U.S. President George W. Bush is about to embark on a tour of several Middle Eastern countries starting next week as his presidency rounds the corner heading for the final stretch of its second and final term at the White House.
The president will travel to Israel, the West Bank, Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt over a period of eight days starting Jan. 8.
Bush, who started out his presidency wanting largely to ignore the Middle East and its perpetual conflicts, found himself dragged into the crux of the Arab-Israeli dispute despite his initial intention of staying well away from a problem of Gordian proportion. If Alexander the Great is said to have circumvented the dilemma of the Gordian knot by using his sword to slice through the rope, thus eliminating the knot, Bush (wrongly) believed he could cut through the Gordian knot of Islamist-driven terrorism by invading Afghanistan and Iraq.
The war in Afghanistan was justified and enjoyed the support of the international community. The country was run by a thuggish regime -- the Taliban -- whose major source of entertainment, after banning everything from music and television to kite flying, was to publicly torture then murder people in sports stadiums.
Only two countries in the world -- Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates -- recognized the Taliban, a regime which was openly supportive of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida organization. In a video recording bin Laden explicitly and unabashedly claimed responsibility for the worst terrorist attack ever carried out on U.S. soil in which about 3,000 people lost their lives.
Strategically, from a national security perspective, as well as politically, it made sense for the United States to go after bin Laden and his supporters in Afghanistan, where al-Qaida enjoyed the run of the land.
But the war on Iraq proved to be a very different matter. The two reasons put forward by the Bush administration in justifying the invasion of Iraq -- that Saddam Hussein was in possession of weapons of mass destruction and that he was in cahoots with the 9/11 terrorists -- simply did not hold water, and proved to be wrong. No WMDs were ever found in Iraq, and it wasn't for the lack of searching. Secondly, bin Laden's theocratic-based philosophy of a strict version of Islamic rule and vision of a revived caliphate stretching from the Asian steppe to Western Europe and beyond, could not have been further removed from Saddam's Baath Party beliefs of a secular society.
Repeatedly, Bush kept hearing from Arab leaders he conferred with something he really did not like to hear; that the road to Middle East peace did not pass through Baghdad, as his administration had hoped, but that the road to a lasting Middle East peace went through Jerusalem and Ramallah.
The democratization "domino effect" the Bush administration had expected to take place in the Middle East after the fall of Saddam simply failed to materialize. Indeed, instead of falling down, the Middle East dominoes appeared to be anchoring themselves even more firmly in place in defiance of U.S. pressures.
One such "domino" Washington would have wished to see pushed down is the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad, whom it accuses of meddling in the affairs of Lebanon and of aiding and abetting anti-coalition forces fighting in Iraq.
But much to the chagrin of the administration, not only did Assad hold steady, he moved to solidify his regime's foundation through a marriage of convenience with Tehran.
So now in the waning days of his presidency George W. Bush is embarking on the road to Jerusalem and Ramallah, hoping his clout and that of the U.S. presidency will help cut through one of the major hurdles in the Middle East's Gordian knot and bring about a two-state solution and an end to the Israeli-Palestinian dilemma.
However, as Bush will meet with Israeli and Palestinian leaders and remind them of their vows made in Annapolis -- to work toward peace -- he will discover that new knots have worked their way into the fray, further complicating the peace process.
The knots come in the form of Israel's intention to proceed with plans to add some 300 housing units in the disputed neighborhood in East Jerusalem of Har Homa, or Jebel Abu Ghneim as the Palestinians call it, along with the expansion of Maale Adumim by about 500 new housing units. No doubt the Israelis will present Bush with their own complaints of the Palestinians further tying up the peace process, such as the smuggling of weapons from Egypt into the Gaza Strip.
Bush may well find that his task is somewhat more complex than Alexander's.
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