Where Are The Old-Style Presidents?

And by old-style, I think of, say, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and the Bushes père et fils. Joe's performance in Tel Aviv. which begins at about 4:05 in the video, is none of the above. He's looking down, reading very deliberately from notecards in an affectless tone, barely avoiding slurring.

"They're committed evils that uh, and atrocities that, uh, make ISIS, uh, look uh somewhat more rational. Y'know uh -- Americans are grieving with you. They really are. And Americans are worried. Americans are worried because they know there's uh this is not an easy field'a navigate whatcha havta do."

At about 5:58, he threatens to veer into another trademark self-serving account of days gone by: "Y'know, uh, years ago I asked the Secretary of State when we were serving in the Senate [presumably John Kerry] to write something for a man -- said, uh, you know a line that I think is appropriate, he said, uh, we need, uh, not just uh -- well, I won't go into it, I'll wait'll later, takin' too much time, but the point is this, that, uh, I'm deeply saddened and outraged by the uh, explosion at the hospital in Gaza yesterday. . ."

I've got to assume Joe's handlers arranged that Joe and Bibi would be seated, when an Obama, a Trump, a Dubya, or a Clinton would be standing. Netanyahu himself during his statement was on the edge of his seat, almost ready to stand up throughout it. Joe was clearly tired and making a pro forma appearance. It was just as well that Jordan earlier canceled a summit with King Abdullah II and Egypt's President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi, because Joe likely couldn't have handled it.

I'm not sure if this is a bug or a feature. It takes me back to the Oval Office meeting with Israel's President Herzog at the White House in July, where Joe also read in an offhand manner from note cards and seemed almost to drift off to sleep. There can be no question that Democrat administrations have been backing away from Israel,when back in the day, Harry Truman had both a visceral sympathy for the new state and a recognition that alignment with Israel would cement Jewish membership in the New Deal coalition.

This piece at The Federalist goes into some detail on the history and motivation of Obama's aim to diminish US support for Israel -- which also means eventually dropping Jews from the Democrat coalition.

In August, Tablet magazine published a much-discussed, comprehensive interview between David Samuels and Obama biographer David Garrow. The biggest headlines that emerged from that interview had to do with Garrow uncovering letters where Obama wrote in detail about his gay sex fantasies. But buried beneath that revelation was a substantial discussion of Obama’s anti-Israel politics. Or as Tablet’s David Samuels put it, “Obama’s hostility to American exceptionalism also seemed linked to his hostility to Israel, or more specifically to America’s identification with Israel.” As Samuels went on to note, the inexplicable fixation Obama had with making Iran — the world’s leading state sponsor of terror attacks, and the same country behind Hamas’ atrocities in Israel over the weekend — a regional hegemon in spite of Israeli (and Saudi) objections is ample proof of that.

. . .“The sheer amount of political capital and focus Obama put into achieving the [Iran nuclear deal] during his second term, to the near-exclusion of other goals, suggests that the deal was central to his politics. It also carries more than a whiff of the kind of politics in which the American Empire is seen not just as unexceptional, but also, in some ways, as actively evil,” observed Samuels. “It was a politics born out of the confluence of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement, which saw a racist war abroad being used to protect a racist power structure at home. That old alliance of civil rights, anti-imperialism, and identity politics made the Democratic Party that Obama positioned himself to lead — college-educated, corporate-controlled — seem cool, allowing it to use post-1960s radical ideology as a language to sell stuff.”

Whatever the history, and whatever the hypocrisy that might be involved, Joe's shambling public demeanor in situations like his visit to Israel makes me nostalgic for Obama, who always displayed a focus, a public crispness and agility that's nowhere to be found with Joe. If we can't have Trump back, dogone it, I want Obama!

Why Are They Mad At Blinken?

Antony Blinken hasn't been having a good tour of the Middle East:

Secretary of State Antony Blinken received a cold reception from Egyptian and Saudi leaders during meetings about support for Israel on Sunday, according to The Washington Post.

Egypt’s Abdel Fatah El-Sisi and Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) rejected Blinken’s call for support of Israel’s counteroffensive in the Gaza Strip, the Post reported on Sunday. El-Sisi and Salman made it clear that they stood with Palestinians and called for Israel to end its “siege” in Gaza.

“I heard a lot of good ideas about some of the things we need to do moving forward,” Blinken told reporters on Sunday following his meeting.

MBS kept Blinken waiting for hours before their expected discussion on Saturday, instead choosing to show up to the meeting the next morning, according to the Post. When the two eventually met, MBS “stressed” that the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) should halt its counter-offensive “that [has] claimed the lives of innocent people” and end the “siege of Gaza.”

