Who Is Maher Bitar?

One thing I've come to notice about the recent questionable diplomatic and intelligence appointments in the administration like Robert Malley and Ariane Tabatabai is how quickly their careers have taken off, although Malley's is currently on hold. As I noted with some puzzlement in this post, by the time she was about 30 as a PhD student, Tabatabai was writing in prestigious foreign policy journals and then began a meteoric rise among various university faculties, NGOs, and the RAND Corporation. Her main qualification appears to have been that she is the daughter of Javad Tabatabai, an Iranian philosopher and professor at the University of Tehran who is close to the mullahs in the government there.

Over the weekend i saw mention of a similar figure, Maher Bitar, who we're told is of Palestinian heritage, but about whom we otherwise know little besides a precocious career rise much like Tabatabai's. His profile as a member of Georgetown Law School's class of 2012 is as informative as any:

Maher Bitar serves as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Intelligence Programs on the White House’s National Security Council staff. From 2017 to early 2021, Bitar served as General Counsel for the U.S. House of Representatives’ Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Before joining the Committee, Bitar was a member of the National Security Council’s Deputies Committee from 2015 until early 2017 in his capacity as Deputy to the U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations. While a career civil servant at the Department of State, Bitar served previously on the White House’s National Security Council staff and as a diplomat focused on the Middle East. Bitar holds a Juris Doctor from Georgetown Law, received a Master of Science degree from the University of Oxford as a Marshall Scholar, and completed his undergraduate studies at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.

A law degree in 2012 would put him in his mid-twenties at the time, which might put his birth date in the late 1980s. But even before his law degree, he seems to have attracted attention and likely influential sponsors.

As Daniel Greenfield reported at Frontpage online magazine, in 2006, as a student at Georgetown University, Bitar was a leader of the anti-Semitic, Muslim Brotherhood aligned Students for Justice in Palestine. As an SJP leader, he organized a so-called "boycott, divestment, and sanctions" campaign against Israel and its supporters on his campus. Greenfield reported that Bitar chaired a panel at a BDS conference where participants discussed how to indoctrinate Christians to believe that Israel has no right to exist.

If he was an undergraduate in 2006, this would also put his birthdate in the mid to late 1980s. He apparently left Georgetown without a bachelor's, went on to Oxford, where he received a Master's in Forced Migration about 2008 (the thesis is available online here), apparently returned to Georgetown and completed his bachelor's degree, and then earned a Georgetown law degree. It's hard to avoid thinking an influential sponsor was behind this fast track.

A federal employee profile puts Bitar working at the US State Department in foreign affairs between 2011 and 2016. He started while still a law student as a Social Science Student Trainee at -- wait for it -- $51,630 per year and wound up there as a GG-15 at $128,082 per year in 2016. At that time,

During the Obama presidency, Bitar served on the National Security Council as the Israeli-Palestinian officer. He was Samantha Power's deputy. In 2016, as UN ambassador, Power played a key role in the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 2334, which labeled Israeli neighborhoods in unified Jerusalem and Israeli towns and cities in Judea and Samaria as a "flagrant violation of international law."

But Bitar is nothing if not a polymath. When the Democrats were voted out in 2016, he moved over to serve as general counsel for the House Intelligence Committee Democrats and played a key role during the first impeachment of former President Donald Trump. Five years out of law school, an expert on Palestinians and working mostly as a diplomat, he's now a general counsel running a comic-opera impeachment.

But with the Democrats returning to the White House in January 2021, it was

announced that Maher Bitar has been appointed to serve as the senior director for Intelligence at the National Security Council. The position is one of the most powerful posts in the US intelligence community. The senior director is the node to which all intelligence from all agencies flows. He decides what to share with the President. And in the name of the President, he determines priorities for intelligence operations and collection.

. . . As one former senior national security council member explained, "The senior director for intelligence controls the information everyone sees. And by controlling information, he controls the conversation."

Usually, the sensitive position is reserved for a CIA officer who is detailed to the National Security Council. Bitar, however, is not an intelligence professional. He is an anti-Israel political activist.

