In the long run, history may take a kinder view of George W. Bush’s presidency than that of the majority of the American people who now see him as a failure. But anyone in Washington who thinks that he can boost his poll ratings or score a foreign-policy triumph on the heels of the Arab-Israeli conflict to divert attention away from Iraq is just dreaming.
Bush’s latest major statement on the Middle East – timed to coincide with a meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas – is seen by many as an attempt by the administration to change the subject from Iraq.
That isn’t likely.
But for all of the abuse that he and his team have taken about their inability to state their case on Iraq or the war on Islamist terror, and despite the possibility that he may well be the most inarticulate man to be president of the United States since the invention of sound recordings, Bush has said some very sensible things about the Mideast during his presidency.
Last week’s speech is another example of the ability of the president and his writers to state some plain facts about the Palestinians and the ongoing war on Israel.
Coming five years after his clarion call for statehood for the Palestinians – provided they renounced terror and adopted democratic norms – Bush tried to sound some of the same themes again:
“The Palestinian people must decide that they want a future of decency and hope – not a future of terror and death. They must match their words denouncing terror with action to combat terror,” the president proclaimed.
Speaking of stopping attacks on Israel, he quite properly declared that doing so is the “only way to end the conflict, and nothing else is acceptable.”
This demonstrates a degree of realism that was never found in the Clinton administration, which was so busy whitewashing Yasir Arafat in the name of advancing peace that neither the president nor his diplomatic team ever realized that Arafat had no real interest in peace.
Bush departed from decades of Arabist policy, an achievement for which he got little credit. But this is not a moment to dwell too much on his virtues. Unfortunately, the administration appears to be headed for a more certain failure on this issue than even its highly unpopular policies in Iraq.
The reason for this is that just as Clinton once wagered his chance for a Nobel Peace Prize on the integrity of Arafat, Bush is resting his hopes on the slender shoulders of Arafat’s successor, Abbas. And for all the outward differences between the two, Abbas is an even worse bet than Arafat.
Arafat was an incorrigible liar and a terrorist, but had he ever taken it into his head to actually try to build peace, he may have had the power – and the firepower – to make it stick.
As Abbas has demonstrated in the years he has been in command of the PA, he does not have that same power. And whatever influence he might have once had, as even the denizens of the State Department have noticed, he no longer controls Gaza, which is in the hands of Hamas.
Bush rightly won’t deal with Hamas in the same way he avoided Arafat, but the fact that he is not a member of this popular Islamist movement doesn’t make Abbas a peacemaker. Nor, despite his more presentable image, has he shown any greater willingness to do so than his deceased longtime chief.
That’s not the line being taken by senior administration officials, who, when asked why anyone should think the Abbas’s government will actually do what the president has asked him to do about incitement and terror after he never did so before, they respond as if someone has made a rude or ignorant remark.
Instead, they point to “a lot of positive factors on the ground” which, they say, demonstrates the “types of dynamics we’re hoping to reinforce.” These officials are honest enough to admit that these “dynamics” are “incipient, very incipient,” but that’s just Washington double-talk for faith in unrealistic Palestinian promises.
In exchange for these “incipient” measures, Bush is prepared to hand over almost half a billion dollars in U.S. taxpayer cash.