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The Quixotic Quest of President Bush
Guest Column | By Ruth S. King | January 14, 2008
I was willing to put on my rosy eyeglasses when President Bush sought to bring defeat and democracy to Iraq because he fought a legitimate war against a monster whose ambitions were deadly.
Remember the joke about a boy who gets a huge box of horse manure as a nasty prank and spends a whole day sifting through it looking for a pony? Well I'm reminded of that by the dozens of friends and supporters of Israel who are looking for the pony in President Bush's foolhardy Middle East peace mission.
I'm told he did insist that Israel was to be a Jewish state although the Arabs unanimously rejected that concept. Well what was he to say? That Israel would be a Hindu state? And, they continue, he did speak of alterations in the borders compatible with Israel's security. Really? And who is to decide what those borders are? Syria? Hamas? Abbas, who is really Arafat in a suit, or Olmert who is an empty suit?
And, they press, he said there was to be no "right of return" for Arab refugees. Well now, that's really a Trojan pony because he also offered them money with which we all know they will buy weapons to use against Israel.
Facts, as Nietzsche said, are always hard and the hard fact here is that our president is on a quixotic mission. I deliberately invoke the Cervantes hero, who was a good man and believed in things as they should be rather than as they are.
I was willing to put on my rosy eyeglasses when President Bush sought to bring defeat and democracy to Iraq because he fought a legitimate war against a monster whose ambitions were deadly. I set aside all other political considerations when confronted with national security and the war against international jihad. He was the only one in a sea of congressional and media appeasers willing to stay the course. I even confess to being slightly soothed by the assurances of those who had friends in high places in the administration that the "Road Map" calling for two states in "Palestine" was just talk and buying time to keep the Arab gutter from exploding while we conducted the war.
But I can't keep sifting through the manure. The president's father once called Ronald Reagan's economic policies "voodoo economics." He was wrong, but his son's foreign policy with respect to the Middle East is "voodoo policy" based on illusion and myth and tergiversation of history. It hurts allies and rewards enemies.
Let us leave aside Israel. What about Jordan whose King Abdullah must be sweating inside of his medal encrusted royal suit? He does rule over 82% of Palestine where the "Hashemite Dynasty" dates only as far back as 1920 when the British deeded 82% of Mandated Palestine to the Arabs. The British gave Iraq to King Feisal, and to his younger brother Abdullah Senior (great-grandfather to the present Abdullah), they gave Trans Jordan. Until 1922 the Hashemites were Emirs of Mecca.
The late King Hussein understood history and the shaky nature of his rule. In 1962 he wrote "Uneasy Lies the Head", a recognition that dynasties fail and their monarchs go off to exile in the sunny Mediterranean ports of Europe. Nonetheless, he was drawn into the 1967 war by the Arabs and lost the West Bank and Jerusalem where his "occupation" had been brutal and recognized only by Pakistan and Great Britain.
It is instructive to recall that in 1970 when the PLO began to exert warlike local rule in Amman and other cities, King Hussein killed and expelled thousands in what became known as "Black September", the name of the terrorist Arab group subsequently responsible for the Munich Olympics massacre of Israeli athletes.
Unfortunately, after the first Lebanon War, and prodding by the Reagan administration, the PLO returned to Jordan and has grown into a powerful jihadist force in league with The Islamic Action Front�Jabhat al-'Amal al-Islami, founded in 1992, and the largest and most influential political party in this "moderate" Arab Muslim nation.
The late Hussein had an understanding with Israel for many years without benefit of treaty. They shared intelligence on troop movements, arms smuggling and local agitation in the West Bank even though Jordan maintained its law forbidding land purchase, home ownership or citizenship to Jews.
Thanks to the Oslo agreement, his son Abdullah cannot openly rely on Israeli help and lives in abject fear of Palestinian Arab resentment. Unlike his father who had a predilection for Western "Barbie" types, Abdullah's bride is Arab. While she is routinely described as a Palestinian "refugee" hailing from Tulkarm, a city in the northern West Bank, she was born in Kuwait to wealthy parents. They became "refugees" only when Kuwait expelled 400,000 Palestinian Arabs after the latter supported Saddam Hussein in the First Gulf War.
He makes soothing gestures to the Arab League by denouncing Israel but probably has a suitcase packed, knowing full well that the jihadists will set their sights on Jordan as well as Israel�..especially if they have a terrorist launching pad in the heights of the West Bank from which they can easily lob missiles and infiltrate Jordan's cities. Only Israel's control of the West Bank can deter this�.and Abdullah knows it.
Where is the coherence in this "peace process? How does it advance our strategy in what is properly called World War Four? Harming democratic Israel and an ostensibly stable and relatively pro-western Jordan is not policy. It harms those nations irreparably, paving the way for Arab massacres and weakens bulwarks of defense against growing militant Islam.
It makes all the tough talk about "the war on terror" more like tilting swords at windmills than real policy.
The original article can be found at http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Ruth King is a freelance writer. She has written a book and articles on gardening, and also writes a monthly column in OUTPOST, the publication of Americans for a Safe Israel.
Guest columns do not necessarily reflect the views of Accuracy in Media or its staff.
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