As usual, John Bolton is absolutely right. His policy prescriptions may be reckless to the point of foolishness (”When in doubt, bomb!”), but his understanding of what is happening in Washington policy (as outlined in his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal yesterday) is unerringly accurate.

While much of the world was hyper-ventilating over the possibility that the United States (and maybe Israel) were getting ready to launch a new war against Iran, Bolton was looking at the realities and concluding that far from bombing the US was preparing to do a deal with Iran. He had noticed that over the past two years the US had completely reversed its position opposing European talks with Iran.

First, the US indicated that it would participate if the negotiations showed progress. Then, when they didn’t, we went further and actively participated in negotiating a new and more attractive offer of incentives to Iran. Bolton noticed that when that package was delivered to Tehran by Xavier Solana, the signature of one Condoleeza Rice was there, along with representatives of the other five members of the UN Security Council plus Germany.

He had probably also noticed Secretary Rice’s suggestion of possibly opening a US interests section in Tehran — the first step toward reestablishing diplomatic relations. And he didn’t overlook the softening of rhetoric in Under Secretary Wm Burn’s recent testimony to the Congress about Iran.

Now, just one day after Bolton’s cry of alarm that the US is going soft on Iran, we learn that the same Bill Burns will participate directly in the talks that are going to be held on Saturday in Geneva with the chief Iranian negotiator on the nuclear file. Bolton’s worst suspicions seem to be confirmed.

Unlike many observers and commentators, Bolton has been looking, not at what the US administration says, but what it does. Ever since the congressional elections of 2006, the US has been in the process of a fundamental change in its policy on a number of key issues: the Arab-Israel dispute, the North Korean nuclear issue, and Iran. Since the administration proclaims loudly that its policies have not changed, and since the tough rhetoric of the past dominates the discussion, it is easy to overlook what is actually going on.

Bolton no doubt noticed that Rumsfeld is gone and replaced with Robert Gates, a very different sort of secretary of Defense. He will have observed that the worst of the neocons (including himself) are now writing books and spending more time with families and friends, cheer-leading for more war by writing op-eds from the outside rather than pursuing their strategies in policy meetings in the White House.

He will have seen the gradual shift of the policy center of gravity from Dick Cheney to Rice and Gates. He will have been listening when the Chairman of the JCS and others have said as clearly as they realistically can that the military option, though never renounced as a theoretical possibility, is the least attractive option available to us and in fact is close to impossible given our over-stretch in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In other words, Bolton, as someone whose policies (in my view) are certifiably insane, recognizes real pragmatism and moderation in Washington when he sees it. And he does not like what he sees in this lame duck administration.

Over the past two or three years, we have been treated to one sensational threat after another about the likelihood of imminent war with Iran. All of these alarms and predictions have one thing in common: they never happened. Perhaps it is time for us to join Bolton in looking at the real indicators. When Bolton quits writing his jeremiads or when he begins to express satisfaction with the direction of US policy, that is when we should start to get worried.

With a few quibbles here and there, I think Dr. Sick gets it exactly right.

“Adelson, whose countenance often suggests that he is spoiling for a fight, takes pride in being an outsider, who has suffered rejection and ridicule but has avenged every slight, many times over. Vindication is sweet, if never quite sufficient…”

“Adelson’s father, a Lithuanian immigrant, was a cabdriver in Boston, and his mother ran a knitting shop from home, in a tenement in Dorchester. Sheldon, his three siblings, and their parents all slept in one room. He and other Jewish boys in the neighborhood were beaten up by Irish youths.”

The last point immediately brought to mind the similar childhood experience of another staunch Likudist, Norman Podhoretz. As he recounted in his famous 1963 Commentary essay, “My Negro Problem — and Ours,” Podhoretz suffered a series of humiliating encounters with “Negro” youths both in schoolyards and other venues close to his predominantly Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn throughout his childhood. According to a review of Podhoretz’s latest book, ‘World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism,’ by Ian Buruma, those encounters, which included beatings, contributed decisively to Podhoretz’s later politics, which Buruma describes as ”the longing for power, for toughness….”

Podhoretz’s original essay, admirable in its honesty, explores the origins of his “fear and hatred” of “Negroes” and finds them in his earliest memories when he could not understand why it was they who “were supposed to be persecuted when it was the Negroes who were doing the only persecuting I knew about — and doing it, moreover, to me. …The Negroes,” he went on, “were tougher than we were, more ruthless, and on the whole better athletes.” It was thus in a confrontation with a Negro gang that Podhoretz underwent his “first nauseating experience of cowardice” that, with it, came the “appalled realization that there are people in the world who do not seem to be afraid of anything, who act as if they have nothing to lose.” To him, Negro life “seemed the very embodiment of the values of the street — free, independent, reckless, brave, masculine, erotic …But, most of all, (Negroes) were tough; beautifully, enviably tough, not giving a damn for anyone or anything” in a world where “sissies” was “the most dreaded epithet of an American boyhood.” (Italics in the original.)

I have been thinking about the relationship between humiliation and the neo-conservative worldview — particularly the rage at much of the world that seems to underlie its more hard-line personifications, such as those of Podhoretz or Adelson or Caroline Glick or, for that matter, Michael Ledeen and Richard Perle — since I first read “My Negro Problem” a long, long time ago. Of course, the latter three were presumably never physically beaten as were Podhoretz or Adelson, but their rage, their obsession with “toughness,” their contempt for softness (diplomacy) and devotion to “hard power” all suggest that they may have suffered their own humiliations.

For example, in Perle’s roman a clef, aptly titled ‘Hard Line,’ you find this description of the childhood of the protagonist, Michael Waterman:

“He had not always been so zealous or so tough. The only jewel in the crown of a Los Angeles kosher butcher named Sam and his wife, Esther, Michael Waterman was born in 1943 and grew up in a two-bedroom, one-bath stucco bungalow on Hayworth Street in the Fairfax section of Los Angeles, equidistant from his father’s shop and the storefront temple where Same went to pray. A slight, precocious child, Michael suffered heavily at the hands of his schoolmates. When most boys his age spent their free time playing baseball, football, or tennis, Michael’s parents insisted, with the best of intentions, on giving him cello lessons four days a week. So during the fifth through eight grades — crucial years for youngsters — Michael Waterman didn’t carry a fielder’s mitt or shoulder pads to school, but a heavy black leather instrument case. Instead of weekends at the beach, he spent his time indoors practicing scales. He was small and perpetually pale and thin and wore orthodontic braces. He was …different. And so his classmates picked on him in the instinctive, impersonal cruel way of preadolescents, and Waterman withdrew like a turtle inside an emotional shell.”

