With our previous musings on the Jeffrey Goldberg Atlantic article in mind, I'd like to point out Juan Cole's thoughts on the matter. The piece contains a good discussion of "neo-cons in the wilderness" and weighs in on my question: Who's being played by the Jeffery Goldberg effort?
For Cole, the administration is the target all the way (my emphasis):
Despite being willing to stop in at an occasional cocktail party, President Obama could not care less what the Neoconservatives say, want or do. Few have been appointed from their ranks to high and influential positions in the Obama administration, in contrast to W.’s, where they held the 8 key positions that allowed them to help push the US into a decade of rampaging wars. . . . Their main project of today, an aggressive war on Iran, is a non-starter with the current White House, its generals, intelligence officials, and most importantly with a public already unemployed, beggared and indebted to the tune of $13 trillion, in part because of the Neocons earlier mad adventures[.]The neo-cons are not without allies, however:
They have more assets than is visible on the surface. They have perhaps half of America’s 400 billionaires on their side. They have the enormous military-industrial complex on their side. They have the Yahoo complex of besieged lower middle class White America on their side. They have the Israel lobbies on their side. They have important segments of the Oil and Gas lobbies on their side. They have the whole American tradition of permanent war on their side. They should not be underestimated.Cole thinks the war-ginning ploy won't work (whew):
Goldberg knows that Obama is not actually going to war against Iran. Despite what he says, Bibi Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, is for all his bluster far too personally indecisive to take such a major step (and certainly not without an American green light; Bibi thinks Clinton had him undermined and moved out of office for obstructing the Oslo accords, and does not want to risk the same fate for causing trouble for Obama in Iraq and Afghanistan). How Goldberg could miss this truism in Israeli politics is beyond me.Take a few minutes to re-read that last quote. It's syntactically dense, but loaded.
A fine and comforting set of conclusions, and I hope Professor Cole is correct. We do not need one more war with a Muslim nation. In this area — war with Iran — Obama appears to be playing it exactly right.
Shall we ride in triumph through Persepolis? Not this week.
GP
