Ben Smith comes up with some pretty good stuff this morning comparing General Jones’s prepared remarks for the J Street conference last week with the remarks as delivered. Jones pledged then that the administration would send a representative to all future conferences held by J Street. It was the best received line of his speech, and it was also the line that made the most news — but it was not in his prepared remarks. Smith also flags this passage, which Jones seems to have freelanced:
The announcement by Abbas that he will not seek another term as president of the PA, Smith says, is “a mark of the trouble currently at the ‘epicenter,’ and how far off that near future is now looking.” Yes, the peace process is a mess, and Obama actually must take the blame for some of the current trouble — things are worse than they were when Obama came into office, and they are worse mostly because of the arrogance with which this administration approached the conflict. Still, though Jones’s comments were troubling, this view — that the Arab-Israeli conflict is our most pressing foreign policy challenge — has been repeated again and again by the president and his chief of staff. Jones may have gone off text, but it is almost certainly the consensus view inside the White House that the Arab-Israeli conflict is, as Obama once said, the “constant sore” that “infect[s] all of our foreign policy.” “It seems quite odd to place the conflict ahead of Afghanistan, Iran, and China, among other White House priorities,” Smith says in a follow-up. And of course the reverse is true, contra Jones. Solving the Iran problem — imagine what the peace process would look like if Israel didn’t feel an existential threat from Iran and if Hamas didn’t have a state sponsor — would have “ripples that echo” across the Middle East and beyond.