It's hard to avoid thinking that influential people have been managing Bitar's career at least from his time as an undergraduate at Georgetown and have been in positions to assure his advancement at early ages for the positions he's held, like general counsel to a congressional committee or senior director for intelligence at the National Security Council, even to the point where he seems to have lacked the basic qualifications for such jobs. How could this happen? This article has a hint:

Washington has announced the appointment of Maher Bitar to senior director for intelligence in President Joe Biden’s National Security Council.

He will oversee the stream of information between the White House and US intelligence agencies.

Bitar previously served as the director for Israeli-Palestinian affairs on the National Security Council under former President Barack Obama.

. . . A Palestinian source reports that messages were passed from Biden’s staff to the Palestinians through a Palestinian billionaire living in Washington in recent months and were initiated by a US diplomat of Lebanese descent, Hady Amr.

Amr, who is married to a Palestinian woman, was a member of Martin Indyk’s staff, held a number of positions in Barack Obama’s administration, and is considered to have promoted the idea of ​​alliances with Islamic elements in the Arab world.

The one message this sends to me is that people like Tabatabai and Bitar are puppets themselves and probably not very smart. We'll have to see how this shakes out.

The Ivy Dilemma

Harvard gets 60,000 applicants every year, and if Harvard came to its senses and expelled your genocide-loving asses, 59,300 would happily run over their own grandmothers to fill your spot https://t.co/H1D9Yb3eYV

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) October 20, 2023

The post on Xwitter above raises an interestimg question: right now, we're at the start of the 2024 college application season. Early decision deadlines begin on November 1, while regular decisions start early next year. The current brouhaha over pro-Palestine demonstrations at elite schools ought to affect applications over the coming 2024 admissions season, right? For instance, here's Bill Maher:

As an Ivy League graduate who knows the value of a liberal education, I have one piece of advice for the youth of America: Don’t go to college, and if you absolutely have to go, don’t go to an elite college, because, as recent events have shown, it just makes you stupid. There are few, if any, positives to come out of what happened in Israel, but one of them is opening America’s eyes to how higher education has become indoctrination into a stew of bad ideas, among them the simplistic notion that the world is a binary place where everyone either an oppressor or oppressed. In the case of Israel, oppressors being babies and bubbes. The same students who will tell you that words are violence, and silence is violence were very supportive when Hamas terrorists went on a rape and murder rampage worthy of the Vikings. They knew where to point the fingers, at the murdered. And then it was off to ethics class.

Do you suspect for one instant that the volume of elite-school applications will drop at all as a result of all this fulmination? The tell that it won't is Maher's need to reassure the reader at the start that he has an Ivy League education himself. Glenn Reynolds, a professor with an endowed chair and Yale Law degree makes these qualifications eminently plain as he posts, Academia is bringing about its own destruction. If it is, he's watching it from the VIP boxes high above the field.

Prof William Jacobson posts on Leftist Campus Embrace Of Hamas Barbarism: “We’re in the ‘suddenly’ phase” of Higher Ed collapse. Jacobson is a professor at Cornell and a 1984 graduate of Harvard Law. Neither Reynolds nor Jacobson appears ready to abandon academe's sinking ship. Even Alan Dershowitz so far hs neither publicly burned his Yale Law degree and returned its ashes nor renounced his emeritus professorship at Harvard.

I once got into an argument with an economics professor in the comments section of his blog. He challenged me, if I saw so many flaws in academia, to find a way to arbitrage the differences in product quality and make money out of it. I never really tried to give him a systematic answer, although it later occurred to me that I arbitraged the situation in my own career by recognizing, as I began writing my PhD dissertation, that I would likely make far more money in a career outside the academy without a PhD than I would inside the academy with one, and I never looked back. So that's my answer to Reynolds and Jacobson.

