Daniel Kurtzer is a big deal. He’s an Obama surrogate and a former ambassador to Egypt and Israel under Clinton and Bush II. His new book, written with Scott Lasensky of the U.S. Institute for Peace, is called Negotiating Arab-Israeli…
I’ve been having my semi-annual argument with a Jewish friend over, Whether the neocons were Jewish or not. I generally find these arguments pointless because there is an element of fear in them: my friends are nervous that Jews will…
After doing an item yesterday on Kenneth Pollack’s incredible endurance as an expert in the op-ed pages of the NY Times even after being dead wrong about Iraq, I went on the Times site and typed in the name “John…
Michael Massing (a friend of mine) has a great piece in the Columbia Journalism Review called “The War Expert,” marvelling at the fact that Brookings Institution scholar Kenneth M. Pollack still gets called up to opine in editorial pages about…
Last week two Harvard Law School professors had a fascinating debate over the Iraq war and American power. One professor was Duncan Kennedy, a pioneer in critical legal studies–i.e., a leftwinger. The other was a prof barely half his age,…
The latest issue of Commentary has a solemn black-bordered memorial to William F. Buckley Jr. as a “master” and “cherished friend” (and the magazine’s editor, John Podhoretz, offered this vaporous and largely meaningless eulogy). Buckley has also been fondly eulogized…
The Philadelphia Jewish Voice has published a fine piece by Paul Maltby, an English prof at West Chester University, that calls on the Jewish community to repudiate the neocons as a “betrayal” of Jewish values. [Jonathan] Tobin [editor of the…
On the fifth anniversary of the dreadful invasion of Iraq, the Times is doing an investigation of the mistakes. Yesterday the paper ran a long piece on the “fateful” decision in May 2003 to disband the Iraqi army, with the…
I’m trying to have more dialogues with Richard Witty because he’s a smart guy who disagrees with me, also I’m grateful that he’s come to this site overcoming his objection to a lot of stuff said here. (On a personal…