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Banned
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Originally Posted by mixedmedia
I agree that US and Israeli policy in regards to Hamas was wrong.
Pillars of democracy tried to undermine the results of what was universally accepted to be a free and fair election. The math of that equation never leads to a sound solution. We've seen this time and again. Invariably the results are perverse.
But that said, it doesn't lead me to the conclusion that more tolerant US and Israeli policies would have led to the peaceful moderation of the Hamas party. I think the extremism that certainly does exist within Hamas bears heavily on the equation. So much so that it's equally conceivable that the moderation of the Hamas party would have led to the same factional violence only within the party itself.
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....again, all we in the US can do is our best to not aggravate the tensions. We haven't done our best, and we refuse to take any responsibility for that.
Until we are willing to examine the US role and it's shortcomings, compared to what we could do....and could have been doing to be an "honest broker", we offer nothing constructive, and our collective "take" is misplaced.
You can see that we refuse to take any responsibility, written all over this thread, and in the historic record:
Quote:
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/15191004.htm
Posted on Thu, Aug. 03, 2006
Bush's attachment to Israel started with trip to the Holy Land
By Ron Hutcheson
McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON - If there's a starting point for George W. Bush's attachment to Israel, it's the day in late 1998 when he stood on the hilltop where Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount, and, eyes brimming with tears, read aloud from his favorite hymn, "Amazing Grace."
"He was very emotional. It was a tear-filled experience," said Matthew Brooks, a prominent Jewish Republican who escorted Bush, then governor of Texas, and three other GOP governors on the Middle East visit. "He brought Israel back home with him in his heart. I think he came away profoundly moved."
Eight years later, Bush is living up to his reputation as the most pro-Israel president ever. As Israel's military action in Lebanon heads into its fourth week, the president is standing firm against growing international pressure for an immediate cease-fire.
His stance has alienated European allies and fueled anti-American sentiment in the Arab world, but Brooks and other pro-Israel activists couldn't be more pleased.
"He is not only the most pro-Israel president, he's redefined what it means to be pro-Israel," said Brooks, executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition. "People used to talk about `ending the cycle of violence.' He doesn't do that. He understands that it is not a cycle of violence when you defend yourself."
Former White House aides and Republican insiders say the president's stalwart support for the Jewish state is an alliance born of emotion, personal ties and the searing experience of Sept. 11, 2001.
His tutorial on Middle East policy began with his 1998 trip, a whirlwind tour that established some personal ties that would become far more significant later. He met Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert, now Israel's prime minister, and he took a helicopter tour with then-Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon.
"It's interesting how history works, isn't it?" Bush mused in a 2005 speech. "The future president of the United States and the future prime minister of Israel were flying across that country, with him describing to me how to keep Israel secure."
It was a conversation that he and Sharon would have many times, often in the privacy of the Oval Office. Bush said he came away from the aerial tour struck by Israel's vulnerability. After flying over the narrowest part of the country, he joked, "We've got driveways in Texas bigger than that."
Bush's views on Middle East policy were largely unknown when he launched his 2000 presidential campaign. Some pro-Israel activists feared that he would follow his father's approach and temper support for Israel with sensitivity to Arab opinions.
President George H.W. Bush angered pro-Israel activists in 1992 by threatening to withhold U.S. loan guarantees for Israel if its leaders continued to permit new Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. Israel responded by ordering a freeze on new settlements.
The younger Bush signaled early on that he would take a different approach.
Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who provided an insider's view of the Bush administration to journalist Ron Suskind, said Bush declared his intention to "correct the imbalances" in Middle East policy at his first National Security Council meeting.
"We're going to tilt it back to Israel. And we're going to be consistent," Bush said, according to Suskind's "The Price of Loyalty," a book about O'Neill's experiences.
Former White House aides say Bush's views hardened after the Sept. 11 attacks. More than ever, Bush saw Israel and the United States as allies in a life-or-death struggle with terrorism.
"Sept. 11 changed everything," former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said. "He knows what little Israel is going through. He views it as a democracy protecting its people against groups that have nothing but terrorism and destruction on their minds - just like us."
White House speechwriter David Frum agreed with Fleischer that Bush's desire to combat terrorism is by far the most important factor behind his approach to Israel.
"The reason he's been giving the green light to Israel in southern Lebanon is he's heading toward a confrontation with Iran," said Frum, who helped write the 2001 speech that listed Iran, Iraq and North Korea as part of an "axis of evil." "Hezbollah is Iran's strongest weapon. That's what this is about - the United States benefits from taking away Iran's weapon."
Frum and Fleischer, both Jewish, discounted the role of religion in shaping Bush's views. Many evangelical Christians strongly support Israel and believe that God gave the Holy Land to the Jewish people.
"I never saw any evidence, in public or in private, that the president's faith had anything to do with his pro-Israel positions," Fleischer said. "I would have been uncomfortable with that."
Still, there's little doubt that Bush's stalwart support for Israel has helped him with Christian conservatives and Jewish voters.
Bush got about 24 percent of the Jewish vote in 2004, up from 19 percent in 2000 and far better than other recent Republican presidential candidates. Bob Dole, for example, got 16 percent in 1996.
It has also earned Bush the gratitude of Israelis.
"I think that we never had such relations with any president of the United States as we have with you," Sharon, now near death after a debilitating stroke, told Bush during a 2002 Oval Office visit. "We never had such cooperation in everything as we have with the current administration."
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....and again....from post #28:
Quote:
http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0204-01.htm
..........But in the aftermath of the fiasco of July's Camp David II summit and the second intifada, which began Sept. 29, both Palestinians and the likely next government of Israel have denounced American mediation attempts as well-meaning, but dangerous or meretricious, or both.
