In the flurry over ObamaCare’s collapse, some have lost sight of a more serious and far-reaching failure by Obama. This report from Time‘s Massimo Calabresi observes that in addition to “his party’s loss of Ted Kennedy’s seat in Massachusetts, the collapse of health care reform and a disorganized war against the banks,” Obama has a really big foreign-policy problem: his Iran policy is an abject failure. Engagement was supposed to wean the mullahs off their nukes, or at least demonstrate to recalcitrant powers like Russia and China that we had exhausted all reasonable options so we could proceed with those crippling sanctions. Calabresi asks: “So, how’s that working? Not very well, by all indications.” Not well at all.
We’ve blown through deadline after deadline. No progress has been made in rounding up support, even as Iran snubbed the West and murdered its own people. The Russians and Chinese still oppose sanctions:
But where Russia had previously taken the lead in blocking sanctions efforts, that role has now fallen to China, which has a rapidly growing stake in Iran’s energy sector. … Without China, which holds a Security Council veto, there is no prospect of meaningful sanctions at the U.N. That in turn means difficulty getting tough sanctions from all the European countries, some of whom can’t act without U.N. approval.
Meanwhile, the Obami are watering down the “crippling” sanctions before we even get to the process of negotiating with “our” side and/or the UN. And then, even if we did get some consensus on mild pinpricks, we’d have to roll them out, implement them, and see if they were “working.” But frankly, we’re not likely to get an agreement on anything worth implementing, even after all that genuflecting to the Chinese. The end result:
Now Obama faces the unpleasant reality that neither the engagement track nor the sanctions track appear to be going anywhere. His defenders at home and abroad say it was the right way to proceed, but skeptics of Obama’s policy are emerging, even in his own party. “What exactly did your year of engagement get you?” asks a Hill Democrat.
Good question: what did we get? Well the mullahs got time to consolidate their grip on the throats of the Iranian people while gaining some international legitimacy. The Iranian protesters got their funding cut and saw the United States go practically mute when it might have mattered the most. The U.S. seems only to have frittered away its moral standing in the world. What we got was another year in which Iran moved closer to membership in the international nuclear-arms club.
Compared to this, health care has been a triumph. But unlike harebrained domestic schemes, getting nowhere is not good enough when dealing with a revolutionary Islamic state bent on acquiring nuclear arms. Both the United States and Israel will soon be confronted with the choice that Obama’s policy was designed to avoid: engage in military action or live with a nuclear-armed Iran. (Who among us seriously thinks Obama won’t be inclined to do the latter?) Obama’s Iran-engagement strategy, among a host of misguided efforts and half-baked ideas, is arguably the most egregious policy failure of his first year. It certainly is the most dangerous.
Unable to break the confinements of interiority, I can’t begin to comment on who Wieseltier’s fortunately-escaped friend might be. But I can, and will, rejoice in not being parochial thereby.
I have no idea who he is. I can’t hazard a guess. Nor can I guess, as of an hour or so ago, what Contentions stands for. A very pro-Israel piece about Palestinian lesbians appeared between 11 and 12 AM today. It has vanished. I can’t for the life of me imagine why. Is Contentions no longer pro-Israel?
Well, the notion that theater critic turned NY Times op-ed columnist Frank Rich has ever had anything interesting or important to say is something of a depressing joke.
Palestinian lesbians!? And I missed it?
A day without Palestinian lesbians is a day without the call of brilliant argument.
#2 and 4 Yes, the vanishing “Palestinian Lesbians” is the far more interesting story here. I saw it, too, but had to feed horses…intending to read it as soon as I could. Conspiracy theories, closet racism, postings from (????) paid Hamas bloggers. I love this place!
Steven from Indiana
Leon Wieseltier used to possess a few brain cells. He brilliantly took to task the silliness of Cornel West. Alas, Wieseltier is now something of a post modernist. He also has this thing concerning anal sex:
“I think it might be a small masterpiece of erotic writing,” Mr. Wieseltier said in a phone interview. “I admired its lucidity, the tone is true and unsentimental, and it’s so natural—the explicitness is so completely unaffected. It’s not a cold book, but it’s not a moist book. In a funny sort of way, you come away with a feeling more for Toni’s mind than for Toni’s body. I had a feeling of regret when I read it, that it fell to Judith Regan to publish it. I miss the austerity of the old Olympia Press. I miss the days when pornography used to be published austerely.”
