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Farewell road map
Now that the Palestinian Prime Minister Abbas has stepped down out of fear of violent death at the hands of his own people (a wholly rational fear for which one cannot blame him), will the Bush administration admit that the whole “road map” was a fraud from the start? Will the American defenders of Israel, who have been biting their tongues so as to “stay with the program,” finally speak the truth of the insanity of the road map, and of how it is a total betrayal of Bush’s June 2002 West Point speech in which he said the United States would have no more dealings with the Palestinians until they had rid themselves of terror?
I see only two possibilities here, and I’ve made this point from the start. Either Bush engaged in the road map knowing it would fail, but he had to do it to fulfil his quid pro quo with Blair; and then, once it failed, the peace process would be finally and definitively abandoned, in which case Bush is a Machiavellian genius. Or else Bush engaged in the road map thinking it would work, in which case he and his advisors are criminally out of touch with reality. Comments
Here is another possibility: Bush engaged in the original road map with the precondition that the Palestinians renounce terrorism because we were closer to 9/11/01 at that time, and it was much more popular to be tough on terrorism back then, and forcing Israel to negotiate with terrorists would have been obviously hypocritical when we refused to do so ourselves. Now, however, the majority of American voters have forgotten all about that precondition —- the requisite 15 minute limit on attention spans having long since passed —- so the currently popular move by the president is to make noises about trying to engineer a lasting peace in Israel. This is the default status quo for American presidents over the last three decades, and the tough talk on preconditions was the temporary aberration. Posted by: Clark Coleman on September 9, 2003 10:39 AMMr. Coleman’s observation is, I fear, correct. Posted by: Lawrence Auster on September 9, 2003 10:47 AM |