Welcome, Mr President, to the misery you've created

In eight years Palestinians have seen the bald eagle of enlightened US power degenerate into a phoney, biased, cynical lame duck

It is a well-deserved irony for George Bush that his first presidential visit to Israel coincided this week with the storm of excitement produced by the unexpected outcome of the two New Hampshire primaries. Nothing could better highlight the irrelevance of the final year of the Bush presidency.
The moment at which an incumbent becomes a lame duck fluctuates in every US administration, depending on circumstances. The day on which the first votes are cast is traditionally the symbolic date, even though the race has been under way in the media for months. This year's riveting contests in New Hampshire certainly proved that true, overshadowing whatever interest there was in Bush's plans for influencing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Even before the president left Washington, expectations for his visit were low. His much-trumpeted meeting of Middle Eastern leaders in Annapolis in November produced a predictably tinny follow-up. Little happened in the subsequent six weeks, and it was only courtesy to Bush that impelled Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas to meet again in advance of the president's touchdown in Tel Aviv on Wednesday and produce the blandest pretence of progress. According to Olmert's spokesman, they agreed to "authorise their negotiating teams to conduct direct and ongoing negotiations on all the core issues". Isn't this tautological statement merely a repeat of what they had already launched in Annapolis?

Bush's engagement in the world's most intractable dispute is late, piecemeal and phoney. Above all, it is one-sided. As Ghassan Khatib, a former Palestinian minister, remarked this week: "Palestinians agree that in the history of the United States, Bush is more biased toward Israel than any other American president." In any conflict, responsibility for making the largest concessions always rests on the stronger party, especially when most of the wrong is on its side. But, despite his rhetoric yesterday, Bush has not used Washington's enormous leverage over Israel to end the occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

He has not even applied pressure for an end to the expansion of Israeli settlements or the dismantling of the spider's web of roadblocks that make normal life for Palestinians impossible. A US plan for benchmarks by which to judge Israeli progress was quickly abandoned last spring at the first whiff of concern by Olmert's government. Occasional state department pronouncements disapproving of settlement expansion are not followed by measures to reflect US anger when - as happened in Jerusalem again on Wednesday - Olmert makes it clear he will continue the illegal construction of Israeli homes.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/comment/0,,2239037,00.html

standing at the podium, talking about democracies ... our dear fuhrer looks more and more like:

But he has neither created this particular misery (although he has created much other misery), nor can he clean it up in the next year.

The article is absurd though in its painting of Hamas as some group of good guy heros here, who just haven't been given a fair shake. Hamas has done absolutely nothing at all to reign in militants, and proudly admits its role in a lot of rocket attacks and hopes to obliterate Israel,

And the article is further wrong in saying that "the responsibility for making the largest concessions always rests on the stronger party, especially when most of the wrong is on its side." It is the weaker side that has to realize when they have had enough, that's when wars end. Not when the stronger side says so, but when the weaker side does. This can be achieved without military might, but there is no way that the weak side has the will of the way to make demands of the strong side, especially on issues like right of return or dismantling settlements containing hundreds of thousands of people.

And not a big contribution, compared with his very direct creation of misery in Iraq.

'Hamas has delivered nothing but misery for Palestinians," he declared. Had he said, "My reaction and that of my Israeli and European Union colleagues to the mandate given Hamas by Palestinian voters has delivered nothing but misery for Palestinians", he would have been closer to the truth.'

But both are true. There lies a tragedy.


'Hamas was, and continues to be, punished not for its occasional use of violence but simply for being popular.'

Hamas uses violence more than just occasionally; has not been popular for some time; and is not being punished for being popular- that is a fairly bizarre statement.