Bush Copies the Biggest Failure of John Foster Dulles’s Playbook By Treating the Hamas Victory in the Palestinian Elections like the Aswan Dam
In the early 1950’s, the United States Congress agreed to provide funds for Egypt to build the high dam at Aswan. After Egyptian President Nasser started to buy weapons from Moscow because he could not purchase them from the west, Dulles, in a fit of pique, withdrew the funding for the dam.
Russia stepped in to finance the
dam, and the cycle of events stemming from the Aswan fiasco were major
contributing causes of the 1956 Middle East war where France, Britain and
Israel invaded Egypt and conquered the Sinai peninsula. (Ariel Sharon was a
brigade commander in that war, and during the two months he spent in Sinai
waiting to be replaced by United Nations troops, he mapped the Sinai peninsula
and pre positioned hidden supplies and ammunition. Israel clearly intended to return, which it did in 1967. For the past 50 years there has always been
a “Hitler” in the Middle East, first Nasser, then Saddam Hussein, now, the
President of Iran.)
Bush’s
and the European Union’s decision to cut off funding to the Palestinian
Authority because of Hama’s victory was about as smart as Dulles’s decision to
withhold funding for the Aswan High Dam.
Now, Iran has stepped in to fill the funding gap, and a suicide bomber
has just killed 9 people and wounded 60 in Tel Aviv.
The failure of Israel and the west
to accept the legitimacy of the Hamas victory is like Bush refusing to accept
Gore’s victory and Schroeder’s refusal to accept Merkel’s victory and now
Berlusconi’s refusal to accept Prodi’s victory. It seems to me that the Hitlers are in the west, if Hitlers are
defined as people who assume power legally but not democratically and then
launch wars of aggression on the basis of concocted intelligence.
Anyway,
the refusal of the west to fund the Palestinian Authority, thereby supporting
illegal occupation and collective punishment, has only created a golden
opportunity for the enemies of peace and of Israel to strengthen their position
in the Middle East. I think the real
problem is that Bush is learning disabled.
This makes him far more dangerous than if he was just stupid or
lazy. Bush can’t learn from his
mistakes. It was the height of
arrogance and stupidity for him to think that the Iraqis, who invented writing,
were waiting for a mediocre attention deficit disordered Yale student who
inherited his office from his father to bring them freedom and democracy.
The invasion of Iraq has weaked the United States and Israel, just as the withdrawing of funding of the Aswan High Dam destabilized the Middle East and led to war in short order. What Iran is showing by thumbing its nose at the United States by continuing its nuclear program and funding the Palestinian Authority, is that the invasion of Iraq was a catastrophic mistake that has only strengthened Iran’s position in the perpetual struggle between Egypt, Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia for predominance in the Middle East. It also shows that the United States was wrong not to engage in discussions with Iran when Iran offered.
One possible explanation for this incompetence,
and one I don’t entirely discount, is that the United States is trying to
provoke a wider war in the Middle East.
If the Bush Administration and Israel can paint the entire Palestinian
people as “terrorists” and criminalize them in the same way the right wing in
the United States is trying to criminalize illegal immigrants, then the groundwork
will be laid for international acceptance of wholesale expulsion of the
Palestinians from the West Bank. But to
where? Guantanamo?
There
is really no alternative to a negotiated settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict and the Israeli and American refusal to deal with the realities on the
ground is what is making more bloodshed inevitable.
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