| |
ANALYSIS
Deja vu as Bush pushed
aside
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON
- As beloved New York Yankee catcher and phrase-maker
Yogi Berra once said, it seems like "deja vu all over
again".
Fourteen months ago, US President George
W Bush demanded that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon
halt incursions into Palestinian-controlled areas,
withdraw from cities Israeli forces had re-occupied, and
refrain from further unilateral actions that would
inflame the conflict. "Enough is enough," snapped the
president, who had conquered Afghanistan four months
before.
Sharon, of course, treated Bush's
demands in much the same way as he would the yapping of
a chihuahua, politely explaining that protecting Israeli
citizens from suicide bombs was his first
responsibility, and otherwise ignoring him. Two weeks
later, the president was praising Sharon as a "man of
peace", while stepping up his rhetoric against
Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, and then
ostracizing him altogether just two months later.
One might have thought - and many people,
including Arabs and Israelis, did - that 14 months and a
decisive US military victory in Iraq later, Bush's
demands for Israeli cooperation in a new, US-backed
initiative to calm tensions, bolster the authority of a
new, more-moderate Palestinian leader - Prime Minister
Mahmoud Abbas - and impart some hope for an eventual
peace agreement might be received by Sharon with
somewhat more respect. But it now seems that Bush has
once again gotten the chihuahua treatment, and the big
question is whether he will do something about it this
time.
The president thought that he had an
understanding with Sharon coming out of the Aqaba
summit: the Israelis would refrain from taking any
unilateral action, especially selective assassinations,
that could undermine Abbas' fragile authority and his
efforts to persuade militant Palestinian factions,
especially Hamas, to halt attacks on Israelis.
But less than 24 hours after a coordinated
attack by several militant groups, including Hamas, on a
Gaza checkpoint that left four Israeli soldiers dead,
Israeli helicopter gunships launched two attacks
intended to assassinate prominent Hamas political leader
Abdel Aziz Rantisi. Those attacks, which killed five
Palestinians and wounded more than 60 others, including
Rantisi, drew an uncharacteristically strong response
from Bush, reminiscent of his initial demands on Sharon
14 months ago.
As top aides burned up the
telephone wires to Jerusalem with protests, Bush told
reporters during a photo-op with visiting Ugandan
President Yoweri Museveni, "I am troubled by the recent
Israeli helicopter gunship attacks," adding that he was
"concerned" that they "will make it more difficult for
the Palestinian leadership to fight off terrorist
attacks".
He was right, of course. As he and
most observers predicted, Hamas struck back. On
Wednesday, a lone suicide bomber blew up a Jerusalem
bus, killing 16 people and wounding dozens more. Since
then, Israel has mounted several more helicopter attacks
against selected targets, including a Hamas military
leader who was killed with his wife, small daughter and
two bystanders when rockets struck the car in which he
was riding.
To close observers of the past two
and a half years of Sharon's rule, the pattern is all
too familiar. As pointed out in a column by Jackson
Diehl entitled "Diplomacy by Assassination" in Friday's
Washington Post, much the same thing happened in June
2001 and again in December 2001.
In each case,
several weeks of relative calm were supposed to lead to
a ceasefire that would in turn permit a resumption of
peace talks. But just as that ceasefire appeared within
reach, the Israeli Defense Force mounted a spectacular
assassination against a Hamas political leader that was
invariably followed up by a Palestinian suicide bombing,
crushing all hopes for a ceasefire and plunging the two
sides into a new cycle of violence. To Diehl and many
others, the attack on Rantisi appeared to have been
premeditated and aimed as much at hopes for the
fledgling US-led road map, as it was at Rantisi himself.
"Had it chosen to, Israel could have targeted
him at any time in the last year, when no peace process
was under way," according to Diehl. "So why did the
helicopters strike six days after the Aqaba summit? The
most logical explanation is that the violent and
entirely predictable consequences were exactly what
Israel's prime minister wanted."
Bush's unusual
attack on Israel on Tuesday suggested that he agreed
with that analysis. And the fact that his remarks
coincided with the publication in the Israeli newspaper
Ha'aretz of a detailed account of the Aqaba meeting that
depicted the US leader as siding with Abbas on key
issues, and even interrupting and sharply rejecting
protests by Sharon, bolstered the notion that the
conqueror of Baghdad had indeed stiffened his spine over
the past 14 months and was prepared to take on Sharon
and his fellow generals.
But Bush's criticism of
Israel sparked a flurry of angry protests from pro-Likud
and Christian Right groups and their congressional and
media allies, particularly after the suicide bombing.
Identifying Washington's "war on terrorism" with the
threat posed against Israel, many critics argued that it
was hypocrisy for Bush to criticize Sharon for the
assassination attempts.
To argue that Rantisi,
for example, should be exempt from attack because of his
status as a political leader "would be akin to saying
that Osama bin Laden was not a terrorist because he did
not actually fly the planes", argued Max Abrahms of the
Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank
that tends to support the Israeli government.
Later last week the White House shifted
direction. "The issue is not Israel," said spokesman Ari
Fleischer. "The issue is terrorists who are killing in
an attempt to stop a hopeful process from moving
forward." On Friday, Powell, who travels to the region
this week, called for restraint by both parties, a
familiar refrain from 14 months ago. And, like 14 months
ago, Bush remained silent, even as Israel carried out
new helicopter attacks.
But all agree that the
stakes are much higher now, if only because Washington's
intervention in Iraq and its ambition to transform the
entire Middle East will make it extremely difficult for
Bush to walk away. "He could lose enormous credibility
in the eyes of the Arab world, Europe and peace
activists in the US if he can't get Sharon to deliver on
the deal," says Lewis Roth, a spokesman for Americans
for Peace Now.
"It was risky for them to get
into this in terms of domestic politics," according to
James Zogby, director of the Arab-American Institute,
"but it's even riskier on the international and regional
level for them to walk away. It's a moment of truth for
the road map; I don't think you can resuscitate it if it
drowns in a pool of blood at this point," he added.
"Bush is caught between the devil and the deep
blue sea," said Rashid Khalidi, a Middle East specialist
at the University of Chicago. "If he backs down and does
nothing, he looks like a wimp. If he escalates against
Sharon, then he's got a king-sized battle on Capitol
Hill and [with] the Israel lobby."
(Inter Press
Service)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
