I'm Being Picky

Good old Roger ("Iran") Cohen is at it again.

This time he is skinning Benjamin Netanyahu.

Here's part of his op-ed:-

It fell to Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, to play the role Khrushchev once played in toughening a young American president.

The former Soviet leader thought he could browbeat Kennedy only to discover, in Vienna, that the Kennedy charm was not unalloyed to steel (“It will be a long, cold winter.”) Netanyahu was the first foreign leader to think he could steamroll Obama. He earned a frosty comeuppance.

The Israeli leader toyed with Obama’s unequivocal call in Cairo last June for a “stop” to Israeli settlements. He allowed the ill-timed announcement that 1,600 apartments for Jews will be built in East Jerusalem. Then, rather than scrap that, Netanyahu chose cheap cheers from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee with “Jerusalem is not a settlement.”

You notices this, right?

He allowed the ill-timed announcement that 1,600 apartments for Jews will be built in East Jerusalem.

He allowed?

Or did opposition forces leak the news to the anti-Bibi Israeli media and it was they who set up the confrontation?

And did Bibi "toy" with the call for a halt in Jewish reclamation of its national land or did he say, and as Hillary Clinton noted, that it was unprecedented to stop construction while negotiations are on as they are a final status issue and since the Arabs had negotiated while construction was preceding for decades?

Is Cohen slightly subverting the facts and the history of which he writes?

And he revives the falsehood attributed to the US military establishment:

Americans, prodded by a report from Gen. David Petraeus, are beginning to see the link between terror recruitment and a festering Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Planning in Washington on Iran has shown a “marked shift in thinking away from the war strategy,” as Nicholas Burns, a former top State Department official, put it to me.

Is no war - as if there has been a war vs. Iran strategy ever - how does America intend effectively to halt nuclear proliferation?