Bush's Legacy-hunting At A Self-imposed Dead End

For an administration that has postured as the daring, rootin-tootin global good guys of reality-altering action, this White House for seven years has stranded itself high atop a chair shrieking at that one mouse that roars: the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

The charitable view is that the neocons in charge weren't as stupid as they seem. They recognized real trouble when they saw it -- the intractability of a decades-long, regional problem that has reverberated throughout the world -- and decided to back off from the potential of any image-spoiling failure.

Better to treat the symptoms of Islamic distrust of the United States, and not its root causes, because those causes are, after all, so damned intractable. Better, and far more thrilling for public consumption, to go elsewhere with guns blasting. Better to forget the whole scene at the trouble's center, and simply hope for the best.

The less charitable view is that the neocons were, and remain, simply hopelessly adrift in their own conflicted positions.

Their boss envisioned a two-state solution; but only the final product of the solution -- two states. He possessed not a clue as to how to get there, and often made matters even worse.

For example the administration endorsed much of Israel's conflict-continuing stubbornness -- such as its blanket refusal of the Palestinian right of return -- making the honest brokerage of a deal as unbelievable as it is unworkable.

So now, with typical glitz and fanfare, the administration steps into the negotiating game at the eleventh hour, having done about as much damage as it could do.

For two terms it has issued nothing but high-minded pronouncements and printed unreadable road maps. Now, desperate for some legacy other than geopolitical chaos, it stages an Arab-Israeli summit -- which, just as typically, it says isn't a summit at all. Summits, you see, are expected to produce results.

But the only result expected is another dead end, hence the administration has made its greatest effort in preemptively lowering expectations. For this outfit, that isn't difficult.

For starters, Bush's aides "insist that [he] does not intend to negotiate personally the two-state peace he has pronounced as his vision." Well, I take it back. That's progress, right there.

Otherwise, aides have laid it out bluntly: "The president is not a gambler," said his press secretary; and "We have said from the very beginning, and the president made clear, that it is the parties themselves that have to make the peace," said the national security adviser among a chorus of expectation-lowering.

But it was Bush himself who put it most bluntly: "The United States cannot impose our vision," he said on the first day of the non-summit. And it was therefore Bush himself who, true to form, put it most incorrectly.

A two-state solution has always been possible, if only the United States would do what it refuses to do: impose.

Someday -- and this is as certain as today's continued volatility in Gaza -- Israel will either withdraw to, or be forced into, its 1967 borders. There is no other solution that promises a lasting peace. But it is likely a peace that will come only from an imposer: that being the United States.

We have always had the military- and economic-aid leverage needed to make it happen, not to mention the troops required within an international peacekeeping force, if only those troops weren't scattered throughout the Middle East hither and yon.

What the United States has always lacked, however, was the political will to make it happen. And Mr. Bush, for all his Superman blustering about global reordering, has lacked that will in even greater quantities than his predecessors.

So, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict will be merely one more problem left for his successor among a roiling vat of problems either wholly created or gutlessly exacerbated by the Bush administration.

And that will be its ultimate legacy.

Comments

[beamer]

they just can't leverage any profit out of peace..

[quousque]

"Someday -- and this is as certain as today's continued volatility in Gaza -- Israel will either withdraw to, or be forced into, its 1967 borders."

No ......... arrogant Zionist delusions will never allow that to happen. The 1967 borders were no more legitimate than today's defacto Greater Israel that encompasses all of Palestine, and a bit more ........ and a just peace must reexamine why there ever was a partitioned Jewish State made out of it at all. What legal right did the UN have to divide that mandated territory in the first place?