Catching it from all sides...
Tucson, Arizona Wednesday, 10 April 2002
Bush can't 'nuance' his way out of mess
By George F. Will
President Bush used a clunky verb when, speaking to a British television interviewer, he blurted out a thought that, it is to be hoped, indicated his increasing discomfort with his policies:
"Look, my job isn't to try to nuance. My job is to tell people what I think." He has stopped doing that just as Colin Powell, cloaked in the perishable raiment of Bush's prestige, has embarked on a trip for which a successful outcome cannot even be defined.
Bush, who despises Yasser Arafat as much as he relishes moral clarity, has lost the latter by speaking what he knows is nonsense about the former.
He is continuing the bankrupt policy of treating Arafat as a legitimate leader and seeker of peace, while an unnamed "senior administration official" speaks to The New York Times about not "compromising the principle of zero tolerance for terrorism."
Bush says, "Enough is enough," meaning . . . what? That there has been "enough" (how much would be excessive?) Arafat terror? "Enough" (more would be excessive?) of Israel's self-defense? He demands that Israel do something - something momentous - and that Arafat say "something."
He demands that Israel truncate a military operation crucial to its security - perhaps even to its survival. And Bush says Arafat "ought to at least say something."
But Arafat was listening, and probably snickering, last Thursday when Bush, in the White House Rose Garden, said Arafat "has not consistently opposed or confronted terrorism."
Some preposterous process of interagency negotiation put the word "consistently" into Bush's reference to a man whose vocation for nearly four decades has been terrorism.
In 1974, in Rabat, Morocco, a meeting of Arab dictatorships anointed a terrorist organization, Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization, "the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people."
And last Sunday, on ABC's "This Week," Amr Moussa, the secretary-general of the League of Arab Nations, asserted that "Arafat is the elected representative - the elected chairman of the Palestinians." Yes, and Stalin was elected by the Politburo.
Ari Fleischer, Bush's spokesman, says Bush believes that the path to peace "goes through Chairman Arafat." If so, what did Bush mean when he said, in the Rose Garden, that "responsible Palestinian leaders . . . must step forward"?
That sounded encouragingly like a call to repudiate the 1974 hijacking of the Palestinians' future.
There are two supposedly crucial components of the coalition against terror. One is the European Union. The other is called, with considerable imprecision, the group of "friendly" or "moderate" Arab nations.
But the EU is essentially neutral between the United States and Iraq. In the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, the EU is on the side of the terrorist Arafat. And all Arab nations support suicide bombers.
Although the Bush administration is intensely, and strangely, eager to get Arafat, a recidivist liar, to say "something," it seems to pay insufficient attention to what others on Arafat's side are saying. Such as the Hamas member who says: "There are lots of open areas in the United States that could absorb the Jews."
A "senior administration official" tells The Washington Post that "Israel and the Arabs have a stake in seeing Powell have a successful mission."
But what "success" could please both, given that the Palestinian objective is the destruction of Israel?
Arafat's foreign minister, Farouk Kaddoumi, recently said: "The right of return of the refugees to Haifa and Jaffa is more important than statehood." But of course. The Palestinian Authority could have had statehood on the West Bank and Gaza by now.
But the only state it wants would be one in which the western border is the eastern shore of the Mediterranean.
Hence the supreme importance of the "right of return" of millions of supposed "refugees," or their descendants, who fled Israel in 1948, anticipating the swift destruction of the new nation by Arab armies.
At an emotional, visceral level, Bush is Israel's very good friend - its best presidential friend since Ronald Reagan, or perhaps even Harry Truman.
But Bush's policy, bent by persons determined to nuance into inanity his war against terrorism, may teach this lesson:
Although it is dangerous to be America's enemy, it can be fatal to be America's friend.
* George F. Will is a columnist with the Washington Post Writers Group.
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Tucson, Arizona Wednesday, 10 April 2002
Manufacture political solution in the Middle East
By Molly Ivins
Well, things do seem to be going to hell, don't they? The beauty of having fled to Mexico for a week to escape the endless blat of television news is that it leaves you with enough energy to tackle the subject of the Middle East - if not with cheer, at least with hope.
And that does appear to be the missing ingredient here - the expectation that anything at all can be done about the situation. Of course it can. The Israelis and the Palestinians are not condemned to some eternal hell where they have to kill each other forever.