In reality, Perle’s parents were both better off and less pious than depicted in this passage, according to his biographer, Alan Weisman, but I don’t doubt that much of the rest of Perle’s description of “Waterman’s” childhood is a more or less accurate reflection of his own sense of being an outsider, a kind of “sissy” forced to endure cruel and humiliating taunts, even as he later got his revenge by excelling at debate and subsequently at political intrigue in Scoop Jackson’s office and beyond. One has only to look at the remarkably curious and vaguely pathetic sequence in “The Case for War,” his production in last year’s “America at the Crossroads Series” on PBS, when he revisits his high school in Hollywood and draws particular attention to and gazes longingly at the names of its movie-star graduates painted garishly above the lockers in the hallway, as if their glamour and celebrity proved something special about himself. Those few seconds conveyed a much more insecure personality than his Beltway identity as the very embodiment of toughness and a “Hard Line.”

Jacob Heilbrunn’s suggestion of a social, as well as a personal, connection between humiliation and what he correctly calls the neo-conservative “mindset” (as opposed to “ideology”) was, along with his description of the movement’s Trotskyite origins, the most compelling part of his book, ‘They Knew they were Right: The Rise of the Neocons’. “The social exclusion experienced by Jews at the hands of the WASP elite” that persisted in the US well into the 1960s stirred a “deep resentment” among many of the movement’s most influential leaders, notably Irving Kristol and Podhoretz, according to Heilbrunn. Indeed, he notes, Podhoretz has described the neo-conservative movement as the war against the “WASP patriciate.”

Neoconservatives “know that they will never be accepted by the establishment,” Heilbrunn goes on in a later passage about Perle. “Indeed, they outwardly revel in the knowledge that they are outsiders. But beneath the veneer of confidence is a seething rage at the government bureaucracy and social elites.”

That rage is on extravagant display throughout the extremely angry book that Perle wrote with David Frum in 2004, “An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror” (as well as on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal), in which the authors pour unremitting scorn on the CIA and the State Department (and Europe) for their failure to understand, let alone seriously address, the apocalyptic threat that faces them in the form of what Podhoretz calls “Islamofascism.” And, ironically, in describing the origin of that threat, they cite the centuries of humiliation experienced by the Muslim world at the hands of the West and, more recently, Israel. The 9/11 attack, in their view, was about “restoring injured pride through the destruction of the symbols of an opposing civilization.”

“The Islamic world has lagged further and further behind the Christian West; since 1948, it has repeatedly been humiliated even by the once disdained Jews,” they write. “These defeats and disasters have been more than a wound to Muslims: They directly challenge the truth of Islam itself.” And that in turn has fueled a “murderous rage” throughout the Middle East. “Religious extremists and secular militants; Sunnis and Shiites; communists and fascists – in the Middle East, these categories blend into one another. All gush from the same enormous reservoir of combustible rage.”

Rage deriving from humiliation is a compelling concept, whether the humiliation originates in physical abuse, personal taunts, social exclusion, or membership in a group, nation, or civilization that has been colonized, occupied, or otherwise subdued or dominated by foreign powers. But the last kind of humiliation is certainly not unique to the Islamic or Arab worlds. Indeed, hard-line neo-conservatives — when pressed to elaborate on “why they hate us” — often draw parallels between the causes of “Islamofascism” and the rise of Nazism in a Germany humiliated and enraged by the Treaty of Versailles after World War I. In recent years, they’ve also warned against the threat of a revanchist Russia eager to restore the Soviet empire and its superpower status; the emergence of an aggressive and ultra-nationalist China, determined to avenge the humiliations it has suffered since the 1840 Opium War and reclaim its status as the world’s “Middle Kingdom;” and even the plotting of the perfidious French who, by manipulating the EU to oppose the U.S., can redress, according to neo-con historiography, the undying shame they presumably must feel about both their Nazi collaboration and their subsequent rescue by Anglo-Americans! The message from these examples is clear: those whom one should most fear are those who feel, whether rightly or wrongly, that they have been humiliated and are unwilling to forgive, if not forget.

What is remarkable — and what really struck me when reading “An End to Evil” — is that Jewish neo-conservatives never seem to acknowledge that they, too, may be susceptible to a similar sense of collective historical humiliation — and the rage that it can create — arising from the centuries of abuse experienced by Jews that culminated in the Nazi Holocaust. Indeed, the book’s tone was so angry that it occurred to me that the authors might be projecting some their own “combustible rage” onto Arabs and Muslims, in particular. (Ironically, Podhoretz proves helpful here: in his 1963 essay, he notes that, “The psychologists …tells us that the white man hates the Negro because he tends to project those wild impulses that he fears in himself onto an alien group which he then punishes with contempt.”) That’s not to say that Perle and Frum and other hard-line neo-cons are incorrect about the existence of feelings of humiliation and anger among Muslims in the Greater Middle East; I just wonder to what extent their own rage, of which they seem much less conscious, exaggerates those feelings and their pervasiveness in the region.

Of course, the Holocaust and its impact on the worldview of contemporary American Jews, the great majority of whom are much more open to accommodation with the Muslim world and Palestinians than hard-line neo-cons, is an overwhelming subject. (For those who are interested, I addressed some aspects of the subject in an article I wrote three years ago, called “From Holocaust to Hyperpower, although I also stongly recommend “The Holocaust in American Life” by Peter Nozick). But, for purposes of this post, the image of Jews going to their deaths “like lambs to the slaughter” — an image that first became dominant during the formative years for the generation that includes Perle, Ledeen, Charles Krauthammer, among others in the early 1960s when the Eichmann trial and “Judgment at Nuremberg”, among other events, brought the Holocaust much more forcefully into the public domain than it had been before — was deeply, deeply disturbing, even at a time when victimhood had gained a certain moral stature thanks to the civil rights movement, and identity politics was on the rise. While Israel’s stunning military victory in 1967 offered a remarkable and highly welcome antidote to the image of Jews as helpless victims, the war — along with other events of the time, including the rise of the Black Power and anti-war movements — also reinforced among a not insignificant number of Jews a sense of vulnerability and insecurity, as well as the notion that Jews had to be tough to survive. Indeed, it was shortly after the war that Podhoretz steered ‘Commentary,’ the flagship publication of the American Jewish Committee, sharply to the right on foreign-policy issues, in particular, and that Rabbi Meir Kahane, who popularized the slogan “Never Again” with its multiple connotations of humiliation, shame, militancy, and rage coming out of the Holocaust, founded the Jewish Defense League. (This was before “Never Again” was appropriated by anti-genocide movements that wanted to make the idea universal, rather than specific to Jews, as Kahane had intended.) Kahane, a man filled with rage, emigrated to Israel in 1971 where he formed the Kach Party, which was put on Israel’s and the State Department’s terrorism lists after one of its U.S.-born militants, Baruch Goldstein, massacred 29 Palestinian worshipers and injured more than a 100 more at the Mosque of Abraham/Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron in 1994. (Kahane himself was assassinated in New York in 1990.)