. . . In Cairo, el-Sisi told Blinken that Israel’s counteroffensive has exceeded “the right of self-defense” and turned into a “collective punishment,” according to the Post. Egypt and the U.S. have reached an agreement to open a corridor in the Rafah border for U.S. citizens evacuating Gaza.

Neither Saudi Arabia nor Egyot has signed on to the Abraham Acccords. The Biden administration has worked toward normalization of Saudi-Israel relations, but the Hamas invasion has put these efforts on hold. On the other hand, the Egypt–Israel peace treaty of 1979 was the first visible step in the overall effort toward Middle East stability. The problem for both Saudi Arabia and Egypt is that their regimes put their domestic prestige on the line when they support these efforts, but any military action involving Israel takes away any potential payoff to them for promoting normalization.

Thus the Obama-Biden Realignment strategy whereby Iran becomes the regional hegemon has risks if Iran isn't predictable. This is the basic problem with the Hamas invasion -- Iran has demonstrated it can't be relied on to be a neutral third party or an actor with restraint. Thus the departure of the US from the region leaves unresolved issues. In the words of the Wilson Center,

a decade-long era of ambitious American geostrategic involvement in the internal affairs regional states, from regime change to societal transformation, began with the Iraq invasion in 2003 and ended in 2013 when President Obama chose not to enforce his redline on Syrian chemical weapons. Surveys at the time showed that Americans no longer wanted to spend trillions of dollars and lose thousands of troops for ephemeral societal goals with little success.

. . . To square that circle, those administrations de-prioritized American resources committed to the region, with the “delta” taken up by America’s many security partners in the region. This “by-with-through” approach with local allies was first implemented successfully in campaign to defeat the Islamic State. Nevertheless, the perceived disengagement of the United States, as regional states faced the threats of Iranian expansion and secondarily Islamic extremism, led moderate Arab states to reorder priorities.

Israel, with its firm position opposing Iranian expansion, and success combating Islamic terrorism, suddenly appeared to be a partial replacement to the US. Furthermore, Israel’s longstanding desire for diplomatic acceptance in the Arab world and its cutting-edge industrial, technological, energy and trade success, suggested it could help Arab states advance in those realms as well.

It seems to me that the frustration of Saudi Arabia and Egypt is primarily a result of their recognition that relying on Iran to maintain a regional balance against Israel is a vain fancy. Iran will try to wipe Israel out until it finally accomplishes that goal, and then Iran will move to take over everyone else. What MBS and al-Sisi are saying is that the Hamas invasion has shown the failure of the Realignment strategy and put them in a more difficult spot politically in their own countries -- they now have no choice but to oppose Israel, which means they have no choice but to oppose US policy, and they're telling Blinken to fix this. The US should not have let things get this far.

I don't normally have high expectations of Victor Davis Hanson, but I think he edges toward the truth here:

Why does the U.S. discount any possibility of a strategic response from Russia—which reportedly has some 6,000-7,000 nuclear weapons—to attacks on its homeland, but seems almost terrified about calling Iran to account for its central role in arming and funding terrorists to start a war with Israel by slaughtering 1,200 civilians?

. . . There are likely somewhere between 600,000 and 800,000 total wounded and dead in Ukraine, in the most lethal conflict in Europe since 1945. Why is the U.S. so eager to call for a ceasefire after a fraction of those casualties in Gaza, but it is near-taboo to mention a breather amid the historical carnage, with no end in sight, in Ukraine?

In effect, we have two separate strategic policies in Ukraine and the Middle East, and both are proving failures. Why are Biden and Blinken so determined to push both of them, especially as contradictory as they are, through?

The Strategic Disconnect

I found another Tablet piece from early 2021 trying to make sense of what might be the Biden foreign policy, this one by Martin Peretz, the controversial former publisher and sometime editor-in-chief of The New Republic. Peretz, a Zionist and something close to a neoconservative, saw a "Mideast blind spot" in Antony Blinken, of whose foreign policy vision he otherwise enthusiastically approved, and he raised the conundrum of Robert Malley:

The twinned issues where Blinken has remained conspicuously reticent and indistinct are the Middle East and the elephant in the Middle East, Iran. In lieu of asserting himself, the secretary of state has approved the reopening of nuclear talks with Iran and outsourced them to Robert Malley, whom he appointed or allowed to be appointed U.S. special envoy to that country. Blinken’s reliance on Malley, and Malley’s own history of finding any opportunity to engage with groups and countries that demonstrably align themselves against American interests, point to a large lacuna, so far, in the otherwise sober vision Blinken has laid out.