The harshest words came from the Palestinians. In a statement Jan. 22, the Palestinian Authority suggested that the U.S.-led peace process was a sham, a "mirage designed to trick" the Arab governments and to give "a false sense of normalcy" behind which Israel could keep building more settlements in occupied territory and take permanent possession of more of the West Bank and Gaza.
In apparent reference to the U.S. negotiating team, with its key members such as Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk coming from organizations associated with the Israel lobby in Washington, the Palestinian statement said, "Unfortunately over the last seven years in particular, the U.S. has become increasingly identified with Israeli ideological assumptions."
The trigger for the Palestinian anger appears to have been an unusual statement by then-President Bill Clinton after the Camp David summit crashed. He elaborately praised the flexibility and courage of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak but pointedly omitted any mention of Palestinian Chairman Yasser Arafat and his travails.
For the Israelis, the concessions put on the table by Mr. Barak under relentless pressure from Mr. Clinton, led to the collapse of his uneasy coalition government and the calling of new elections. Polls project him to be defeated soundly by the more hawkish leader of the Likud coalition, Ariel Sharon.
The man who is expected to be one of the inner circle of Mr. Sharon's advisers, former U.N. Ambassador Dore Gold, made it clear that Mr. Sharon will not be calling on the United States for more mediation help. He spoke last week at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a pro-Israel public policy think tank (where Mr. Ross was and will become a senior fellow and where Mr. Indyk was executive director).
Mr. Gold, as is his style, was blunt and to the point. "We maximized the U.S. role, yet we didn't get results. We have way over-used [the American] presidential impact. There may be value in letting the parties engage by themselves" -- that is, without any American presence.
In a biting farewell to Mr. Clinton, Mr. Gold said, "The lesson is that you don't call a Camp David [summit] unless you've done your homework."
So why did such an heroic American effort end in failure and rejection, particularly after it was marked with a triumphant beginning for Mr. Clinton in 1993 on the White House lawn after a joint signing by Mr. Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin?
Simply put, there was always a lack of honesty in the U.S. effort. The "honest broker" had a cultural and political bias toward one party, Israel, and a vast lack of knowledge and sympathy for the other side, the Palestinians.
There was always an internal contradiction in U.S. foreign policy which was overlooked by the Arabs, as long as they could see an advantage for themselves or, more importantly, no alternative.
As the first President George Bush said honestly when he was in office, "We are not even-handed" in the Middle East.
Successive U.S. administrations have made a continuing priority commitment to Israel's security and well-being. That endures, despite inconvenient Israeli governments such as Yitzhak Shamir's or Benjamin Netanyahu's. The reason: Because of the overwhelming sentiments expressed by the American electorate as represented by the Congress, voter turnouts in key states like California and New York and campaign contributions.
The Arab governments do not claim that U.S. sympathy toward Israel resulted in stacking the deck against the Palestinians. What they do suggest is that the background of the American negotiators simply made them insensitive to deeply held Arab views about such issues as recognizing the rights, in some way, of more than 4 million Palestinian refugees.
Second, the world has changed.
Ten years ago, at the end of the Persian Gulf war and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States was the only global power that mattered. Now things are more complex. The European Union (EU), by far the largest contributor to the strangling Palestinian economy, is edging closer to the Middle East negotiations and the United Nations is becoming more assertive.
As a symbol of the upheaval in U.S. Middle East policy, the only outsider at the recent Israeli-Palestinian talks in Taba, Egypt, was the representative of the EU, Miguel Moratinos. No American representatives were present or invited by either the Israelis or the Palestinians.
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....and also from post #28:
Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp...45652-2003Feb8
.......Rumsfeld echoed the Perle group's analysis in a little-noted comment to Pentagon employees last August about "the so-called occupied territories." Rumsfeld said: "There was a war [in 1967], Israel urged neighboring countries not to get involved . . . they all jumped in, and they lost a lot of real estate to Israel because Israel prevailed in that conflict. In the intervening period, they've made some settlements in some parts of the so-called occupied area, which was the result of a war, which they won."............
......The State Department pressed for continued negotiations and pressure on Sharon to limit the scope of his military response to Palestinian suicide bombers, while the Pentagon and the vice president's office favored more encouragement for the Israelis, and less concern for a peace process which, they said, was going nowhere anyhow........
But the administration did make a series of statements and gestures intended to restrain Sharon's response to suicide bombings, and to reassert the traditional U.S. policy that Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank had to cease. At the urging of Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, Bush publicly embraced the idea of a Palestinian state.
An internal debate split the administration and invited the lobbying of think tanks, Jewish organizations, evangelical Christians and others who take a fierce interest in the Middle East. While some groups including Americans for Peace Now lined up against Sharon's tough policies and in favor of negotiations, most of the organizations and individuals who lobbied on these issues embraced a harder line, and supported Sharon. Over the past dozen years or more, supporters of Sharon's Likud Party have moved into leadership roles in most of the American Jewish organizations that provide financial and political support for Israel.
Friends of Israel in Congress also lined up with Sharon.
In November 2001, 89 of 100 senators signed a letter to Bush asking the administration not to try to restrain Israel
from using "all [its] strength and might" in response to Palestinian suicide bombings. Signers said they wanted to persuade Bush to prevent Secretary of State Colin L. Powell from pressuring Sharon......
....A series of episodes in which Bush felt Arafat behaved inappropriately further soured the relationship. Bush repeatedly refused to meet with Arafat, who had met with Clinton 21 times. And month after month, U.S. officials blamed Arafat for failing to prevent the suicide bombings in Israel..........
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