‘Great Men’ have grating effect on Mideast

Mark Steyn once again cuts through the crap and correctly labels the Emperor, or at least the Emperor’s Envoy Plenipotentiary as having a severe sartorial deficiency in his new wardrobe:

It’s easy to fly in a guy in a suit to hold a meeting. Half the fellows inside the Beltway have Middle East “peace plans” named after them. Bush flew in himself a year or two back to announce his “road map.” Before that it was Cheney, who flew in with the Cheney plan, which was a plan to open up a road map back to the last plan, which would get us back to “Tenet,” which would get us back to “Mitchell,” which would get us back to “Wye River,” which would get us back to “Oslo,” which would get us back to Kansas.

And none of these Great Men meeting with other Great Men gets us anywhere. Some of the Great Men can’t speak for their peoples (Mubarak) or their legislatures (Abbas). And a lot of the Great Men can’t even speak for themselves: From the late Yasser Arafat to Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, they say one thing in meetings with Western emissaries and something entirely different to their compatriots. And some of the Great Men we send to negotiate aren’t all that great: the wretched Mohammed El Baradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Authority, is, in fact, a patsy for the nuclear mullahs.

The stark reality of the situation corresponds fully to the above mentioned starkness of the attire, or lack thereof.

To reprise one of my all-time favorite Iranian negotiating positions, let’s recall the perfect distillation of what Great Man diplomacy boils down to in the Middle East, as reported in the New York Times exactly a year ago: “Iran will resume uranium enrichment if the European Union does not recognize its right to do so, two Iranian nuclear negotiators said in an interview published Thursday.” If we don’t let Iran go nuclear, they’ll go nuclear. Negotiate that, Chuck Hagel.

REALLY! This is a powerful cluebat, that needs to be forecefully applied to the talking heads and fuzzy cogitators that are always oh so ready to keep talking forever, whether anyone is listening or not. Steyn goes on and makes a telling point about why these negotiating mind games never seem to quite work out:

The median age in Gaza is 15.8 years old. How likely is it that any of those bespoke Palestinian “moderates” who’ve been permanent fixtures on CNN and BBC Middle East discussion panels for 30 years have any meaningful sway over a population of unemployed uneducated teenage boys raised by a death cult? Israel withdrew from Gaza and, instead of getting on with a prototypical Palestinian state, Hamas turned the territory into an Islamist camp. Israel withdrew from Lebanon entirely in 2000, yet Hezbollah is now lobbing rockets at Haifa.

Why? Because in both cases these territories are now in effect Iran’s land borders with the Zionist Entity. They’re “occupied territories” but it’s not the Jews doing the occupying. So you’ve got a choice between talking with proxies or going to the source: Tehran. And, as the unending talks with the EU have demonstrated, the ayatollahs use negotiations with the civilized world as comedy relief. They don’t get Larry King’s salutes to Red Buttons and Don Knotts on Iranian TV, so entering into talks with the French foreign minister is as near to big-time laughs as the mullahs get.

These are just some of the highlights hear. Steyn, as usual, is well worth the read. Go check him out.