(JNi.media) Will Secretary of State John Kerry’s unbridled optimism finally destroy the World? The thought keeps coming to mind when reading the New Yorker’s David Remnick’s enviably elaborate report “Negotiating the Whirlwind — Can Secretary of State John Kerry break through in Syria?” In fact, by comparison, President Obama comes across as cautious, hesitating to employ the mighty US military prowess unless it was clear it could make a difference. One precious quote Remnick lifted from former NSC official Philip Gordon, writing in Politico, illustrates things most emphatically: “In Iraq, the US intervened and occupied, and the result was a costly disaster. In Libya, the US intervened and did not occupy, and the result was a costly disaster. In Syria, the US neither intervened nor occupied, and the result is a costly disaster.” Which means that, in the end, Obama’s way is at least cheaper.
Possibly the most indefatigable manner with which Kerry approaches matters of security was displayed by Remnick’s recalling of the Secretary’s efforts to negotiate peace between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad.
“Assad told Kerry that, in order to make peace with Israel, he had to get back the Golan Heights, territory lost in the 1967 war. For that to be considered, Kerry replied, Syria would have to cease the transit of arms through Syria to Hezbollah, in Lebanon, and to Hamas, in Gaza.
“’We basically delivered him a pretty strong message of, You better stop this or else,’ Kerry told me. ‘But I also engaged with him, because he wanted to talk about another subject—a relationship with Israel in the future. I don’t think I’ve ever talked about this publicly, but he was ready to make a deal with Israel. And the proof of that is a letter I still have that he wrote and signed proposing a structure by which he was willing to recognize Israel, have an embassy there, make peace, deal with the Golan, et cetera.’ (A representative of the Syrian government denied that Assad ever wrote such a letter; he also denied that Assad took any oppressive measures in 2011.) Syria asked Kerry for economic assistance, including a pipeline to Iraq and aid for technology and health care. When Netanyahu was told of the discussions, he was reluctant. ‘Bibi came to Washington, and one of the first things out of his mouth in the Oval Office was, I can’t do this. I’m not going to—I just can’t.’”
Mercifully, as Remnick notes, “the issue was rendered moot in March, 2011, when the revolution began in Syria.” It is terrifying to consider the possibility that should Assad had been able to quash the rebellion early, as his bloodthirsty father had been known to do, Secretary Kerry would have employed his full throttle bullying methods from the aborted “peace negotiations” between Israel and the Palestinians to force Netanyahu off the Golan Heights.
One other unforgettable segment in Remnick’s New Yorker piece (which, as usual, defies all the newborn rules about brevity in an Internet-driven world, God bless them) has to do with his residences. He and Teresa Heinz, who would have made the wealthiest couple ever to live in the White House, had Kerry beaten Bush in 2004, “have no shortage of residences; in addition to the houses in Georgetown and on Nantucket, they live in an eighteenth-century five-story pile on Louisburg Square, in Beacon Hill; in a family compound on Naushon, a private island off Cape Cod; in a fifteenth-century English farmhouse that was reassembled on the bank of Big Wood River, in Sun Valley; and on a ninety-acre farm called Rosemont, outside Pittsburgh…”
The rest of Remnick’s really long portrait of Kerry is familiar, if not trite. Perhaps the most trite is his account of the quarrel between the White House and Netanyahu, which intensified as soon as Kerry came on board. Remnick recites Netanyahu’s Mufti-invented-Zyklon B faux pas; Ambassador Ron Dermer’s arranging the speech in Congress behind Kerry’s and Obama’s backs; Ya’alon’s snide remark about giving Kerry the Nobel Prize already so he’ll shut up and leave us alone; UN envoy Danny Danon’s big mouth attacks against the one UNSC member who can veto away the barbarians at the gate; negotiator Yitzhak Molcho’s mission of torpedoing the peace talks with Saeb Erekat; and, of course, Ran Baratz’s Facebook posts. With that out of the way, Remnick presents Kerry’s views on peace between Israel and the Palestinians which is chock full of 1992-style platitudes, rife with bad information and unconcealed biases.
He quotes Kerry’s special envoy Frank Lowenstein, who, in a manner reminiscent of the Bourbons, who learned nothing and forgot nothing, warns that “The window for a two-state solution is closing, though none of us who’ve worked on it will regret that we tried to save it.” This approach of thinking inside the box on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and condemning anyone who dares set foot on the mat right next to the box is vintage Kerry.
