Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 2007, pages 7-9

Special Report

Bush Calls a Peace Conference While Stoking a Wider War

By Rachelle Marshall

THREE MONTHS AFTER President George W. Bush issued his call for a regional Middle East peace conference to be held in November, a basic question remained: Was Bush’s announcement an effort to enhance his image and cover up past inactivity, or was it the start of a process he would see through to the end? More specifically, after seven years of giving unqualified support to Israel, including approval of its settlement activity, separation wall, and policy of collective punishment, would the Bush administration press the Israelis to end their illegal 40-year occupation or allow them to remain unyielding?

By mid-October the prospects for peace were not hopeful. It was still not certain when the conference would take place or if it would be held at all. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas had held six meetings to plan for the session but were still far apart on an agenda. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who will chair the conference in Annapolis, Maryland, made repeated visits to Israel and the West Bank in an effort to bring Olmert and Abbas together on a document that would serve as a basis for discussion, but the two leaders and Rice ended up talking past one another.

Abbas called for a draft agreement containing specific provisions on borders, the status of Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, water rights and security, and said there should be a timetable for Israel’s compliance. He no doubt remembered that his predecessor Yasser Arafat had gone to Camp David in 2000 without a previous commitment from Israel on these issues. When Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians some disconnected chunks of West Bank territory separated by Israeli roads and settlements, Arafat turned him down and was blamed by President Bill Clinton for the failure of the conference.

Olmert insisted that the meeting in November deal only with vague long-term goals, and Rice, after some diplomatic double-talk, agreed. She expressed hope that the two sides would settle on a “common set of principles” leading to Palestinian statehood, but said, “I’m not certain that a timetable that says, ’We have to complete X by Y time’ is where we want to go. There will be some things about which the Israelis won’t be ready to enter into more details, and that’s just fine.”

Two weeks earlier a senior White House official was more direct. “There will not be a negotiation” at the November conference, he said.

Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki threatened that the Palestinians would boycott the conference unless there is an agreement beforehand to discuss basic issues. The likelihood that a true two-state solution would emerge from such discussions, however, seems virtually nil. Olmert is too weak politically to offer the Palestinians substantial concessions, since to do so would bring on the resignation of right-wing nationalists in his government and the collapse of his coalition. In addition, many Palestinians and even a few Israelis now believe that given the realities on the ground—nearly half a million Jewish settlers, hardened Israeli military bases, and an elaborate highway network designed exclusively for Israelis—the only workable solution to the conflict is a single democratic state in which all citizens have the same rights regardless of ethnicity or religion.

Bush’s main hope was that Arab leaders would come to the conference and agree to normalize relations with Israel. This may be why Laura Bush traveled to the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Kuwait in mid-October. Her official mission was to talk about breast cancer, but it undoubtedly included persuading their leaders to come to Annapolis. If so, Israel’s intransigence made her job difficult.

Saudi Arabia had previously expressed reluctance to attend the conference unless final status issues were discussed, and Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal suggested that Israel also begin taking confidence-building measures, such as freezing settlements and stopping construction of the separation wall. “It will be curious,” he said, ”for Abbas and the prime minister of Israel to be talking about peace and the return of Palestinian land while Israel is continuing to build more settlements.”

Prince Saud also urged that Hamas be included, saying that “Peace can not be made by one man or half a people.” If the international community had accepted the unity government brokered by Saudi Arabia last February, he said, Hamas might have eventually renounced violence against Israel—something Hamas had previously offered to do in return for Israel’s withdrawal to its 1967 borders.

On Oct. 15 the Jerusalem Post reported a warning by Israeli military intelligence and the Palestinian Authority that Hamas would attempt to torpedo the peace talks, but Israel was making that job unnecessary. Instead of easing conditions on the West Bank the Israelis added 40 more checkpoints, bringing the total to 572. Land confiscations and settlement construction continued. As the date of the peace conference grew closer Israel seized 400 acres of Palestinian-owned land on the West Bank for a road that will bypass Jerusalem and allow Israel to build 3,500 new homes in the already massive settlement bloc east of Jerusalem.

