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Letter from diplomats tells Bush: Middle East policy is 'dangerous'
(Rupert Cornwell, The Independent, 05 May 2004)
More than 60 former US diplomats yesterday lambasted George Bush for running a one-sided Middle East policy, claiming that the President's open-ended support for Israel was costing the US "credibility, prestige and friends". . . . "Your unqualified support for Israel's extra-judicial assassinations, its Berlin Wall-like barrier, and its harsh military measures in occupied territories" was costing the country its credibility, the letter said. It warned that current US policies were placing US diplomats, civilians and military overseas "in an untenable, even dangerous position." . . . As with their British counterparts, the last straw for the letter's signatories - many of them veterans of Middle East postings - was the 14 April meeting in Washington when Mr Bush endorsed the plan of Ariel Sharon, Israel's Prime Minister, to hang on to five substantial settlement areas in the West Bank, and flatly rejected the right of return for Palestinian refugees. . . . Describing what he called "an almost hopeless situation", Andrew Killgore, a former US envoy to Qatar, complained that Mr Bush had given his public support to Mr Sharon without talking to the "quartet" of the US, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia, which devised the so-called "road-map" plan for a settlement. . . . "There was no need to go that far," Mr Killgore, the prime organiser of the letter, told a press conference yesterday. And there was "no competition" between the President and Senator John Kerry, his probable White House challenger in November, he said. "They're both very dedicated Zionists, it seems to me." . . . Edward Peck, a former senior US diplomat in Baghdad, said Mr Bush had been "misled" by his closest advisers. By endorsing Mr Sharon's proposals, he said, the President had effectively "ended the tripartite arrangement" of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, brokered by the US. . . . Mr Bush is probably the most pro-Israeli president in recent times (certainly more so than his father). But John Kerry, his Democratic challenger-designate this autumn, is a scarcely less ardent supporter of the Jewish state, promising that if elected president, he would never push Israel into peace agreements that were against its interest.

posted by LoZo 7:46 PM