"It’s true that Iran’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif, said that Iran’s response had 'concluded,' but Zarif is a moderate often outmaneuvered by hard-liners."

"I know this partly because back in 2004, after Zarif approved a visa for me, I was detained in Iran by security forces looking for information that could embarrass Zarif and get him fired. My best guess is that Iran will strike back hard in a way that leaves it some plausible deniability. Perhaps it’ll be a truck bomb at a diplomatic mission or Trump property, or perhaps rocket attacks on a military site by a proxy, or a cyberattack on an oil refinery or the power grid, or perhaps mines that damage oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has options, and let’s not celebrate prematurely."

Writes Nicholas Kristof in "Trump Has a Bizarre Idea of Winning/Let’s tally up the results of his efforts with Iran" (NYT).

That made me read Zarif's Wikipedia page. I see that he sojourned in the United States, beginning when he was 17, at a college-prep school in San Francisco. He stayed in San Francisco to get a BA and an MA at San Francisco State. Then he got a Ph.D. at the University of Denver (thesis: "Self-Defense in International Law and Policy").

ADDED: The Wikipedia page has this picture of John Kerry representing our interests in a discussion with Zarif in 2015:



Where did that take places? At the Castle of the Asparagus!

The feet-out-in-a-lounge-chair position is unfortunate. Kerry had broken his leg in May of 2015. Here's how that calamity was reported in The Guardian at the time:

Secretary of State John Kerry broke his leg in bike crash near Scionzier in France on Sunday, apparently after hitting a curb. He then scrapped the rest of a four-nation trip that included an international conference on combating the Islamic State group....

Kerry’s cycling rides have become a regular occurrence on his trips. He often takes his bike with him on the plane and was riding that bicycle on Sunday.... During discussions in late March and early April between world powers and Iran, he took several bike trips during breaks. Those talks were in Lausanne, Switzerland, and led to a framework agreement....

ALSO: (From August 2015) "We have a deal that is so incompetent, so bad. Think of the deal. We make a deal, our chief negotiator goes into a bicycle race at 73 years old, he falls he breaks his leg. That was the good part of our deal. That was the only thing that happened.... I swear to you I will never ever ride a bicycle, at least in a race...."

Trump vs. Kerry.

Mr. President, you should be more worried about Paul Manafort meeting with Robert Mueller than me meeting with Iran's FM. But if you want to learn something about the nuclear agreement that made the world safer, buy my new book, Every Day Is Extra: https://t.co/DKjc33Kvvu https://t.co/cesltkt0zW

— John Kerry (@JohnKerry) September 14, 2018

"How awful was John Kerry’s speech on Israel?"

Jennifer Rubin counts the ways — 10.

And here's this in the NYT: "Kerry’s Blunt Words for Israel Denounced by Lawmakers in Both Parties."

“While he may not have intended it, I fear Secretary Kerry, in his speech and action at the U.N., has emboldened extremists on both sides,” said Senator Chuck Schumer, the incoming Senate Democratic leader.

A bipartisan chorus of lawmakers, upset with President Obama’s decision last week to allow the passage of a United Nations resolution condemning Israel’s construction of settlements in disputed territory, made clear that they were looking past the departing administration.

Is Kerry lying?

This was on CNN's "State of the Union" this morning. (The topic is the extradition of Fethullah Gulen.) Watch closely:

If you've watched the clip, vote on whether Kerry is lying:

Yes. Distinctly.

Yes, but only in the usual way.

He's being careful, hiding some things. I wouldn't say "lying."

He seems reasonably honest for a person in his position.

I see a straightforwardly honest man.

 

pollcode.com free polls

"'I absolutely love this job,' [John Kerry] told me more than once. “It is so much fun.”

Me = David Remnick, in The New Yorker, who drops that quote right after this description of a few weeks in the life of John Kerry:

One day, his plane settled in Samarkand, where he patiently endured a forty-five-minute lecture from the dictator of Uzbekistan. The next day, he was in Ashgabat, the surreal, peopleless capital of Turkmenistan, a hermetic state where the post-Soviet dictator renamed the days of the week and devoted a national day to the muskmelon. Kerry had flown to Santiago to take part in a conference to save the world’s oceans. Then he was in Paris, in the wake of the terrorist attack at the Bataclan concert hall, to join talks designed to rescue the earth from overheating to the point of global catastrophe.

