CLINTON - His good intentions made a Mideast mess

greenspun.com : LUSENET : Current News : One Thread

NYPost

BILL'S ‘GOOD' INTENTIONS MADE A MIDEAST MESS

April 24, 2001 -- THIS past weekend, two bombs detonated inside Israel, killing a 53-year-old doctor and injuring more than 50 people. At almost the same moment, Bill Clinton was making an appearance in a suburban Philadelphia synagogue. "Does he want peace?" the former president said of Palestinian strongman Yasser Arafat. "I think he does."

Two weeks ago, the Israeli newspaper Maariv published an eye-opening diary account by Israel's chief negotiator of the July 2000 summit at Camp David between Israel and the Palestinians.

According to Shlomo Ben-Ami, Clinton angrily denounced the Palestinians in no uncertain terms: "A summit's purpose is to have discussions that are based on sincere intentions and you, the Palestinians, did not come to this summit with sincere intentions."

The summit's collapse was followed, six weeks later, by the Palestinian initiation of a low-intensity war that grinds on and on with no foreseeable letup. At the very least, this war of Yasser Arafat's is a retroactive justification of Clinton's angry words last July.

Why, then, does the former president continue to voice the opinion that the warmongering Arafat wants "peace"?

Try an analogy.

When medical students finally conclude their two decades of schooling, they are still required to take the Hippocratic oath, with its ancient but still powerful pledge: "First, do no harm." The same principle should be at work when the president decides to act as a diplomatic physician, seeking to cure ailments in the international system that do not immediately and directly affect the lives of Americans abroad or the American national interest.

In the Middle East, Clinton made a different pledge. Call it the "hypocritic oath." His stated goal of bringing "peace" was so admirable in principle that it was considered beyond reproach. Good intentions were considered the same as good policy.

But those who opposed Clinton's efforts, starting with the U.S. role in brokering the Oslo accords back in 1993, were not given comparable credit. They were considered the enemies of peace, even though all principled criticism of the American role was based on a pessimistic expectation that Clinton's efforts would lead to bloodshed.

Israelis in the peace camp now bitterly acknowledge the validity of this view. Ben-Ami himself told Maariv, "When Arafat signed the Oslo Agreement in 1993, his understanding was that he would eventually get all his demands." Those demands, of course, included the preposterous Palestinian claim to the whole of Jerusalem, not just the Eastern sector taken by the Israelis in 1967.

The peace camp inside Israel believed, as did Clinton and his men, that the logic of negotiations would inevitably lead Arafat to moderate his stance in his quest for a state that would finally offer the Palestinian people a homeland. But by June 2000, it should have been clear to these dreamers that negotiations had no magical power to transform Arafat into George Washington.

And so Clinton's hypocritic oath kicked in. He insisted on convening the Camp David summit, though its failure was predetermined. "Why," laments Ben-Ami, "didn't [the Palestinians] tell us beforehand, ‘Guys, it's worthless to go for a summit since for us it's either all or nothing?'"

The answer is simple: Arafat went to placate Clinton. "Clinton told me that he was very angry with the Palestinians for not coming up with substantive proposals," Ben-Ami writes. "All they did was listen while he was asking them to move forward." What else could they do? They wanted war, not peace. "I have a lot at stake here as well," Clinton told the Palestinians, according to Ben-Ami.

What was at stake was the revelation for all the world to see of Clinton's hypocritic oath. He could visit every synagogue in America from now until the day he dies and propound his foolish vision of a peace-seeking Arafat - but it's the bombs and the corpses that speak the bloody truth.

-- Anonymous, April 24, 2001

Answers

"Good intentions?" That'll be the day!

-- Anonymous, April 25, 2001

Good intentions don't count one whit at that level of global manipulation. Besides, AFAIC, it was pure ego. He shares a major responsibility for the escalated violence this past year.

-- Anonymous, April 26, 2001

Moderation questions? read the FAQ