Newsgroup: it.arti.cinema
Titolo: George W's bloody folly

Bush's fantasy Middle East plan is bound to fail. It
will strengthen those who want war, not peace
Jonathan Freedland Wednesday June 26, 2002 The Guardian
That was a fantastic speech. Quite literally,
fantastic. George Bush's address on the Middle East,
delivered outside the White House on Monday evening,
consisted, from beginning to end, of fantasy. It bore
so little relation to reality that diplomats around the
world spent yesterday shaking their heads in disbelief,
before sinking into gloom and despair. Our own Foreign
Office tried gamely to spot the odd nugget of sense in
the Bush text - but, they admitted, it was an uphill
struggle. Israelis committed to a political resolution
of the conflict were heartbroken. Even Shimon Peres,
foreign minister in Ariel Sharon's coalition,
reportedly called the speech "a fatal mistake",
warning: "A bloodbath can be expected." The core of the
president's message was that the Palestinians must
embark on a sweeping process of internal reform before
they can even think about getting back to the
negotiating table. They must transform themselves into
a democratic market economy, free of corruption and
with a separate judiciary and legislature if they are
to be considered eligible for statehood - which, when
it comes, will be merely provisional. Shall we count
the ways in which this is completely absurd? George
Bush is demanding that Palestine become Sweden before
it can become Palestine: it must be stable, prosperous
and boast constitutional arrangements which still elude
Britain - our judiciary and legislature are not
separate - let alone the Arab world before it can
become even a state-in-waiting. This would be laughable
if Palestine were in tranquil Scandinavia. Even there
it would count as putting the cart before the horse,
asking a nation to create the institutions of a highly
developed country before it becomes a state. But this,
remember, is being demanded of the Palestinians -
statebuilders with every possible obstacle in their
way. Like the fact that they are under military
occupation. As the New York Times noted yesterday: "How
the Palestinians can be expected to carry out elections
or reform themselves while in a total lockdown by the
Israeli military remains something of a mystery."
Palestinian ministers complain they cannot visit a
village 10 minutes away; they can pass laws but not
implement them. They are Potemkin ministers, existing
on paper only. Yet now they are to build the
Switzerland of the Levant, where the streets are clean
and government functions like clockwork. This is George
in Wonderland stuff. Monday's speech even had a touch
of black comedy. The president said the new Palestine
should be taught good governance, nominating the Arab
states for the role. Imagine it: democracy lessons from
Saudi Arabia, a masterclass in liberty from Kuwait. But
that is not the president's greatest fantasy. Yasser
Arafat must go, he says, though without naming him. It
may be refreshing to hear a US president come clean in
his conviction that he has the right to pick other
nations' leaders, but this demand exposes fully the
vacuousness of Bush's thinking. For who does he imagine
might replace Arafat? Does he not realise that
Palestinians are angry with their leader not because he
has been insufficiently pro-American but because they
see him as too moderate, too willing to do Israel's
bidding. The Palestinian street is not clamouring for a
man who will crack down harder on Islamist militants or
sing a western song about free trade and local
elections. So if elections go ahead, here's what will
happen. Either Palestinians will deliberately defy
Washington and re-elect Arafat or they will choose
someone more hardline. Any leader who has the Israeli
or US stamp of approval will immediately be discredited
as a puppet and promptly rejected. Also, for all his
flaws, Arafat has an asset none of his rivals can
match. He is still, thanks to his long history, Mr
Palestine: his signature on a compromise deal is the
only one that could persuade his people to accept it.
By rushing his exit now, Bush is depriving any future
peace agreement of the only Palestinian who could
deliver it. S o the president's speech shows a man
unconnected to Middle Eastern reality. But it is worse
than unhinged; it is dangerous. First, Bush has given a
green light to Sharon to continue his policy of
military force coupled with a refusal to freeze
settlement building on the West Bank. Monday's wording
implied that Sharon is only obliged to pull back from
Palestinian cities or freeze settlements once the
Palestinians have worked their way through the US
wishlist. So long as violence goes on, or Arafat
remains in place, the Israeli PM can do what he likes.
Given that the president refused to specify what the
final settlement might look like - delaying that and
other questions to later talks - he has supplied Sharon
with an incentive to get busy now, building
settlements, putting up fences and carving new borders.
If Bush had declared that the eventual Palestinian
state would be on the other side of Israel's 1967
borders, there would be no point in Israel trying to
redraw the map. But now Sharon has every motive to
create his notorious "facts on the ground". There is
danger on the Palestinian side too. The only people
celebrating yesterday were the Islamist extremists of
Hamas and Jihad, chiding moderate Palestinians for ever
believing that politics, rather than violence, might
bring results. Bush has not dangled any serious carrot
before the Palestinians: no promises on Jerusalem or
refugees or final borders. Even Colin Powell's planned
international conference seems to have vanished. All
Palestinians will get if they comply with Washington's
demands is a provisional state on 42% of the West Bank.
Maybe. Few will consider that a prize worth the
sacrifice of their own leader and a national
transformation. So this new plan of Bush's is a flight
of errant, irresponsible fancy that can only fail,
bringing more bloodshed and ruin to the peoples of the
Middle East who are desperate for something better. But
it will reverberate far beyond. It will damage the
international standing of the US president and America
along with it. Muslim and Arab nations will be
antagonised by this plan of inaction, while
chancelleries from London to Moscow will realise they
are dealing with a leader who pays no lip-service to
them - or to basic reality. This is a foreign policy
failure for George Bush. If he were a Democrat, both
the Washington press corps and Congress would already
be racking it up alongside the unextinguished threat
from al-Qaida and the continued freedom from captivity
of Osama bin Laden. Those failures, and now the
guarantee of further slaughter in the Middle East,
should be prompting hard questions about Bush and his
war on terror. America needs to snap out of its
post-9/11 torpor of consensus and realise there is a
leadership problem in the US - and his name is George
Bush. 
j.fre...@guardian.co.uk

Shall we count the ways in which this is completely absurd? 
(...)
delizioso :-)
vanz
--
"It came with a black dude but it kept being pulled over"
MIB II