My belated answer to the economics prof is that the undergraduate higher education product is so thoroughly uniform and cartelized that arbitrage is effectively impossible. It's like the airline industry under fare regulation -- every airline had to charge the same fare between any pair of cities, so that they had to sell the sizzle, not the steak. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton are selling the sizzle, an undergraduate product that's otherwise indistinguishable from one university to the next.

The only real arbitrage that's currently taking place is with a few institutions like Hillsdale College, but that's a different subject that I may take up another time.

But let's return to my original question here: will there be any decline in applications to elite schools for 2024 admissions due to any perceived defect in product quality that might be reflected in pro-Hamas and anti-Jewish demonstrations on campus? My sense of things is that if there's any decline, it will be traceable almost entirely to economic conditions, not product quality. In fact, I would even ask if any decline in Ivy applications would be reflected in an increase in applications to Brandeis University, Yeshiva University, American Jewish University, or Touro University. Instead, I would guess that even Jewish applications to the Ivies will continue at more or less the same level.

I first visited these issues 20 years ago or so when I became interested in the Dartmouth alumni trustee movement. This arose early in the last century when Dartmouth College, facing a financial crisis, asked its alumni to bail the school out, in return for which several seats on the board of directors would be nominated and elected by the alumni. This went unnoticed for decades until, in the 1980s and 1990s, conservative students began criticizing liberal faculty and administration policies. The result was that sympathetic alumni organized campaigns to elect avowed conservatives to the board as opportunities arose.

I participated in online forums and wrote several articles in The Dartmouth Review in support of the movement. I saw the potential for a curriculum more like Hillsdale College, although I was always somewhat skeptical of the movement's aims and whether they could be accomplished. The movement foundered for two reasons: first, the alumni trustees who were elected turned out to be narcissistic self-promoters, and one was arrested for domestic violence on top of that.

The other reason was harder to beat, most alumni, but especially the parents of current students, objected to the movement on the basis that any controversy about the quality of the Dartmouth product would detract from the perceived value of a Dartmouth degree on a resume. The parents in particular -- many of whom were alumni themselves -- didn't like the idea of annual fees that could otherwise buy a really nice boat or vacation home going to something that wouldn't pay off in a child's career.

That sank the movement, and the college moved to seize control of the trustee nominating process to prevent its reemergence. The problem with the current round of complaints about the Ivies is similar: alumni, parents, current and prospective students, even Jews, won't tolerate any perceived decline in the value of an Ivy degree. At best, they're going to take objections to elite education -- that it actually makes you stupid, as Bill Maher alleges -- cover their ears and go LALALALA.

There have been a number of elite-school scandals in recent years, including the Varsity Blues and now the pro-Hamas demonstrations on campuses, that have had no real impact on the demand for elite-school admissions. It's going to take something much, much bigger to change things.

The $200,000 Check

Yesterday the Comer committee released a copy of a $200,000 personal check from Joe's younger brother Jim to Joe himself, characteied as a "loan repayment". Per the committee,

In 2018, James Biden received $600,000 in loans from, Americore—a financially distressed and failing rural hospital operator.

According to bankruptcy court documents, James Biden received these loans “based upon representations that his last name, ‘Biden,’ could ‘open doors’ and that he could obtain a large investment from the Middle East based on his political connections.”

On March 1, 2018, Americore wired a $200,000 loan into James and Sara Biden’s personal bank account – not their business bank account.

And then on the very same day, James Biden wrote a $200,000 check from this same personal bank account to Joe Biden.

There's less to this than meets the eye. There's no specific quid pro quo involved, at least from what we can see now, and Joe was out of office at the time. Both Joe and Jim can claim it was what it said it was, just a loan repayment, nobody's business but theirs. On the other hand, it does reflect a mingling of family finances that we've seen especially in Joe and Hunter's dealings with each other. The committee continues,

Even if this was a personal loan repayment, it’s still troubling that Joe Biden’s ability to be paid back by his brother depended on the success of his family’s shady financial dealings.

Some immediate questions President Biden must answer for the American people:

Does he have documents proving he lent such a large sum of money to his brother and what were the terms of such financial arrangement?

