Elliot Abrams has wielded his corrupt politics for 25 years in Washington and continues to do so: http://www.salon.com/opinion/featur...p://www.salon.com/src/ads/jfk/jfk_splash.html The British P.M. thought he had a deal: He'd support the war and Bush would stand up to Ariel Sharon. But administration neoconservatives, led by Elliott Abrams, killed the deal. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Sidney Blumenthal Nov. 14, 2003 | Tony Blair, about to welcome George W. Bush to London for a state visit on Nov. 18 with pomp and circumstance, has assumed the mantle of tutor to the unlearned American president -- a pedagogical role that defines the latest phase of the hallowed special relationship. Bush originally came to Blair determined to go to war in Iraq, but without a strategy. Blair instructed him that the casus belli was Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, urged him to make the case before the United Nations, and when the effort to obtain a U.N. resolution failed, persuaded Bush to revive the Middle East peace process between Israel and Palestine that Bush had abandoned. The new "road map" for peace there was the principal concession that Blair wrested from Bush. Blair argued that renewing the negotiations was essential to the long-term credibility of the coalition goals in Iraq and the whole region. But within the councils of the Bush administration that initiative was systematically undermined. Now Blair welcomes a president who has taught him a lesson in statecraft he refuses to acknowledge. Flynt Leverett, a former CIA analyst, revealed to me that the text of the road map was ready to be made public before the end of 2002: "We had made high-level commitments to key European and Arab allies. The White House lost its nerve. It took Blair to get Bush to put it out. But even then the administration wasn't really committed to it." Leverett is also a former senior director for Middle East affairs at the National Security Council, one of the authors of the road map, and now a fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. "We needed to work this issue hard, but because we didn't want to make life difficult with Ariel Sharon, we undercut our credibility." In the internal struggle over peace in the Middle East, the neoconservatives within the administration prevailed. Elliott Abrams, chief of Middle East affairs at the National Security Council, was their point man. During the Iran-contra scandal of the Reagan presidency, Abrams was a player in setting up a rogue foreign policy operation as the assistant secretary of state for Latin America. His solicitation of $10 million from the sultan of Brunei for the illegal enterprise turned farcical when he transposed numbers on a Swiss bank account and lost the money. He wound up pleading guilty to lying to the Congress and was eventually pardoned by former President Bush. He spent his purgatory as the director of a neoconservative think tank, denouncing the Oslo Accords and arguing that "tomorrow's lobby for Israel has got to be conservative Christians, because there aren't going to be enough Jews to do it." Abrams was rehabilitated when George W. Bush appointed him to the NSC in December 2002. In his new position, Abrams immediately set to work trying to gut the text of the road map. He was suspicious of the Europeans and British, considering them to be anti-Israel if not inherently anti-Semitic, and spoke vituperatively against them to his colleagues. But working in league with his neoconservative allies in the vice president's office and at the Department of Defense, Abrams was unable to prevent Blair from persuading Bush to issue the road map at last. The key to the road map's success was U.S. support for Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen, indispensable as a partner for peace, but regarded as a threat by both Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat. At the summit on the road map at Aqaba, Jordan, in June, Bush told Abu Mazen: "God told me to strike at al-Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them." Abu Mazen was scheduled to come to Washington to meet with Bush a month later. For his political survival, he desperately required U.S. pressure on the Sharon government to make concessions on building settlements on the West Bank. Abu Mazen sent a secret emissary to the White House: Khalil Shakaki. He is the director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, the only independent Palestinian institute of its kind, which was physically destroyed by Arafat's thugs in early July. I met with Shakaki in Ramallah on the West Bank recently, where he revealed his account of his urgent trip to the White House. There he met with Elliott Abrams and laid out the conditions of Bush's support essential for Abu Mazen's continued existence. Abrams told him, he said, that Bush "couldn't agree to anything" and offered domestic political considerations: Bush's reliance on the religious right, his refusal to offend the American Israel Political Action Committee and the demands of the upcoming election. "Why are you inviting Abu Mazen here?" asked Shakaki. "We're not inviting him," Abrams replied. "He's just here." Shakaki pleaded that the Palestinian was "a window of opportunity" and "an experiment" who could not go on without U.S. help. "He has to show he's capable of doing it himself," Abrams answered dismissively. Inside the NSC, those in favor of the road map, CIA analysts Flynt Leverett and Ben Miller, among others, were forced out. On Sept. 6, Abu Mazen resigned, and the road map, for all intents and purposes, collapsed. "We are moving towards hell," Shakaki told me. Tony Blair gave George W. Bush a reason for the war in Iraq and prompted him to offer a commitment to peace for the Middle East, preventing Bush from appearing as a reckless and isolated leader. In return for his good faith, the teacher's seminar on the Middle East has been dropped. "Just what is it that Blair has influenced?" wonders Leverett. Harold Macmillan, the postwar prime minister, famously remarked that after empire the British would act toward the Americans as the Greeks to the Romans. Though the Greeks were often tutors to the Romans, Macmillan neglected to mention that the Greeks were slaves.
More likely, the Brits are cadets on the USS Great Britain. Great read. The conservative press has all but stopped their promotion of Bush's roadmap to peace and the "unprecedented" cease fire between the IOF and PLO. Glad someone is still looking at the problem.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1084786,00.html "The Israeli government has admitted in a secret memorandum that Ariel Sharon has failed to honour commitments to President George Bush to dismantle Jewish settler outposts in the West Bank" And yet... oh, screw it.
