I think this debate became very binary and it was like you could call for

intervention in Syria and simultaneously grant yourself a moral high ground but

also avoid learning the lessons of what had happened.

I mean, when people would say to me,

you guys over learned the lessons of Iraq,

it just happened.

Like, sometimes you should learn lessons,

you know, and it just happened,

and it just happened in the neighboring country with a kind of mirror image sectarian divide and we had 150,000 troops in that country at the peak of the war and we still couldn't stop people from killing each other.

Why we were going to be able to stop people in Syria from killing each other with cruise missiles,

that was the position that I found frustrating.

And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.

Last week I was in Israel for a very brief trip to give an academic lecture. Now I should preface this by saying that I don't follow Israeli politics

nearly as closely as I should.

And while my instinct is of course to be very skeptical of

Benjamin Netanyahu and his governments I sort of assumed that the new government that he was putting together would largely be more of the bad same.

Now I was worried about the fact that Netanyahu was about to enter into a coalition with far-right extremist partners like Ben Gvier,

but that effectively we should expect a continuation of the kind of governance that Israel saw in the

many previous terms in which Netanyahu was Prime Minister. I was struck getting to his role, just how worried,

quite moderate, with me establishment people in the country are about this incoming government.

Netanyahu announced that he would try to expand the national broadcaster is the Israeli equivalent of the BBC.

He is keen to pass a law which allows the Knesset, the country's parliament, to overrule any decision

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