Remember Jimmy Carter and how he told us all we should put on a sweater?* Jimmy Carter was an awful president, you guys, and everyone knows that.
It couldn’t have been Jimmy Carter who brokered the Camp David Accords, because the Camp David Accords brought a real and lasting peace between Israel and Egypt for the last 34 years, and, again, Jimmy Carter was an awful president who never did anything and should have stuck to peanut farming and communist coddling and just left the sweater-wearing-exhorting to the adults, the Republicans, duh.
Yep, Israel and Egypt, two countries with a long history, two neighbors who never quite got along. They’ve been fighting for literally thousands of years, but Jimmy Carter helped broker the Camp David Accords, and the Camp David Accords laid the groundwork for a real chance at peace in the Middle East. If nothing else, Camp David marked a decisive end to the era of Nasser and pan-Arab efforts to drive the Jewish state into the sea.
For those of you who don’t know what Wikipedia is, the Camp David Accords basically bought off both the Israelis and the Egyptians: the United States agreed to pay about $3 billion in subsidies annually to each of the two nations. But while the structure of Israel’s government has remained largely unchanged, Egypt is no longer a military dictatorship, and it’s less than clear that the Morsi government can deliver on the same preconditions for peace to which Anwar Sadat agreed.
I should stress that neither the Israelis nor the Egyptians are backing away from Camp David right now. And no matter what the radicals in either country call for, neither country’s leadership is spoiling for more tank battles in the Sinai. But an agreement that has defined the Middle East for a generation is under perhaps greater pressure than ever before.
The Egyptian people are, largely, tired of American arms enabling the country’s security forces. The Netanyahu government does not like that Barack Hussein Obama fellow one bit, and the relations between the two men are infamously frosty. And not only is the United States facing calls to rein in its budget deficit**, but BHO hizz self has said that Egypt is not “an ally.”
And then this whole stupid video thing by a guy who is obviously not named Sam Bacile had to go and happen, and for chrissakes, it’s the weekend, doesn’t the Muslim world have the same weekends as us?*** We’re not sayin’ here, but we are just sayin’: the people directly affected by Camp David don’t seem to be super-thrilled about it anymore, even though it’s worked for the last 34 years.
*This was not something Jimmy Carter ever actually said! More than a decade later, Democrats had finally figured out what hit them, and they did something similar to George Bush père.
** No, I’m not arguing that “Derrr, we spend too much on furrin’ aid!”, that argument is stupid. But other people are saying that and have been saying that for a long time. So.
*** No.
