[Guardian Unlimited, U.K.]

The Daily Star, Lebanon

'Pity' Bush, Who Has Come to Review His 'Foreign Policy Carcass'

"Pity George Bush this week, for he comes to review the desolate landscape of his failed policies in the Middle East. … Bush is the delinquent foreign-policy maestro of an otherwise great country."

EDITORIAL

May 14, 2008

Lebanon - The Daily Star - Original Article (English)

When U.S. President George W. Bush's plane lands in Israel at the start of his visit to the Middle East, perhaps it should do one of those corkscrew dive-descent landings, because that would probably be the only thrill he gets during this visit to the Jewish state and several Arab countries. If Bush were an honest man, he would sense the circus-like element of his foreign policy in the Middle East - lots of ups and downs, plenty of drama, noise and thunder and fire and explosions. But when you go home there is nothing of substance left behind, just a momentary feel-good legacy of entertainment, illusion and make-believe. Pity George Bush this week, for he comes to review the desolate landscape of his failed policies in the Middle East. But pray, also, that his successor takes the time to study the causes of this cumulative failure and avoids them in the years ahead.

Bush is the delinquent foreign-policy maestro of an otherwise great country. He has failed to deal honestly and rationally with the realities of the region, preferring wishful thinking and simplistic black-and-white threats to the hard work and nuanced sensibilities that are needed to grapple with the problems, challenges and opportunities of the Arab-Asian region. His desperate, last minute, pull-the-rabbit-out-of-the-hat attempt to achieve Palestinian-Israeli peace at Annapolis was clearly insincere - because he didn't invest the required political capital to get it done, and lacks the intellectual clarity and moral gumption to make it happen. He hoped to ride a runaway horse to the finish line and ended up in a horror house of mirrors. His peace partners have proved illusory, his necessary impartiality is nonexistent, and his sense of how Palestine and Israel fit into the wider picture in the Middle East is totally absent. 

Posted by WORLDMEETS.US

Worse for him, he visits at a time when events in Lebanon have delivered his sixth consecutive major foreign-policy failure in the region: Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon haven't generated the anti-Islamist surge in democracy that he vowed to produce, his overall government-reform policy in the Arab world lies in tatters and in locked drawers, and his "war on terror" has sparked perhaps the single biggest resurgence and decentralization of terror in modern history.

The lessons of his cumulative, enormous and continuing misdeeds are bountiful, and offer rich study material for his successor. The single most important being that if you use foreign armies to rearrange the political furniture in distant lands with their own histories and values, you will fail spectacularly, every time, with absolute certainty.

American triumphalist apologists, neoconservative desperados and allied intellectual airheads will argue Bush's rationales for years, with the same result: disdain and rejection from much of the world, and the hope that real American values will rear their fairer heads when this policy and masquerade of morality is mercifully laid to rest.

[Posted by WORLDMEETS.US May 15, 11:36am]