Re: Re: How Bush betrayed Blair and the Israeli/Palestinian peace process Our last President that looked at the problem made things 1 billion times worse.
Yes, although I don't know why soft bunny made you remember. Mana was really really great. I was very impressed -- they were very impressive showmen. No opening band, full American Airlines Center. I took my younger daughter, who commented after the show started that "it was just like 'School of Rock'!" I dig it when my beaner bruthas make good...
Mana I went to the Chicago show last year. Didn't go this year because I thought that it would probably be the same set. I'll go when they get new material. What was the set like Oman?
Based on pictures and set lists of shows over the last year, I think it was very similar. I got the sense that this tour was really to spark interest in their greatest hits album which should be coming out this year. I didn't know Mana before a few months ago, but the folks that I was with said that it was essentially a few songs from the latest LP, and then their big hits. The Dallas Morning News gave it a nice review, and they definately did not seem like they were mailing it in. Mana say keep the environment clean. And US out of El Salvador.
Re: Mana This is a bunch of crap. I feared that Bush was going to hang Blair out to dry on this one, but he made every effort to get this thing on track. Shite, the Palestinians killed some of our guys over there and he still maintained the course. It's really hard to make peace when one side doesn't want it. You can't force a peace such as this;it has to come from the politicians all the way down to the "desperate and downtrodden" for it to work. You can shift the blame all you like, but most folks know who is guilty here.
The problem has always been this: while Bush holds the seat, power, and authority of man responsible to not only his nation but the greater matters of the globe, he is, in truth, a man unable to see past his fossil fuel background; thus, Blair suffers this, as Bush as poseur explores Middle East peace, his focus has never left securing fossil fuel acces for his friends and family... The three branches of life's tree are thought, word and deed. You can never know what a man (or, especially, a woman) is thinking; you can only go by what they say until what they say conflicts with what they do. Then, as Blair is discovering, you can only go by what they do; what they say can rarely ever again hold water. Oh, but you CAN force peace in this "Global war on terror?" Stop your talk; with every utterance, you both expose your foolishenss, and lay bare the reality of the choices this administration (and, to be fair, several others) makes regarding the Middle East...that is, there are two reasons for the soulless cash-whores that wield certain types of power in our nation to seek to maintain the Middle East conflict as it is... (1) We sell lots of arms, and profit is good, regardless. (2) The conservative bloc likes a contiguous Israel for its "Rapture requirements," and this is an election cycle... Any other analysis that fails the above tests is pissing into the wind...
From the 60 Minutes segment, "Zion's Christian Soliders," aired 8 June, 2003. "...The Christian fundamentalists believe the only Israelis who are really listening to God are the hard line Jewish settlers who live on the West Bank and Gaza and refuse to move. The Christians trudge up to these settlements as if they were making pilgrimages to holy shrines. That’s because they and the settlers share a core conviction. They believe that God gave the land of Israel to the Jewish people. “Every grain of sand, every grain of sand between the Dead Sea, the Jordan River, and, and the Mediterranean Sea belongs to the Jews,” says [former Colgate marketing executive from Memphis, and founder of the Moral Majority Ed] McAteer. This includes the West Bank and Gaza. What about the three million Palestinians who live on the West Bank and Gaza? McAteer suggests the bulk of them could be cleansed from this God-given real estate and moved to some Arab country. Nothing can come between the Jews and their land. In fact, many fundamentalists believe that when Prime Minister Rabin signed the Oslo accords and offered to trade land for peace, it was not only a mistake, it was a sin. “They were going against the word of God. You cannot go against the word of God. And I believe that God stopped it ... by the things that happened.” says Arthur. She hints that God punished Rabin by assassinating him. “I think that God did not want that Oslo Accord to go through...” So, when I submit that ..."The conservative bloc likes a contiguous Israel for its "Rapture requirements...," I am, in fact, referring to that bloc of conservatives that reflect the views of the religious right, who, again, feel they must have a "whole" Israel, full of Jews and not Arabs, for Rapture to begin...where, of course, as the 60 Minutes piece puts it: "...“The Jews die or convert. As a Jew, I can’t feel very comfortable with the affections of somebody who looks forward to that scenario,” says Gershom Gorenberg, who knows that scenario well. Gorenberg is the author of the “End of Days,” a book about those Christian evangelicals who choose to read the Bible literally. “They don’t love real Jewish people. They love us as characters in their story, in their play, and that’s not who we are, and we never auditioned for that part, and the play is not one that ends up good for us.” “If you listen to the drama they’re describing, essentially it’s a five-act play in which the Jews disappear in the fourth act...” So for me to submit "the conservative block" was inaccurate...I meant to say the religious base thereof...
This was on Blair to know better. He had no leverage to force Bush to make what would have been a serious foreign policy shift, Bush had no incentive to keep his promise, and the whole situation is probably insolvable anyway. Pretty easy to picture a scenario where the West alienates Sharon, and Arafat leadership responds by concluding that Israel is ripe to be overthrown militarily. I can't blame Bush for screwing up an Israel-Palestine roadmap for peace - there is no one on earth who right now can bring those two to the table and realistically negotiate. I think I said if Bush had succeeded, I'd have voted for him next year - that's how impossible it will be.