The New Republic

Good to learn the "Daily Mail has become the standard-bearer for investigative reporting." and longterm job security for "Michael Weiss is the executive director of Just Journalism, a London-based think tank that monitors the British media's coverage of Israel and the Middle East." How does Michael Weiss keep track of the double standard for Israel in the British media? Two for two for The Weekly Standard online today: "Should Israel Bomb Iran?: Better safe than sorry" BY Reuel Marc Gerecht http://weeklystandard.com/articles/should-israel-bomb-iran

- K2K

July 18, 2010 at 1:34pm

"It had been an admittedly dull news season in Albion,...." It's always a dull news season in Albion since they always find space and time to deafme Jews.

- jdyer

July 18, 2010 at 3:08pm

More tough talk from Billy Kristol and his merry band of chicken-hawks over at the Weekly Standard. K2K, didn't you tell us a few weeks ago that Billy reported that the U.S.. was going to support a U.N. censure of Israel over the Palestinian "relief" boat incident? Could it be that Little Billy was wrong again? Is Billy right about anything? War in Iraq? Nope. Domino theory where the Mid East would submit to common sense once they saw the fate of Hussein? Not even close. His war made things worse. The man who gave the world Dan Quayle is wrong again.....imagine that.

- OscarPeck

July 18, 2010 at 6:48pm

"Is Billy right about anything? War in Iraq? Nope. Domino theory where the Mid East would submit to common sense once they saw the fate of Hussein? Not even close." Some people would disagree with such a sweeping and contemptuous assessment, like Christopher Hitchens, for example: "CH: No, I don’t think they’ve all run away. I mean, there was a quite creditable book produced of people making, an anthology. I don’t, just don’t have its name in my head just right now. [I think he means this - MH.] But people from various spots in Europe and the rest of the world, and America, too, saying that we have to finish with this Saddam Hussein regime. There’s no alternative. But the fact has to be faced, that this is considered to be an almost bizarrely eccentric position now, even though, you know, Iraq now has elections, has a constitution… HH: A free press. CH: …has a free press, it has bad political parties behaving in selfish ways. It has a wonderfully functioning autonomous zone in the northeast of the country for its Kurdish minority, the first time in their history they’ve ever had anywhere to call their own. These are people who have been turned into refuse, and raw material for mass graves within very recent memory. None of this is credited…furthermore, not a small thing, by the way, we can actually certify Iraq as having been properly inspected and disarmed, which we couldn’t before, unless we took the word of Saddam Hussein. That’s not a small thing, and it’s had a good knock on effect on politics in Iran next door, and in Lebanon, and elsewhere, too. The fall of Saddam Hussein was generally very positively experienced. And I think it will be remembered as a great thing to have done. But unfortunately, the overlay of incompetence and mismanagement and bungling that followed the liberation is never going to be forgiven or forgotten. And by the way, I don’t think it should be. " http://www.hughhewitt.com/blog/g/3979a77d-720a-4853-8890-1fc4f22c23cb

- noga1

July 18, 2010 at 7:07pm

Ack, hopefully someone was fired for sloppy work on this. It only makes the Mossad's job harder next time.

- WandreyCer

July 18, 2010 at 8:01pm

noga: gotta love Hitchens. hope he survives, and helps the Kurds - they need every voice they can find these days. I expect the Obami are evaluating whether to site a permanent U.S. base in Iraqi Kurdistan due to the concerns with Turkey, and ongoing political stalemate in Iraq. oscarpeck, you have me confused with someone else (I did enjoy Elliot Abrams smackdown of Peter Beinart on Zakaria's GPS - which triggered your 1980's flashbacks - but, I enjoy anyone smacking down the hand-wringing PB full of jelly.). I read Weekly Standard on the very rare occasion a subject of interest to me pops up in a search. Did not need WS or The Spine to know the British have covered Israel and Russia use of fake passports in a totally different double-standard way. Maybe Peretz is trying to drive away the commenters deranged by their intolerance of neo-cons.

- K2K

July 18, 2010 at 8:52pm

Sure noga the world is better without Hussein. There are dozens of other dictators the world would be better off without that we could easily topple. That argument, is simply past-posting. You're giving a retrospective justification that was justified at the time on a scandalous lie. And Bill Kristol was a major propogator of those lies. I did read some of the article that K2K offered re Israel taking out the nukes. The author is clearly pro-theocracy. Look at how he says that the first Ayatollah wasn't that bad; the problem with THIS Iranian leader is that he lost his theocratic way; Iran is still above Hussein Iraq or the Soviet Union because they are grounded in the morals of theocracy. It's the same garbage we hear from these right wingers in their support of Christian theocracy here in the U.S. A very implicit, but clear, support of theocracy. We're going to have to do something about Iran. They cannot have nuclear weapons. We all know that.