Did he have similar financial arrangements with other family members that led them to make similar large payments to him?

Just the News provides additional context to the Jim Biden deal. In 2018, Jim received a total of $600,000 in loans from Americore, which the committee characterizes as "a financially distressed and failing rural hospital operator" that eventually declared bankruptcy.

After Americore Health declared bankruptcy, a Chapter 11 trustee sued James Biden alleging that the company loaned him $600,000 while it was struggling to stay afloat.

"Instead, of complying with his fiduciary responsibilities, Defendant helped Debtors procure an ill-advised bridge loan from a hedge fund that had a deleterious impact on the financial affairs of the Debtor and ultimately forced Debtors into bankruptcy, as he never delivered the promised the large investment from the Middle East," the bankruptcy court document reads. "And worse, Defendant never repaid the Loans to Americore Health, including during the time that Debtors were strapped for cash."

The plaintiff claims that it did not receive an equivalent value in services for the payments to James Biden and that the company was "Was insolvent on the dates that such transfers were made, or became insolvent as a result of such transfers."

. . . Americore has faced its own legal troubles and accusations from employees of improper management that are separate from James Biden's relationship with the company.

The UK Daily Mail has the best account of how these circustances affect Joe:

In an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com, Bush administration White House ethics chief Painter said that the President could face serious consequences if he can't produce evidence the supposed loan is real, and demanded his aides show the receipts.

'What is absolutely critical here is to find documentation of the original loan from the President to his brother, and the President should produce that,' Painter said.

'If there was no loan, there are serious questions about whether this was income for tax purposes in 2018. That's really a huge problem.

. . . When he announced his bid for President in 2019, he was required to file a statement with the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) listing his income, assets and liabilities dating back to 2017.

OGE rules say Joe did not have to report the loan itself on his disclosure forms. But Painter said interest earned on the loan could be reportable as an income source for the then-presidential candidate.

On his form, filed in July 2019, Joe listed income ranging from tens of thousands of dollars from speaking engagements dating back to November 2017, to a $950 distribution from a retirement account.

But there were no entries for interest payments from his brother James – who goes by the nickname 'Jim'.

'I think that would have to go on the form, if you got interest from your brother. And it certainly would have to go on the tax forms,' Painter said.

'If it was not a loan, then there would be serious problems over why it wasn't reported on the 2019 candidate disclosure form, as well as for income tax.'

IRS rules say loans between family members must charge a minimum interest rate in order to not be considered gifts or income. At the time, the minimum rate was around 3%, which would be $6,000 for a year-long $200,000 loan.

One thing that's significant for me is that, in addition to showing more widespread commingling of family business interests and at least one payment directly to Joe, we're starting to see amounts that would be more worth Joe's time. Five-figure payments here and there, which we've seen via Hunter, won't support the Biden family lifestyles. A six-figure payment comes closer, but we'd have to see a lot more of this kind of thing to make the whole idea credible.

What works in our favor at this point is that Jim is simply not the sharpest knife in the drawer. That he would write a $200,000 personal check to Joe and call it a "loan repayment" suggests this won't be the only clumsy move we'll find -- it llooks like Hunter, his partners, and other family retainers were much more circumspect. Jim juist wrote personal checks.

But again, this is just another episode that will keep Joe from ever holding a traditional press conference with freewheeling questions from reporters.

How Instapundit Has Fallen

I began following Glenn Reynolds as Instapundit not long after 9/11. His pitch at the time, as outlined in An Army of Davids (2006) was libertarian, and I was never quite comfortable with the title -- anyone who studies the Old Testament in any depth won't be comfortable with the prospect of a Sorcerer's Apprentice calling up legions of Davids. One was plenty -- ask Uriah the Hittite.

