SPIEGELONLINE INTERNATIONAL: The American president came to the Middle East in an attempt to deliver peace. Instead, George W. Bush's visit to the Holy Land has only deepened the divide between the Israelis and Palestinians.
US President George W. Bush is an optimist. That's why he's visiting the Middle East this week in order to speed up the peace process that he started in Annapolis (more...) at the end of 2007.
He wants to use the 12 months left to him in the White House to solve the 60-year-old Middle East conflict, he says, and he gushes bravely about a two-state solution -- with Israel and Palestine living in harmony, side by side.
But during his visit, which ends Friday, he has achieved exactly the opposite. Instead of bridging the divide between the Israelis and the Palestinians, he has made it wider. Neither has he accelerated the peace process. Instead, he has merely managed to make it more difficult. On the red carpet that was laid out for him in the Holy Land, he has managed to bury the Palestinian state before it was even born.
Take, for example, what Bush said at a joint press conference with President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah on Thursday: The US president promised the Palestinians their own state within a year. He said he was convinced that a peace accord would be signed before the end of his term in January 2009.
Speaking at Abbas' side, Bush said that he was confident that "with proper help, the state of Palestine will emerge." Sources close to the negotiations said that Bush had offered to visit the region again if this was required to give the peace process fresh impetus. And the White House also announced on Thursday that Bush had named Lt. Gen. William Fraser as his envoy to monitor the Israeli-Palestinian "road map" peace plan.
But Bush has expectations that cannot be fulfilled in the madness of the Middle East; in fact, they just come across as naïve. He appears to assume that some kind of inner compulsion to find a harmonious solution to conflicts must exist -- a view that is not supported by history. Bush’s Mideast Pipe Dream >>> By Pierre Heumann
Mark Alexander (Paperback)
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