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.
So 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.freedland@guardian.co.uk