John O. Brennan: evaluation

Transcript context

…As you know, President Trump put his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in charge of a Middle Eastern peace deal. This was mocked mercilessly for a long time, yet it seems he came up with something when other people had not before. Should we view that as a sign of the bankruptcy of our foreign policy elites, that just some guy determined to do something can cut a deal? It’s far from complete, but it does seem better than nothing, right? Well, I’m glad that there has been an improvement in relations between some key Arab states — the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Sudan on the Arab side — and Israel on the other side. I think this was an effort by the Emiratis and Bahrainis in particular, with the agreement of Saudi Arabia, to give Donald Trump a victory before the election as a way to help him out. It formalized some of the ties and relationships that had already existed for a number of years between the UAE, in particular, and Israel, and it brought it up into the public view and surface. I do not believe that it is something that has helped the cause of peace in terms of settling the Palestinian problem. The Palestinians got absolutely nothing out of this. Bibi Netanyahu threatened to annex the territory of the West Bank and then agreed to suspend his planned annexation in exchange for this relationship between the Arab states and Israel. Bibi Netanyahu has been long opposed to a two-state solution. I just think that the Palestinian people have been deprived of the very basic human rights and dignity that they deserve for so long. And now we have Arab leaders who were basically turning a blind eye to the Palestinian problem, and I think that is very unfortunate. The fact that the United States has moved the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem — it has undermined the United States’s traditional role of playing honest broker between the Arab states and Israel. I think, yes, looking at it just in isolation, it’s good that the UAE, Bahrain, and Sudan have relations with Israel. But at the same time, I don’t know whether or not it’s now going to be more difficult or harder to address the Palestinian problem, which is long, long overdue for some type of resolution that, again, does justice to the Palestinian people. How much do you think about the much earlier history of the CIA? For instance, it came out some while ago that the CIA supported modern art and abstract expressionism. This was seen as a counterweight to the more communist tradition of mural paintings. Do you look back and think, “Gee, that was crazy. We would never do anything like that”? Or do you look back and think, “Well, that made sense for the time, but times change”? How do you view the earlier CIA?…

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