The Empire 75

'Bush's Second-Biggest Mistake.

By William Fisher.

t r u t h o u t Columnist.

Monday 04 December 2006.

The New York Times Sunday ran a series of articles by prominent historians who endeavored to answer the question, "Is Bush our worst president?" In the interest of balance, there was a "yes" piece, a "no" piece, and a "we don't know yet" piece.
Fair enough.
But what struck me about these articles is how little attention they devoted to Bush's second-biggest mistake.
His first big mistake, as we all now know, was turning his attention and our resources away from Afghanistan, the country that harbored those who attacked us on 9/11. We'll be paying a high price for that mistake for decades.
His second-biggest mistake was the place to which he then turned his attention and our resources - Iraq, a country that posed no imminent threat to our national security or that of its neighbors. And he did so on the basis of false, exaggerated, and hyped "intelligence."
That was his second-biggest mistake not simply because the Iraq adventure has turned out to be, as Tom Ricks would say, a fiasco.
Another significant reason is that it totally ignored what is indisputably the most serious and intractable problem in the Middle East: the Israeli-Palestinian issue - the 900-pound gorilla in the room.
For the past six years, this administration has been AWOL on this hair-trigger issue. It is one whose solution cannot be advanced by occasional visits to the White House by Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert, or Abu Mazen. It cannot be advanced by sporadic visits to the area by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. It cannot be advanced by pronouncements from the White House about the wisdom of a two-state solution. It cannot be advanced by hailing Sharon's Gaza initiative, which has effectively turned that strip of land into a prison. It cannot be advanced by the president's endorsement of yet more West Bank settlements and redrawing the UN boundaries because of "changing reality on the ground."
Nor can it be advanced by refusing to talk to Hamas, because that bunch won the support of many Palestinian voters in the kind of fair election the president keeps pressing nations to hold. The president needs to ask why the Palestinian people voted for Hamas.
Whatever their reasons, the sorry result of US post-election policy is to legitimize yet more suffering for the people who live in the Palestinian territories, thus turning up the volume of the anti-Americanism that already permeates the region.
So dire is this 50-year-old problem that it cried out for a long-term, sustained, on-the-ground diplomatic effort on the part of the Bush administration. It required the presence, and the skills and patience, of a Dennis Ross or a Richard Holbrooke.
Now, alas, it may be too late. Our virtually total neglect of the problem, our lopsided support of Israel's protracted incursion into Lebanon, and our unconscionable delay in pushing the UN for a cease-fire, may have robbed us of whatever credibility we once had as an "honest broker."
Still, President Bush keeps referring to "the road map," as if he and his people had expended any energy whatever in trying to lay the predicate for its implementation. There is no road map. It's dead.
No one ever thought it would be easy - maybe not even possible - to persuade Hamas to abandon its refusal to recognize Israel's existence or to give up on driving its people into the sea. And no one ever thought it would be easy to persuade the Israelis to make real concessions.'

Lees verder: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/120406A.shtml