On Wednesday night, I received a phone call from Anthony Scaramucci, the new White House communications director. He wasn't happy. Earlier in the night, I'd tweeted, citing a "senior White House official," that Scaramucci was having dinner at the White House with President Trump, the First Lady, Sean Hannity, and the former Fox News executive Bill Shine. It was an interesting group, and raised some questions. Was Trump getting strategic advice from Hannity? Was he considering hiring Shine? But Scaramucci had his own question-for me.

"Who leaked that to you?" he asked. I said I couldn't give him that information. He responded by threatening to fire the entire White House communications staff. "What I'm going to do is, I will eliminate everyone in the comms team and we'll start over," he said. I laughed, not sure if he really believed that such a threat would convince a journalist to reveal a source. He continued to press me and complain about the staff he's inherited in his new job. "I ask these guys not to leak anything and they can't help themselves," he said. "You're an American citizen, this is a major catastrophe for the American country. So I'm asking you as an American patriot to give me a sense of who leaked it."

In Scaramucci's view, the fact that word of the dinner had reached a reporter was evidence that his rivals in the West Wing, particularly Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, were plotting against him. While they have publicly maintained that there is no bad blood between them, Scaramucci and Priebus have been feuding for months. After the election, Trump asked Scaramucci to join his Administration, and Scaramucci sold his company, SkyBridge Capital, in anticipation of taking on a senior role. But Priebus didn't want him in the White House, and successfully blocked him from being appointed to a job until last week, when Trump offered him the communications job over Priebus's vehement objections. In response to Scaramucci's appointment, Sean Spicer, an ally of Priebus's, resigned his position as press secretary. And in an additional slight to Priebus, the White House's official announcement of Scaramucci's hiring noted that he would report directly to the President, rather than to the chief of staff.

Scaramucci's first public appearance as communications director was a slick and conciliatory performance at the lectern in the White House briefing room last Friday. He suggested it was time for the White House to turn a page. But since then, he has become obsessed with leaks and threatened to fire staffers if he discovers that they have given unauthorized information to reporters. Michael Short, a White House press aide considered close to Priebus, resigned on Tuesday after Scaramucci publicly spoke about firing him. Meanwhile, several damaging stories about Scaramucci have appeared in the press, and he blamed Priebus for most of them. Now, he wanted to know whom I had been talking to about his dinner with the President. Scaramucci, who initiated the call, did not ask for the conversation to be off the record or on background.

"Is it an assistant to the President?" he asked. I again told him I couldn't say. "O.K., I'm going to fire every one of them, and then you haven't protected anybody, so the entire place will be fired over the next two weeks."

I asked him why it was so important for the dinner to be kept a secret. Surely, I said, it would become public at some point. "I've asked people not to leak things for a period of time and give me a honeymoon period," he said. "They won't do it." He was getting more and more worked up, and he eventually convinced himself that Priebus was my source.

"They'll all be fired by me," he said. "I fired one guy the other day. I have three to four people I'll fire tomorrow. I'll get to the person who leaked that to you. Reince Priebus-if you want to leak something-he'll be asked to resign very shortly." The issue, he said, was that he believed Priebus had been worried about the dinner because he hadn't been invited. "Reince is a fucking paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac," Scaramucci said. He channelled Priebus as he spoke: "'Oh, Bill Shine is coming in. Let me leak the fucking thing and see if I can cock-block these people the way I cock-blocked Scaramucci for six months.'" (Priebus did not respond to a request for comment.)

Scaramucci was particularly incensed by a Politico report about his financial-disclosure form, which he viewed as an illegal act of retaliation by Priebus. The reporter said Thursday morning that the document was publicly available and she had obtained it from the Export-Import Bank. Scaramucci didn't know this at the time, and he insisted to me that Priebus had leaked the document, and that the act was "a felony."

"I've called the F.B.I. and the Department of Justice," he told me.

"Are you serious?" I asked.

"The swamp will not defeat him," he said, breaking into the third person. "They're trying to resist me, but it's not going to work. I've done nothing wrong on my financial disclosures, so they're going to have to go fuck themselves."

Scaramucci also told me that, unlike other senior officials, he had no interest in media attention. "I'm not Steve Bannon, I'm not trying to suck my own cock," he said, speaking of Trump's chief strategist. "I'm not trying to build my own brand off the fucking strength of the President. I'm here to serve the country." (Bannon declined to comment.)

He reiterated that Priebus would resign soon, and he noted that he told Trump that he expected Priebus to launch a campaign against him. "He didn't get the hint that I was reporting directly to the President," he said. "And I said to the President here are the four or five things that he will do to me." His list of allegations included leaking the Hannity dinner and the details from his financial-disclosure form.

