Soccer Dad

And then the general walked into a bar ...

A lot has been written the joke Gen. James Jones, the administration's national security advisor said at the dinner given by the Washington Institute for Middle East Policy last week.

It's actually a very funny joke, but what bugged people, was the "ethnicizing" of the principles of the joke and making two of the parties "Jewish merchants." (I didn't know that Muslims aren't supposed to wear ties!)

Still my bigger problem isn't that Gen Jones told the joke however clumsily he told it; it's his policies that bother me. Just One Minute plumbs the contents of the speech and points out (via memeorandum)

We had "peace" after World War I, yet many embittered Germans simply pointed to the Treaty of Versailles as one more grievance and another reason to go back to war. As David Bernstein and Barry Rubin noted recently, it is not at all clear what Palestinians believe about this.

Many Palestinians (and their partners in the international grievance community, such as Iran) may believe a narrative in which the tide of history is running their way - Israel is more isolated now with Obama in office, Iran is closer to a bomb, Gaza has been returned to the Palestinians in exchange for not much, and who knows what the next decade will bring - in this environment, why should Palestinians sign away their imagined "right of return" now? And how would Palestinians react to a "peace" deal imposed by the US - would they say "Peace at last" and resume something like a normal life, or would this become the Versailles Treaty of the 21st century?

It is this outlook that motivated Gen. Jones as he created the Palestinian police force and write a report, never released, that supposedly blamed Israel more for the lack of peace than the Palestinians. It is the policies that Jones advocates that convince me that he is unfit for his job. They are a lot more important than a poorly told joke.