Bush and Rice: Worse than Oslo

To understand the essence of the Hezbollah peace process, let us begin by recalling the insanity of the Oslo peace process, from which President Bush’s June 2002 speech (remember that?) supposedly delivered us. The idea of Oslo—never formally stated as such but tacitly acknowledged by the Rabin government—was that the Israelis did not even expect the Palestinians to comply with their commitments under the agreement, such as ending terror and ending hate-Israel indoctrination in their schools. Rather, the Israelis hoped that the process of negotiations itself would lead the Palestinians to the point where they saw that they had more to gain by accepting Israel’s existence than by continuing their campaign to destroy it, at which point they would be willing to make a final deal exchanging their acceptance of Israel’s existence for Israel’s recognition of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. But up to that magical moment when the terrorists would convert to peaceful democrats, nothing would be expected of them, they would be free to carry on their terrorist incitement and activities and still get all the benefits of the peace process including control over their own territory, international recognition, and vast financial subsidies. This was the fatuous fantasy, the criminally stupid policy, of Rabin, Peres, and Barak, backed and pushed by Clinton. We know the disaster it led to, how coddling unreformed terrorists only inflamed their intent to kill Israelis and destroy Israel. Bush, supposedly having learned this lesson, reversed the Oslo logic and said in 2002 that the U.S. would not help the Palestinians move toward a peace settlement unless they clearly gave up terror.

But then, most distressingly, Bush in 2003 betrayed his renunciation of Oslo and began negotiating again with the Palestinians despite their evident failure to suppress their terror infrastructure or uproot their terror culture. Following the Palestinian election in 2005 Bush has further upped his support for a Palestinian state and his demands for Israeli concessions. Let us be clear that this is even worse than the Oslo process, since Bush is acting as though the (unreformed) Palestinians deserve, not just participation in negotiations with the ultimate hope of getting their own state, but their own state, period.

The same “super-Oslo” mentality can be seen in the Bush team’s shocking recent statements about whether Hezbollah ought to be a part of Lebanese democratic politics. Bush said recently:

I like the idea of people running for office. There’s a positive effect when you run for office. Maybe some will run for office and say, vote for me, I look forward to blowing up America. I don’t know, I don’t know if that will be their platform or not. But I don’t think so. I think people who generally run for office say, vote for me, I’m looking forward to fixing your potholes, or making sure you got bread on the table.

And look at what Bush’s twin brain Condoleezza Rice is saying:

When people start getting elected and have to start worrying about constituencies and have to start worrying not about whether their fire-breathing rhetoric against Israel is being heard, but about whether or not that person’s child down the street is able to go to a good school or that road has been fixed or life is getting better, that things start to change.

Follow Rice’s logic. She’s saying that once terrorists are elected to office, and once they become responsible for running a country, then the force of their circumstances will make them stop being terrorists. Under Oslo, it was assumed that the process of negotiations would lead the terrorists to abandon their terrorism, at which point they would be willing to make a final deal with Israel and so acquire a state. Under Oslo, the reformed terrorists only get their state after they’ve ceased being terrorists. But under Bush’s and Rice’s Hezbollah peace process, unreformed terrorists get their own state, and then the experience of running their own state makes them stop being terrorists! Instead of overthrowing the Terror Masters (i.e., the Mideast state supporters of terror), Bush wants to set up new ones.

Just as Bush’s “road map” to Mideast peace is worse than the Oslo peace process, so is his Hezbollah peace process. Yet this is the man celebrated and lauded by “conservatives,” including those who excoriated Oslo.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 23, 2005 08:14 AM | Send