Find a happy place.  Find a happy place.  Alternatively, you can just  channel David Lee Roth, circa 1988’s “Just Like Paradise.”  And you don’t want to go home, baby, particularly if you’re trying to run Israel:

An atmosphere of permanent crisis has surrounded Netanyahu’s bureau ever since he took office.

While other blogs have focused on Netanyahu’s poor choice of words for some of Obama’s most senior advisers (he called Rahm and Alexrod “self-hating Jews”), I think the much, much igger story is about the disarray within Netanyahu’s cabinet and the PM’s questionable decision-making:

[I]t is clear that all of Netanyahu’s aides dislike each other: They are constantly badmouthing each other and blaming each other for leaks. [National Security Adviser] Arad, for example, demanded that Hauser undergo a lie-detector test and is now demanding the same of [PR chief] Hefetz. And the latter two say “it is impossible to work with” Arad.

Compounding the problem is an inexperienced bureau chief, Natan Eshel, and a former spokesman, Yossi Levy, who is still clinging to his office and refusing to give it up to his replacement, Hefetz - who, for his part, is kept out of half the discussions.

Netanyahu appears to be suffering from confusion and paranoia. He is convinced that the media are after him, that his aides are leaking information against him and that the American administration wants him out of office. Two months after his visit to Washington, he is still finding it difficult to communication normally with the White House.

Or as one anonymous senior Israeli minister put it, “it [is] very difficult to work with the premier. “He drives us mad,” the minister said. “Every minute things change, and I am constantly busy doing maintenance on Netanyahu.”

Have you heard that Obama’s foreign policy is in crisis?  Yup, sure is.  A few things haven’t gone his way, and the wheels have come off everything.  It’s terrible.  The world’s end is nigh.

Or think of it this way:

From the tropical gulags of Cuba to the now-blood stained streets of Tehran, from the festering sore of human despair in Pyongyang to the tin pot dictatorship that is Venezuela, the president has held fast to the notion that totalitarian government is the product of a failure to communicate. Sit down with the mullahs, understand the plight of the Castro brothers, and sympathize with the psychic trauma of Kim Jong Il’s quest to find the perfect gray pantsuit, and the dictatorial urge will wither. This is Obama as idealistic undergraduate - the man who sees four sides to every triangle.

If there was a way to imitate the sound of a needle scratching off a record, insert it here.  In short, drivel like this is a felony of intellectual laziness.

Criticizing Obama’s foreign policy reads from this script:  Obama wants to talk to the world.  But, the world is a mean place and bad things continue to happen.  Yet Obama still insists on talking.  He’s naive, weak, and doesn’t understand how the world really works.  If Obama was really tough, he’d refuse to deal with those despots and stand strong in the cause for American Freedom.  And Obama’s a pansy.  Did we mention that?

Nevermind that is precisely the highly-flawed brand of foreign policy “intellectualism” that brought you such star-studded soirees like “The Iraq War”, “The Axis of Evil,” and “The Insurgency That Is In Its Last Throes”.  It’s the kind of detached-from-reality thinking that wantonly ignores the world as it is, preferring to stand puff chested, middle finger raised to all those petty dictators.  Why?  Just because we’re f**king American.

Obama, of course, realizes that America has short-term security interests that demand progress, regardless of those in power.  As the White House has repeatedly said and shown, freedom, democracy, and human rights will remain very much on the agenda, but we can’t expect that America’s values will be magically exported before our security concerns are assuaged.  In short, America is be a safer place by dealing with the world’s leaders today and pressing them on values, not attempting to will our adversaries out of power.

He favors low-level engagement designed to produce gradual, measurable, sustainable change over the long term.  The lazy argument above demands a knee jerk reaction of strength, lest you face the cat-calls of weakness.

Or, as Obama said in response to a question on Iran, “I think that we don’t know yet how this thing is going to play out. I know everybody here is on a 24-hour news cycle. I’m not. OK?”

When the mullahs announced they were prepared to launch an “inquiry” into the election results, it seemed promising.  But then when you think about it, an inquiry is nothing more than a delaying tactic, like when my buddy Tom proposed to his fiancee but refused to set a wedding date, brilliantly ensuring that she’d stop bothering him about getting hitched while only committing to “talk about timing” in a year.

Tom’s scheme worked.  Iran’s didn’t.  Indeed, Iranians began chucking flower vases at their metaphorical Tom and demanding he tie the knot hasta pronto.  In response, the Ayatollah has upped his offer, suggesting that certain selected - and undoubtedly pro-Ahmadinejad - urns would be recounted.  Opposition candidate Mousavi is holding out for a full recount, but the Guardian Council - the Ayatollah-appointed election commission - has thus far refused to void this contest and hold a new one.

We’re about to find out just how out-of-touch Iran’s leaders are.  Despite cell phone and internet outages, protesters have managed to convene peacefully - sometimes eerily silently - across the country.  If the election is upheld, Ayatollah Khamenei must realize the potential for a full-scale revolt, one that would oddly book-end the 1979 revolution.  The force of those in the streets - who are composed of much more than 1979’s student-lead change of power - should compel a significant revision of the contest.  If it doesn’t, then these guys were asking for it.

