British Prime Minister Tony Blair is in the US for talks with President Bush. Expected to be on the agenda are the need for a new UN resolution (which they seem to agree on); concern over hardline tactics in Iraq (which they are expected to disagree about somewhat); and Bush’s support of Sharon’s plan (which by many accounts may have really pissed the PM off).
From a commentary in the Guardian:
It has a kind of logic: Bush knows that supporting Sharon will please his predominantly conservative Christian, pro-Israel constituency, and a foreign policy achievement can only help in an election year marred by bad news from Iraq.
Harder to fathom is why Tony Blair should go along with such a shift. He persuaded a reluctant parliamentary Labour party to vote for war on Iraq last year with the promise that he would push Bush to act on Israel-Palestine. His reward was the much-delayed publication of the road map, which was hardly a great triumph: merely a set of toothless guidelines and a hoped-for timetable. Now even that is in shreds, and yet Blair smiles and takes it, welcoming Bush’s green light to Sharon as a positive “opportunity”.
It’s beginning to look humiliating for Blair – the one promise he extracted for his dogged fidelity in Iraq trampled on so publicly. You would think now would be the moment for Blair to show some daylight between himself and Bush, if only for his own self-respect. Will that happen today in Washington? Don’t bet on it.
Even those who aren’t necessarily 100% behind the PM feel that he needs to come away from the meeting with some token of friendship from Bush:
Former UK Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told the BBC that Mr Blair would be a “false friend” if he “doesn’t fairly bluntly put it to President Bush that he is pursuing policies in Iraq that are going to get us into increasing difficulty there”.
He stressed that Mr Blair had “put a lot of his political capital on the line to support that relationship”, adding: “President Bush owes it to him to listen today.”
Blair’d be a fool to hold his breath, IMHO.
I don’t think Bush would admit to making mistakes in Iraq if God Himself showed up and mapped them out with 8×10 glossy color photos, complete with circles and arrows with an explanation on the back of each one.
Like the post above this one, we have yet another example of leftist confusion between words and deeds. The US position on the right of return was that it was a deal-breaker before the announcement, and it remains so after the announcement. It was the position of Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton. The fact that Bush has publically said that the Palestinians no longer get to storm off in a huff by appealing to the right of return whenever negotiations aren’t going their way is a good thing, but not a change in position.
The flip side of that is the fact that the ‘roadmap’ was crap since the Palestinian government continues to be uninterested in even attempting to stop terrorism from their borders. Noticing that fact is not CAUSING a problem with the peace process, it is ACKNOWLEDGING a problem with the peace process.
In my opinion the left’s failure to deal with the problem of direct PLO complicity in terrorism is one of the things which has allowed the ‘peace process’ (scare quotes intentional) to flounder for years. The PLO sees that it can obtain massive EU monetary support AND still engage in war against Israel because the diplomatic niceties can always be maintained.
Blair’s in town? I didn’t know the Westminster Show was in DC this spring! Sorry, couldn’t resist.
Sebastian-
You’ll probably be shocked and disappointed to learn I agree with you about the futility of the Palestinians holding out for the right of return. Israel is not about to commit demographic suicide, no matter how much wishful thinking the PLO engages in.
That does not necessarily mean that the Wall is a good idea, or that Sharon is acting in good faith, or that Bush isn’t an idiot for shredding any remaining pretense that the US is capable of being a neutral mediator.
Frankly, the best thing that could happen in the Middle East would be for Sharon and Arafat to spend the rest of their days trapped on a desert island with only each other for company. Let them feed on their years of hatred and bile by themselves.
If it were only Sharon and Arafat there wouldn’t be a problem.
It has been well understood for at least 15 and probably 20 years that the ‘right of return’ if it ever existed is never going to be enforced. If clearing the air about that fact is so damaging to the Palestinian’s fragile psyches that it will ruin than peace process, then it is clear that they had not mooring with reality. In which case it is a damn good thing that we got it out into the open–again.
The right of return issue is, to my understanding, secondary (and distantly so) to legitimizing the West Bank settlements as a step towards an eventual border that limits the Palestinian state to a chain of tenuously connected ghettos.
Indeed. The Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories are illegal under the Geneva Conventions.
Further, as has been acknowledged openly in Israel since 1980: “Today, there is no prospect for a viable Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza without abandonment of most Israeli settlements. Palestinian negotiators have indicated that if there were agreement in principle that the borders of the Palestinian state are defined by the 1967 Green Line, including East Jerusalem, they would be willing to discuss border adjustments. Such an arrangement might cede to Israel large, heavily populated settlements located near the Green Line in return for Palestinian annexation of equivalent areas of land on the Israeli side of the line.”cite
But no Israeli Prime Minister has ever been willing to give up the illegal settlements in exchange for peace.