I know Bush. He's your best chance for peace

[RichardP]

I know Bush. He's your best chance for peace
By David Frum
(Filed: 23/11/2003)


For a visiting North American, there was something terribly sad about London last week. Everything had been prepared for a glorious celebration of Anglo-American friendship. The flags had been massed, the backdrop was beautiful - but the stage was empty. I felt that I had wandered into Miss Havisham's bedroom: everything had been readied for an event that never quite took place.

The protests themselves were not so impressive: they felt much less energetic and purposeful than the last anti-war protest I attended in London, the October 2002 march on Hyde Park. What was most disturbing was not the vehement hatred of Bush and the United States expressed by a radical fringe, but the cool dismissal of him expressed by the great moderate middle of British society.

Again and again I was asked about the odds that Bush might lose in 2004, to be replaced by some Democrat who would offer alternative policies: "alternative" being a euphemism for "conciliatory". A good many people, particularly in the media, are telling themselves that if only Bush could be got rid of, the US would release the Guantanamo detainees, withdraw from Iraq and create a Palestinian state.

Think again. Bush may fail. But if he fails, it is unlikely that America today will then conclude: "How terrible that the people of the Middle East gravitate towards violence and authoritarianism. It must be our fault. Quick - let's give them a Palestinian state so they will stop blowing up our office towers."

It is much more likely that Americans will conclude: "Something is seriously wrong with these people. And we'd better take steps to protect ourselves from them." You do not, after all, have to send your armies into the heart of the Middle East to fortify your society against Middle Eastern terror. You can also do it by barring Middle Eastern people from your territories and keeping careful watch over those who have already entered. You can do it by supporting regimes willing to crack down on terrorist organisations by any means necessary. You can do it by cutting back on your presence in the region, reducing investment and trade, striking from a distance whenever any state or group seems close to acquiring weapons of mass destruction - but otherwise consigning the people of the region to stagnate in their own rage.

Many Europeans interpret rage as evidence that the enraged must have been victimised. Americans are less prone to accept such excuses. That's why they execute murderers. That's why they are so overwhelmingly unsympathetic to the Palestinian cause. (Americans as a whole sympathise with Israel over the Palestinians by a margin of three to one; Republicans by a margin of seven to one; conservative Republicans by a margin of eight to one.)

Since September 11, President Bush has again and again challenged the view that Islam is biased towards violence and against democracy. He has dismissed as "condescending" the view that the one-fifth of mankind who follow Islam have unfitted themselves for self-rule - and repeatedly praised Islam as a good and peaceful faith. Polls suggest that Americans are already decreasingly likely to agree.

One of America's largest foundations, Pew, regularly sponsors surveys of American attitudes towards religion and public life. It has found that between March 2002 and June 2003, the proportion of Americans who agree that Islam is more likely than other religions to encourage violence rose from 25 per cent to 44 per cent.

In the wake of the Vietnam war, there appeared a sudden burst of artistically ambitious movies about the US debacle in Indochina: The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now being the two most successful. These movies offered similar interpretations of what had gone wrong - well-intentioned Americans had been drawn into an evil vortex they did not understand, and had been corrupted and destroyed. Left-wingers hated these movies: Surely, they argued, it had been the Americans who had been the destroyers and the Vietnamese who had been the victims? But that message was unheard - or, if heard, disdained.

In the wake of an American failure in Iraq, no imaginable American president - not Wesley Clark, not Howard Dean - would dare propose an increase in foreign aid or other assistance to the Middle East. A failure would be interpreted as a vindication of America's isolationists and pessimists, not its Leftists and pacifists - as proof that gunmen and suicide bombers actually do epitomise the region's values and culture.

Fortunately, it now seems overwhelmingly probable that the US will succeed in Iraq and that Bush will be re-elected; that the Iraqis will gain their freedom and the Palestinians will get their state. And if and when these things do happen, Europeans and Britons will have to accept that George W Bush is not some weird American fad - that he represents something big and important about the United States.

