The return of the Baker and Saudi plans should be very troubling to those who have been Bush’s chief critics. The pessimists about democracy and Iraq turned out to have been right about the administration’s blithe dismissal of the perils of its idealism. But history did not begin or end with the last few years. If the neocon strategy made sense, it was chiefly because the Bakerite realism had failed disastrously in the preceding decades.
Is our collective attention span so short that we have forgotten how a policy of relying on supposedly stable and authoritarian Arab regimes got us in the mess that led to the 9/11 attacks? And did decades of American pressure (pre-George W. Bush) on Israel to make concessions lead to peace or even moderate Palestinian demands? Clearly not, as the historic blunder that was the Oslo peace process proved.
Every step back from an aggressive support of Israeli self-defense will be rightly perceived as a victory for Arab extremists who will be emboldened to commit more violence, not less.
The truth is that while the George W. Bush doctrine may have failed, it was no more or less of a failure than that which preceded it. And, despite many well-aimed barbs on Iraq, none of Bush’s critics seem to have viable alternative ideas about how to deal with Iran, the Palestinians or Iraq.
In none of those cases does merely calling for more engagement or yapping about the need for peace (as many on the Jewish left do nonstop) constitute a strategy. Indeed, the Baker ideas and the Jewish “peace” camp’s nostrums about more pressure on Israel are just “staying the course” on concepts that were proven to be fallacies even before George W. Bush took office.
It may well be that the Bush doctrine is dead or dying, but those who are so enthusiastically sitting shiva for it need to do better than merely recycle “peace plans” that were long ago consigned to the trash bin of history.