More dirty tricks from the crooked crowd in the White House?
From the start of this sub-controversy over Speaker Pelosi’s comments in Damascus I’ve suspected a tampering hand from the White House.
You know the details. Pelosi said she had conveyed a message of peace from the Israelis to the Syrians. And then Prime Minister Olmert’s office issued a statement appearing to contradict what Pelosi said. The Post OpEd page, the organ of jejune establishmentarianism and neo-Blimpism, called Pelosi’s claim a ‘pratfall‘. With admirable diligence, the Post OpEd writers took Olmert’s Office’s statement at face value and then embellished it …
The Israeli prime minister entrusted Ms. Pelosi with no such message … Ms. Pelosi not only misrepresented Israel’s position but was virtually alone in failing to discern that Mr. Assad’s words were mere propaganda.
But I’ve never thought it was that simple since before Pelosi ever made her statement, the Israeli press was reporting that Olmert had entrusted Pelosi with such a message. As Ha’aretz highly respected diplomatic correspondent Aluf Benn wrote the day before Pelosi’s arrival in Damascus …
The speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, is scheduled to meet with Syrian President Bashar Assad in Damascus today, and will deliver a message of calm from Israel.
“We hope the message will be understood,” political sources in Israel said yesterday. “The question is whether Assad is looking for an excuse … so that he can carry out an attack against Israel in the summer, or whether this is a mistaken assessment.”
Pelosi visited Israel yesterday and told her Israeli interlocutors that the country must speak with Assad and that the door should not be closed to Syria, even though she is aware that Syria supports terrorism and continued cooperation with Iran.
If you read Benn’s article you’ll see that Olmert’s message was part of an effort to head off a possible confrontation this summer tied to Arab fears of an American strike against Iran. (It’s a complicated issue, which can find out more about by reading Benn’s article.)
Now, who else says this? Rep. Tom Lantos (D-CA) is the Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, a Holocaust survivor and very close to AIPAC. He was with Pelosi in the key meetings in Jerusalem and Damascus and he says “The speaker conveyed precisely what the prime minister and the acting president asked.”
So what happened? Ron Kampeas of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency is another person who follows these issues closely and knows a lot about them — that is to say, he doesn’t approach these issues through the prism of reading Drudge or what the Vice President said on the Rush Limbaugh show. In any case, Kampeas takes a look at the story. It’s a lengthy piece with a lot of important detail. But let me excerpt this section which touches on the issue of, again, what happened?
If that was the case, why did Olmert need to make a clarification, as Israelis were not speaking on the record. Lantos suggested there was pressure from the White House.
“It’s obvious the White House is desperate to find some phony criticism of the speaker’s trip, even though it was a bipartisan trip,” said Lantos, a Holocaust survivor who is considered the Democrat closest to the pro-Israel lobby. “I have nothing but contempt and disdain for the attempt to undermine this trip.”
The White House had no comment on the allegations by Lantos that it pressured Olmert to offer a clarification.
Such backdoor statecraft between the White House and Olmert would not be unprecedented.
Last year, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice talked Olmert into a 48-hour cease-fire during the war with Hezbollah to allow humanitarian relief, but within hours Israeli planes were bombing again, to Rice’s surprise and anger. Olmert had received a call, apparently from Cheney’s office, telling him to ignore Rice.
So we’ve had a lot of fun over the last few days with the RNC political shop and Drudge leading a lot of dopes around by the nose. But let’s hear a bit more about this. The message the Israelis sent to Damascus was intended to convince the Syrians that the Israelis were not planning to attack the Syrians in concert with an American attack on Iran. There was concern in Israel that this might lead to a preemptive Syrian attack. A message like that from Israel to Syria might be very unwelcome to some people in the White House. Did the White House pressure Olmert? If there was no message, why was the existence of the message being discussed by Israeli officials before Pelosi went to Damascus? Will the White House deny pressuring Olmert? And did any of this occur to the folks who write the Post’s editorials?
So what’s the story? Maybe this whole episode deserves some real reporting.