I got the sense that Scaramucci's campaign against leakers flows from his intense loyalty to Trump. Unlike other Trump advisers, I've never heard him say a bad word about the President. "What I want to do is I want to fucking kill all the leakers and I want to get the President's agenda on track so we can succeed for the American people," he told me.

He cryptically suggested that he had more information about White House aides. "O.K., the Mooch showed up a week ago," he said. "This is going to get cleaned up very shortly, O.K.? Because I nailed these guys. I've got digital fingerprints on everything they've done through the F.B.I. and the fucking Department of Justice."

"What?" I interjected.

"Well, the felony, they're gonna get prosecuted, probably, for the felony." He added, "The lie detector starts-" but then he changed the subject and returned to what he thought was the illegal leak of his financial-disclosure forms. I asked if the President knew all of this.

"Well, he doesn't know the extent of all that, he knows about some of that, but he'll know about the rest of it first thing tomorrow morning when I see him."

Scaramucci said he had to get going. "Yeah, let me go, though, because I've gotta start tweeting some shit to make this guy crazy."

Minutes later, he tweeted, "In light of the leak of my financial info which is a felony. I will be contacting @FBI and the @TheJusticeDept #swamp @Reince45." With the addition of Priebus's Twitter handle, he was making public what he had just told me: that he believed Priebus was leaking information about him. The tweet quickly went viral.

Scaramucci seemed to have second thoughts. Within two hours he deleted the original tweet and posted a new one denying that he was targeting the chief of staff. "Wrong!" he said, adding a screenshot of an Axios article that said, "Scaramucci appears to want Priebus investigated by FBI." Scaramucci continued, "Tweet was public notice to leakers that all Sr Adm officials are helping to end illegal leaks. @Reince45."

A few hours later, I appeared on CNN to discuss the overnight drama. As I was talking about Scaramucci, he called into the show himself and referenced our conversation. He changed his story about Priebus. Instead of saying that he was trying to expose Priebus as a leaker, he said that the reason he mentioned Priebus in his deleted tweet was because he wanted to work together with Priebus to discover the leakers.

"He's the chief of staff, he's responsible for understanding and uncovering and helping me do that inside the White House, which is why I put that tweet out last night," Scaramucci said, after noting that he had talked to me Wednesday night. He then made an argument that journalists were assuming that he was accusing Priebus because they know Priebus leaks to the press.

"When I put out a tweet, and I put Reince's name in the tweet," he said, "they're all making the assumption that it's him because journalists know who the leakers are. So, if Reince wants to explain that he's not a leaker, let him do that."

Scaramucci then made a plea to viewers. "Let me tell you something about myself," he said. "I am a straight shooter."
(c) 2017 Ryan Lizza is the Washington correspondent for The New Yorker, and also an on-air contributor for CNN.

MY LATE friend, Nathan Yellin-Mor, the political leader of the LEHI underground, once told me that a certain politician is "not a great thinker and not a small fool."

I remember that sentence every time I think about Gilad Erdan, our Minister of Public Security. His part in the events of the last few weeks, in which the entire Middle East almost exploded, confirmed this judgment.

On the other hand, Binyamin Netanyahu reminds me of the saying: "A clever person is one who knows how to extricate himself from a trap which a wise person would not have gotten into in the first place."

About Netanyahu I would have said: "A very clever but not a very wise person."

THERE ARE two ways to look at historic disasters. The one sees them as plots of evil persons, the other as acts of folly.

It is easy to understand the first school. After all, it cannot be possible that our very lives depend on a bunch of fools, who have no idea about anything.

For example, it is easy to believe that Binyamin Netanyahu sent a secret order to a security guard at the Israeli embassy in Amman to kill two Jordanians, so as to enable him (Netanyahu) to negotiate with the King of Jordan to release the guy in return for the removal of the metal detectors from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Pure genius.

The other version is much more prosaic. It says that the people who determine the lot of nations and countries - emperors and kings, statesmen and generals, leftists and rightists - are almost all perfect fools. A frightening idea. But it was always so, and still is. All over the world, and particularly in Israel.

One of my friends said this week: "There is no need to put cameras on the Temple Mount, as is now suggested. We should put the cameras in the cabinet room, because that is the source of the greatest danger to the future of Israel."

BARBARA TUCHMAN, the American-Jewish historian, originated the phrase "the March of Folly." She researched several historic disasters and showed that they were caused by sheer stupidity.

