It comes in the guise of counsel to Hillary Clinton whose politics and policies they do not trust. After all, these are matters that have been informed by the vox populi and these high-minded folk distrust the vox populi intrinsically. I don't.
Now, as you may recall, I did not favor Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination. And I did not much like her designation as secretary of state. But my views of her were personal. I thought that the country had had enough of the Clintons, and I expressed myself strongly. And maybe even more than a bit unfairly. But Hillary will now be the secretary of state, a much more able and subtle chief diplomat of the Obama administration, surely, than Bill Richardson or Chuck Hagel would have been. I hereby call off my now completely irrelevant struggle against Hillary.
And that's because I trust her to respect the allies whom the American people trust and to which it wants to be allied.
On August 30, 2007, Roger Cohen wrote a column on the New York Times op-ed page called "Mother of Conflicts." Who is that mother? It is the old Jewish mother. The Bush administration was responsible for the hopelessness of the Palestinians because of "its uncritical war-on-terror embrace of Israel." I suppose that Cohen prefers India's way of waging war on terror, which is almost nothing.
In any case, with a few columns on Israel in between, Cohen returned to his topic on December 1. "Try Tough Love, Hillary," he calls it. You know his advice. It's almost everybody's advice, including to some small degree mine. And, since Cohen is no fool, he also tells the Palestinians to "renounce terrorism" against Israel and Jews. For his mouth to God's ears. What about renouncing terrorism with each other? Or making peace between and among the Palestinian factions?
Cohen is not the only one to give such sage advice to Hillary. She is getting inundated. On Tuesday, both the New York Times and the Financial Times devolved the identical counsel on her.
The FT's leader was called "Obama gambles on Hillary Clinton." Among other errors in her ways, "she took a strongly pro-Israel stance," especially on Jerusalem. But not just. She actually understands, as does Obama, that Palestinian rejectionism impedes peace more than any particular settlement in the West Bank or certain Jerusalem streets. Despite this, her convictions on these matters, "will presumably soften." By the way, did the FT worry during the twenty years of Jordanian occupation whether Jews had access to the Western Wall or the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem? I doubt it.
The Times advises that the Obama-Clinton team become, unlike their predecessors, "closers" on Israeli-Palestinian peace. It has more faith in the future makers of foreign policy makers than in the ones who still govern. And how exactly will anyone guarantee that whatever territory Israel leaves will not be home to
missiles and rockets and terrorists, generally? Is Gaza a precedent? And why not?