US
Brent Scowcroft, National Security Adviser to Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush, explains why he supports the Iran agreement:
If the United States could have handed Iran a “take it or leave it” agreement, the terms doubtless would have been more onerous on Iran. But negotiated agreements, the only ones that get signed in times of peace, are compromises by definition. It is what President Reagan did with the Soviet Union on arms control; it is what President Nixon did with China.
David French sees the deal with Iran as another manifestation of Obama’s tolerant attitude toward political Islam:
The pattern keeps repeating itself. When it comes to Mideast unrest, the administration repeatedly backs the more Islamist “street” over the more secular establishment. But what if the Islamic supremacists are the establishment? Then, the administration stands with the Islamists. American arms flowed to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood government, but deliveries were frozen for months after the world’s largest political protests helped eject the Brotherhood from power, replacing it with a government dedicated to fighting jihadists. Similarly, America stood by as Iran’s mullahs crushed the Green Revolution, missing a chance to depose a decades-old enemy regime. Obama believes there can’t be peace until the Islamists are mainstreamed.
Israel
Nahum Barnea writes about the ever growing tension between Netanyahu’s government and the Obama administration:
The word “unprecedented” is often overused in journalism. Most events that happen here have precedents. Crises between the governments in Washington and Jerusalem have occurred before; the same goes for periods of cold relations.
What justifies the use of the word “unprecedented” in the current crisis is that the Israeli government, rather than the American, is pulling back. It’s a lost battle: the Iran deal can’t be stopped. The only thing left is the ego, the chest-puffing, the tempting game of American internal politics. This isn’t Israeli chutzpah: It’s a dangerous gamble in a casino. It’s playing with fire.
Khaled Abu Toameh takes a look at what Palestinian leaders are doing with US money:
The “investment” in Palestinian democracy and peace with Israel has been a complete failure because of the refusal of the U.S. Administration to hold the Palestinian Authority fully accountable.
Unless Western donors bang on the table and demand that the Palestinian Authority use their money to bring democracy to its people and prepare them for peace, the prospects of reviving any peace process in the Middle East will remain zero.
Middle East
Professor Rajan Menon explains why the Islamic State has staying power:
There’s more to IS than its horrendous cruelties would suggest. In anarchic, violent Syria and Iraq, it has acquired a social base by providing people—more precisely, those who adhere to its draconian theological rules, don’t rebel, and refrain from aiding and abetting its enemies—security, functional institutions, and basic economic necessities. Many of those living under IS rule doubtless have no choice, but others are drawn to its mission of building an Islamic polity and restoring the pieties and glories of old.
Walter Russell Mead examines the main insights from a curious WSJ interview with a former Saudi General:
It seems clear that there is a lot of Arab-Israeli diplomacy going on that is not U.S. driven at this point—discussions of truce talks with Hamas just keep popping up. The assumption has to be that both sides are looking for some way of limiting the ability of the Palestinian issue to interfere with cooperation against the perceived major menace of Iran. Arabs need enough movement from Israel so that cooperation against Iran doesn’t totally play into Shi’a propaganda about Iran being the only true center of resistance to the evils of Zionism and the West. Israel’s right wing, pro-settler government is looking for concessions it can make that will satisfy the Arabs without enraging its base.
Jewish World
Rabbi Efrem Goldberg has an interesting take on the 340 rabbis who publically supported the Iran deal (the title references my piece on the matter, which he politely disagrees with):
Nobody would look back and dismiss the debate between Wise and Bergson regarding advocacy during the Holocaust as politics. Nobody would read a sermon of a rabbi from 1943 calling on his members to lobby their elected officials to intervene and say it had no place in the synagogue.
Michael Helfand argues, in response to Mosaic’s monthly essay, that the American Jewish leadership should be prepared to cede some of the protection it receives in the name of pluralism:
My point is simply this: an approach that at present might seem to offer wider protection to Jewish religious practice may over the longer haul threaten the consensus that has long undergirded American society’s unstinting embrace of religious liberty itself.
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