Yo Zbig! What a surprise seeing you here-UPDATE

Eric "Fingerman" Fingerhut takes a break from dismantling Timesian critiques of American Idol to wonder why, after all the contortions the Obama campaign assumed to persuade us that Zbigniew Brzezinski had no role, no, none at all, in advising the candidate, he seems to now be advising the president.

The New York Times even added that Obama had dropped in on the meeting — which also included a number of other former national security advisers, although not Condi Rice or Stephen Hadley from the Bush II administration (Colin Powell, who was NSA during Bush I but Secretary of State during W.’s first term, was part of the meeting.)

This is really kind of stunning, when one looks back at the efforts the Obama campaign went to in order to make sure Jewish voters knew that they had nothing to do with Brzezinski and his ideas on the Middle East. And there was good reason for that: Brzezinski is not considered much of a friend of Israel by many pro-Israel voters. Last fall, he even suggested that if Israel sent jets to attack Iran’s nuclear program, the U.S. should shoot them down.

Obama surrogates, and even Obama himself, insisted that they had virtually nothing to do with Brzezinski, constantly making this case to Jewish and pro-Israel voters for months.

UPDATE: I should note — as Eric does in his blog post — that Brzezinski’s presence at the meeting does not constitute proof that he advised the campaign. The folks who told us then of his limited involvement (a lunch with the candidate, a single conference call, an introduction at a university rally) were not dissembling then; the people who were trying to spin those three minor involvements into a major role were. I’ve covered two presidential campaigns now, and "adviser" is a full-time job, never more than a Blackberry buzz away, living in HQ when you’re not on the road as a proxy. And the people then (in the Clinton and McCain campaigns) who pretended Brzezinski had that role must have known better, as their camps also had fulltime "advisers" and peripheral boosters.

In fact — like in all campaigns — there was a weird echo chamber going on. There were Democrats who took aim at McCain for taking "advice" from Brent Scowcroft (who also attended the meeting Eric refers to), although Scowcroft’s "advice" was about as susbtsantive as Brzezinski’s, as McCain defenders noted at the time. In a normal world, you’d think that getting hit by a cheap shot would make you think twice about delivering one, but not in politics. McCain’s fulltime advisers were graduates of neoconservatism, rejecters of "realism" and committed to the close alliance with Israel; Obama’s (Dennis Ross, Daniel Shapiro, Tony Lake, Dennis McDonough) were centrists who were also committed to the close U.S.-Israel alliance.

That said, I share Eric’s surprise at the news that Brzezinski is one of six former national security advisers called in to help formulate a major peace plan. Every former NSA in the room (save, perhaps, for Sandy Berger) was a "realist." Where were Condi Rice, Stephen Hadley, even Lake, who was an actual adviser to the campaign? Hadley and Rice played a major role in jump-starting Annapolis, a process that the Obama administration has embraced.

Now, that also said, the advisers’ session was the call of the current NSA, Jim Jones. And Ignatius’ account of the meeting, while relying on an administration source, kind of glorifies the grand old men in the room; did one or more of them point Ignatius to the meeting? Did the senior administration official simply confirm the meeting and then go on to describe the push for a "30,000 feet" peace plan that would bring everyone into the room? Did Ignatius, perhaps unwittingly, collocate the meeting with the former NSAs to the peace plan because he was grateful to the NSAs for the scoop, and perhaps sympathized with them?

In other words, should we necessarily understand from Ignatius’ piece that the former NSAs are critical to the formulation of the plan? Or was this meeting one small component of a much larger picture?

At least one person I’ve spoken to in a position to know (sorry for my obscure sourcing, a product of my Israeli journalism training, but I can’t say more) says no: In fact, the "30,000" feet plan, I hear, emanates from … Dennis Ross.

So why would Ross favor a "30,000" feet plan, going for a comprehensive solution, and fast? Read his books and see what he thinks, post facto, about the joys of incrementalism.

And why would a faction not known for its friendliness to the pro-Israel viewpoint as articulated in Washington’s mainstream want to hijack a formulation shaped by Ross, who is perceived by this faction as being hijacked by Israel?

In other words, why would one actor who reviles another actor as propagating useless, dead-end ideas, rush to claim those ideas once they had traction?

That, readers, is a G-ddamn novel.