May 12, 2002

In fairness, and for the record, the primary responsibility for the current horrors in the Middle East lies squarely on the Israeli and Palestinian leadership, which has been execrable. A bit of recent history, as a reminder of how we all got to the current wretched pass:

In July of 2000, Yassir Arafat walked away from the best deal any real-world Israeli government was going to offer. The Palestinians had a legitimate grievance that even this left a good many Israeli settlements in place on Palestinian land, but the Israeli offer was something to negotiate from, not walk away from.

Arafat walked, and things started to go downhill.

In September of 2000, Ariel Sharon went to the Temple Mount, AKA Al-Aqsa, with about five thousand bodyguards. He did this apparently with the sole purpose of inflaming the Palestinians - which he accomplished all too well.

The second Intifada erupted, and things were going downhill much, much faster. Just as Sharon played into the hands of of Hamas extremists, so the Palestinians played into the hands of Sharon. Years, even decades of peacemaking efforts unraveled in months.

At the end of March, with a Palestinian suicide bombing every day - now a cafe, now a supermarket, now a Passover seder - the Israelis were driven beyond all patience, and were bound to respond. Sharon's response, all too typically for him, has been to repeat on the West Bank the disastrous folly of his 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

Remember, though, that things did not come to these horrors overnight - it took 18 months to get there. Meanwhile, back in the good old USA, five Supreme Court justices made George W. Bush president. He promptly washed his hands of Middle East peacemaking. He had other priorities - mainly lining his campaign contributors' pockets.

Moreover, the Bush Administration - as mouthpiece Ari Fleischer recently let slip - had an abiding belief that anything Bill Clinton did must be bad. Bill Clinton tried to drag the Israelis and Palestinians to a peace agreement. Ergo, that was bad, and the Bushters would not dirty their pristine hands with it. Bush can't be blamed for the brutal stupidity of Arafat and Sharon - but he can and should be blamed for ignoring it for more than a year.

September 11 should have been a warning signal that something had to be done about the Middle East. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, the Bushters actually showed some good sense. At first they avoided getting sidetracked by Iraq, and focused on al-Qaeda and the Taliban. But no sooner did the war start going well than they lost that focus.

For the first three months of 2002, the sole apparent Middle East policy of the Bush administration was to gin up a war against Iraq. Now, Saddam Hussein is a thoroughly vicious character, and the world will not be a whit poorer for his passing. But he has never been a significant player in international terrorism, and the alleged connections between Saddam and al-Qaeda are tenuous at best.

It is hard to avoid the suspicion that the obsession with getting Saddam has more to do with settling a Bush family score than with any strategic objective.

Meanwhile, while Bush was fiddling the Middle East burned. Now it has blown up - and the utter vacuity and incoherence of Bush Middle East policy has been exposed to the world in the worst possible way. Bush has been shown as unable to make up his mind, and unable to exert any influence when he does.

If it weren't all so horrible, it would be funny. But it is horrible, and not funny at all. The United States has lost global standing in a matter of weeks that it may take years to recover - just as it may take years to get Israel and Palestine back to the uneasy peace that prevailed through most of the 1990s.

We do not know whether Bush, or Al Gore, or Bill Clinton, or any American president would have been able to put the brakes on the Middle East bus and stop it before it went over a cliff.

Sadly, we do know that Bush never even tried.

-- Rick Robinson

Last revised 11/07/2006 ... by RM Robinson

Email me: Lyonesse@compuserve.com

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