Excerpt
Has the Atlantic magazine become a propaganda tool — “a de facto party to the neoconservative and Israeli campaign to initiate a global war with Iran”? That question was being discussed last week on The Atlantic’s own Web site, among other places, after the magazine unveiled a cover story saying that Israel is likely to bomb Iran within a year.
The article wasn’t an argument for bombing, just a report on Israel’s state of mind. So why all the outrage — why, for example, did Glenn Greenwald of Salon title his slashing assessment of the Atlantic article “How Propaganda Works: Exhibit A”?
In part because the author of the article is Jeffrey Goldberg, who has previously been accused of pushing a pro-war agenda via ostensibly reportorial journalism. His 2002 New Yorker piece claiming to have found evidence linking Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda is remembered on the left as a monument to consequential wrongness. And suspicions of Goldberg’s motivations only grow when he writes about Israel. He served in the Israeli army, and he has more than once been accused of channeling Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu.
There is certainly a bit of channeling in Goldberg’s Atlantic piece. For example: “Netanyahu’s belief is that Iran is not Israel’s problem alone; it is the world’s problem, and the world, led by the United States, is duty-bound to grapple with it.” Still, the piece is no simple propaganda exercise. Indeed, what’s striking is that, for all the space given to the views of hawkish Israeli officials, they don’t wind up looking very good, and neither does their case for bombing Iran. The overall impression is that, as Paul Pillar, a former C.I.A. official, put it after reading Goldberg’s piece, Israel’s inclination to attack Iran is “more a matter of the amygdala and emotion than of the cortex and thought.”
Example of Israel driving their Iraq policies while drunk.
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