Economist’s cartoon. Laura Rozen at Al Monitor says it’s spot-on.
BN, with megaphone, banging on drums ‘stop, no’, as Obama-Rouhani play poker- says it all @MehrzadBBC: pic.twitter.com/eslIGv7qkf @ChemiShalev
— Laura Rozen (@lrozen) November 16, 2013
The accompanying article in the Economist, by Lexington, is plain about Netanyahu playing the Israel lobby against the Obama administration:
Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has not held back. In a speech to thousands of Jewish-Americans in Jerusalem on November 10th he more or less called the American president and his envoys naive to the point of imperilling Israel’s survival..
And it warns that the lobby can’t overplay its hand because of war-weariness in the American public:
The Israeli lobby loses leverage
To those who brood, darkly, about Israel’s influence in American politics, the bogeyman of choice has long been the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a hawkish lobby group. AIPAC’s friends in Congress, notably Robert Menendez, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, have suggested that new sanctions would strengthen America’s hand with Iran….
[Democrats] do not wish to embarrass their president. But senators distrust Iran intensely, and are not convinced that Mr Obama will insist on a robust deal, either. AIPAC will need to tread carefully—a core tenet of Israeli diplomacy is maintaining bipartisan support in America.
Roger Cohen at the Times has nothing to say about Israel. It’s the French banging the drum, he says, and that’s not bad. We should be worried about the cheese-eating surrender monkeys in the White House.
The cheese-eating surrender monkeys of France, in the phrase from “The Simpsons,” have become the world’s meat-chomping enforcement tigers. As for the United States, it has, in the French view, gone a touch camembert-soft…
The United States, of course, is not quitting the Middle East and isolationist tendencies are easily overstated — as [French Foreign Minister Laurent] Fabius later conceded.
But his warnings are worth heeding. Obama spoke to Hollande this week; he expressed how “the United States deeply values its relationship with France.” The president could usefully borrow some French toughness to get a winning Iran deal.
When the cheese-eaters are in the White House it is time to worry.
Cohen’s position puts him in the same camp as David Brooks, the conservative NYT columnist. Though Brooks (who is “gooey-eyed” about Israel, stronger stuff than Cohen’s “liberal Zionist–and I am one”) cites Israel’s concerns. From NPR last night:
Host Audie Cornish: How do the congressional politics here help or hurt the negotiating position of the U.S. going forward?
BROOKS: Well, it makes it much tougher. And they sort of back up what’s become the French position which is to be more skeptical of the talks. And there are two good reasons for that. The first is that if we – the administration sometimes seems so eager to put a nonproliferation deal, we end up winking at some of the human rights abuses of the regime.
The second, and this is the worry of Israelis and others, which is that once you start weakening the sanctions and there’s Katie bar the door, it’s hard to keep any sanction regimes in place and the pressure on Iran just diminishes and diminishes.
Now notice when the liberal commentator EJ Dionne steps in on NPR, there’s a hint about Israel’s role in our politics but no edification. Dionne demystifies nothing:
DIONNE: First of all, in American politics, you don’t lose much by being anti-Iran and so I think there’s going to be some pressure from Congress. But this also – and I’ve talked to administration officials about this. This strengthens them vis-a-vis the Iranians because the administration, while it’s saying to Congress please don’t strengthen these sanctions now, let’s see if we can make these talks work, the administration can always hold the threat that sanctions could get worse as it’s trying to get Iran to make concessions.
The administration seems to have some confidence that they can get a pretty good deal out of Iran, but of course that’ll also depend on how outsiders judge whether it is a pretty good deal.
Outsiders? Do outsiders judge the Affordable Care Act? Who are these foreign-policy judges? And when is the mainstream media going to talk about the Israel lobby?
P.S. As Alex noted yesterday, Foreign Policy is being more forthright: Foreign Policy magazine’s John Hudson reports that Israel and the Obama administration are locked in an “information war” over a deal with Iran. Hudson reports that “Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Ron Dermer and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee are storming Capitol Hill
H/t Scott Roth.
“BROOKS: Well, it makes it much tougher. And they sort of back up what’s become the French position which is to be more skeptical of the talks. And there are two good reasons for that. The first is that if we – the administration sometimes seems so eager to put a nonproliferation deal, we end up winking at some of the human rights abuses of the regime.”
And of course NPR Audi Cornish does not even walk through this very large door opening by Brooks to bring up Israel’s decades long human rights abuses against the Palestinians. Even when the perfect opportunity to address this obvious contradiction Audi cannot stir up the muster to walk through that door. Absolutely pathetic. NPR fails over and over again to simply walk through these openings.
