Asia Times: Bush, McCain dream on in war land

WASHINGTON - In separate speeches delivered an ocean apart, the two standard bearers of the United States Republican Party on Thursday offered rosy visions of a future designed to gladden the hearts of Israel-centered neo-conservatives without offering any details about how their dreams will be achieved.
In an address before the Knesset in Jerusalem marking the 60th anniversary of Israel's founding, President George W Bush predicted that 60 years from now the Jewish state will co-exist with a Palestinian homeland in a democratic Middle East where "al-Qaeda and Hezbollah and Hamas will be defeated" and "Iran and Syria will be peaceful nations, with today's oppression a distant memory ..." ..... Just a few hours later and some 11,000 kilometers away, Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, told a partisan audience in Columbus, Ohio that, if elected, he will have "won" the Iraq war by 2013 and brought home "most of the servicemen and women who have sacrificed terribly so that America might be secure in her freedom."

.....

In contrast to Bush, however, McCain failed to mention any progress on settling the Israel-Palestinian conflict, suggesting that such an effort will not rate particularly high on his foreign policy agenda.
That should be just fine with pro-Likud neo-conservatives who, despite their appreciation for Bush's staunch support for former hard-line prime minister Ariel Sharon (whom the president Thursday praised in his speech as "warrior for the ages, a man of peace"), have been uneasy about his thus far feeble efforts to prod the two sides towards a framework peace agreement by the time he leaves office next January.
Indeed, Thursday's speeches served to underline how powerful and durable the neo-conservative vision of the world, particularly for the Middle East, remains, at least for the Republican Party, and how likely it would be that a president McCain would "stay the course" set by Bush.

.....

Bush's speech was pure neo-conservatism, beginning with his assurance that Washington was "Israel's closest ally and best friend in the world" and featuring a familiar depiction of the world as a struggle between the forces of "good and evil", the latter embodied by the most immediate threats to Israel's security - Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and Syria.
"Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along," he declared in a thinly veiled slap at the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, Senator Barack Obama, who along with most of the US foreign policy establishment has called for engagement with Tehran and Damascus.

"We have heard this foolish delusion before," he said, referring to the failure of Western powers to challenge the Nazis in the 1930s, a core neo-conservative leitmotif. "We have an obligation to call this what it is - the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history," he continued, implicitly comparing the threats faced by Israel with Nazi Germany and explicitly assuring his audience that "... the world must not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon."
But Bush offered no ideas as to how his hopeful vision of the Middle East, particularly that of a "homeland have long dreamed of and deserved", in 2068 will be achieved. No ideas, that is, apart from confronting "evil", presumably through military force if necessary, and steadfastly promoting basic freedoms and democracy in the region - a policy some of his neo-conservative backers believe Bush has largely abandoned as he has sought to rally Sunni Arab leaders against Iran and its allies.

McCain similarly failed to explain how he would achieve his own vision of victory in Iraq, substantial progress in Afghanistan, a defeat of al-Qaeda, and Iran's abandonment of its alleged nuclear ambitions by 2013. His comments led Rand Beers, a top counter-terrorism official under both George H W Bush and Bill Clinton who resigned from the National Security Council in protest against the younger Bush's decision to invade Iraq, to compare the speech to Richard Nixon's "secret plan" to end the Vietnam War as a gimmick to win the 1968 presidential election. .....
The absence of detail regarding how these goals will be accomplished drew mainly scorn from both Democrats and independent observers, with the former president of the influential Council on Foreign Relations, Leslie Gelb, describing McCain's vision as "kind of a wild-eyed, unsupported prediction". ..... McCain himself suggested that his world view was not so different from Bush's. Asked later on Thursday about the president's assertion that negotiating with "terrorists and radicals" today was similar to appeasing Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, McCain said he agreed with the analogy.