- OscarPeck

July 18, 2010 at 8:53pm

Actually, the derangement is to consider neo-cons as legitimate participants in policy debate rather than as ideological fanatics who should be ignored.

- roidubouloi

July 18, 2010 at 9:05pm

Here from another thread is my discussion of the Gerecht piece that K2K so admires, to be followed by basman's. The piece is a pretty good example of the nuttiness of neo-cons. _______________________________________ Gerecht's piece is worth reading for its dishonesty. Contrary to K2Ks characterization, Gerecht is unable so support any of the claims he makes in his lede. He devotes a large section to the depth of anti-Semitism in Iran, then another section to the increasing brittleness of the Iranian regime on a shrunken base of clerical and popular support and participation. He concludes this with the rather astonishing claim that, when such brittle dictatorships are militarily challenged from outside, they are much more likely to fall than to consolidate their power and that this will more likely than not be the case in Iran if the regime were "embarrassed" by an Israel airstrike. Needless to say, he gives not a single example to support this historical claim. Can anyone think of one? I can't. Gerecht does not claim that Israel can succeed in halting the Iranian program or even venture to say how much it might be damaged. Indeed, he confesses his doubt, that the program may be so well advanced and dispersed that it is too late. His thesis, however, is that even a "half-successful" Israeli raid has the prospect of so destabilizing the Iranian regime that it falls and that this is therefore Israel's best strategic option. Note well, he does not claim that a raid will halt the program, but that the Iranian government will fall as a result. He doesn't even bother trying to explain why we should expect that the government that emerges would be any better or safer for us and Israel than the government that is there now. He than goes on to claim, without any real support, that Iran will be too timid to do any of the things that are feared (after explaining in his section about anti-Semitism that Iran has not at all been too timid to do such things in the past when it was, by his lights, even less rabidly anti-Semitic than today). He concludes with a discussion of the reasons why Iran might lose control of nukes, if it got them, to factions within the ruling clique who would be willing to use them. Also needless to say, he doesn't bother to reconcile the thesis that Iran might be sufficiently out of control to use nuclear weapons (with the likely result of its annihilation), but would not be so out of control as to engage in any of the other military/terrorist actions that he pooh-poohs, even as, he claims, the regime is crumbling. Amazing to me that just because a guy has history with the CIA and is set up in a right-wing think tank, he can spout so much complete nonsense and not be laughed out of the room. But then, given the nonsense that the right spouts in public every day, I should have learned by now.

- roidubouloi

July 18, 2010 at 9:08pm

Posted by basman on another thread: ______________ I, too, found one of the essential pivots of Gerecht’s argument shaky, to say the least: that a hobbling attack on Iran’s program will likely weaken, or bring down the regime and, to add to that, embolden democratic forces in Iran. That cannot be I imagine, because I can’t know, part of the risk calculus by Israeli policy makers. The ability of Israel to hobble Iran’s program is ambivalently dealt with by Gerecht. His essay is premised on such capability though he does not venture any opinion on that: “Provided the Israeli air force is capable of executing it, and assuming no U.S. military action, an Israeli bombardment remains the only conceivable means of derailing or seriously delaying Iran’s nuclear program and—equally important—traumatizing Tehran.” Gerecht hedges on this point somewhat by lauding the efficacy of a half successful campaign what I find an odd bit of analysis: “Any halfway successful Israeli raid could transform the Western approach to the Islamic Republic. An Israeli strike could finally prompt the Western powers to think in concrete terms about what it would mean to allow the Revolutionary Guard Corps nukes.” I don’t know what Gerecht means by a half way successful campaign because he does not spell out the criteria measuring degrees of success. But it strikes me that what he’s really, at bottom, saying is that any raid at all—which will for a certainty do some damage to Iran’s program—*could* prove salutary by possibly causing the West to think hard and concretely about what it means for the R.G. to have nuclear weapons. So some problems I find here are: 1.The reference to half successful gives away his argument. That argument is ostensibly premised on the precondition of Israeli militarily capability, but “half successful” renders that qualifying assumption moot. 2. The hedging reference to “could finally prompt” is an awfully fragile and contingent benefit for Gerecht’s dramatic prescription, now, arguably, by his own words, no longer premised on necessary Israeli military capability. 3. Reinforcing that contingent “could” is the plain fact that he, we, have no way of knowing what a raid will prompt Western Powers to think. So contingency and speculation team up to undermine the argument for this benefit. It’s at least just as likely that Iran is pragmatic enough simply to take revenge on Israel for such a raid, and not touch the U.S. for fear of American reprisal, and the Western powers, furious with Israel’s unauthorized raid, will leave to reap its own created whirlwind. So again, I can’t imagine, this fanciful benefit being part of Israeli cost benefit reckoning. 4. Further the articulation of this benefit presumes that America has not thought “...hard and concretely about what it means for the R.G. to have nuclear weapons.” Who is to say so and who is to doubt that it has and is approaching the problem by its own best lights. After all as Gerecht himself says: “The great merit of the Bush and Obama administrations’ efforts to engage Iran in nuclear negotiations is that they have transformed the discussion about the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program. The West bent over backwards to be nice to Tehran, to extend carrots rather than sticks. The slow ramping up of Western sanctions has also forced all concerned to be more explicit about the Iranian menace.” The talk about the benefits of a half successful raid suggests to me a certain tendentiousness in Gerecht. He really doesn’t care if what Israeli military capability can do: he wants an attack. Here is for me, and for him too, his “money quote”: “Without a raid, if the Iranians get the bomb, Europe’s appeasement reflex will kick in and the EU sanctions regime will collapse, leaving the Americans alone to contain the Islamic Republic. Most of the Gulf Arabs will probably kowtow to Persia, having more fear of Iran than confidence in the defensive assurances of the United States. And Sunni Arabs who don’t view an Iranian bomb as a plus for the Muslim world will, at daunting speed, become much more interested in “nuclear energy”; the Saudis, who likely helped Islamabad go nuclear, will just call in their chits with the Pakistani military.” Tellingly, he next goes on to ask the question, “So then, does the Israeli air force think it can do it?” but then drifts off into a non answer about what Jeffrey Goldberg observes about Netanyahu and his historian father, and gives his real indifference to that answer away with his too casual comment: “Israeli hawks may be wrong about what their air force can do, but they express sentiments—where there is a will, there is a way—that most Israelis probably still share.” I find this kind of shaky, speculative, deeply contingent, presuming and tendentious argument pervades Gerecht’s way too many words. There is, of course, a sober and terrible question to be answered by Israel at the core of his essay: whither strategic patience. But, in my opinion, Gerecht’s rehearsing of the case for an attack is flawed and the bits I have pointed out, as I see them, are of a piece with what’s wrong with what he wrote.