EJ Dione “outsiders” Wow E.J. don’t push the envelope too far. Sad. When will Audi, E.J etc grow some? Thank goodness for Mondoweiss, Going to Tehran, Informed Comment, Walt’s Foreign policy blog, Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now…NPR and other MSM outlets croak on these critical issues.
Although here we have the Economist stepping out of the box
The column by Roger Cohen was one of the most idiotic I’ve read in a long, long time, and I don’t usually read Cohen’s columns(I was directed to his column by people I follow on Twitter who were laughing hard about it).
He wrote a pretty racist column stereotyping the entire Italian people just a few weeks ago in a way you could never get away, say, stereotyping Jews or blacks.
We now have two Cohens. Big idiot(Richard Cohen) and little idiot(Roger Cohen).
But apparently writing really racist stuff is not an issue if you’re an aging Jewish man in the media. Remember David Brooks’ column a few months back about typecasting the entire Egyptian people as racially inferior? Seriously, I am amazed how much you can get away with if you have the right age, gender and ethnicity.
As for his argument, who is going to pay with their blood? Little idiot Cohen has 4 kids. I doubt any of his privileged kids are going to fight any wars.
And his insistance about Syria’s “nonradical opposition” is just more fantasy. The radicals have been eating the “moderates” for breakfast for months, even years now.
In the latest meeting in Moscow, AP and Reuters all but conceded that the Western obsession with the ‘moderates’ was a fantasy and a castle made out of thin air. The “moderates” can’t even get along with each other and most of them are not even in the country. It reminds you of the Bush administration’s Chalabi fix, who turned out to be a master at smelling a desperate Western country wanting to fantasize about a political situation that didn’t exist in order to justify their invasion. I don’t fault Chalabi for scamming the Bush administration, I fault the Bush administration for being so desperate and, frankly, stupid, by falling for it. It’s the same thing with the so-called “moderate opposition”. Most of these leaders don’t even live in Syria but live comfortable lives in Western capitals, mooching off the status of the “moderate opposition” as Syria’s Islamists get more and more radical by the day.
I know this is terribly naive, but I would want people who write about bombing countries, and especially going to war, to have served in the army first and preferably have gone to war themselves. It’s never going to happen, but we could at least get rid of the Big and Little idiots as well as hangers-ons like Brooks or Goldberg. Oh, sorry, Corporal Goldberg has served in the army. Only the Apartheid army. Maybe he gets to qualify, after all.
For Arutz Sheva.
“Hollande prepares to visit Israel, reap reward for stance on Iran
The French president will travels to Israel Tuesday for the first time since his election 18 months ago, a visit aides say will focus on the next round of talks in Geneva.
As French President Francois Hollande prepares for his first official visit as head of state to Israel and the Palestinian territories, beginning on Sunday, he is enjoying rare plaudits from unusual quarters.
France’s tough stance in talks last week between Western powers and Iran on Iran’s nuclear program, may not have been to the liking of Tehran, where the “gun-slinging” French were blamed by Fars news agency for thwarting a deal.
Western diplomats also privately expressed frustration at Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius’s refusal to endorse a deal that did not contain iron-clad guarantees on the risk of Iran developing a nuclear bomb.
But France’s uncompromising approach has also won it new friends.
“Vive la France!” U.S. Republican Senator John McCain tweeted, as the talks in Geneva ended without the interim accord that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. conservatives had preemptively labelled a “bad” deal. ”
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/1.558334
I guess the wine is flowing and french fries are just pommes frites again.
It would appear that the Russian delegation to the failed Geneva talks were only informed of a change in the agreed draft [between P5+1 and Iran] at the last minute, just as the Russian delegation was about to leave. Lavrov implies that they were forced to make a quick up or down decision on the amended draft, and did not realize the degree to which it was likely to cause the talks to fail, according to Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javed Zarif over half the original US draft was gutted and had nullified the previous understanding. US duplicity and Russian naivete, a toxic brew, http://original.antiwar.com/porter/2013/11/15/lavrov-reveals-amended-draft-circulated-at-last-moment/ and after Lavrov has complained repeatedly about Kerry talking from both sides of his mouth to different constituencies, and then there was the Libya resolution debacle.
Roger Cohen shouldn’t that be:
When the surrender monkeys are in the White House it is time to worry.
You know, since the cheese-eaters are now, in your words, “the world’s meat chomping enforcement tigers”.
FYI I’m not confident you can appeal to a young audience simply by referring to The Simpsons and talking about tigers and monkeys and brie. Dress it up how you like, hasbara is easily recognised.