Bush's Middle East Legacy

Explosively False Propaganda
Bush's Middle East legacy
by Muhammad Sahimi

No part of the world, not even the United States, has been more deeply affected by George W. Bush's presidency than the Middle East. From the lofty goals of starting a "democratic revolution," making a "new Middle East," and helping the Palestinians to have their own independent state, to the bogus "war on terror," invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and meddling in Lebanon, Bush's Middle East policy has been simply one disaster after another.

Iraq

If there is one minor positive outcome of Bush's Middle East policy, it has to be the removal of Saddam Hussein and his Ba'ath Party from power. But at what price?

1. Iraq has effectively been partitioned among the Shi'ites, Sunnis, and Kurds.
   
2. Iraq became a vast training ground for extremists from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, and Kuwait.
   
3. Iraq's infrastructure has been damaged greatly. It would take decades to put Iraq back to where it was before the war.
   
4. Much of Iraq's cultural heritage was looted from museums.
   
5. Iraqi prisoners were tortured at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.
   
6. Two million Iraqis have left their country. Clearly, they are the highly educated (at least 3,000 of them professors), professionals, and the affluent, and, therefore, their departure is a great brain drain. Proportionally, it would be equivalent to 24 million Americans leaving the U.S.
   
7. Close to 2.5 million Iraqis have been displaced within Iraq. Proportionally, it would be equivalent to 30 million American refugees within the U.S.
   
8. As many as 1.1 million Iraqis may have been killed. Proportionally, it would as if over 13 million Americans had been killed, a staggering number. Notable among the dead are at least 230 Iraqi professors, with another 60 missing, presumably dead.
   
9. At least 1 million Iraqi children have become orphans.
   
10. Seventy percent of Iraqi children suffer from mental stress disorder.
    
11. Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University, the 2001 Nobel laureate in economics, and Linda Bilmes of Harvard University estimated that the eventual cost of the war may reach $2 trillion. If, for a period of 10 years, the funding for cancer research were doubled, every American with diabetes or heart disease were treated, and a global immunization campaign that could save millions of children were carried out, the total cost would be about $600 billion.

Palestine/Israel

When Bill Clinton left the White House in 2001, the Israelis and the Palestinians were tantalizingly close to a peace agreement. Today, the probability of peace is practically nil. No other U.S. president has supported Israel as blindly and one-sidedly. He is also the first U.S. president who actually recognized Israel's policy of building and annexing settlements in the West Bank, giving Israel a secret letter committing the U.S. to such a policy.

With Bush's support, Israel "evacuated" Gaza but created the largest jail on Earth: Gaza's land, sea, and air borders are all controlled by Israel. It attacks Gaza at will, and when it kills innocent women, children, and old men, what does Bush say? "Israel must defend itself."

Bush and Rice pushed for democratic elections among Palestinians. The radicals actually wanted such elections too! What happened? The elections were held and certified as democratic by Jimmy Carter, but Hamas won. It received more votes than any other group, including Fatah, and took control of the Palestinian parliament.

As usual, Rice was shocked. "Nobody saw it coming," she declared. (No secretary of state has made more trips to Israel and Palestine than Rice without having anything to show for it.) So what happened? Instead of trying to work with Hamas, which has never been a threat to the U.S., Bush began punishing the Palestinians by cutting off all aid and pressuring others to follow the U.S. lead. Hamas responded to this by routing the Fatah forces in Gaza, taking full control there.

Bush has paid lip service to the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. In his recent speech before the Knesset, Israel's parliament, Bush promised the Palestinians that they would have a state of their own "over the next 60 years." Some promise.

Bush's Israel/Palestine legacy? Peace between Israel and the Palestinians is more farfetched than ever.

Read further here on Lebanon, Iran, Afghanistan and general Middle East.