Can you detect Remnick's opinion of Kerry in those 4 sentences? I think he doesn't want to speak ill of him — not outright — but he sees him as a sad failure. Here's one more paragraph from the article. Test my theory:

But while Kerry made his name in a radical voice, he was always a man of the establishment. More than any diplomat or politician this side of Bill Clinton, he has an abiding faith in the value of personal relationships and of his capacity to persuade. All he has to do is get the parties in a room and he can’t lose. Obama, by contrast, has no more cultivated relationships with foreign leaders than he has with Republican leaders. Where Obama is skeptical, Kerry is almost sentimental in his optimism. He has even made his peace with Henry Kissinger: “I seek his advice—he’s a brilliant guy.” He recounted a lunch that they had recently, at which Kissinger told him, “The difference between you and me is that I think that personal relations don’t matter much. I think interests matter.” Kerry replied, “I think interests matter, of course, but I think personal relations can help matters—they can be influential.”

And, a bit later:

There is no concealing his eagerness to make a deal; to a critic, his style is reminiscent of the customer who sternly tells the salesman, “I’m not leaving here until you sell me a car.” No one seems to inspire Kerry’s outrage, including the worst of his negotiating partners. “I think they want to be valued for who they are and understood for where they come from and what their life is about,” he told me. “I think if people have a sense that you know what they’re about, they can build some trust with you....”

But don't you have a sense that they know what you're about? What if they see you as an over-optimistic sentimentalist who really wants to make a deal and to feel that he has a relationship with you?

"Someone had changed a single word in the draft text — from a 'should' to a 'shall' — and suddenly the entire climate deal appeared at risk of faltering."

"Secretary of State John F. Kerry phoned his old friend, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, in exasperation over a tiny revision that implied huge new legal and financial obligations. 'We cannot do this,' Kerry warned."

Tiny? One word is not tiny. If you think the difference between "should" and "shall" is tiny, you can't be trusted to proofread the text of a deal. Good for Kerry, noticing. But in saying "We cannot do this," he revealed something quite un-tiny.

The U.S. team, led by Kerry and chief climate negotiator Todd Stern, struggled to fend off demands from small island states and other poorer countries for guaranteed “loss and damage” compensation, essentially payment for negative impacts of climate change. But the Obama administration would not contemplate such an open-ended financial obligation that Congress would have to approve and U.S. citizens would have to pay for....

After the call to Fabius, U.S. and French officials decided together that the word change had been accidental. As such, it could be handled as an ordinary typographical error and erased at the discretion of the conference leader.

John Kerry in Cuba, raising the flag at the reopening American embassy.

The NYT reports:

Mr. Kerry said at the embassy that while “Cuba’s future is for Cubans to decide” and the choice of how they would be governed was solely their responsibility, the United States “remained convinced that the people of Cuba would be best served by a genuine democracy, where people are free to choose their leaders, express their ideas, and practice their faith; where the commitment to economic and social justice is realized more fully; where institutions are answerable to those they serve; and where civil society is independent and allowed to flourish.”

The unfairness of the WaPo headline "Scholars rank Kerry dead last in terms of effectiveness."

See the problems?

Foreign Policy magazine this week announced the results of its 2014 Ivory Tower survey of 1,615 international relations scholars from 1,375 U.S. colleges.

One question they were asked was: “Who was the most effective U.S. secretary of state of the past 50 years?... [D]ead last, is John Kerry. He also got a total of only five votes and tied Eagleburger’s 0.31 percent, but the magazine lists him at 13th.

The first problem is that he's only tied for last place. That's not dead last. Obviously, he's listed after Eagleburger because the convention is to use alphabetical order in the case of a tie.

The second problem is that it's only the last 50 years. 

The third problem — the one that bugs me — is that the scholars were only asked to cast a vote for first place. I'd say that last place only makes him the least likely to be regarded as the most effective. If the question were Who was the most average U.S. secretary of state of the past 50 years?, perhaps he'd have come in first. And if it had been Who was the least effective U.S. secretary of state of the past 50 years?, the most votes might very well have come to rest on someone who got a lot of first-place votes on the most effective question.

