Hillary Clinton agrees with me. She has accepted the core lesson of the Iraq experience–and says that the U.S. must deal with one-time terrorist elements in working with a unity government the Palestinians form. The old No partner for peace foot-dragging by the Israel lobby is out the window. Clinton has said:
we may do business with people who got swept up
in some kind of move that doesn’t necessarily define their attitude
toward the United States, or the use of violence
Matt Duss says this is the new conventional wisdom.
This reminds me that, for all of their trumpeting about the success
of the Iraq surge, conservatives have never been forced to admit how
the strategy of reaching out to former insurgent elements in Iraq
represented a complete refutation
of the “war on terror” ideology that the Bush administration embraced
after 9/11. Clearly, there are terrorist networks that seek to do
Americans and our allies harm, but the idea that they represent
anything like a united “Islamofascist” front against the West or an
“axis of evil” necessitating “with us or against us” ultimata has
rightly been cast into the ash heap of history.
Robert Naiman echoes the point at Huffpo, noting that Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, a stalwart of the lobby, has backed Clinton on this line (per the JTA). Naiman suggests that Obama feels he has political cover for putting pressure on Israel re the settlements, too. But is it all too late for the alleged two-state solution?
