(Early) Monday Smackdown Watch: Matthew Yglesias on Jeffrey Goldberg's Obama Derangement Syndrome
Matthew Yglesias puts his finger on why friends don't let friends trust any of the conclusions of Jeffrey Goldberg:
...Jeffrey Goldberg's reluctance endorsement of the Iran deal is a big PR win for the Obama administration.... You won't hear many complaints....
But part of that arbiter role is that he has to take some swipes at the White House, leading to a ridiculous interpretation of how we got here.... [Goldberg's] central--and incorrect--premise... is that the Iran deal (which is good) is better than no deal... but that a tougher approach could have produced some much better utopian deal had Barack Obama really wanted one:
But... this provisional agreement... [is] a success mainly within a specific reality created by Obama and his European partners... in which the goal was to moderate Iran’s behavior on a single issue, and not to remove the regime...
The central fallacy in this and most other critiques of the Obama administration's approach is that it forgets that other countries get a say in what happens.... George W Bush... took a much tougher line on Iran than... Obama. But Obama's approach didn't lead to less pressure on Iran, it lead to more pressure.... By hewing to a line that Brazil and Germany and Russia and Italy and China thought made sense, Obama brought concerted multilateral pressure to bear... [and so] sanctions began to cripple the Iranian economy... because the sanctions were multilateral.
To construct an effective multilateral process you need to advance an agenda that can attract broad multi-lateral support.... Insisting that sanction relief must be contingent on principles the international community doesn't support would merely mean there are no [multilateral sanctions in the first place. That's not a reality the Obama administration created, it's a reality they recognized.
One does have to wonder whether Jeffrey Goldberg believes that the Bush attack on Iraq in 2003 produced a peaceful, stable, multi-confessional, democratic, pro-Israel Iraq. One does wonder how long Jeffrey Goldberg will persist in being wrong about a whole range of issues concerning the Middle East. So far the issues range from the advisability of the Bush attack on Iraq and the nature of Likud to the likelihood of success of the Obama Iran-pressure negotiation strategy--plus many more--and most recently the place of European Jews. At some point he has to mark his views to market, doesn't he?
