President George w. Bush is the guy who gave us the "road map" for peace in the Middle East, the way forward to solve the Israeli/Palestinian conundrum. It's an on-again, off-again ploy he likes to drag out just before he attacks some nation in the region.
Remember Iraq? Part and parcel of that grand adventure was Bush's promise to deliver the Palestinians from their plight. Good optics with the Arab world, right? Then, when the Iraq business fell into the toilet, so did Bush's interest in the Palestine promise.
So now Bush is making the same noises again. Must restart the Palestinian peace process. Let's get it going, this fall at the latest.
Curiously, today's Guardian quotes an administration official as stating that Dick Cheney has won Shrub's support for military action against Iran next year. Bush/Cheney apparently don't trust their successor, Democrat or Republican, to deal with Iran.
It really is starting to get mind numbing isn't it? imagine how much smoother things could have gone in the middle east had they just stuck with afganistan and maybe took some time with it...make it into something that could have been great (even that is hopeful thinking), but the US had to push it's limits and ended up with the quagmire that is Iraq....and now the possibility of Iran it's complete madness.
ReplyDeleteYes, numbing it is. If you're interested in where this all went wrong, check out the late David Halberstam's piece in this month's Vanity Fair. The myth of Cheney as the evil genius is nonsense. Cheney is a rash idiot, albeit of a different genre than Bush. It takes a wicked brew of stupidity and hubris for a nation as notionally powerful as the United States to screw up globally as badly as this regime. Now it lies with the sane West to find a way to extract itself from these bumpkins. I do, however, have to admit that they have buckets of faux gravitas to keep them afloat.
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