Americans are fundamentally a generous and optimistic people. Those political leaders who have achieved lasting success in American politics - such as Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan - did so by appealing to Americans' best qualities. If the people approve and return George W Bush, it will be because he did the same: because he extended the universal principles that Americans espouse to that vast and challenging stretch of earth from Morocco to Malaysia.

Almost everybody agrees that the war on terror represents a new kind of war. It is hardly surprising, then, that those in charge of this war should sometimes make mistakes. Perhaps the timing of this state visit was one of those mistakes. But over the next five years, there will be plenty of opportunities to correct that error - and for this President who has risked so much to advance the common ideals of the English-speaking peoples to return to Great Britain to receive the cheering welcome he deserves.

• David Frum, a former special assistant and speech-writer to President Bush, is the author of The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W Bush.

Information appearing on telegraph.co.uk is the copyright of Telegraph Group Limited and must not be reproduced in any medium without licence. For the full copyright statement see Copyright
.................................................. .................................................. ....

I also have grave concerns about some of Bush's ME and Israel policies; especially, the latter. However, is there a Democrat out there in never land, who would serve Israel better as an ally?
The media and many Americans and others ridiculed him when he was elected President. Yet, when I, as hundreds of millions did, witnessed "terrorist" destruction of the WTC and the murder of thousands of innocent lives; I thanked God, it was he in the White House, not his predecessor. Yes, he has errored, yes, some of his policies are deeply flawed in my opinion. Yet, no one seems to come up with a Democrat who would not be conciliatory at best, or collapse to the demands of these terrorists demands; only to discover, they still want to annihilate the West... needless to say the US, Israel and their allies in particular.

[Mediocrates]

http://hnn.us/articles/1825.html

11-24-03: News Abroad

Why Bush's Israeli Policy Won't Work
By Judith Apter Klinghoffer

Ms. Klinghoffer is senior associate scholar at the Political Science department at Rutgers University, Camden, and the author of Vietnam, Jews and the Middle East.

"Israel should freeze settlement construction, dismantle unauthorized outposts, end the daily humiliation of the Palestinian people and not prejudice final negotiations with the placement of walls and fences," President Bush said in his otherwise defiant speech in Whitehall. With this sentence George W. Bush reassured his audience that American presidents may come and go but the competition to appease the Arabs with Israeli currency remains in tact. During the Cold War the main competitors were the US and the USSR. Today they are the US and the EU and a media which has come to view itself as the “second superpower.” This means that rather than improve her strategic position, Israeli concessions merely invite demands for additional concessions. The US tries to pacify the Arabs by blocking Israeli efforts to improve her strategic position and that leads her competitors to advocate steps which would worsen it. It was the failure to understand this dynamic which led Prime Minister Barak to try to improve Israeli world standing by exiting Lebanon and offering a generous settlement to the Palestinians. His gestures resulted in a bloody Intifada and a startling new wave of Arab and European anti-Semitism.


This was not the first time that Israeli attempts to achieve some peace and quite were rebuffed. A short examination of the Kennedy administration’s policy towards Israel is most instructive since in 1960 Israel had no settlements, territories, outpost or checkpoints. It was simply a small socialist state created by the UN whose neighbors had refused to accept that decision and openly threatened to annihilate her the moment they acquired the capacity to do so. They were led by the fiery Gammal Abd’l Nasser who was emboldened by the joint American-Soviet determination to save him from the strategic consequence of his mistakes during the 1956 Suez War. Suez not only undermined Washington’s relations with its principle allies but radicalized the Middle East. The Iraqi monarchy was overthrown and Lebanon and Jordan teetered. Eisenhower ended up having to send troops to Lebanon in 1958. His Middle East policy was in shambles.


