\jeff{krimmel}

Simple Minded Middle East Policy

I have spent a little time over the past couple of days thinking about what President Bush told British Prime Minister Tony Blair about the current crisis in the Middle East. Specifically, President Bush said,

The irony is, what they really need to do is to get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit, and it’s over.

First, I don’t think the president knows the meaning of the word ‘irony’. But, many words exist of whose meaning the president is unaware, so I won’t discuss this any further here. Second, does the above statement strike anyone else as being exceptionally simple minded?

Don’t you think Hezbollah (and likely Syria) are thinking the exact same thing, except with ‘the United States’ in place of ‘Syria’ and ‘Israel’ in place of ‘Hezbollah’? We could all argue about which interpretation is fairest until we’re blue in the face, but it’s not going to help end this crisis any sooner.

I find the president’s above statement to be yet another example of a damning affliction that grips this administration and its strongest adherents: the fallacy of black versus white. Everything is cast as either good or evil, strong or weak, loyal or treasonous. No middle ground exists. To the president, the conflict in the Middle East is easy to solve. The evil doers need to stop doing evil. Done deal.

The problem is the evil doers don’t think they’re doing any evil. They think we’re the evil ones. Obviously they won’t find us very persuasive when we tell them to just straighten up their act. Here is where the clever art of diplomacy enters.

I don’t have a solution to this problem. I would soon have a Nobel peace prize hanging around my neck if I did. But I find it highly disconcerting that the leader of the free world sincerely believes that getting Syria “to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit” would solve the current Middle East crisis. What a pitifully insufficient approach to foreign policy that is.