Is The Surrender pornography, then? “I fear that her publisher thinks it might be pornography,” Mr. Wieseltier said sharply. “It’s not pornographic at all. It’s an account of an experience, not an account of a pleasure or an account of a sin or an account of a crime. ‘Serious writing about sex’ is what I’d call it.
“It’s a miracle that a trade publisher did this at all,” he added. “Other New York publishers were simply cowards.”
http://www.tonibentley.com/pages/surrender_pages/surrender-observer.html
Let’s face it, Wieseltier is a very weird guy. He also represents the decline of The New Republic.
This is why the publication is so dangerous. Far too many people support Barack “Barry” Obama because they trust the opinions of Marty Peretz and Leon Wieseltier.
“A very pro-Israel piece about Palestinian lesbians appeared between 11 and 12 AM today. It has vanished. I can’t for the life of me imagine why.”
I am also bewildered. What happened?
Vanishing lesbians and anal sex aside, as to the NYT op-ed, we should also keep in mind that we’re dealing with THE NEW REPUBLIC here. We may need an eight month investigation and 115-page essay by Franklin Foer that finally reveals it wasn’t the NYT the essay was referring to, but rather a web-site; not an op-ed, but a blog post; and that Leon Wieseltier doesn’t actually “care deeply” about anything and furthermore has no friends.
“When Wittgenstein reached the conclusion that “whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent,”
Ludwig Wittgenstein was a very strange guy. He also said a lot of dumb things. We are not obligated to be silent when discussing matter such as God, life after death, and other speculations concerning a possible spiritual realm. We must simply realize that they are not empirically verifiable one way or another.
I should also quickly add that Wittgenstein had the added advantage of having a “foreign sounding last name.” If were a Ludwig Jones or a Ludwig Smith—we might not have ever heard of him. Wittgenstein sound so intellectual. People are often impressed by the very fact that one can pronounce it without any difficulty.
How does Wittgenstein justify his overweening conceit with such boring and self indulgent writing? He doesn’t need to shut up, because nobody reads his crap anyway.
Admit it, Podhoretz: you didn’t make it through all 1,143 words of his op-ed, did you? I doubt you even tried. His empty soliloquy reads like a journalistic version of preening in the mirror. “I’m such a pretty, pretty girl!” He’s probably blowing himself kisses right now.
As the Marquis de Condorcet said of Poor Richard’s Almanac, so of Wieseltier’s essay: it is that sort of “unique work in which one cannot help recognize the superior man without it being possible to cite a single passage where he allows his superiority to be perceived.”
As the Marquis de Condorcet said of Poor Richard’s Almanac, so of Wieseltier’s essay: it is that sort of “unique work in which one cannot help recognize the superior man without it being possible to cite a single passage where he allows his superiority to be perceived.”
Yes, I said the same thing to the plumber the other day.
$200 for a clogged drain?
The essay he’s talking about has to be Jeffrey Goldberg’s new York Times op-ed about Israel from two weeks ago. I have no inside information, but that has to be it. As Max Boot pointed out on Contentions, Goldberg ended up making part of the Walt-Mearsheimer argument about Aipac being bad for Israel — despite the fact that Goldberg trashed the Walt-Mearsheimer book in Wieseltier’s pages in the The New Republic. I wish I could see the emails between Goldberg and Wieseltier from the week following Goldberg’s op-ed.
How did that work out for you, SteveMG? It’s been my experience that the delicate irony of French logic is lost on plumbers, contractors, waiters in French restaurants, and even French professors.
In those situations, I prefer the Buddhist koans of Coach Mike Ditka, one of which seems fitting for Wieseltier’s essay: “That’s a two pound lump of [crap] in a one pound sack.”
And next time, for Pete’s sake, use Draino.
Perhaps the NYT ref was misdirection. LW mentions being in Jerusalem last week… I like to think that he is referring to the mind-boggling op-ed by Larry Derfner appearing in the May 28 issue of the Jerusalem Post, titled “Rattling the Cage: Al-Dura and the conspiracy freaks.” It marks a new low in the decline of reasoned discourse. See http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1211872839035&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FPrinter
The Derfner piece is indeed a shocking piece of illogic.
I canceled my subscription to the New Republic over the Franklin Foer investigation and a similar illogical attempt at cover-up.
My original reason for subscribing to TNR was to read Wieseltier. At some point he became as illogical as Derfner and Foer and no effort to understand his reasoning was worthwhile any longer.
Time for the rest of you to give up on Wieseltier. He has succumbed to ideological derangement.
It took 15 comments to get to the answer! (At least the answer I figure is correct.)