Bolton in Fantasyland
For some reason, major op-ed page editors feel that it’s a good idea to publish op-eds expressing old discredited ideas from discredited figures like John Bolton. For his latest offering, Bolton puts forward what he calls a “three state” approach to the Palestinian problem, in which “Gaza is returned to Egyptian control and the West Bank in some configuration reverts to Jordanian sovereignty.” Matt Duss offers some response. Marc Lynch further observes that this idea is opposed by the government of Egypt, opposed by the government of Jordan, and opposed by the Palestinians. It’s a total non-starter.
It’s also worth appreciating the essentially circular logic behind the suggestion. Behind the “in some configuration” euphemism lies the fact that what Bolton is proposing is that Israel grab whichever choice slices of the West Bank settlers or the IDF want, and Jordan take over administering the rest. But why not just make this offer directly to the Palestinian leadership, rather than to the government of Jordan? Well, because no Palestinian leadership that wanted to stay in power would or could accept it. The idea is deemed too objectionable to the Palestinian population and to Arab sentiment writ large. But this exact same problem arises when you substitute “Jordanian leadership” for “Palestinian leadership.” The underlying problem of the unacceptability of this solution to Palestinian public opinion exists no matter who you put in charge. Putting this idea on the table is just a way of pretending to have an idea to offer while in fact you’re completely unwilling to grapple with the actual situation. If anything, trying to do this would probably make Israel’s security problems much worse by jeopardizing Israel’s peace treaties with Egypt and (especially) Jordan as the existing regimes would be destabilized by the presence of the new populations. The idea here is that the government of Jordan could act on Israel’s behalf as the jailer of the Palestinians in a way that allows Israel to avoid moral and political culpability for them. But the Jordanians aren’t nearly that stupid, and I have some trouble believing that Bolton is actually stupid enough to think they might be.
57 Responses to “Bolton in Fantasyland”
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January 5th, 2009 at 6:30 pm
But its a great debate starting point if your goal is to blame “arabs” for not doing enough to solve the problem!
January 5th, 2009 at 6:50 pm
Remember when it was Saddam Hussein who was the problem? Remember the subtitle for that 1996 “new strategy for the protection of the realm” which called for removing Saddam Hussein as the way to make the Palestinians realize that they had no governments supporting them and so now they’d just quit and settle into subservience? The neocons always make the same arguments, all they do is change the identity of the foreign devil who surely must be the real problem.
And trying to shoulder the Jordinian government with the responsibility for the Palestinian people (while Israel keeps total control over all the land and, perhaps more importantly, all the water) is a real oldie….
January 5th, 2009 at 6:50 pm
I have some trouble believing that Bolton is actually stupid enough to think they might be.
Occam’s Razor: Pamela Geller promised him a feel.
Still, it’s nice that the op-ed desks of the NYT and WaPo both thought that it John Bolton had something worth printing… on the same day. Is the slush pile for op-eds really that shallow over the holidays?
January 5th, 2009 at 6:56 pm
I bet Biden digs the Bolton Plan.
January 5th, 2009 at 6:58 pm
Bolton isn’t serious about this. It is simply some noise to provide a tiny bit of cover for the ongoing operation. Like the little clouds of chaff fighter planes release to throw off enemy radar. It is just some fluff which will fall to the ground and be forgotten in a few hours.
This guy knows exactly what his role is and this is it. He’s a tail gunner or a better analogy is a sniper out on the flank. His army, the army of the right, has been advancing steadily for 65 years and every army needs to protect if flanks.
January 5th, 2009 at 6:59 pm
For the record, too, it’s worth noting that the PNACers have treated Jordan as the carpet under which Israel’s problems can be brushed since ‘A Clean Break’. The dogwhistle to the Eretz Israel crowd — that a Palestinian state already exists, and its name is Jordan — is one that never goes away.
January 5th, 2009 at 7:06 pm
yeah, there’s also the whole black september thing.
January 5th, 2009 at 7:06 pm
yeah, there’s also the whole black september thing.
January 5th, 2009 at 7:06 pm
yeah, there’s also the whole black september thing.
January 5th, 2009 at 7:07 pm
January 5th, 2009 at 7:07 pm
Hey, can’t we get some Peretz blogging around here?
January 5th, 2009 at 7:11 pm
Let’s try that again (preview feature, anyone?):
Curiously, I’m not having the same trouble.
January 5th, 2009 at 7:28 pm
yeah, there’s also the whole black september thing.
Yep. You can say that again, dbt.
January 5th, 2009 at 7:30 pm
Another person in my list of nice-if-their-parents-would-have-been-gassed.
January 5th, 2009 at 7:40 pm
Say what you will about John Bolton, but nobody has been so influential on hair styles since the Beatles broke up–the man single-handedly discredited the whole idea of mustaches, leaving us with a younger generation in which the males all look like Amish farmers . . .
