Attention to the Unseen

Michelle Goldberg writes: Some Jewish leaders, alarmed by the backlash to the war, are trying to rule any discussion of Israel’s role in instigating it out of bounds. In a speech on Monday, Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, denounced those who “pointed fingers at the Israelis who — they claimed — whispered a few too many times in President Trump’s ear.” Greenblatt’s heavy-handed attempt to police the discourse is bound to fail, because it’s asking people to…

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Politico reports: German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul on Wednesday warned of a dangerous spiral of unintended consequences if the Middle East war escalates further. “There is a real risk of escalation, which could plunge not only this region but the entire world into a major crisis,” Wadephul said during a joint press conference with his French counterpart, Jean-Noël Barrot, in Berlin. The German government under Chancellor Friedrich Merz was initially far more supportive of the U.S. and Israeli attacks on…

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The New York Times reports: Two top intelligence officials directly contradicted one of the Trump administration’s justifications for going to war with Iran, repeating on Wednesday the intelligence community’s conclusion that Iran was years away from developing missiles capable of hitting the United States. Testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, and John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, would not say whether the intelligence community had determined that Iran would be able to launch such…

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  One of Israel’s most highly regarded and world-renowned professors of history and international relations, Avi Shlaim, says that Donald Trump is “Netanyahu’s poodle”, adding that Netanyahu “plays him like a fiddle”. Prof. Shlaim says that Donald Trump is the only American President who is gullible enough to become part of Netanyahu’s plan for regime change in Iran. However, Prof. Shlaim believes that regime change is almost impossible to achieve from the air and what is far more likely is…

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Politico reports: When the U.S. started firing Tomahawk missiles at Iran late last month, many of President Donald Trump’s allies hoped it would be a quick, surgical operation, similar to last year’s strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities or the ouster of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro in January. Though uneasy, they were reassured by the belief that Trump’s open-ended objectives gave him the flexibility to declare victory whenever he saw fit. Now, more than two weeks into the campaign, some of…

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Shane Harris writes: Joe Kent, the U.S. government’s top counterterrorism official and a self-identified “America First” Republican, is not the only Donald Trump ally to disagree with the president’s decision to attack Iran. But today he became the first senior government official to do so publicly, quitting his job and offering an explanation that undercut Trump’s rationale for starting the war. “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation,” Kent wrote in his resignation letter, an extraordinary statement from an…

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The Guardian reports: Britain’s national security adviser, Jonathan Powell, attended the final talks between the US and Iran and judged that the offer made by Tehran on its nuclear programme was significant enough to prevent a rush to war, the Guardian can reveal. Powell thought progress had been made in Geneva and that the deal proposed by Iran was “surprising”, according to sources. Two days after the talks ended, and after a date had been agreed for a further round…

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Middle East Eye reports: Senior Iranian officials have repeatedly invoked the convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein to attack Washington’s political elite during the ongoing Israeli-US war on the country. Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, accused figures linked to Epstein’s network of plotting to provoke a global crisis and blame Tehran. Posting on X, Larijani said: “I’ve heard that the remaining members of Epstein’s network have devised a conspiracy to create an incident similar to 9/11 and blame…

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Dan Sabbagh writes: If there was a moment when the absence of a US strategy on Iran was exposed, then this was it. Donald Trump demanded on Saturday that the UK, China, France, Japan and others participate in a naval escort for oil tankers through the strait of Hormuz. Despite launching the attack on Iran, with Israel, the White House does not seem to have fully anticipated what was likely to follow. Iran had few good military options for fighting…

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