Photoillo by Ed Johnson

“A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.”
—Rudyard Kipling

At last, Mitt Romney has told us one specific thing he intends to do as president: get weapons to al-Qaeda.

Trying to salvage a week of self-evisceration on foreign policy from the Republican presidential nominee, his leading foreign policy advisors, Eliot Cohen and Richard Williamson, told The New York Times last Friday just what a President Romney would do differently in the Middle East. Their critique included the insistence that President Obama “engage” the rebels in Syria. According to the Times, they did “[stop] short of saying that the United States should provide lethal arms” but favored “facilitating” the provision of lethal arms from other Arab states.”

Mr. Williamson is a former diplomat, Mr. Cohen a former State Department official who teaches at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. It must be very advanced, because for the life of me I can’t understand how it is that a gun, or a grenade, or a rocket launcher changes in nature when it is shipped out by, say, a Saudi prince instead of the U.S military.

The primary reason the United States has not done more to help the rebels in Syria has been that Islamic extremists, including members of al-Qaeda, are widely reported to be in their ranks. Mr. Obama and his advisors are reluctant to risk arming these elements, or to help put into power a regime worse than the one it replaced. They are engaging a treacherous and complex region with the prudence it requires.

A more sensitive politician than Mr. Romney, meanwhile, might have picked up on how one speaker after another in Tampa lambasted the president for supposedly “leading from behind”—while cleverly refraining from suggesting an alternative. Condi Rice typically demanded to know, “Where does America stand?” on Syria, but conspicuously did not offer a word about where it should stand.

Well, now we know. Just as the right-wing response to gun violence here in America is more guns, the Romney answer to the Middle East is more weapons, dispensed to who-knows-who, so long as we’re not the (direct) suppliers. This isn’t “standing up for American values,” it’s “plausible deniability.” Of course, we can rest assured that there will be no blowback from this course—just as there was none from supporting the Taliban against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

“Leading from behind” is the description of our recent policy in Libya, as attributed to an anonymous Obama staffer, and it was such a disaster that it left one of the world’s major sponsors of terrorism bleeding out in the sand at a cost of zero American lives. But such limited victories are hardly the style of Mr. Cohen, a Paul Wolfowitz protege who has for years been advocating “World War IV” against radical Islamism from his battle post on The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page.

For Mr. Cohen, the next front in this war is regime change in Tehran, a goal that conflates nicely with the right-wing trope that President Obama is a Neville Chamberlain-style appeaser at a moment of “existential” world crisis. Hence Dinesh D’Souza’s claims that the president has inherited an “anti-colonialist” mindset from his Kenyan father, the accusation by Charles Krauthammer that he pointedly returned a bust of Winston Churchill to the British Embassy, Rudy Giuliani’s belief that Mr. Obama has an “almost irrational desire to negotiate” with Iran, and the charge by numerous leading Republicans that the president, in Mr. Romney’s words, intends to “hollow out our military through devastating defense budget cuts.”

Lending his support to such indictments was Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who asserted on 9/11 that the U.S. had lost the “moral right” to keep his country from launching a preventive attack on Iran. This was at best a thoughtless remark, coming as it did on the anniversary of the U.S. taking a pretty big bullet for our opposition to radical Islamism. It was also disingenuous. Mr. Netanyahu is not worried that we will prevent Israel from attacking Iran; he is worried that without our assistance such an attack will be ineffectual.

As Mr. Netanyahu knows, even a combined U.S.-Israeli air attack is unlikely to guarantee an end to Iran’s nuclear program. Confirmation will require yet another American invasion of a massive Central Asian country half the world away, this one with a population more than twice that of Iraq and Afghanistan combined, infinitely more cohesive than those states and better equipped to defend itself.

Nothing would be more likely to unite the entire Islamic world against us—and to alienate our other allies. Nothing would be more likely to spark endless rounds of deadly terrorist attacks—especially here in this city.

