Bush’s Lexicon of War and Peace
Fawaz Turki, disinherited@yahoo.com
Never mind how disingenuous the assertion was. But when President Bush, in an address last Wednesday at the American Enterprise Institute, invoked peace to justify war, namely that ousting Saddam Hussein in Iraq would bring peace to Palestine, you had to sit up and listen, albeit with measured insouciance.
That’s a new one for the history books: Palestinian independence, according to the Bush lexicon, will come about in the thunderclap of a military confrontation that 225,000 US and British troops, now poised around Iraq, appear ready to launch soon.
Rhetoric aside, for the Bush administration to be taken seriously as a peace broker, it must begin by broadening its focus, that is, disclosing what steps it is planning to take, and then proceeding to speak in a distinctly evenhanded, independent American voice, not a voice captive to, or identified with, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his expansionist policies. Without that shift in America’s Palestinian policy, Bush’s earnest pronouncements count for naught.
To be sure, a careful reading of Bush’s speech does indeed indicate that there has been a shift, particularly on the controversial issue of Israel’s illegal settlement activity — a shift that, incredibly, draws the American administration closer to Sharon’s view, which is that “substantial concessions” by the Palestinians are necessary before Israel can be expected to halt the expansionist enterprise. “As progress is made toward peace,” Bush said, “settlement activity in the territories must end.” He even pledged his “personal commitment” to the creation of a Palestinian state “to live in peace with Israel.” But note here the apparent change of gears on settlements. In contrast to earlier speeches, going back to last June, in this one he dropped any reference to the Mitchell Committee, headed by former Senate Majority Leader, George Mitchell, which recommended in 2001 that, as first steps, the Palestinians should end their uprising against the occupation, and the Israelis should, simultaneously, end their settlement of occupied land.
It is clear that by dropping any reference to Mitchell, Bush was signaling his embrace of the position adopted by Sharon, whom the American president improbably called at one point “a man of peace.”
Long on rhetoric and short on action — including his reluctance to follow through on that “personal commitment” — Bush has also calculatedly delayed release of a “roadmap” implementing peace plans for Palestine, drafted by the quartet reportedly at the behest of the Israeli government, which is “seeking 100 changes,” according to an Israeli newspaper report, to the seven-page document.
The fact is that in his speech the president appeared to signal a shift in his administration’s policy, when he said: “As the terror threat is removed and security improves, Israel will be expected to support the creation of a Palestinian state.”
The shift evinced in Bush’s speech may seem minor, but as the Washington Post reported last Friday: “In a world where every presidential statement is carefully parsed for deeper meaning, a number of experts said the pledge of personal commitment — especially if not backed by action — might have less of an impact than the apparent shift in policy concerning the settlements.”
And consider how far to the fascist right the new Israeli government has moved, with the addition of the National Union bloc, which strongly opposes the creation of a Palestinian state and favors more Jewish settlements, thereby killing any chance for renewed peace talks. What is needed by the administration, then, is a change in focus and a change in direction.
A tall order? Could be. But it is an equally tall order to expect us not to take the linkage of Iraq to Palestine that the president posited in his speech as a fatuous proposition.
The struggle between Israeli Zionism and Palestinian nationalism has lasted for almost a century. Iraq’s role in it has been marginal. While the US invests extraordinarily immense resources to start a war in our part of the world — a war whose outcome is unpredictable and fraught with uncertainties that may impact on our political destiny for decades to come — it has shown little resolve to invest any resources to pursue peace in it. What it has invested in, however, is a close alignment with a new Israeli regime that is far from eager to strike a deal creating a Palestinian state or dismantling settlements. The long and short of it is that Bush has contributed little save empty rhetoric to the peace process. Yet when asked by a reporter on Thursday to comment on the claim that his administration has not “focused aggressively” on the Middle East peace process, the President bristled: “We have been working on the Middle East every day.” Say what now?
George Bush may or may not have been “working on the Middle East every day,” or working on it every other day, but let’s face it, the effort has yielded few rewards. His main concern has been war, not peace.
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