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Fatal vision: how Bush has given up on peace
(ROBERT FISK, The Independent, 23 June 2002)
George Bush Junior gave up last week. . . . There will be no Middle East peace conference in the near future, no serious attempt to halt the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, not a whimper of resolution on the region's tragedy from the man who started the "war for civilisation'', the "war on terror'', the "endless war'' and, most recently, the "titanic war on terror''. . . . Just a week ago, as we all know, Mr Bush had another of his famous "visions". They started in the autumn of last year when he had a vision of a Palestinian state living side by side with Israel. This particular vision coincided quite by chance, of course, with his efforts to keep the Arab states quiescent while America bombed the poorest and most ruined Muslim country in the world. Then this dream was forgotten for a few months until, earlier this year, Vice President Dick Cheney toured the Middle East to drum up Arab support for another war on Iraq. . . . the President has had yet another vision, a rather scaled-down version of the earlier one. Now he dreams of an interim Palestinian state. It is a sign of how obedient American journalists have become that not one US newspaper has seen this for the preposterous notion it really is. . . . Talal Salman, the editor of the Beirut daily As Safir, wrote in his newspaper last week that interim envisages "a provisional state on territory segmented like beehives'', with every town, village and refugee camp cut off by "a wall of tanks and permanent and moving checkpoints; with everything under helicopter surveillance ... with death squads monitoring intentions and dreams, targeting anyone they discover, determine, speculate or suspect may have explosive materials in their blood". . . . And amid these horrors, what do we get from Mr Bush? Delay. Obfuscation. A vague plan – revealed as usual to the pliant New York Times – suggested that the Bush boys and girls were going to ignore the "right of return" of Palestinian refugees, dump the "final status" issues of Jerusalem and settlements on the Israelis and Palestinians and – by far the most hilarious clause – would "find new language" to bridge Israel's and Palestine's interpretation of UN Security Council Resolution 242.

posted by LoZo 2:04 PM