'Kerry has to own his failure'
Kerry risks being seen as trying too hard at the expense of a range of other pressing international issues, and perhaps even his reputation, according to several senior administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity about sensitive internal and diplomatic matters.
“A point will come where he has to go out and own the failure,” an official said. For now, the official said, Kerry needs to “lower the volume and see how things unfold.”But not everyone agrees.
Amid the fast-moving events, all of them apparently downhill, some experts said it was not the time to walk away.
“First of all, you still have a clock that runs to the end of the month,” the original negotiating deadline set by Kerry, said Dennis Ross, who served as a senior Middle East expert in three U.S. administrations. “We’ve had a pretty significant investment in this, and to walk away from it before you determine for sure there is nothing else to be done, I’m not sure that’s what you want to do at this moment.”
“I have not been one of the skeptics” who have increasingly questioned the utility of the effort, Ross said. Although negotiations under previous administrations rarely approached the core controversies dividing Israel and the Palestinians, “I know from conversations with both sides that the kinds of things they’ve been talking about are the real issues,” including Israeli security, Jerusalem and the final borders between two states.
“In his defense, Kerry’s task is a thousand times greater than probably any previous negotiator,” said Aaron David Miller, a vice president at the Wilson Center who helped formulate U.S. policy in the Middle East for two decades before leaving the State Department in 2003.
“He’s not dealing with interim issues,” Miller said, but with the “crown jewels of the peace process.”
A U.S. official close to Kerry said the possible gains are worth any risk of failure or of looking overeager. Asked whether Kerry’s White House bosses might think he is obsessively chasing a lost cause, the official answered quickly: “That’s not what the president sees it as, and he’s the one who decides these things.”
Deputy national security adviser Benjamin J. Rhodes said, “The president was fully aware of Kerry’s interest and energy about the subject when he was chosen as secretary of state.” When President Obama went to Israel last spring, Rhodes said, “he went out of his way to both re-energize his own commitment to this at the beginning of his second term and also to very, very demonstrably empower Kerry.”
“Frankly,” Rhodes said, “having a secretary of state who plays such an active role . . . has, to some extent, taken the burden off of us.”Read the whole thing.
This was another attempt by the Obama administration to push an agenda for which conditions were not ripe. It was a mistake - a bad and foreseeable mistake.
What's left unsaid here is how the Obama administration will look if this inevitable failure explodes into a cacophony of violence. You can bet that they will do all they can to avoid the responsibility and the blame.
Labels: Aaron David Miller, Barack Hussein Obama, Dennis Ross, John Kerry, Middle East peace process
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:58 AM
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