I read the speech yesterday and think it is quite good.
I am curious as to why it took this long for him to make it. I have just read that Iran is now calling for an oil embargo on all western coutries that support Israel and wonder if this had anything to do with it. Or perhaps Bush was sitting on this speech for a few days to let Arafat experience a bit of Israeli smackdown first? Anybody think there were no cynical reasons?
Well, since Dubya has previously badmouthed/downplayed the Clinton Administration’s efforts to negotiate a peace in the region, I imagine that he didn’t want to jump in for fear of looking contradictory. He would have preferred it if Sharon and Arafat had settled things quietly, so he could try to build a coalition against Iraq. Now that the mess has gotten uglier, he’s finally realized that he can’t have his “Iraq Attack” team until this is settled, so he finally bit the bullet. IMO, anyway.
And I didn’t think too much of the speech; aside from the sheer tardiness of it, most of the sentiments were common-sense “duh” statements. I also foud it mildly aggravating that he used suicide bombers as an example of Palestinian atrocities, but didn’t bring up anything comparable on the Israel side – I imagine that having snipers shoot at disabled grandmothers outside of hospitals would qualify…
I read something about ambulances being targeted, or something-doesn’t that violate the Geneva Convention?
I also read about ambulances being used to transport munitions and bomb-making material, which pretty much makes them fair game.
This devout Christian president will not stand idly by while Christ Jesus’ birthplace becomes a bloddy battlefield. Imagine if this were occuring in the Clinton administration. The rabid conservatives will put this outrage on top of the list.
There is only one major Palestinian town left unoccupied. Jericho.
Had to step in before they all disappeared.
Regarding the Geneva Convention, it has become very common for medical personnel to be attacked in conflicts around the world. Nowadays, being in the Red Cross or Red Cresent will get you shot at as much as if you were a soldier.
This is due in large part because conflicts are intrastate instead of interstate. Geneva Conventions largely apply to states, not subunits of states and in those conflicts civilians are always targeted.
In Serbia the Red Cross was used by the Serbians as a way to collect Muslim refugees in “safe havens”. Then the Serbians could just go to one spot to kill its enemies. This happened in Srebrenica in July of 1995. The Serbians took over the area, forced 23,000 women and children to walk across minefields and led off all the men to be executed (probably around 7,000). The Red Cross essentially created an easier way to kill the people they were trying to help.
A good article on that is “Unarmed Warriors” by Michael Ignatieff in the march '97 The New Yorker.
I would never underestimate Bush in the foreign policy arena. He’s got advisers who know the territory inside and out.
His timing is simple: he waited until Sharon had eviscerated the PA and forced Arafat to the wall, and then he steps in and says: “Enough! Time to negotiate.”, knowing that the negotiating position of the PA and Arafat is minimal at best.
Bush & Co know that the enemy in Israel is more or less, ideologically and religiously, the same as the enemy in the 9/11 attacks: uncompromising Islamic fundamentalists who would be bombing and raising a ruckus if there were a secular state in the Holy Land. That Arafat can’t see this, or that he has, like his buddy Saddam Hussein, thrown in his lot with them, is a measure of how unintelligent and corrupt the Palestinian leadership is.
And how duplicitous: there’s only one reason why Arafat would have allied himself with such scum: because he really does not accept the idea of Israel and is maneuvering, in every way he knows how, to get rid of it.