One example: Word War I, with its millions of victims, which was the result of a sequence of incredibly imbecilic acts.

A Serbian fanatic killed an Austrian archduke, whom he accosted by accident, after the planned attempt on his life had failed. The Austrian emperor saw an opportunity to show his prowess and delivered an ultimatum to little Serbia. The Russian Czar mobilized his army to defend his Slavic brothers. The German general staff had a contingency plan that provided that once the Russians started to mobilized their cumbersome army, the German army would cross into France and smash it before the Russians were ready to fight. The British declared war in order to help the French.

Not one of these actors wanted a war, least of all a world war. Each of them contributed just a little piece of folly. Together they started a war which left millions of dead, wounded and disabled. In the end, they all agreed that the only person to blame was the German Kaiser, who was not a little fool either.

THE SAME historian would have been delighted to write about the latest incidents on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

Three Palestinian fanatics, citizens of Israel, killed three Border Guard "fighters" there, who happened to be Druze. (The Druze are a separate semi-Muslim sect.)

Somebody, probably within the police, hit on the brilliant idea of installing metal-detectors to prevent such atrocities.

Three minutes' thought would have sufficed to understand that this was a foolish idea. On a good day, hundreds of thousands of Muslims enter the Temple Mount, in order to pray in and near the al-Aqsa mosque, one of the three most holy places of Islam (after Mecca and Medina). Getting them to pass the detectors would have been like passing an elephant through the eye of a needle.

It would have been easy to phone the Waqf (Muslim trust) officials, who are in charge of the Mount. These would have quashed the idea, because it would have asserted Israeli sovereignty over the holy place. They could also have phoned the king of Jordan, who is formally in charge of the Waqf, who would have put an end to the nonsense.

But the idea reached Erdan, who grasped immediately that such an act would turn him into a hero. Erdan is 46 years old and was educated in a religious seminary. In the army, he did not serve in a combat unit, but in an office. The typical career of a right-wing politician.

Erdan behaved like a child playing with fire near a gasoline container. The metal detectors were put in place without informing the waqf or the king. At the last moment he informed Netanyahu, who was about to go abroad.

Netanyahu has many expensive hobbies, but his most cherished pleasure is to go abroad and meet with the world's great, in order to prove that he is one of them. He was about to meet with the new president of France and after that four leaders of Eastern Europe, all of them half-democrats and quarter-fascists.

Netanyahu was not in the mood to deal with the nonsense of Erdan, one of his dwarfs, when he was about to meet with the world's giants. Without quite understanding what he was doing, he agreed to the detectors.

It is not clear when the General Security Service (Shabak) was asked. But this body, which is deeply connected with the Arab reality, warned against it. So did army intelligence. But who are they compared to Erdan and his police commissioner, a kippah-wearing commander, who is no genius either.

THE MOMENT the detectors were put in place, events exploded. In the eyes of the Muslims, it looked like an Israeli attempt to change the status quo and become masters of the Temple Mount. The gasoline container caught fire.

The folly of the decision became clear at once. Jehovah and Allah entered the scene. The Muslim worshipers would not pass through the detectors. The multitudes started to pray in the streets.

The severity of the matter soon became evident. The Muslims, both Israeli citizens and subjects in the occupied territories, who a moment before were just a faceless mass, were suddenly revealed as a determined people, ready for a fight. That was a real achievement of Erdan's. Bravo.

The detectors did not discover any weapons, but they revealed the dimensions of the government's foolishness. Mass demonstrations took place in Jerusalem, in the Arab townships in Israel, in the occupied territories and in the neighboring countries. On the first weekend, seven persons were killed, hundreds were wounded.

The new idol was called "sovereignty". The Israeli authorities could not remove the detectors without "giving up sovereignty" (and also "giving in to the terrorists"). The waqf could not give in without sacrificing "sovereignty" over the third holy place of Islam. By the way, not a single government in the world recognizes Israeli sovereignty over East Jerusalem.

The Muslims are afraid that if the Jews take over the Temple Mount, they will destroy the Dome of the Rock (the beautiful blue and gold-capped structure) and the al- Aqsa mosque, and build the Third Temple in their place. That may sound crazy, but there already exist in Israel fringe groups that are training priests and producing implements for the temple.

According to Barbara Tuchman, leaders can be accused of folly only if at least one wise person had warned them. In our case, such a person was Moshe Dayan, who, immediately after the conquest of the Mount in 1967, ordered the Israeli flag to be removed and forbade the soldiers to enter.

NOBODY KNEW how to get out of the impasse.

