President George Bush continues to act as if he were a ventriloquist's dummy sitting on the lap of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Sharon says he doesn't like Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Bush says, I don't like Arafat. Sharon says he won't talk peace. Bush says, It's not time to talk peace. And so on and so forth.
Most Americans don't give a hoot about the Middle East one way or the other, just as they don't give a hoot about Asia, Africa or Latin America. Americans should understand, however, that as long as the U.S. government assists the Israelis in brutalizing the Palestinians, denying them the protection of international law and denying them their basic human rights, then the supply of terrorist recruits will be infinite.
Why American presidents are so willing to risk American lives, to jeopardize America's national interests, to give away American taxpayers' money by the billions in order to cater to the Israelis and their powerful American lobby will no doubt fascinate future historians. In the meantime, Bush is proving to be totally incompetent in the conduct of American foreign policy.
His ignorance of the world at large is astounding. Apparently, he was not kidding when he joked about never reading any books. He probably demands that his staff give him one-paragraph summaries of complex issues with multiple-choice options. His entire policy, if you can call it that, about the Middle East seems to be dictated by the Israelis and their American agents.
The entire Arab world at last is willing to make peace with Israel, and Sharon and Bush are flatly turning their backs on the opportunity. Sharon is doing so because he has no intention of ever making peace with the Palestinians and says so frequently. Bush is doing it because he does whatever Sharon tells him to do. In doing that, Bush is sending a clear signal to the Arab world that he looks upon it with the same racist, colonialist attitude of Sharon. Arab suggestions and advice count for nothing. Bush seems to think he can always bully and/or bribe the Arab countries into going along with whatever Sharon decides to do.
That is an extremely dangerous assumption.
Among the many subjects Bush never bothered to study is general semantics, and its most important lesson is that today is not yesterday. The Middle East in 2002 is not the Middle East in 1948. The United States in 2002 is not the United States in 1991. The age of the Western stooge is coming to an end in the Arab world. A new generation of Arab leaders is in the wings. Mr. Bush is, vis-á-vis the Middle East, like the old segregationists in the 1960s who refused to recognize that American blacks had finally said, "Enough is enough."
America's (and Israel's) military superiority rests entirely on its high-technology Air Force. It is only a matter of time before the Chinese or the Russians make an air-defense breakthrough that will erase that superiority. And once we have to go man to man, tank to tank, without domination of the sky and ground by air power, Americans will learn that we are not the superpower our politicians claim we are. The day will come when we will not be able to bomb defenseless people with impunity, and on that day, Americans will wish they had relied more on diplomacy than on force.
George Washington's farewell address is the greatest statement that was ever made about what America's foreign and domestic policy should be. He warned against "passionate attachment" to another nation, which, he said, produces a variety of evils — the illusion of common interests where no real common interests exist; adopting the enmities of the other; and participation in the quarrels and wars of the other without any justification. Still another evil is that such a passionate attachment gives to "ambitious, corrupted or deluded citizens the facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country." Too bad Bush isn't a reader.
Charley Reese can be contacted at [email protected]
