Mondoweiss

Roadmap's offspring: Iraq war. And the settlement freeze's?

The Times of London is reporting that the west and Israel are moving toward a deal in which Israel makes concessions on the alleged peace process and is given the green light to attack Iran within a year.
"Urgent!!!" writes Mohammad of Vancouver. "When are you going to address this. It is getting louder and louder. What deal?" Then this prescient awful thought: "This is the rerun of the Roadmap and the Iraq War."

'Birthright' trip provider: Iraq war was 'great for Israel'

Excellent reporting in the New York Jewish Week on a "divorce" in the birthright program that provides free trips to Israel for American Jews, 26 and under. Gone is Shlomo "Momo" Lifshitz, the largest Israeli provider of the trips, through his organization, Oranim Birthright, who promoted the marital and rightwing political aspects of the trip too hard:

 “Oranim’s  ‘honeymoon package’ and emphasis on ‘making Jewish babies’ commit a cultural faux pas that carries the potential to damage Birthright’s image in the U.S.,” said Ruth Stein, who attended an Oranim trip in June 2007. “Such ‘religious’ choices are regarded as private matters that are none of anybody’s business.

“Momo’s lectures on the unsurpassed beauty of Jewish women, among other topics,” continued Stein, “are especially risky given the trip’s reputation as a secular option for non-religious Jews.”...
“The right-wing perspectives presented were rather unsettling, and the indoctrination was unappealing,” said a 23-year-old 2005 Oranim trip participant, who requested to remain anonymous due to his work at an American Jewish organization. “[Momo] spoke to our group, saying, ‘Some people say the Iraq war was good for Israel. Wrong. The Iraq war was great for Israel,’ representing a rather astonishingly narrow viewpoint.”

Gabriel Schoenfeld is following us on Twitter, giving me a morning-- uh, brainwave

From The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, June 16, 1895:

I was indifferent to my Jewishness; let us say that it was beneath the level of my awareness. But just as anti-Semitism forces the half-hearted, cowardly, and self-seeking Jews into the arms of Christianity, it powerfully forced my Jewishness to the surface. This has nothing to do with affected religiosity.

Recently neocons Eli Lake and Gabriel ("That is why Iraq is such an important cause") Schoenfeld started following us on Twitter. Guys, if you substitute neoconservatism for anti-Semitism in Herzl's formulation (and the Bush Administration for Christianity), you find me--a happily-assimilating, intermarried Jew (and like Herzl, a feature-writer) who discovered the rock of his Jewishness when you guys pushed my country to incinerate an Arab society in the name of democracy and the sanctity of Israeli occupation.
Tell me, Why shouldn't Herzl, a political visionary if ever there was one, be a role model to young integrated American Jews? Why shouldn't they respond to the real conditions of their lives, as he did when he confronted anti-Semitism, by consulting their Jewishness and coming up with new political ideas for the Middle East to replace your blueprint for permanent war?

His resume featured 'millions' of deaths, still McNamara retained stature. Why?

Steve Walt eulogizes McNamara. This one's hard to excerpt:

Neocons-- read McNamara's obit. Reread. Again. Repeat, for 40 years

I keep meaning to do a post on Robert McNamara's very long persecuted old age and what that example holds for the neoconservatives, who if Richard Perle keeps his lipids down in the south of France, and Elliott Abrams gets ahold of his blood pressure, face an unending groundhogs day of roasting conscience over the Iraq error. Scott McConnell beat me to it:

I am always somewhat interested in the amount of angst the Vietnam war caused Robert McNamara-- though he never could quite unambiguously  admit he was a key originator of tragic bloody mistake.
Regrets over Vietnam  was a major factor in the final decomposition of the Wasp establishment--those men who had supported the war lost their faith in it, and in many cases found it breaking their  their relationships with their sons and daughters, even their marriages.  Out of it grew an ambivalence about power which the neocons soon capitalized upon--harping on the Wasp "failure of nerve" and presenting themselves as tough-minded enough to lead America during a seemingly dangerous passage of the Cold War. It was an attractive posture--or it certainly seemed attractive to me when I was twenty five or so.
I wonder if Paul Wolfowitz suffers from the same sleepless nights.  I doubt it, but don't rule it out entirely.  I'm unaware of any major  "second thoughts"  from the neocons over Iraq, though Lawrence Kaplan has written the war was a  mistake, and reached out to some antiwar writers (Andy Bacevich, me) in the magazine he edits, World Affairs.

