Column: The Middle East Mess Bush Helped Make Messier
With Team 43 it's either too much or too little, but always plenty of talk. Far-reaching yet short-sighted policies aimed at going over the top or doing nothing at all are launched for whatever politically opportunistic reason, then towering rhetoric kicks in, often retroactively, to justify them.
Last year's gargantuan tax cut was, and remains, the Platonic Ideal. The screwiest idea to come down the pike since SDI, the fiscal gibberish was hurriedly thrown together in reaction to Steve Forbes's equally screwy idea about flat-tax flubdubbery. W. needed a colossally fatuous plan to bewitch hardcore conservatives in the primaries, the scheme was hatched, then campaign rhetoric ensued which made it seem as though George had been walking around with the thing in his hip pocket since partying at Yale. Thus supply-side catastrophe was reborn.
The same depth of thought went into the administration's Middle East policy--to use a charitable word--only this time such thought was directed at doing too little. Aside from ignoring the rather prickly issues that constitute the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because the truly Evil One, Bill Clinton, had built a reputation addressing them, W. sat on his entitled posterior and allowed a gruesome situation to become gruesomer mostly to satisfy, once again, his conservative base of a decidedly pro-Israel slant.
For fifteen months he groaned on with the plainly counterintuitive argument that both sides somehow needed to make nice and cease all the firing before the United States would intervene in negotiating a political settlement. Cart-before-the-horse foreign policy, rhetorically tortured to please the hardcore homefolks. That internally political train of thought was, of course, a disaster of international proportion. Former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski spoke for a chorus of critics when he said,"I fail to see how plunging the Palestinian side of the equation into anarchy is a contribution to the peace process." Yet it wasn't Brzezinski's eyesight that was failing, for as an unnamed administration official confessed of his team's policy:"There's less here than meets the eye."
Eventually, conveniently contributing to Bush's Middle East inertia was his Manichean rhetoric about terrorism. The comforting oratory, designed mostly for ringing those approval-rating bells, was deceptively simple and applied retrospectively to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to justify our doing--oddly--nothing. There were good guys and bad guys over there; matters were black or white; the belligerents possessed either righteousness or malignity. The rhetoric proffered a simplistic worldview. Hence we could wink at and do nothing about whatever Ariel Sharon felt like doing--he's the one with a white hat on his head (and not a black towel around it) and loads of righteousness, by the way--because, after all, he was fighting terrorism.
There was only one problem with that approach: the rest of the world and especially the Islamic portion seemed to have this fuzzy sort of third view that nothing is ever quite so simple, no matter how stridently one wishes to rhetorically frame it. Complex realities have a way of dissolving tidy definitions.
For example at precisely what point does fighting for national survival end and terrorism begin? If one were to answer,"That's easy, with the taking of innocent civilian lives," then the U.S.--so the Islamic world said--is backing a terrorist madman, for Sharon approved the 1982 massacre of hundreds of innocent Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla. And today he matches rock-throwing Palestinian children with tanks and missile-firing helicopters.
The Islamic critique can be extended in a way that hits closer to home. When the U.S. takes innocent lives in the execution of a"higher" purpose we call it unfortunate" collateral damage." True, civilians may not be the prime target, but how much difference does that make to the victims? Is collateral damage more properly collateral terrorism?
When American forces during WWII participated in targeting German women and children with incendiary bombing raids, did they fit today's definition of terrorists? What was Wounded Knee? A necessary and strategic military strike? What was Sherman's"total war" in his march to the sea? What was the destruction of Loyalist property and lives in our own war of liberation? Does mere separation in time give terrorism a make-over?
Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States asked similar questions in a recent op-ed piece. He wrote that he was proud to be a friend of the U.S. but"frustrated" that"this strange principle of [Palestinian] resistance to military occupation ... seems to be difficult for many American political, intellectual, and media elite to comprehend--even though it has been practiced by others in the past, such as Nelson Mandela ... Gen. George Washington .. and even Menachem Begin."
In a related note, University of Maryland government professor Shibley Telhami has written that"to pretend that this issue is simply one of a choice between good and evil is to know nothing of human psychology." Yet that is what the Bush administration persisted in doing in ignoring the conflict's complexities. Rather than dirtying its hands in the grueling work of reaching a peace accord that addresses legitimate grievances from both sides, it was busy spewing high-minded platitudes that neatly squared with the administration's simplistic rhetoric on terrorism, pretending one side was fundamentally good and the other fundamentally evil.
The pretense has now backed the U.S. into an even more impossible diplomatic corner, since passions are running higher than ever and charges of terrorism are being hyped by all. The greater tragedy? Far more Israelis and Palestinians will pay with their lives for the Bush administration's sitting back and resting on rhetoric, mostly to please conservative homeboys.
© Copyright 2002 P. M. Carpenter
Fifth Columnist is published weekly by History News Network and buzzflash.com.