Bush Backs Away from Timetable for Palestinian Statehood « Tikun Olam-תיקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

Bush Backs Away from Timetable for Palestinian Statehood

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3 Responses to “Bush Backs Away from Timetable for Palestinian Statehood”

Ed Marshall says:

October 22, 2005 at 10:16 AM

It’s all a joke anyway.

As far as I know this is the only subject in the world where I give Bush any credit at all. Say President X really wanted the situation resolved (presumably in some context resulting in two states divided roughly on the green line and with some sort of mechanism for resettling the Palestinian refugee camps back into Israel or the West Bank and Gaza). What sticks do you really have in dealing with the Israelis?

Congress controls the purse strings and if you want to see the most united, House and Senate you have ever seen, threaten to cut the cash. They will rally to cough up extra money just to spite the executive and let everyone know where they stand on THAT question. That’s exactly what they did to George the Greater.

Even if you really, really, decided you were sick of it all and retasked the Middle East Theatre group to go run the IDF out of the West Bank and Gaza and solve the thing yourself, the likely result would be most of the inhabitants of the Middle East vaporizing in thermonuclear detonations.

It’s a really remarkable conundrum but I don’t blame Bush (much). There is damn little you could do worse than go send Dennis Ross to explain the American position.

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Anne from New York City says:

October 23, 2005 at 6:37 AM

I don’t know why Ed Marshall thinks ending the occupation would INCREASE the chances of nuclear war…if anything it would decrease the likelihood.

If you want to get involved in pressuring Congress, you’ll have to do more than blog. A couple of organizations to get involved with would be the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation (a coalition) and the Council for the National Interest:
http://www.endtheoccupation.org
http://cnionline.org

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Ed Marshall says:

October 23, 2005 at 10:40 AM

I didn’t mean to imply that at all.

I was running through the possible tools the U.S. has to end it and feel that in the incredibly unlikely event we were to get all pious about “the inadmisibility of aquiring territory through conquest” like we were in 1991 and run them out at gunpoint the likely reaction would be nuclear (well, maybe if not if we stopped at the green line like Gulf War I and without a doubt if we went for “regime change” like Gulf War II).

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