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The Third Man

(Weekly Standard) Elliott Abrams - Missing from the Bibi vs. Barack drama in Washington was the man who really torpedoed the peace process, Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas is 76 and will retire from politics next year, having announced that he will not seek reelection. A man without charisma or great political courage, he lost first the 2006 elections and then control of Gaza to Hamas. Abbas was never a serious candidate to make the difficult compromises that a peace deal with Israel would require and then defend himself against charges of treason and betrayal. To the generous peace offer made by Ehud Olmert in 2008, Abbas responded with silence. Obama's mistreatment of the visiting Netanyahu can only have deepened the latter's belief that Obama was irretrievably hostile. Obama gave a major Middle East speech the day before Netanyahu arrived. The message was clear: I have no interest in what you are saying and will make my views plain even before we exchange one word. Worse yet was the lack of any advance notice. The Israelis had been told days before that the Obama speech would cover the Arab Spring and say little about them, and were given only a couple of hours' notice that, on the contrary, the president would make a significant policy statement that contradicted Israeli views. They felt - and they were - blindsided. In the Clinton and Bush administrations such major policy statements were preceded by weeks of consultations, and when a president breaks that pattern it is a deliberate and powerful message. This is the explanation for the brief tutorial in Israeli security concerns that Netanyahu held Friday in the Oval Office: The gloves were off, but it was Obama who took them off first. The writer, senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, was a deputy national security adviser in the George W. Bush administration.
2011-05-31 00:00:00
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