If Eisenhower’s bitter Middle Eastern experience did not suffice to get John Kennedy to alter the American Middle East policy, his party affiliation should have. Kennedy was a Democrat with a significant Jewish constituency. The Democratic Middle Eastern plank called for peace talks, an end to the (illegal) Arab economic boycott of Israel, “independence for all states” (including Israel), unrestricted use of the Suez Canal by all nations (the restrictions were illegal under international law and Israel was permitted to use them in the early fifties) and “resettlement of the Arab refugees in lands where there is room and opportunity for them (i.e., not in Israel).” It should be noted that millions of refugees in both Europe and Asia were settled in new lands after W.W. II. The Arab insistence of the repatriation of the Palestinian refugees in Israel proper (the West Bank was under Jordanian control and Gaza under Egyptian control) was extraordinary especially in light of the large number of refugees from Arab lands Israel was busy settling. Still, Israel was open to negotiation on that matter provided it is done in the context of peace negotiations which would necessarily include Arab recognition of its right to exist. The appeasers demanded that Israel repatriate the refugees simply as a gesture of good will.


Before he could make a credible run for president, Kennedy felt the need to reassure an important democratic constituency that was nervous about his father’s dubious pre-W.W.II. record of Nazi appeasement. So, he met with a group of Jewish leaders and upon hearing their concern about Israel’s wish for progress toward peace, he issued a statement promising “to waste no time” before using his authority “to call into conference the leaders of Israel and the Arab states to consider privately their common problems.” In a speech to the American Zionist Congress he even promised to convene a regional peace conference, and move toward mutually beneficial economic development. “The Middle East needs water, not war; tractors, not tanks – bread, not bombs”. Israel was cautiously delighted but, then as now, the Arab leadership considered any inclusion of Israel in the Middle East to be hate speech. Then, as now, economic development was the last priority of Arab tyrants.


“Time will judge between us and Mr. Kennedy,” wrote the Egyptian paper Al Jumhuriyya. But to Gammal Abd’l Nasser’s delight, soon after taking office, Kennedy immediately sent him a flattering personal letter. Nasser responded by asking the American president to set aside his campaign promises and put the Arab-Israeli conflict “in the refrigerator.” Nasser’s dream was to unite the Arab world under his leadership and having Israel as an enemy was useful for his purpose. In any case, despite the generous inflow of Soviet arms, his army was not yet ready. For Israel, this meant an unwanted, expensive arms race.


Kennedy immediately acquiesced. “Early in the Kennedy administration,” writes Dean Rusk, “the President and I decided we should not go into the region with some sort of an American ‘peace plan’ and try to sell it to both sides.” But Nasser wanted and got more. In December 1961 a group of African countries sponsored a UN resolution calling for direct peace talks between Arab states and Israel under UN auspices. It was called the Brazzaville resolution. The US not only failed to support the resolution but demanded that ISRAEL help undermine it. David Ben Gurion (whom Kennedy met in New York instead of Washington to spare Arab feelings) insisted that the UN should hear it. Myer Feldman succeeded in receiving from Golda Meir “a firm, secret commitment” not to push the resolution. Who was Myer Feldman? He was Kennedy’s Jewish liaison, the man Kennedy used to reassure American Jews that he was looking out for Israel while pressuring Israel do accede to American policy needs including cutting a deal to repatriate Arab refugees without Arab acceptance of Israel’s right to exist. Oh, yes. The United States was busy trying to sell an American plan to both sides; it was only the “peace plan” that was put “on ice.” What did Myer Feldman get for Israel? Defensive Hawk missiles. It was to be to be the beginning of a tradition. Israel could count on the US to provide her with the arms to defend herself if not to achieve peace.


What did Kennedy get for this betrayal of his promises and ideals? Not a thing. On July 10, 1961 Kennedy sent a note to Bundy demanding to know whose idea it was for him to send letters to the Middle Eastern Arab leaders. “The reaction was so sour I would like to know whose idea it was, what they hoped to accomplish and what they think we have now accomplished”. It prevented us from looking “hopelessly pro-Israel” was Dean Rusk’s answer. Perhaps so, but the result of the appeasement was increased Egyptian adventurism. Nasser sent troops to Yemen to help the revolutionary side and plotted to overthrow the Saudi monarchy. In 1963 it was Kennedy’s turn to send troops to the Middle East. This time it was called “operation Hard Surface” and its purpose was to protect the Saudi regime from Nasser. The mission was kept secret from the American people but not from the Arab people. The Egyptian media focused attention on the “entry of Jewish American soldiers” also known as the “enemies of God” into Islam’s holy land. This, like all other Egyptian anti-American vitriol, was ignored. Yes, Osama Bin Laden had a predecessor.

