John Kerry’s finest hour: Obama Team Labels Israel an Outlaw Nation

By John Grant

Hallelujah!

As President Obama is about to fade from the White House forever to make way for the Twitter King’s juggernaut of furniture wreckers, his abstaining vote on a United Nations Security Counsel resolution to condemn Benjamin Netanyahu’s settlement policies in the West Bank and Jerusalem as “illegal” has rocked the leadership of that tiny nation. Naturally, Netanyahu and others in the Likudist pro-settlement camp went ballistic, since they’ve written Obama off as a loser and know what a coup the condemnation resolution is. To be so condemned as an outlaw faction will encourage further opposition to Likudist Israel in Europe, as it will put an international stain on products made in West Bank settlements. Many of those products are being exported illegally, a situation that will now be in the public eye.

One of the brightest spots in all this is that, in the last three yards of his two-term run, President Obama assumed some backbone vis-à-vis Netanyahu, a leader who dis’ed and humiliated him publicly on several occasions. The same with Secretary of State John Kerry, whose 70 minute speech at the State Department Wednesday showed glimmers of the young Vietnam veteran John Kerry who publicly wondered, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? ... [W]e have been used in the worst fashion by the administration of this country.”

To Netanyahu’s remark that “Friends do not take friends to the Security Counsel,” Kerry replied with the equivalent of the well-known public service line: “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk.” The runaway arrogance of the Israeli right can easily be seen as akin to being drunk at the wheel on one’s own exceptionalism and entitlement.

John Kerry has been a longtime insider in the very same American government that “used him in the worst fashion” as a young man. So for me, his remarks come not from a “friend” of Israel, but from the equivalent of a parent who birthed Israel in 1948 under President Harry Truman. That post-WWII moment in history, of course, was rich with profound Washington decisions that Americans were forced to live with in the years that followed. Some of those decisions went completely off the rails. This has a compelling poignancy for me, since as a “baby boomer” born in 1947, my life spans the same years. Some might say I've gone off the rails. I presume Kerry must feel some of this, too; he was born in 1943. In 1947, Truman and Congress established the National Security State; the CIA was officially born out of the OSS that year. President Truman and “the buck stops here” was ground zero. For the Vietnam War, 1945 was the fateful year...

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