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The Granddaddy of Dumb Ideas

(Slate) Aaron David Miller - Right now, no idea will bring Palestinians any closer to realizing their legitimate national aspirations for statehood. But neither desperation nor sympathy for a deserving cause should compel us to embrace and pursue bad ideas that might only make matters worse. And admitting the nonstate of Palestine to the UN - the granddaddy of dumb ideas - will do precisely that. I should know. Having spent 20 years providing both very good and very bad advice on Arab-Israeli issues to half a dozen secretaries of state, I've come up with my fair share of doozies. These included inviting Yasser Arafat to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and encouraging then-President Clinton to believe he could negotiate a conflict-ending agreement between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat at the Camp David summit in July 2000. It must be something in the water that leads well-intentioned American mediators to assume that trying anything to keep the peace process alive - no matter how wrong-headed, risky, or dysfunctional - is better than not acting at all. This obsession with process over results, motion over movement, is the solutionist's curse. Once you conclude that action is mandatory, no matter the cost, you begin to slide down a slippery slope. At the bottom of the hill, failure almost always awaits. The Palestinians cannot succeed in gaining admission to the UN as a member state. We've already seen a trial run in September and October. The U.S. will veto, and has already persuaded others on the Security Council to oppose, Abbas' petition. Nor does winning by losing seem to have gotten much for Palestinians so far, except a UNESCO admission which prompted the U.S. to cut off the program's funding. The UN gambit just made it easier for Israelis to claim that it is the Palestinians who aren't serious about negotiations. Negotiations between empowered Israelis and Palestinians willing and able to pay the price of a settlement would remain the only possible path to a solution, if there was one. But right now, there isn't. The writer, a former adviser on the Middle East to Democratic and Republican secretaries of state, is now a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center.
2012-01-06 00:00:00
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