Bibi Schools Obama On Mideast Reality

With his admittedly “healthy ego,” President Obama seldom encounters someone with the audacity to set him straight. Enter Bibi Netanyahu, delivering a humiliating Oval Office history lesson.

'Like any politician at this level, I've got a healthy ego," Barack Obama said a few days before getting elected to the highest office in the land and having his healthy ego injected with steroids.

Now this president believes he's so smart, he can solve problems lesser mortals can't. The Middle East is a problem that has flummoxed president after president. But if we can land a man on the moon and kill Osama bin Laden, why can't the smartest man in the country make peace between the Jews and the Arabs?

In a 2007 Foreign Affairs article, Obama promised that withdrawal from Iraq "will allow us to focus our attention and influence on resolving the festering conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians — a task that the Bush administration neglected for years."

Obama the campaigner vowed his Mideast policy would be based on "a clear and strong commitment to the security of Israel." But as president he's shown that he thinks kicking Israel around is a big part of the answer.

Last Thursday he insisted "the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines" — an unprecedented betrayal of the Jewish state by its most indispensable ally.

And so Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made history in the Oval Office on Friday, giving one of the most impassioned and instructive displays in the history of statesmanship. As Americans watched almost painfully, the president's arrogance and naivete were fully exposed as he sat in awkward silence.

Netanyahu, keenly aware that his nation's survival is in the balance, stated that "a peace based on illusions will crash eventually on the rocks of Middle Eastern reality." He said that "while Israel is prepared to make generous compromises for peace, it cannot go back to the 1967 lines, because these lines are indefensible."

That's because "before 1967, Israel was all of nine miles wide — half the width of the Washington Beltway. And these were not the boundaries of peace; they were the boundaries of repeated wars, because the attack on Israel was so attractive from them."

The spectacle harks back to Margaret Thatcher's public scolding over 30 years ago of another president sporting an oversized ego: Jimmy Carter.

It took a Thatcher to alert the world to America's timidity regarding the Soviet Union; Netanyahu, like the Iron Lady, is someone willing to tell Barack Obama that he's got a lot to learn.