Israel is robbing Gaza’s children of an education.

Nor was there any let-up in army raids, including arrests and killings. On Sept. 18, while Rice was in Tel Aviv discussing the peace conference with Olmert, Israeli troops were swarming through the streets of Ein Beit Elma refugee camp in the West Bank, searching homes and dragging off scores of male residents. In Gaza three days later, Israeli troops killed three Palestinians and bulldozed 13 homes and several acres of agricultural land. One of the victims was 17-year-old Mahmoud al-Khafafi, who was hit by a tank shell, then run over by a bulldozer.

Just before Rice arrived in Israel, Hamas officials in Gaza again offered a complete cease-fire and an end to the firing of rockets into Israel in return for a reopening of the crossings from Gaza into Israel and Egypt. Israel rejected the offer and immediately declared Gaza to be “hostile territory,” a move that opened the way for the government to further reduce supplies of electricity and fuel. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned that any cutoff of electricity or water to Gaza would constitute collective punishment and be a violation of international law. Israel said it would not cut off water, but most of Gaza’s water comes from local wells and it can’t be pumped without electricity.

Because Israel already lets in nothing but the most basic food and medicine, more than a million Gazans now live on the edge of hunger. Israeli banks have stopped all transactions with Gaza banks, so there is a severe shortage of cash. Because electricity and water are frequently cut off the sewage system is in danger of collapse. And as if material deprivations were not enough, Israel is robbing Gaza’s children of an education. The lack of paper and ink meant that more than 350,000 UNRWA textbooks could not be printed this year and thousands of pupils had to start school without them.

Gazans have nevertheless gained a rare degree of security since Hamas took over last June. According to a Sept. 8 report in The New York Times, “People stroll at all hours, theft has practically stopped, even armed police officers are seldom seen.” Hamas has made it illegal to carry weapons in public and dried up the thriving arms market.

The relative calm may not last, however. After Israeli air strikes killed 12 Palestinians in Gaza in late September, hundreds of bearded gunmen wearing black robes and calling themselves the Army of Islam came out for the funeral. The group is responsible for repeated rocket attacks on Israel and the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier in 2006. Another shadowy group, the Popular Resistance Committees, fired Katyusha rockets into Israel in early October, one of the few times more sophisticated rockets have been used by Palestinians. If Israel continues to arrest and assassinate Hamas leaders, these groups could grow to fill the vacuum.

Keeping Regional Tensions High

Meanwhile, U.S. and Israeli actions are keeping tensions high elsewhere in the region. Syria is vital to the Middle East peace process, but Israel’s Sept. 6 air strike on Syria which was carried out with the advance knowledge of the U.S., may convince Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad that nothing is to be gained by attending the November conference.

A senior Israeli military official said the air strike was intended “to re-establish the credibility of our deterrent power,” suggesting that the target was a nuclear facility. U.S. officials said Israel had informed Washington several months ago that Syria had begun work on a nuclear reactor. As a signer of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (like Iran, but not Israel), Syria has the right to build a reactor to produce electricity. An investigation by the International Atomic Energy Agency in 2004 found no evidence it was doing so, however. In any case, one can only speculate on how the U.S. would react if Syria bombed Israel, or if Pakistan bombed India.

Israel’s action against Syria may have been a warning to Iran that it would not hesitate to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities if necessary, and that Washington would not protest. The latter supposition gains strength as the Bush administration heaps increasing blame on Iran for U.S. problems in Iraq and Afghanistan. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq, has accused Iran of arming Iraqi insurgents, and recently asserted that the Iranian ambassador to Baghdad is a member of the Revolutionary Guard, which the Senate has declared to be a “foreign terrorist organization.” (Just before the 2004 election, the obliging Petraeus wrote an op-ed column for The Washington Post praising the “tangible progress” U.S. troops were making in Iraq.)

