President Bush is touring this week Egypt, Israel, the Palestinian territories, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates. With a year to run in his final mandate, and after many months in the lame-duck condition, his possibilities are much reduced from what they were several years ago. He is mocked for a “victory lap” that he would not dream of claiming for himself. There are two principal purposes of the journey. Both are diplomatic, and as ever, the less important will be the more visible.
The pursuit of peace and the equally unachievable “two-state solution” between Israel and Palestine is, at best, only for show. Mr. Bush’s only significant contribution has been to withdraw his predecessor’s unqualified receptiveness to Yasser Arafat and successors. He will not be laying a wreath at Ramallah, to the man who was the most frequent house guest when Bill Clinton occupied the White House. And while the American role as “sometimes arguably honest broker” between Israeli and Palestinian interests continues, with all the other illusions upon which it was built, the pressure to make reality conform with the illusions has been largely withdrawn. The U.S. State Department has become content to utter the clichés and go through the motions. I almost think Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, has a computer with algorithms to generate random meaningless texts containing fixed phrases such as “roadmap to peace.”
The emergence of Hamas, its victory in a soi-disant election, its conquest of the Gaza Strip, and its increasingly violent hold on both the inhabitants of the Palestinian territories, and their aspirations, has reduced the prospects for agreement with Israel from remote to nil.
Hamas differs from Fatah in three respects, each subtle or overt depending on how wide one chooses to open one’s eyes. It refuses to indulge in the multilingual wordplay for which Arafat and his successors were justly famous, but is instead plain about its short, middle, and long-term aspiration to “push Israel into the sea.” It is equally plain about the Shariah, or Islamic religious basis of the emergent Palestinian state, having rejected Fatah’s old socialist-secular rhetoric; and indeed, Gaza is now being run as the Taliban ran Afghanistan. And finally, though Sunni itself, Hamas is willing to make fairly open alliances with revolutionary Shia Iran, as with any fanatical Islamist source of money, weapons, and international influence.
There was next to nothing any U.S. president could do to stop the triumph of Hamas, given the premises of the Madrid and Oslo agreements, that created the conditions for permanent Intifada in the Palestinian territories. “Oslo” did this, with Israel’s reckless support, by putting the ruthless old terrorist Arafat in charge of the territories, on the ludicrous theory that at least such a man could deliver on agreements. They took him at his word as an “ex-terrorist,” and have harvested the wind.
Progress, towards anything resembling peace, can now only come by disavowing the Oslo premises—at horrific cost, given emergent circumstances through the rest of the region.
For the real purpose of the Bush tour is to discuss the threat of Iran, behind closed doors, with everyone but the Palestinians. And in those discussions, the president carries a credibility that the western liberal media are ill-equipped to understand.
It is for the very reason that the United States invaded Iraq, and has actually changed the basic political order in that country, through action not words, culminating in the “surge” of the past year, that Bush himself is credible. In a phrase, he reminded the Arabs that the United States is no paper tiger, and by doing so, created the very possibility of an Arab resistance to the encroachment of fanatical Islamism. For as Fouad Ajami put it in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, “There is a deep streak of Arab pragmatism, a grudging respect for historical verdicts, and for the right of conquest. How else did the ruling class in Arabia, in the Gulf and in Jordan beget their kingdoms?”
They may not like the U.S., and they certainly do not like the transformation of Iraq into the most open Arab society, threatening by its very survival the mores and fatalistic assumptions of the whole region. But in the coming contest with revolutionary Iran, and despite their own formidable oil wealth, they currently have no choice but to make common cause with the U.S. and this new and strange Iraq. Only the election of a complete fool (such as Barack Hussein Obama) as the next U.S. president, will change this state of affairs.
The question of Mr. Bush’s legacy is not interesting. Anyone who speculates about how history will view him is claiming the ability to predict the future: for past events are invariably judged in the light of later ones. He has nevertheless created a platform on which the next president could build.
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