Posted on 09/10/2003 6:32:07 AM PDT by areafiftyone
In 1968, male anti-war activists who rallied to the presidential campaign of Senator McCarthy famously cut their shoulder-length hair in order to broaden their electoral appeal, going “Clean for Gene.” The opposite impulse appears to have overtaken the presidential campaign of Howard Dean.
As Dr. Dean, the current frontrunner for the Democrat Party nomination for president, rode the wave of anti-war feeling that has swept through the party’s left wing, his mainstream views on Israel were attracting significant criticism. At a recent Miami gathering on Dr. Dean’s behalf, organized by current and former Green Party activists, campaign literature was available on every conceivable subject, except for Israel. Given the location, this was more than a bit odd. In 1992, President Clinton’s campaign smeared Paul Tsongas in Florida over a Senate vote on Syria, making it appear that the Massachusetts man was soft on Baathists.
Until recently, Dr. Dean’s position could be described as hewing to the left wing of Aipac, the pro-Israel lobby demonized by the anti-Israel left. Steve Grossman, a former Aipac president and Democratic National Committee chairman, is helping run the Dean campaign, and Dr. Dean himself told the Forward that he identifies more closely with Aipac than with Peace Now, although he added that he thought Peace Now had been important at previous moments: “My view is closer to Aipac’s view,” Dr. Dean said.“At one time the Peace Now view was important, but now Israel is under enormous pressure. We have to stop terrorism before peace negotiations.” Presumably, he meant that during the Clinton presidency, while Ehud Barak was in power, the peace option rated higher than it does now.
Yesterday, Dr. Dean was the target of criticism from Senators Lieberman and Kerry, two of his rivals for the nomination, because of remarks he made at a Santa Fe, N.M. coffee shop. “It’s not our place to take sides” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Dr. Dean said, adding for good measure his observation that the number of settlements Israel would ultimately have to evacuate was an “enormous number.”
In an interview in yesterday’s Washington Post, Dr. Dean acknowledged Israel’s “special relationship with the United States,” but insisted that “if we are going to bargain by being in the middle of the negotiations then we are going to have to take an evenhanded role.”
Mr. Lieberman, who is increasingly casting himself as the ideological alternative to Dr. Dean, called the remark “a major break from a half century of American foreign policy.”
Mr. Kerry said the comment underscored Dr. Dean’s “lack…[of] foreign policy experience,” and said the idea would amount to “a radical shift in United States policy towards the Middle East. If the president were to make a remark such as this it would throw an already volatile region into even more turmoil.”
Previously, Dr. Dean has been excoriated in left wing Web sites and press for his pro-Israel remarks. An Internet “Petition to Howard Dean for Clarification of Stance on Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” expressed, “deep reservations regarding your stated positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” The site listed the candidate’s alleged onesided pro-Israel rhetoric:
“You spoke often of the Israeli victims of terror, yet you failed to acknowledge the three-fold number of Palestinian civilians who have been killed by the Israeli Defense Forces, or the Israeli military’s incursion and illegal occupation of large portions of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. These incendiary actions by the Israeli military have fueled much of the animosity in the region, and they must be acknowledged in any fair assessment of the situation. It is also important to recognize that the expropriation of land and settlement activities have been repeatedly condemned by the U.N. Security Council, and the United Nation’s General Assembly has determined that Israel’s occupation of the territories have ‘no legal basis.’”
In Counterpunch, Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair’s Web magazine, Dr. Dean is compared to Mr. Clinton for his ability to combine right and left wing political characteristics: “While Dean is pro-choice and supports same-sex civil unions, he is progun, pro-death penalty, and as hawkish on Iran and Israel as many of the neo-conservatives running the White House today.”
A columnist at alternet.org, Ahmed Nassef, calls him “Sharon’s Man” and “A Hawk, Dressed Like a Dove.” If Dr. Dean hoped this new twist would help calm these troubled waters, he grossly miscalculated. A Dean candidacy will draw back the few percentage points of voters who defected to the Greens in 2000. But these comments may make a Dean candidacy all but impossible.
If it makes for poor politics, Dr. Dean’s comments fare worse as diplomatic theory. American “evenhandedness” in the Israel-Palestine circumstance translates as American pressure on Israel. At some point, in some contexts, America may feel required to exert pressure on Israel. But what might be valid in some future context is hardly right just now. Dr. Dean used to know this.
To argue, as Dr. Dean did, that America is insufficiently engaged in the peace process, is to exonerate the Palestinians. Does Dr. Dean mean to argue that if only Mr. Bush had shuttled back and forth between Ramallah and Jerusalem, Mahmoud Abbas would have stood fast, Hamas would have stood down, and Yasser Arafat would have stood aside?
One suspects that Dr. Dean’s comments were either ill considered or politics, pure and simple. The administration’s Middle East diplomacy has been sucked into the gravitational pull of the 2004 presidential election. The abject failure of Palestinian moderation is being laid at Mr. Bush’s door step.
That’s why Dr. Dean’s slide away from Israel is the opposite of the Clean for Gene phenomenon. Rather than draw the left into the more respectable world of liberal politics, Dr. Dean has drawn his liberal forces into alignment with the anti-Israel left. His comments were not those of the anti-Israel left, but they will signal those forces that they will have an open door to the Oval Office if Dr. Dean takes the White House.
I stop reading whenever this "frontrunner" stuff is spouted. "No preference" is still the preference of a plurality who are surveyed about the Dem contenders.
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