Bush’
Failure
By William James
Martin
24 July, 2007
Countercurrents.org
In the 1976 presidential debates,
candidate Jimmy Carter told President Ford that Ford’s only accomplishment
in office had been avoiding another Watergate.
Carter, who would become
President Ford’s successor, could boast, if in the unlikely event
that he so chose, of successfully negotiating the Israeli-Egyptian treaty,
the Panama Canal treaties, the SALT II treaty with the Soviet Union
along with having established normalized relations with the Peoples
Republic of China, as well as having enacted a wide range of energy
legislation, and having created the Department of Energy and the Department
of Education, and also increased he preparedness of the US military
by adding to it the Stealth jet fighter and the cruse missile. Jimmy
Carter passed 76% of the legislation he sent to congress, the second
highest percentage of an any president in history.
What may we say of the accomplishments
of President Bush, who has had twice the length of time in office of
Carter? Bush’s accomplishments are hard to think of.
To his credit, Khadafi’s
Libya has emerged from conversations with the administration with an
agreement to forswear the acquisition of nuclear weapons in return for
the lifting of trade sanctions. Khadafi’s efforts to acquire a
nuclear weapons capability was in any case a lethargic one. And North
Korea seems to be moving back to the agreement of 1994, negotiated by
Carter under the Clinton administration, which did not survive the initial
period of the Bush administration just after Bush took office in 2001
and effectively abrogated the treaty. But these are pretty much at the
periphery of the administration’s main focus
Beyond these matters, which
were peripheral to the administration’s attention, Bush seems
to have failed in all of his intended objectives, not least of which
is freeing Americans from the threat of Al Qaeda.
Far from defeating Al Qaeda,
Bush has only strengthened it, while paying the price of hundreds of
thousands dead Iraqis and Americans and three quarters of a trillion
dollars transferred from the pockets of American taxpayers to the banks
of east Asia, which is the location of US borrowing in order to pay
for the war.
The recently released unclassified
portions of the National Intelligence Estimate titled, “The Terrorist
Threat to the US Homeland”, concluded that Al Qaeda, after having
been driven from Afghanistan, had reconstituted itself in the remote
mountainous area of northwest mountainous area of Pakistan and had re-established
its training infrastructure and its global lines of communication. The
assessment also concluded that though Al Qaeda had little organizational
control over Al Qaeda in Iraq, it had benefited and gained stature from
its apparent affiliation as Al Qaeda in Iraq is perceived by many in
the Arab world as being at the forefront of the struggle with the United
States.
A second government report
issued in the same week written by the National Counterterrorism Center
was titled, “Al Qaeda Better Position to Strike the West”,
whose title pretty much describes its content.
The insistence of the US
in locating components of a missile shield in central Europe and the
US intention to deploy forces in Bulgaria and Romania has increased
tension with Russia and has caused Russian President Putin to announce
Russia’s suspension of it obligation under the Treaty on Conventional
Armed Forces in Europe which had placed limits on the placement of non-nuclear
forces in Europe.
Rather than creating democratic
governments in the Middle East, triggered by the overthrow of the Iraqi
government and the intended overthrow of the Syrian and Iranian governments,
which fortunately, he has failed to do, he has, by seeking to destroy
the democratically elected government in Palestine and the electoral
successful Hezbollah in Lebanon, has convinced most of the residents
of the Middle East that American efforts at introducing democracy into
the Middle East is nothing but a strategy for augmenting the hegemony
of Israel, and that democracy will be discarded as soon as an election
victory goes to a party in opposition to Israel. He has not only failed
to diminish the regional influence of Iran, but, by eliminating Iran’s
regional adversary, Iraq, and having replaced it with a friendly Shiite
government whose leadership was mostly nurtured in Iran during the dictatorship
of Saddam, Bush has dramatically increased Iran’s relative power
and influence.
Bush has failed to make a
contribution to the US military and has, in fact, depleted it of manpower
and available fighting potential as well as have depleted it of materiel’
and equipment in the Iraq war.
There were those in the administration
that argued that “the road to Jerusalem leads through Baghdad,”
meaning the overthrow of Saddam, who contributed financially to the
families of Palestinian “martyrs”, would contribute to a
solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Not only has this not
been the case but the argument rest on the most superficial assumptions
and shallowness of understanding of what motivates the Palestinian national
movement or even what the conflict is all about.
