WOBBLY VISION :

As most of you will recall, President Bush made some Rose Garden remarks some two and a half months ago, regarding the situation in the Middle East. He then allowed Colin Powell to go on a mission to Palestine and Israel to attempt to salvage a peace process. Some of you will also recall that his remarks were met with almost universal hysteria by war bloggers and neocons. Their dire predictions and accusations of sell-out and wobble are now ash in their mouths, but we'll not seek to track down the guilty parties...

(Well, okay, just one, and not a fellow blogger [you know who you are] but a Timesman. Here's a piece by Frank Rich that was merely dim-sighted when he wrote it but in retrospect is obviously dim-witted : The Bush Doctrine, R.I.P.. Okay, one more, the obligatory dose of Kristol meth about Bush wobbling : Lost in the Wilderness : The Middle East gets worse and worse for the administration.)

Instead, let us celebrate the perceptive among the cognoscenti. Rare were the voices of reason raised in the administration's defense, but Tom Friedman's was one :

President Bush's speech last week was particularly important because he put America in exactly the role it should be playing: restoring clear lines. He drew a clear line for Israelis - that no matter how many settlements they've built, any peace deal has to be based on the 1967 lines. He drew a clear line for Palestinians - that suicide bombers are not "martyrs, they're murderers."

But Mr. Bush did not draw the line down the middle. He was more critical of Mr. Arafat than Mr. Sharon because he knows something the Arabs have consistently tried to ignore: Ariel Sharon did not come from outer space. He was elected only after Mr. Arafat walked away from the best opportunity ever for creating a Palestinian state: the Clinton plan. Mr. Arafat deliberately chose to use military pressure, instead of diplomacy or nonviolence, to extract more out of Israel, and Israelis turned to Mr. Sharon as their revenge. This context is critical, and Mr. Bush has refused to ignore it.

A firm U.S. hand in redrawing all the fudged lines is our only hope. Otherwise the distinction between the sane center and the extremists, in both communities, will become totally blurred, with the hard-liners calling all the shots.

That stands up awfully well.

Here's another, from the day of that speech, that we here are kinda proud of :
FORCING THE CONTRADICTIONS (Thursday, April 04, 2002) :

This was the President's strongest statement since the immediate aftermath of the 9-11 bombings, as he issued an ultimatum to Palestine, Syria and Iran ordering them to choose sides in the war on terrorism. His requirement that Palestinians cease attacking Israel and that Syria and Iran cease aiding terrorists confronts them all with choices that may have terrible consequences. There may still be time for the other two nations to draw back from the brink, but by drawing a line in the sand at a point where it is almost inevitable that the Palestinians will cross it, President Bush seems to have laid the groundwork for a full scale American tilt towards Israel.

Yasar Arafat has always had a genius for saving his own skin, but one doubts that the Palestinians are any longer capable of accepting this final offer of peace; they seem too much in love with death. So the further terror attacks that they will almost certainly launch, or permit to be launched, will in effect make it their own fault that the U.S. sides with Israel. Even more important, by speaking out so forcefully against Hamas, which seems the only potential successor organization to Arafat's PLO, the President basically warned that the next Palestinian leadership is already part of the axis of evil. Palestine's only options appear to be immediate peace or a future war with both Israel and America, a war that they can't conceivably win. Pretty grim prognosis, eh?

If you heard the speech it was really striking how much the language and the tone in which the President delivered it resembled those earlier speeches in which he declared war on al Qaeda. We certainly don't view the suicide bombers as legitimate warriors, but the Palestinians and many others in the Islamic world do; yet the President referred to them as "murderers". That's very harsh, though entirely appropriate, and indicates a real disregard for Palestinian popular opinion and desires, as does his statement that the situation Arafat finds himself in his largely of his own making. It sure sounded like the President is prepared to consider this conflict to be the next front in the war on terror and Palestinian terror organizations, including the PLO, to be the next target.

As the too little noticed piece in today's Jewish World Review revealed, the administration has been walking a path that it has co-ordinated very closely with the Israelis, in particular with Natan Sharansky. When the Bush administration took office in January 2001, they bowed out of the Middle East, at Israeli behest, agreeing that Arafat was not a serious partner for peace. After 9-11 they were sucked back in and decided to give Arafat one last chance to prove his intentions were peaceful. As expected, he failed to do so, and now the administration is once again withdrawing from the process and giving Israel a free hand. Only from within the midst of this process did it appear confusing and contradictory. Unfortunately, in the midst is where daily punditry occurs. That's a significant problem with networks, papers, magazines, and bloggers, all of whom are locked into our modern 24 hour news cycle and few of whom served this story or their readership well.

UPDATE :
ONE TRICK PONY :
Bush's Speech : Yesterday the president cut through the diplomatic double-speak and expanded on his bold vision for American foreign policy. (William Kristol, 06/25/2002, Weekly Standard)

President Bush rose to the occasion yesterday. As he did in his speech to Congress on September 20, in his State of the Union address on January 29, and in his West Point speech on June l, he rose above the morass of diplomatic double-speak and the in-fighting of his own administration, left behind the tired and failed formulas of the past, and charted a new course for American foreign policy.

Bill Kristol is becoming the most tiresome person on the Right--measuring everyone against his own personal standard of Zionism and judging everyone, except himself, wanting. Here, in an entirely predictable column, he not only fails to mention the April 4th speech--which he can't because he criticized it at the time--he also fails to recognize the continuity of the Bush policy--which he can't because he's been the main proponent of the wobbliness theory. America's "new course" has been in effect for eighteen months now. It merely holds that there is unlikely to be peace between Israel and Palestine so long as Yasar Arafat or others like him are in control of Palestine, so why bother to try and engage in futile negotiations. That it's taken Mr. Kristol almost two years to comprehend the new policy says more about him than about the administration.

UPDATE II :
IF YOU AREN'T GOING ANYWHERE, YOU DON'T NEED A MAP :
Making Bush's Vision Realistic (DENNIS
ROSS, 6/26/02, NY Times)

The vision Mr. Bush outlined in his speech on Monday is forceful, but it is far more an exhortation for reform than a plan. Even as
exhortation it faces significant problems. What happens, for example, if Yasir Arafat, still an important symbol for many Palestinians, is re-elected in
free and fair elections early next year? How will President Bush go about making his vision of transformation a reality? Will he give the Palestinian
people a way to achieve what they need to achieve? Will his statement this week have any more effect than Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech
last fall or his own speech on April 4?

I hope so, but I am doubtful. The words are right, but I do not see the mechanism for connecting diplomacy to the realities on the ground. Secretary Powell has been asked by Mr. Bush to work intensively with others "on a comprehensive plan to support Palestinian reform and institution building." Who on the Palestinian side will he work with? In the period before elections and the creation of new institutions, who other than the remnants of the Palestinian Authority can Secretary Powell find to stop the violence? And make no mistake: no diplomatic effort, no reform process, no political talks will have any chance of success if the violence continues, because the day-to-day situation of terrorism and reprisals is a force that will continue to overwhelm any plan.

Mr. Ross nearly seems to get it. But it's most likely that there are no mechanisms because the reality on the ground is that no amount of diplomacy is going to transform Palestinian society. It's hard to see how this speech was anything other than the U.S. bowing out of a pointless attempt to negotiate a settlement that can probably only be imposed after Israel defeats Palestine in a fairly brutal war--much as peace with Japan and Germany could only come after democracy was imposed on them at the barrel of U.S. guns. In those cases, it's worth noting, great care was taken to reconstitute the institutions of civil society. It was not expected that mere elections would create democracy. Nor will they in Palestine.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 25, 2002 10:06 PM