With a plate full of the economy, jobs, health care, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, etc., and ever aware that you can't want Middle East peace more than the parties, there's been some chatter that if its current efforts continue to stumble, eventually the administration may simply set aside the Middle East conflict until a riper day. Who has time, right? But Ben Smith notes that National Security Advisor Jim Jones as Obama himself has indicated that they consider the Middle East conflict a central priority, despite the considerable frustration and setbacks:
"... National Security Advisor James Jones's departure from his prepared remarks in his J Street address -- which I noted earlier -- offers an unusual sense of the White House's foreign policy priorities, a reader notes."[O]f all the problems the administration faces globally, that if there was one problem that I would recommend to the president that if he could do anything he wanted to solve one problem, this would be it," he said of the Middle East conflict, calling the Israeli-Palestinian situation "the epicenter" and a problem that "has ripples that echo, that would run globally and affect many other problems that we face elsewhere in the globe."Now, he was speaking to a group focused on the region, and perhaps the passage is intended for that audience. Because otherwise, it seems quite odd to place the conflict ahead of Afghanistan, Iran, and China, among other White House priorities."Meantime, a Washington Jewish community activist notes, there is still no meeting time confirmed between Obama and Netanyahu who is coming to town this weekend
1 comment:
The writer should have listened to Jim Jones' word: "epicenter." He did not say the Palestine conflict was the most important problem but the "epicenter." Of course, the disintegration of Pakistan or a nuclear attack on Iran would be a more serious problem per se, but neither is at the center of the whole Western conflict with Islam. Only the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has that particular characteristic of inflaming everyone's passions and striking everyone as egregiously immoral.
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