Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Zbigniew Brzezinski calls Joe Scarborough's Mideast views "stunningly superficial".



Zbigniew Brzezinski calls Joe Scarborough out on his "stunningly superficial knowledge" of the Israel Palestine peace process.

Scarborough: "You cannot blame what's going on in Israel on the Bush administration."

Brzezinski: "You know, you have such a stunningly superficial knowledge of what went on that it's almost embarrassing to listen to you."
The Bush regime have been absent to a disgraceful degree for the past eight years. Scarborough should know that. There have been no meaningful discussions between the two sides. And that has been because the Israelis don't want to return to the 1967 lines and Bush didn't want to make them do anything that they didn't want to do. That's why the Road Map was such a joke.

But it's when Scarborough gets to Clinton and "the great offer that Israel never made" that he simply becomes embarrassing. To be fair to Scarborough, he claims that most Americans believe what he believes, and he's right. But that's the core of the problem. Most Americans are fed - and believe - unadulterated Hasbara.

Scarborough claims that Brzezinski "knows" things that "most of the international community" rejects. The problem is that "most of the international community" does not reject what Brzezinski says, as we know it to be a fact.

Arafat did not reject that deal.

The fact that Scarborough does not know that is embarrassing. He's supposed to be a journalist.

Soon afterward, Shlomo Ben-Ami, then Israel's foreign minister, met Arafat in Cairo. He agreed that Arafat didn't exactly reject the Clinton plan - but didn't unequivocally accept it either.

"The problem with Arafat is that he's never clear," Ben-Ami recalled. "He says things like, `If there's a will, there's a way.' All kinds of slogans that don't mean anything."

Talks continued at Taba, Egypt, and by all accounts made considerable progress. Ben-Ami says the Israelis even kept a helicopter standing by to rush the Palestinian negotiators to Gaza in case a deal was reached.

Saeb Erekat, a top Palestinian negotiator, says: "We were very close to an agreement." That may overstate the situation, but notes of a European diplomat who was present suggest movement on everything from territory to Palestinian refugees.

"Progress was made at the Taba talks," Arafat said last month, and he referred to the joint statement on January 27, 2001, when the negotiations were suspended because of the imminent Israeli election.
And then in came Ariel Sharon. So Brzezinski is right and Scarborough is embarrassingly wrong on this.

Hat tip to Crooks and Liars.

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