Pres. and Mrs. Bush are headed to Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt next Tuesday, on a trip that will run through May 18. They will arrive in Israel on the morning of Wednesday, May 14.
In a press briefing yesterday, national security adviser Steve Hadley spelled out that the trip
- will be an opportunity to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Israel’s founding and to demonstrate our nation’s support for and commitment to the region.
The President will reaffirm his personal commitment to peace between Israelis and Palestinians, and encourage continuing efforts for a two-state solution, a democratic Israel and a democratic Palestine living side by side in peace and security.
The trip will demonstrate the President’s steadfast opposition to extremists and their state sponsors, Iran and Syria, who are expending enormous energy to thwart opportunities for security, freedom and peace in the region.
So the trip will, in every possible sense, put Israel first. Pres. and Mrs. (Burma mis-step) Laura Bush will spend two full days in Israel before cramming in quick one-day visits to Saudi Arabia and Egypt. In Israel, they’ll have separate meetings with PM Olmert and Pres. Shimon Peres. They’ll tour Masada. They’ll hear from the Quartet’s latest colonial administrator of Palestinian affairs, Tony Blair. They’ll host their own reception to celebrate Israel’s Independence Day. They’ll meet Israeli youth, etc etc.
While in the area of Israel/Palestine they won’t be either visiting Ramallah or meeting Pres. Abbas. (They will later meet him, and half a dozen other US proxy leaders from the region in quick back-to-back meetings in Sharm al-Sheikh, Egypt.)
This is just four months after Bush’s last visit to the Middle East, which was memorable mainly for the way he mocked the hardships inflicted on the Palestinians by Israel’s stifling system of movement controls in the West Bank.
Hadley’s statement continued to use the administration’s lame, content-free narrative about the US’s “struggle” in the Middle East being against “extremists”.
I have a sense of foreboding about this visit. Tensions in Lebanon, Gaza, Sadr City, and Egypt are all currently simmering and mounting toward a possible full boil.
Rami Khouri has an intriguing op-ed in the Beirut Daily Star today. It is titled Mideast change is coming, and may not be pretty. In it, he argues:
- The convergence of six trends in the Middle East – the changing realities of food, energy, water, population, urbanization and security-dominated politics – is likely to create conditions that will be politically challenging, if not destabilizing, in many countries in the years ahead. The confluence of these trends is very similar to what happened in the region in the mid to late 1970s, when the current Islamist wave of social identity and confrontational politics was initiated.
Things will be much more difficult this time around, and the consequences could be much worse, especially in view of the ripple effect of the war in Iraq, Iran’s growing influence, the continued stalemate in Palestine and the weakening of some Arab governments. It is difficult to predict exactly what will happen in the years ahead, but the stressful factors propelling change are already clear and we would be foolish to ignore them.
I agree with everything Rami writes there. He draws a compelling picture of many of the “deep” structural problems in the Middle East. These problems form the inescapable back-drop to everything that is currently happening in the region.
Germany’s leading Green Party pol and former Foreign Minitser and Vice-chancellor Joschka Fischer also described a largely congruent set of structural threats to the region’s current governance system in this op-ed in the DS, on Monday.
But I also have a strong and disquieting sense that the purview of both of these pieces is too “lofty” and longterm. Throughout the Arab areas of the Eastern Mediterranean, the crises of food and fuel prices, and of the legitimacy of US-backed governments, seem already to be, as I said, near boiling point. I cannot imagine there is anything that Pres. Bush can do, on a journey that is designed first and foremost to demonstrate the very special place that Israel occupies in US foreign policy, that can lessen these tensions. Indeed, his arrival in the region and his performance at all these very pro-Israeli events there may well increase regional tensions even more.
Members of the U.N. Security Council should stand ready to work urgently to contain the regional conflagration that might occur. Actually, they should have done a lot more, long before now, to rein in the unbridled, one-sided, and inflammatory exercise of US-Israeli power in the region.
Pat Lang and Rami Zuraik are also really both worth reading about the escalations in Lebanon.
Lang asks:
Have the Jacobins, their Israelis allies and whatever it is that Cheney is, decided to end the suspense and trigger a war on Hizbullah and maybe Syria.
Greetings:
Of interest (hopefully) are the efforts of Lebanon’s civil society movements to end the impasse-Khallas (devoted to ending the brinkmanship amidst Lebanon’s warlords) airs a television spot regarding the violence:
http://yalibnan.com/site/tv/2008/05/khalass_tv_ad_on_civil_disorde.php
Kevin,
I was in Lebanon last month on the anniversary of the start of the civil war, and there were a number of demonstrations and other events during that period. I attended one that evening with a friend of mine.
I certainly hope what we are seeing now is not the start of a repeat. If it were up to the people…
HI Shirin:
Yes, there are some active groups working against a civil war-a new group has begun on Facebook-I received an invitation to join today.
Whether it be in Lebanon or in Casamance, the question of impunity looms large for me-Witness Zimbabwe-the question for me (hence my interest in reading HC’s blog) is how to stop this violence? If we as an introspective species are able to both harm and heal, how do we tip the balance toward more healing and reconciliation?
HC, any ideas on useful mechanisms of conflict resolution in any of these instances?
