Jeffrey Goldberg, Columnist

Obama's Inaction Isn't Destroying the Middle East

There was an amusing (well, darkly amusing) juxtaposition on the home page of the New York Times the other day.

January 6, 2014 at 6:01 PM UTC

Jeffrey Goldberg is a columnist for Bloomberg View writing about the Middle East, U.S. foreign policy and national affairs. He is a national correspondent for the Atlantic, the author of "Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror" and a winner of the National Magazine Award for reporting. He has also covered the Middle East as a staff writer for the New Yorker. Goldberg began his career at the Washington Post. He later wrote a column for the Jerusalem Post, covered the Mafia for New York magazine, and wrote for several years for the New York Times Magazine. He has been a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and a fellow of the Jerusalem Foundation. He was born in New York, and now lives in Washington with his wife and three children.

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There was an amusing (well, darkly amusing) juxtaposition on the home page of the New York Times the other day. One headline read, "For Obama, a Real and Rare Vacation in Hawaii." The story reported that, "Air Force One was barely off the ground for the 10-hour flight when White House aides began making bold predictions: They expected no urgent news to break during the trip. And this year ... they were right." Another story on the same page was topped with this headline: "Qaeda-Linked Militants in Iraq Secure Nearly Full Control of Falluja."

I suppose that since news of the near-collapse of Iraq as a unitary state and the resurgence of al-Qaeda came at the very end of Obama's trip to Hawaii, the first story was mainly right. Still, the second story contained the sort of news that could genuinely be called urgent.