Aid to Egypt continued flowing and Kennedy never broke his promise to keep the Arab – Israeli conflict “in the refrigerator.”


The only difference between Bush’s demand that Israel not “prejudice” peace and Kennedy’s demand that it agree to keep the conflict “on ice” is in the word peace. The first president to use the word peace was Lyndon Johnson after the 1967 war. Kennedy told the Zionists of America that only “time will tell whether Israel will continue to exist.” But Johnson, too, insisted that Israel not “prejudice” the peace by creating a Palestinian entity in the West Bank and Gaza. During the 1973 war Israel was not permitted to “prejudice” the peace by withdrawing to the Sinai passes. Any Israeli attempt to change the status quo meets impeccable American opposition. The result is continued conflict and increased resentment of the people who suffer from the conflict. George W. Bush seems finally ready to end the American support for Middle Eastern tyrants. Isn’t it time he also end the failed freeze policy? After all, nothing will motivate the Palestinians to cut a peace deal with Israel more than the fear that the fence will end up representing the final borders between Israel and Palestine.

[RichardP]

Originally posted by Mediocrates
http://hnn.us/articles/1825.html

11-24-03: News Abroad

Why Bush's Israeli Policy Won't Work
By Judith Apter Klinghoffer

Ms. Klinghoffer is senior associate scholar at the Political Science department at Rutgers University, Camden, and the author of Vietnam, Jews and the Middle East.

"Israel should freeze settlement construction, dismantle unauthorized outposts, end the daily humiliation of the Palestinian people and not prejudice final negotiations with the placement of walls and fences," President Bush said in his otherwise defiant speech in Whitehall. With this sentence George W. Bush reassured his audience that American presidents may come and go but the competition to appease the Arabs with Israeli currency remains in tact. During the Cold War the main competitors were the US and the USSR. Today they are the US and the EU and a media which has come to view itself as the “second superpower.” This means that rather than improve her strategic position, Israeli concessions merely invite demands for additional concessions. The US tries to pacify the Arabs by blocking Israeli efforts to improve her strategic position and that leads her competitors to advocate steps which would worsen it. It was the failure to understand this dynamic which led Prime Minister Barak to try to improve Israeli world standing by exiting Lebanon and offering a generous settlement to the Palestinians. His gestures resulted in a bloody Intifada and a startling new wave of Arab and European anti-Semitism.


This was not the first time that Israeli attempts to achieve some peace and quite were rebuffed. A short examination of the Kennedy administration’s policy towards Israel is most instructive since in 1960 Israel had no settlements, territories, outpost or checkpoints. It was simply a small socialist state created by the UN whose neighbors had refused to accept that decision and openly threatened to annihilate her the moment they acquired the capacity to do so. They were led by the fiery Gammal Abd’l Nasser who was emboldened by the joint American-Soviet determination to save him from the strategic consequence of his mistakes during the 1956 Suez War. Suez not only undermined Washington’s relations with its principle allies but radicalized the Middle East. The Iraqi monarchy was overthrown and Lebanon and Jordan teetered. Eisenhower ended up having to send troops to Lebanon in 1958. His Middle East policy was in shambles.


If Eisenhower’s bitter Middle Eastern experience did not suffice to get John Kennedy to alter the American Middle East policy, his party affiliation should have. Kennedy was a Democrat with a significant Jewish constituency. The Democratic Middle Eastern plank called for peace talks, an end to the (illegal) Arab economic boycott of Israel, “independence for all states” (including Israel), unrestricted use of the Suez Canal by all nations (the restrictions were illegal under international law and Israel was permitted to use them in the early fifties) and “resettlement of the Arab refugees in lands where there is room and opportunity for them (i.e., not in Israel).” It should be noted that millions of refugees in both Europe and Asia were settled in new lands after W.W. II. The Arab insistence of the repatriation of the Palestinian refugees in Israel proper (the West Bank was under Jordanian control and Gaza under Egyptian control) was extraordinary especially in light of the large number of refugees from Arab lands Israel was busy settling. Still, Israel was open to negotiation on that matter provided it is done in the context of peace negotiations which would necessarily include Arab recognition of its right to exist. The appeasers demanded that Israel repatriate the refugees simply as a gesture of good will.


