One Utah

I am honored to discover that Utah House Majority Whip Steve Urquardt reads OneUtah. I have been ruminating all day about his response to my post “World Gone Crazy.”

First, let me thank Steve for his public service. I also admire his willingness to take a stand in areas where others refuse, and most importantly, his efforts to engage the public through his blog.

Steve wrote It is a crazy and troubling world. A very complex world. Your passion and compassion are wonderful. But, I think it denies the complexity of these things to simply lay it off on the Bush administration. The middle east is a millenia’s old struggle.”

I agree the world is complex particularly the Israeli-Palestinian (IP) issue. I spent a year in Israel studying the issue from both perspectives in pursuit of a degree in the subject, and as a preface to a life studying it. My father escaped Nazi Germany in 1939 and is the only one of his family NOT living in Israel.

So it is with the benefit of a thorough and intimate knowledge of the situation in that part of the middle-east, that I “lay it off on the Bush Administration.”

There is little debate that the Bush administration has, by the standards set in prior administrations, done nothing to further peace and diplomacy there. So while it is true Bush didn’t start it, and it is “a millenia’s old struggle”, the US has played a major role in keeping the peace (Camp David, Madrid Peace Conference, Olso, Wye River Conference etc) beginning at least with Carter, and ending with Clinton.

After coming to office, Bush 43’s stated policy related to the IP problem was “hands off” followed by refusing Palestinian Prime Minster Arafat permission to come to the United States. Prior to that, Arafat had been a frequent visitor. To applaud that move as many did, is irresponsible and certainly no favor to the Palestinian people.

A mild statement appearing on the non-partisan Wikipedia regarding Rice “”Rice can be justly criticized for being too hawkish, too fawning toward Bush, too lacking in social or diplomatic graces, and too inexperienced to broker an Israeli-Palestinian settlement and resolve the crisis over Iran and North Korea’s nuke threat.”

This prescient (Oct 2002) excerpt from The American Prospect
“Though no Arab state is likely to attack Israel militarily, the Lebanese Hezbollah organization might do so as a Syrian proxy, pulling Israel into fighting on its northern front. Palestinian terrorist groups will also have high motivation to attack, as a way of striking both at Israel and the United States. Exploiting the “festive opportunity” of war in Iraq, says Menachem Klein, an expert on Palestinian politics at Bar-Ilan University, Sharon could decide it’s time to “take care” of the Palestinians via a major operation in the Gaza Strip or the outright expulsion of Yasir Arafat. As the Israeli operation in Ramallah in late September showed, that remains Sharon’s goal. But, Klein stresses, Arafat’s exit would not in the least reduce popular Palestinian commitment to achieving independence in the West Bank and Gaza. The impact of war in Iraq could be to escalate conflict with the Palestinians, to destabilize Israel’s immediate neighborhood and to lose a generation’s painful movement toward peace.”

One could easily go on for days about whether Bush is responsible for what’s going on in Israel today, but it would be easier to point out, that he’s consistently shown little interest in preventing it for obvious reasons.

Steve made another statement I’d like to consider. Steve said, “But just as most people tuned out folks who said Clinton was single-handedly destroying civilization, they also tend to tune out people who say the same thing of Republican administrations.”

If one were to list the ways in which either president could be accused of trying to “destroy civilization” it would be hard to equate the two. It’s kind of like equating Clinton’s lie about Monica and Bush lies about… not to mention the fact that such an analysis would reveal that one of them not only failed miserably to destroy the world, but oversaw one of the greatest periods of economic prosperity in our history.
In fact equating the two might beg the question they are equal in any way. I think history will bear out what polls say today; the similarities between the two begin and end with the fact of their contiguous service.

This entry was posted Saturday, July 15th, 2006 at 3:44 pm and is filed under National Politics, Peace, This Blog, War. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.