Times April 24, 2003
US hawks seek to block the road to peace
From Roland Watson in Washington
REPUBLICAN hawks have begun pre-emptive moves to undermine US support for the new Middle East peace plan.
The aim is to suggest that the long-awaited “road map” leading to the creation of a Palestinian state is against US interests. The charge has been led by two leading neo-conservatives closely linked to the Bush Administration.
Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives, used a speech on Tuesday to unleash a blistering attack on Colin Powell’s State Department. The “road map” constituted an attempt by its officials and overseas governments to work against US policies, Mr Gingrich said.
Tom DeLay, leader in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, has warned Mr Bush against pressing Israel to ease its crackdowns in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and to withdraw from some settlements, as called for in the peace plan.
“The Israelis don’t need to change course. They don’t need to travel the path of weakness as defined by the neo-appeasers,” Mr DeLay said. He called the road map “a confluence of deluded thinking between European elites, elements within the State Department bureaucracy and a significant segment of the American intellectual community”. Much of the US Right’s objections to the road map derive from its origin — the “quartet” of the US, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia.
Mr Gingrich, a senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think-tank, said that the plan had been produced by a group that was an “invention” of the State Department. It was “a deliberate and systematic effort to undermine the President’s policies procedurally by ensuring that they will consistently be watered down and distorted by the other three members”.
But the details of the road map and its fate have become one of the latest power struggles between General Powell, the Secretary of State, and his neo-conservative critics within the Administration.
Mr Gingrich lambasted the State Department and, by inference, General Powell. Claiming to speak for Mr Bush’s best interests, Mr Gingrich said the White House and State Department represented “two world views in conflict about foreign policy”. General Powell’s department represented “process, politeness and accommodation”, whereas Mr Bush believed in “fact, values and outcomes”.
He said that the Administration’s policy of regime change in Iraq had been characterised by “six months of diplomatic failure and one month of military success”.
The White House moved to defend General Powell. Ari Fleischer, Mr Bush’s spokesman, said that he was an able diplomat. Officials also defended General Powell’s planned visit to Syria, authorised by Mr Bush but attacked by Mr Gingrich as “an appeal to a weak, economically depressed dictatorship”. Yet the attacks from Republicans of such seniority indicate the struggle that Mr Bush faces.
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