Tuesday, January 23, 2007

I've admired Wes Clark for a long time. But his comments to Ariana Huffington about wealthy Jews pushing the country toward war with Iran strike me as nutty and disturbing. Either I seriously misjudged the man, or his comments were misquoted or taken wildly out of context.

Matthew Yglesias, however, thinks Clark's comments are perfectly spot-on. Indeed, he says they're not just correct but obviously so. As he writes, "Everything Clark said, in short, is true. What's more, everybody knows it's true."

Well, I don't know it's true. Moreover, I find Yglesias's defense of the proposition that it's obviously true, and his further contention that criticism of Clark's comments amounts to Israel hawks stifling debate, to be wildly unconvincing.

Benny Morris is one of Israel's most distinugished (sic) historians and he has been one of its most troublesome. It was he who truly opened up the question of the wave of Arab refugees during the Independence War. And, of course, he has been a writer and essayist for TNR. (See here, here, and here, and especially here).

Like many of us, Morris has been racked by the nuclear noise out of Iran and also by the oh-so-calm folk who do not see in Dr. Ahmadinejad's dreams a real nightmare. Well, Morris has put his fears into words, the most desolating words I have read in a very long time. It was published in The New York Sun, and I trust that you will now read it here.