MAKING MISTAKES

Others (Matt Yglesias and Juan Cole, to name two) have already quite ably unpacked today's deeply awful David Brooks column (ironically titled "Make No Mistake"), but the item is so rife with misrepresentations and jejune non-sequiturs, so characterized by a desperate need to pull a shiny plumb out of the shit-pie that is Bush's foreign policy, and so far and above the usual level of Brooksian silliness that I think it's worth addressing briefly.

Yes, as David notes there is now an opening, however small, for repositioning toward peace negotiations. After four years of intifada, four years of Israeli colonization and collective punishment of Palestinians, and four years of Palestinian resistance and terrorism, there seems to be a possibility that the players could get back to the table. The idea that this is somehow or in any way a result of anything Bush has done, let alone a result of some sort of well-thought out plan, is just skull-clutchingly stupid.

It's true Bush is the first U.S. president to make a future Palestinian state an acknowledged part of his policy. And he's gotten a hell of a lot of mileage out of that, because that's about all he's done. As is a pattern with this president, he seemed to think that mouthing the words was good enough. Almost everything Bush has done subsequent to his recognition (belated on the U.S.'s part anyway) of the inevitability of a Palestinian state and his grand announcement of the Road Map, such as isolating Arafat, countenancing the Apartheid Wall, backing Sharon's efforts to hold on to vast swaths of the West Bank and deny Palestinian refugees the right of return to properties stolen during the 1948 war (reversing thirty years of U.S. policy in the process), has been entirely counterproductive to Israeli-Palestinian peace. If a negotiated settlement is to be reached, Bush will doubtless have to backpedal on much of this. And when he does, David Brooks will then of course point out that this was all a part of the grand strategy of George W. Bush, that foreign policy savant, that Metternich of Crawford.

Pace, LGM, but I think it's clear: Worst. Brooks. Ever.