Mr. Netanyahu has inserted himself directly into our electoral politics as no foreign leader ever has before. Throughout Mr. Obama’s time in office, he and his government have treated this American president with contempt and impatience, seeking every opportunity to publicly humiliate him and bring him to heel. Last March, he went so far as to equate the Obama administration’s refusal to move more swiftly against Iran with the War Department’s refusal to bomb Auschwitz as a way of saving European Jews from the Holocaust.

It’s an odious comparison—but one that upends his own argument. Bombing Auschwitz would have meant killing many of its prisoners outright. Those who survived and managed to escape would have had to make their way, starving and barely clothed, through the pitiless German and Polish populations surrounding them. Even bombing the rail lines to the camps would have been of dubious value; Allied fliers bombed rail networks relentlessly throughout World War II only to see the Germans assiduously rebuild them. To the very end of the war, the Nazi regime insisted on devoting significant resources to the slaughter of the Jewish people, and it’s hard to believe they would have stopped even if their death camps were destroyed.

The War Department made the strategic decision that the fastest way to end the Holocaust was to devote all of its resources to crushing the Nazis. In retrospect, it’s hard to argue with that. Meeting the terrible challenges that the world presents requires a steady nerve and real judgment. Making believe that the situation in Syria can be resolved with a few arms shipments (under the right label) is no more helpful—or realistic—than fantasizing that a wave of American bombers could have curtailed the Holocaust, or that another such wave can end Iran’s nuclear threat.

My friend tells me Carter had a focused forward expression, he was on a mission. "Do you think someone is going to try and knock him off?"

The concern reflects a couple of realities. At 82, Carter would seem to have found a spiritual model in one of the heroes of his book, Anwar Sadat, who, at Carter's urging, took on the orthodoxies in his own culture to sign a historic peace agreement, and who gave his life to do so. Carter is taking on the orthodoxies in his own culture, with the same sense of all or nothing.

The venom he is encountering on the Jewish right is staggering. Even I'm surprised. Marty Peretz has called him a Jew-hater. Shmuel Rosner, the Haaretz correspondent who not long ago rated American presidential candidates on the degree to which they ignored the Palestinian issue, with obliviousness being a positive, has branded him a likely antisemite. And in doing so, subscribed to the most parochial formulations offered by neoconservative Iraq-warrior Eliot Cohen.

When will the Jewish universalists in American life come forward? That is the great threat Carter poses to the parochial: that others will start to care. And a policy that has been commandeered by a small set of interests will at last become the business of the American people. A bestseller with the word "apartheid" in the title—we're getting closer and closer to the Elian Gonzales moment, the moment when the American people wake up and realize that a fanatical lobby is not representing America's best interest.

Again the real journalistic responsibility here is not to repeat the smears of the Rosners and Peretzes, but to examine the simple question: Is what Carter is saying of the Occupied Territories true? Having been there, I say it is.

The paper was rejected by the Atlantic, as too hot for this country to hear. And while it has been favorably received in Israel and England, it continues to be smeared in this country in the Washington Post and the Boston Globe. The latest attack is from Eliot A. Cohen, a Hopkins professor, in the Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/04/AR2006040401282.html

Cohen says the professors are guilty of antisemitism, bigotry and of trading in ideas from the "sewer" in broaching their belief: that the Israel lobby is too powerful.

This is, once again, a fearful response from the rightwing Jewish community, fearful that if the issue is even discussed, Jews in this country will be persecuted. It reminds me of my own relative's comment after 9/11, They're going to blame the Jews. This anxiety has controlled the response to the powerful Harvard paper: If we even discuss it, Jews will be blamed. As for the ideas? Cohen's claim that the lobby is not powerful is based on such weak arguments as, the Cuba lobby is powerful, too, or, People who don't like Israel also supported the war in Iraq. Of course these things are true. They in no way invalidate Walt-Mearsheimer's assertions, that the Israel lobby has had a stranglehold on our policy in the Middle East (which is not to be confused with Cuba) and that it played a central role in the (disastrous) Iraq war planning.

