Edwin Starr, "WAR," 1970
George W. Bush - what's he good for?
Before you answer that, consider what a service he's been able to render the fellow lame duck Israeli government in his final weeks in office. Just by continuing to occupy White House space, he provides cover for an Israeli operation that has received universal (minus one) condemnation.
How else to explain the abstention by the United States on yesterday's UN Security Council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire? How could Condoleezza Rice say
... and then abstain from voting in favor? What kind of principles are these? Her words make a mockery of the Middle East "Peace Process."
Bush likes to refer to the land that Israelis and Palestinians covet as "the Holy Land." Maybe he sees a Biblical reference in his hand-washing abstention:
"When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, 'I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it'."
When I started writing this post, my title was going to be "Bush Enables Razing of The Gaza Ghetto." Then I considered "Flattening A Concentration Camp Called Gaza." But then I saw that French right wing anti-semitic Holocaust denier Jean-Marie Le Pen had used those same terms, for his usual nefarious, rabble rousing purposes (his anti-immigrant rantings show that he's no friend of Arabs either).
But if Gaza is not "a thickly populated urban slum area, inhabited predominantly by members of a minority group" (Random House Webster's College Dictionary), then it's hard to imagine a clearer contemporary example of ghetto. And while Le Pen's history of Holocaust revisionism makes his use of "concentration camp" immediately suspect, instead go back to the origin of the term. The British Army's herding of noncombatants into "concentration camps" in the Boer War a century ago led to the death of thousands of women, children, and elderly inmates through disease and malnutrition. Just like Gaza, cut off from medical supplies and food rations, just like Iraq during the Nineties - and beyond...
By giving Israel the message "Stop the fighting in Gaza - but just not yet" (as London's Telegraph put it), history repeats itself: this is what Seymour Hersh wrote of Bush Administration thumb twiddling during Israel's disastrous Lebanon campaign of summer 2006:
despite calls from several governments for the United States to take the lead in negotiations to end the fighting, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that a ceasefire should be put off until “the conditions are conducive.”
What is George W. Bush good for? His "waiting for conditions" or "waiting for the Egyptians," plus slavish Congressional support for Israel Right or Wrong, may very well be setting the conditions for a Hamas takeover of the entire Palestinian political scene - which it was set to do anyway in January 2006 when it swept parliamentary elections, in both Gaza and the West Bank.
Why? Simply because - despite Israel's omnipresent, multilingual spokespersons, whether IDF or Foreign Ministry - the "message" that video footage presents to Palestinians and to the outside world is of civilian carnage, schools bombed, children orphaned, sanctuary violated. Everyone knows that Hamas is guilty of firing rockets deliberately into Israeli towns, but with its massive sledge hammer of collective punishment, Israel has succeeded in garnering sympathy for Gazans, and by extension, legitimacy for the resistance (its middle name) of Hamas.
"The West Bank: We're All Hamas Now - Supporters of Fatah Unite Behind Enemy" is how today's London Independent describes one of the most significant unintended consequences of the Israeli offensive. For anyone who knows the Arab world's - and the rest of the world's - sympathies for the Palestinians, this outcome comes as no surprise.
A year ago, President Bush was in the middle of his final Middle East tour, and gave a speech on "The Importance of Freedom in the Middle East." Read this, and remember that Hamas won Palestinian elections fair and square:
I recognize that some people -- including some in my own country -- believe it is a mistake to support democratic freedom in the Middle East. They say that the Arab people are not "ready" for democracy... You cannot expect people to believe in the promise of a better future when they are jailed for peacefully petitioning their government. And you cannot stand up a modern and confident nation when you do not allow people to voice their legitimate criticisms.
If he were not complicit in the sin of selective democracy, he might have said "And you should not be surprised that when election results are overturned because the winners are Islamists, they turn to violence." In Algeria in 1992, in Palestine in 2006, free and fair elections resulted in victories for Islamist parties; when the results were overturned, the ensuing violence should have surprised no one.
In yesterday's Boston Globe, Andrew Bacevich sketches the dangers to both Israel and the United States of seeing primarily military solutions to the difficult but overwhelmingly political problem of dealing with Hamas. In his Washington Post Op-Ed yesterday, "An Unnecessary War," former President Jimmy Carter shows that a modicum of "peace processing" was all that was missing to extend the Israel-Hamas truce.
But this was not just an opportunity lost. It was another conscious Bush opportunity denied.