Prophetic talk. He's simply quoting the Bible position on Israel. He is referring to Bush and Powell abandoning a brother or those in need, on siding against Israel with her enemies and about not going after strange gods (Allah) by inviting their priests to dinner, and about Bush and Powell exalting themselves above G-d to make peace with liars and murderers when the Bible clearly says there will be none. Bush and Powell are bringing judgment on their own heads and anyone standing with them and the author above is merely reporting on events. They obviously believe they can serve two masters when Jesus said that you cannot.
Ex 23:32 Thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor with their gods.
2sheep replies: "...He is referring to Bush and Powell abandoning a brother or those in need, on siding against Israel with her enemies and about not going after strange gods (Allah) by inviting their priests to dinner, and about Bush and Powell exalting themselves above G-d to make peace with liars and murderers when the Bible clearly says there will be none. Bush and Powell are bringing judgment on their own heads".
What a joke! Here's what is reeeeally going on (note especially the words, "an audience of fools:
April 10, 2002 Playing to an audience of fools-Tony Blankley
Our allies and friends in Europe and the Middle East remind me of Prince Metternich's description of the Prussian royal court: "A conspiracy of mediocrities united by the common terror of any decisive action." But because it is difficult — perhaps not feasible — for even the mighty United States to walk alone in this world, President Bush is obliged to try to congeal these gobs of jelly into a reasonably solid platform from which he can launch a series of decisive battles against terror — in Iraq, the Horn of Africa and other of the world's garden spots. Since September 11, it is obvious that Mr. Bush has firmly grasped the fundamentals of the situation: Everything must come second to our paramount need to extinguish terrorists who might reach our soil and the weapons of mass destruction that might reach their grip. In the last two weeks of Middle East chaos, among the things that had to come second to that paramount need has been the president's reputation for straight talk. He has reluctantly, but decisively, plunged into the inglorious world of coded diplomatic language.
Or to put it more bluntly, he has been forced to use words manipulatively and insincerely in order to assuage our contemptible, but necessary, allies. Gary Cooper has been forced to masquerade as a used car salesman — saying and doing almost anything to make the sale. If the president can temporarily sacrifice his cherished reputation for straight talk, we Americans who support his struggle against terror must be willing to temporarily sacrifice our scorn for manipulative political language. As I understand the last few weeks, Mr. Bush has been winking to us as much as he can. But here's the challenge he faces. Our European and Muslim friends became hysterical over Israel's march into the West Bank. Even though Mr. Bush knows the chance of negotiating a meaningful peace with Yasser Arafat and the suicide bombers is nil, those deluded and frantic friends think there is a chance and have insisted that Mr. Bush make the effort. To make the effort, he had to — temporarily — agree to work with Mr. Arafat and not call him what he is — a terrorist and a protector of terrorists.
He also has been compelled to insist that Israel pull back — even though he understands that once the suicide bombers start up again, Israel will have to go in again. If we are disgusted by this idiocy, imagine how the president must feel.
We got some sense of his true instincts when he talked to the press at his Crawford Ranch dressed in denim and slouched in his chair. He let Mr. Arafat have it with both barrels. Of course the highest ranking government official down there, other than the president, was a deputy press secretary. When his senior aides in Washington saw that performance they rushed to correctly remind him of his larger — if distasteful — duties. To wit, his Thursday White House remarks with Colin Powell stolidly by his side in which the president announced all the foolishness that is currently afoot with the Powell mission. I am told that Mr. Bush was so reluctant to have to utter those words, that his remarks went through 17 drafts.
Now, the same media commentators who have misunderstood the world since their college days have pronounced that with the president's deeper involvement in the Middle East mess, his authority and credibility will be smashed, should he not succeed. They are as wrong now, in their stylish clothes, as they were 30 years ago in their bell bottoms and beads.
The only thing Mr. Bush needs to gain is Israel's temporary withdrawal from most of the West Bank. And he will get that because it is in Israel's national interest to comply. Israel's grand strategy — going back 100 years to the time before it was even a state, when there was only a First National Zionist Congress — has been to ally with a great power: First it was with the Ottoman Empire; after World War I it was with Great Britain; and after World War II it has been with the United States. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is not mad, only stubborn.
