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COMMENTARY
April 21, 2004
The new smite
I don't think it's my imagination though I have had to read a lot of tea leaves to come to this conclusion. I think quite apart from exigencies of an election year that the Bush administration nay verily President Bush himself is changing his tune; that his own reading of the apocalyptically bad situation in the Middle East is evolving with experience. He is quietly abandoning positions which have been proven na?ve. He is hunkering into positions that have been proven unavoidable. The new song which will flavour his second term if there is one might be entitled No more Mr. Nice Guy. The tea leaves I am reading are all over Iraq and Afghanistan but also heavily deposited in Gaza. Punches the Americans were still pulling only a few weeks ago are being freely delivered. Now the world is getting increasingly out of touch with America. This is evident in the common assumption that the Democrat presidential candidate John Kerry would offer a kinder gentler version of American statecraft and therefore deserves the prayers of the world's peaceniks. Mr. Kerry though essentially a man of the left is a political weathercock. Read carefully what he has been saying recently about the U.S. commitment in Iraq and national interests throughout the region. He is now trying to position himself as hawk to Mr. Bush's dove in the "war on terrorism". He is less tactful than Mr. Bush in referring to the "Islamic threat" and has been downright rude to Saudi Arabia. In press conferences among international media he has forgotten that he can speak French. (Mr. Kerry is also moving into positions that Mr. Bush is moving on from but that is a different story.) And the polling data suggest the U.S. public may be getting grittier rather than softer in their determination to deal with the hard problems presented by international terrorism and rogue states. Example: at the same time that an increasing proportion think things are not going well in Iraq a stable or increasing proportion think the U.S. should remain there. Karl Rove Mr. Bush's political wizard seems to have detected that Americans are tiring not of aggressive political language but of anything that smacks of empty idealism. I have noticed that the administration including even the State Department is muting the blather about "democracy in Iraq". Since it's not going to happen they might as well stop promising. U.S. support for Israel is the real test since Israel remains to anyone with a reasonably clear comprehension of the Middle East America's only reliable ally. On Israel the U.S. public has now had 31 months to consider the "plight of the Palestinian people" and also their behaviour in light of what happened on 9/11/01. Sympathy for suicide bombers is at a new low. Sympathy for Israelis who kill Hamas terrorist leaders is at a new high. It is against this political background that President Bush has been emboldened to "move the envelope" out of reach of the old Oslo platitudes and openly endorse Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's efforts to build a security barrier around the West Bank (to match the one already around Gaza) and even retain possession of proximate Israeli settlements on the non-Israeli side of the old "Green Line". Why should Israel give up anything when she will get nothing in return? Why should she act any differently from the U.S. in hunting down and killing terrorists publicly pledged to her annihilation? The response to Mr. Bush's endorsements of Israel are serious by "moderate Arab" diplomatic standards. King Abdullah of Jordan postponed a meeting in the White House and President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt gave an interview to Le Monde in Paris in which he said among other unpleasant things that American and Israeli interests will not be safe, not only in our region but anywhere in the world. So what else is new? Appeasement is a two-way street. Until now it has generally been assumed that the U.S. must do the appeasing and that Arabs and their allies are supposed to be appeased. It is this basic formula that not only the Bush administration but the U.S. at large has grown sick of. They get nothing for their appeasements but more grief; just as Israel received no benefits -- only more blown-up buses -- when she wasn't killing Yassin or Rantisi. Everything else being equal you might as well smite your mortal enemies. The trick after all is to make them appease you. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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