The Kerry Plan

With Barack Obama and his continually shrinking band of ardent supporters so heavily focused on class warfare, it's surprising that he has any time at all for foreign policy. In fact, maybe that's a good thing. As disastrous as this president's domestic policy has been ("disastrous might actually be too kind) with a stagnant economy, skyrocketing debt, unrestrained federal spending, domestic scandals that led to government persecution of his political opponents, Barack Obama's foreign policy has been a an even worse litany of failures.

Before they can practice, physician's take the Hippocratic oath that states (in part), "First Do No Harm." Unfortunately, Obama and the geniuses at the State Department take no such oath. They have made decisions and taken actions that have done harm, serious harm.

Under the leadership of past Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, we've seen Egypt descend into chaos, Syria escalate a civil war into a humanitarian disaster, Libya go out of control, Iran get ever closer to a nuclear weapon while playing this president as if he were an idealistic 6-year old, al Qaida grow stronger (testimony yesterday by Obama's own national security staff confirms this) despite lies promulgated by this president in the run-up to the 2012 election), nuclear armed North Korea careen from belligerence to irrationality, China flex its muscles in an unprecedented manner, Iraq and Afghanistan slowly slip back toward Islamist control ... yeah, just a remarkable record!

And now, the new genius at the State Department, John Kerry, has decided that his goal is to pressure Israel into a "peace agreement" that is neither tenable nor advisable. Obama supporter Thomas Friedman describes the outline of the plan:

The “Kerry Plan,” likely to be unveiled soon, is expected to call for an end to the conflict and all claims, following a phased Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank (based on the 1967 lines), with unprecedented security arrangements in the strategic Jordan Valley. The Israeli withdrawal will not include certain settlement blocs, but Israel will compensate the Palestinians for them with Israeli territory. It will call for the Palestinians to have a capital in Arab East Jerusalem and for Palestinians to recognize Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people. It will not include any right of return for Palestinian refugees into Israel proper.

If the "Kerry Plan" sounds familiar, that's because it's basically the same plan that has been proposed for the past 4 decades. In fact, it's a plan that Israel entertained, but the palestinians rejected, not with words, but with the intifada and rockets.

But no matter, the great success of every other Obama foreign policy initiative (see the list above) emboldens him to crate a similar "success" in Israel. God help Israel.

Kerry—not the brightest bulb in the chandelier—seems to have forgotten to address some key questions before he proposes his plan:

• Exactly who is Israel to negotiate with? Who has authority to speak for all palestinians when each faction hates the other?
• Why, as a very first step, before negotiation even begins, hasn't palestinian leadership acknowledged Israel's right to exist?
• How will Hezballah in Lebanon fit into all of this? As part of the negotiated settlement that stopped Israel's attack during the Lebanon war, the UN was supposed to keep Hezballah from acquiring missiles from Iran and Syria. Now, 40,000 missiles later ... well, you get the picture?
• Why should Israel trust the Obama administration to provide "security arrangements" when Obama has back-stabbed many of its allies in the region?

But no matter. For John Kerry, these are just piffles.

The past five years have indicated that Barack Obama has learned nothing from his foreign policy failures. In fact, I'm not even sure he recognizes them as failures. And that's probably the scariest part of all.

Update (2/3/2014):
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Just when you think there's no way the Obama administration could make still another foreign policy blunder in the Middle East, John Kerry steps up to the plate. Here's Kerry this week indirectly legitimizing the anti-Israel boycott conduced by leftist organizations in both the US and Europe:

"You see for Israel there's an increasing de-legitimization campaign that has been building up. People are very sensitive to it. There are talk of boycotts and other kinds of things," Kerry said. "Today's status quo absolutely, to a certainty, I promise you 100 percent, cannot be maintained. It's not sustainable. It's illusionary."

Instead of castigating the left-wing academics and "activists" who have been conducting this anti-Israel campaign for years, Kerry suggests it can work. He is, not to put to fine a point on it, an idiot. One wonders what that makes the guy who hired him.