- roidubouloi

July 18, 2010 at 9:12pm

It is sad to see allegedly educated people get so confused by my passing along links to essays about nuclear Iran that the confused see "characterizations" or "endorsements" where there are none, as if it is a heinous crime to think someone else might want to read different points of view on a very serious issue. Contrary to the confused commenters, I first noted on July 16 the URL for anyone interested in the subject of nuclear Iran, the liberal Walter Russell Mead's "Nuking Westphalia", and then 07/18/2010 - 10:17am EDT | K2K just posted online: "Should Israel Bomb Iran?: Better safe than sorry" BY Reuel Marc Gerecht [copied introduction] [added: Gerecht's remaining 7,000 words are a methodical analysis of each of these scenarios, starting with "Anti-Semitism run amok"] Just read Joe Klein's July 15 Time magazine article "An Attack on Iran: Back on the Table" how very confusing to read CENTCOM has firm plans.

- K2K

July 18, 2010 at 9:48pm

the necessity of transplanting comments from other threads 07/18/2010 - 8:46am EDT | K2K basman on the terroroid: "arguing for the sake of arguing and for other mysterious reasons, best known to yourself, I can't fathom and, finally, don't care about." my casual observation is that roid is a big yawn of a word terrorist, a Terroroid. The Terroroid deploys various propaganda techniques in his compulsive mission to disrupt The Spine, the alleged redoubt of neo-cons in his conspiracy-wracked brain. The Terroroid uses a pattern of posting consecutive attack comments in order to derail any dialog between other commenters. When the Terroroid escapes his restraints, and, if I am in a counter-terroroidism mood and unwilling to waste time to use other counter-terroroidism techniques, posting anything George Orwell wrote about any propaganda technique will compel the Terroroid to a flaccid counter-attack.

- K2K

July 18, 2010 at 9:53pm

"It is sad to see allegedly educated people get so confused by my passing along links to essays about nuclear Iran that the confused see "characterizations" or "endorsements" where there are none, as if it is a heinous crime to think someone else might want to read different points of view on a very serious issue." Now K2K, you did describe the Weekly Standard as "two for two"....that suggests two articles, and two winners. Maybe that's not what you meant, but it's a reasonable interpretation. If it comes to a point that Iran's facilities need to be bombed, it is the U.S. that has to do it. Well, it doesn't have to be the U.S. I suppose, but it can't be Israel. The U.S. will get the support of all of our friends in the mid east before it's done. And that is key. Just as it was for the successful Iraq War in which we went in for a legitimate purpose, took care of business, and got out.

- OscarPeck

July 18, 2010 at 10:46pm

"Gerecht's remaining 7,000 words are a methodical analysis of each of these scenarios" Except that they are nothing of the kind, not methodical and not analysis, as is obvious if one but reads the piece.

