Undermining the Bush Doctrine
Andrew McCarthy writes that the conference is "crushing for Bush supporters" and wonders what happened to the Bush Doctrine:
Seduced by the fantasy of peace-loving Palestinians, the president and his top diplomats have made creation of a sovereign state for these blood-soaked jihadists the bedrock of our Middle East policy — thus undercutting any credibility the Bush Doctrine may have had. Remarkably, the State Department tells the New York Times that its game-plan for the farce is to commit both Israel and the Palestinians “to carry out long-postponed obligations included in the first stage of the 2003 peace plan known as the road map.” On the Palestinian side, the primary obligation was to end terrorism. That’s precisely the same promise the terror master and Palestinian founder Yasser Arafat gave to President Clinton after the first and before the second Intifada.
The promise is never meant and never kept because it cannot be. At the existential core of Palestinian identity is the belief that Israel — the “Zionist entity” — is an illegitimate interloper which must be purged from Muslim land. So ingrained is this conceit that, in reality, the Palestinians are not even attending the farce. The terrorist organization they knowingly and willfully elected to represent them, Hamas, is boycotting Annapolis as a waste of time, a diversion from the jihad.
Instead, Palestinians are nominally represented in the proceedings by Mahmoud Abbas, Arafat’s successor as leader of the Fatah party and the State Department’s favorite “moderate.” So the delusion that the Palestinian people want peaceful cohabitation in Israel is layered over by the delusion that Fatah is a credible peace partner. The cherry on top is that Abbas is both inclined and able to deliver on the obligations of peace.
It is madness. Palestinians are reared from birth to abhor Israelis. A dehumanizing hatred pervades their media, education system, and society at large. Their national monuments glorify suicide bombers. That, indeed, is why recent polling shows that 75 percent of Palestinians, including a whopping 93-percent of young Palestinian adults (aged 18 to 25), deny Israel’s right to exist. It is also why they chose Hamas when given the chance.
The alternative, Fatah, could be thought “moderate” only in the sense that Hitler would be a moderate if you compared him, say, to Satan. By its constitution, Fatah calls for the “eradication of Zionist economic, political, military and cultural existence[,]” through an “armed revolution” which is to be the “decisive factor in the liberation fight and in uprooting the Zionist existence” — a revolution that “will not cease unless the Zionist state is demolished and Palestine is completely liberated.” To effectuate the armed revolution, Fatah maintains its own terrorist wing, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, which works closely with Iran, Syria, and other jihadist organizations....Simply stated, the farce is crushing for Bush supporters. This administration is hellbent on granting statehood to savages who worship “martyrdom,” who have bombed their way to the table, and whose non-negotiable demand — a “right of return” to Israel for millions of migrant Palestinians — would sound the death-knell for a civilized democracy that is our only true friend in the region. So desperate is the administration to show “progress” and “engagement” that it is placing its chips on an unreconstructed terrorist organization, Fatah, that fails the most basic tests of sovereignty — able neither to control its own territory nor to acknowledge the right of a neighboring sovereign to exist. And in executing the strategy, the administration is betraying the principle that state sponsors of terror like Syria must be eradicated or reformed, but never embraced — the only roadmap to real peace.
The same theme was echoed in an interview of Caroline Glick by NRO's Kathryn Lopez:
Lopez: All things being what they are: If there’s a single good that can come of this conference, what would you urge the U.S. that it be?
Glick: The only good thing that can come from this conference is that President George W. Bush recognizes the harm that Rice is doing to the U.S.’s national-security interests by undermining the Bush doctrine. From the six-party talks with North Korea to her bizarre and dangerous decision to attempt to appease Iran by holding talks with the millenarian theocracy in Iraq; supporting the EU’s failed nuclear diplomacy and authorizing the U.N. Security Council to (mis)handle Iran’s nuclear-weapons program; to her seeming obsession with establishing a pro-Iranian, jihadist Palestinian state before the end of the Bush presidency; to her unpardonable neglect of Iraq, Rice has taken a knife to everything Bush has staked his presidency on.
If the failure of Annapolis causes the president to distance himself from Rice and end her foreign-policy supremacy, then in retrospect, the conference may have been worth the effort.
Lopez: What’s the Bush legacy in the Mideast likely going to be?
Glick: If Bush reins in his appeasement-mongering secretary of State and returns to the guidelines for U.S. foreign policy that he set out in his first term, then his will be a revolutionary legacy of freedom in the Middle East. The promising situation in Iraq, if allowed to progress will indeed bring about the first Arab democracy. Were the president to liberate the Palestinians from the tyranny of their terror leaders and antagonists in the Arab world, he could set the conditions for true peace between them and Israel. If he were to reignite his call for freedom and empowerment of liberals in the Arab world and if he were to make good on his pledge to support Iranian democracy activists, he would leave the region and the world safer, freer and less threatening than he found them when he assumed office.
If, on the other hand, he continues to empower Rice to undermine all he has fought for his legacy will be one of cowardice, betrayal, and failure.
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