would lay the foundation for more direct, if arms length, security coordination and would go some way in neutralizing the Palestinian cause as a rallying point throughout the region for Iran.

Furthermore, delivering on a two-state arrangement and embracing the key points of the Arab Peace Initiative could produce two possible, useful scenarios. The first is that those Arab regimes that are in the "all options on the table" camp could be more supportive of military strategies against Iran if Palestine was on the drawing boards. The mere possibility of an Israel-Saudi-Jordan-Egypt condominium against growing Iranian power in the region may dramatically alter the calculations of Iran’s leadership. This "show of strength" is possibly more constructive and compelling to Iran’s leaders than the "we’re really going to unilaterally bomb them" approach Israel is flirting with.

The other possible scenario, seldom discussed, is that Iran’s posture itself relaxes as an Israel/Palestine deal is reached. Jordan’s King Abdullah conveyed this in an interview with Fareed Zakaria:

KING ABDULLAH: "I still go back to saying the core issue is the Israeli-Palestinian problem, because all roads in our part of the world, all the conflicts lead to Jerusalem.

"Today, Iran is putting itself as the defenders of the Palestinian cause. Several days ago, Osama bin Laden in his taped message to the United States again underlined the suffering of the Palestinians. It is the injustice felt towards the Palestinian people that allow other states actors and non-state actors to take the role of being the defenders of the Palestinians.

"If we solve this problem, then I believe we start to unwind all the other pressure points inside of the Middle East."

ZAKARIA: But could you in Jordan live with an Iran with a nuclear weapon?

KING ABDULLAH: "If we solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem, why would Iranians want to spend so much money on a military program? It makes no sense…."

I was in the audience at the 2010 Aspen Ideas Festival when Jeffrey Goldberg conducted the astonishing interview he recounts in his article with UAE Ambassador Yousef Otaiba who essentially said that if Iran continued on its current course, the UAE would support a military strike against Iran. What Goldberg failed to mention is that Otaiba also strongly emphasized that the most important radicalizer in the region was the unresolved Palestine-Israel dispute and that the smart strategy to deal with the Iran challenge was to unwind the Israeli occupation. He and other senior Arab leaders have told me that in their view, this would neutralize much of Iran’s growing power in the region.

In one of my own interviews with a very senior UAE diplomat, I was told that the best way for the US and allies to confront Iran was to deliver on Palestine

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