While more recent historical research has suggested that the “lambs-to-the-slaughter” paradigm was over-simplified, and Holocaust-related museums and school curricula have tried over time to present a more-nuanced image, the Jew-as-victim has remained dominant through most of the last 40 years or so, and the fact that the Holocaust itself has become so thoroughly integrated into American culture and education, primarily through the efforts of the “Israel Lobby,” has probably not helped in that respect. And while the image no doubt helps ensure continued U.S. support and sympathy for Israel, it has also perpetuated a sense of humiliation for at least some Jews. Consider, for example, this passage in Rich Cohen’s 1998 book, “Tough Jews”, a paean to Jewish-American gangsters, like Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky, who Cohen sees as the perfect counterpoint to the Jew-as-victim paradigm. Cohen, who was born in 1968, writes of both his embarrassment and anger with the Holocaust unit taught in school.

“You see, for people like me, who were born long after Germany was defeated, the worst part of the Holocaust was never the dead bodies; it was the way Jewish victims were portrayed. In history class at my junior high school in Illinois, we were forced to sit through films, spooled by some A/V geek, that showed images of the Holocaust: all those Jews waiting to be shot, looking ahead with already dead eyes, trees in the background, hands covering genitals. In none of those pictures was there even a faint suggestion of personality, an individual. There was only a silent, wide-eyed mass, the shame of being marched naked, being seen by women, by men …For forty minutes I would sit there, surrounded by non-Jewish classmates, my eyes burning my neck starting to itch. At recess I would walk up to Clay Mellon, biggest kid in our school, the bully who ran everything, and say, ‘You stupid asshole.’”

Cohen doesn’t tell us what happened next, but the message is pretty clear: humiliation leads to aggression, however ill-considered or indirect it may be. Moreover, the humiliation doesn’t even have to be up close and personal, as with physical attacks or verbal taunts; in this case, it was conveyed by a film strip created 40 years before and half a world away. Is it no wonder that Arabs and Muslims get angry when they see video of violence perpetrated against Palestinians by Israeli soldiers or settlers broadcast on their television screens in real time or read Mohammed Omer’s account of how he was treated by Shin Beth?

So, might humiliation — whether in the form of physical beatings by the “Other”, as experienced by Adelson and Podhoretz and their generation; or taunting and social exclusion, as experienced by Perle and his generation; or learning about (through watching old film strips and photos and other means) the mass murder of a collective group of which you are a member, even if two generations removed, or some combination of two of the three, or all three — produce a rage that would translate into extremely and even irrationally aggressive policy recommendations against a perceived threat? At the least, it would make such a result more likely. Yet, while hard-line neo-cons recognize that dynamic in other groups, particularly those they see as enemies, they never seem to see how it might apply to their own experience and outlook.

At the same time, rage and aggression is clearly not an inevitable outcome of humiliation, however it is incurred. Most Jewish Americans have been exposed to one, two, or even all three of these kinds of humiliations but, unlike the hard-line neo-cons like Adelson, Podhoretz, Perle, and Frum, they still oppose attacking Iran and favor withdrawal from Iraq; they still support territorial compromise a two-state solution with the Palestinians for whose plight they even express some sympathy; and they are not obsessed with “Islamofascism,” nor, in Buruma’s words, do they “[long] for power and being tough.” So, while humiliation may well be a necessary condition for the kind of extremism that hard-line neo-cons espouse, it may not be sufficient by itself.

It may be that the timing of the humiliation(s) experienced by the individual in relation to his or her own emotional and social development, as well as the degree to which the individual is traumatized by the experience(s), are key factors that trigger the anger and aggression that, in my view, underlie the neo-conservative worldview. In that respect, I found a reaction to Buruma’s essay by a reader of Josh Marshall’s blog, talkingpointsmemo.com, last September, particularly compelling. Although closer in age to Perle, the reader, “PK” was subject to beatings — in his case, by Italian and Irish kids — of the kind experienced by Podhoretz and Adelson in their youth. Here’s what he writes about Buruma’s analysis of Podhoretz, although I suspect he would apply it to Adelson, if not the others, as well:

“The simple explanation is that Podhoretz is suffering the rage of the impotent. When I was a young Jewish kid in the fifties, I lived in an area that was 90% Irish and Italian Catholic. I still like to joke that growing up I thought my middle name was “kike”.

It was not unusual for my small crowd to be constantly bullied and intimidated by these other kids. Most of us were bookish and only a few of us were big enough or tough enough to fight back when it inevitably came to blows. Over the years, most of figured out a way to make peace and by the time we were in high school, some sort of truce had evolved.

Yet with all of that, when I feel I am being pushed around, my mental state conjures up what can only be called violent fantasies of revenge……..inflict the beating on my persecutor that I couldn’t inflict as a kid but that was the source of humiliation to me.

I am sure that Podhoretz must have had the same type of internal reaction. The difference is that he must have a personality defect and has been unable to evolve past the primitive emotional level of his childhood. Add a towering intellect and powerful personality and you get the kind of miscreant that throughout history has lead [sic] people into monumental carnage as a means to overcome their own insecurity and feelings of helplessness.

I know this may sound like pop psychology from a layman but in a lot of respects I can relate to the experiences Podhoretz had as a kid and the feelings it engendered. The difference is that I have learned that hatred and revenge are poisonous to the soul. Podhoretz makes the mistake of believing that if he can only find a way to conquer his “enemies”, it will somehow mitigate his own sense of inadequacy. Where he has gone, there is no coming back, nothing would ever be enough, there will always have to be a new enemy, always another affront to his manhood, always another way to prove he is not that weak little impotent Jewish kid afraid of being beaten up.”

