KT McFarland Thinks Middle East War is Possible, Since the World Didn't End on Saturday

Before launching into the nitty-gritty with KT McFarland, Imus recalled how the two ran into each other in the hallways of Fox a few days ago. “I asked you something, and I was only half-listening,” he said. “Neither of us can remember what it was.”
 
With that riveting story under his belt, Imus moved on to relatively less earth-shattering subjects, like President Obama and Bibi Netanyahu meeting in the Oval Office this past Friday.
 
“I think he threw Israel under the bus, and I think he did it very deliberately,” McFarland, a Fox News national security analyst, said of Obama’s speech on Thursday calling for peace negotiations in the Middle East to include pre-1967 borders for Israel. “The question is why did he do it?”
 
At their joint press conference, McFarland observed that the President “looked at Netanyahu with contempt,” while the Israeli Prime Minister regarded Obama “with concern.” She further asserted that Obama is trying to affect regime change in Israel to try to get a prime minister “he thinks he can deal with.”
 
Or, Obama is preparing for the United Nations vote in the fall to determine Palestinian statehood, which the United States has historically voted against. “Obama could go to the U.N. and say, ‘Look, I tried to get negotiations started, nothing happened, now we declare Palestine a state,’” McFarland said. “And, frankly, I think then there’s a war.”
 
Golan HeightsShe doesn’t necessarily think, as others do, that Bibi lectured the President, but pointed out that the most important part of any discussion about Israel’s borders is figuring out who gets the Golan Heights, which she visited just a few months ago.
 
“You stand there, you see Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel,” she told Imus. “You see the whole region. And whoever controls those Golan Heights controls the region. And that, I think, is what the debate is about.” Right now occupied by Israel, the Golan Heights is technically in Syrian territory.
 
And even if some sort of Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement is cobbled together, the question of who enforces it looms large. “That’s a part of the world where people have been fighting for 3,000 years,” McFarland said. “They don’t look at a peace agreement as the end of the deal. They look at the peace agreement as a cessation, a pause in the fighting until they take up their arms again.”
 
Israel’s only perceived ally in the region has been Egypt, with whom it has long held a peace treaty that is now threatened by the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise in the country since Hosni Mubarak was removed from power in February.
 
“The Muslim Brotherhood, poised to do well in the elections, is talking about abrogating the peace treaty,” McFarland said, and agreed with Imus’s observation that there will never be peace in the Middle East in either of their lifetimes. In fact, during a trip to Israel last Thanksgiving, she noticed the groups in the area stockpiling missiles in preparation for war.
 
Among the reasons war between Israel and its many enemies would occur is the desire for leaders in Syria and Iran to deflect attention away from their own domestic problems. She believes tensions will peak in September, when the UN vote is set to happen.
 
But tension had already peaked on Imus’s forehead, from which he had 26 stitches extracted last week, and which he was instructed to rub for two minutes each day to help it heal. For some reason, he decided those two minutes should be during his interview with McFarland, and he was now in need of some Vicodin.
 
“I’ve had a lot of people interview me,” she said. “And nobody’s ever concluded at the end that it’s time to take pain medication.”
 
-Julie Kanfer