Repercussions of a failed policy (Bush has no moral authority)

[ProSense]

Letting Gaza Burn

Chris Toensing
July 13, 2006

Snip...

This tiptoeing around the facts, while it sounds unusually absurd on this occasion, is in line with Bush (and Clinton) administration practice of long standing: Blame the Palestinians for starting the fight, exonerate Israel of any culpability, place the onus on the Palestinian leadership for Palestinian suffering at Israeli hands and hint at behind-the-scenes pressure on Israel to stand down. These last hints have grown steadily more delicate in the post-9/11 years. When the Bush administration decided that they, too, wanted to order missile strikes against Islamist militants on foreign soil, they stopped complaining about Israel’s extrajudicial executions in Gaza and the West Bank. When President George W. Bush called for Israel’s “immediate” withdrawal from reinvaded West Bank towns in April 2002, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice clarified that “now” did not mean “right away.” The withdrawal, she said, should be “orderly,” and not “helter-skelter.”

Still, decorum required the White House to insist that Israel not “remove” Yasser Arafat and, eventually, to prevail upon Israel to provisionally accept Bush’s “road map” to peace. In the name of that document, the State Department objected when Israel wanted to withdraw from Gaza without any coordination with the Palestinians, and Rice set about polishing her diplomatic rock-star image with an arduous parlay to open a Gazan border crossing that Israel kept closing even after withdrawing.

In the wake of the Hamas victory in January’s Palestinian elections, however, the daylight between U.S. and Israeli positions disappeared. That border crossing has been closed for nearly half of 2006, to the predictable detriment of Gazan exports and incomes. The U.S. discontinued financial aid to the Palestinian Authority, and stayed quiet as Israel withheld millions in customs revenue that belong to the Palestinians by treaty. So it seems superfluous to ask “Where is the U.S.?” as Gaza feels the squeeze.

Rather, the questions ought to be: Will the U.S. demand that Israel not unleash similar collective punishment on Lebanon? Meanwhile, how can Bush believe that the U.S. can help resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by unequivocally backing one side? And when will Americans demand that their presidents act as truly honest brokers?

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/07/13/letting_gaza_burn.php

Anybody seen that roadmap to peace, anywhere??

Is there any area of foreign policy this moronic Administration hasn’t totally failed in??? George W. Bush has to be the biggest failure in the history of this planet…

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2006_07/009161.php#918786

[whistle]

1. This is right on target, Bush the war criminal

[ProSense]

2. The ICC!

U.S. Policy on the ICC

Until recently, the U.S. has had a history of involvement with the ICC. The U.S. delegation to the 1998 Rome Conference, which established the treaty creating the ICC, was the largest and most influential. In December 2000, before leaving office, President Clinton signed the Rome Treaty and expressed the importance of continued engagement with the ICC. He believed that cooperation with the Court was essential to addressing U.S. concerns and achieving U.S. objectives.

Since taking office in 2000 however, President Bush has adopted a stringent policy of isolation and opposition against the Court. In 2002, President Bush not only “unsigned” the Rome Statute—a legally ambiguous act—but has also pushed for legislation such as the American Servicemembers’ Protection Act (ASPA), which is dubbed the “Hague Invasion Act” by our less than amused European allies.

President Bush’s chief complaint against the ICC is that it will unfairly target US military personnel serving abroad. As Commander in Chief, he is worried that the thousands of US military forces currently deployed around the world will face trumped up charges of war crimes and the like by a politicized Court. Yet countless officials, both American and European, have assured President Bush that the Court is politically impartial, and furthermore, that even if US military personnel commit war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide, they are very unlikely to be hauled into the ICC. This is because the ICC is by definition a court of last resort, meaning that it will only try a national of a state that is unable or unwilling to prosecute that national. Because the US has a sound judicial system in place, in most cases the ICC will not have jurisdiction to try US military personnel.

Nevertheless, the Bush administration refuses these assurances and has made its animosity for the Court well known. Yet of all the drastic measures it has taken since the Court’s establishment in July 2002, none are as alarming as the administration’s recent push for Bilateral Immunity Agreements (BIAs) to be signed between the US and state parties to the ICC.