January 5th, 2009 at 7:49 pm
Please send him some “just for men” rea.
January 5th, 2009 at 8:00 pm
“Still, it’s nice that the op-ed desks of the NYT and WaPo both thought that it John Bolton had something worth printing… on the same day.”
Nothing like making it clear who you’re propagandizing for. The MSM is owned by who? Working for who? Beholden to who?
Doesn’t take much to guess that one.
The Zionists trot out Bolton at every opportunity.
I’m surprised Dershowitz hasn’t been quoted widely in the last week, too.
JJ: “I bet Biden digs the Bolton Plan.”
Yup, old Joe “I’m a Zionist. You don’t have to be Jewish to be a Zionist” “Let’s break up Iraq” Biden probably does. Somebody should ask him just to make it official.
January 5th, 2009 at 8:07 pm
“I’m surprised Dershowitz hasn’t been quoted widely in the last week, too.”
Richard,
Alan’s jerking off at Jpost.com. Check that shit out. That guy’s parents should have been gassed too.
January 5th, 2009 at 8:11 pm
“But the Jordanians aren’t nearly that stupid, and I have some trouble believing that Bolton is actually stupid enough to think they might be.”
And why is that?
January 5th, 2009 at 8:11 pm
RSH: see, I’m going with “lazy and browbeaten” over “ZOMG ZOG!”
Notlob and Torture Yoo presumably know that the slush-pile for op-eds is dry this time of year, because most people have lives. The Perhaps Smirking Bill Kristol put in a good word.
Now, Notlob comes across as a higher-achieving version of the crazies who write letters every day to the Bumfuck Courier-Sentinel. My guess is that he emails op-eds to every big newspaper on a regular basis. So, just as letters editors publish their crazy regulars just to make them go away for a few weeks, the editors who receive Notlob’s screeds will print them on slow news days in the hope that he’ll stop bothering them.
January 5th, 2009 at 8:14 pm
Why, oh why, does a jackass like Bolton even get to have a role in our national discourse? I find the idea that we’re even discussing his arguments an infuriating waste of time.
January 5th, 2009 at 8:19 pm
“Why, oh why, does a jackass like Bolton even get to have a role in our national discourse?”
May I suggest Stephen Walt’s book, The Israel Lobby?
This country is completely hijacked by the Zionists. You really think Obama can do jack? Zionists brought him to power by financing his expensive campaign not it’s their ROI time baby.
Obama is a rogue character, has always been and will always been. Zionists figure that shit out early enough.
January 5th, 2009 at 8:49 pm
Stay classy Farid.
Not only is the idea such a non-starter that it makes giving the mess back to Turkey look like a good bet, but it manages to make Israel less secure.
Right now you could create a Palestinian state and give it security guarantees in return for strict limits on its military. You give the land back to Egypt and Jordan and I don’t see them accepting any limits on what they can do with it. What would stop Egypt from rolling a mobile scud launcher right up to the border just to mess with people’s heads?
January 5th, 2009 at 8:51 pm
Possibilities:
1) he’s that stupid.
2) writing op-eds for a living is like writing for Vogue: you try to find believable material to fill columns every week.
3) he and his buddies are just killing time, thinking that they can run out the clock. If he doesn’t realize that the clock never stops, that gets us back to 1).
January 5th, 2009 at 9:10 pm
Pseudonymous in nc: I’m not so sure about that. That might apply to the second string newspapers, but the big boys know what time it is.
I don’t think these guys spend their time writing op-eds. I suspect most of the time they are INVITED to write these op-eds. However, you might be right that they are invited BECAUSE the alternative is either no op-eds or op-eds written by somebody who might not toe the statist party line.
In any event, it’s no accident that this stuff comes out in a coordinated manner. It did so in the run up to the Iraq war – remember Judy Miller? – and it did so in the 2006 Lebanon war and it’s doing so now.
Oh, yeah, it’s coordinated at least to the extent that some people make sure this opinion gets out there in the major papers and the media.
In the meantime, Juan Cole thinks CBS did a good job on this one:
http://www.juancole.com/
Monday, January 05, 2009
“It’s Hell in Here”
“They are Bombing 1.5 million People in a Cage”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev6ojm62qwA
January 5th, 2009 at 9:11 pm
Bolton acknowledges the obstacles to implementing his proposal, but it’s not as if every other proposal doesn’t have its own obstacles. The key point about Egypt and Jordan is that both countries have a monopoly on the use of force in their respective territories, so peace negotiations were possible with them. That isn’t true for the Palestinians, and until it is — until there is a Palestinian leadership with the power to enforce the terms of any ceasefire or peace deal on its own side — no peace is possible.
