Bret Stephens must feel that his side has lost the debate on
the Iran
nuclear deal – or is about to – because he is already complaining that his team
had been maltreated by the Obama team. Maybe he'll now demand that he and his
team be compensated … for this is the Jewish way.
You can feel his agony, and you can almost hear his moaning
as you read his column – that which came under the title: “All the President's
Certitudes” and the subtitle: “A more confident leader wouldn't tar opponents
as stooges and idiots.” It was published on August 11, 2015 in the Wall Street
Journal.
Here is the member of a tribe that usually unfurls with
pride like the plumage of an oversexed peacock in the business of wooing a
potential mate – now doing something that is very different. Normally, the
tribe rejoices when things unfold its way; like the time when its members
described the swaggering done by George W. Bush. This happened shortly after
the latter shocked the Iraqis, and awed the world with a display of confident
certainty that he had done the right thing.
In fact, W. Bush was so confident he was put on this Earth
to rid it of terrorism, he fantasized that the Iraqi leaders were harboring
terror groups despite the fact that all the available evidence was pointing in
the opposite direction. Time proved him wrong, of course, so now that the
confidence belongs to the Obama team, Bret Stephens and his Judeo-Israeli team
took to whining because they lost the debate concerning a situation that is
inherently of the fail-safe kind.
That is, these people know they will never win the debate no
matter what happens from here on because President Obama avoided having a war,
and nothing was broken. The net result is that the worst that can happen is
that Iran will be caught cheating, will be punished accordingly by the
international community, and will be forced to stop cheating … nothing worse
than that.
Here is how Stephens expresses his sorrow: “Not enough has
been said about the bald certitude or the naked condescending disdain with
which he [Obama] treats his opponents. He has the swagger of a man who never
seems to have encountered a contrary point of view he respected, or come to
grips with the limits of his own intelligence.” Now my friend, imagine what
Bret Stephens and Company would have said and would have done if the Iran
nuclear deal had been concluded – exactly the way it was now – by George W.
Bush. They would be having a party on Cloud 9.
Another thing which Stephens complains about is that Mr.
Obama cited who was in favor of the deal, and who was opposed to it. He draws
the President's list of those in favor, and estimates it to be 99% of the human
race. He mockingly calls it: “the forces of good, the children of light.” He
then draws the list of those opposed to it, and pretends to imitate the
President calling them: “Virulent Republicans, lobbyists, warmongers, those who
were wrong about Iraq ,
hard-liners in Iran , and Israel .” Not to
be outdone, Stephens adds his own two-cent worth of insults: fools or knaves,
the benighted or the willfully wicked.
Mocking aside, he now reminds the President and his
entourage of the predictions they made and did not pan out. What he failed to
tell the readers, however, were the predictions that people on his team made –
like those to the effect that American troops invading Iraq were going
to be met with hugs and kisses. The difference between the two sets of
predictions being that nothing was broken when Obama's predictions failed
whereas those made by the Jewish team led to the calamity we are now witnessing
in the Middle East .
Unashamed and undeterred, he does the very Jewish thing of
hinting that the President came close to uttering an anti-Semitic slur;
something he does in a very subtle way this time so as to put Obama on the
defensive without offending him too much. This done, he hits him on the head
with a huge demand: “A confident president would … transfer to Israel surplus
B-52s plus a stockpile of Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs.”