It is worth noting here that Malley, besides being an architect of President Barack Obama’s Iran deal and a longtime proponent of outreach to Iran and Hamas, is a childhood friend of Blinken’s: The two grew up together in Paris, Malley as the son of a European-style Jewish communist with anti-imperialist politics and links to Yasser Arafat and Fidel Castro, and Blinken as the stepson of an active and influential Zionist businessman and philanthropist who was also a public supporter of détente between the West and the Soviet Union. The divergences and convergences of their fathers’ politics are not irrelevant to understanding the sons.

. . . The assignment of Malley—who, when he is out of government, runs his inherited anti-imperialist priorities through dogmatic internationalists like George Soros, for whom the idea of a national interest is inherently suspect—shows that Blinken hasn’t looked very hard at the reality of Iran’s actions on the ground, or paid much attention to the recent history of attempted rapprochements with the regime, especially Malley’s. (Soros has not been mentioned in the debate over Malley’s appointment, but he should be: No one can claim that Malley’s proximity to an ideologically driven billionaire who funds a multinational, activist NGO empire and has real interests in international decision-making, currency, and oil markets is irrelevant or an unfit subject of discussion.)

. . . Maybe Blinken and Biden feel constrained by Obama’s Mideast realignment policy and obligated to continue his intended legacy-making initiative, at least for a time; maybe Malley is leveraging the public strength of Obama’s legacy, and the former president’s sway with key administration figures like Susan Rice, to exercise undue influence in the Biden White House.

Peretz's speculations are on point for 2021, but the problem is that things have changed. Susan Rice's position in the Biden administration slowly faded despite high early expectations, and she left the administration entirely this past April:

On April 24, 2023, President Biden announced that Rice would be departing from her position as director of the Domestic Policy Council on May 26, 2023.

Also in April, Robert Malley began the process of having his security clearance suspended and being placed on leave from his position of special envoy for Iran. Nevertheless, every indication is that Blinken (and by implication, Biden) has continued the Obama policy of Realignment, tacitly encouraging Iran to play an active role in counterbalancing Israel and continuing a policy of payments to the regime there.

But the big event since Peretz's 2021 piece has been the Russian reinvasion of Ukraine in February 2022, a reassertion of its 2014 claim that Ukraine was part of Russia, which in turn had been provoked by US support for the coup against Ukraine's then-president Viktor Yanukovych, who had been favorable toward Russia. After Russia reoccupied the Donbas and Crimea in 2014, the conflict was dormant, especially during the Trump administration, until it broke out again with the Biden presidency, possibly encouraged by Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan.

All of a sudden, Biden doubled down on a neoconservative policy in Ukraine, effectively orchestrating a Western attempt to remove Ukraine completely from the Russian sphere of influence and move it into the EU and even NATO -- but in the quadrant to the south, the object continues to be to disengage from supporting Israel and outsource the Middle East stability project to a nuclear Iran. In short, the plan seems to be to decolonize the Middle East, effectively abandoning Western interests in Israel, Lebanon, Syria, the Arabian peninsula, and Iraq, while simultaneously recolonizing Ukraine as a Western proxy.

Is there a grand vision here? It's hard to see one. If Robert Malley isn't pulling the strings now -- if indeed he was ever pulling the strings -- who is? One possible explanation might be here:

When people talk about “Ukrainian grain” they’re actually talking about grain that is now owned by US and EU mega-corporations such as Vanguard Group, Kopernik Global Investors, BNP Asset Management Holding, Goldman Sachs-owned NN Investment Partners Holdings, and Norges Bank Investment Management, which manages Norway’s sovereign wealth fund.

Several large US pension funds, foundations, and university endowments are also invested in Ukrainian land through NCH Capital – a US-based private equity fund, which is the fifth largest landholder in the country.

Ideology may be less an answer than money alone, and there we might go back to Joe Biden and the renewed question of what he and his closest retainers were up to at the Penn Biden Center. The Comer committee is rasing entirely reasonable questions in a letter to Special Counsel Robert Hur:

The letter to Hur comes as Comer appeared to discover an omission in Biden’s narrative about the mishandling of classified information. Joe Biden’s senior aide, Annie Tomasini, who reportedly told Hunter Biden multiple times that she loved him, handled the president’s classified documents at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, DC, 20 months before Joe Biden’s lawyer disclosed the discovery of the documents to the public, Comer revealed last week.

Comer also believes the president’s timeline of events omitted multiple visits from at least five White House employees: Dana Remus, Anthony Bernal, Ashley Williams, Annie Tomasini, and an unknown staffer. “There is no reasonable explanation as to why this many White House employees and lawyers were so concerned with retrieving boxes they believed only contained personal documents and materials,” according to Comer.

So the committee now wants to see what Hur has. This may eventually begin to explain the inchoate strategic policies we've been seeing.