January 5th, 2009 at 9:13 pm
I don’t have any trouble believing that Bolton is stupid. He is not, however, the “fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth,” an honor which I believe is forever reserved to Doug Feith, according to poor Tommy Franks, who should know.
BTW, speaking of stupid, has Feith weighed in on this latest Gaza travesty? Any comments of his public anywhere?
January 5th, 2009 at 9:25 pm
Bolton isn’t stupid. The proposal isn’t meant to be advocating a policy. It is meant to derail policy choices. This sort of thing isn’t a rhetorical exercise it is an act of provocation and Bolton is an agent provocateur. That’s why he is given space in the Washington Post, and probably soon enough the New York Times. Or is it the other way around? It’s an announcement that our permanent government elite is ready to ride this thing right to the final solution if needs be. Without really thinking about it.
All this silliness will end only if the Saudis are forced to end it. The day they are forced to support the Palestinians with diplomacy, money and the oil card is the day Bolton will be writing op eds for the Spokane Shopper, where he belongs.
January 5th, 2009 at 9:38 pm
Seriously Fred, quit drinking the kool aid for just a second. The PA would be a lot better at monopolizing the use of force if they hadn’t spent the last decade getting systematically dismantled by the Israelis. During Defensive Shield the IDF was ransacking PA government offices that had nothing to do with security, smashing computers and burning records and even destroying the bathrooms. For years after that, every time a bomb would go off in Israel the IDF would blow up a Palestinian police station.
Along those lines, Hamas has shown a pretty impressive ability to turn the rockets and suicide bombs on and off. I imagine that will go away now.
What this is about is whatever excuse Israel can pull out of its ass for avoiding peace talks.
January 5th, 2009 at 10:35 pm
There are 2.5 million people in the West Bank.
There are 6 million people in Jordan. The per capita income in Jordan is one tenth of that of Israel, about $2700 per person. Assuming that the West Bank per capita is the same as Gaza, $650 per, that’s troublesome.
It means (a) that the West Bank would require major investments and upgrades to integrate into Jordan. And (b) Jordan just doesn’t have the money. Look at the troubles that Germany has had integrating East Germany. I don’t think the Jordanians could manage it at all.
Jordan’s systems are already straining at the limits to cope with about 900,000 Iraqi refugees.
I think it’s pretty obvious to anyone that Jordan simply doesn’t have the ability to assume control of the West Bank.
Pull that, and you’d eventually destabilize the whole of Jordan. A much smaller Palestinian presence destabilized the admittedly fragile Lebanon.
Plus, there’s the political complications. The Jordanians simply don’t have the capacity to rein in the politics of the West Bank. It would be a disaster.
Idiot notion.
Egypt might make a go of it for a time. But I don’t think they’d be happy at all. And it has enough complications that I’d see them just wanting to stay out of it.
It really is a colossally stupid idea.
January 5th, 2009 at 10:54 pm
I think discredited conservatives like Bolton get play time because there aren’t any non-discredited Republican policies remaining. And Bolton doesn’t realize he’s washed up, which is worth something I guess, to those who never give up.
January 5th, 2009 at 11:02 pm
I don’t think these guys spend their time writing op-eds. I suspect most of the time they are INVITED to write these op-eds. However, you might be right that they are invited BECAUSE the alternative is either no op-eds or op-eds written by somebody who might not toe the statist party line.
I’m going to give the NYT the benefit of the doubt here, because I just can’t imagine a conversation along the lines of “how about we ask John Bolton and John Yoo to write about the limits of executive power?” other than as a yuk-yuk bet among drunk editorial staff at the Christmas party. (The WaPo op-ed, I’m not so sure about, though the piece reads like it was shopped around.)
I also consider Bolton pathetically awful enough to imagine him spending his days at the AEI composing op-eds while waiting for a call from Faux News to do a few minutes on camera. There is a lot about the higher echelons of political life (and journalism) that is mundane and even silly, and
It’s also much more satisfying to think of Bolton as a Pooterish figure, because that disempowers him. He’s no longer a shithead with authority: instead, he’s just a crazy fucker who has enough Village points to get onto the op-ed page rather than the letters-to-the-editor page… or in blog comments section.
Now, you can argue that my interpretation is Kremlinology, and that the awarding of valuable op-ed space to a crazy fucker like Bolton should be taken at face value. And you’d have a point. But op-ed trolling only differs from blog trolling by its location, and op-ed trolls get printed for all sorts of arbitrary reasons.
January 5th, 2009 at 11:39 pm
Chances are Bolton really is that stupid, or more accurately his opinions about the Middle East really are that stupid. I’ve met some folks who run in the same think tank circles as Bolton — the common thread that unites them all is a curious inability to distinguish reality from a Tom Clancy novel.
Their problem isn’t stupidity, per se, nor is it a self-consciously corrupt and disingenuous argument.