As Franz Fanon wrote in “The Wretched of the Earth,” “Violence is a cleansing force [that] …frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inactivity: It makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.” Remarkably, that quote appears in Perle’s “An End to Evil” as part of the passage devoted to explaining the origins of Muslim and Arab extremism. Compare it with Charles Krauthammer exulting in the smashing victory achieved by the U.S. in Afghanistan –

“What talks in the region? Power. …The elementary truth that seems to elude the experts again and again — Gulf War, Afghan war, next war — is that power is its own reward. Victory changes everything, psychology above all. The psychology in the region is now one of fear and deep respect for American power”

– and you can hear what Fanon was writing about.

In an article in Monday’s USA Today, ret. Army Gen. Jack Keane, a key architect and supporter of the “Surge”, who is close to both Gen. David Petraeus and the neo-conservatives who are advising McCain, predicted “significant reductions (in U.S. troops in Iraq) in 2009 whoever becomes president.” Even more remarkably — and in contrast to the repeated cautions by senior military officials in Iraq, including Petraeus, that the progress made by the Surge over the past year remains “fragile” and “reversible” — Keane told the newspaper, “I think the momentum we have (in Iraq) is not reversible.”

With Bill Kristol and the Weekly Standard already declaring victory, Keane’s assessment opens the door for McCain, who revised his previous opposition to setting any timetable for withdrawal when he declared in mid-May that most U.S. troops would be out of Iraq by 2013, to suggest an accelerated pace that may yet approach Obama’s timetable for withdrawing all U.S. combat troops 16 months after taking office, or by June, 2010. Despite the ridicule that such a revision might invite, the fact is that the Iraq war remains a loser for McCain, especially among independent voters.

Interestingly, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, who is desperate to get more troops into Afghanistan, revived the possibility Monday that Washington will continue withdrawing troops from Iraq after only a brief pause in August after the formal end of the Surge. That possibility seemed to have been put on the shelf a couple of months ago when Bush indicated that troop levels were unlikely to be reduced below the 140,000 to be reached at the end of this month through the rest of the administration. Whether Mullen’s remarks were provoked by a new assessment that improvements in Iraq are indeed irreversible, as Keane apparently believes, or whether they reflect a new Pentagon effort to persuade Bush to revise his own timetable isn’t clear yet.

[In his opening statement, he says] “I will say this, however: My position with regard to the Iranian regime hasn’t changed. They remain a destabilizing factor in the region, and that’s evident and actually more evident when one visits. But I’m convinced a solution still lies in using other elements of national power to change Iranian behavior, including diplomatic, financial and international pressure. There is a need for better clarity, even dialogue at some level.”

[In response to a question about his discussions with his counterpart in Israel during his recent visit there, he says] “Certainly, the concern about Iran continues to exist. And you talk about the nuclear threat. And I believe they’re still on a path to get to nuclear weapons and I think that’s something that needs to be deterred. They are — and I talk about my time up on the border. They are very involved with Syria, very involved with Hezbollah, supporting Hamas. And so the network that they support is also a very dangerous one and a very destabilizing one.”

[Asked about what the consequences of an Israeli strike on Iran and how the Iranians would react, he says] “Well, I …don’t want to speculate in that regard. Clearly, there is a very broad concern about the stability level — the overall stability level in the Middle East. I’ve been pretty clear before that from the United States’ perspective, the United States’ military perspective in particular, that opening up a third front right now would be extremely stressful on us. That doesn’t mean we don’t have capacity or reserve, but that would really be very challenging. And also the consequences of that sometimes are very difficult to predict.

“So I think that, you know, just about every move in that part of the world is a high-risk move. And that’s why I think it’s so important that the international piece, the financial piece, the diplomatic piece, the economic piece be brought to bear with a level of intensity that resolves this.”

[Asked whether he was suggesting that an Israeli attack would drag the U.S. into a military confrontation with Iran, he says] “I’m not specifically again speculating about what the consequences of any action would be. It is a very, very broad, and what has been enduring for a while, concern about the instability in that part of the world. And destabilizing acts, destabilizing events are of great concern to me.”

“…I’m really very focused on trying to inject as much stability in that part of the world. And it is my view that Iran is at the center of what is unstable in that part of the world. And it reaches all the way, you know, from Tehran to Beirut.”

[After insisting that U.S. forces could prevent Iran from closing the Straits of Hormuz at least for any sustained period, Mullen is asked to elaborate on what he meant by the need for dialogue and whether it includes military-to-military talks.] “No, I’ve — when I talk about dialogue — actually, I would say very broadly, across the entirety of our government and their government, but specifically that would … need to be led, obviously, politically and diplomatically. And if it then resulted in a military-to-military dialogue, I think that part of it certainly could add to a better understanding about each other. But I’m really focused on the diplomatic aspect.”

“…We haven’t had much of a dialogue with the Iranians for a long time, and I think if I were just to take the high stakes that …I just talked about a minute ago, part of the results of that engagement or lack of engagement, I think, is there. But as has been pointed out more than once, it takes two people to want to have a dialogue, not just the desire on one part.”

[Asked whether he’s saying there’s a need for dialogue between the United States government and the Iranian government, he says] “…I think it’s a broad dialogue. I think it would cover the full spectrum of international — and it could very well certainly cover the dialogue between us as well.”

Mullen is actually going further in calling for dialogue than former Centcom Commander Adm. William “Fox” Fallon did. And note that there’s no mention of the current precondition, that Iran suspend its uranium enrichment. His opposition to any attack by Israel is really quite explicit.

Now, the question is, why did Mullen, who clearly enjoys the backing of his boss, Pentagon chief Robert Gates, go as far as he went in his remarks? Is it simply an effort to tamp down rising tensions (and oil prices) set off the threats and counter-threats of the last few weeks, as even the White House seemed inclined to do, particularly in the wake of Israel’s well-advertised exercises last month and the publication of Sy Hersh’s New Yorker article over the weekend? Does it reflect real concern that Israel may indeed be preparing to attack unilaterally or that the hawks are gaining ground in their push for an attack before the the administration leaves office? Or does it reflect confidence that the realists are in control and that now, particularly in light of indications this past week that the Iranians may be prepared to conditionally accept the latest 5+1 offer, is the moment to push for serious engagement? I think it’s still too early to tell, but the message behind these remarks is pretty clear: the Pentagon brass are firmly opposed to military action.

Earlier this week, colleagues sent me a lengthy — but quite eloquent — statement by Mohammed about his experience that, with his permission, I am posting on the blog. I found his thoughts about Shylock’s appeals in the “Merchant of Venice” to his Christian persecutors as Mohammed himself was undergoing what must have been a very traumatic and deeply disillusioning experience at the hands of his fellow human beings to be particularly compelling. You can judge for yourself.

