Obama's know-nothings discuss Egypt

Via TPM's intriguing new "Egypt wire", this:

President Obama was reportedly briefed for 40 minutes on the situation in Egypt today. Here, a photo of his meeting with National Security Advisor Tom Donilon; Chief of Staff Bill Daley; Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communication Ben Rhodes; Tony Blinken, National Security Advisor to the Vice President; National Security Council Chief of Staff Denis McDonough; John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism; and Robert Cardillo, Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Intelligence Integration.

What is notable is the absence of anyone in the group who has any serious knowledge about either Egypt or the broader region. So thorough-going has been the witch-hunt that AIPAC and its attack dogs have conducted over the past 25 years against anyone with real Middle East expertise that the U.S. government now contains no-one at the higher (or even mid-career) levels of policymaking who has any in-depth understanding of the region or of the aspirations of its people.

The campaign against anyone with regional expertise-- the so-called "State Department Arabists"-- was launched in the public sphere by the dreadful know-nothing Robert Kaplan, in the 1980s. It got a strong foothold throughout the federal bureaucracy-- and far more broadly than in just the State department-- with the arrival of Pres. Clinton in 1993. Clinton, that is, who brought along as his key advisers on the affairs of the whole region the two long-time pro-Israel activists Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk! Then, of course, under GWB, we had Elliott Abrams and rest of the neocons running regional affairs for the government.

And what was happening inside the State Department during all those years? Only hacks like Jeffrey Feltman or Donald Blome-- the list is endless... -- who could prove their unswerving loyalty to the pro-Israel agenda got promoted or retained. Throughout those 16 years of the Clinton and GWB presidencies, a generation of career diplomats grew up whose main mantra was to do nothing that might question or even upset Israel. (There were, of course, those heroic few who questioned the prevailing, AIPAC-fueled "wisdom" on the advisability of invading Iraq in 2003, who resigned their posts at the time.)

So now, in the Oval Office, we have the blind leading the blind and the blind advising the blind. [H/T Xymphora]