Process dodge ball
by digby
Matt Duss at Tablet points out (rightly in my view) that all this caterwauling about Netanyahu’s breach of protocol is beside the point. Yes, it’s improper. But the issue isn’t really about who invited whom and whether or not they should have done so:
The idea that there was nothing untoward about the Republican speaker of the House and the Israeli ambassador arranging such an invitation in secret and then springing it on the White House doesn’t really pass the laugh test. Imagine, for comparison’s sake, that congressional Democrats had, in a similar manner, arranged in 2003 for French President Jacques Chirac to deliver a speech against the Iraq invasion. Somehow I doubt we’d even be debating its propriety.
Where Leibovitz and I do agree, however, is that the current U.S.-Israel tension is more about policy than personalities. While the two men have never gotten along, it’s a mistake to treat this as a personal dispute. Treating it as such misses the important fact that the two men represent genuine constituencies who have very different views of how to advance their respective country’s security interests and the role that the other should play in helping them do that.
First off, to paraphrase John McCain, the fundamentals of the U.S.-Israel relationship remain strong. The military-to-military relationship is among the closest that the United States has with any country. The intelligence- and information-sharing between the two countries, particularly on the issue of Iran, is, as multiple Israeli security officials have told me over the past several years, “Better than ever”—or at least it was until Netanyahu decided to start selectively leaking information about Iranian nuclear talks in order to scuttle a deal.
And, not to put too fine a point on it, it’s a big deal that this is happening. Manners and protocol are beside the point and they are obscuring the real issue at stake.
Now, maybe that’s not a totally terrible thing in this case. These are very delicate negotiations which shouldn’t be happening in public in the first place at least until an actual deal is struck. Arguing over the diplomatic protocol of a congressional speech may actually be a good thing in this case. Still, it’s a common problem with these issues of war and peace. We end up hotly debating the process and fail to argue about the underlying issue. And then it happens and everyone stands around going “w3hat the hell just happened?”
Read Duss’s piece if you’d like to know what the real argument is all about and why we should be concerned about it.