gary's choices: Please exhale: Israel is not going to attack Iran
Every few months there is a concocted “crisis” involving suggestions that Israel is just on the verge of attacking Iran. This cycle started almost a decade ago, and it has repeated itself roughly annually, though sometimes more frequently.
In the early days, these alarms typically began with a…
Isn’t it ironic that the irrational actor might be Israel’s leadership and not Iran’s?
The second misunderstanding is the mistaken notion that diplomacy is, in the words of CIA analyst Paul Pillar, “some kind of reward for the other guy, rather than what it really is: a tool for our side.” Talking to the adversary is a strategy for getting what we want, by helping us understand the opponent’s interests and objectives. As veteran diplomats Thomas Pickering and William Luers put it, “this preposterous law would make it illegal for the U.S. to know its enemy.”
A surprising number of people don’t “get” diplomacy.