Old Questions On Robert Malley Are New Again

I ran into this short piece at Tablet, one of the sites that broke the Malley-Tabatabai story the week before the Hamas invasion of Israel, which points out that they'd been contrarian over US policy over Israel and Iran all along, with links to prove it. One of those links, from May 2021, is The Realignment: In the Middle East, Biden is finishing what Obama started. And his top advisers are all on board. A little searching indicates that this was re-linked frequently at the time, but it's gone dormant until the new questions have come up about Blinken and Malley.

Is the new president [Biden] forging his own path in the Middle East, or is he following in the footsteps of Obama? Until now, those who feared that his presidency might become the third term of Obama fixed their wary eyes on Robert Malley, the president’s choice as Iran envoy. When serving in the Obama White House, Malley helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal, which sought accommodations with Tehran that came at the expense of America’s allies in the Middle East. In a revealing Foreign Affairs article, written in 2019, Malley expressed regret that Obama failed to arrive at more such accommodations. The direction of Obama’s policy was praiseworthy, Malley wrote, but his “moderation” was the enemy of his project. Being “a gradualist,” he presided over “an experiment that got suspended halfway through.”

Malley, the article leads one to assume, is now advising Biden to go all the way—and fast. But surely it is the president, not his Iran envoy, who determines the direction and pace of policy. Over the course of a career in Washington spanning nearly half a century, Biden has never cut a radical profile. Nor have Sullivan or Secretary of State Antony Blinken. The presence of this pair at Biden’s side signaled to many that Malley would not drive Iran policy. Shortly after the election, a veteran Washington insider noted to a journalist that “Blinken and Sullivan are certainly from the more moderate wing of the party, and that is reassuring.”

The piece goes on to tease out just what the "experiment" Malley referred to in Foreign Affairs involved:

To what, precisely, was Robert Malley referring when he spoke of Obama’s half-completed “experiment”?

If you answered “the JCPOA [the Iran nuclear deal],” you got it wrong.

If you said “improving relations with Iran,” you scored much higher, but you still failed.

The president’s “ultimate goal,” Malley wrote, was “to help the [Middle East] find a more stable balance of power that would make it less dependent on direct U.S. interference or protection.” That is a roundabout way of saying that Obama dreamed of a new Middle Eastern order—one that relies more on partnership with Iran.

It then ties Malley's policy prescriptions to Jake Sullivan, Biden's current national security adviser:

In May 2020, six months after Malley penned his Foreign Affairs essay, Jake Sullivan, writing as an adviser to Biden’s presidential campaign, co-authored his own article laying out a Middle East strategy. The goal, he explained, is to be “less ambitious” militarily, “but more ambitious in using U.S. leverage and diplomacy to press for a de-escalation in tensions and eventually a new modus vivendi among the key regional actors.” If we substitute the word “balance” for “modus vivendi,” and if we recognize that “de-escalation” and “diplomacy” require cooperation with Iran, then Sullivan’s vision is identical to Obama’s “ultimate goal” as described by Malley. Sullivan emphasized that equivalence when he defined the objective of his plan as “changing the United States’ role in a regional order it helped create.”

The piece goes on to argue that the Obama-Biden administrations have been remarkably secretive about the overall initiative, which it calls "The Realignment", which can be expressed as follows:

First, allow Tehran an unfettered nuclear weapons program by 2031; second, end the sanctions on the Iranian economic and financial system; third, implement a policy of accommodation of Iran and its tentacles in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Lebanon; and fourth, force that policy on America’s closest allies. If the United States follows those commandments, then a kind of natural regional balance will fall into place. The United States, so the thinking goes, will then finally remove itself from the war footing that traditional allies, with their anti-Iran agenda, have forced on it. Thereafter, diplomatic engagement with Iran will be the primary tool needed to maintain regional stability.

The piece then ties the Realignment to US domestic policies and the future of Zionism, prophetically it would seem:

Contemporary progressivism is, shall we say, less than enthusiastic about Zionism. One of its cherished goals is to reduce American support for Israel, and the Realignment helps it realize that ambition—but it does so slyly. It refrains from making its anti-Zionism explicit for fear of stirring up opposition to the project among the largely pro-Israel American people. But by upgrading relations with Iran, the Realignment perforce downgrades the Jewish state.

How Israel responds to this downgrading will depend on how its prolonged domestic crisis, marked by four national elections in two years’ time, finally gets resolved. Netanyahu haters in the Biden administration will be sure to delight if he is toppled from power and succeeded by someone with less foreign policy experience, such as Yair Lapid, the chairman of the Yesh Atid party. The White House believes that a post-Netanyahu Israel will work to accommodate its main demands. If, however, Netanyahu remains in power (or if he is succeeded by someone with a similar disposition on Iran), then the Israelis will not readily accept the diminished role assigned to them by the Realignment.

