AWACS: He Does It Again

It was a battle that the Administration had blundered into by inadvertence, never realizing until almost the last moment how high the stakes had become. And thus only by investing all the President's prestige could victory be won. Moreover, that triumph could be only tentative and ambiguous, trading the certainty of new strains in the already troubled U.S. relationship with Israel for a marginal, perhaps temporary, improvement in America's ties with another critical Middle Eastern nation, Saudi Arabia.

But once the chips were on the table, the consequences of defeat, in...