PATRICK LAWRENCE—More broadly, The Times piece appears amid flagging enthusiasm for the Ukraine project. And it is in this circumstance that Entous and Schwirtz went long on the benefits accruing to the CIA in consequence of its presence on the ground in Ukraine. But read these two reporters carefully: They, or whoever put their piece in its final shape, make it clear that the agency’s operations on Ukrainian soil count first and most as a contribution to Washington’s long campaign to undermine the Russian Federation. This is not about Ukrainian democracy, that figment of neoliberal propagandists. It is about Cold War II, plain and simple.
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PATRICK LAWRENCE—There is no need to wonder what causes this departure from observable facts, diabolically purposeful as it often is, and what comes of it. This may seem an unprecedented moment in human history, but there are, indeed, many precedents. Barbara Tuchman told us all about them in The March of Folly (Knopf, 1984): These grand lapses reflect an absence of intellect, vision, and principle at leadership level and lead ineluctably to failure and one or another kind of mess. The Ukraine case, the preoccupation in Munich last week, could not possibly make this clearer.
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PATRICK LAWRENCE—ISRAEL is a psychologically diseased nation that boasts as it inflicts this suffering on The Other that obsesses it. The world is invited—the ultimate in perversity, this—to partake of Israel’s sickness and said, in a Hague courtroom two weeks ago, “No.”
Post–Gaza, apartheid Israel is unlikely ever to recover what place it enjoyed, merited or otherwise, in the community of nations. It stands among the pariahs now. The Biden regime took this risk, too, and it has also lost. Its support for the Israelis’ daily brutalities comes at great political cost, at home and abroad, and is tearing America apart—its universities, its courts, its legislatures, its communities—and I would say what pride it still manages to take in itself.
