Posted on 03/17/2003 10:01:47 AM PST by knighthawk
WASHINGTON - President Bush has paid a heavy price for Tony Blair's insistence on a second United Nations resolution on Iraq -- and the last installment came due just yesterday. On Friday morning, President Bush stepped into the Rose Garden at the White House to announce the United States would join the United Nations, the European Union, and Russia to press Israel to create a Palestinian state by 2005.
This latest statement restated Bush's demand that the Palestinians cease acts of terrorism. And it reaffirmed his insistence that the Palestinian Authority reform itself to be more democratic and less corrupt.
Beyond that, though, the statement amounted to a series of concessions.
1. It hailed as the first step to "democratization" the appointment of a new Palestinian prime minister -- even though this prime minister was hand-selected by Arafat and seems to have little authority over the Palestinian Authority's money or its militia forces. The bold old "Arafat must go" position seems to have evolved into a new "Arafat must hide." Fittingly, the first person Tony Blair telephoned after Bush's statement was ... Yasser Arafat.
2. Russia and the central authorities of the European Union have both opposed and hampered Bush's Iraq policy. Yet when it comes time to settle the Middle East's most vexed issue, both are to be treated as honoured partners. Bush's representatives have sometimes warned of the unspecified "consequences" that may befall the nations that have tried to thwart the American war on terror. For the moment, at least, those consequences don't look especially scary.
3. The "road map" amounts to a return to the old Clinton policy of outside powers trying to coax peace into existence. The Bush people had scathingly criticized this policy: Clinton, they said, seemed to want peace more than the Israelis and Palestinians did -- which encouraged the Palestinians to believe that turning down one American offer was the sure way to get a better offer next time.
There were some good things in the Bush statement, especially his insistence that the other Arab states -- and not just the Palestinians -- must clearly declare their acceptance of Israel. But even if the statement had been perfect in every detail, it would still have been wrong in its timing.
To issue a statement on a Palestinian state now -- with an American-sponsored resolution faltering in the Security Council, with France (the Palestinians' most important European sponsor) in full opposition to the United States -- makes Bush and the United States look over-eager and weak. If Bush intended to squeeze Israel, the right time to do it would have been after the Iraq war, when he would get credit in Europe and the Arab world for his magnanimity. To offer the promise on the eve of war makes the promise look like something that was squeezed from Bush -- which means he will get little credit for it.
Will Friday's statement shake loose any votes at the Security Council? It seems unlikely. But the continued pursuit of those votes adds another couple of days of delay to a military campaign that has already been long postponed.
By delaying into mid-March, Bush has given Saddam Hussein more time to prepare his defences, his booby-traps, and his terrorist reprisals.
He has given the European anti-war movements more time to organize.
He has spent many months on the Iraq problem that might -- if the Iraq problem had been solved in, say, December -- have been devoted to the next targets in the war on terror: North Korea and Iran.
And he has allowed extra weeks of uncertainty to take their toll on the U.S. and world economies.
Let's be clear: Nobody doubts that a Palestinian state is going to have to be part of a final Middle Eastern settlement. Western ideas are unlikely to gain ground in the Arab world so long as Arabs (rightly or wrongly) believe that Palestinian Arabs are being oppressed by a Western power.
The issue that has divided President Bush from his European critics is not whether there should be such a state, but how it should come into existence. Will it be imposed on Israel -- or negotiated from Israel? Will it offer Israel meaningful guarantees -- or more broken promises? Will it be born as part of a larger Arab-Israeli settlement -- or will other Arab states retain the right to wage their own private wars on Israel?
For the past two years, President Bush has been consistently and bravely correct on all these questions. He needs now only to stay the course a little longer -- through the liberation of Iraq -- and he will find himself in a vastly stronger position to make an Israeli-Palestinian peace his way rather than the European way. To surrender that position now, in exchange for a vote or two in favour of a Security Council resolution that France and Russia will veto anyway, hardly seems like a shrewd deal.
This Tony Blair: He's getting expensive.
Well, at least he is with us!
Fine. Just know that some of us doubt the possibility of any "final Middle Eastern settlement."
Well settlement short of the 1000 year reign.
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