These assertions are important and deserve to be discussed on their merits, without fearful slurring and name-calling.

Observers regard the Presidential acknowledgment of the Cohen book as an important signal because the author is not merely a respected defense academic, but a charter member of the hawkish Republican circle promoting military action against the Baghdad regime. He writes for The Wall Street Journal 's editorial pages and similar venues, and his book was prominently blurbed by Bill Kristol, the Weekly Standard editor who called it the single volume he most wished Mr. Bush would read.

Why? Simply because Mr. Cohen's book argues that civilian leaders in wartime, such as Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill, achieved greatness by pushing their pusillanimous generals toward victory. Such historical analogies excite the hawk faction in their ferocious interoffice and interagency hostilities with adversaries in and around the Pentagon and the State Department who are skeptical about another, more ambitious Iraqi adventure. The most notable of those skeptics, of course, is Secretary of State Colin Powell, whose credentials as a military officer and diplomat only make him more suspect in the hawks' eyes. In recent days, Secretary Powell has been joined publicly in his skepticism by other figures from the previous Bush administration, including Lawrence Eagleburger and Brent Scowcroft.

In theory, Mr. Cohen's analogy would embolden this President Bush to act more boldly than his father; to disregard or discipline those uniformed dissenters who warn against war-making; to demand action and answers rather than excuses, and so on. It all sounds good, and in some circumstances would be good. (For instance, it would be very good if Mr. Bush demanded answers about the apparent escape of Osama bin Laden from Afghanistan, rather than pretending that the capture of Al Qaeda's Führer never had been a prime objective of our operations there.) Freed of constraints, Mr. Bush could ignore what Secretary Powell or our allies might say. The bombs would begin to rain on Baghdad and Tikrit as our troops prepared for the final assault.

As any true admirer of Churchill realizes, however, there are a few differences between the British lion and the present occupant of the White House. Churchill did take a daily nap, but he also labored long past midnight, even in his 70's. Aside from those grueling work habits, which allowed him to produce multiple works of history, memoir and journalism while pursuing his political career, Churchill brought a long résumé of military and diplomatic experience to his relationship with the general staff. He was a graduate of the military academy at Sandhurst, and as a young officer he took part in the Empire's last cavalry charge-in the Sudan in 1898. He was named First Lord of the Admiralty twice and served at the front during World War I. (Come to think of it, those credentials distinguish him from Mr. Kristol, too.)

After toiling on his book for 15 years, Mr. Cohen is understandably thrilled by the Presidential attention. Still, he would surely admit that its lessons have little relevance to the merits and risks of war with Iraq today. The questions about that war remain the same: What are its purposes? Why are they worth American blood and treasure? Is there any way to achieve those objectives without bloodshed?

A few years ago, Mr. Cohen wrote critically about the Clinton administration's bombing strikes against Iraq. Back then, the professor noted that "this is a war not about weapons of mass destruction (few remain to Iraq) but about American credibility; not about removing Saddam as an immediate threat to his neighbors (he poses none) but about uprooting an incorrigible regime and a long-term threat." Yet we are told daily by proponents of war that it is about Iraq's alleged possession of such weapons and the threat those weapons pose. Which is it? That is what the President must explain, clearly and precisely, to the public, the Congress and our allies.

Meanwhile, before Mr. Bush styles himself a latter-day Churchill, let's hope he absorbs all of what history tells us about that icon. Whatever Churchill's private opinions were about his wartime allies, he knew that without them, England would perish and the Axis would rule Europe. However determined he was to overrule the appeasers, he was still a pragmatist. In describing the late prime minister, Mr. Cohen quotes a passage that Churchill himself wrote about Lord Halifax: "a love of moderation and a sense of the practical seemed in him to emerge in bold rather than tepid courses. He could strike as hard for compromise as most leaders for victory."