And Israel's pullback will be sufficient, because the American people — if not the media savants — don't expect any more. Consider yesterday's CNN Gallup Poll. Sixty-seven percent approve of Mr. Bush's policy in the Middle East, but only 48 percent think he has a clear policy and only 39 percent expect Mr. Powell to accomplish anything. And by 74 percent to 21 percent the public doesn't believe that if we reduce our support for Israel we will reduce the risk of terrorist attack on us.
In other words, a sensible American public understands our enduring threat from terrorism, doesn't expect any resolution of the mess in the Middle East and supports whatever the hell the president is doing there.
Those of the president's supporters who are getting agitated over his recent circumlocutions should understand that he is play-acting to an audience of fools — and (as Shakespeare once wrote) he is signifying . . . nothing.
In most of the major news- papers in America and abroad, the key word to describe President Bush’s recent Middle East policy has been “reversal”. That’s the polite version: incoherence, disarray, humiliation are the words one hears behind closed doors.
The argument goes something like this: after months of deliberate disengagement, Washington has finally relented and re-engaged with the intractable Israeli-Palestinian dispute. After once advocating a crude “black and white” approach to terrorism, the Americans have finally been persuaded by their European friends and Arab “allies”, that the Middle East is, in fact, a painting in greys.
You can’t speak of terrorism and democracy, of evil and good, the argument runs, in the context of Israel. Hamas is not Al-Qaeda. Yasser Arafat is not Osama Bin Laden. The United States must therefore intervene to impose its own solution on both parties. Without such a solution, America can kiss goodbye to its ambitions to move on to Iraq.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is twaddle. Beneath the inevitable twists and turns of world events, there is much less of a “reversal” in current US policy than meets the eye. In fact, the current violence and chaos in Israel and the West Bank, culminating in the latest suicide bomb as secretary of state Colin Powell was pressing for peace, may play ultimately into the Americans’ hands.
To see why, cast your mind back to Bush’s Rose Garden speech declaring “enough is enough” 10 days ago, and to his declaration that Israel must withdraw “without delay” from the West Bank. The headlines focused on the actual news: that Bush was publicly chiding Israel for the first time. But the speech itself — wrestled over for days in the White House and finally synthesised by Condi Rice — gave a far different impression.
The bulk of the speech was a ringing defence of Israel, her right to self-defence, and an explicit declaration that Arafat’s terror machine is directly linked to Iraq, Iran and Syria. This is what Bush believes; it is what the hawks’ wing in Bush’s cabinet assumes; it is what the US Congress — which is more pro-Israel than the administration — clearly feels. And the proof of the real intent of the administration has been in its subsequent response to Israel’s refusal to end prematurely its campaign to root out the infrastructure of Palestinian terror. Apart from mild statements of concern and irritation, the administration has done nothing. Nor is it likely to do so. The critical thing with this tight-lipped administration is to watch what it does. Its inaction and reticence are eloquence personified.
So why the chiding of Israel? What Bush’s speech did, and what Dick Cheney’s and now Powell’s Middle East tours have done, is to take the heat off America for essentially supporting Ariel Sharon’s war.
By publicly haranguing Sharon, by pressing him to do something most American officials knew wouldn’t happen, the White House gets some credibility for even-handedness in the Middle East — all for the sake of the Europeans and Arabs. By going through the motions of diplomacy in the Arab-Israeli dispute, the administration is also beginning the throat-clearing to prepare the world for the next war — against Iraq. “See?” they’ll say. “We tried.” Now you can’t blame us for moving on.
Cheney’s trip ended in apparent failure; so, in all likelihood, will Powell’s. But that, of course, for many in the administration, was the point. What the current Bush strategy is about is not solving the Israeli-Arab conflict — the Bush people are far too intelligent to believe that such a solution is even faintly feasible. What it’s about is demonstrating to the world that no level of “engagement” is likely to achieve anything worthwhile under current conditions.
