Shades of gray, Nixon and the Israeli-Egyptian peace

This article is an example of inability to distinguish "shades of gray" (a topic addressed in several of my posts: here and here). The article describes President Sarkozy's re-election problem. Therefore one is struck by the following irrelevant line:
"In 1974, the French (to no avail) urged Americans to overlook Richard Nixon’s Watergate misdeeds and to concentrate instead on foreign policy successes such as the opening to China and Middle East peace talks (even though those talks were really the handiwork of the late, lamented and lamentable Anwar Sadat)."

My comments:
1. This is a popular kind of a cheap attack at Nixon (here is another example). These attacks succeed precisely because of inability to perceive that there are many nuanced views fitting between "liberal" and "conservative", as they described in respectively "conservative" and "liberal media"; or good and bad, as described in Hollywood movies.

Nixon is uniformy reviled by both extremes of the political spectrum. Yet, though he was not a "good guy", there is too much evidence against squarely describing him as a "bad guy" - I wrote here about his achievements, which define modern America more than the contributions of most other presidents.


2. There is also a curious omission in the quote paragraph - the contribution of the Israeli prime minister Menahem Begin. This betrays anti-Israeli bias, completely uncalled for in the article about President Sarkozy. Yet, as the saying goes, "It takes two to tango" - unsurprizingly this was recognized by the Nobel committee, which awarded the two men the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize.

In this context, degrading Nixon's contribution also means dismissing the achievements by the Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who, for example, was behind the agreements that ended the 1973 Yom Kippour war, initiated by no one else, but Anwar Sadat himself.

3. The two points outlined above are a coherent part of a certain liberal stereotype. I find it therefore somewhat unsual that the article does not mention Jimmy Carter, whom left-wing extremists often credit with everything good that has ever happened in the Middle East (he did though oversee the Camp-David accords that led to the Israeli-Egyptian peace - not a small achievement!)