Madeleine Albright and Hillary Clinton tied for fourth at 8.70 percent.

I suspect that John Kerry got so few most effective votes, because the kind of scholars who might have voted for him chose Madeleine Albright or Hillary Clinton instead. If the question had been least effective, I suspect that Hillary Clinton would have been at least 4th on that list too.

"This city of over two million people was attacked beginning late Saturday night from at least two directions by the militants from the Islamist insurgency..."

"... which effectively controls the territory surrounding the city. Loud explosions were heard in the center of the city, and small-arms fire and artillery in its suburbs."

Boko Haram in Maiduguri, Nigeria.

The attack on Maiduguri coincided with a visit by Secretary of State John Kerry to Nigeria’s commercial capital, Lagos, for meetings with President Goodluck Jonathan and his challenger in the coming presidential election, Muhammadu Buhari, a retired general. Mr. Kerry was expected to focus in part on the Boko Haram threat amid mounting friction between the United States and Nigeria over how best to deal it....

After a meeting with his British counterpart, earlier this month, Mr. Kerry said that the attacks by Boko Haram constituted war crimes and asserted that the United States was planning a “special initiative” to counter the group. But Mr. Kerry has not provided details of what that initiative is, when it might be undertaken or how the cooperation between the American and Nigerian militaries might be improved.

It's really painful to wince for 3 and a half minutes, but I'm afraid you must look at this.

"Secretary of State John Kerry is in Paris after the White House apologized for not sending a high-ranking official to a massive unity rally after the terrorist attacks there," and he's using James Taylor to convey the message "You've Got a Friend."

I love James Taylor, so this is really difficult for me. But of all the douchebaggery in the history of the world... this takes the gateau!

AND: I felt compelled to write some parody lyrics, but then I heard Meade typing away. "Are you writing parody lyrics?" I ask. More typing. Meade: "First!" I see he's written:

I'll come running
to appease you again

Is parody even needed:

Close your eyes and think of me and soon I will be there
to brighten up even your darkest nights.

I'm overwhelmed by the absurdity of the idea that on one's darkest nights, it would help to visualize John Kerry.

Hey, ain't it good to know that you've got a friend?
People can be so cold.
They'll hurt you and desert you.
They'll take your soul if you let them,
Oh, but don't you let them.

Indeed. Kerry was cold. Don't let him take your soul! Is that what our dear James was thinking as he sang those holy words with his honestly bald head so steadfastly bowed down?

ADDED: James Taylor has helped Obama before. There was this from October 2012:



Can't you just feel the moonshine?

Josh Earnest sent to express the view that the Obama administration "should have sent someone with a higher profile" to the Paris march.

"We agree that we should have sent someone with a higher profile in addition to the ambassador to France," the White House press secretary said, obviously impelled by what WaPo calls "intense scrutiny on both sides of the Atlantic on Monday, with Republicans sharply criticizing the president at home and both domestic and foreign media raising questions about the dearth of U.S. presence at the event."

Eh. It's only the White House press secretary. And he's stepping on John Kerry's message:

This is sort of quibbling a little bit in the sense that our assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland was there and marched, our ambassador was there and marched, many people from the embassy were there and marched.

But: "The Wall Street Journal reported that Nuland actually marched in Washington, D.C." And: "The Associated Press reports that Kerry said he was going to France on Thursday, to reaffirm U.S. solidarity with its oldest ally." And this garbler of messages is our chief diplomat!

And what about Eric Holder, who was in Paris at the time? The Justice Department got out the message that he had "changed his schedule to travel to Paris this weekend to personally express his solidarity with the people of France," but "he had to return to Washington Sunday afternoon." It doesn't say why could could change his schedule but not the part where where "he had to return."

Not impressed. 

"It’s very clear that between the Putin Kremlin and the Obama White House there is a very bad chemistry."

"It's not a question of simply distrust, it’s a question of intense dislike between the two leaders... The more [Secretary of State John] Kerry creates a perception he has a special relationship with [Russian Foreign Minister Sergei] Lavrov, the more he puts Lavrov in a difficult position with officials in his own capital, starting with Putin... It’s clear that when Kerry deals with Lavrov and hopes that because they have overlapping interests, that would allow cooperation where useful, that is not a model of relationship that Putin is prepared to accept.”

