- In accepting the Republican nomination for President
on September 2, Bush plunged into a strange reverie. Ignoring the mess
that actually exists, Bush said: "As the citizens of Afghanistan and
Iraq seize the moment, their example will send a message of hope throughout
a vital region. Palestinians will hear the message that democracy and reform
are within their reach, and so is peace with our good friend Israel. Young
women across the Middle East will hear the message that their day of equality
and justice is coming. Young men will hear the message that national progress
and dignity are found in liberty, not tyranny and terror. Reformers and
political prisoners and exiles will hear the message that their dream of
freedom cannot be denied forever. And as freedom advances, heart by heart
and nation by nation, America will be more secure and the world more peaceful."
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- While we must all pray for and work to achieve such outcomes,
the Bush speech is a dream that totally ignores the real situation and
the actual prospects for the Middle East. The real situation is that the
United States invaded a country that was not threatening the United States
in any way. In the process the United States killed more than 10,000 Iraqis,
wounded at least ten times that number, many of them women and children,
destroyed much of the Iraqi infrastructure, imprisoned thousands of Iraqis
and tortured many hundreds of them, and put our young men and women in
harms way for no vital national purpose. In August 2004 alone US losses
ran to more than 66 killed and 1100 wounded.
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- The real situation is that the Bush team is talking about
invading Iran when the US does not have adequate forces to occupy Iraq.
The real situation is that Iraqi control and ownership of its enterprises,
including oil, have been covertly compromised by sales to foreign businesses
including Israelis. The real situation is that with bases springing up
at every convenient location in Iraq, the US intent is not to leave. The
real situation, therefore, is that the Iraqis face years of occupation
by foreigners, meaning also years of outside interference in their internal
affairs.
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- In Afghanistan the real situation is there are not enough
foreign, US, British or other forces in that country to assuredly pacify
even the remnants of the Taliban. This is where the War on Terrorism began
and where it is bogged down for want of forces, or for that matter, for
want of apparent Bush team interest.
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- Somewhere in the outback between Pakistan and Afghanistan,
the real situation is that Osama bin Laden and his core al Qaida team operate
in comparative safety to plot, we are told, horrendous attacks on the American
economic and financial infrastructure. Potential attacks on such "icon
targets in the United States are said to be high on the al Qaida list.
However, if those leading institutions at this stage do not have sufficient
built-in redundancy to survive such an attack without disruption, we have
three emergency preparedness problems instead of one: We have leadership
that is inattentive to our system needs, and we have spent billions on
homeland security to produce sitting ducks.
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- With respect to Palestine, in the past several weeks
the prospect that the Palestinian people will ever "hear the message
that democracy and reform are within their reach has grown dim indeed.
Bush has signed on to the complete Likud agenda for expelling the Palestinian
people from their homeland. Sharon is taking advantage of the inattention
to foreign policy details that typically is bred of a presidential election
year, and he is moving briskly forward to annex the West Bank. Since the
beginning of March 2004, far from responding to US diplomatic urgings to
stop new settlement activity, Israeli authorities have approved almost
5,000 new construction requests in at least fourteen settlement areas.
The real situation is that Sharon and his Zionist supporters are moving
as rapidly as they can to render the idea of a Palestinian state entirely
moot, regardless of what happens to the Palestinian people.
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- Nothing the United States is doing or talking about doing
in the rest of the Middle East is capable of delivering the opportunities
for young people that Bush dreams about. Right now, Israeli leadership
is contemplating raids into Syria to deal with Shiites--a group called
Hizballah (Party of God)--who sympathize with the Palestinians and fight
on their behalf. Right now Israelis are working with Kurds in Iraq to mount
operations against Iran. The Israelis assuredly are not doing this against
US will. All of this is street news, not intelligence. Pressure appears
to be mounting among leading neocons in the Bush team--and encouraged by
Israeli--to attack Iran to prevent that country from achieving home grown
nuclear weapons. The overt Bush team agenda, therefore, is riddled with
actual and potential conflict situations, none of which contribute to a
climate for peaceful change.
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- In the real Middle East situation, there is no moment
to seize. Such dream-like promises as Bush reflected in his speech Thursday
night are destructive, therefore, because they offer a hope that is unreal.
They breed disappointment, because in the most tragic sense, the Bush dream
is a lie. Not because the things he muses about are undesirable. Far from
it; they are devoutly to be wished. They are lies, because the real US
intent is being wreaked on the landscape for all to see.
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- The Bush team has a vision of the Middle East that collides
with the needs and expectations of the people. It has an unreal perspective
on what and how long it might take to achieve changes in Islamic societies
that many Muslims want. It displays at best a shallow understanding of
what writer William Pfaff calls the interactions with terrorism of Islamic
religion and nationalist goals in Islamic societies, especially among the
young. That vision demands that the nuclear ambitions of other countries
be suppressed to preserve the Israeli monopoly. And its bottom line is
the only things driving American interests in the Middle East are Israeli
security and oil. That vision is a hard sell to anyone but Bush team members,
Israeli extremists and supporters. Unfortunately, John Kerry has embraced
virtually all of it.
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- While George Washington did not necessarily envisage
the financial, business and political complexity of our present operating
system, he certainly foresaw the corrupting patterns of influence that
now drive our political processes. In his Farewell Address, he expressed
concern that the way our emerging political system would work "opens
the door to foreign influence and corruptionthus the policy and the will
of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.
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- The present Middle East reflects a situation Washington
well could have had in mind. Both Republican and Democratic Party leaders
have pledged the same allegiance to Israel to gain or avoid losing swing
votes in November. As a result, Israel has become the very type of foreign
entanglement that Washington warned us about. And if both candidates live
up to their commitments to Israel, no balanced, reasonable or potentially
successful policy that serves American interests is likely to emerge in
the next four years. Instead, the region is in for very hard times indeed.
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- Both George W. Bush, or, if elected, John F. Kerry, should
take Washington,s caution seriously, because the immediate danger is a
growing separation between vital American interests and American foreign
policy. That spread is more serious than the immense distance between
the Bush dream speech and the realities of the Middle East.
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- The writer is a retired Senior Foreign Service Officer
of the US Department of State. He will welcome your comments at wecanstopit@charter.net
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