'Morally, we are what we do, not what we say we meant' (Bromwich)

I did a post yesterday, in the moment, foolishly giving Obama a break, prospectively, if Israel is to bomb Iran. Two of my intellectual betters demurred. Jack Ross:

I'm closer to Antony Loewenstein than to you on this one.  If it happened, Obama's responsibility would depend on how one defined the word; what might matter more is how he responded after the fact. Biden was just trying to speak diplomatese and doing badly, with Mullen coming in to do it better.  As a rule in all things, I totally don't get why a large section of the media, especially on the right, jumps up and down hysterically whenever Biden has a senior moment.

David Bromwich:

If Obama commands or consents to the bombing of Iran, he is responsible. Moral judgment is only intelligible as moral if you infer the motive from the action. You can't read in the motive you are comfortable with "against the very grain of" actions. That way lies a no-fault system of self-justification. It is the same argument the apologists for the Iraq war use to justify Bush. (Obama in Iran, of course, would be not a whit less guilty than Bush in Iraq, who also had the lobby to contend with). A version of the same argument has been offered by willfully sympathetic liberals to palliate the monstrous acts ordered by Cheney, Addington, Haynes, etc., on the ground that these men did what they did out of a "deep concern for their country." Obama unhappily is one of the people who have spoken that excuse for them. But, morally, we are what we do--not what we say we meant. And this must hold so long as moral identity has any meaning. If I do a thing but later say that I did not mean to and would have preferred not to, the person who extends his approval to me for my good intentions has drained the word "I" of all meaning.

Washington Post reporter Tom Ricks describes paper's unreconstructed neocon op-ed page as 'insane'

How has the internet liberated journalists? Tom Ricks works at the Washington Post. He also has perches at Foreign Policy and some thinktank. Here a genius post at Foreign Policy about the Post op-ed page titled, Stop the Insanity! In its entirety (Ricks understands the attention span of the internet).

Hardly a day goes by without the op-ed page of the Washington Post carrying an article by a veteran of the Bush Administration holding forth on foreign policy. Michael Gerson, a former Bush speechwriter and policy advisor, even has a regular columnist gig. And today Yosemite Sam [evidently a snarky reference to John Bolton's mustache] advocates bombing Iran. It's as if in 1969, the people who brought us to disaster in Vietnam were constantly writing on how to build on their success-and expand the war to Thailand, Malaysia, and Burma. 

P.S. Note that Foreign Policy blog is part of the Slate Group, which is part of the Washington Post. Sophisticated media.

'Forward' piece touches on dual loyalty as motivator for Iraq war

The best line in Nathan Guttman's piece in the Forward about the Justice Department's effort to prove that a pro-Israel spy ring was operating inside the Pentagon, AIPAC and the Israeli Embassy came from Steve Rosen, the former AIPAC lobbyist whose indictment on espionage charges the Justice Department recently dropped.

In 2003 the Justice Department stung Rosen. Here is how it went down. The feds had flipped a Pentagon analyst named Larry Franklin, who had been passing along secrets to Rosen and fellow AIPAC'er Keith Weissman. And in June 2003 they gave Franklin a fake cable saying that Israeli agents in Kurdistan were in mortal danger. Franklin brought the paper to Weissman at a restaurant. Weissman went back to AIPAC. Rosen promptly told an Israeli diplomat. 

Franklin told the Forward that the AIPAC guys' actions crossed a line. The Forward got in touch with Rosen, who bridled.

"Franklin did not expect us to warn the Israelis that they would be kidnapped and killed? That’s like telling officials of the NAACP that there is going to be a lynching, but don’t warn the victims, because it is a secret.”

Obama vs Gelb=democracy vs covert war

In a piece in the forthcoming New York Review of Books, David Bromwich creatively opposes the post-colonial credo of Obama in his Cairo speech to a book by Leslie Gelb of the Council of Foreign Relations, which mingles the best-and-the-brightest and Machiavelli. Excerpts:

Obama spoke at the end about the general good of democracy: his predecessor's favorite and almost his only theme. Advocates of democracy ought to maintain their support for freedom even when they gain power. As for religious freedom, its sincerity is not measured by a rejection of other people's faith. And women's rights are not to be confused with the approval or discountenancing of an orthodox custom...

To Cairo, and then to Gaza, I hope

I'm off to Cairo later today, and then on to Gaza, I hope. Thanks to the generous support of readers of this site. I'll be in Cairo when my president gets there, next month.