Kudos to Jackson Diehl

Jackson Diehl, the deputy editor of the WaPo’s editorial page, had a pretty good signed op-ed piece on Israel’s Gaza war in today’s paper.
It starts off thus:

    Israel’s new battle with Hamas in Gaza means that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will be remembered for fighting two bloody and wasteful mini-wars in less than three years in power. The first one, in Lebanon during the summer of 2006, punished but failed to defeat or even permanently injure Hezbollah, which is politically and militarily stronger today than it was before Olmert took office. This one will probably have about the same effect on Hamas, which almost certainly will still control Gaza, and retain the capacity to strike Israel, when Olmert leaves office in a few months.

Diehl goes on, too, bemoan the fact that though Olmert’s time in office has been marked by him making a noticeable move away from Likud-style territorial maximalism and towards a much more robust awareness of the need to conclude a realistic final peace with the Palestinians and the Syrians, yet, his final weeks in office will be remembered much more for this disastrous war effort than for the relatively visionary things he has said about the Palestinians in recent weeks.
I think it’s significant that Jackson has written this piece. (He was also, I’m assuming, the main brain at work behind the relatively good and realistic editorial on the Gaza war that the WaPo published yesterday.) That’s because he is precisely the kind of influential, American liberal hawk whom the Israeli government needs to keep on its side if it wants to minimize the rift this war will cause between Tel Aviv and the broader US political establishment.
Thank God for Jackson’s understanding of many of the regional (Mideast) dynamics at work in the present era! Even if he does base some of his argument on the fact that Israel’s war against Gaza is a “distraction” from the need to keep up the pressure against Iran– the argument as a whole about the tragic folly and counter-productive nature of the present war is still one that needs to be made as effectively as possible in Washington DC; and Jackson Diehl is a good and credible person to make it.

5 thoughts on “Kudos to Jackson Diehl”

  4. I suppose it follows that Tuesday morning’s Washington Post editorial” will strike some partisans as “comparatively bad and unrealistic.” Could the Nameless Voice of the Corporation be trying to please everybody — half and half on alternate days?
    Up in Manhattan, a different fishwrap management crew is undoubtedly playing some such game:
    “Israel must defend itself. And Hamas must bear responsibility for ending a six-month cease-fire this month with a barrage of rocket attacks into Israeli territory. Still we fear that ….
    after which it becomes plain how scared and worried the New York Times Company is that some customers are going to dislike them no matter what they say. “Still they fear that” … they cannot please everybody. And indeed they cannot.
    The anonymous dictators of the Los Angeles Times are no braver than those of the NYTC, which is why I rather like the second WP stab at it for at least being different. Also for happening to agree with myself that the sideshow may be more important than the circus under the big top. That is to say, one will (perhaps) learn most of all by keeping one’s eye on that beach ball that General Mubárak is juggling on the tip of his nose:
    [T]he governments of Egypt and Jordan … are accused of silently supporting Israel’s air attacks. Those governments, along with the West Bank Palestinian administration of President Mahmoud Abbas, have issued rote condemnations of Israel. But they have also accused Hamas of triggering the conflict by ending a ceasefire — and they have responded harshly to the Iranian camp, which has “practically declared war on Egypt,” as Cairo’s foreign minister angrily put it yesterday. Far from encouraging an uprising, Mr. Abbas’s police broke up demonstrations by West Bank Palestinians on Sunday. Egyptian security forces have forcibly prevented Palestinians from crossing the border from Gaza. Israeli and U.S. officials see this divide as encouraging.
    Whatever bright young thing it is that the WP boardroom has found to ghost for it, she is a little confused and confusing about certain native and local details,
    [T]he split is more sectarian than ideological. Among those counted in the moderate camp is Sunni-ruled Saudi Arabia, which shares Hamas’s fundamentalist creed. And among those joining in the unmitigated denunciations of Israel yesterday were the Shiite rulers of Iraq, including Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. ,
    but I daresay she can learn. It is a great deal to be able to think for oneself, after all, and almost beyond praise to be able to think for oneself on so hormone-rousing a topic as neo-’Islám. (Not even to mention the Palestine Puzzle.)
    The bad news is that Mlle. Chose appears to be on the wrong side, as wrongness presents itself to this keyboard. But her freshness remains a delight; she is about the only opinionatrix in sight who diagnoses DARS™, the dread Divide-and-Rule Syndrome, and then comes out in FAVOUR of it:
    “The weak and unpopular government of President Hosni Mubarak … will find it hard to resist further concessions [to its own subjects and to Street Arabs generally] if the fighting continues. (…) Israel must be careful not to allow its military campaign to undermine its own diplomatic end game — or to hand another political victory to an Iranian regime that remains a far greater threat to Israel than Hamas is.”
    Lesser imperialists and colonisers and invasionites would never dream of admitting the General’s unpopularity in a public place where they might be overheard.
    Mlle. Chose does not pretend that her policy is the policy of the Tel Aviv régime. I guess she is recommending it to them as an improvement over their current model. To show that nobody is perfect, she makes sufficiently clear that she has no more clue than the rest of the human race what M. d’Olmert conceives himself to be up to, exactly. But this is not a defect, for the anonymous editorialiser is not legally or morally or ‘professionally’ obliged to practice psychoanalysis without a license.
    I think it improves the quality of the pudding to omit that particular ingredient, though tastes differ and I should not dream of insisting. The NYTC and LAT pieces already referred to are full of amateur political freudwork, however, so anybody who pleases may read through all three and then decide what pleases best. [*]
    Happy days.
    ___
    [*] In Manhattan, Dr. Outis prefers to dabble in electoral psychoanalysis: “Mr. Barak and Israel’s foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, both candidates to succeed Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in elections set for February, must not be drawn any further into a competition with the front-runner, Benjamin Netanyahu, over who is the biggest hawk.”
    A bit to my surprise, laid-back So. California runs more to geopolitical ditto: “Aside from the additional carnage it would cause, an attempt to uproot Hamas would damage the already moribund peace process — and without removing Hamas from the political equation.”
    (( Score Mlle. Chose five more bonus points for not merely recognizing the moribundity of the peace process, but for going on to take appropriate evasive action by scarcely letting it be mentioned! This, too, is a de gustibus business, though. Unless perhaps an arguer were to argue that the policy of Mlle. Chose deliberately attempts to make sure that peace does not come to pass any decade soon. A harsh and unwarrantable judgment, that would be, and yet one could make out a prima facie case. IRUD. ))

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