This, published in May 2021, puts us right into October 2023. Netanyahu, closely aligned with Donald Trump, returned as prime minister in December 2022. Indeed, as the Jerusalem Post observed at the time,

As election results heralded Benjamin Netanyahu’s amazing comeback, Yair Lapid and Naftali’s Bennett’s government of change let out its final breath.

Less than a year and a half after they made history and ended Netanyahu’s 12-year consecutive rule, history ironically struck back: Bennett, who retired after heading the government for 12 months, earned the dubious title of the prime minister with the shortest tenure ever, breaking Ehud Barak’s previous dishonorable record from the beginning of the millennium. Lapid, however, will end up serving for only 4 months, thus replacing his partner Bennett on the top of the short list.

Netanyahu, on the other hand, continues to break his own records, triumphantly approaching his sixth term, accumulating even more years as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, a title he already holds.

And it appears that the Hamas invasion earlier this month will cement Netanyahu's position now in a national unity government that will last as long as the Hamas war continues. Little is being said right now about what's going on in US-Israeli relations, but the tension that I think was evident in the brief exchange between Biden and Netanyahu in New York, when Netanyahu pointedly referred to "good Irish whiskey" and Biden crossed himself, suggests that Netanyahu, who spent time in the US between the 1950s and 1970s, is a savvy political player in the US environment as well as in Israel.

The Hamas war has put Netanyahu into the US election just as the progressives have aligned themselves with Hamas. This has the Democrats in a bind. Right now, Netanyahu is calling the shots.

The prediction in the 2021 Tablet piece, that a Netanyahu return to power wouldn't be a good sign for the Realignment -- or for the progressivist agenda behind it -- does point to an unresolved question. Malley, a direct report to Antony Blinken, a childhood friend of Blinken, and an Obama-Sullivan protégé, lost his security clearance and was put on leave from the State Department in a series of steps last spring, well before the Hamas attack, which itself appears to have come as a surprise to all Western parties. But the Tablet piece suggests that Blinken is on board with the Malley agenda notwithstanding.

What was going on there? I very much doubt l'affaire Malley signaled any serious Blinken departure from the Realignment, which has been central to progressivist Democrat policies. We still have a great deal to learn.

What's Up With Joe?

I'm deeply skeptical of this week's news. Israel, as it has every right to do, has carefully controlled news from its war in Gaza to the point that anything we hear is days old at best, and it reveals almost nothing. So naturally, across the board, legacy media and Conservative Inc lead with Israel-Hamas non-news or the sideshow of pro-Hamas demonstrations elsewhere. There are occasional notes that Joe Biden hasn't been very visible for much of the week -- his big event was tripping on some steps in Philadelphia yesterday.

But enough other news still dribbles out to convince me there's stuff we aren't being told. For instance, it sounds as if, instead of being in the White House Situation Room being briefed with his cabinet on the Hamas war, Joe spent Sunday and Monday of the holiday weekend in an interview with Robert Hur, the special counsel for his own classified document investigation:

Ian Sams, a spokesperson for the White House counsel’s office, said in a statement that the voluntary interview was conducted at the White House on Sunday and Monday as Biden and his national security team grappled with their response to the surprise weekend attack on Israel by Hamas militants and as the president received some criticism for not being more visible during the crisis.

It’s not clear when Hur’s team approached Biden’s lawyers about an interview or how long they’d been negotiating. Asked on Aug. 25 if he planned to sit for an interview with the special counsel, Biden replied, “There’s no such request and no such interest.”

The interview could signal that the special counsel investigation is nearing its conclusion.

But another story that seems to have gone almost unnoticed yesterday suggests this may be wishful thinking:

The House Oversight Committee this week revealed that five White House employees were involved in Biden’s stolen classified documents case.

. . . Recall that it was reported that Joe Biden’s attorney [Patrick Moore] first discovered “Obama-Biden administration documents in a locked closet while packing files as they prepare to close out Biden’s office in the Penn Biden Center” in November 2022.

. . . Joe Biden’s former assistant as Vice President, Kathy Chung, in April testified to the House Oversight Committee about the mishandling of classified documents by Biden since his time as Vice President.

Chung testified that White House Counsel Dana Remus tasked her with retrieving boxes of classified documents from Penn Biden Center as early as May 2022.

Joe Biden knew about his own classified documents scandal brewing long before he directed his DOJ to raid Mar-a-Lago – the timeline actually goes back to March 2021.

According to new information released by the House Oversight Committee, Joe Biden lied about the timeline. Annie Tomasini, Assistant to the President and Senior Advisor to the President and Director of Oval Office Operations, went to Penn Biden Center to take inventory of President Biden’s documents and materials on March 18, 2021.

