More on Bush’s opening to terrorists

Providing further support for my indictment of President Bush for his contradictory and deceitful policies, a reader writes:

Now I’m hearing that the Bush administration is considering having contact with Hamas, with, of course, the devious Europeans leading the way. Not having a strategy to win in Iraq is bad enough, but this shows a complete lack of understanding of who the enemy is, since Hamas has the same identical ideology and tactics as Al Qaeda. They consistently say that their whole purpose as an organization is the destruction of Israel and its replacement with an Islamic Taliban like state, and they clearly say they have no interest in compromise or diplomacy and also hate America. But maybe they don’t realize what they really want, and if they were given a “democratic state” they would abandon all their prior goals and essentially give up their religion.

And, of course, lurking behind this is another mistaken basic assumption, which is that the biggest problem in the Middle East is the “Palestinian problem” and that the solution is to have a Palestinian state no matter what. If this sounds pretty crazy, it’s not the first time the Bush administration has flirted with going in such a disastrous direction. A couple weeks after President Bush gave his post 9/11 speech where he said that we would make no distinctions between the terrorists and the states who sponsor them, he seemed abruptly to change course and began talking about getting together a coalition to fight terrorism which would include non other than Iran, Syria, and the PLO. Then you heard Brent Scowcroft saying that we had to have the widest possible coalition to fight the terrorists. According to this view the only real terrorists are Al Qaeda, and all the other terrorist groups and terror supporting states are just upset because there is no Palestinian state. Fortunately the president didn’t continue on this disastrous course and returned at least mostly to the original position of clarity. However, it looks as if he’s going in this same wrong direction again, and now is even flirting with the prospect of creating a state led by an Islamic terrorist group that will threaten both Israel and the United States. This is what can happen when there is no conceptual clarity and is also evidence of how trying to appease the Arabs and the Europeans who are pushing for this will ultimately only endanger the security of the American people. I hope they come to their senses and realize how crazy this is.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 27, 2005 10:13 AM | Send