Sunday, September 16, 2007

The Implications of the Real Carter Legacy for Israel

Noah Pollak writes about the 'revised' version of what Carter accomplished for the Middle East--
Brzezinski brags to the press about how his dedication to diplomacy got results—as opposed, he intones, to the senseless warmongering of the Bush administration—we are witnessing a self-aggrandizing swindle, an attempt not only at enhancing the legacy of the Carter administration but of advancing the proposition that in the Middle East, peace is always possible with the right amount of skilled and dedicated American diplomacy.

The true lesson of the Egypt-Israel rapprochement is actually the opposite of what people like Brzezinski would like it to be: It is a lesson in the sometimes irrelevance of American diplomacy in forging peace between nations, and more importantly it is an example of the reality that peace between implacable foes is usually only possible when one has so thoroughly beaten the other on the battlefield that the defeated party is left with only one option, to sue for peace. People like Brzezinski would like us to believe that heroic diplomacy in 1978 midwifed a peace treaty. Candidate Obama will be ill-served listening to this nonsense. [emphasis added]
This is something that Amir Taheri wrote about in January 2006:
For a war to be won, it is not enough for one side to claim victory. It is also necessary for one side to admit defeat. Yet in the Arab-Israeli wars, the side that had won every time was not allowed to claim victory, while the side that had lost was prevented from admitting defeat. Why? Because each time the United Nations had intervened to put the victor and the vanquished on an equal basis and lock them into a problematic situation in the name of a mythical quest for an impossible peace.
Instead, the US is going to force Israel to make peace with terrorists.
Even if it kills her.

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1 comment:

Soccer Dad said...

Camp David was the result of a diplomatic blunder, Carter made.
On October 1, 1977, the U.S. and the Soviet Union unexpectedly issued a joint statement on the Middle East calling for an Arab-Israeli peace conference in Geneva, with the participation of Palestinian representatives. The communiqué marked the first time the U.S. officially employed the phrase “legitimate rights of the Palestinian people.”

Reaction in the U.S. was immediate and furious. “[A] political firestorm erupted,” wrote historian Steven Spiegel. “After American officials had worked successfully for years to reduce Russian influence over the Mideast peace process and in the area as whole, critics could not understand why the administration had suddenly invited Moscow to return.”

Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, who five years earlier had expelled thousands of Soviet military advisers from Egypt, neither liked nor trusted the Russians, and decided to kill the U.S.-Soviet initiative in the womb. His decision to go to Jerusalem to address the Knesset electrified the world and caught the Carter administration completely off guard.