Biden lied by omission!

“We have discovered new information about the number of White House employees involved in President Biden’s mishandling of classified documents,” the House Oversight Committee said on Wednesday.

“President Biden’s attorney stated that the discovery of classified documents at Penn Biden Center occurred on November 2, 2022.” they said.

“Our Committee has developed evidence showing the timeline of relevant events began in 2021 and involved at least five White House employees,” the Republican-led Committee said.

“President Biden and his legal team omitted months of communications, planning, and coordinating among multiple White House officials, a former VP staffer, Penn Biden Center employees, and President Biden’s personal attorneys to retrieve the boxes containing classified materials.” the Oversight said. “There is no reasonable explanation as to why this many White House employees and lawyers were so concerned with retrieving boxes they reportedly believed contained only personal documents and materials.”

On January 30 of this year, I posted about Patrick Moore, who by the received narrative at the time was the White House counsel who "discovered" the Penn Biden Center document cache on November 2, 2022. By then, it was reported that Moore

then informed the National Archives and Justice Department.

. . . On Tuesday [January 17] it emerged that Moore has already spoken to John Lausch, the U.S. Attorney for the northern district of Illinois.

Lausch was initially tasked with investigating the classified material; his job has now been taken over by the special counsel, Robert Hur, who was appointed on January 12.

In the new context of the information from the Comer committee, it looks as though Moore dsicovered he'd become involved in something much bigger than cleaning out an office closet, went straight to the National Archives and Justice Department, quit his job as White House counsel, withdrew from the case, and went home to Boston. Something's hinky here.

The Comer committee letter to White House Counsel Edward Siskel lists five specific episodes in which White House staff, as well as Biden retainer Kathy Chung, at the Defense Deparment at that time, reiviewed the Penn Biden Center documents between April and October before calling in Patrick Moore, who it strikes me was something of a designated chump who'd "discover" the cache. It looks like Moore quickly understood his problem, went to the authorities, and skedaddled.

CNN comments on the Hur interview over the holiday weekend:

Compared to special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into classified materials found at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence, including the indictment handed down in June, Hur’s probe into Biden has continued to operate quietly behind the scenes.

Still, the protracted length and exhaustive nature of the investigation has frustrated top Biden aides who expected it to wrap up months ago given the relatively small number of classified documents involved, according to a person familiar with the White House’s thinking.

That person said some Biden aides believe Attorney General Merrick Garland was overly cautious in selecting Hur, an appointee to two top Justice Department roles during the Trump administration, to ensure the investigation was politically unassailable.

I'm fascinated by the disconnect between Joe's public activities and what seems to be going on behind the scenes. Last month, it was reported,

The president, 80, has taken several stumbles in his nearly three years in office - falling while boarding Air Force One, tripping on various staircases, and taking a dramatic tumble at the Air Force Academy when he encountered a sandbag.

Now, as polls show a majority of voters are increasingly concerned about his age, Biden's team is taking extra steps to prevent him from stumbling in public, Axios reported, betting that any mockery he receives will be worth it to avoid a public tumble.

The measures, according to that story, briefly included having him wear sketchers without socks, but the photo at the top of this post shows him back to dress shoes, long socks, and garters. In other words, same old same old, along with a campaign stop where he pitched Bidenomics. His problem, that he can't hold a traditional press conference where he might get questions on US hostsges in Gaza, Afghanistan weapons going to Hamas, Hunter, Robert Malley, the Penn Biden Center, or many other areas, continues -- and his handlers still haven't been able to solve the problem of tripping on stairways.

They just won't mention that other stuff, hope nothing new comes up, and maybe they can still stop him from tripping on stairs.

So, What's Our Iran Policy Now?

Just poking around the web for information on the on again-off again $6 billion payment to Iran, I found this as of June 16:

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken rejected reports Friday that Washington and Tehran were close to deals on limiting Iran's nuclear program and releasing U.S. citizens detained in the country.

"With regard to Iran, some of the reports that we've seen about an agreement on nuclear matters or, for that matter, on detainees, are simply not accurate and not true," Blinken said when asked about indirect talks via Oman.

As of August 10, we heard this:

The United States and Iran reached a deal on August 10 for Tehran’s release of five Iranian-American dual nationals to house arrest in exchange for Washington’s release of several jailed Iranians and the unfreezing of about $6 billion in Iranian oil revenue.

. . . The latest prisoner release is not the first time Iran has demanded ransom payments in exchange for releasing hostages. In 2015 and early 2016, the Obama administration negotiated a similar scheme alongside the nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, sending Iran $400 million — the first installment of a $1.7 billion payment — as Tehran released four Americans.