“SUMMARY OF EVENTS IN THE DETENTION, INTEROGATION & TORTURE
OF PRIZE WINNING INTERNATIONAL JOURNALIST, AGE 24, GAZA NATIVE MOHAMMED OMER BY ISRAELI AUTHORITIES, JUNE 26-27, 2008.

Note: This is a compilation of his first hand account of the events of June 26 and June 27, 2008. On June 28th as this is being transcribed Omer is again in transit to a European hospital in Gaza due to chest pains and difficulty breathing and swallowing as a result of the following.

07:00, THURSDAY JUNE 26, 2008:
Mohammed Omer arrives at the Jordanian transit center to catch the bus which will take him across the border to the Israeli transit center at Allenby, just west of Amman Jordan in the Occupied West Bank. Omer was returning from a multi-country speaking tour on the situation in Gaza in Europe in addition to receiving the 2008 Martha Gellhorn Award for Journalism with co-recipient Dahr Jamal. Omer at age 24 is the youngest person in history to receive this prestigious award. He arrived in Amman from France Saturday June 21, 2008, eager to get home for his brother’s wedding next Thursday. Israeli authorities refused him transit forcing him to remain in limbo on a Jordanian transit visa for five days until word arrived he’d be allowed to go home.

Boarding the bus that crosses the border between the Occupied Territories and Jordan, the following transpired.

09:50, THURSDAY JUNE 26, 2008:
Mohammed Omer: “I arrived with others at the Israeli immigration terminal at Allenby around 9:50 AM, entering with the others on my transport, through luggage collection and security screening which leads into the holding area for passport control. As I stood in line to approach the passport agents, I believed everything to be okay and that I’d soon be home in Gaza. At this point a female Israeli soldier approached me and asked, ‘Where are you from?’ I replied, ‘Gaza’. She asked, ‘Where is that?’ and I answered in Hebrew, ‘Azzah’. She nodded, stating ‘Oh yes,’ before pausing and adding, ‘Actually, according to my computer, you don’t have an entry permit.’ Pointing to the rows of chairs facing the Passport agents she motioned me to have a seat and told me someone would call my name.

One hour and a half later , my name still had not been called. I watched as people with American and European passports easily traversed passport control and questioning as well as the VIP club members who simply show passports and pass. I continued to wait.

I was called by a blond haired man with green eyes, a Shin Bet agent, (hereafter referred to by the Israeli acronym Shabak), the internal Israeli intelligence division similar to the FBI or MI-5 in the US or Britain. In Hebrew he asked, ‘Efo Mokhammed?’
In English I replied, ‘Yes, I am Mohammed.’

He asked me to come to him and then asked where my bags were. I pointed to the holding area with my luggage, two pieces: an overnight backpack and a medium size suitcase. He asked if I brought anything illegal with me and responded of course not.

The blond Shabak then asked for my cell phone, telling me to turn it off and remove the battery. I asked if I could make a phone call quickly to let my Dutch Embassy escort, who was waiting on the other side of the terminal know what was happening. The shabak replied forcefully, ‘No! You can’t’.

This was my first indication this delay was not routine. Had it been, there would have been no issue with me informing my diplomatic escort of the situation.

Note: Absent a watch, wall clock or mobile phone, times can only be approximated from this point forward.

APPROXIMATELY 11:00, THURSDAY JUNE 26, 2008
I removed the battery from the cell phone as I have been asked and placed my luggage on the two metal tables as requested. He then asked me to leave my belongings and follow him. I recognized we were entering the Shin Bet offices at Allenby. Upon entering, he motioned for me to sit in a chair within a closed corridor. I could see nothing beyond the walls, only the cameras above my head watching me.

APPROXIMATELY 12:30 , THURSDAY JUNE 26, 2008
After what seemed to be one hour and thirty minutes, both doors at the end of the corridor opened. I watched as one of the Palestinian passengers exited securing his belt to his trousers. A second man followed behind and was struggling to put on his T-shirt. Immediately I realized I was not in a good place. The rooms from which they exited must be used for strip searching. Suddenly, I became nervous, but stayed calm with all the soldiers.

A uniformed shabak officer with police clothes, referred to as Avi by his co-workers told me to come with him. My luggage had been brought and he proceeded to empty each of all contents, manually checking every item from underwear to the gifts of perfume I’d purchased for friends and family. He then tossed the gifts to the other side of the table. Shortly thereafter, a well built muscular blond man in his forties joined Avi while green eyes from earlier entered the room to supervise. Green eyes began what soon became apparent to me to be an interrogation.

‘What is this?’ he says pointing to what is obviously clothing. ‘What is this?’, ‘What is this?’ he continues to pepper in elementary English as each item is removed from my luggage. Avi now moves to my backpack, (overnight bag) containing my documents, letters from readers throughout Europe, copies of e-mails, my articles, my journalist notebooks and the business cards of members of parliament in Greece and Sweden as well as those of members in the House of Commons in England in addition to cards from various business people I met throughout Europe. All of my records, contacts and correspondence of my 3-week trip, not to mention all of my notes for future stories the intelligence orders examined. They then collected all of my documents and dumped them into a blue box adding my cell phone and the memory cards storing all of the photographs from my trip and the presentations I made to the governments of The Netherlands, France, Sweden, Greece and in the United Kingdom.

They were looking for something specific but I wouldn’t know what until green eyes demanded, ‘Where is the money, Mohammed?’

What money I thought. Of course I had money on me. I was traveling.

Confused, I replied I had some money from various nations but not much. He commanded I place all currency on the table, which I did. It amounted to the equivalent of about four hundred pounds–roughly $800 USD. For a moment I was relieved, thinking this was just a typical shakedown. I’d lose the cash with me, but that would be about it.

However, my traveling money failed to suffice. Dissatisfied, he pressed, ‘Where is the English pound and how much you have?’

I realized he was after the award stipend for the Martha Gellhorn Prize from the UK and I told him I did not have it with me. I’d arranged for a bank transfer rather than carry it with me. Visibly irritated the intelligence agent continued to press for money.

Around me, its filled with hall room filled with more intelligence officers, bringing the total Israeli personnel, most well armed in the room to eight: eight Israelis and me. At this point I realized this wasn’t a simple shakedown.

