JUST 'CAUSE HE SAID IT CAN'T MEAN THAT HE MEANT IT, CAN IT? :

Mideast Misstep : Bush's dismal foray into peacemaking. (Adam B. Kushner, 6.27.02, American Prospect)

President Bush concluded his Rose Garden speech about the Middle East on Monday by calling the moment "a test to show who is serious about peace and who is not." Given how na•ve his plan is--how astonishingly far it is from any foreseeable reality--he may have failed his own test. It's not that Bush's goals aren't noble or correct, but real diplomacy takes more than wishful thinking.

Bush's fuzzy logic, to borrow a term, is weakest with regard to what he calls the "Palestinian leadership." By refusing even to name Yasir Arafat, the president showed that he's just not ready for an honest attempt at peacemaking.

Considering that they uniformly think he's a moron, the Left has an "astonishingly" hard time figuring out what he's doing. We might first pause to consider Mr. Kushner's statement that Mr. Bush's goals may be "noble or correct" but that's not what "real diplomacy" is about. Presumably then it's about the ignoble and incorrect.

But then look at that second paragraph. Mr. Kushner refers to what he calls the "fuzzy logic" of the Bush speech. The logic is apparently fuzzy because the only conclusion you can draw from the speech is that we aren't interested in the "peace" process and Mr. Kushner can't believe that's the point of the speech. After all, this is diplomacy. Even if peace negotiations would be ignoble an incorrect you can't let that stop you, can you?

Who's na•ve?

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 27, 2002 3:50 PM