Voodoo Foreign Policy
April 13th, 2006A brief note: Field and Stream magazine is out making the argument that Bush is bad for hunters and fishers. My reaction? Of course! It’s always bad PR when the Vice President does something for recreation and shoots someone in the face while doing it. That’s why they keep him out of Disneyworld, after all.
Now to the meat of this coconut. Is the Middle East peace process dead?
The elected president of the PA can’t be blamed for feeling bitter. Abbas was welcomed by the West with relief as a prudent successor to the dangerously unreliable Yasser Arafat. Now, his pleas to resume payments to the PA go unanswered. He did get good news during our conversation with a call from Norway. The Norwegian government agreed to consider restoring its funding, and Abbas is off to Oslo next month.
If it does reconsider, Norway would get an earful from Israel. Foreign Ministry officials reiterated to me that the Israelis will not tolerate anybody doing business with an unreformed Hamas. They predict the PA sooner or later will meet conditions, but almost nobody agrees with that. That ends the Mideast peace process for the foreseeable future.
It looks like it is to me. There are a variety of things affecting the peace process in the Middle East, and a million of them have nothing to do with the United States. Hell, some of the roadblocks on this roadmap are hundreds of years old. However, that doesn’t excuse the Bush Administration’s laziness in Palestine. In The Price of Loyalty Paul O’Neill recalls the first Cabinet meeting, in which Bush declares that America should “disengage” from the “Israel issue” and just let them deal with it. The lazy attitude taken by the Bush Administration is partially responsible for the current problems. And so is their lack of vision.
You might call the Bush Administration’s ideas about the Middle East “Voodoo Realignment.” In their haste to change the Middle East, the Bush White House argues that by changing Iraq they’ll “restructure” the “fundamentals” in that troubled land. There’s some validity to that, as can be seen in Lebanon and Syria, but not enough to warrant what they argue. You can’t just say, “We made an example out of Saddam. Iraq has had elections. Palestine will be okay and hold hands with Israel!” because while those things are true about Iraq, the world doesn’t operate through voodoo.