Obama’s Foreign Policy Expertise
More Carteresque by the day:
Democrat Barack Obama misused a “code word” in Middle East politics when he said Jerusalem should be Israel’s “undivided” capital but that does not mean he is naive on foreign policy, a top adviser said on Tuesday.
Addressing a pro-Israel lobby group this month, the Democratic White House hopeful said: “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.”
The comment angered Palestinians, who want East Jerusalem, captured by Israel in 1967, as the capital of a future state. “He has closed all doors to peace,” Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said after the June 4 speech.
Obama later said Palestinians and Israelis had to negotiate the status of the city, in line with long-held U.S. presidential policy.
Daniel Kurtzer, who advises Obama on the Middle East, said Tuesday at the Israel Policy Forum that Obama’s comment stemmed from “a picture in his mind of Jerusalem before 1967 with barbed wires and minefields and demilitarized zones.”
“So he used a word to represent what he did not want to see again, and then realized afterwards that that word is a code word in the Middle East,” Kurtzer said.
Whether or not Jerusalem should remain the undivided capitol of Israel is a debatable issue - I think it should be, because anything remotely like a retreat on the part of Israel will just be seen by the Jihadists as another signal to attack. But one can have either view and have a rational foreign policy - but you can’t have both. You can’t, that is, try desperately to mend your fences with America’s Jewish voters who might prove vital in a close November election while at the same time keeping on board your supporters who think that the Palestinians are the good guys in the Israeli-Palestinian war. Pick one, and stick with it.
Obama tried to have it both ways, and now he’s got his advisor out assuring all and sundry that it was a mistake…just a verbal gaffe…but verbal gaffes in such a serious issue can lead to dead people, and the people of the United States need to take this into consideration as they make their choice in November.
36 comments June 19th, 2008
