Fawaz Turki, disinherited@yahoo.com

Attention Arab columnists who have trusted in, and written supportively of, President Bush’s efforts to bring freedom to Palestine and Iraq: If your readers are now inspired by the need to tear your reputation from limb to limb, and laugh you off the Op-Ed page, they would be fully justified in doing so. So commentary police, cuff me now.

Last week, the American president gave his blessing to a unilateral plan by the Zionist Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to pull settlements out of Gaza, in return for Washington’s approval of Israeli retention of virtually half the West Bank. The proposed evacuation, however, would authorize Zionist military forces to continue to enter Gaza, on whim, and permit the Israeli entity to maintain control over the territory’s airspace, seaports and border crossings. Moreover, Gazans will be denied the right to rebuild their airport and develop a commercial port.

A virtual prison? To be sure, Gaza has always been known as “the world’s biggest prison,” with its 1.3 million inhabitants hemmed in like prison inmates, who found it impossible to travel outside their homeland because of strict frontier controls by the occupiers, and a nightmare even to move from town to town within the territory itself because of military checkpoints.

Now, thanks to President Bush, not only the hardships inflicted on Gazans will increase, but their hopes for a future as free men and women will be killed. Beyond dooming Gazans to a life of destitution, and approving the takeover of half of the land in the West Bank for permanent settlement by Zionist Pied Noirs, the president of the United States also egregiously denied Palestinian refugees their historic right of return.

Thus, in his meeting with Sharon last week, Bush wantonly reshaped the political, demographic and historical map of the region, surpassing in his sellout of the Palestinians the betrayal meted out to them in 1917 when “His Majesty’s Government,” with the same facile ease, issued the infamous Balfour Declaration that “viewed with favor” the creation of a “Jewish homeland” in the Palestinian people’s patrimony.

What Bush has wrought in Palestine, the heartland of our world, is unpardonable — and will not stand.

The Bush administration, along with its neocon brokers of imperial ideas, has acted equally recklessly in Iraq, where it has screwed up there too, despite the initial welcome by ordinary Iraqis of the overthrow of Saddam, a ruler who had tyrannized them for decades.

Now beginning their second year of occupation of the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates, American forces face a fierce insurgency that has isolated the US-appointed civilian government from ordinary Iraqis, and stopped the American-financed reconstruction effort, as foreign contractors hunker down against waves of ambushes and kidnappings, and scores of Iraqis, weary of being labeled collaborators, hesitate to show up for their jobs.

The extent of the popularity of the resistance may be unclear, but in nationwide surveys, taken even before the sieges of Fallujah and Najaf, a growing percentage of Iraqis have said they saw the US forces as occupiers, not liberators.

Bush has shown himself a go-getter at staging superb PR moments, whether it was when he stood atop the wreckage of the World Trade Center with a bullhorn or when he landed on an aircraft carrier in a flight suit to tell America that the war in Iraq was over (Ya, right!), and equally adept, in major policy speeches, at raising Palestinians’ hopes by promising them statehood and freedom in 1995.

You want an example of the cognitive dissonance between President Bush’s benign utterances and his artless conduct of foreign policy, then consider the response he gave to a question by a reporter at his well-publicized press conference last week. “They’re not happy they’re occupied,” he said. “I wouldn’t be happy if I were occupied either.”

He was speaking of Iraqis, but he may as well have been speaking of Palestinians. Yet, he lent the prestige of the American presidency last Wednesday to a formalization of the occupation of a people by another in Palestine.

Hello, Earth to Bush, are you there? Are you with us? Guess not.