Netanyahu did not interrupt his successful tour abroad in order to hurry home and take things into his own hands. Why would he? If he hurried home every time one of his minions committed a foolish act, how could he and Sara'le, his wife, enjoy the world?

And then a divine miracle happened. God Himself entered the fray.

A Jordanian handyman was working in the apartment of an Israeli security guard in the Israeli embassy in Amman. Suddenly he attacked the guard with a screwdriver and slightly wounded him. The guard drew his revolver and shot him dead. For good measure, he also shot and killed the owner of the apartment, a Jordanian physician.

It is not clear whether the incident happened because of a quarrel over money or whether the handyman suddenly decided to become a "shahid" (martyr). Neither is it clear why the guard shot him dead, instead of shooting him in the leg or using the unarmed combat techniques in which he was trained.

The former Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir, not a small terrorist himself, once pronounced that no (Arab) terrorist should be allowed to leave the scene of a terror act alive. And indeed, since then hardly one has left alive, whether a girl with scissors or a man swinging a screwdriver. Even a seriously wounded attacker, lying on the ground and bleeding severely, was shot in the head. (The shooter was released from detention this week.)

Anyhow, for Netanyahu and Erdan the Amman incident was a gift from heaven. The Jordanian king agreed to release the security guard without investigation, in return for the removal of the metal detectors in Jerusalem. With a sigh of relief that could be heard throughout the country, Netanyahu agreed. No Israeli could refuse to remove the detectors in return for the saving of one of our gallant boys. It was not a giving up of "sovereignty", it was the saving of a Jew - an old Jewish commandment.

All the members of the embassy staff were returned to Israel - about an hour's drive - and Netanyahu feted their "salvation" - though nobody had threatened them.

IN THE meanwhile another thing happened.

Netanyahu does not fear God or the Arabs. He fears Naftali Bennett.

Bennett is the leader of the "Jewish Home" party, the successor of the National-Religious party, once the most moderate party in the country. Now they are the most extreme right-wing party. It is a small faction, with only eight Knesset members (out of 120), but that is enough to break up the coalition and bring the government down. Netanyahu is mortally afraid of them.

When the fury over the detectors was at its peak, a young Arab entered Halamish settlement and killed three members of a settler family. He was wounded and captured, miraculously left alive and hospitalized.

Just a few hours later, Bennett and his female Minister of Justice demanded that the assailant be executed. There is no death penalty in Israel, but for some reason this penalty was not stricken from the codex of military courts. So Bennett and his beautiful Justice Minister demanded its use.

In all the history of the State of Israel, only two people have ever been executed by legal process. One was Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust. The other was an engineer convicted of espionage (wrongly, it later appeared) in the first weeks of the state.

The demand for the death penalty is incredibly stupid. Every Muslim "terrorist" dreams of becoming a "shahid" - one who sacrifices his life for Allah and reaches paradise. His execution would fulfill his dream. And nothing arouses national and international emotion more than an execution.

There is something sick about enthusiasts of the death penalty and the public that supports them. If their demand were accepted - no chance - this would constitute a great victory for the Muslim fanatics. Fortunately, all the Israeli security services object strenuously to the demand.

It's not like Donald Trump to "stifle" himself, as TV's Archie Bunker used to say, but the president has been relatively subdued about his decision, reportedly made last month, to terminate the CIA program that has armed, trained, directed and protected jihadist fighters in Syria. Trump's uncharacteristic reticence on the matter is understandable, given the agency's homicidal culture and history.

It is also likely that Trump's gaggle of White House generals, led by Secretary of Defense James "Mad Dog" Mattis and national security advisor H.R. McMaster, have kept the Pentagon in check, preventing a reprise of the mutiny that sabotaged President Obama's cease-fire and intelligence-sharing agreement with Russian forces in Syria, on September 17 of last year. In a blatant rebellion against civilian authority, U.S. warplanes killed 100 Syrian soldiers at Deir Ez-Zor, allowing ISIS to overrun half the city. The next week, with Secretary of Defense Ash Carter at his side, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford told the Senate Armed Services Committee, "The U.S. military role will not include intelligence sharing with the Russians." The Pentagon had "punked" lame duck President Barack Obama and his secretary of state, John Kerry.

Donald Trump took note, and surrounded himself with generals before setting foot in the White House, perhaps to shield his presidency from falling prey to its own "Seven Days In May"-type scenario. Or, maybe Trump the Bully just likes the company of other crude and stupid men. At any rate, Trump this summer defied the War Party and its corporate media mouthpieces, negotiating a cease-fire with the Russians in several regions of Syria, to be followed by additional truces, and ending the CIA's not-so-covert role as Grandmaster of Islamic Jihad. It seemed...unreal.

