Robert Dreyfuss | The Nation

Looking like a slightly deranged grandfather obsessed with something only he can see—perhaps an older, male version of the off-kilter character played by Claire Danes on Showtime’s Homeland—Benjamin Netanyahu fussed and scribbled over a cartoon bomb at the podium of the United Nations yesterday. With any luck, the bombastic, extremist, too-far-right-for-even-Likud Israeli prime minister has done himself in.

You can read Netanyahu’s entire rant, if you like.

Of course, Netanyahu has looked like a bizarre version of Paul Revere for years now. (As he himself said yesterday at the UN: “I’ve been speaking about the need to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons for over fifteen years.”) No one, or almost no one, believes that Iran is a vast nuclear threat and that the United States (or Israel) has to bomb it in weeks or months or, as Netanyahu suggests, at the latest next summer. Not the Obama administration, which is treating Netanyahu as if it wishes it could haul out a straitjacket and a syringe. Not the Israel national security establishment, which is almost universally opposed to a strike on Iran. Not the Iran Project—which represents a cross section of the American national security establishment and has laid out, in detail, why there’s no need to go to war against Iran.

UPDATE: While pessimistic in his report to the UNSC, Brahimi allowed a glimmer of hope to penetrate—saying, “All I can tell you is that the situation is indeed extremely difficult. There is a stalemate, there is no prospect today or tomorrow to move forward.”

But he added, “Now that I have found out a little bit more about what is happening in the country and the region, I think we will find an opening in the not-too-distant future. I refuse to believe that reasonable people do not see that you cannot go backward, that you cannot go back to the Syria of the past. I told everybody in Damascus and elsewhere that reform is not enough anymore, what is needed is change.”

EARLIER POST: Lakhdar Brahimi, the veteran diplomat and former Algerian foreign minister who succeeded Kofi Annan as the UN’s Syria mediator, is scheduled to brief the UN Security Council today on the results of the first round of his talks, according to Al Arabiya. So far, a diplomatic solution to the civil war doesn’t look likely, but there are some promising signs. One is that in Damascus, a large group of representatives of the nonviolent opposition to President Assad’s government met to call for Assad to step down. As The New York Times reports:

The United States is sharply reducing its “partnership” with Afghan national security forces (ANSF), including Afghanistan’s army, in the wake of a steady series of so-called green-on-blue attacks in which uniformed Afghans have killed US troops and other international forces. Among other things, this is likely to increase civilian casualties among Afghans between now and 2014.

Let’s unpack this: in recent days, besides the green-on-blue attacks, there have been several incidents of US forces killing Afghan civilians, including an airstrike over the weekend that killed eight women and children. As usual, NATO/ISAF inituially denied killing the women and girls, then admitted it, as CNN reports:

NATO admitted that it had killed Afghan civilians in an airstrike early Sunday morning, hours after saying there was no evidence of civilian deaths. “A number of Afghan civilians were unintentionally killed or injured during this mission,” the coalition said in a statement accepting “full responsibility for this tragedy.” NATO’s International Security Assistance Force “offers its sincerest regret to the families,” the statement said. The coalition first cast doubt on an Afghan official’s assertion that eight women were killed and seven more wounded in a coalition airstrike Sunday morning in Laghman province.

Mitt Romney has, for all intents and purposes, pretty much disqualified himself for the presidency by his intemperate comments in regard to the murder of the US ambassador in Libya. His bungling trip to Britain, Israel and Poland was bad enough, but his shocking remarks blasting President Obama and kowtowing to extremist, anti-Muslim Republican voters ought to be the final straw.

A quick summary of the facts: an extremist, Israeli-American’s film about Islam stirs up radical Muslims in Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere. The US embassy in Cairo, obviously sensing that tension was building, condemns the propaganda film. Then, the embassy in Cairo and the consulate in Benghazi come under attack. When the American diplomats are killed, including the US ambassador, President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton issue fierce condemnations. And Romney says this:

I’m outraged by the attacks on American diplomatic missions in Libya and Egypt and by the death of an American consulate worker [sic] in Benghazi. It’s disgraceful that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.