Before he could make a credible run for president, Kennedy felt the need to reassure an important democratic constituency that was nervous about his father’s dubious pre-W.W.II. record of Nazi appeasement. So, he met with a group of Jewish leaders and upon hearing their concern about Israel’s wish for progress toward peace, he issued a statement promising “to waste no time” before using his authority “to call into conference the leaders of Israel and the Arab states to consider privately their common problems.” In a speech to the American Zionist Congress he even promised to convene a regional peace conference, and move toward mutually beneficial economic development. “The Middle East needs water, not war; tractors, not tanks – bread, not bombs”. Israel was cautiously delighted but, then as now, the Arab leadership considered any inclusion of Israel in the Middle East to be hate speech. Then, as now, economic development was the last priority of Arab tyrants.


“Time will judge between us and Mr. Kennedy,” wrote the Egyptian paper Al Jumhuriyya. But to Gammal Abd’l Nasser’s delight, soon after taking office, Kennedy immediately sent him a flattering personal letter. Nasser responded by asking the American president to set aside his campaign promises and put the Arab-Israeli conflict “in the refrigerator.” Nasser’s dream was to unite the Arab world under his leadership and having Israel as an enemy was useful for his purpose. In any case, despite the generous inflow of Soviet arms, his army was not yet ready. For Israel, this meant an unwanted, expensive arms race.


Kennedy immediately acquiesced. “Early in the Kennedy administration,” writes Dean Rusk, “the President and I decided we should not go into the region with some sort of an American ‘peace plan’ and try to sell it to both sides.” But Nasser wanted and got more. In December 1961 a group of African countries sponsored a UN resolution calling for direct peace talks between Arab states and Israel under UN auspices. It was called the Brazzaville resolution. The US not only failed to support the resolution but demanded that ISRAEL help undermine it. David Ben Gurion (whom Kennedy met in New York instead of Washington to spare Arab feelings) insisted that the UN should hear it. Myer Feldman succeeded in receiving from Golda Meir “a firm, secret commitment” not to push the resolution. Who was Myer Feldman? He was Kennedy’s Jewish liaison, the man Kennedy used to reassure American Jews that he was looking out for Israel while pressuring Israel do accede to American policy needs including cutting a deal to repatriate Arab refugees without Arab acceptance of Israel’s right to exist. Oh, yes. The United States was busy trying to sell an American plan to both sides; it was only the “peace plan” that was put “on ice.” What did Myer Feldman get for Israel? Defensive Hawk missiles. It was to be to be the beginning of a tradition. Israel could count on the US to provide her with the arms to defend herself if not to achieve peace.


What did Kennedy get for this betrayal of his promises and ideals? Not a thing. On July 10, 1961 Kennedy sent a note to Bundy demanding to know whose idea it was for him to send letters to the Middle Eastern Arab leaders. “The reaction was so sour I would like to know whose idea it was, what they hoped to accomplish and what they think we have now accomplished”. It prevented us from looking “hopelessly pro-Israel” was Dean Rusk’s answer. Perhaps so, but the result of the appeasement was increased Egyptian adventurism. Nasser sent troops to Yemen to help the revolutionary side and plotted to overthrow the Saudi monarchy. In 1963 it was Kennedy’s turn to send troops to the Middle East. This time it was called “operation Hard Surface” and its purpose was to protect the Saudi regime from Nasser. The mission was kept secret from the American people but not from the Arab people. The Egyptian media focused attention on the “entry of Jewish American soldiers” also known as the “enemies of God” into Islam’s holy land. This, like all other Egyptian anti-American vitriol, was ignored. Yes, Osama Bin Laden had a predecessor.

Aid to Egypt continued flowing and Kennedy never broke his promise to keep the Arab – Israeli conflict “in the refrigerator.”