As of yesterday,

The U.S. and Qatari governments have agreed to block Iran from accessing any of the $6 billion it gained access to as part of a prisoner swap deal between the Biden administration and Tehran last month, Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo told House Democrats on Thursday, according to three sources familiar with his remarks, two of whom were in the room.

. . . The administration has faced bipartisan pressure to block Iran’s access to the money as U.S. officials continue to investigate whether Iran had any direct involvement in Hamas' terrorist attack on Israel. The Biden administration has said Tehran could use the $6 billion only for humanitarian assistance.

Secretary Blinken now hedges:

During a portion of an interview with NBC News set to air on Thursday’s broadcast of “NBC Nightly News,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated that the $6 billion in Iranian assets unfrozen by a prisoner swap deal the Biden administration brokered was money Iran was allowed to accrue under the Trump administration and Iran has “always been allowed to use” these funds for humanitarian reasons, but “for technical reasons, Iran was having trouble actually using the funds,” and the Biden administration moved it to a different account, “where the money could actually be used, but under the supervision of our Treasury Department, only for humanitarian purposes.”

. . . "And not a dollar of that money has been spent to date. And we retain the right to freeze that account.”

So it wasn't going to happen, but then it did, but it was Trump's fault, and we're maybe gonna freeze it, or maybe not, according to some people who were in the room. I don't buy a billion of it.

Meanwhile, the guy who was Blinken's special envoy to Iran, Robert Malley, who would have been the point man for this whole deal, had his security clearance suspended, was taken off the project, and was not allowed in the building sometime between April and June of this year, when Blinken originally said nobody was close on a deal -- er, what deal?

The deal that isn't taking place, of course. What other deal could there be?

Something's really, really hinky here, and nobody's asking questions. I asked on Wednesday what the real agenda would be on Blinken's trip to Israel. One question that popped into my mind was the timing of Isreal's declaration of a national unity government:

Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Benny Gantz, an opposition party leader, announced they have reached an agreement to form an emergency unity government in the wake of attacks launched by the militant group Hamas.

The Jerusalem Post reported on Wednesday that both sides came to an agreement after meeting at the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) headquarters in Tel Aviv.

I think this was to forestall any attempt by Blinken to play sides against Netanyahu. Biden clearly doesn't like Netanyahu, and Netanyahu trusts neither Biden nor Blinken. The Israelis are certainly aware of the reality that they play a role in US politics:

Two separate U.S. State Department tweets calling for Israel to stop its counterstrikes against Hamas terrorists in Gaza are now deleted.

It follows fierce backlash against the agency for seeming to suggest Israel doesn't have a right to defend itself or engage in counter operations after Palestinian fundamentalists launched a multi-front surprise attack on Saturday.

I get the impression that Netanyahu at this point has the upper hand.

What Else Can We Discover About Ariane Tabatabai?

Recent developments have focused attention on Ariane Tabatabai, in particular that she is currently Chief of Staff for the US Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict. On the other hand, a web search brings up what almost looks like too much information.

She appears on web sites as adjunct professor at Goergetown University, Middle East Fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and an adjunct senior research scholar at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), and the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, which says of her

Ariane M. Tabatabai is an associate political scientist at the RAND Corporation. Prior to joining RAND, she served as the director of curriculum and a visiting assistant professor of security studies at the Georgetown University Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and an international civilian consultant for NATO. Previously, Tabatabai was a post-doctoral fellow (2017-18) in the International Security Program and a Stanton nuclear security fellow (2013-14) in the International Security Program and the Project on Managing the Atom at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs where she was also an associate (2014–2015). Tabatabai also held positions as a non-resident scholar with the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute; senior associate in the Proliferation Prevention Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and adjunct senior fellow in the Middle East Program at the Center for A New American Security (CNAS). She holds a Ph.D. in War Studies from King's College London. She is the co-author of Triple Axis: Iran's Relations With Russia and China and has published widely in academic, policy, and mainstream outlets, including International Security, the Journal of Strategic Studies, the New York Times, the Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy.

This frankly makes my head spin. Why isn't this woman already queen of the world? She also has a Wikipedia entry that isn't helpful in putting any of the above in context:

Ariane Tabatabai (Persian: آرین طباطبایی, born in Tabriz) is a former senior policy advisor to the United States Department of Defense who has vowed allegiance to the Iranian government. She is a graduate of King's College London and the daughter of Javad Tabatabai, an Iranian philosopher and professor at the University of Tehran.

It doesn't give a birth date. LinkedIn shows her with a BA from SUNY Stony Brook in 2008, an MA in International Peace and Security from Kings College London in 2011, and a PhD in War Studies from Kings College London in 2015. The 2008 BA might place her birth date in the mid to late 1980s, but other dates for her career milestones are difficult to determine. So far, I've been unable to find out how and when, if she was born in Tabriz according to Wikipedia, she found her way to the US and study at SUNY Stony Brook, and how she excelled here to the point of moving to Kings College London. Her father continues to be thriving in Iran under the current regime there.

