Mideast allies near a state of panic (LA Times)

[TomInTib]

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-usmideast3dec03,0,7181716.story?coll=la-home-headlines

U.S. leaders' visits to the region reap only warnings and worry.
By Paul Richter
Times Staff Writer

December 3, 2006

WASHINGTON — President Bush and his top advisors fanned out across the troubled Middle East over the last week to showcase their diplomatic initiatives to restore strained relationships with traditional allies and forge new ones with leaders in Iraq.

But instead of flaunting stronger ties and steadfast American influence, the president's journey found friends both old and new near a state of panic. Mideast leaders expressed soaring concern over upheavals across the region that the United States helped ignite through its invasion of Iraq and push for democracy — and fear that the Bush administration may make things worse.

President Bush's summit in Jordan with the Iraqi prime minister proved an awkward encounter that deepened doubts about the relationship. Vice President Dick Cheney's stop in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, yielded a blunt warning from the kingdom's leaders. And Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's swing through the West Bank and Israel, intended to build Arab support by showing a new U.S. push for peace, found little to work with.

In all, visits designed to show the American team in charge ended instead in diplomatic embarrassment and disappointment, with U.S. leaders rebuked and lectured by Arab counterparts. The trips demonstrated that U.S. allies in the region were struggling to understand what to make of the difficult relationship, and to figure whether, with a new Democratic majority taking over Congress, Bush even had control over his nation's Mideast policy.

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more at article

[Peace Patriot]

1. Bush's "...push for democracy.."??? Har-har.

Reporters are not really critical thinkers any more. How can they accept and use a phrase like that with a straight face?

Bush's "push for chaos" in the Middle East would be more accurate.

The article is otherwise a fairly decent one, chronicling Bush, Cheney and Rice's efforts to look like they were doing something in the Middle East. What the Middle East said back to them was, in essence: "You broke it, you fix it." They've thrown up their hands--except Israel's Olmert who thinks it's all just great. (Boy, I wish Israelis would smarten up about these rightwingers and war profiteers.)

The part that stood out like an infected pimple:

"Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was gloomy about the prospects for a deal between his Fatah party and the militant group Hamas that would allow formation of a nonsectarian government and open the way for increased aid and, potentially, peace talks with Israel.

"Rice said afterward that the administration 'cannot create the circumstances' for peace.

"'This is the kind of thing that takes time,' she said. 'You don't expect great leaps forward.'"

----

Six years. SIX YEARS to get right. And more than five years now of slaughtering and torturing hundreds of thousands of Arabs and Muslims--and she wants MORE TIME!

This is the kind of thing that takes time. That should be her epitaph.

Or, better yet, the title of her forthcoming book--after all this is over--when she has promised (in some newsturd I read yesterday) to disclose their "mistakes" in Iraq. That little private diary of hers that she plans to get typed by the Stanford secretarial pool a couple of years from now.

I can't wait to read it.