But this is just one illustration of the shallowness of Reynolds's thought processes. His intellectual mentors include Ayn Rand, Robert A Heinlein, and Philip K Dick. His predictions have fallen short. In the link,

Reynolds titles a chapter 'Small Is the New Big'. He discusses the rise of "armchair workers" (through companies such as eBay), doing work at home—as well as specialty-based cottage industries such as Coffin's Shoes in Knoxville, TN. He argues that future trends will create a mosaic of co-existing big box retailers, local firms, and businesses run from home.

The COVID lockdowns ended that fantasy. Insofar as they represented an experiment in working from home, it was a failure, with big companies across the board insisting that workers return to the office for at least minimum days per week. Retail is also collapsing. On the other hand, the idea of commuting from suburbs to urban downtowns has been in a long-term decline, hastened by rising crime in the cities, something libertarians, for whom legalized narcotics are a core principle, never envisioned.

Reynolds writes, "where before journalists and pundits could bloviate at leisure, offering illogical analysis or citing 'facts' that were in fact false, now the Sunday morning op-eds have already been dissected on Saturday night, within hours of their appearing on newspapers' websites". He states that the internet has redistributed access to information from professional journalists acting as media gatekeepers to millions of ordinary people in the blogosphere and elsewhere. He remarks, "many unknowns can do it better than the lords of the profession".

The army of Davids, at least the one with David Brooks, David Ignatius, and David Gergen, is doing as well as ever. The pundit who's faded since 2006 is Glenn Reynolds. He posted just yesterday, regarding the ads on his site, which have grown trashier:

SOME PEOPLE DON’T LIKE THE NEW ADS. Sorry, the problem is that InstaPundit has been demonetized by Google, for unspecified “dangerous” content. Between the overall trend of ad revenue decline — which hits everyone — and the trend of cutting advertising to right-leaning sites, and now this, ad revenue is down about 90% from its high, I’d estimate, and it may get worse. (The Amazon revenue, which we’ve been phasing out anyway, is similar). At some point I’ll probably have to go to some sort of subscription model — maybe one that lets you buy out of the ads — or a purely donation-supported model.

Wait a moment. The great libertarian hope, the little guy blogging the truth from his basement, or at least the law professor blogging the truth from his home office, has been demonetized by Google, which puts the big in big tech, and the law professor is suffering? I thought the new order was going to stop this, Google would fade away, and the internet would give equal access to all the individual blogger voices!

I think there are good reasons Reynolds is in decline as a commentator. For starters, he was and is part of the respectable Ivy establishment he criticizes, a Yale Law graduate, holder of an endowed chair at the University of Tennessee, son of a professor at the same institution, he nevertheless attacks academia as corrupt but always insists he's not like the grifters who actually run the place. In this, he set the pattern for innumerable academic bloggers whose disaffection with the culture went only so far, and whose disaffection they expressed only after they got tenure.

And the product he sells is shoddy. If his moral philosophy comes from Ayn Rand, his eschatology comes from Ray Kurzweil, Vernor Vinge, and Aubrey de Grey, luminaries of transhumanism, which at root means to adddress the issue of mortality by technologically extending the human lifespan in increments until humans are in practice immortal.

In the popular imagination, transhumanists have allowed themselves to be characterized as people who freeze their heads after death in hopes that at some future date, technology will allow them to be resuscitated and have their heads grafted onto new bodies, thereby achieving immortality or something like it -- should they die again, they can simply have their heads refrozen and be resuscitated yet again farther down the line. (Catholic cemeteries don't offer the head freezing option.)

One problem for admirers of Reynolds is that he's never had the intellectual depth to challenge the "head freezer" image of transhumanism, but to do this would imply that there's a dimension of the belief that goes beyond head freezing. In more recent years, he's stopped plugging for Kurzweil, Vinge, and de Grey on his blog, but I don't believe he's ever seriously renounced transhumanism. Instead, he plays small ball with little posts like this one:

MICROBIOME NEWS: In a Huge First, Scientists Transfer Alzheimer’s to Healthy Young Animals. “The study also revealed specific bacteria in the gut are directly linked to cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s patients. This highlights the gut microbiome as a key area of research for Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, and that could lead to new ways to treat the disease.”

