There’s an awful lot wrong with this Moshe Ya’alon op-ed in today’s LA Times and I don’t have the time to go through the whole thing right now, but just note the first sentence: “After a few years of benign neglect, Israel is back on the itineraries of well-meaning foreign emissaries.”

Israel was hardly being neglected by the United States during the years before Condoleezza Rice semi-rediscovered the Arab-Israeli peace process — it was, then as now, our country’s largest recipient of taxpayer dollars. Less quantifiably, but also significantly, Israel continued to receive a very large quantity of American diplomatic support. One can sympathize to some extent with Israeli officials feeling like their country attracts a disproportionate quantity of busybodies pushing peace plans, but while it would be one thing for Ya’alon to genuinely argue that Israel should be left to its own devices, it’s another thing entirely to say that the United States should just be totally indifferent to how our most generously subsidized client state relates to its neighbors and to the millions of stateless Arabs over which it rules.

David Ignatius displays his mastery of deliberate obtuseness in The Washington Post:

In “back to the future” mode, the name being mentioned these days is Ayad Allawi, a former Baathist who was interim prime minister and has strong support among Sunnis, even though he’s a secular Shiite. Allawi has bundles of money to help buy political support, but it comes from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, rather than the United States.

Being mentioned by whom? And why? Might Allawi have published any op-eds in prominent newspapers that Ignatius works for? Mightn’t there have been some reporting recently on this “money to help buy political support” going to a powerful Republican lobbyist and communications operation here in DC? Meanwhile, this description of where the money comes from seems pretty misleading. A good friend of his runs a CIA-funded “Iraqi” intelligence service that doesn’t report to Iraq’s government. Another friend stole a billion dollars (much of it presumably from the US Treasury originally) from the Iraqi government.

I want to just reiterate how crazy the idea that we’re ten years from victory in Iraq by briefly recollecting America’s attempted intervention in Lebanon’s 1980s-vintage civil war. We went in, you’ll recall, in 1982, about six years into the fighting, and really expanded our mandate in 1983. This led to the bombing of the Marine barracks later in ’83, and US forces were withdrawn in early 1984.

Some people think the Reagan administration made the right call by withdrawing; others think it did the wrong thing. Nobody, however, regard the intervention as a great success. Nevertheless, the civil war ended just five years later with the 1989 Taif Agreement. To say that our current policy is working and needs just ten more years to stabilize Iraq is lunacy — just leaving stands a perfectly good chance of working just as quickly at radically lower cost.

UPDATE: Yes, I know that the total duration of the Lebanese Civil War was longer than that. The point is to put the ten years time horizon into some perspective. Even an effort to stabilize a country that everyone agrees was a failure, like America’s 1983 peacekeeping efforts in Lebanon, can come fewer than ten years away from the dawn of stability. By a similar token, the American Civil War ended fewer than ten years after James Buchanan’s blunders. Ten years isn’t just longer than America has political will to sustain, it’s genuinely too long. Policies that work accomplish their goals faster than that, something that’s supposed to unfold at the speed Petraeus is talking about isn’t working at all.

I was gone all day yesterday, but when I got home I saw my copy of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt and I’m eager to give it a read. The originally essay certainly had its flaws, but it was much better than the demagogic counter-campaign it unleashed.

When you look at something like, say, Cuba policy it’s unfortunate for our policy options to be circumscribed by the extreme views of a small domestic lobby, but it’s not obvious that this has any fundamental significance. America’s policies in Israel’s neighborhood have, by contrast, taken on dramatically higher levels of significance over the past six years or so. The original essay prompted a little debate on this but, frankly, too little — and I’m very eager to see what the authors have been able to do with some greater length at their disposal.

Along with financial crises, another important issue about which I know nothing is India. Tyler Cowen strongly recommends India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy, “a truly excellent book by Ramachandra Guha, well over 800 pages and yes it will be finished.” Sounds like a good introduction to the subject. Reihan Salam, however, says he picked the book up on Cowen’s recommendation “And it’s bad. Really, really bad.”

Reihan, however, concedes that “At present, there is embarrassingly little to choose from, which is perhaps the only good reason to recommend Guha’s profoundly lackluster effort.” Isaac Chotiner seems to be somewhere in the middle but closer to Cowen’s view. Thinking about the depths of my ignorance on this subject, I realize that I don’t even have any idea what the controversial issues in a history of India might be, so I’m really lost at sea.