Dimitri Simes, president of the Center for the National Interest, quoted in a Bloomberg piece titled "Inside Obama’s Secret Outreach to Russia."

"But to suggest that this Senate report will really tip the scales when it comes to the United States’ enemies rallying support..."

"... you have to believe that the following exchange is happening somewhere in the Middle East."

Intro to a dialog between "Abdul" and "Ahmed," imagined by international politics prof Dan Drezner.

Forget the children's drawings on mommy's wedding dress...

... what about John Kerry's big floppy shorts, worn while kiteboarding... and while the world burns?

"I wish Netanyahu and his government had a better sense of the toxic repercussions of mobilizing GOP proxies as cut-outs in this way."

Says Josh Marshall (in a dizzying swirl of metaphor).

It should go without saying that the Israel-US alliance becomes more brittle as it becomes more clearly identified with a single US political party. And perhaps more than that, as it becomes more clearly identified with the ties between Netanyahu and US Republicans.

The headline is "Dangerous Game," and we're told "Nothing gets the Obama administration's ire up like the perception (very often grounded in reality) that Netanyahu and his government ministers are trying to scuttle his initiatives by inveigling themselves into domestic partisan conflict in the US."

Marshall won't say it directly, but this feels like desperation about the 2014 elections.

"But what does Kerry do? He adopts Hamas’s position..."

"... undermining both Israel and Egypt, in putting out a proposal that would let Hamas keep its remaining missiles and tunnels. The Israeli government decried this as a 'capitulation' to Hamas and was understandably 'outraged.' In a tenure filled with gaffes, missteps and blinding vanity this is a new low for Kerry."

And John Kerry saw that it was good.

"That was good," said John Kerry as he was led to his car by Hoshyar Zebari, the Iraqi foreign minister, after a 100-minute meeting with Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and other senior Iraqi officials at Maliki's "carefully maintained compound, which was the scene of an incident in December 2008 when a shoe was thrown at President Bush."

Over Bush will I cast My shoe...

"A horse is a horse, of course of course / And no one can have a discourse with a horse..."

We were just talking about the important new game called "Vox-shaming," and James Taranto has a fine entry. I'm only going to quote the part I found hilarious.

Not that anything is supposed to be funny about the Israeli-Palestinian problem, but there's a Vox article called ""Does It Matter That John Kerry Compared Israel to Apartheid?" that says "pretty much the entire American discourse around Israel-Palestine has devolved into an endless stream of language-policing. . . . This is all discourse about discourse," to which Taranto retorts:

A horse is a horse, of course of course / And no one can have a discourse with a horse / That is, of course, except discourse with the Famous Mr. Ed. Or, as the New York Times once put it: " 'John Kerry walks into a bar,' goes the Washington version of the old joke. 'Bartender says, "Hey, Senator Kerry, why the long face?" ' "

SOS Kerry on the "apartheid" remark he didn't know was being recorded: "If I could rewind the tape, I would have chosen a different word..."

"... to describe my firm belief that the only way in the long term to have a Jewish state and two nations and two peoples living side by side in peace and security is through a two state solution... In the long term, a unitary, binational state cannot be the democratic Jewish state that Israel deserves or the prosperous state with full rights that the Palestinian people deserve."

If I could rewind the tape... in other words, if I knew that there was going to be a tape.

If I could rewind knew there was going to be the tape, I would have chosen a different word avoided the clear language that makes what I mean to say comprehensible, and I would have deployed the mind-numbing, meandering verbiage that has work for me for years either to effectively lull people into thinking that they in their weakness must have drifted off and missed the point or to arrive at the absurd but self-flattering belief that they appreciate the subtle explications of The Man of Nuance.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again:

John Kerry's "poof speech."

Don't worry, Kerry lovers. He'll survive. He didn't use a homophobic slur. He said "Poof, that was sort of the moment. We find ourselves where we are."

He was talking about the Israeli/Palestinian difficulties, and the "poof" moment was "Israel’s announcement of 700 new housing units for Jewish settlement in an area of Jerusalem across the 1967 lines, in territory the Palestinians claim for a future state." In Israel, that's being called Kerry's "poof speech."

This does seem to open up the Israelis to a charge that they are using homophobic slur against Kerry.