Dissatisfied that larger sums of money failed to materialize, green eyes accused me of lying. I again repeated the prize money went to bank draft and I already had shown him all the cash I had on me. Avi interjected, ordering me to empty my pockets, which I already had. Seeing they had tapped out, he escorted me into another room, this one empty.

‘OK take off your clothes’ Avi the intelligence officer ordered.

I asked why. A simple pat-down would have disclosed any money belts or weapons; besides, I had already gone through an x-ray machine before entering the passport holding area.

He repeated the order.

Removing all but my underwear, I stood before Avi. In an increasingly belligerent tone he ordered, ‘take off everything’.

‘I am not taking off my underwear,’ I stated. Again he ordered me to remove my underwear.

At this point I informed him that an escort from the Dutch embassy was currently waiting for me on the other side of the interrogation center and that I was under diplomatic transit.

He replied he knew that thus indicating he didn’t care and again insisted I strip. Again I refused. There was no reason for me to do so.

At this point he placed his hand on his hip revolver and I became quite frightened. Tears welled in my eyes and I began crying, ‘Why are you treating me this way?’ I asked attempting to maintain my composure. ‘I am human being.’

For a moment I flashed on the scene in the Oscar winning film, The Pianist where the Jewish man, being humiliated by a Nazi quoted Shakespeare, invoking his faith in place of written words, ‘Doth a Jew not have eyes?’ the old man queried, attempting to appeal to the humanity buried somewhere in the soul of his oppressor. Finding myself confronting the same racism and disdain I wanted to ask Avi, ‘Doth a Palestinian not have eyes?’

Like the Nazi, would his indoctrination inoculate him from empathy as well? Likely, I reasoned, it would.

Avi smirked, half chuckling as he informed me, ‘This is nothing compared to what you will see now.’

With that the intelligence officer unholstered his weapon, pressing it to my head and with his full body weight pinning me on my side, he forcibly removed my underwear. Completely naked, I stood before him as he proceeded to feel me up one side and down the other. He knew I had nothing on. The x-ray would have shown such and once people pass through the first security check, no one is allowed to leave the area, even to go have a smoke, get food or drink.

Avi then proceeded to demand I do a concocted sort of dance, ordering me to move to the right and the side. When I refused, he forced me under his own power to move side to side. Terrified now, I started to cry. Backing off, he ordered me to get dressed and follow him.

Returning to the room with my luggage, the blond intelligence officer initiated a discreet form of psyops as he proceeded to dissect my belongings. ‘You are a crazy man,’ he said nonchalantly, shaking his head side-to-side signifying disgust.
‘Is there anyone who is Gazan who would go to France, see Paris and then come back to Gaza where there is no food, no fuel, no clean water? Where there is darkness?’

As he spoke his tone dispensed words in slices of condescension.

‘Or do you like to be around the Hamas system in Gaza?” he accused, not looking for an answer or giving me the freedom or ability to respond.

Goading, he continued. ‘Aren’t you ashamed to have your name and reputation associated with such a dirty place as Gaza?’

Finally I responded. ‘Returning home is my choice. I want to be a voice for those who have no voice and get the truth out about Gaza to the world,” I stated forcibly, adding, ‘I have no affiliation with the Hamas. I don’t even think they like me.’

The fact is, politicians rarely have an affinity for those charged with overseeing their actions in the press.

Patronizing, he continued in less than optimal English, ‘You speak well English, where did you study?’

‘Islamic University in Gaza’, I replied. Peripherally I watched as the other agents seemed to be reveling in ransacking my belongings with total disregard for order and fragility. Patiently I requested they repack the items once they finished checking them. Avi barked at me, telling me to shut up and not interfere.

Angered, I replied, ‘I am a journalist and I’m not accustomed to shutting up. I am asking please…’

‘You don’t touch anything,’ he bellowed.

Dropping my arms in a motion of acquiescence, I relented, replying, ‘All right.’

My protests seemed to encourage their zeal for exploit and further invasion of my privacy. I watched helplessly as Avi and another young man proceeded to open the designer perfumes I’d purchased in Europe.

‘Why the perfumes,’ the blond interrogator asked.

‘They are gifts for the people I love,’ I replied.

He retrieved and held up the European chocolates. Motioning to them, I added, ‘And the chocolate is for a pregnant woman in Gaza who has always dreamed of eating European chocolates.’

Superciliously he replied, ‘Oh, do you have love in your culture?’

Back to Shakespeare, ‘Doth a Palestinian not have ears? Are we not human?’ The callous and racist nature of his taunt aggravated. Beginning to lose my patience, realizing his attempts to infuriate me by sliding through insults in the guise of questions, I countered that of course we have love in our culture.

At this moment he spied the visitor’s pass I used to record my segment with BBC World Service Radio. ‘Oh,’ he quipped mockingly. ‘You were also on the BBC World Service as well’.

I answered affirmative and he continued, ‘I see that you have been everywhere for the past three weeks.’

None of this questioning seemed productive and I wasn’t sure where this was going. The man is fully aware I am a journalist, under escort with embassy personnel from a country Israel considers a good ally. He is fully aware of what I write and where I’ve been. Before him rests the data and I was not afraid of what he would discover because I had nothing to hide from him. However increasingly I felt alarmed. What fed my anxiety originated with the others in the room, armed men looking at me with increasing disdain. I knew enough about the inner workings of Israeli intelligence that each of these men had a specific task. In time each would take his turn; this interrogation would not pass for some time. With so many in the room, I could only guess what each was empowered to deploy. Three had engaged me. That left five to go.

The insolent nature of his questions with their inferences of disrespect escalated. Extracting a trophy presented to me by journalists in Greece as a commendation and acknowledgement of the danger all journalists in war zones face, he pointed to the writing.

‘What is this and what language is that?’

Greek, as ancient as Hebrew and Arabic is quite easy to spot. Either this man was an idiot, and I didn’t think that. Or he was attempting to further rack me.

I responded that the language was Greek and that the trophy was presented to me by the Union of Greek Journalists.

‘Greece?’ He responded arrogantly. ‘Don’t you know that Greece is not a friend of Israel?’

I simply replied, ‘I don’t care,’ which I didn’t, wondering how Grecian government would respond to such an accusation.

Behind me two men proceeded to ridicule and derisively provide an ever expanding lampoon of epitaphs on my belongings and correspondence, each becoming increasingly vile and profane. They seemed to delight most in mocking the letters from readers in England I had not had an opportunity to read. The stress of this coupled with the anxiety of not knowing and the assaults on my psychologically through innuendo and condescension increasingly taxed me physically as well as emotionally. Having been without facilities, food and water for nearly twelve hours, I began to feel faint. As the blond interrogator continued his verbal pummeling, my mind wandered and my consciousness played toward escape. I fought to remain coherent, but my body informed me it had other plans.

