I read a copy of this earlier today and was told it wasn’t up on the web yet, but this Googe cache works. It’s a New York Review of Books article by George Soros “On Israel, America & AIPAC.” It’s a long piece, so I wouldn’t want to commit myself to the proposition that I agree with every single sentence inside it, but it strikes me as basically correct and likely to prompt many, many, many an unfair attack. It’s also likely to create some trouble for Soros-backed groups and Soros-backed organizations. On one level, that’s too bad, since nobody deserves that kind of trouble.

On the other hand, this whole debate has gotten a little painfully meta with tons of back-and-forth about whether people are being intimidated, or whether people are anti-semites, or using charges of anti-semitism to intimidate people, etc., etc., etc. At some point, it would be good to not cut through that and debate the actual issue at hand — whether the United States should adopt different policies vis-a-vis Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict — and if Soros’ article pushes things in that direction, it’ll be all to the good.

UDPATE: Eh, I’m taking this down . . . not only did it have a bunch of typos, but they were significantly obscuring my meaning on a subject where it’s worth being clear. What I wanted to do was link to Nicholas Kristof’s observation that “Democrats are railing at just about everything President Bush does, with one prominent exception: Mr. Bush’s crushing embrace of Israel.”

Then I wanted to draw a distinction between two kinds of Democrats. One are Democrats who aren’t railing at Bush’s Israel policy because they agree with Bush’s Israel policy. The other kind are Democrats who do disagree with Bush’s Israel policy but who are trying to signal that fact quietly, rather than railing about it, because they think it’s too politically risky to rail.

Josh Meyer at the LA Times shows that even as administration rhetoric has improved to emphasize the extent to which there’s no purely military solution to terrorism, the actual budget has shifted in an even more Pentagon-focused direction.

Justin Logan makes many good points including most notably:

But the most damning fact about the “surge is working” narrative is that the violence in Iraq always has been cyclical, with dips in violence occurring every year in the months from January through March or April. So, in fact, the decline in violence Kagan observes was entirely predictable, and indeed was predicted. The Pentagon’s own “Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq” report pointed out that by the end of 2006, the violence in Iraq had reached its highest level since the war began, and so the downtick should be viewed in that context. But what appears likely to happen is what has happened since the beginning of the war: these temporary downticks do not stop the overall upward trend of violence in Iraq. See page 20 of the most recent “Iraq Index” from the Brookings Institution for glaringly obvious proof of this ratcheting up of violence in the country.

Let’s just say I don’t share the optimism of the Always Wrong Brigades or their allies among the 101 Fighting Keyboarders.