One of my central justifications in voting for Bush the first time around was always that, while the first President Bush’s administration had been openly hostile toward Israel, the Clinton/Gore administration was, despite all of its public mouthings of support for Israeli security, the most pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel administration ever to inhabit the White House. The counter-argument that I repeatedly heard back then was that the President really doesn’t decide foreign policy – he has to negotiate between his interests, those of the Pentagon, and those of the State Department.
This view is wrong, and has been well-documented as such by one of my favorite undergraduate professors, Dr. Laurie Eisenberg (incidentally, I highly recommend this book – another wide-spread error that it firmly puts to rest is the idea that familiarity between Israeli and Arab leaders does anything to increase the liklihood of peace. In fact, it seems to decrease it).
As if that wasn’t enough, this story serves as yet another example of how the President can single-handedly have a huge impact on Israeli security:
The United States does not intend to push for or sponsor any resumption of Syrian-Israeli talks, but will not object should Israel choose to take up Syrian President Bashar Assad’s offer to resume negotiations, senior American officials told Jerusalem this week.
The officials expressed skepticism about Assad’s intentions, arguing that had he been serious, he would have used diplomatic back channels rather than calling for new talks in a newspaper interview. They also said that even if Assad would like to sign a peace deal, they are unconvinced he is strong enough to do so.
Compare this approach with that of the Clinton administration, which repeatedly pushed Bibi and then Barak to make peace with Syria even while they knew that the elder Assad was still actively inciting terrorism in order to get negotiating leverage. It’s sad to say, but for all of the Bush family’s Saudi and Arab ties, it is refreshing to have an administration that has the basic moral clarity not to force Israel to negotiate with enemies even while those enemies openly facilitate attempts at it’s destruction.
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