The invasion of Iraq was
to be the panacea that was to have solved all of the Middle East’s
problems.
Not only has Bush failed
to destabilize Syria, but Syria is enjoying an economic boom despite
the economic sanctions which the US Congress has imposed on that Middle
East nation.
A question that is rarely considered by the TV political pundits is;
what is Bush’s overarching foreign policy strategy and objectives?
The administration’s
foreign policy focus is almost totally on the Middle East and it is
very much tied to the interests of Israel.
Before the invasion of Iraq,
Israel looked to the east to see Saddam Hussein who was determined to
be a regional power in possession of a large army, who had, in the past,
pursued a nuclear and biological weapons program, who provided financial
support to the PLO, and who had, during the first Gulf War, hit Israel
with dozens of Scud missiles, which, however, were ineffective in causing
damage. The US sponsored UN sanction program had, however, diminished
Iraq as a serious threat in that it destroyed the Iraq economy.
Israel now looks to the north
and sees Syria who has declined to enter into a peace treaty with Israel,
lacking a negotiated settlement of the Golan Heights, has fought two
wars with Israel and exercises influence throughout Lebanon and assist
in the arming of Hezbollah which has been effective in its skirmishes
with Israel and in the 2006 summer war, and arguably, was the cause
of Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon which Israel had
occupied for twenty years. The Syrian government host offices of leaders
and representatives on Hamas, and various factions of the PLO.
Israel looks again to the
east to see Iran, a nation of 65 million people, ten times larger than
Israel, with a considerable economic base and considerable oil producing
capacity and probably developing the potential to develop nuclear weapons.
These are the three competitors
with Israel for regional dominance and the states that, in Israel’s
view, could pose, or could have posed, in the case of Iraq, an existential
threat to Israel.
Seeking regional dominance
is not unique to Israel, but is the universal goal of all states of
sufficient population and resources to compete within their own regional
spheres. The quest of a state’s population for security impels
such action. That is one of the main reasons that Israel will never
voluntarily surrender any significance sovereignty or autonomy to the
Palestinian -- that, and the expansionist philosophy of Zionism, in
both of its secular and religious dimensions.
The administration’s
goals in the Middle East of seeking regime change in Iraq, Iran, and
Syria exactly coincide with Israel’s objectives, and Iran and
Syria, and Iraq before the invasion, are Israel’s competitors
for regional dominance. To understand Israel’s regional interests
is equivalent to understanding what drives American foreign and Middle
East policy.
The Bush administration fails
to see the humanity of the Palestinians and to understand their perspective
that they have been oppressed for 60 years as their land continues to
be stolen and their rights continue to recede. The Bush administration
cannot view Hamas as any other than a destructive terrorist group and
cannot understand that the rise of Hamas is result of the failure of
the Oslo as well as the loss of confidence in the American approach
to yield anything other than continuing subjugation for the Palestinian
people.
The Bush administration views
Hezbollah in Lebanon as simply no more that a proxy of Iran and fails
to see that members ofHezbollah are Lebanese with their own interest
which includes protecting Lebanon from Israeli encroachment, which in
Israel’s 1982 invasion took the lives of up to 20,000 Lebanese
and in the summer of 2006 destroyed much of the infrastructure and took
more than 1300 lives.
The US perspective is Israel’s
perspective, and Israel has little incentive to understand Hamas’
or Hezbollah’s own self interest as these organizations are seen
as threats and as competitors for power.
The perspective and understanding
of the Bush administration is exactly the perspective and understanding
of Israel and the foreign policy of the Bush administration is exactly
the foreign policy of Israel.
No two countries in history
have ever so thoroughly melded and have consolidated their foreign policies
into a single unified endeavor.
That the Bush Middle East
policy has failed so thoroughly and so dramatically reflects the narrow
perspective of Israel and the inadequacy of its policy formulations
as a template for a great power with interests which do not coincide
with Israel’s and which has a need for a more inclusive view of
the world incorporating international law and a more panoramic understanding
of the universal yearnings for justice.
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