No More “Let’s Pretend”

There is a line to be drawn between the excellent appointment of Elliot Abrams to the NSC as Director of the Near East and North Africa, and the increasing impatience of the President with Iraq and the Palestinians. It is the Bush Administration’s ever-increasing unwillingness to play “let’s pretend.”

There is a line to be drawn between the excellent appointment of Elliot Abrams to the NSC as Director of the Near East and North Africa, and the increasing impatience of the President with Iraq and the Palestinians. It is the Bush Administration’s ever-increasing unwillingness to play “let’s pretend.”

Early steps in that direction were the abandonment of Kyoto and the International Criminal Court and withdrawal from the ABM Treaty – all of which were based on the pretence that countries, including dictatorial regimes would put the democratically-understood rule of law ahead of their own perceived ethnic or national interest.

The Oslo process pretended that Arafat had renounced his terrorist-megalomaniacal-kleptocratic side (his only side, in our view) and was a politician, if not a statesman, with whom democratic governments could do business. President Bush’s 24 July speech abandoned the pretence and his current expressed concern for the economic plight of the Palestinians is further evidence of his lack of interest in pursuing a process designed to lead to an independent Palestinian state.

The Clinton administration’s “containment” of Iraq required pretending Saddam was not continuing his quest for weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver the arsenal. On the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Kuwait, Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon said, “Iraq is contained. It has a broken economy. It is an isolated state. I think that’s the fundamental accomplishment over the last 10 years.” We replied: Ten years after the expenditure of lives and treasure in Desert Shield/Storm; and after the aborted Shiite uprising in the south and Kurdish uprising in the north of Iraq – costing thousands of lives; and after the expenditure of nearly $20 billion for the daily flights since 1991 and countless billions spent on the rest of the U.S. presence in the Gulf and in Turkey; and after years of sanctions, which Saddam manipulated to fall on hapless civilians, Saddam is still doing precisely that which has made him a threat to regional stability and world peace since 1981 when Israel took out the Osirak reactor. It’s not good enough.” (JINSA Report 152) President Bush seems to agree and has taken on a task made harder by so many in Europe and the Middle East with a vested financial, political or religious interest in having the U.S. continue to pretend that nothing out there can hurt us. The appointment of his “democracy expert” to the Middle East job – a job at which so many “Middle East experts” have failed – is a sign that the President is well aware of what can hurt us and plans to deal with it politically as well as militarily.

There is more pretence currently being shredded over North Korea, where it is now clear that our “humanitarian aid” fed the government and allowed it to spend its limited resources on nuclear weapons. In Zimbabwe we have threatened to provide food aid to starving people without the government’s help or permission to avoid a similar situation. We rejected China’s offer to dismantle some of the weapons aimed at Taiwan if we stop supporting our democratic friends there. Saudi Arabia should be next.