The Obama administration has taken some heat from conservatives for not supporting freedom strongly enough.  Patrick Barry at DemocracyArsenal lays out the five strains of conservative incoherence on the issue here.  In reality, the White House is toeing a pretty fine line on this so far, and doing it well.  The Obama folks have cast doubt on the election’s validity without a wild-eye’d rush to demonize Ahmadenijad, who, after all, could come out of this smelling like a rose and end up as Obama’s negotiating partner on the nuclear issue; nor have they offered support to the protesters that they can’t actually provide.  Rhetoric creates expectations, as Bush (pere) found out in 1991 when he encouraged Iraqis to rise up against Saddam, only to have those same Iraqis turn against America when it didn’t back up its words with actions.

[photo-AP]

Reports are filtering out that Egypt and Saudi Arabia want the Obama administration to set a two year limit on Arab-Israeli peace negotiations, or else they’d rescind the Arab Peace Initiative plan.

I’m not sure what to think about a two-year deadline. It’s good to have a goal, but if you try and fail, what happens next?  Can you extend the deadline?  Does one party walk away and any hope for peace falls by the waste side for another 40 years?

I’d support a deadline, but I think the process has to be a little more advanced than it currently is before establishing one.  Right now, it just seems like too much work and not enough time.

Anyone notice that al Qaeda released a tape denouncing Obama’s attempts to engage the Middle East?

Right.  Didn’t think so.

AQ thrives on conflict… the clash of civilizations and all that.  And now that Obama has made several important appeals to the same broad audience whose loyalties (and who provide money, manpower, and logistical support) may be torn, AQ’s long term viability has to be questioned.

The group has to be worried that it’s verging on irrelevance.  My guess is that it needs to re-ignite that conflict–ideally for them, in the form of an attack–that draws America back into direct contention with the Muslim world.  They need Obama to react harshly, to prove to Muslims that Barack Hussein Obama is just like every other American president.

AQ terrorist plotting times have varied widely, but I would assume that 18 months is a reasonable timeframe to conceive, plot, plan, and execute a massive attack on American soil.  So if nothing’s happened by about the end of 2010, we can say with high confidence that the Al Qaeda threat will have been permanently–possibily even irrevokably–degraded.

I was at an event hosted by the Project for Middle Eastern Democracy (POMED) and the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID) all afternoon discussing the speech, so I have plenty of thoughts running through the ol’ noggin.  The most pointed comment of the afternoon was after the moderator remarked how a student apparently stood up and screamed “I love you” during part of the address.  A little old Palestinian woman raised her hand and said, “Isn’t it nice when an American president gives a speech in the Middle East and someone interrupts him with ‘I love you’ instead of a thrown shoe?”

Otherwise, about that speech… I’m not sure what I can really say that adds too much value to the fodder already out there.  Sure, it was eloquent, well-spoken and all that.  One of the presenters at the POMED/CSID event complained that the speech didn’t go far enough - that it was a bunch of nice words but that it laid down no policy.

Well, what more do you want right now?  Obama is trying to reintroduce America to the region and Muslims worldwide.  He’s trying to take the first, tentative steps by saying that the Middle East can welcome America as a partner who listens, who doesn’t dictate, but is willing to play the honest broker who pushes for constructive dialogue to resolve the region’s problems.  To start dictating policy after the Bush hangover would revert right back to the American-styled preachiness that drove many Muslims away.

This was the opening chorus of a five act play — nothing more, nothing less.  America won’t solve the region’s ills, or address every issue that every interest group wants Obama to mention in one speech.  But that wasn’t the White House’s aim.  Down the road, if American actions–in the form of resolute, continued engagement as an honest broker–don’t follow this salvo, then the speech would be a failure.  But for today, this is a vital first step.

I’ve always read Tom Friedman’s columns and books with a healthy dose of skepticism.  Sure, he’s thought-provoking enough, but I’m constantly wary of the frames through which he pitches his thoughts.  Seriously - the man’s an absolute genius at taking a split-second event (like seeing a Burger King billboard in Saudi Arabia) and making extraordinarily broad, often unfounded conclusions (that globalization has come to the Middle East).

But I don’t hate him as much as Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi does:

I’ve been unhealthily obsessed with Friedman for more than a decade now. … Like George W. Bush with his Bushisms, Friedman came up with lines so hilarious you couldn’t make them up even if you were trying…

Remember Friedman’s take on Bush’s Iraq policy? “It’s OK to throw out your steering wheel,” he wrote, “as long as you remember you’re driving without one.” Picture that for a minute. Or how about Friedman’s analysis of America’s foreign policy outlook last May: “The first rule of holes is when you’re in one, stop digging. When you’re in three, bring a lot of shovels.”

First of all, how can any single person be in three holes at once? Secondly, what the fuck is he talking about? If you’re supposed to stop digging when you’re in one hole, why should you dig more in three? How does that even begin to make sense?

And just when you thought this healthy does of Friedman-skepticism wasn’t going anywhere… voila!  It does:  I’ve used this set up so I can actually credit Friedman when he does good work.  Read the rest of this entry »