Ever since they introduced Times Select I pretty much gave up on reading the New York Times (for years, it was my browser's homepage), so I missed this editorial in the paper the other day. I only found it now through a mention in Daniel Levy's indispensable blog.
In any event the Times headline asks "What would a diplomat do?" and proceeds to reflect on Chris Hill's stunning successes in negotiating the dismantling of North Korea's nuclear program. The Times points out these negotiations represented a real break from the Bush administration's typical recourse to ad hominems and bullying, and also that they require not just "countless hours" of work but
a willingness to compromise with a leader President Bush once famously said he "loathed."
More on the flip...
Now, if Daniel Levy -- the former Israeli negotiator at the heartbreaking Taba round with the Palestinians and one of the authors of the Geneva Initiative -- is talking about this editorial, we can bet that his interest isn't US diplomatic relations with North Korea. Sure enough, the topic soon turns to the mess in the Occupied Palestinian Territories:
Consider Mr. Bush’s announcement last week that Ms. Rice will preside over a Middle East peace meeting this fall. That might seem a breakthrough for a White House that started out claiming that too much diplomacy — by Bill Clinton — unleashed the second Palestinian uprising. And we’re being told that Ms. Rice considers an Israeli-Palestinian peace her last, best chance for a legacy. Still, there’s no sign that either she or Mr. Bush has grasped the lesson of Mr. Hill’s North Korea breakthrough.
They are still refusing to talk to people they loathe. The militant Palestinian movement Hamas is definitely not invited to their meeting, even though it controls a large swath of Palestinian territory and psyche. And Syria probably won’t make the list. Both deserve loathing but also have the ability to shatter any peace effort, and further isolating them will only give them further incentive to try.
The New York Times, then, has joined what is quickly becoming a headlong rush of public figures, analysts, and Middle Eastern politicians who wish to distance themselves from the trainwreck known as George W. Bush's Middle East policy. In a previous diary, I documented a list that at that time included
ten European nations, the Arab League, the political leadership of Hamas, the Fatah old guard, and the former US envoy to the Middle East peace process [James Wolfensohn]
and in the same diary I noted that both Colin Powell and Salon columnist Gary Kamiya had also joined in.
Time Magazine's Tony Karon links today to a blog post he wrote on TomDispatch last week:
The Bush speech simply restated the key term of the administration’s long dead "roadmap" — before there can be peace talks, the Palestinians will be required to destroy Hamas. In other words, there will be no peace talks, just a lot of wishful thinking. As White House Press Secretary Tony Snow put it, "I think a lot of people are inclined to try to treat this as a big peace conference. It’s not."
The Hans Christian Andersen fairytale about the emperor’s new clothes might accurately describe current U.S. policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — except for one important detail. In the fairytale, the emperor’s courtiers are careful never to let on that they can see their monarch’s nakedness; in the case of U.S. Middle East policy, there is what playwright Bertolt Brecht might have called an epic gap between some of the actors and their lines. Plainly, very few of them believe the things that the script requires them to say.
In this absurdist take on the old fairytale, whenever anyone points out that the emperor has no clothes, they are simply told "duh!" before the players get back acting as if it’s fashion week in the palace.
Can there any longer be any doubt on what the true progressive position on Hamas is?