White House Spin Shaped by Jewish-American Israel-Firsters
GEORGIE ANNE GEYER
UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE
WASHINGTON -- President Bush has now called Secretary of State Colin Powell's trip to the Middle East "a success" and said the trip "laid the foundation for peace." White House spokesman Ari Fleischer followed up by saying that the president considers Ariel Sharon "a man of peace."
My, how the webs of history close about us and weave their sinuous ways with us! In a mere two weeks, we have gone from the president's saying that "Sharon will heed my call" about withdrawing from the Palestinian territories -- plus "I meant what I said" and "Enough is enough" -- to these almost Soviet-like responses.
If these last two weeks have been a great success, one has to wonder what a great failure would be. In terms of convoluted thinking and perhaps deliberately deceptive conceptualizing, we are almost back to the Vietnam War's "we had to destroy the village to save it" sophistries, so intense is the sense of unreality about the Bush White House these days!
Meanwhile, Powell, a sophisticated man who understands that there must be a political settlement in the Middle East, was back home, trying to put his embarrassed good soldier's face on the whole fracas. It isn't easy when your president is praising the "man of peace" who just left the Palestinian camp of Jenin in utter ruins, who destroyed the entire Palestinian infrastructure in order to pre-empt any possibility of a peace process, and who now wants to move on to the rest of the Middle East.
The White House's first grievous mistake -- one that history warns clearly about -- was to send an American secretary of state on what is essentially an errand boy's mission. Henry Kissinger has warned against this ad infinitum, in his books and speeches, driving home the indelible point that, when he "shuttled" back and forth to the Middle East three decades ago, he never went unless an agreement had essentially, if secretly, been made beforehand. The hand of the American secretary of state moved not to haggle for position, but to ring the closing bell -- on his terms.
Instead, Powell, a man respected around the world, was sent on a demeaning mission, acting rather as a traveling salesman. His assignment: Try to persuade men who clearly understood he had no power or mandate behind him to buy something that even Powell was not sure of. (A "cease-fire," a "truce," a "political settlement"? Who really knew -- except the people who wanted none of the above and thus could easily scuttle his work.)
The White House's second and related mistake was to refuse to put power -- logical and realizable threats of action -- behind the trip.
Both sides to the conflict, but Sharon particularly, saw that there was no price to pay for snubbing and jollying the American administration. For some reason, "enough is enough" just didn't move Sharon. He knew, rightly so, that if he kept presenting the ever-gullible Americans with one brutal fait accompli after another, they would end up praising him, if only to alleviate their own humiliation.
The third mistake was to continue to see the Middle East crisis -- and this really is a crisis -- in terms purely of "terrorism."
That idea, pushed incessantly by hard-liners within the administration and by the Sharon government, makes Bush appear to the world as a man who has no feelings about the Hobbesian horrors of a Jenin (which will most probably go down in history as a "war crime"), who cannot distinguish a colonial situation from a purely terrorist one, and who is actively and disturbingly moving to undermine international law during the course of his presidency.
A "success"? Our former ambassador to Israel, a fair-minded man, Martin Indyk, said this week: "It is a mistake to call this visit a success. There is nothing to point to in ways of success. What has been left behind is a lot of anger on the Palestinian side and no mechanism in place or momentum toward any future solution. I really don't see that there is anything positive toward the future."
But the avid neo-conservatives, Israeli lobbyists and Christian fundamentalists are bombarding radio and TV with pro-Sharon diatribes supposedly supporting the president's policies.
Day after day, they are pressing Bush to allow "man of peace" Sharon -- the man who during his lifetime oversaw the 1953 massacre in the Jordanian village of Qibya and the 1982 massacre in the Palestinian camps in Lebanon -- to essentially lead American policy.
Meanwhile, the White House prepares to wage war on Iraq and God only knows who else!
Indeed, George Stratford, the founder of Stratford.com, the influential dot-com analytical service, put forth this hard-line with unusual clarity this week on Lou Dobbs' CNN show: "Israeli strategy is something that the U.S. should emulate. You can't predict when terrorists will attack, so you should hit everywhere. We must end up with the Israeli strategy on a world basis: Hit everyone at once!"
By the end of the week after Powell's return, the White House was moving to take still another step in the Middle East. There was talk about sending to the area CIA Director George Tenet, who had done some substantial negotiations there earlier. Powell suggested that Tenet might go back to rebuild the relations between Israeli and Palestinian security officers that were doing quite well under the Oslo Accords of the 1990s. Maybe a mission working together, to dig the bodies out of Jenin? The air of unreality only grows. |
