Today's TOCS episode goes on the air a little less than an hour, with highlights from my interview with Prof. Barry Rubin, analysis from Dan Diker, and the weekly roundup of US, Israeli, and international news. To hear the show live - and to submit questions via the chat room or get on the air through the phone lines - head over to the show's Blog Talk Radio page at 2pm PST.

The call with Diker covered (1) the increasingly pointed tensions between Obama and our NATO allies over Iranian nuclearization and (2) the so-called Fayyad peace plan, where Prime Minister Fayyad wants to unilaterally declare a Palestinian state. To give you an idea of the kind of game Diker brings to the latter debate, here's Sunday's CSM article on the plan:

Fayyad's plan was recently analyzed in depth by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA), a right-of-center think tank. Dan Diker, the JCPA's senior foreign analyst, says that the plan is potentially dangerous because it doesn't call for working in tandem with Israel on issues that the Jewish state sees as essential to its security... "For Israel to be 12 kilometers [7 miles] away from a Palestinian state that is 3,000 feet above sea level, which is looking down on Ben Gurion airport with most of Israel's infrastructure? After the rockets from Gaza, people are saying, 'Yikes, this is a dangerous proposal,'" Diker says... Fayyad, who clearly does his homework, already has Diker's report from the JCPA printed out in his office in Ramallah.

As always, make sure you grab the full Barry Rubin interview from the One Jerusalem audio page after the show. Prof. Rubin sat down for 35 minutes of questions, only a dozen or so of which made it into the highlight cut.

Topics that you'll get only in the full interview: the decades-long campaign of anti-American mass murder and torture waged by Iran's proxies in Lebanon, the pitfalls of security assistance to the Palestinian Authority and Lebanon, and how Obama's engagement-centric diplomacy pushes moderate countries into the Iranian orbit. There's also an extended bit about the Obama Effect. It turns out that The One's personal popularity doesn't exactly change the calculations of our allies and enemies. Which isn't to say that Middle East writers like Hendrik Hertzberg are cutting their Obama hagiography out of whole cloth. But, in the final analysis, they're probably not winning any prizes for rigorous and levelheaded social scientific analysis either.

References:
* RubinReports [Official Site]
* Dan Diker Home Page [FreedomOutpost]
* The Omri Ceren Show [Blog Talk Radio]
* Interview: How Salam Fayyad plans to save the Palestinian dream | csmonitor.com
* New Middle East Events Prove it: Obama Right About Most Everything - Hit & Run : Reason Magazine [Reason]

Related Mere Rhetoric Categories:
* The Omri Ceren Show
* Diplomacy
* Lebanon and Hezbollah