Another one-of-a-kind old fool
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, has endorsed Barack Obama. I doubt that this development is sending shivers down any spines at Hillary Clinton headquarters. Indeed, Clinton has just picked up a more consequential endorsement -- that of Wesley Clark. In contrast to Brzezinski, who is closely associated with the ghastly failures of the Carter years, Clark led a successful, albeit not particularly difficult or relevant, military campaign.
Noah Pollack at Commentary's Contentions notes, however, that Brzezinski is touting his "record in the Middle East," bragging that "I’m part of the only administration that brought about peace between Israel and its neighbors.” He's referring, of course, to the peace agreement that Israel and Egypt reached in 1978.
But in truth, if the Carter administration had had its way, this agreement would never have been reached. As Pollack correctly recalls, "from the outset of the Carter administration, the American commitment had been not to a deal between Israel and Egypt, but to a comprehensive resolution of the Palestinian question. . .inclusive of the Soviet Union, Israel, and the PLO. . . ." Indeed, Carter insisted that any deal would have to be comprehensive. Fortunately, Egypt and Israel remained focused on their own interests. They thus ignored Carter and worked out a bilateral deal, the details of which were finalized at Camp David. In essence, then, the deal occurred not only independent of the Carter administration, but in defiance of it.
That's not to say that Carter and Brzezinski were wholly irrelevant to developments in the Middle East. Their failure to back the Shah of Iran, and their subsequently inability to cope with his successors, helped give rise to our most dangerous enemy in the world.
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