Editor's
Note:
Much is happening in the Middle East so we expanded
this issue to two articles. Let's get right to them.
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How Sharon won US backing for Gaza strategy - by
Suzanne Goldenberg
Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, is fond of
flaunting his connections in the White House, and the
remarkable closeness of his relationship with President
George Bush.
The fruits of that friendship were on full view
yesterday when Mr.
Sharon emerged from his talks at the White House with a
letter from the American president endorsing Israel's
unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, while
retaining control of the majority of the West Bank.
Nearly 15 years after the first President Bush
established the idea under the Madrid accords that peace
in the Middle East was impossible unless the
Palestinians were brought into the equation, his son
appeared yesterday to have lost faith in the idea of a
negotiated peace between Israel and its closest Arab
neighbor. The borders of Gaza - and possibly the West
Bank - would now be dictated by Israel.
The change of heart was widely credited to Mr. Sharon,
who persuaded Mr. Bush that Yasser Arafat's inability or
unwillingness to end Palestinian suicide bombings made
him an enemy in the global war on terror.
"The Bush administration seems to have accepted the
Sharon premise that there is no partner for
negotiations," said Philip Wilcox, a former US consul
general in Jerusalem, and president of the Foundation
for Middle East Peace. "It offers commitments to Israel
without any corresponding commitments to the
Palestinians which I think is unwise."
The territorial dispensation was not the only milestone
victory for Mr. Sharon. In his statement yesterday, Mr.
Bush rejected the guiding principle of the Palestinians
for the last five decades: the right of return of
refugees. The American president also redefined the
state department description of Jewish settlements as
"obstacles to peace".
For all his success on American soil, Mr. Sharon has a
struggle ahead of him. On May 2, he is due to present
his proposals for a withdrawal from Gaza for the
approval of his rebellious Likud party.
The calculation of both men yesterday appeared to be
that a benediction from the White House was essential
for the survival of his Gaza withdrawal plan.
"Sharon must come home with some assurance that the
United States does not see it as a first step towards
evacuation of most of the settlements," said Menachem
Klein of the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies. "He
also wants to be able to say that Washington will back
him if he wants to use Apache helicopters to fire on the
Gaza Strip after the pull-out."
However, the boost to Mr. Sharon caused almost immediate
anger and dismay in the Arab world. Mr. Arafat termed it
the death of the peace process - hours before the
contents of their letters were made public.
Although Mr. Bush said he remained committed to a
Palestinian state, those claims were unlikely to carry
weight among Palestinians, or the greater Arab world.
"The United States may lose its status, or what remains
of its status, as an honest broker," said Mr. Klein. "It
will be very difficult for them. It may also make some
problems with Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. If the
presidential text is very pro-Israel, the Egyptian
opposition will argue that President Mubarak was too
cooperative."
Instead, yesterday's events will probably confirm the
suspicion that the US shares Mr. Sharon's opinion that a
settlement with the Palestinians can only be imposed,
not negotiated.
That may lead to repercussions months or even years from
now, but in this election season the White House has
other considerations. Mr.
Bush is in dire need of a foreign policy success as the
costs of America's invasion of Iraq escalate. With no
end in sight to an insurrection that has begun to
inflict heavy casualties on US military forces and the
entire project in Iraq - Washington finds it prudent to
fall back on a reliable ally: Israel.
"The Bush administration wants to demonstrate progress
in what is still called the peace process, and it
believes that it can demonstrate that progress by
supporting Israel's withdrawal from Gaza, and is willing
to pay a price to Sharon so that Sharon can present his
package to the Israeli parliament and to help Sharon win
his way in the Likud," Mr. Wilcox said.
Israel has also succeeded in wearing down the
administration's qualms about the wall Mr. Sharon is
building through the West Bank by making a few
adjustments to the route. Washington also decided not to
penalize Israel by deducting loan guarantees - unlike
last year when the wall cost the Jewish state $ 300m (
#170m).
Meanwhile, Mr. Sharon's aides brought US officials
around to Israel's vision for the West Bank, sketching
out a division of land in which Israel would retain
control of large swaths of territory, and the
Palestinians would be confined to isolated pockets.
By the beginning of this month, US officials said they
might support claims to three West Bank settlement blocs
- if Mr. Sharon was prepared to offer a more
far-reaching withdrawal.
Mr. Bush yesterday appeared to have shed almost all of
his reservations about Mr. Sharon's vision for the
Middle East calling his plan a historic opportunity, and
urging the Palestinians to see it as a first step
towards a state.
It seems highly unlikely that the Palestinians will
agree.
This is Bush's Vietnam - By Arthur Schlesinger
This has been a rough time for Americans. Just a year
ago, Americans and Iraqis triumphantly pulled down the
statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. A year later, a
spreading anti-American insurgency ripped across Iraq,
accompanied by Iraqi mobs mutilating dead Americans and
shouting hatred of the occupiers. An American year of
miscalculations and misjudgments seems to have led Iraq
into a chaos bordering on anarchy.
Senator Kennedy's crisp assertion - "Iraq is George
Bush's Vietnam"
- crystallizes emotions in the United States and stirs
powerful memories. "Failure is not an option" had been a
favorite Pentagon cliché, but Pat Buchanan, an
isolationist of the old school, now declares, "what
Fallujah and the Shia attacks tell us is that failure is
now an option."
A respected professional diplomat Morton Abramowitz,
asks "Does Iraq Matter?" in The National Interest, a
sober conservative journal.
