http://www.counterpunch.org/martin05022008.html
Back Door Diplomacy Trumps Bush Administration
The Carter Coup
>
> By WILLIAM JAMES MARTIN
>
> Former President Jimmy Carter
> independent Middle East diplomacy
> is nothing less than a coup of the
> American foreign policy of the Bush
> administration.
>
> He has now met twice with
> the representatives of Hamas
> including its head,
> Khalid Meshaal and has had
> one-on-one meetings with the
> heads of state of Egypt, Syria,
> Saudi Arabia, and with King Abdullah of Jordan.
>
> The Prime Minister of Israel,
> Edmund Olmert has refuse to
> meet with him.
>
> Carter has called the Israeli/American
> policy of starvation a "crime", he has
> observed that 30 to 40 Palestinians
> have been killed for every Israeli killed,
> as fact never spoken by an American politician
> or statesman, and rarely by any of the
> US news media.
>
> He said,
>
> "any side that kills innocent
> people is guilty of terrorism."
>
> That means that Israel is as
> guilty of terrorism as the
> Palestinians,
>
> and by implication,
> 30 to 40 times more guilty,
> a very radical notion for an
> American statesman,
>
> and completely unprecedented,
> but certainly true of the past
> month during which time,
> 120 Palestinians residents
> of Gaza were killed by the
> Israeli army within the
> space of two days.
>
> Carter said, the Palestinians in Gaza were being
>
> "starved to death, receiving fewer calories
> per day than people in the poorest parts of Africa."
>
> "Its an atrocity what is being perpetuated
> as punishment on the people of Gaza.
>
> It's a crime .
>
> I think it is an abomination
> that this continues to go on."
>
> Cater is now watching a society
> being abused and starved for their
> participation in a plebiscite because
> the result were unwelcome to both Israel
> and the United States. Carter,
>
> who monitored the election in
> which Hamas gained the majority of seats,
> declared it to be completely fair,
> the fairest election in the Arab world,
> in fact, must have been as dismayed as
> anyone to see people punished for
> expressing their preference in a
> democratic election.
>
> But the pattern was familiar.
>
> Carter had also monitored the
> election in Palestine in 1996
> in which Arafat defeated a field
> of almost a dozen other candidates
> only to see the Bush administration
> ostracize Arafat,
>
> effectively assassinating him politically,
> and acquiesce to Sharon's determination to
> place him under house arrest.
>
> Even more im****tant,
> he has initiated diplomacy which
> directly conflicts with and counters
> the American government's policy,
> under George Bush,
>
> of isolating and ostracizing whatever
> political party the US and Israel
> consider to be their enemy,
> whether Iran or Hamas.
>
> This is in some ways no less than
> a coup and an attempt to displace
> the entire Bush approach to its
> conduct for foreign policy and
> replace it with an approach that
> has been shown to have worked.
>
> Not that anyone should feel sorry for that.
>
> It has been amply demonstrated that the
> Bush/Neocon approach to foreign policy
> has been a colossal failure leaving in
> its wake millions of dead and displaced,
> starvation and suffering in the territories,
> and failure to reach any of Bush's stated
> objectives -
>
> like a Palestinian state by 2005
> as the end product of the Roadmap,
>
> like establi****ng a placid democratic
> government in Iraq that contributed to
> American and Israeli security,
>
> and democratizing the entire Middle East.
>
> Instead,
> Bush has brought us endless war
> and conflict of which hardly
> anyone knows how to slow its
> momentum.
>
> A radical change in American Middle East
> policy occurred in 1981 when Ronald Reagan
> replaced Jimmy Carter as president.
>
> A Middle East policy which checked
> Israel's expansions in Lebanon and
> colonization of the West Bank and
> East Jerusalem was replaced by a
> passive policy and by a president
> with no knowledge of or interest
> in the Middle East.
>
> Reagan reposed,
> and some in his administration winked,
> as Israel launched an invasion of Lebanon,
> in 1982,which resulted in 20,000 Lebanese dead,
> Israel's shelling West Beirut all summer long,
> the occupying an Arab capital,
> and the orchestrating of the
> massacre in the Sabra and
> Shatila refugee camps where
> possibly as many as 2000
> defenseless refugees were massacred.
>
> I short time,
> Islamic terrorists bombed
> the American embassy in Beirut
> killing 63 American,
>
> mostly CIA and American diplomats,
> and then the Marine barrack killing
> 241 American soldiers.
>
> In October of 2004,
> in a taped message to the American people,
> Osama bin Laden said,
>
> "While I was looking at those
> destroyed towers in Lebanon,
> it occurred to me to punish
> the unjust one in a similar
> manner by destroying towers
> in the United States so that
> it would feel some of what we
> felt and to be deterred from
> killing our children and women...."
>
> Bin Laden, of course,
> was referring to the summer
> long shelling of West Beirut
> during Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
>
> Carter watched painfully, no doubt,
> as his activist diplomacy was replaced,
> by the Reagan team, with a policy of
> effectively, if not intentionally,
> giving Israel free reign.
>
> And during the Bush administration,
> Carter has complained of Bush's
> inactivity and of the fact that
> there has been no negotiation,
> between Israel and the Palestinians,
> for the first seven years of the Bush tenure.
>
> Eventually the Annapolis conference
> was convened between the Israelis and
> Fatah under the leader****p of Mahmoud Abbas,
> but with no presidential leader****p,
> negotiations are taking place only
> nominally with Israel continuing its
> settlement expansions and destruction
> or confiscation of Palestinian resources.
>
> The attack on the WTC and the
> Pentagon on 9/11 was good news
> for Israel,
>
> as former Israeli Prime Minister
> Netanyahu recently observed,
>
> as Ariel Sharon convinced Bush
> that both the US and Israel were
> fighting the same battle,
>
> that terrorism was the common enemy,
> and that Israel's enemies were America's enemies.
>
> The subsequent Bush years evolved
> into an American foreign policy
> indistinguishable from Israel's,
> and American resources,
> capital and personnel
> were placed at the disposal
> of Israel strategists.
>
> The aim and focus of the planners
> in the Pentagon and the White House
> became blurred as they were some of
> the same people who,
>
> just a few years earlier,
> as members of the American
> Enterprise Institute and other
> think tanks financed by Israel
> and charged with providing policy
> analysis for Israel instituted plans
> which were identical to those provided
> previously to the government of Israel.
>
> Those plans included the overthrow
> of Saddam Hussein in Iraq which had
> been a long standing objective of
> Israel strategists.
>
> The Saddam Hussein government of
> Iraq had long been deemed to have
> been a regional threat to Israel,
> but it was not a threat to the
> United States,
>
> though Bush convinced the
> American people otherwise
> and also that Iraq possessed
> weapons of mass destruction.
>
> The Bush policies have been shown to be bankrupt,
> and Carter is replacing them with an approach
> that has been shown to have worked.
>
> William James Martin teaches in the Department
> of Mathematics at the University of New Orleans.
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