- roidubouloi

July 18, 2010 at 11:11pm

It is highly unlikely that Israel has the technical means to do major damage to Iran's nuclear program (without itself using nuclear weapons). You just cannot carry that kind of ordinance on an F-16. It would require cruise missiles, smart bombs, and heavy bombers, B-1, B-2, B-52. Not even clear that the US has the means, but the difference in capability in this regard is huge. However, as even Gerecht points out, the only peaceful means of achieving the goal is by interdiction of Iran's oil and gas. I find it fairly remarkable that we would even consider the bombing option first. You can un-interdict. You cannot un-bomb.

- roidubouloi

July 18, 2010 at 11:19pm

Not to mention that K2K linked to Gerecht's article on three different threads. Must be because he hates it. I think it is because he didn't read it or, if he read it, didn't understand it. And I don't even have to copy from another thread to point that out.

- roidubouloi

July 18, 2010 at 11:21pm

oscarpeck, my apology, what I meant by "two for two" was two articles in one day worth reading from Weekly Standard when I rarely find two worth reading in a month as I tend to read news reporting, not propaganda or opinion. Nuclear Iran and Greater Kurdistan are of particular interest, so I include more points of view. "the successful Iraq War'. yes, the good old days of the First Gulf War. That was the last year the United States had an international trade surplus, because the Saudis, and maybe a few other countries, actually reimbursed the U.S. for the military costs. We should have continued to be mercenaries. The Landgrave of Hesse became the richest ruler in 18th century Europe from selling his Hessian subjects as soldiers to the British.

- K2K

July 18, 2010 at 11:40pm

U.S. B52s and B2s are based on Diego Garcia. keeping track of other assets is what keeps everyone guessing, but glad our Marines had a nice steak bar-be-que in Bahrain on July 4.

- K2K

July 18, 2010 at 11:47pm

Weekly Standard article was gibberish. When in doubt blame THe Guardian for another shabby job. It did not refute the fact that Mossad assassinated in Dubai a Hamas official(?) of little consequence, one of many, and used fake passports of an ally. That makes Mossad in fact a terrorrist type organization and with the possibility taht regular Israelis (those not affiliated with Mossad) more suspect to searches like all other people from Middle East. Would Israelis be any different?

- NR027810

July 19, 2010 at 12:39pm

The article wasn't meant to refute the story. It was meant to demonstrate the double standard practiced by the media and political . As for "a Hamas official(?) of little consequence, one of many, " I don't know that you are right. Why would the Mossad send 26 operatives (if I understood correctly) into hostile territory known to be covered by security cameras every five meters or so if the target was of such little consequence as you would have us believe? "According to his aide, Al-Mabhouh was involved in the 1989 abduction and murder of two Israeli soldiers, Avi Sasportas and Ilan Sa'adon, whose murders he celebrated by standing on one of the corpses.[4][13] In a video taped two weeks before his death, and broadcast on Al-Jazeera in early February, Mabhouh admitted his involvement, saying he had disguised himself as an Orthodox Jew.[14][15] In May 1989, a failed attempt was made to arrest him for his involvement in the murder of the two Israeli soldiers and he subsequently left the Gaza Strip; his home in Gaza was demolished by Israel in 1989 as retribution for the attack.[16] According to a report in The Palestine Chronicle, al-Mabhouh had survived two assassination attempts; the first was a car bombing; the second took place in Beirut in 2009 and involved the use of poison which rendered him unconscious for 30 hours.[17] Al-Mabhouh was believed by Israel to have been involved in smuggling weapons and explosives into Gaza.[1] He spent most of 2003 in an Egyptian jail.[10] He had been arrested and released several times by Israel. At the time of his death, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was wanted by the Israeli, Egyptian and Jordanian governments,[10] and living in Syria.[18] In recent years, Mabhouh is alleged to have played a key role in forging secret connections between the Hamas government in Gaza and the Al-Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guards in Iran.[5]" (wiki)

- noga1

July 19, 2010 at 8:43pm

noga: "The article wasn't meant to refute the story. It was meant to demonstrate the double standard practiced by the media" yes, at least one Irish voice raised the same point. http://www irishcentral.com/story/news/periscope/irish-should-expel-russian-diplomat-after-spy-passport-fraud-97840754.html (noticed by Goldblog, but, before one gets ones hope up that maybe the media is noticing the double standard, read the comments) TNR's spam filter really objects to this URL! re-insert the .

- K2K

July 20, 2010 at 12:45am

I still wonder why it would take 26 field operatives for any hit.

- K2K

July 20, 2010 at 12:49am

"I still wonder why it would take 26 field operatives for any hit." There were two previous attempts that failed. This time they wanted to make sure, I guess, that nothing would go wrong.

- noga1

July 20, 2010 at 7:34am