There is no military solution, but there is a political solution - and they will get there. The United States is obliged to broker the deal because there's no one else to do it.
The situation could certainly use a couple of good funerals, but failing that luck, we have to deal with what's there. It is possible to deal with people who are beyond persuasion by either fact or logic, which to an outsider is certainly how both the Israelis and the Palestinians now seem to be behaving.
Political solutions to apparently intractable situations can be manufactured. While the world has been paying very little attention, the Irish Republican Army has actually been destroying its own weapons dumps. Who thought there was a solution in Northern Ireland five years ago?
Or on Cyprus, where the Greeks and the Turks enjoyed a history of hostility of far superior antiquity to that in the Middle East. This can be done.
The second important point is that the situation demands respect for the moral complexity of the situation. That's where we are slightly handicapped by our president, the moral simplifier.
From the beginning, the trouble with "war against terrorism" has been the definition of terrorism and the immutable fact that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
After he got us involved in this war on a noun, President Bush then upped the ante and announced it was a war between good and evil, and we would continue until we had eradicated evil. Oh man, this is going to be a long sucker. It is precisely because of this rigid good-vs.-evil oversimplification that Bush has been sort of snookered by Ariel Sharon into blindly supporting his actions because they are supposed to be "anti-terrorist."
The worst news I've read lately is several reports quoting people close to Bush saying, "He feels in his gut . . . ."
He feels in his gut it is his mission in life to fight terrorism. He has a bad gut reaction to Arafat. Trust me on this, when Bush starts thinking with his gut, we're in big trouble.
Let me say for the umpteenth time, Bush is not a stupid man. The IQ of his gut, however, is open to debate. In Texas, his gut led him to believe the death penalty has a deterrent effect, even though he acknowledged there was no evidence to support his gut's feeling. In my opinion, Bush's gut should not be entrusted with making peace in the Middle East.
Bush's gut does not like complexity. When you're in the middle of a moral crusade against evil, it's damned annoying to have to stop and grapple with unpleasant complications. Moral complexity is a condition of life, and we will serve neither our own interests nor those of the Middle East if we keep pretending this is good vs. evil.
There are many Palestinian terrorists. The Palestinians also have legitimate grievances that must be addressed. Sharon himself started this second intifada with his cruelly reckless and deliberately inflammatory visit to the Temple Mount.
Took no genius to see what that was going to touch off. If you want to blame this intifada on someone in particular, Sharon is the leading candidate.
It is, however, more useful to concentrate on what can be done now. Any settlement will have to include getting the Israeli settlers off the West Bank - another instance in which Sharon has ill-served Israel.
Removing the settlers is not a job anyone would envy - that's where one sees the fanaticism on the Israeli side.
There has been much discussion of the suicide bombers as though this were some huge new spanner in the works. Everyone from shrinks to political scientists has had a go at explaining them, but it is at base a political phenomenon, a function of anarchy and powerlessness.
I believe Sharon has reacted in a criminally stupid way, guaranteed to do no good at all. He is so focused on his old enemy Arafat that he is destroying Al Fatah, which will leave, of course, only Hamas.
Actually, as a conflict, the Israeli-Palestinian mess is a known quantity, similar to other conflicts over territory. It is the United States that is facing the truly bizarre situation: terrorists without territory.
I think American Jews have an important role to play in this delicate and dangerous situation.
The impulse of all Jews to support Israel totally - especially when Israelis are being blown up - is entirely understandable. But it's not necessarily helpful to Israel in this situation.
I do not think this is a time that calls for uncritical support. But anyone who tells you criticizing Israel at this parlous time is somehow helping the Palestinians must be as dumb as, well, John Ashcroft, who maintains that to question Bush is to help terrorists.
It truly doesn't help to play the blame game, but this administration was warned again and again that the escalating violence would finally break into catastrophe. And still they did nothing, apparently out of blind anti-Clintonism: Clinton pushed for a Middle East peace, therefore Bush wouldn't. Hell of a policy. Onward.
If Bush had any imagination, he could put together an extraordinary peace commission involving any combination of Jimmy Carter, Colin Powell, Bill Clinton, George Mitchell, James Baker, Kofi Annan, Nelson Mandela - you get the idea.
You can name your own players. Meantime, all we can do is wish Godspeed to Powell.
* Molly Ivins is a columnist with Creators Syndicate. |
