[iwar] [fc:Fatal.vision:.how.Bush.has.given.up.on.peace]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2002-06-26 06:20:07
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From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
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Date: Wed, 26 Jun 2002 06:20:07 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [iwar] [fc:Fatal.vision:.how.Bush.has.given.up.on.peace]
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Fatal vision: how Bush has given up on peace
A vacillating President and lack of a credible plan is fuelling 
hatred in the Middle East

Robert Fisk
Independent
  23 June 2002

George Bush Junior gave up last week. After all the blustering and 
grovelling and the disobeyed instructions to Israeli Prime Minister 
Ariel Sharon and all the hectoring of Palestinian leader Yasser 
Arafat and all the "visions" of a Palestinian state, the President 
threw in his hand. There will be no Middle East peace conference in 
the near future, no serious attempt to halt the conflict between 
Israelis and Palestinians, not a whimper of resolution on the 
region's tragedy from the man who started the "war for 
civilisation'', the "war on terror'', the "endless war'' and, most 
recently, the "titanic war on terror''. Mr Bush, his ever more 
incomprehensible spokesman Ari Fleischer vouchsafed to us last week, 
"has come to some conclusions". And - this really took the biscuit - 
"when the President determines the time is right, he will share it".

I love the idea of this increasingly incompetent strategist on Middle 
East affairs quietly weighing, like Frederick the Great, the odds on 
the rights of three million Palestinian refugees to return, the 
future of Jerusalem, and the continued growth of settlements for Jews 
on occupied land - only to decide that these weighty matters of state 
must be withheld from his loyal people. After lecturing the pompous 
and pathetic Arafat on his duties to protect Israel it only took an 
Israeli shell fired into a crowded Palestinian market - another of 
those famous Israeli "errors" - to shut Bush up again. Just a week 
ago, as we all know, Mr Bush had another of his famous "visions". 
They started in the autumn of last year when he had a vision of a 
Palestinian state living side by side with Israel. This particular 
vision coincided quite by chance, of course, with his efforts to keep 
the Arab states quiescent while America bombed the poorest and most 
ruined Muslim country in the world. Then this dream was forgotten for 
a few months until, earlier this year, Vice President Dick Cheney 
toured the Middle East to drum up Arab support for another war on 
Iraq. The Arabs tried to tell Cheney that there was already a rather 
dramatic little war going on in the region. And what happened? George 
Bush suddenly had his vision thing again.

Now, however, after six visits to the United States by Ariel Sharon - 
and after Bush was totally ignored by the Israelis when he demanded 
an immediate end to the West Bank invasion and an end to the siege of 
Palestinian towns - the President has had yet another vision, a 
rather scaled-down version of the earlier one. Now he dreams of an 
interim Palestinian state. It is a sign of how obedient American 
journalists have become that not one US newspaper has seen this for 
the preposterous notion it really is. The great American newspapers - 
I'm talking about their physical bulk not their contents - tiresomely 
pontificate on the divisions within the American administration on 
the Middle East. Or they ask whether there's a Middle East policy at 
all: there is not, of course. But the ideas of this US 
administration, however vacuous or simply laughable, continue to be 
treated with an almost sacred quality in the American press and on 
television.

What on earth, for example, does interim mean? I noticed that in the 
past four days, interim has turned into provisional, an even more 
miserable version of the original vision. It reminds me of Madeleine 
Albright's truly wonderful proposal that the Palestinians should be 
happy because they might get "a sort of sovereignty" over some areas 
of Arab east Jerusalem.

But what does interim portend? Talal Salman, the editor of the Beirut 
daily As Safir, wrote in his newspaper last week that interim 
envisages "a provisional state on territory segmented like 
beehives'', with every town, village and refugee camp cut off by "a 
wall of tanks and permanent and moving checkpoints; with everything 
under helicopter surveillance ... with death squads monitoring 
intentions and dreams, targeting anyone they discover, determine, 
speculate or suspect may have explosive materials in their blood".

A provisional state is an innovation no one has ever heard of before. 
It's a state unrelated to its land or to its people. All other states 
are permanent. But the Palestinian state will be a stop-gap, 
according to President Bush, and thus its role or existence can be 
ended in a day or a year if its usefulness comes to an end. It does 
not need to find territory - after all, it is only interim - and 
permanent institutions such as an army (perish the thought), the 
luxury of independence, or sovereignty, or an economy, or foreign 
relations will be denied. This will be Israel's luxury.

And in the absence of leadership from President Bush, Ariel Sharon 
can do what he wishes. He can dig ditches and lay down so much barbed 
wire that a map of the West Bank will portray a land covered in 
blisters; a smallpox of settlements and surrounded villages. Crazy 
ideas blow through Washington. Israelis can discuss in all 
seriousness the eviction of the entire Palestinian population. Now 
Nathan Lewin, a prominent Washington attorney and Jewish communal 
leader, is calling for the execution of family members of suicide 
bombers.

His exact words are as follows: "If executing some suicide-bomber 
families saves the lives of even an equal number of potential 
civilian victims, the exchange is, I believe, ethically permissible. 
It is a policy born of necessity.'' Forgetting for a moment the logic 
of this rubbish - if the suicide bomber has already killed himself, 
knocking off granny and the kids is not going to have much effect - 
it raises some intriguing questions. Who should be the first to die 
in the family of suicide bombers? If the bomber has three children, 
how many of them do you kill? The youngest or the oldest? Or the 
whole lot? Is there a minimum age for execution? Is five years old 
enough to be put before an Israeli execution squad? It would 
certainly be hard, even for Mr Lewin, to explain to a three-month-old 
baby why it had to be put to death. Or would it be only men? Or just 
wives and older sisters?

Merely by asking these questions, it is possible to demonstrate the 
obscene depths to which this terrible war has sunk. To their great 
credit, prominent members of the American Jewish community have 
condemned Lewin's fantasies. And it is necessary to reflect that the 
Palestinian suicide bombers don't even ask these questions. For the 
suicide bombers are executioners, the executioners of whole Israeli 
families. The immolation of their own lives does not excuse the fact 
that, in their last moments, they are able to see the Israeli child 
in the pram who will die with its mother, the Israeli family eating 
its pizzas on a hot Wednesday afternoon, the old folk celebrating a 
Jewish religious festival who will be his or her victims. The 
17-year-old Palestinian girl who blew herself up to kill a 
16-year-old Israeli girl remains an awesome symbol of youth 
destroying youth.

And amid these horrors, what do we get from Mr Bush? Delay. 
Obfuscation. A vague plan - revealed as usual to the pliant New York 
Times - suggested that the Bush boys and girls were going to ignore 
the "right of return" of Palestinian refugees, dump the "final 
status" issues of Jerusalem and settlements on the Israelis and 
Palestinians and - by far the most hilarious clause - would "find new 
language" to bridge Israel's and Palestine's interpretation of UN 
Security Council Resolution 242. This is the all-important 
resolution, of course, which calls for an Israeli withdrawal from 
territories occupied in the 1967 war in return for the security of 
all states in the area. The Israelis claim that they can keep what 
land they want because the resolution does not place the word "the" 
before the word "territories" - even though the same UN resolution 
specifically says that land cannot be acquired through military 
conquest.

It is somehow fitting as the Israeli-Palestinian war turns 
incandescent that this weak and vacillating President should consume 
his time with a debate on the meaning of the definite article. Should 
"the" read "some"? Should Palestine be provisional? Or should Mr Bush 
be just an interim President?

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