This is really quite strange. Yesterday, my inbox began filling up with email telling me that Jeffrey Goldberg had gone on NPR and, when asked about my critiques of his Atlantic article on bombing Iran, claimed I had “retracted” part of what I had written. When I read the first couple emails, I assumed the emailers had heard it incorrectly or were mischaracterizing Goldberg’s remarks, because not only had I never issued any retraction of those criticisms, but I never wrote anything remotely close to what could possibly be misconstrued that way: I never even hinted that anything I had written was inaccurate, because it wasn’t. I was reasonably sure that even Jeffrey Goldberg wouldn’t simply fabricate such an event of that significance and announce it as fact on NPR as a way of discrediting a critic. But sure enough, once the audio was posted by NPR and I listened to it, I found — genuinely, perhaps naïvely, to my amazement — that what the emailers described is exactly what happened.
