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Jeffrey Goldberg pushes for war with Iraq --er, make that Iran
Former Israeli soldier and current writer for the Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg has a long cover story (9/10) on the "better than 50 percent chance" that Israel will launch air strikes against Iran by next July, with the aim of taking out the alleged nuclear threat from the Islamic Republic. Based on roughly 40 interviews with American, Arab and Israeli officials--some of them anonymously--Goldberg meanders from describing the worst-case scenario for what will happen after Israel attacks Iran to relaying dubious Israeli claims about how Iran is the new Nazi Germany to an analysis of Netanyahu's relationship with his right-wing 100-year-old father. He does this while assuring readers that he is "not engaging in a thought exercise, or a one-man war game."
Goldberg's is just the latest in a line of recent stories from neo-conservatives and others on Israel or the U.S. bombing Iran (The Weekly Standard, 7/26/10; The Washington Post, 8/1/10).
Why anyone would listen to Goldberg or give him space in a magazine to hype up the threat from another Middle Eastern country is beyond comprehension, given Goldberg's role in printing propaganda about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and Iraq's ties to al-Qaeda (The New Yorker, 3/25/02; 2/10/03; Slate, 10/3/02). That turned out wonderfully, remember?