Stress had tied my stomach in knots and without warning I began to vomit all over the in the arrival hall. At the same time I felt my legs buckled from the strain of standing and I passed out. For some time my mind vacillated between conscious, semi-conscious and un. I could hear voices and then nothing.

I awoke on the floor to someone screaming, repeating my name over and over, ‘Mohkammed! Mokhammed! Mokhammed!’

As he screamed in my ears I felt his fingernails puncturing my skin, gouging, scraping and clawing at the tender flesh beneath my eyes. This was the intelligence officer’s method for gauging my level of consciousness. No smelling salts as is the civilized manner for reviving a person. Clawing at my eyes and tearing the skin on my face proved his manner of rendering aid.

Realizing I was again conscious thou barely the Israeli broadened his assault, scooping my head and digging his fingers in near the auditory nerves between my head and ear drum. Rather then render first aid, which is the protocol and international law in instances whether prisoners of war or civilians, the soldier broadened his assault. The pain became sharper as he dug is nails, two fingers at a time into my neck, grazing my carotid artery and again challenging my consciousness before pummeling my chest with his full weight and strength.

I estimate I lay on the floor approximately one hour and twenty minutes and I continued to vomit for what seemed like a half hour. Severely dehydrated, focusing took flight and the room became a menagerie of pain, sound and terror. The stench further exasperated and seemed to inflame my captors further. I couldn’t move, speak or shout. I felt tears fall and vomit, but my tongue seemed dislodged. Words would not come. The last thing I remember before losing consciousness again was the choleric incantation of my name in Hebrew, ‘Mohammed ata shome!’ demanding, ‘Mohammed do you hear?’

I could not answer and again my world fades to black.

Revived again I vaguely heard a woman with a Hebron Palestinian accent pleading somewhere out of my sight and my eyes closed.

‘Let this young man alone! Leave him!’ The Israelis ignored her. Frustrated she shouted, ‘May God punish you!’

Her pleas fell without sympathy, met with orders from Israeli soldiers telling her to leave. All around me I heard Israeli voices and then one placed his combat boot on my neck pressing into the hard floor. I remember choking, feeling the outline of his shoe and in my increasing delirium thought for a moment perhaps someone was rendering aid. Reality destroyed that hope. Around me, like men watching a sporting match I heard laughing and goading, a gang rape of verbal and physical violence meted by men entrenched in hatred and rage. As the beating, scratching and assaults continued, I was sure my body and face must look more like a football than a man. I again lost consciousness and awoke to find myself being dragged by my feet on my back through my vomit on the floor, my head bouncing on the pavement and body sweeping to-and-fro like a mop. Humanity or the capacity to be human seemed void within the souls in charge of my body. What causes men to hate so?

After my employment as a human mop, I was transferred to a wheelchair, thou my full faculties had yet to return. I did not realize yet that I had been transferred to a military clinic for Israeli soldiers. Later I would discover on my chest several stickers in Hebrew marking the place where the paddles from the defibulator interacted with my heart as the doctors attempted to revive me. Not getting the response they wanted, they forced my eyes open and still I did not awaken.

It was at the Israeli military clinic I began to awake and heard frantic Hebrew shouted from a number of people and a word I did know, ‘Ambulance’ in English. I felt someone force open my eyes and drop in some liquid into my eyes and nose. I could feel it and began to become aware of my surroundings. Soon I heard a man speaking reassuringly in Arabic, “We are the Palestinian Red Crescent Ambulance,’ he told me.

‘We were called by Israeli soldiers to pick up your body and get you to a hospital.’ He said around 1:30 or so, as I guess.

Behind him an Israeli soldier approached the ambulance insisting the EMT’s (Emergency Medical Technicians) would not be permitted to move me until I signed a paper. First of all, anything signed by a person incapacitated cannot be binding, thou this is a technicality often expunged from Israeli protocol. Fortunately, people were looking out for me. The driver asked the soldier what kind of paper and the soldier explained that it would indemnify the Israelis should anything happen once I was transferred into Palestinian custody. In other words, if I died or was permanently disabled as a result of Israel’s actions, Israel could not be held accountable. One would think I was in a third world dictatorship rather than the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’. One would think.

Thou I could not see him; I recognized the voice of the soldier as Avi.

The EMT replied, ‘He’s unconscious. You can’t make him sign something he cannot read and we don’t know yet what you did to him during the interrogation.”

Avi asserted again that I sign this waiver before they’d allow me to be transferred and treated, something directly in contravention with international humanitarian law. The driver again intervened stating, ‘He can’t wake up. Let us call the Dutch embassy since they are waiting for him outside.’

Alarmed soldier shot back, ‘Don’t call the Dutch embassy! This is none of your business.’

Flustered by the thought of disclosure the soldier continued to insist. My guardian angel EMT informed me later that that the soldier insisted, ‘It’s not allowed for you to call anyone about his case or ask for accompaniment until he gets the medical treatment in the hospital.’

In other words, my tormentors wanted to make sure nobody knew what they had done to me. Nor did they want anyone with diplomatic caché to witness what happened to me. The Israelis needed plausible deniability and they were willing to extort and skirt international law if necessary.

I learn later my guardian on the ambulance was EMT Mahmoud Tarairah who accompanied me in the back of the bus (ambulance) to the hospital, rendering aid as needed. Mahmoud confided in me that he thought it was strange that the soldiers were insisting that I should not inform the Dutch Embassy, my escorts, that I was in hospital and why. His healthy skepticism saved me.

SOME HOURS LATER:
When I fully awoke and opened my eyes I found myself in a quiet cool place.
Pain seemed everywhere. I attempted to move my arm but the pain and IV prevented it. My vitals must have signaled the nurse’s station because a nurse quickly appeared at my bedside and soothingly reassured me, ‘You are here with us; we are Palestinian doctors.’

Groggy I asked, ‘Where am I?’

“Jericho hospital,” a doctor who joined him replied.

I mused quietly to myself that I had always wanted to visit Jericho. Until now I had been denied by the Occupation Forces for the all-encompassing ’security reasons’. I had hoped my travel to be by car or bus rather than a gurney with a saline drip. I couldn’t help but chuckle internally at the irony. Chuckling audibly still was too painful. I then asked about my belongings: passport, phone and luggage.

