One Harmful Handshake - Danielle Pletka
The American secretary of state believes that a Sunni Arab world unified by fear of a radical [Shi'ite] Iran may finally force the Palestinians into peace with Israel. In other words, the Arabs will deliver the Palestinians, and the Americans will deliver the Israelis. This is old think at its worst.
[E]mbracing one terrorist to weaken another is not a foreign policy strategy, it's just unprincipled gamesmanship.
The American secretary of state believes that a Sunni Arab world unified by fear of a radical [Shi'ite] Iran may finally force the Palestinians into peace with Israel. In other words, the Arabs will deliver the Palestinians, and the Americans will deliver the Israelis. This is old think at its worst.
[E]mbracing one terrorist to weaken another is not a foreign policy strategy, it's just unprincipled gamesmanship.
(New York Daily News)
UPDATE:
Mecca Accord Ended Rice's Attempt to Restart Peace Talks - Helene Cooper
While the Bush administration has a view that pits America, its [Sunni] Arab allies, Israel and Europe against [Shi'ite] Iran [and] Syria...this is not necessarily how America's Sunni Arab allies view the world.
In the past year, Shiite Iran has been wooing Hamas, which is Sunni. The Saudis did not like that, so they fought to get Hamas back on the Sunni side. The Mecca pact put an end, at least temporarily, to the Hamas-Fatah bloodletting. It also put an end, at least temporarily, to Rice's attempt to restart peace talks.
(New York Times)
(New York Times)
3 comments:
Sadly, as has been seen at every step of the way, the Bush Administration; understands less about the Mideast then almost anyone else in the 21st century. They have helped to make the world a more dangerous and angrier place. They have brought death and destruction and anarchy to Iraq, and somehow thought that would bring the peoples of the Mideast around to America's way of thinking. Sadly, progress seems hopeless until the next election.
Of course, when I mentioned progress, I meant progress as Americans would see it. Depending on your point of view, there may have been a lot of progress in the mideast lately. Thanks to our destruction of stability in Iraq, the enormous death toll of Iraqis and our failure to finish off Al Qaeda leadership when it was still in Afghanistan, we have created an empowered and emboldened Iran, A resurgent Hamas and Hizbollah. We generated a dynamic where a quasi-ally like Saudi Arabia, needs to support a Hamas-Fatah accord and leave the US out of it. If you are any of the above mentioned parties, you may very well feel there has been progress made recently. But none of that bodes well for American interests.
Oddly enough, there are both prominent Democrats and Republicans who support the notion of riding the Sunni-Shia tension. The moves [by the Bush administration] have garnished rare admiration from Dems.
i suspect the whole thing is a house of cards [ie. they hate us more than they hate each other], but only time will tell.
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