Apologies, a corrective to my last post-
I ought to acknowledge that it is the seeming loss of _introspection_ that yields armed conflict and human loss: thus, existentially speaking, across contexts-how do we restore insight amidst the “sheer terror” (to quote HC from the Making of Modern Lebanon) in Lebanon, Zimbabwe, Casamance?
This looks like a pure propaganda trip to keep the allies in line for eight more months. Bush will be stiffing Abbas again, as he did on Abbas’s recent Washington visit.
news report (9 May 2008):
US President George W. Bush’s decision to cancel tripartite talks with Israel and the Palestinians next week, and a criminal probe into Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, have cast a shadow over Israel’s 60th birthday celebrations.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AaL1Se38gg
“Barack on America and Israel”
Too many of our politicians, Obama included, speak of America’s “special relationship” with Israel. I disagree with Obama’s claims that “we” share “much in common culture,” that Israel is the site of “so much of our understanding of the world around us”, or that Israel is a “robust democracy” or is “committed to a rule of Law, civil rights and civil liberties.”
Which Israel is he talking about?
There is something to be said for tying the “Israel is our ally” and “shared values” guff to talk of a “robust democracy… committed to the rule of law, civil rights and civil liberties.”
If Israel were committed to these, peace would be just around the corner. If it is not so committed then whether it shares “our values” (as opposed to Bush’s) and is thus an “ally” are moot.
And this, I suspect, is why the ultra zionists are insisting that Hillary stay in the race and leave no card unplayed, yea even unto Strom Thurmond’s cards.
Fighting in Lebanon again? Not to worry. It will doubtlessly provide Nasrallah with an opportunity to claim another “huge victory for the Lebanese people.”
It may sound melodramatic, but I do think what we are witnessing in the ME is real ‘end of empire’ stuff. The old order – a US hegemony supported by Israel and the “Arab moderates” – is crumbling, and their old tactics – violence and intimidation – are just not working anymore. We are seeing the rise of mostly non-state actors – Hizballah, Hamas and the Brothers – combined with a resurgent Iran who cannot be intimidated. That said, like Khoury I am sadly not predicting an “Arab spring”. There is nothign more ugly than a dying empire, and the US and its clients will not give up easily. Fasten your seatbelts.
Irish, I tend to agree with you– both that this is end-of-empire stuff and that the empire is unlikely to give up gracefully. The latter part of that equation can, however, certainly be affected by the actions of those of us inside the US who will need to counter all the pro-“empire” propaganda, including all the hate-talk directed against Muslims etc. It can also be affected by the actions of other, much more responsible actors in the international arena. Hence my call for the UNSC to start acting much more wisely to de-escalate tensions and help everyone chart a more peaceful way forward in the whole of the ME.
To me, Kevin, that’s the best form of “conflict resolution” I can suggest, for the whole region; though of course the local pro-peace actors also need a lot of support.
Sadly, though, the UNSC may not act speedily because of the P-5 problem. Of the 5, Britain and France are racing to be the ‘favored’ Washington lap-dog these days, and Russia and China could be thought of as quite happy to see the US bogged down in the ME and having its military capabilities seriously degraded for every day its stays bogged down… So what we’d need is a global citizen’s coalition for de-escalation in the ME.
For my part, though, as a US citizen, my priority is to intervene here, in the US, to try to urge policies of de-escalation and respect for all members of the world community. That is, an end to imperial-type policies including an end to all US military and covert interventions in the ME.
I have recently had a chance to listen to Rami Khouri expand on his points in Los Angeles. Helena correctly lauds the points brought up by Mr. Khouri but also astutely notes that they are lofty and long-term. I brought up 3 rejoinders to his views:
1- They downplay the role of imperial interventions as a process that deepens the problems posed by these long-term trends. Specifically, such interventions are not a vehicle for modernity, but in fact “fix’ the region into a political and social structures that are highly regressive. An example is the transformation of Iraq from a nationalist project into a patch work of sectarian and tribal alliances geared to enable the American political project in Iraq. Another example is the “fixing” of political structures in the gulf into one run by social regressive and politically pliant princely families. Compare Saudi Arabia today to how things were in the fifties and early sixties, a period characterized by more socially promising modernizing currents
2-Related to #1, those views remain silent on the massive impact of an oil-based extraction economy on the overall economic and social trends in the region, an impact that is again regressive
3-They overvalue the role of NGOs and other westernized civil society organizations as vehicle of change and somewhat under-represent the enormous role of the “population cauldrons” of the region: Gaza, Sadr city. the Souther district of Beirut, the Mahala Alkubra of Cairo etc, as critical engines of change.
These rejoinders only emphasize the interplay between the near-term political and long term social and demographic. A long term solution to the latter necessitates a renewed political process across the region of decolonization, 60+ years after this was supposed to have been achieved. This is the tragedy and irony of the current situation
The patterns of violence in Lebanon are quite revealing vis-a-vis the assassination of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri-can anyone say SSNP?
While we must acknowledge the failure of empire, the US being the prime target of this prevailing discourse, Iran cannot be left out of the discourse-Elizabeth Picard an exemplary scholar/analyist of Lebanese affairs has long articulated the proxy nature of the US/Iranian contest for Lebanon. Iran’s looming power in the region also ought not be underestimated-While this may sound “Bushite”, it is in fact a reality-
KDJ