Israel Matzav

Talking with the enemy

Thankfully, David Ignatius is not the US Secretary of State. Writing in today's Washington Post, Ignatius suggests that US Secretary of State is travelling in a diplomatic green zone on her current trip to the Middle East, when she should be travelling in the red zone:

America needs to break out of its diplomatic Green Zone, or it will become a prisoner of events beyond its control. What's needed is aggressive, innovative policy that, to use a favorite Israeli term, "creates new facts on the ground." To me, that means a process of engagement -- especially now, when the mullahs in Tehran and their allies in Damascus and Beirut seem so afraid of it.

We should send an ambassador back to Damascus, tomorrow. We should encourage the widest possible contacts with Iran, leading to an eventual resumption of diplomatic ties. We should treat reconstruction of postwar Lebanon with the urgency we should have applied to postwar Iraq. We should deepen our contacts with a Lebanese government that includes two Hezbollah ministers. We should designate a special presidential envoy for the Middle East -- the obvious choices would be former secretary of state James A. Baker III or former president Bill Clinton.

Sorry, but the last time I checked, the US was de facto at war with Hezbullah - a terror group - Hamas, Syria and Iran, the parties with whom Ignatius wants Rice to talk. You don't talk to an enemy during a war - you talk to them when the war is over. In fact, the real question, as David Bedein points is why Rice is meeting with 'moderate Palestinian President' Mahmoud Abbas Abu Mazen, given Abu Mazen's Fatah's sponsorship of the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades - a terror group. Bedein asked an American government official why Rice met with Abu Mazen:

The American government official responded, "The US Government views Abbas as the head of the Fatah, and the Fatah as separate and distinct from the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade".

It would seem that this American government official is not familiar with the US State Department web site. Only ten months ago, the US State Dep't annual report on terror in which it linked the Fatah and Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades: http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/65472.pdf, where the Aksa Brigades is openly linked by the US State Department to the Fatah

The relevant sections of the annual report speak for themselves

Read the whole thing.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:57 PM