Sunday Reads: Inside Assad’s palace, Bennett’s political failure, American Jews’ Holocaust obsession
US
According to Lee Smith, the only way the US can stop Iran from going nuclear is by displaying a credible threat of force:
Now with sanctions apparently off the table until at least March, it’s a good time to recalibrate by returning to first principles. The policy of the United States is to stop Iran from getting the bomb—by any means necessary, including, as even President Obama has said, through the use of military force. No policy of sanctions, bargaining, or inducements can work unless the use of force becomes once more a credible possibility. But is that possible with this president?
Andrew Bacevich argues that although Obama’s ‘foreign policy muddlers’ have no grand vision, that might not necessarily be a bad thing:
If that's what handing the keys to big thinkers gets you, give me Susan Rice any day. Although Obama's “don't do stupid shit” may never rank with Washington's Farewell Address or the Monroe Doctrine in the history books, George W. Bush might have profited from having some comparable axiom taped to his laptop.
Israel
Mazal Mualem discusses Jewish Home leader Bennett’s recent political failure – his unsuccessful attempt to put a popular soccer player in the Knesset:
It doesn’t really matter how much Bennett tells everyone that HaBayit HaYehudi is a party of the people with a little bit of everything. It doesn’t matter how much he tries to hide the messianic settlers and the homophobes, who fill respectable positions in his party. This week, it became clear that there is HaBayit HaYehudi, and then there is Bennett.
The Washington Institute’s Jeffrey White believes that a real escalation between Israel and Hezbollah would be much more destructive than the 2006 campaign:
Current expectations that Israel and Hezbollah can manage escalation may or may not hold true; similar assessments were made before all of the recent Gaza conflicts (2009, 2012, 2014), and Hezbollah's drastic miscalculation sparked the 2006 war. If a new conflict does in fact break out, Israel and Lebanon are in for a very difficult time. War in 2015 would probably be significantly more intense and destructive than in 2006, and all of Israel would likely be targeted, not just the north. Such a conflict would bring significant pressure to achieve a clear success, further driving the parties to sustain the fighting and raise it to higher levels of violence.
Middle East
Foreign Affairs’ Jonathan Tepperman discusses (video) the fascinating behind the scenes details of his interview with Bashar Assad:
The civil war in Syria will soon enter its fifth year, with no end in sight. On January 20, Foreign Affairs managing editor Jonathan Tepperman met with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus to discuss the conflict in an exclusive interview.
Simon Henderson writes about the surprising shake in Saudi Arabia’s government:
Just two days after President Obama's visit to Riyadh, King Salman has sacked several of the princes who met with the U.S. delegation. According to U.S. and Saudi reporting of the January 27 summit, talks between the two leaders were dominated by national security topics, including Iran, the “Islamic State”/ISIS, and Yemen. It is therefore surprising that the most senior departure is Prince Khaled bin Bandar, the head of Saudi intelligence, who sat near the king during the discussion. Although Khaled has been retained as an “advisor” to the king, this is usually thought of as an irrelevant position. He has been replaced by Khaled bin Ali bin Abdullah al-Humaidan, a nonroyal former general who was already a senior intelligence official.
Jewish World
Shaul Magid discusses (following Jacob Neusner) the role of American Jewry’s obsession with the Holocaust in its cultural identity in a thought-provoking piece:
For Neusner it is not that the Holocaust objectively stands outside any covenantal framework. Rather, it is that the process of secularization has made that framework inoperative and thus unable to absorb an event of such magnitude. And it is the need for the Holocaust to fill the vacuum of a Judaism void of content and not its unique status that drives the American Jewish obsession. In some sense the Holocaust takes on religious meaning because there is no religious meaning to supplant it.
Charles Krauthammer believes that another holocaust against the Jews is not that unthinkable:
On the 70th anniversary of Auschwitz, mourning dead Jews is easy. And, forgive me, cheap. Want to truly honor the dead? Show solidarity with the living — Israel and its 6 million Jews. Make “never again” more than an empty phrase. It took Nazi Germany seven years to kill 6 million Jews. It would take a nuclear Iran one day.