The new “engagement” is primarily therefore a sham — for international consumption. Its purpose was beautifully illustrated last Friday as Powell swiftly premised his upcoming meeting with Arafat on Arafat’s unconditional condemnation — in Arabic — of the latest suicide bombing.
Arafat, who supports, orchestrates and pays for such murders of civilians, said nothing for days and then gave a highly equivocal condemnation of terrorism, blaming the Israelis equally for the targeting of civilians. Quod erat demonstrandum. You couldn’t have had a clearer illustration of who exactly Arafat is, and the folly of talking to him about anything to do with peace.
That’s quite a coup for the American hawks. More significant are the tangible fruits of the Israeli operation. Hundreds of top Palestinian terrorists have now been detained. Their headquarters have been ransacked; their documents seized; their contacts examined. The links between the Palestinians, Saddam, Syria, Iran and Al-Qaeda can now be explored in greater detail than before.
Of course, there’s always the remote chance that Powell may succeed, and some sort of meaningful dialogue could emerge. Stranger things have happened. Perhaps, as each side stares into an abyss of ever-widening conflict, they might pull back from the brink. Israel might decide, as she surely should, to withdraw from the West Bank and essentially construct a new Berlin Wall to keep Palestinians out.
The Palestinians might decide that they are sick of being used as pawns by other Arab dictators in a bloody game of Middle Eastern chess. If such a miracle occurs, America doesn’t lose. In fact, it would be a wonderful development. But the beauty of the current Bush strategy is that it doesn’t really matter. Whether this piece of diplomacy succeeds or fails, the broader war continues.
The current public clash with Sharon could improve Washington’s frayed relations with the more amenable Arab tyrants, by showing the limits of Washington’s clout with Jerusalem. But Sharon’s intransigence also serves underlying American interests in gaining better intelligence to counter terror in the region. To take no chances, America has been quietly moving the bulk of its military operations from Saudi Arabia to the more stable base of Qatar, just so the war on Iraq is not contingent on Saudi approval.
Domestically, the Bush administration is risking little. Bush still has an approval rating of more than 80% in opinion polls. Unlike Europeans, most Americans still strongly sympathise with an Israeli democracy battling Arab dictatorships and terrorism, and Bush’s conservative base is furious for what backsliding there has been.
Powell should not be misread either. The notion that he is some sort of gadfly in the administration, an internal dissident bravely trying to forge peace while his fellow cabinet members wage war, is a fiction. Powell is as much a team player as Bush is a friend of Israel. Any government waging war must have a diplomatic wing, to soothe allies, placate world opinion, buy time. Powell is the good cop to Donald Rumsfeld’s bad cop. But nobody doubts who the sheriff is.
And if you think the recent flurry of diplomacy is a sign that the sheriff has gone wobbly on terrorism, or has been distracted from his essential mission of aiming at Saddam, you’d be very much mistaken. Bush knows in any case what any hard-nosed assessment of the region will reveal: that until Iraq and Iran have been dealt with, no peace in Israel will be possible.
Those who think the Israeli-Arab conflict is the key to dealing with Iraq and Iran have it exactly the wrong way round. Iraq and Iran are the financial, ideological and military instigators of the current intifada. They intensified the ArabIsraeli conflict precisely to derail the coming war against them. But Bush won’t be derailed.
When the regimes in Tehran and Baghdad are defeated, independence for a free Palestine alongside Israel will be possible. Until then, all the diplomacy in the world is mere window-dressing. And Bush is turning into something of a master decorator.
I thought that the New Testament makes it plainly clear that we will be saved based solely upon our faith in belief in the Lord Jesus. If we are also to be judged based upon what nation we live in, or what our political leaders do, or on what our stance is in relation to a battle between men, then doesn't that put lie to the New Testament?
Why would the Lord tell me that I will be saved based solely upon whether I love Him and accept him as my savior, when really he is also going to judge me based upon my political support of a politician?