Peace-loving people around the world held their breath, waiting for the War Party's revenge. Trump seemed to hold his breath -- and his tongue -- too, playing down the cease-fire arrangement, even as French President Emanuel Macron stood at his side in Paris, July 13, telling the press: "No matter who they are, we want to build an inclusive and sustainable political solution. Against that background, I do not require Assad's departure. This is no longer a prerequisite for France to work on that, because I can only tell you that, for seven years, we did not have an embassy in Damascus, and still we have no solution." Trump was remarkably low-key in Paris: "We are working on a second ceasefire in a very rough part of Syria," he said. "If we get that and a few more, all of a sudden, you're going to have no bullets firing in Syria, and that is a wonderful thing."

Back in late March, the Trump administration had signaled its abandonment of regime change, with both UN Ambassador Nikki Haley and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson indicating that Syrian President Assad's ouster was no longer a priority for the United States. But, within a week, Trump was hurling Tomahawk missiles at a Syrian airbase, purportedly in retaliation for a chemical weapons incident that only a fool or a U.S. corporate media hack would blame on Syria.

Then, two months later, on June 26, in a bizarre episode even for Trump, the administration charged the Syria military with preparing to launch another chemical weapons attack, for which the Assad government would "pay a heavy price." Strangely, the White House seemed to have failed to notify either the Pentagon or the State Department about the Syria threat, or the proposed retaliation.

Stranger still, Trump issued his weaponized rant during the same period when his administration must have been deeply engaged in negotiations on a cease-fire with the Russians. We at Black Agenda Report wondered whether Trump had gone "play-crazy" - "acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon."

Or, maybe the outburst was prompted by an aborted attempt to scuttle the talks with the Russians. Or, maybe Trump just had to shout the demons out of his system. Who knows?

The demons at the Washington Post and the New York Times have only one explanation for all earthly phenomena, including the termination of the CIA's jihadist overseer duties in Syria: Trump is "colluding" with the Russians. The Times moaned that "the decision is bound to be welcomed by the Russians." The WP whined that "the Russian government had long opposed the program, seeing it as an assault on its interests." Neither paper is concerned that the CIA project violates international laws against unprovoked attacks on sovereign nations, as well as U.S. laws against giving material assistance to al Qaida, a prime beneficiary of CIA weapons, or that half a million Syrians have died, as a result.

Despite his apparent vow of semi-silence on the CIA front, Trump could not resist a Twitter retort. "The Amazon Washington Post fabricated the facts on my ending massive, dangerous, and wasteful payments to Syrian rebels fighting Assad," he wrote, effectively declassifying the now-defunct (are we sure?) CIA terror campaign.

Donald Trump has taken the strangest, messiest, "play-crazy" (or just plain crazy) route imaginable towards fulfilling his campaign pledge to curtail Washington's urge to regime change, and to ease tensions with Russia. His presidency has been six months of pain and confusion.

The drive to put more sanctions on Russia might feel good. But fueling a new Cold War can only propel the United States in the wrong direction. It's time to turn away from a collision course, not step on the gas.

Whatever you think of Vladimir Putin - or Donald Trump, for that matter - they are the presidents of the world's nuclear superpowers. Piling sanctions on Russia means escalating tensions. And that's extremely dangerous.

When this year began, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved its risk-estimate Doomsday Clock closer to apocalyptic midnight than at any time since 1953. "The probability of global catastrophe is very high, and the actions needed to reduce the risks of disaster must be taken very soon," the Bulletin's expert panel warned.

If new sanctions target Russia, the predictable results will include angry responses from the Kremlin and more polarized attitudes in both countries - damaging the prospects for any detente while boosting a spiral of mutual hostility.

Democratic lawmakers rightly deride Republicans for their "climate change denial," but both parties are locked into a kind of "nuclear war denial" in relation to Russia. The latest sanctions bill is part of an obsession with denouncing Russia that leaves scant room for considering how to reduce the dangers of nuclear war between the two countries.

Such a war would be horrific. "A war fought with the deployed U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals would leave Earth virtually uninhabitable," according to Steven Starr, a former member of the Physicians for Social Responsibility national board.

In a warning last winter, former Defense secretary William Perry said, "We're going back to the kind of dangers we had during the Cold War." Those concerns are even more relevant and urgent now: "We are starting a new Cold War. We seem to be sleepwalking into this new nuclear arms race."