Their problem is a stupid, corrupt ideology.
January 6th, 2009 at 12:47 am
Julius Streicher Gauleiter of Franconia 1922-1940. Publisher of the weekly newspaper, Der Stürmer. Alfred Rosenberg Racial theory ideologist. Later, Minister of the Eastern Occupied Territories 1941-1945. Hans Fritzsche Popular radio commentator, and head of the news division of the Nazi Propaganda Ministry. Tried in place of Joseph Goebbels.
John Bolton.
The commonplace commonalities of propagandists for the destruction of peoples.
January 6th, 2009 at 1:27 am
Bolton’s a tool, and this plan is laughable in the present day, but it is interesting to think this is almost certainly how the situation would have been resolved had the ‘67 war not occurred.
It is likely that at some point, in the course of a peace agreement, Israel would have accepted a *very* limited number of refugees, the Old City of Jerusalem would have been placed under international supervision, Egypt would have had to annex Gaza and give citizenship to its residents and Jordanian rule over the West Bank would have been recognized by then as well — though, of course, by that point, Jordan might well have been Palestine, for who’s to say that the PLO would not have seized power in a united Kingdom of Jordan.
January 6th, 2009 at 1:52 am
Good points, but 40 years too late. The situation has changed too much.
January 6th, 2009 at 2:44 am
If your job is defending indefensible policies, it’s smart to be stupid. You argue better if you really believe your lies.
January 6th, 2009 at 3:04 am
Can we say, “One state solution”. Really, all these issues keep returning to that immutable fact. Any other final solution will continue a repetition of this horrible cycle.
January 6th, 2009 at 3:50 am
“Can we say, “One state solution”.”
What would that solve? Just how would this one-state be run? I fail to see what the “one state solution” would change.
The only way it could work is if weren’t under local control at all and isn’t in fact a state but a UN dependency of some sort (which will please neither Israelis or Palestinians).
January 6th, 2009 at 5:39 am
“Bolton’s a tool,…” … or is that “fool”?
Everything that was wrong with the Bush Administration is summed up by the fact that this man was made UN Ambassador without even enough Republican votes to get him confirmed.
He is an arrogant and stupid man with a good line in forceful abuse for interviewers.
January 6th, 2009 at 9:04 am
This idea is a like a kaleidescope of stupid. You can keep turning it around and look at in from a new direction, and you’ll keep seeing whole new patterns of stupid.
January 6th, 2009 at 3:33 pm
Speaking of discredited figures, is anyone else as sickened as I am by the increasingly frequent appearances of the criminal Tom DeLay on the talk show circuit? WTF!!
January 6th, 2009 at 5:05 pm
I, frankly, don’t see how a Palestine state would work. It’s not that I am not in favour of it; I am. I just don’t see it won’t collapse into a banana republic.
And why the FUCK did Egypt not annex Gaza? The U.S. and Israel could have just paid the Egyptians, I don’t know, 50 billion, heck, let’s make this 100 billion dollars to take the place, and we wouldn’t have this problem?
January 6th, 2009 at 6:02 pm
Farris: “Just how would this one-state be run? I fail to see what the “one state solution” would change. The only way it could work is if weren’t under local control at all and isn’t in fact a state but a UN dependency of some sort (which will please neither Israelis or Palestinians).”
You’re partly right. What would need to happen is that the UN dissolves Israel as a state. What would have to happen then is that the UN selects various moderates from both Israel and Palestine – people who aren’t hard core Zionists or Islamics – and commission them to come up with a Constitution that provides an adequate amount of secular and Sharia law, guarantees the civil rights of both populations, and establishes the IDF as the core military unit of the new country (simply because it’s better than the more ragtag Hamas/Fatah military), and allows Jewish police to patrol Jewish areas and Palestinian police to patrol Palestinian areas, at least initially.
Then they set the criteria for standing in elections with sidelines the radical Zionists and Islamics while allowing pretty much anybody else to stand.
Then comes the hard part – reconciliation and restitution for stolen lands. That should be based strictly on legal documentation. If your documents are in order or in the public record, you get your land back, otherwise tough noogies.
There is no other possible solution. The only way a two-state solution would work is if Israel is forced to retire to the 1948 boundaries, dismantle ALL the settlements, completely remove any control of the Palestinians whatsoever, etc. – and it’s just not going to happen as long as Zionists are running Israel.
The key to solving the problem is sidelining the Zionists and the hardcore Islamics. Without that the only solution is the absolute destruction of one side or the other.
January 12th, 2009 at 3:56 am
Hey Mr. Yglesias,
Your comments section is full of loonies, some of them kinda unsavory.
It reflects poorly, ’s all I’m saying.
January 12th, 2009 at 3:02 pm
Actually, I’d say it reflects accurately. Who else but loonies would read this garbage?
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