The man is terrified of aging, especially Alzheimer's, and he buys into panaceas like fixing your gut bacteria. Yale really ought to be embarrassed, but so should the University of Tennessee.

His Handlers Have Lost Confidence In Him

There's been very little this morning about Joe's presser aboard Air Force One following his departure from Israel. The most pointed was at Gateway Pundit, which posted stills of John Kirby's expressions as Joe spoke. A full video -- about 13 minutes -- of the presentation is available on C-Span. As in the stills, the most important feature is the body language and expressions of the handlers.

From the start to about 2:30, Karine Jean-Pierre is visible in the lower right quadrant looking glum. Beginning about 1:45, John Kirby appears between Joe and Ms Jean-Pierre looking volcanic. At 2:27, Joe says to the press, "You guys are such a pain in the neck," and Kirby and Jean-Pierre adopt the expressions of middle school administrators contemplating a riot in the stairwells. At 2:35, Kirby and Jean-Pierre withdraw beyond camera view to consult. This seems to have been a message to Joe to go to questions from the press.

When these begin, Kirby adopts a painful expression a little like someone watching a tightrope walker whom they're confindent won't make it across the rope. By 5:29, he struggles to put on a game face. At 6:54, he disappears behind Jean-Pierre, who is shaking her head. At 7:34, she begins to say, "We gotta wrap up, guys. . ." but Joe persists, while Kirby becomes more visible and more unhappy. The two-shots with Kirby, one of them showing Kirby rolling his eyes, take place just before the end. As Joe exits, there's a brief shot of Kirby with a look of utter disgust on his face.

What are they disappointed about? There seems to be a general consensus that Biden executed predetermined US policy. For instance, per CNN:

The White House had attempted to balance the public and military support for Israel with the reality that Arab partners are critical to Biden’s approach by going to Jordan for a summit with the key Arab leaders. But the last-minute scrapping of that meeting meant Biden would no longer go to Amman and instead faces a new diplomatic headache.

. . . While there was no explicit stipulation from the US that Israel not launch its invasion until Biden leaves the region, that’s the understanding among American officials who have spent the past several days debating and planning the president’s visit, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.

American officials want humanitarian plans for Gaza fully signed off on and implemented before start of the invasion, the people said, describing that task as among Biden’s main objectives during his visit to Tel Aviv on Wednesday.

In other words, in the specific context of the Hamas invasion, Biden had little wiggle room, especially after Jordan canceled the summit with Arab leaders. At that point, all he could do was claim limited success in a limited field of action, viz, getting Israel to provide humanitarian aid in Gaza, and maybe sorta-kinda limiting or delaying Israeli reprisal. But this makes any president forced to attain such limited objectives look less than decisive -- even a Reagan would have to spin this somehow. Why are Jean-Pierre and Kirby so unhappy?

The root of the current crisis has been the tacit encouragement both the Obama and Biden administrations have given Iran, that they will give the mullahs a free hand in the region. That Iran should encourage Hamas to invade Israel is just a logical outcome of this indulgence. A secondary factor is Joe's perceived weakness. The problem for the rest of the Middle East is that, as even Joe recognizes, the Hamas invasion puts the moderate states in an impossible position of seeming to support Israel if they don't enthusiastically support Hamas -- and they blame Biden for letting it happen.

Given the overall constraints of policies Joe didn't create -- Blinken, as far as anyone can see, inherited them from Obama and has been implementing them independent of Joe, and he's been in the Middle East all week trying unsuccessfully to fix things in detail -- there's little Joe can do independently.

Maybe Kirby and Jean-Pierre are upset that Joe is trying to take too much credit for what's happening, when he's had so little control over it start to finish. But this is a problem Joe's handlers and puppetmasters have brought on themselves, although Joe is in no position to rescue them or himself. The basic issue is that the current Iran policy has failed. I'll be surprised if Kirby, Jean-Pierre, or Blinken ever acknowledge this. On the other hand, Republicans are failing to grasp the opportunity.

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?