"America's pre-eminent power position in the world,"
Ambassador Abramowitz argues, "can endure an early
withdrawal from Iraq. US forces are so overstretched
that a withdrawal might enhance our overall power
position and our capacity to do more about Osama bin
Laden and other terrorist groups." After all, did US
withdrawal from Vietnam seriously undermine the American
position in the world?
Vietnam and Iraq are dissimilar in vital respects. In
Vietnam we Americans inserted ourselves in an ongoing
civil war; in Iraq we imposed war on the country for
reasons that turned out to be false.
But Vietnam and Iraq are indeed similar in the
"quagmire" effect - and in the lack of historical
experience and cultural knowledge and the consequent
ignorance and arrogance that lead us into quagmires.
Meanwhile a battle of the books is taking place for the
hearts and minds of the American people. Against All
Enemies an indictment of the Bush administration by
Richard Clarke, counter-terrorism director for
Presidents Clinton and Bush, tops the New York Times
best-seller list. Second is Deliver us from Evil by Sean
Hannity, a television pundit who defines "evil" as
liberalism. The fourth, sixth, seventh, eighth and 10th
books on the list are anti-Bush; the ninth and 14th are
anti-liberal. A new contender, moving to the top, is
Worse than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W
Bush by John W Dean, one time counsel to President
Nixon.
Of course 2004 is the year when Americans indulge in the
quadrennial ritual of electing a president. The
situation today is that roughly
45 per cent of the electorate, according to most polls,
love George Bush; and roughly 45 per cent loathe him.
Most of the 90 per cent have made up their minds and are
unlikely to change their votes.
The remaining 10 per cent consists of undecided
independents, largely in the suburbs, economically
conservative but culturally tolerant. The outcome in
November will depend partly on that 10 per cent. It will
also depend on the turnout of each candidate's basic
source of support. The Bush base lies in the religious
right; the Kerry base lies in the anti- corporate left.
The dilemma each candidate faces is that the positions
he takes to please his base may well displease the
undecided 10 per cent.
Thus President Bush, worried about his base, seeks to
reassure the religious right by proposing an amendment
to the US Constitution banning homosexual marriage. That
will very likely hurt him among the undecided 10 per
cent, who think that government should not interfere
with private lives.
Senator Kerry has a similar dilemma. He faces the
challenge of Ralph Nader, the anti-corporate crusader,
who four years ago took enough votes away from the
Democrats to defeat Al Gore and elect George Bush. Yet
Senator Kerry, in moving to the left in order to defend
himself against Nader, risks upsetting the undecided 10
per cent, mostly moderate in their views.
But will not the war be the decisive issue? It is, after
all, President Bush's war. There was no popular clamor
for a war against Iraq. If we had not gone to war, few
Americans would have cared. Few would even have noticed.
Why was President Bush, as both Richard Clarke and the
former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill have
testified, so obsessed with Iraq? I do not think it is
for petty reasons. Mr. Bush very likely buys into the
neo-conservative fantasy that the victory of democracy
in Iraq will democratize the entire Islamic world and
establish his own place in history. "A free Iraq," as
President Bush said yesterday, "will stand as an example
to reformers across the Middle East."
Other reasons - oil, Israel, the search for military
bases in place of Saudi Arabia, liberation of Iraq from
a monstrous tyrant - are secondary compared to the
historic mission for which the Almighty has chosen him.
To accomplish the mission, Mr. Bush has transformed the
basis of American foreign policy. For the nearly half
century of the Cold War, US foreign policy was founded
on containment plus deterrence.
Mr. Bush scrapped that. The new basis of US foreign
policy is preventive war. As President Bush has said,
"We must take the battle to the enemy... and confront
the worst threats before they emerge."
The immediate reason that Mr. Bush opened Pandora's box
in the Middle East and invaded Iraq was his moral
certitude that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass
destruction and that he was working in close partnership
with Osama bin Laden and al-Qa'ida. Those convictions
turned out to be delusions. This denouement does great
harm to Mr.
Bush's credibility and to that of the United States; it
has got us into a ghastly mess in Iraq; and it has
diverted attention, resources and military might from
the war that should have commanded the Bush
administration's highest priority - the Afghan war
against al-Qa'ida and international terrorism. Meanwhile
Afghanistan is a mess too. Mr. Bush chose the wrong war
in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The impact of the war on the election is hard to
predict. In international crises, the American instinct
is to rally round the flag and the President - for a
while at least. Thus far, the protests against the war
have not been extensive. But Fallujah has been compared
to the Viet Cong's Tet offensive in 1968, which set in
motion a process that drove President Lyndon B Johnson
from the White House.
The war's impact depends on the success of the American
occupation in stopping the disintegration of Iraq and
achieving a measure of stability. It depends on the
possible capture of Osama bin Laden. It depends on the
possible trial of Saddam Hussein. It depends on all
sorts of unforeseeable variables. As Harold Wilson used
to say, "In politics, a week is a very long time." Six
months is an eternity.
In a democracy, elected leaders must be held
accountable. The war on Iraq was a matter of
presidential choice, not of national necessity.
The rekindled memory of Vietnam calls to mind a highly
decorated young naval lieutenant returning from Vietnam
named John Forbes Kerry, who put a poignant question to
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on 22 April 1971:
"How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a
mistake?"
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The author is a former Special Assistant to President
Kennedy, 1961- 4, and author of The Bitter Heritage:
Vietnam and American democracy, 1941-1966'.
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