Remnick writes: “Kerry believes that Israel, along with the occupied territories, is headed toward becoming a ‘unitary state that is an impossible entity to manage.’ He is particularly concerned, he said, that the Palestinian Authority could collapse; that, in the event, the PA’s thirty thousand security officers would scatter; and that chaos and increasingly violent clashes with Israel would follow.”
The PA has remained in its semi-lawless state since its inception in the early ’90s. When Israel relied on it to maintain law and order, more Israelis paid with life and limb for that folly; when Israel tightened control—on one occasion, in 2002, actually retaking all of Judea and Samaria—fewer Israelis suffered.
As Remnick portrays him, Kerry is immune to information from outside his echo chamber. Granted, over the years the same echo chamber has taken on the size of several echo stadiums, but, populous as it may be, this echo chamber has been repeating the same mantra for at least 25 years, disregarding the mounting body of evidence to the contrary. The mantra goes:
“The Israeli-Arab conflict must be solved through negotiations”—be it the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians or between Israel and all the many other Arab countries in the region.
The mantra assumes there is such a thing as “Arab,” when in today’s Middle East, just as it has been for millennia, the term stands for the most tribal society on the planet. It also assumes there is such a thing as a “conflict” to which both sides are contributing equally. But that, too, is erroneous. In the end, after all the inequities inflicted by the Zionist movement, real and imagined, have been settled, there will still remain Israel’s fundamental sin, which is its very existence. Its very being is a slap in the face of Islam. And so the “conflict” may be mitigated, there may be stretches of better security, interspersed with less security, but that very basic fact that an area formerly occupied by Muslims must remain Muslim will never go away.
As to the negotiations — since 1973 Israel had a signed peace with Egypt, for which it gave up a landmass more than twice its size. For the most part it has been a cold peace, but as soon as the regime changed, in 2012, the possibility of a new war reared its ugly head. On the other hand, in Syria, instead of a written peace, Israel only had the memory of its punishing aerial attacks on Syria’s infrastructure, following the Yom Kippur attempted invasion from the north, and its insistence on retaliating every single time the Assad Sr. and Jr. regime attempted to provoke it. Both versions have offered a fragile, unreliable modus vivendi, but the Syrian one cost a lot less.
Remnick cites Kerry’s vision of a peaceful Middle East to forge an Arabian Nights vision: “There’s a solution. It would be good for Israel; it’d be great for the Palestinians; it’d be great for the region. People would make so much money. There’d be so many jobs created. There could be peace. And you would be stronger for it. Because nobody that I know or have met in the West Bank is anxious to have jihadis come in.”
“The alternative is you sit there and things just get worse,” Kerry proceeds with the Arabian Nightmare portion of his pitch. “There will be more Hezbollah. There will be more rockets. And they’ll all be pointed in one direction. And there will be more people on the border. And what happens then? You’re going to be one big fortress? I mean, that’s not a way to live. It seems to me it is far more intelligent and far more strategic—which is an important word here—to have a theory of how you are going to preserve the Jewish state and be a democracy and a beacon to the world that everybody envisioned when Israel was created.”
Could Kerry imagine an end to the State of Israel? Remnick asks.
“No, I don’t believe that’s going to happen,” he tells Remnick. “It’s just, What is it going to be like, is the question. Will it be a democracy? Will it be a Jewish state? Or will it be a unitary state with two systems, or some draconian treatment of Palestinians, because to let them vote would be to dilute the Jewish state? I don’t know. I have no answer to that. But the problem is, neither do they. Neither do the people who are supposed to be providing answers to this. It is not an answer to simply continue to build in the West Bank and to destroy the homes of the other folks you’re trying to make peace with and pretend that that’s a solution.”
Has Kerry not read the news about the near-collapse of Hezbollah, after losing at least 1,300 fighters in Syria? Has he not read the demographic reports showing a steep decline in the Arab birthrate in Israel, while the Jewish birthrate has been climbing steadily? Is Kerry not aware of Israel’s success in maintaining law and order in a democratic system where an Arab faction is the third largest in the Knesset?
After about 10,000 words, the message is clear: John Kerry is a relentless, indefatigable 72-year-old Boston Brahmin, the Energizer Bunny of foreign policy—who also shares that cute toy’s capacity for introspection and vision. Remnick agsin cites Philip Gordon, Obama’s principal adviser on the Middle East from 2013 to the spring of 2015, who said about Kerry: “His optimism is such that he thinks, We will confront this! We will deal with it! There’s got to be a solution. We just need to find it and lead people there.”
And Remnick quips: “Gordon does not say this with admiration.”