Smearing Dan Kurtzer

Dan Kurtzer is one of the people unofficially advising Barack Obama on Middle East policy. And why not? He’s got the kind of record you’re looking for in an adviser. He’s a longtime career foreign service officer who rose to hold such posts as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research, Ambassador to Egypt, and Ambassador to Israel. Obviously, that background doesn’t give him the sort of deep grounding in national strategy that John McCain garnered going on TV a lot to spread hysteria and spout nonsense. Which probably explains why the McCain campaign’s latest “say anything” gambit is a bizarre attack on Kurtzer.

Kurtzer, you see, in addition to being commissioner of the short-lived Israel Baseball League went to Syria recently where he urged the Syrian government to move expeditiously toward making peace with Israel. This, the McCain campaign would like is to believe, is practically treason. Or something. Definitely bad for the Jews and much worse that, say, Mike Huckabee’s strong stand against the possibility of peace at any point. Either way, Jeremy Ben-Ami from J Street had a solid response:

It’s not clear what John McCain gains by attacking both stated Israeli government policy and a leading American Jewish diplomat. Is it really John McCain’s policy to oppose Israel’s efforts to end its conflicts with its neighbors diplomatically? American Jews strongly favor Israel’s efforts to negotiate peace with Syria. Not only is McCain’s position unlikely to win him support in the U.S. Jewish community broadly, it’s a policy that runs counter to the national security interests of the United States.

Indeed. J Street’s trying to get people to petition John McCain to disavow this for what it’s worth. It’s hard to even understand what the McCain campaign’s views on the merits of this issue are — they perhaps think it’s wrong to ask Syria to make concessions? — in a way that tends to underscore the difficulty one has making reasonable foreign policy situations when one views international conflict as providing important domestic political opportunities.