An intriguing but frustrating window into Obama’s West Asia policy | Just World News

An intriguing but frustrating window into Obama’s West Asia policy | Just World News Now comes (yet another!) book by one of the hordes of nation-security technocrats who dominate West Asian policymaking in Democratic administrations here in Washington. In this case, it is Grand Delusion: The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East, a recent book by Steven Simon, a guy who has worked as first a career civil servant and then a political appointee in U.S. administrations going back to Pres. Ronald Reagan, and who between government stints has transited through DC’s ever whirling revolving door into presumably lucrative positions in all the “usual” kinds of militaristic think-tanks. Don’t yawn yet, though. Unlike most of his counterparts in the nat-sec punditocracy who have written memoirs of their times in office, Simon at least started to reflect on “what went wrong” with U.S. policy towards West Asia (the “Middle East.”) And in the chapter on the Obama administration—in which he served as senior NSC director for the Middle East and North Africa—he reveals a number of jaw-dropping details that help to explain the in-bred, reflexively pro-military and pro-Israeli atmosphere of not just the explicitly political class in DC but also wide swathes of the supposedly “policy intellectual” class of DC think-tank-dom.