The only difference between Bush’s demand that Israel not “prejudice” peace and Kennedy’s demand that it agree to keep the conflict “on ice” is in the word peace. The first president to use the word peace was Lyndon Johnson after the 1967 war. Kennedy told the Zionists of America that only “time will tell whether Israel will continue to exist.” But Johnson, too, insisted that Israel not “prejudice” the peace by creating a Palestinian entity in the West Bank and Gaza. During the 1973 war Israel was not permitted to “prejudice” the peace by withdrawing to the Sinai passes. Any Israeli attempt to change the status quo meets impeccable American opposition. The result is continued conflict and increased resentment of the people who suffer from the conflict. George W. Bush seems finally ready to end the American support for Middle Eastern tyrants. Isn’t it time he also end the failed freeze policy? After all, nothing will motivate the Palestinians to cut a peace deal with Israel more than the fear that the fence will end up representing the final borders between Israel and Palestine.
Great article, Mediocrates, as I am in a quandary, as are most, about Bush’s “policy” in the Middle East and specifically, Israel. I posted Frum’s article more for affect to see what you, I and others feel must be done or not done.
I am not an American, but hold great interest in her government’s foreign policy; as it affects the world as a whole. I have no answers, no solutions; sure I can be an armchair Commander-in-Chief, as we all are at times. American policies, past and present regarding Israel are now a domino effect. Who will be left to pick up the pieces? Israel, as always.

[Mediocrates]

I don't think Bush has a middle eastern policy. I think that like all well trained MBA's (me too!) he operates in 100% Crisis Management mode. There doesn't appear to a great deal of strategic depth and that's why we see so many conflicting statements.

[RichardP]

Originally posted by Mediocrates
I don't think Bush has a middle eastern policy. I think that like all well trained MBA's (me too!) he operates in 100% Crisis Management mode. There doesn't appear to a great deal of strategic depth and that's why we see so many conflicting statements.
Yes, good point, Mediocrates, I believe much of Bush's no Middle-Eastern policy is those, whom he has chosen as advisers. Any leadership, be it government, corporate is only as good as those, with whom the CEO or president surrounds himself/herself. I believe if, Bush should be fortunate and be re-elected; he must do some boardroom deep cleaning.

[elke]

Originally posted by RichardP
Yes, good point, Mediocrates, I believe much of Bush's no Middle-Eastern policy is those, whom he has chosen as advisers. Any leadership, be it government, corporate is only as good as those, with whom the CEO or president surrounds himself/herself. I believe if, Bush should be fortunate and be re-elected; he must do some boardroom deep cleaning.

But it goes the other way around, too! The people the manager chooses reflect his/her capabilities! In addition, the whole point of various people in charge of various departments, is to have someone knowledgeable, who concentrates on his/her job alone, - and then it's the job of the manager to weave the information received from all these people into a cogent policy! Which is then ordered to be implemented through those same people, who supplied the information.

That's why the President's (or any manager's, for that matter) intelligence level is extremely important! First of all, the person has to be intelligent enough to pick the appropriate people for the various jobs. However, the second part is even more important: the President has to have a vision, a policy, and an ability to sift through the information provided to him, and balance the interests of the various departments against the needs of the country.

IMO, the individuals involved in the Cabinet are adequate. It's the leadership that isn't! I know that it's fashionable to blame Powell for all the MidEast back and forth; but IMO, the responsibility is squarely with Bush! Not only because he picked Powell in the first place; but mostly because Powell, from where I sit, seems to be preaching what the State Department is supposed to be preaching: diplomacy... compromise... appeasement... Historically and legitimately, it's the State Department's job!

The State Department - as is the case with all the other departments, - is only carrying out Bush's will. Let me put it this way: Bush is either in agreement with them (and if he is "convinced" by the specific person(s), then he is no leader in the first place); - or he is a very poor manager, who cannot control the situation. Either way, is he really the best option?

[mrsherwin]

Bush does not really understand jewish interests nor does the world . we need to be more willing to tell people exactly what we want as i feel being more specific will provoke more specific responses from our american allies