On a trip to Afghanistan in late September, Adm. William Fallon, head of the U.S. Central Command, accused Iran of providing the Taliban with roadside bombs used to kill American soldiers. As U.S. forces proved no more able than previous invaders to put down Afghan resistance, Fallon said, “There is no doubt that agents from Iran are involved in aiding the insurgency.”

According to former U.S. diplomat Peter Galbraith, such charges “defy common sense.” He pointed out in the Oct. 11 issue of the New York Review of Books that the Taliban are Sunni fundamentalists who brutally repressed Shi’i when they were in power and murdered several Iranian diplomats inside their consulate. As for Bush’s accusation that Iran is organizing Iraqi insurgents, Galbraith quoted Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi as asking, “Why should we do that? Why should we undermine a government in Iraq that we support more than anybody else?”

Nevertheless, according to Seymour Hersh, the Bush administration has asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff to formulate plans for possible “surgical strikes” on Revolutionary Guard facilities in Iran. In an article in the Oct. 8 issue of the New Yorker, Hersh quotes a retired CIA official as saying, “They’re moving everybody to the Iran desk...and ramping up everything. It’s like the fall of 2002.”

Iraq’s national security adviser, Mowaffak al Rubaie, is emphatically opposed to a U.S. attack on Iran. He told The Washington Post, “There should be “absolutely no—big fat no—bombing of Iran,” and emphasized that constructive dialogue between Iran and the U.S. was critical to the stability of Iraq. Bush is certain to ignore such advice. In a speech on Sept. 13 he said U.S. troops would have to remain in Iraq long past his presidency in order to counter Iran. Defense Secretary Robert Gates clearly did not have reconciliation with Iran in mind when, in a speech to Congress, he referred to keeping troops in Iraq “on a more or less permanent basis.”

In a recent BBC/ABC poll, 72 percent of Iraqis said the presence of American forces was making them less safe, and accounts of U.S. military actions bear them out. In the first eight months of 2007, 1.9 million more Iraqis were forced to flee their homes and the number of detainees doubled. At least 73 Iraqi civilians were killed by American air strikes between the end of September and late October. After a raid on Oct. 11 killed nine children and six women in a town northwest of Baghdad, a military spokesman blamed al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia for the deaths, saying they had used the civilians as a shield. No one reminded him that al-Qaeda would not be in Iraq if not for the U.S. occupation.

On Sept. 16, security guards from Blackwater USA shot to death 17 civilians while driving through a Baghdad square firing indiscriminately. No bullets had been fired at the guards, and it later emerged that Blackwater employees have been involved in at least 200 shooting incidents since 2005, many of them covered up with payments by the State Department. No Blackwater employee has ever been prosecuted, and the same is true of the thousands of other heavily armed mercenaries hired by U.S. agencies to do police work.

Under a law promulgated by L. Paul Bremer in 2003, private contractors in Iraq are immune from prosecution. Even if the law is changed, the privatizing of the war under the Bush administration makes it almost impossible to trace ultimate responsibility. On Oct. 9 another group of private guards riddled a taxicab with 40 bullets, killing two women. This time the guards were with the Unity Resources Group, a company owned by Australians, based in Dubai, and registered in Singapore. That company in turn was hired by RTT International, which is operating under contract to the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are costing Americans $3 billion a week, with the total already at $800 billion. Much of that money is going to 160,000 private contractors and the corporations that employ them. Even more is going to weapons manufacturers, whose CEOs have seen annual pay raises of 200 to 688 percent since 9/11, according to the Institute for Policy Studies. The average annual salary of these CEOs is now $12 million. The Bush administration has made war a profitable industry, and as long as there is profit in war, Middle East peace will not be a priority.

Rachelle Marshall is a free-lance editor living in Stanford, CA. A member of the Jewish International Peace Union, she writes frequently on the Middle East.

< Prev		Next >