She first appears in the Semafor article writing e-mails to senior Iranian diplomatic figures in 2014, which would place her at Kings College London finishing her PhD.

Ariane Tabatabai, the current Pentagon official, on at least two occasions checked in with Iran’s Foreign Ministry before attending policy events, according to the emails. She wrote to [Mostafa] Zahrani [former director general of strategic affairs in the foreign ministry] in Farsi on June 27, 2014, to say she’d met Saudi Prince Turki al Faisal — a former ambassador to the U.S. — who expressed interest in working together and invited her to Saudi Arabia.

. . . Ariane Tabatabai told Zahrani that she was slated to give testimony before the U.S. Congress on the nuclear deal. On July 10, 2014, she wrote that she had been asked to appear before multiple congressional committees alongside two Harvard academics — Gary Samore and William Tobey — whom she viewed as hawkish on Iran. “I will bother you in the coming days. It will be a little difficult since both Will and Gary do not have favorable views on Iran,” she wrote.

.. . Tabatabai shared a link with Zahrani to an article she’d published in the Boston Globe that outlined the “Five Myths about Iran’s Nuclear Program.” The piece explained why Iran needs nuclear power and highlighted a fatwa, or religious edict, that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei allegedly issued forbidding the development of nuclear weapons as un-Islamic. Some Western officials have questioned the legitimacy of the fatwa.

It appears that she then began a meteoric rise among various university faculties, NGOs, and the RAND Corporation, although so far, the precise dates of all these connections have proven difficult to pin down. The Wikipedia entry suggests that at least by 2021, she'd attracted the attention of Robert Malley:

After the Biden administration took office in January 2021, she joined the US negotiating team in nuclear negotiations with Iran, but together with Richard Nephew, she left the team after a few months due to differences with Robert Malley, the head of the US negotiating team, and also because they believed that US would lift too many sanctions on Iran and consequently the possible agreement would not be strong enough.

The precise timing and details of the working relationship between Malley and Tabatabai before 2021 and after the apparent split while she worked for him in the State Department are unclear. Richard Nephew, with whom she apparently worked while on the Iran negotiating team, is listed on the US State Department website as follows:

Secretary Blinken announced Richard Nephew as the Department of State’s Coordinator on Global Anti-Corruption on July 5, 2022. Nephew is returning to the Department from Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, where he was a Senior Research Scholar. He is a published author, including of a book, chapters for edited volumes, and articles on sanctions, deterrence, and nuclear proliferation. Prior to his tenure at Columbia, Nephew served as deputy special envoy for Iran, Principal Deputy Coordinator for Sanctions Policy, and Director for Iran on the National Security Staff. He also served in the Department’s Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, as well as in the Office of Nonproliferation and International Security at the Department of Energy. Nephew holds an MA in Security Policy Studies and a BA in International Affairs from The George Washington University.

For now, the most I can surmise from this sketchy information is that Ariane Tabatabai and Richard Nephew are new members of a strange menagerie associated with Antony Blinken, a group we've so far come to know includes Amos Hochstein, Robert Malley, and Blinken himself. Blinken, Hochstein, Malley, and Tabatabai in particular appear to be part of a supranational elite, born or educated outside the US, with strong international connections that appear to have fast-tracked them through academic and diplomatic careers from the start. All have prestigious credentials related to Iran, national security, and energy.

It's mildly reassuring that in addition to the letter to Blinken from the House Oversight Committee that I linked yesterday, other Republicans are on the case:

Sen. James Risch (R., Idaho) and Rep. Michael McCaul (R., Texas)—the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, respectively—are asking the State Department for information on whether Malley was compromised by the Iran Experts Initiative (IEI), a vast Iranian government-controlled propaganda operation that allegedly includes at least three of the diplomat's close associates, including one who works at the Pentagon and has a security clearance.

Although the letter refers specifically to an Iranian influence operation called the Iran Experts Initiative (IEI), it isn't clear that Tabatabai was ever part of the IEI. The Iran International piece shows her sending Zahrani links to articles she'd published in 2014 advocating Iran's position on the nuclear negotiations, but I would question whether IEI or other enablers assisted in these publications. She seems in fact to have had a large number of well-placed enablers who could put her, hardly over 30 and with little experience outside the classroom, into prestigious and influential positions in universities, the Rand Corporation, NGOs, and ultimately the Defense Department, despite what some commentators have noted were security red flags on her record.

We're only at the base of this learning curve.