The ambulance drivers were taking care of them for me I was told. Upon which I asked about the Dutch Embassy, insisting that I needed to call Wim and other Dutch friend as soon as possible, believing they had no idea what had happened to me.

A member of the hospital staff retrieved my bags and I riffled through realizing all of my careful packing had been reordered into chaos. I found my cell phone on one side and the battery on the other. When I tried to use it, my mobile acted strangely, dialing numbers on its own. I immediately shut it down and asked to borrow a phone. One of the EMT’s offered his, first calling Katja Shury-Zweers at the Dutch Embassy and informing her of my situation, prognosis and location. He then offered his phone to me so could contact others in Europe and the States.

As I dialed friends and colleagues the doctor came in to check my vitals and I informed him I was having difficulty breathing and that my chest, stomach and neck, especially the area where the Israeli intelligence officer dug his fingers into me; this region throbbed in pain.

The hospital is small and no enough rooms for me as doctor Diaa Al Husieni suggest empty rooms for more critical cases and all I wanted was to get home to my family and back to Gaza. As Dorothy stated in the Wizard of Oz, no matter what, there really is no place like home. Besides I knew the hospital was short on beds and now that I was stabilized, (or at least in my male mind believed so) it seemed selfish to occupy one that could be needed by others.

My treating physician Dr. Diaa Al Hussieni explained to me that the combination of high pressure, stress and exhaustion were the reasons my body gave out and what I experienced was a nervous breakdown. This is what caused the vomiting. Rest was required and I should seek medical attention in Gaza in addition to getting medication for the chest, stomach and neck pain. Given the shortages in Gaza of all medical supplies, I wasn’t sure if this would be possible. It turned out to be irrelevant. Due to the damage to my neck, I had difficulty swallowing anything. I wouldn’t be able to take medication even if I had it.

After a few more hours I got into fresh clothing and tried to walk out into the corridor and toilet. I found my legs didn’t always cooperate with my will. They seemed to have a mind of their own. It would be several days before they would cooperate with the upper half of my body. Nearly around 4 o’clock Lisa from The Netherlands Representative Office met me and accompanied me to a checkpoint in Jericho where we obtained a permit for me to travel through the Eretz crossing and for the first time in over a day, traveling in the Dutch diplomatic car, I began to feel safe. Mr. Robert van Embden and Mr. John van der Zande were waiting for me to assure my traversing of the Eretz checkpoint remains uneventful.”

As you can imagine, Israel does not figure prominently in Feith’s book, and you would never guess from reading it that, as early as 1996, Feith — along with David Wurmser and their common mentor, Richard Perle — was already thinking that the ouster of Saddam Hussein was the key to transforming the regional balance of power decisively in favor of Israel, thus permitting a Likud-led Israel to make a “clean break” from the Oslo peace process and “secure the realm” of the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, as well as its pre-1967 borders.

I don’t intend to review of the book, at least now. But the map that appears next to Feith’s “Introduction” depicting Iraq and its neighbors as of 2003 offers some insight into his worldview and Israel’s rightful place — or, more precisely, its size — within it:

Not much space for a Palestinian state, is there? Good strategic depth around Jerusalem. Looks like the Golan isn’t supposed to revert to Syria, either. No suggestion of occupation. It’s all Israeli.

Incidentally, In his book, Feith claims that it was Fred Ikle that got him the undersecretary for policy job, but I have it on excellent authority that it was Perle, the only man who Rumsfeld (who himself referred to the West Bank and Gaza as “so-called occupied territories”) believes is his intellectual equal, whose recommendation was decisive. And it’s good to know that the Washington Post still considers Perle credible enough to give him space on its op-ed page to warn against the perils of multilateralism in dealing with Iran, as it did today.

Now, the Telegraph has offered a soapbox to John Bolton who, consistent with his views of the past four or five months, still believes that George W. Bush will not order an attack on Iran before he leaves office, but also now argues that Israel will do so between the November elections and the inaugural of the new president, particularly if that president is Sen. Obama. “With McCain they might still be looking at a delay” beyond the inauguration, Bolton told the newspaper. “But, [g]iven that time is on Iran’s side, I think the argument for military action is sooner rather than later absent some other development.”

(Bolton also insists that the Arab world would be privately “pleased” by such an attack, although, given his acute cultural sensitivity, I have no idea how he might reach such a conclusion, particularly given recent polling data, as well as the consistent and unequivocal statements of opposition to any attack (least of all one by Israel) by top Arab leaders, most recently in the Washington Post by Jordan’s King Abdullah.)

The interview with Bolton comes on the heels of the New York Times’ (somewhat credulous) account of Israeli military exercises over the eastern Mediterranean and Greece last week which was depicted as a trial run for an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. That report, which has traveled through the global media at the speed of light, has obviously added to speculation regarding Israel’s intentions and Washington’s attitude.

Unfortunately, neither the Telegraph article nor Bolton addresses whether Israel would seek a green light from Washington before carrying out such an attack and whether, if it did, the Bush administration would offer one — a key point given the fact that Israeli warplanes would almost certainly have to traverse U.S.-controlled Iraqi air space to get to their targets. Most analysts believe that Israel is most unlikely to act without some sign of U.S. approval in light of the enormous consequences — economic, as well as military and political — that would almost certainly ensue from such an action. And, of course, if Washington went along, then it would clearly be considered an accomplice, which, accordingly, raises the question why, under those circumstances, it wouldn’t itself take part. (The Telegraph notes that Bill Kristol still holds out hope that Bush himself will order an attack, particularly if Obama wins the election.)

I believe it is increasingly clear that if there is going to be an attack on Iran — be it Israeli or U.S. or both — before Bush leaves office, it will take place in the period between the election and the inauguration. And I also agree that an attack is more likely if Obama wins the election than if McCain win. That said, however, I still believe an attack is more of a possibility than a probability and that what we are seeing in the ongoing flurry of threats, predictions, and leaks is more psychological warfare directed at persuading Iran, Russia, China, and Washington’s European allies that war is really going to happen unless Tehran halts its uranium enrichment program than it is the real thing. As one former senior U.S. Middle East intelligence officer noted today, the Israelis have long relied on the element of surprise in their military strategy (see last December’s attack on the alleged Syrian nuclear facility), and advertising their intentions quite as ostentatiously as they have been does not appear consistent with that record. Indeed, using Bolton in the Telegraph as a channel for scaring the Iranians, if, indeed, the Israelis put him up to it, would seem counter-productive.