HopeChange Chronicles: Bibi's Beatdown and Its Aftermath

I'll say this: the ripples of Netanyahu's visit to the US are still surging everywhere.  I haven't seen so much interest in either the event or its context in a long, long time. On a personal note, it's even gotten people interested who usually don't pay attention to foreign policy in general or the Arab-Israeli conflict in particular.  The Cine-Sib isn't a foreign policy nut like me (he's a normal happy well-adjusted person, see), but over the last few days he in all seriousness asked me about the Six Day War and its aftermath.  I've been giving him mini-lectures on Israeli history.  Then yesterday I spent half an hour with him as we looked at a map of Israel, its various borders over time, and its surroundings.  It was fun -- but kind of odd, as he and I are usually laughing about video games and movies, not having a serious discussion about geography and Israeli security ("What's this 9-miles-wide thing that everybody keeps talking about...?").  "Indefensibility" is just a word until you see actual topographical features on a map?

So onto another related matter: OK, so I'm getting two wildly variant reports of the aftermath of Netanyahu's speech among Israelis.  The New York Times reports that a wagonload of people hated it.  This op-ed in the Jerusalem Post refers a poll that showed that his approval rating soared over 10 percentage points.  Hmmm.

Actually, that op-ed about Bibi's triumphantly Churchillian speech is worth a look in its entirety.

On a similar note, this analysis by William Russell Mead is a firecracker in its own right.  It also gives us our quote of the day about Obama's foreign policy, which I quote at length after the jump:

His record of grotesque, humiliating and total diplomatic failure in his dealings with Prime Minister Netanyahu has few parallels in American history.  Three times he has gone up against Netanyahu; three times he has ingloriously failed.  This last defeat — Netanyahu’s deadly, devastating speech to Congress in which he eviscerated President Obama’s foreign policy to prolonged and repeated standing ovations by members of both parties — may have been the single most stunning and effective public rebuke to an American President a foreign leader has ever delivered. 

Netanyahu beat Obama like a red-headed stepchild; he played him like a fiddle; he pounded him like a big brass drum.  The Prime Minister of Israel danced rings around his arrogant, professorial opponent.  It was like watching the Harlem Globetrotters go up against the junior squad from Miss Porter’s School; like watching Harvard play Texas A&M, like watching Bambi meet Godzilla — or Bill Clinton run against Bob Dole. 

The Prime Minister mopped the floor with our guy.  Obama made his ’67 speech; Bibi ripped him to shreds.  Obama goes to AIPAC, nervous, off-balance, backing and filling.  Then Bibi drops the C-Bomb, demonstrating to the whole world that the Prime Minister of Israel has substantially more support in both the House and the Senate than the President of the United States. 

... [Obama] clearly had no idea what he was up against when Bibi Netanyahu came to town.

Oh, snap!  I suppose I should revise the current score of Bibi 6, Obama 1.  But as awesome was Netanyahu's breathtaking speech was (and oh, it was -- and should be required listening for anybody interested in rhetoric or statesmanship), he never should have had to give it like that.  US-Israeli relations should never have gotten to such a point that the Prime Minister of the US's closest Middle Eastern ally had to administer such a total rebuttal of the American president's approach.  It made his 7-minute-long dressing down of a lecture about reality look like mere child's play.  Still, the increasingly obvious fact that Obama has lost his standing almost abjectly in the Arab-Israeli conflict (on both sides) means that things have gotten much more perilous for everybody. 

On another note: I don't know about you, but I am sick and tired of Obama's utterly misguided approach to interacting with friends and allies as opposed to adversaries and antagonists.  I am glad that Netanyahu pushed back.  But it should never have come to that, not in the kind of public spanking that we saw.  The fact that it was even necessary speaks volumes in itself.

And, yes, I know that Netanyahu isn't too popular at home or among the more dovish segments of American Jews. I know he's known to be a prickly, difficult personality (the word "Nixonesque" has been used), and he's probably like Anthony Bourdain in that I love watching these guys and agree with most of what they have to say in their blunt honesty, but I would probably think they were real (insert rude word here)s in person.  Yet none of this matters, not really, if in the final calculation Netanyahu ends up being the bulwark of liberty in a time when such defenders are harder and harder to find.


UPDATE: Draft Bibi!  More thoughts on the impact of the speech.