Road Map to Peace?

Where have the cartographers been since 2001?Bush is not directly responsible the attacks by Israel and Hezbollah. However, his hands-off tilt toward Israelis and his misplaced focus on Iraq has done little to create a workable diplomatic solution to the Israel- Palestine problem. The result has been to promote a policy preference in Israel in which violence is the first resort and not the last.

The two-state solution of Israel and Palestine was at best a promise and at worse a hope when Bush entered the White House. It is now dead as a door nail. Future historians will mark his term as the point in which his Neocons promoted a permanent detour of the 'road map' into the direction of a one-state solution, with Palestinians relegated to two fenced-in 'reservations' so confining that they are rendered incapable of founding either a state or an economy.

Putting it in the best light possible, my interpretation of our alliance with Israel was thyat it was predicated on a purpose to exert some element of restraint on Israel's using its conventional and nuclear capability for massive retaliation against its foes. But Bush's post 9-11 obsession with Iraq seemed to vacate this traditional U.S. responsibility. Future historians will resolve whether this neglect was benign or willful. What is apparent to all, the result has become a historic catastrophe.

Bush, the self-anointed apostle of democracy for the Middle East, has become the fifth horse of the apocalypse. The ruins of Iraq and Lebanon will be his legacy.