Bush's Second-Biggest Mistake
By William Fisher
t r u t h o u t | Columnist
Monday 04 December 2006
The Washington Post Sunday ran a series of articles by prominent historians who endeavored to answer the question, "Is Bush our worst president?" In the interest of balance, there was a "yes" piece, a "no" piece, and a "we don't know yet" piece.
Fair enough.
But what struck me about these articles is how little attention they devoted to Bush's second-biggest mistake.
His first big mistake, as we all now know, was turning his attention and our resources away from Afghanistan, the country that harbored those who attacked us on 9/11. We'll be paying a high price for that mistake for decades.
His second-biggest mistake was the place to which he then turned his attention and our resources - Iraq, a country that posed no imminent threat to our national security or that of its neighbors. And he did so on the basis of false, exaggerated, and hyped "intelligence."
That was his second-biggest mistake not simply because the Iraq adventure has turned out to be, as Tom Ricks would say, a fiasco.
Another significant reason is that it totally ignored what is indisputably the most serious and intractable problem in the Middle East: the Israeli-Palestinian issue - the 900-pound gorilla in the room.
For the past six years, this administration has been AWOL on this hair-trigger issue. It is one whose solution cannot be advanced by occasional visits to the White House by Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert, or Abu Mazen. It cannot be advanced by sporadic visits to the area by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. It cannot be advanced by pronouncements from the White House about the wisdom of a two-state solution. It cannot be advanced by hailing Sharon's Gaza initiative, which has effectively turned that strip of land into a prison. It cannot be advanced by the president's endorsement of yet more West Bank settlements and redrawing the UN boundaries because of "changing reality on the ground." ..........
The complete article is at:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/120406A.shtml