RUTHFULLY YOURS

Miller’s Crossing

                      Caught in the Headlights – and With a Silly Hairdo

It took nearly two decades, but there are signs that Aaron David Miller, Dennis Ross’s first mate in navigating the treacherous waters of the Oslo Peace Process under Bill Clinton, has finally been mugged by reality.  Signs, but no real bump on the head.  Miller, I suspect, has become agnostic on the “Peace Process”, but will never become an atheist.  Listen to this clever hedging:

“I’m very uneasy because at the end of the day, I don’t see what the game is, I don’t see what the strategy is,” he said. “Even if it’s an initiative, what’s the objective, what’s the strategy?”

And if that weren’t pusillanimous enough, catch this one:

“You have two non-state actors, two non-state environments (Hezbollah and Hamas) who are not proxies of Iran and or Syria but who clearly reflect their capacity to want to influence events — and then you have Iran” and its potential nuclear threat.

“Non-state environments?”  Miller has been for so long entrenched in “Process” that the whole conflict has been reduced to a Princeton graduate course exercise.  Chafing at his role as Sancho Panza to Ross’s Quixote  and clearly disappointed by not being chosen by the Barak-Hillary team to pursue the never-ending “Process” he apparently feels like the bride left standing at the altar.  Even his Newsweek article (“Obama Must Get Tough with Israel”) , published a week before Obama’s inauguration could not secure him a job.  And even his old boss, Dennis Ross was exiled to the wilderness of pretending to constrain the Iranian nuclear push.  Miller is now speaking out, but guardedly, and in Princeton-speak:

“Like all religions, the peace process has developed a dogmatic creed, with immutable first principles. Over the last two decades, I wrote them hundreds of times to my bosses in the upper echelons of the State Department and the White House; they were a catechism we all could recite by heart. First, pursuit of a comprehensive peace was a core, if not the core, U.S. interest in the region, and achieving it offered the only sure way to protect U.S. interests; second, peace could be achieved, but only America could help the Arabs and Israelis bring that peace to fruition.”

This is fascinating stuff.  For years, of course, Miller, along with his boss, Ross, sang the tune of pressure only on Israel.   He helped devise the “infernal algebra” according to which both sides – Israelis and Palestinians were equally recalcitrant – but when you substitute real numbers and specifics, all the pressure was to be applied to only one party, and you know who that was.

Taking his cues from the junior academic bozos of the Israeli Left, Miller signed onto the panacea of  “land for peace” that was to become the overarching principle that would bring us to the Promised (un-land?).  But the fundamental Arab desire to overturn the 1948 defeat and their constant incitement to do so, was consistently excused by the Ross-Miller team.  When confronted with actual U.S. funded Palestinian textbooks, for example, that urged children to become Jihadists and suicide bombers, Ross replied that the Palestinians were not really intent on evil, but that they only had Jordanian textbooks to draw from.  And I guess that’s why fifteen years after the fall of the Third Reich, German schoolchildren were still using Nazi, racist primers.  Right. Apology after apology.

Only after  Clinton felt betrayed by Arafat at the 2000 Camp David meeting, did Dennis Ross speak out.  Miller, however, as always, was hedging his bets:

“I was one of the 12 Americans there,” Miller said. “Sadly, and despite all these commitments and good intentions, it was not well managed. There was never a chance. We had to watch in the fall of 2000 after first Intifada broke out, the collapse of everything Israelis and Palestinians tried to achieve — we tried to help them — essentially be destroyed.” 

Looking for cover under “good intentions” (really?, including Arafat’s now proven plan to ignite the Second Intifada well before he got to Camp David), Miller still espoused the old-time religion of Oslo, the disastrous policy he helped implement.

But now with no prospect of jumping back in the saddle under an Obama administration, he has his doubts.  If there were any questions about his never being reinstated as a negotiator, under Obama, at least, cast your eyes on this statement:

“After Obama and Mitchell’s fruitless first year, I worry that the mediator’s mystique of a Kissinger or a Baker, or the willfulness and driving force of a Carter, won’t return easily.” 

If this heresy weren’t enough to keep him in exile, the chutzpah alone of heaping praise on Jimmy Carter, of all people, is Miller’s crowning absurdity.

Ron Kampeas, the J Street drum-beater for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency signals what’s in store for heretics from the “Process” even if they helped design the monster.  Stray from the Party Line and suddenly you’ve become “perfidious.”  

Again, we have the spectacle of defeat claiming a thousand parents while victory remains an orphan.
Thanks for nothing, Aaron David Miller.