By David Hirst
THE GUARDIAN , London
In his memoirs, the former US president Bill Clinton writes that the Camp David summit, of which this month marks the fourth anniversary, was the greatest failure of his career. And that, he says, was overwhelmingly Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's doing -- for, unlike Israeli Premier Ehud Barak, who had been ready for "enormous concessions," the Palestinian leader couldn't "make the final jump from revolutionary to statesman."
There is one reason that, even if he believes this, he should not, even now, be so publicly proclaiming it. Camp David was essentially Barak's brainchild. Desperate for a breakthrough in the moribund peace process, he conceived the gambit of telescoping both the still unaccomplished "interim phases" of the Oslo agreement and "final-status" issues into one grand, climactic conclave that would "end the 100-year conflict." Clinton only persuaded a deeply reluctant Arafat to attend at all by pledging not to blame him for an inglorious outcome.
But blame him is precisely what Clinton did at the time. And that he should still be doing so renders his partisanship even more grossly out of place. For the controversy of which it is a part has moved on -- and much in Arafat's favor. It revolves around a second case, almost as momentous as Iraq, where intelligence was politicized and corrupted to serve a preconceived agenda.
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/edit/archives/2004/07/20/2003179714
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