Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Likudnik Hawks Work to Undermine Annapolis

Likudnik Hawks Work to Undermine Annapolis
by Jim Lobe
Despite near-universal skepticism about the prospects for launching a
serious, new Middle East peace process at next week's Israeli-
Palestinian summit in Annapolis, a familiar clutch of neoconservative
hawks close to the Likud Party leader, former Israeli Prime Minister
Binyamin Netanyahu, isn't taking any chances.
Hard-liners associated with the American Enterprise Institute and
Freedom's Watch, a bountifully funded campaign led by prominent
backers of the Republican Jewish Coalition, among other like-minded
groups, are mounting a concerted attack against next week's meeting
which they fear could result in pressure on Israel to make territorial
concessions.
The attack, which comes amid steadily growing neoconservative fears
that the administration of President George W. Bush is becoming
increasingly "realist" in its last year in office, is being directed
primarily against Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, rather than the
president himself.
Rice, who has devoted an unprecedented amount of time and travel in
the past several months to nudging Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas toward agreement on a
framework that will deliver a two-state solution, said she hoped to
achieve that goal by the time Bush leaves office in January 2009.
"The parties have said they are going to make efforts to conclude [a
final peace accord] in this president's term, and it's no secret that
means about a year," she told reporters, noting that next Tuesday's
meeting is designed to launch an intensive negotiating effort over the
coming months. "That's what we'll try and do. Nobody can guarantee
that - all you can do is make your best effort."
But such an effort is anathema to hard-line neoconservatives whose
presence in the Bush administration has dwindled steadily over the
past two years, but who retain influence primarily through Vice
President Dick Cheney and key members of the White House national
security staff, notably Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott
Abrams.
Indeed, among the most prominent hawks who have attacked the Annapolis
meeting, to which senior officials and diplomats from 46 nations and
multilateral groups have been invited, has been David Wurmser. Until
August, Wurmser served as Cheney's main Middle East adviser. His
opposition to the aborted Oslo peace process dates back to its very
beginning in the early 1990s.
In a press luncheon sponsored by the hard-line Israel Project Monday,
Wurmser, a former director of AEI's Middle East program, argued that
the current moment was the worst time for the administration to
initiate a new Israeli-Palestinian peace process, particularly given
the importance and more urgent threats to US interests posed by North
Korea, Iran, Syria, Iraq, and Venezuela.
"It simply sends the wrong signal," he said, stressing that, contrary
to Rice's arguments and those of other foreign policy realists, any
pressure on Israel to make concessions at the moment would only
embolden Iran and weaken Washington's Sunni-led regional allies which
the administration hopes to forge into an Arab-Israeli coalition
against Tehran.
While Wurmser is perhaps the most recent administration alumnus to
speak out against Annapolis, other hardline neoconservatives close to
Netanyahu are also rallying against any serious peace effort.
Danielle Pletka, AEI's vice president for foreign and defense policy
studies, published a column in the New York Times this week which
accused the administration of aping the policies of former President
Bill Clinton, particularly on North Korea and the Israeli-Palestinian
process.
Pletka, a protégé of neoconservative impresario Richard Perle, was
particularly scornful of Abbas, whom she described as "powerless" and
a "pretender," and of Rice who, she complained has "recently sought
advice from not just Bill Clinton but, of all people, Jimmy Carter" -
the former president who is excoriated by neoconservatives for his
1977 endorsement of a "Palestinian homeland," as well as his recent
book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.
Not to be outdone, the Wall Street Journal's "Global View" columnist,
Bret Stephens, also linked Rice's peace efforts to Carter, even while
conveniently omitting the fact that it was Carter who forged the 1978
Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt.
Noting the political weakness of both Abbas and Olmert, as well as the
widespread skepticism that the parties are prepared to make the
necessary compromises, Stephens, a former editor of the right-wing
Jerusalem Post, expressed wonderment "why this administration has
gotten itself caught in the Venus flytrap of the Arab-Israeli
conflict, after vowing not to do so, and why it has done so with a
degree of ineptitude that recalls the dimmer moments of the Carter
administration."
Meanwhile, the ultra-hawkish president of the Center for Security
Policy (CSP), Frank Gaffney, also took out after Rice in a Washington
Times column that derided the Annapolis meeting as "Condi's Folly,"
called Rice herself a "zealot who has lost any sense of reality," and
labeled Abbas' Fatah party a "terrorist organization" along with other
"Islamofascist" groups, including Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda and the
Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Gaffney, another Perle protégé, argued that the "only Palestinian
state that can possibly come from ...Rice's zealotry will be a dagger
pointed at the heart of Israel and a new safe-haven for terror aimed
at the United States and other Western nations."
The column's title, "Staticidal Zealotry," partially echoed recent
public complaints by two Freedom's Watch founders, Sheldon Adelson and
Gary Erlbaum, regarding the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's
(AIPAC) endorsement of a letter signed by some 130 lawmakers in
support of the Annapolis initiative and increased US assistance for
Abbas' Palestinian Authority (PA).
AIPAC, which is widely considered the heart of the so-called "Israel
Lobby" in Washington, has itself been pressed hard by both the
administration and the Olmert government to support next week's
meeting.
Adelson, a casino magnate with an estimated net worth of more than 26
billion dollars who is also a strong backer of Netanyahu, argued that
Olmert's engagement the Annapolis process posed a mortal danger to
Israel.
"I don't continue to support organizations that help friends
committing suicide just because they say they want to jump," he told
the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) in what was taken a threat to
reduce his substantial financial backing if the group did not heed his
Likudist agenda.
Both Adelson and Erlbaum, who is a Philadelphia property developer,
are major donors to Freedom's Watch, a group formed in August to
defend the Bush administration's "surge" strategy in Iraq against
legislative efforts to mandate a withdrawal of US combat forces.
The group, more than half of whose leaders is drawn from the RJC board
and staff, intends to raise at least 200 million dollars for
advertising and other public relations activities to support its hard-
line positions on the Middle East, according to a recent New York
Times profile.
In recent weeks, the group has employed a high-priced PR firm to test-
market a campaign apparently designed to rally public support for an
attack on Iran, according to a recent article by investigative
reporter Laura Rozen published in Mother Jones magazine. Ari
Fleischer, who served as Bush's chief spokesman during his
presidential campaign and in the White House until 2003, is one of a
number of former administration officials active in Freedom's Watch.
(Inter Press Service)

 (Inter Press Service)
Bush is desperate to make a deal with the Muslim world before the USA
economy implodes and then the USA will have lost the upper hand and
leave the Muslims to set out the terms of settlement
Muslims all know the US economy is collapsing , so its OK to keep
talking a bit longer until the USA collapses completely and then
Israel will be swept away completely and all jews will be forced to
account for their war crimes in full
It wont be long now
kanga