Goldberg, Wieseltier and Zechariah on Obama

  Jeffrey Goldberg, currently an Atlantic national correspondent, during a question and answer session last week at Sinai Temple after his speech on “Israel, Iraq and al Qaeda:”

There is almost this childish belief that on January 20, 2009 we will elect another president and that it will be Obama, or at least a woman, and the world will say “Oh great!  Now we can like you again!” 

There is this level of childish certainty in that — that I find unfathomable.  Because the next American president will have to advance America’s interests around the world.  Some of those interests will have to be advanced in hard ways. 

I predict that if Barack Obama becomes president, by late 2009 the stories in newspapers in Europe and on TV across the Arab world will be “Oh my God, this Obama is like Bush Lite!” 

Why?  Because he’s had to take hard steps in Afghanistan.  Because he’s had to take hard steps in Pakistan.  Because he hasn’t actually pulled out of Iraq, because pulling out of Iraq is not as easy as it sounds when you are debating Hillary Clinton on a stage somewhere. . . .

Because the next president — whoever it is — is going to face the same set of enormous problems, and like any president is going to have limited maneuverability to deal with those problems.  And those problems are not going to go away.  The Islamic Jihad is not going to say “Well!  They elected Barack Obama!  I guess we should just have a bake sale or something.”

Leon Wieseltier, writing Wednesday in The New Republic, on Barack Obama:

I cannot escape the foreboding that we are heading into an era of conflict, not an era of conciliation. . . . I cannot imagine that the threat to American security from Al Qaeda and its many associates can be met without a massive and sustained military operation in western Pakistan . . .

It is not "the politics of fear" to remind Obama’s legions of the blissful that, while they are watching Scarlett Johansson sway to the beat, somewhere deep inside a quasi independent territory we might call Islamistan people are making plans to blow them to bits.  (Yes, they can.)

. . . And into this unirenic environment strides Obama, pledging to extract us promptly from Iraq and to negotiate with our enemies. . . . [D]oes Obama really believe that he has something to propose to these ruthless regimes that they have not already considered?  Does he plan to move them, to organize them, to show them change they can believe in?

Zechariah as depicted on Michelangelo’s ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Zechariah, writing maybe 2,500 years ago, in Zechariah 9:12: 

“Return to the stronghold,

Ye prisoners of hope.”