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Book Review: Ben Rhodes on Obama's Middle East Worldview
(Wall Street Journal) Martin Peretz - Ben Rhodes, President Obama's deputy national security adviser, has written The World as It Is, the assertion of a worldview billed as a statement of reality. On the Palestinian question, Rhodes complains that the Israelis, who are "stronger" than the Palestinians, demanded unreasonable assurances of support when Obama pressed for a two-state solution. He ignores the special qualities of a conflict in which a democratic state must confront hostile militants who don't hesitate to hide behind civilians to feed their David-and-Goliath narrative. When the subject is the Iran deal, Rhodes reduces Israel to Netanyahu, and Jews who opposed Obama's policies toward Iran to pathological actors: They had "internalized the vision of Israel constantly under attack." At no point does Rhodes engage with the real objections of people concerned with these conflicts - chiefly that Obama was trying to impose broad, sweeping change on a region whose historical particularities make change incremental at best. The writer was from 1974 to 2011 the editor of the New Republic.