I missed this. Last month Fareed Zakaria in the Washington Post assailed the New Republic for publishing John McCain, urging a violent revolution in Iran with our complicity of course– or rather, in the new neocon trope– by "unleash[ing] America’s full moral power" to topple the Tehran regime.
Zakaria said it was a fantasy to believe that such ideas worked out well. And you can tell he is talking about an ultra-Zionist agenda in singling out neocons Reuel Marc Gerecht and Bret Stephens and quoting lines on the "gushing wound" of Palestine (from Akbar Ganji’s recent speech, at an awards ceremony in which Zakaria played a part).
Well, who has responded to Zakaria but the New Republic’s Leon Wieseltier himself, of course in the pages of the Washington Post, carte blanche, where he tries to style violent adventurism "realism." Wieseltier’s labors here, as well as McCain’s original piece, are signs of desperation. He knows that the maximalist vision of Israel that he inherited from his Jabotinskyite father and seems never to have reexamined is passing by. The literary editor used to leave the brutal high-altitude foreign policy stuff to his bombardiers, but it seems that they have largely walked away from the hangar. Beinart for instance.
