The Middle East Interest

By Jeremy Ben-Ami

Six decades ago, my father fought alongside Menachem Begin for Israel’s independence. If you’d have told him back then that politicians in the world’s last superpower would be jockeying today to see who can be more “pro-Israel,” he would have laughed at you. Grateful as I am for decades of U.S. friendship to Israel, I have to wonder, as the state my father helped found turns 60, just who is defining what it means to be pro-Israel in the United States these days. [read on]

img: Darrow

Sally Quinn nails it in a brutally candid post that lays bare the true politics of association in an alleged feminist’s career:

“You don’t choose your family but you choose what church you want to attend,” she said. But you do choose your husband.

She chose Bill Clinton. And she has not gotten up and moved.

Instead, she has enabled him over the last 32 years of their marriage, not only standing by him, denying what she knew about his womanizing and trying to delegitimize those who told the truth about it…

About one girlfriend, Connie Hamzy, she said,,”We have to destroy her story.”

About Gennifer Flowers she denied the story even after having a tape played on television about it. It was “attack the motives and the details,”said former Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Myers to Sally Bedell Smith, author of “For Love of Politics” (ever wonder why so many former Clintonites are not supporting her or are actively supporting Obama? And what about Senate colleagues?). He was accused of sexually harassing Kathleen Willey. He was accused of rape by Juanita Broadrick, exposed himself to Paula Jones and finally had a sexual relationship with a 21 year old White House intern, a few years older than his own daughter…

Hillary did not get up and move.

Thanks, Sally. [The Daily Dish]

Hitchens tells a story about the time that the newly appointed Iraqi president, Jalal Talabani, first came to Washington, and stayed in a wing of the White House, along with other members of his administration and various figures—Kurdish, Shia and Sunni—who had participated in the movement to topple Saddam. Hitchens was invited to a reception there. “And at one point,” he says, “we were all babbling, and Talabani said that whenever he’d quarrelled with Paul Bremer, which he often did, Bremer would says ‘that’s just your Marxist training coming out again.’ There was a pause. And then Talabani remarked, ‘I wonder if President Bush knows how many Marxists he has under his roof this evening?’”

Hitchens replied that Bush probably didn’t have the faintest idea, but that if he did, he probably wouldn’t mind. Because at least it was an assurance of a group defined by something other than religious sectarianism. (Hitchens does not see any aspect of Bush’s foreign policy as being forged out of his own Christianity.)

“Their Marxism was very different from mine,” Hitchens clarifies. “There was much more Maoist stuff—third-worldism, Castroism—in the background. Still, that was a great moment, and everybody saw the joke.” [read on]

Fareed Zakaria discusses his new book “The Post American World” at TPM Cafe, in which he poses questions he says are “fundamental to our understanding of American foreign policy.”

Zakaria asserts that although the world is in a relatively peaceful period, the United States “[has] done a great job of scaring the hell out of people.” He adds, “my fear is that the United States continues to have a maximalist view of international security - which sees any deviation from what we want - as evidence of evil. [via: The POMED Wire]

img: Frazer Hudson

by Alex Beam

What if they decided to pursue the Arab-Israeli conflict by other means? Inevitably, it would take place on the Internet. And inevitably Wikipedia would be involved.

In what was probably not a very smart idea, Gilead Ini, a senior research analyst for Camera, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, put out an e-mail call for 10 volunteers “to help us keep Israel-related entries on Wikipedia from becoming tainted by anti-Israel editors.” (Basically, anyone with a Web browser can edit articles on Wikipedia, which wreaks havoc with the site’s treatment of controversial topics like evolution, Bill Clinton, or the Middle East.) More than 50 sympathizers answered the call, and Ini put his campaign into motion. [read on]

In her book, Freedom’s Unsteady March, Tamara Cofman Wittes argues that democratic reform in the Arab world is neither a luxury nor a pipe dream, but a necessity, an essential component of any strategy to achieve long-term American goals in that critical region:

“A proper understanding of America’s role and its limits is necessary to transform a comfortable and only-when-convenient idealism into a sustainable and effective policy. A hard-headed framework for making unavoidable choices about how and when to press for democratic change is necessary to prevent the freedom strategy from being abandoned as impractical when such choices emerge. Think of this book as a realist’s argument for democracy promotion in the Middle East and a guidebook for making the choices that a realistic strategy demands.” From Chapter One

img: Paul Slater

via: Mark Nickolas’ Blog

File this one away:

Senator Obama and Senator Clinton want to set a date for withdraw. That’s what they want to do is get everybody out. I believe that would lead to catastrophe and chaos and that we would have the whole region including the whole region and the country in such turmoil that we would be required to come back to the region. And I just want to promise you this. My friends, I will have an energy policy that we will be talking about, which will eliminate our dependence on oil from the Middle East that will - that will then prevent us - that will prevent us from having ever to send our young men and women into conflict again in the Middle East.

–John McCain during remarks at event in Denver today.

Here it is:

img: Sam Hadley

by Fouad Ajami

We needn’t give credence to the idea of a vast “Shiite crescent” stretching from Iran to Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon to appreciate the challenge posed by the Iranian theocrats to the American project in Iraq and to the order of that Greater Middle East. These are crafty players, the men who rule that radical realm. The networks of terror they have at their disposal have a way of overlooking the fine distinctions of theology and politics. In its struggle for primacy in the habitat around it, Iran is not a Shiite power per se: It aids and abets a Shiite-armed movement in Lebanon and also works with the Sunni die-hards of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the Palestinian territories. [read on]