Not the first one to say it

No, indeed. Nick Cohen in today's Observer is not the first. This blog linked to an article by Caroline Glick on a similar topic a little while ago. Nevertheless, Mr Cohen has got there and has done so in elegant prose. Because the obsession with Israel (and pace Mr Cohen, it is more obvious on the left than the right) has been laid bare by events of recent weeks. It appears that the people of various North African and Middle-Eastern countries have realized what a terrible con-trick has been perpetrated on them by their rulers aided and abetted by the Western media and have turned their guns or their mobile phones on those rulers. Sadly, they cannot have a go at the Western media.

While we are on the subject of catastrophic errors, here is an excellent article by James Traub in Foreign Policy: "The End of the Arab Dream".

Muammar al-Qaddafi's fall won't just mark the close of an awful dictatorship -- it will end the Arab world's disastrous half-century-long affair with utopian governing fantasies.

Well, one can but hope. So far, the signs are fairly good - the Arabs of various countries seem to have woken up from the nightmare but will they be seduced by yet another utopian panacea?

As for the obsession with Israel, I predict it will be back within a few months, most noticeable in the Guardian and the Observer.