In an apparent appeal to Biden, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared: “There can be no going back to the previous nuclear agreement.” Apparently indifferent to this appeal, Biden has excluded Israel “from the list of countries he said needed to be included in negotiations with Iran toward a new nuclear agreement.” Two years ago, […]
Thomas Friedman Has Learned Nothing and Forgotten Nothing
Thomas Friedman, who has spent decades at The New York Times preaching to the Israelis as to what they must do, has managed to find fault with, while so many others are cheering, the Israel-UAE-Bahrain agreement. The story is here. Thomas Friedman, the New York Times pontificator on the Middle East, and especially Israel, could […]
Friedman’s Fantasy
“A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.” – Arthur Miller, from Death of a Salesman Writing of America’s relationship with Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s Iran, Efraim Karsh recounts that, “So entrenched had the idea of this Iranian-American symbiosis become that successive US administrations came to view Iranian interests as indistinguishable […]
The History of Every Country
“So potent was religion in persuading to evil deeds.” -Lucretius, 99-55 B.C. In his recent op-ed in the New York Times, ISIS Heads to Rome, Thomas Friedman writes, “The U.S. keeps repeating the same mistake in the Middle East: overestimating the power of religious ideology and underappreciating the impact of misgovernance.” He goes on to […]