Israel Matzav

James Baker tries to 'F**k the Jews'

Mark Steyn weighs in today on the much-anticipated Iraq Study Group report. Steyn thinks James Baker is going to try to fulfill his aspiration to 'f**k the Jews' as he once famously said, but in the process, Baker may do the same to the United States of America:

According to The New York Sun, "An expert adviser to the Baker-Hamilton commission expects the 10-person panel to recommend that the Bush administration pressure Israel to make concessions in a gambit to entice Syria and Iran to a regional conference … "

On the face of it, this sounds an admirably hard-headed confirmation of James Baker's most celebrated soundbite on the Middle East "peace process": "F—k the Jews. They didn't vote for us anyway." His recommendations seem intended to f—k the Jews well and truly by making them the designated fall guys for Iraq. But hang on: if Israel could be forced into giving up the Golan Heights and other land (as some fantasists suggest) in order to persuade the Syrians and Iranians to ease up on killing coalition forces in Iraq, our enemies would have learned an important lesson: the best way to weaken Israel is to kill Americans. I'm all for Bakerite cynicism, but this would seem to f—k not just the Jews but the Americans, too.

It would, furthermore, be a particularly contemptible confirmation of a line I heard Bernard Lewis, our greatest Middle Eastern scholar, use the other day — that " America is harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend." To punish your friends as a means of rewarding your enemies for killing your forces would seem to be an almost ludicrously parodic illustration of that dictum. In the end, America would be punishing itself. The world would understand that Vietnam is not the exception but the rule.

Read it all.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:26 AM