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Jewish World Review Nov. 3, 2008 / 5 Mar-Cheshvan 5769 Was He Wrong About Everything? By Jonathan Tobin
The next president should not repeat the Middle East mistakes of Bush or Clinton
The answers will assuredly revolve around Hurricane Katrina, the war in
Iraq, and the financial meltdown that has panicked Wall Street and made
a Democratic victory this November all but certain. Yet, even as Bush
gets swept into the proverbial dustbin of history, it would be a
mistake to succumb to the temptation of viewing everything he did as
wrong.
BAD FOR ISRAEL?
In the partisan debate for the Jewish vote, the Democrats argue that
the Bush administration has been harmful to the Jewish state. This is
despite the fact that most Jewish voters understood the administration
to be quite friendly to Israel.
Part of this has to do with the stale debate about the decision to go
to war in Iraq. There's no question that the demise of Saddam Hussein
and the weakening of Iraq helped Iran. Tehran's nuclear potential now
poses the No. 1 threat to both Israel and the region in general.
That's a fair point, though it must be said almost no one in the
pro-Israel community on either side of the aisle was unhappy about the
fall of Saddam, given his history of attacks on Israel and support for
terrorism. Iran's growing strength is frightening, and the decision to
invade Iraq must be considered to have contributed to it.
Yet, this line of reasoning fails to take into account that if Saddam
had been allowed to stay in power, his menacing of the region would
have continued and Iran's nuclear program would still have grown to the
existential threat that it is today.
Even more significant to the Democrats' strategy to woo Jewish voters
is the charge put forth during the current campaign that Bush's
decision to back away from Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy should also be
considered a mistake.
They argue that Bush's refusal to continue Bill Clinton's hands-on
engagement with the faltering peace talks led to years of violence and
the current impasse. This point, heralded by no less a personage than
Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden, is not only an
indictment of Bush's place in history, but a chilling prescription for
foreign policy in the next four years.
As such, it could not be more wrong.
Whatever else one may say about George W. Bush's time in the White
House, his negative view of Bill Clinton's mad dash for a Nobel Peace
Prize was spot-on. Clinton's feckless advocacy for the Oslo process,
even after it was clear that this scheme would lead to disaster, is
spoken of today as a noble failure by his admirers.
But the truth is, the Clinton administration was itself at fault for
spending years coddling then-Palestinian Authority leader Yasser
Arafat. It was Clinton (who made Arafat his most-frequent foreign guest
at the White House) and his foreign-policy team, including respected
men like Dennis Ross (who is hoping to return to office next year), who
indulged Arafat's demands, and lied to both the public and Congress
about the Palestinian's ties to terror and unwillingness to abide by
the peace accords that he, Arafat, had signed.
Clinton's sponsorship of the July 2000 Camp David conference resulted
in a sweeping Israeli peace proposal from then-Prime Minister Ehud
Barak. The answer from Arafat was a decisive "no." His dismissal of
Israel's offer was topped a few months later by the launch of a
Palestinian terror offensive that would take the lives of more than a
thousand Israelis and far more Palestinians.
The idea that Bush could have prevented this war or lessened its impact
is ridiculous, since it started on Clinton's watch, not his. More to
the point, it was Bush, acting against the advice of Secretary of State
Colin Powell, whose actions directly contributed to squelching the
intifada.
In 2002, as the violence grew in intensity, Bush broke with precedent
by refusing to stick to the Clintonesque policy of urging "restraint on
both sides." Despite Powell's objections, Bush gave Israeli Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon a "green light" to send in the Israel Defense
Force to clean out Arafat's terror bases in the West Bank. He also
backed the building of the separation fence that effectively ended the
suicide-bombing campaign.
Just as in 2006, when Bush supported the failed effort to fight back
against the Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon, the administration
understood that being evenhanded about the response to terror was a
diplomatic code phrase for stopping Israel from defending itself.
What's more, after Israel's capture of a ship filled with Iranian arms
sent to assist the Palestinian attacks, Bush finally did what his
predecessor would not. He rightly branded Arafat as an unrepentant
terrorist, and cut off American aid and diplomatic contact with him.
Bush then went on to state that peace could only come once the
Palestinians rejected terror and the leadership of those who support
terror.
Was that a mistake? Can anyone really believe that continuing Clinton's
urging for more concessions to Arafat would have brought peace?
LEARN THE LESSONS
Abbas, Arafat's longtime aide, looked more respectable, but was no
better than his mentor and was powerless, to boot. Bush's decision to
push Abbas to allow elections that were then won by Hamas was another
blunder. And, in the last year of his presidency, Bush has abandoned
Middle East policy to Powell's successor Condoleezza Rice, who seems
determined to re-enact the follies of Clinton's final year in office.
Though Democrats now claim the 2007 Annapolis conference, which Rice
and Bush hosted, was too little, too late, it was just as foolish as
Clinton's Camp David debacle. All it accomplished was to ratchet up the
pressure on Israel again, while doing nothing to force the Palestinians
to face reality and make peace.
As Israel prepares to elect new leadership and faces apocalyptic
threats from Iran, with no assurance that the international community
will act responsibly, the next president must avoid falling into the
trap of believing that every Bush precedent is to be overturned.
It isn't really important whether Bush gets credit for doing the right
thing about Arafat and backing Sharon's tough policies, which defeated
Palestinian terror. What is important is to learn the lessons not only
from Bush's mistakes, but also from those of his predecessor.
If the next administration is staffed by people who embrace the Clinton
Administration's delusions about Palestinian intentions, then we can
expect the same results that we got the last time: more bloodshed.
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JWR contributor Jonathan S. Tobin is executive editor of the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent.
Let him know what you think by clicking here.
© 2007, Jonathan Tobin
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