What Does Jeffrey Goldberg Know About Iran Anyway?

What Does Jeffrey Goldberg Know About Iran Anyway?

By Ali Gharib
LobeLog
October 9, 2010

Just when you get done writing up ignorance about Iran in Israel, former IDF Corporal Jeffrey Goldberg goes and tries to call out Matt Yglesias, who is visiting Israel for the first time, for having written about the Jewish State before he made the Hajj. Goldberg, in a parenthetical interjection, writes:

you’d think with all his commentary on the place he had actually visited once or twice before, but such is blogging

It leads to an obvious question, and Goldberg’s Atlantic colleague Max Fisher beat me to it on Twitter (which we’ve been using, too, @LobeLog ):

I don’t get this criticism of [Matt Yglesias] because I’m pretty sure Goldberg has never been to Iran http://bit.ly/bg8TL1

Well I have no idea if Goldberg has been to Iran, which he just wrote a nearly 10,000 word piece about attacking. But maybe he’s been there — I don’t know. Maybe he crossed over for a quick visit when he was only fifteen miles away in Halabja, Iraq. Goldberg was there writing a massive piece for the New Yorker, published in March 2002, where the star witness — in a 1000-word section sub-headed “THE AL QAEDA LINK” – turned out later to be a serial liar. But that wasn’t “blogging,” was it — it was a reported piece. (Goldberg, incidentally, sticks by his reporting, or has Eli Lake do it for him anyway.)

Goldberg, of course, supported the invasion of Iraq back then (Ken Silverstein called it “Goldberg’s War”) and, within a year, it was a done deal. On Iran, which I don’t know if he’s been to, he insists that his feeling about a military strike is “profound, paralyzing ambivalence” at least until the end of this year (another two and a half months).

Continued. . .