WHAT'S WRONG WITH GENEVA

Rich Lowry is wondering why the Geneva pseudo-accord, negotiated among private citizens of Israel and the Palestinian territorities, has generated so much anger in Tel Aviv. In reply, Jonah Goldberg writes the following:

Rich - A couple points off the top of my head. First of all, when you say this is precisely the sort of thing we should want from Palestinian and Israeli civil societies, I understand your point, but I can also understand the Israeli government's rage. After all, I'm sure you would have considerable contempt if private citizens here started working on peace treaties, environmental accords etc. without approval of the US government. If Jimmy Carter cut a deal with North Korea -- without consulting the White House -- I bet you'd be livid. And whether you were or not, Carter would be in violation of the Logan Act -- as Charles Krauthammer recently noted.

That's a very good example--in fact, it actually happened, in precisely the way Jonah describes. In 1994, the Clinton administration was trying to talk Kim Il-Sung back from the brink of nuclear statehood. Carter was a quasi-official representative of the US, and negotiated the deal that became the '94 Agreed Framework, without letting the administration in on the details. How did he solidify the deal, which he had good reason to expect the Clinton administration would reject? He first got a handshake from the North Koreans, then went to CNN and announced that a deal had been reached, leaving the Clinton administration in the position of either rejecting a deal that it had apparently sanctioned (via Carter), or accepting a deal it didn't want. Feckeless to the core, Clinton chose the latter, setting up a regime that tried to buy off the world's looniest dictator, and then tried to persuade everybody in the world that the deal was so good that it was his idea all along.

Jonah wrote a nice piece about the Carter debacle last year, as a matter of fact.