Make Or Break For
Bush
President George W. Bush faces a crisis
that will make or break his presidency. Ironically, to use his words applied to
Yasser Arafat, Bush finds himself in a situation of his own making.
Last
week, the president was publicly humiliated by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon, who arrogantly ignored Bush's repeated calls for the Israelis to stop
their military operation and pull out of the West Bank. The secretary of state
was also publicly humiliated. The king of Morocco kept him cooling his heels for
two hours before consenting to see him and then, in front of the press,
embarrassed him with a hostile but legitimate question, "Why are you here
instead of in Jerusalem?" All of the Arab leaders, in fact, instead of heeding
Bush's demand that they condemn terrorism, laid new demands on the United
States.
Bush seriously misread Sharon. That's probably because he is
ignorant of the Middle East and its history. I think he relies on his staff to
give him little yes-or-no choices to make. If Bush had bothered to read the
British and Israeli press or, God forbid, one or two books on the conflict, he
would have known: Sharon started the intifada; Sharon has been the one who has
refused to negotiate for the past 14 months; Sharon has systematically destroyed
the Palestinian Authority and the Oslo peace process; and Sharon does not intend
to yield an inch of the West Bank.
All of this time, Bush has apparently
thought that if the Palestinians would just lie down, Sharon would resume the
negotiations. Apparently, he wasn't aware that Arafat did keep the peace for
three weeks, and Sharon's response was to start a program of systematically
assassinating Palestinian political leaders. Bush, of course, routinely condemns
every act of resistance by the Palestinians, and the most he has ever said to
the Israelis is, "Gee, I hope you show some restraint."
So now his
reputation and that of the United States is at stake. It isn't just the Arab
world that is fed up with Israel's brutality and flaunting of international law
and America's one-sided support for Israel. It's the European Union, the United
Nations and Russia. Serious demonstrations against Israel and the United States
are taking place all over the world.
So here's Bush's dilemma: Sharon
will not stop his military operation. Sharon will not negotiate with the
Palestinians. Bush will have to force him. The reason Sharon feels confident in
humiliating the president is because he believes that the Israeli lobby has such
a lock on Congress that it will prevent Bush from taking any measures to punish
him for his defiance. Hence, when Bush butts heads with Sharon, he will also
have to butt heads with the Israeli lobby.
The question upon which the
success or failure of his administration depends is, does Bush have the guts to
do that? I don't know. We'll just have to wait and see. If Bush caves in to
Sharon, American prestige will plummet, and his coalition for his war on
terrorism will fall apart. Moreover, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will
eventually start a wider war in the Middle East, for which Bush will be justly
blamed.
The reason this is a situation of his own making is that Bush
should have pressured Sharon into negotiations 14 months ago, instead of falling
for Sharon's ruse that he wouldn't talk while Palestinians were resisting the
occupation. Bush should have been equally critical of the Israeli violence. It
has apparently taken him 14 months to realize that the Palestinian violence is
provoked by the Israeli violence.
His popularity, while still high, is
already starting to drop, and if he lets Ariel Sharon walk all over him, I
predict he will be a one-term president. The larger question for the American
people is this: Who runs American foreign policy, the
elected president or the Israeli lobby?
Charley Reese
can be contacted at [EMAIL PROTECTED].
© 2002 by King
Features Syndicate, Inc
http://reese.king-online.com/Reese_20020419/index.php
THE END
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