Arab News Editorial

Fifty-three retired US diplomats have followed the example of their former British colleagues and written an open letter criticizing Bush Middle East policy. But unlike the UK diplomats, the Americans, who include a former ambassador to the Kingdom, have focused on Bush’s unilateral tearing up of the Palestinian road map. Once again experts on whom in normal times a US administration would be expected to rely for sound advice have underlined that Bush White House policies are ill-informed knee-jerk reactions which in their ignorance of the subtleties of regional politics are only making a bad situation worse.

The Likud party’s rejection of Sharon’s plan to evacuate the Gaza Strip but annex large parts of the West Bank demonstrates how vacuous White House planning is. A moderately well-informed foreign policy specialist could have told the president and his hawkish advisers that fundamentalist Zionists within the party would throw out decisively any attempt to give up an inch of what they see as Greater Israel. Sharon himself must have been pretty sure that this was how the party vote would come out — but he assured the Americans the plan would go ahead. In any case the US administration leapt in with both feet and backed it.

In so doing they forfeited much of what remains of America’s standing as an honest broker in the Middle East. The disaster that is US intervention in Iraq has been compounded by the abandonment of the road map, in return for no political gain whatsoever. The only winners of course are the Israelis. There was disbelief among top Zionists when Sharon returned last month from Washington with more than the Israeli government could ever have hoped for. If it turns out to have been a confidence trick by Sharon, designed to alienate the United States from the Arab world and leave it with Israel as its sole friend in the Middle East, it will be one of the most masterful diplomatic coups ever pulled off.

George W. Bush is clearly contemptuous of experts who do not tell him what he wants to hear. He is busy presenting himself to his electorate as a plain-speaking, regular American guy. Republican pollsters reckon that this is the image that is going to chime most effectively with the voters in November. But the job of the most powerful man in the world calls for a lot more than an ordinary man. It requires considerable insight and a willingness to seek out the best-quality advice, from whatever quarter it may come. The record of the Bush administration from virtually its very first act of rejecting the Kyoto Treaty has been the consistent rejection of wise counsel. This shortsighted president has perpetrated one serious gaffe after another. History may judge Bush grossly incompetent. Will US voters have the same insight come November?