Blog-on-Blog: About Jeffrey Goldberg Blog Bashing Roger Cohen
Posted by K.E. White on March 17, 2009
Summary: Let’s move on from debates over the character of the Iranian regime; it gets us no closer to the real questions: 1) how best to deter Iran from going nuclear and 2) if Iran develops nuclear weapons, how best to prevent catastrophe.
Yesterday Jeffrey Goldberg dedicated his Atlantic blog entry to exposing NYTimes columnist Roger Cohen’s shallow conception of the Iranian threat faced by Israel. You can read/watch the ‘Cohen evisceration’ here in full, but here’s boiled down version:
-Roger Cohen debated Rabbi David Wolpe; the topic: Iran and Israel
-Wolpe insists Cohen imagine a time when the balance of power between Iran and Israel flips: meaning when Iran has nuclear weapons/equal or greater conventional military capabilities. Add to this that Hamas and Hezbollah are Iran proxies, and thus would reap direct benefits from such strategic flip.
-Cohen waffles—says some things about stopping Iran from getting The Bomb. Audience laughs.
The problems with this semantic takedown (even if Contentions gives it kudos):
