Bush the imperious, the impotent

President Bush’s off-the-planet utterances continue, as detailed by Carolyn Glick in her useful and disturbing (but, as usual, overlong) column on the total disconnect between Bush’s statements and his actions. As she shows in the below section from the article, over and over Bush says the Palestinians “must” do such and such. For the imperative word “must” to have meaning, there must be negative consequences for the addressed party if the demanded action does not take place. But far from imposing any negative consequences on the Palestinians, Bush keeps giving them more money even as they ignore his imperious but impotent demands. I used to be enraged beyond description at President Clinton’s mixture of faux anger with actual appeasement in his responses to terrorist attacks. But here, as in so much else, Bush turns out to be, not only like Clinton, but worse.

And in fact, the president did have some strong words for the Palestinians. He said they “must match their words denouncing terror with action to combat terror. The Palestinian government must arrest terrorists, dismantle their infrastructure, and confiscate illegal weapons—as the road map requires. They must work to stop attacks on Israel, and to free the Israeli soldier held hostage by extremists. And they must enforce the law without corruption, so they can earn the trust of their people, and of the world. Taking these steps will enable the Palestinians to have a state of their own. And there’s only way to end the conflict, and nothing less is acceptable.”

This strong statement led [Michael] Oren to assert that Bush’s speech was a clear message of support for Israel and against Palestinian terrorism. Yet the statement, and others that Oren quoted in his defense of Bush, were wholly disconnected from the actual policy that Bush is advancing and that he spelled out clearly in his address.

Neither on Monday nor at any other time did Bush condition his support for the Palestinians on their taking concerted action against terrorism. Indeed, as he made clear in his speech, his policy is predicated on the basic assumption that the Palestinians must be bribed with money, American legitimacy and Israeli lands, and that Israel must be pressured to make more and more concessions to the Palestinians before one can expect them to change their terrorist policies, values and goals.

Far from revisiting this assumption after Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s US-trained Fatah forces surrendered to Hamas in Gaza last month, administration officials responded to the rout by intensifying their belief in it.

Take for example Bush’s demand that Abbas arrest terrorists. Bush made this demand while simultaneously upholding Abbas as a peace-seeking, terror abhorring leader. Yet Abbas’s one consistent demand is for Israel to release terrorists from prison and grant amnesty to terror commanders it has yet to arrest.

Today the administration has made preventing a Hamas takeover of Judea and Samaria its immediate goal. Monday morning The Washington Post reported that since the Hamas takeover of Gaza, US intelligence agencies have concluded that the only thing preventing Hamas from taking over Judea and Samaria is the IDF. As one senior intelligence official put it, “Israeli military operations are the major factor restricting Hamas activity [in the areas].” Yet rather than urge Israel to maintain its counter-terror operations, Bush said that the Israelis should find “practical ways to reduce their footprint” in Judea and Samaria. He also pledged $80 million to Fatah militias whose officer corps are teeming with the same terrorists that Abbas is supposed to be arresting.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 24, 2007 03:09 PM | Send