Bush & Bloody Reality
Bloody reality bears no relation to the
delusions of this President As a bomb explodes in
Beirut and Israel kills 19 in Gaza raids, Bush takes
his Middle East peace mission to Saudi Arabia (and
signs off $20bn weapons deal with repressive regime)
By Robert Fisk
The Independent (UK)
January 16, 2008
http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article3342174.ece
Twixt silken sheets - in a bedroom whose walls are also
covered in silk - and in the very palace of King
Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, President George Bush awakes
this morning to confront a Middle East which bears no
relation to the policies of his administration nor the
warning which he has been relaying constantly to the
kings and emirs and oligarchs of the Gulf: that Iran
rather than Israel is their enemy.
The President sat chummily beside the all-too-friendly
monarch yesterday, enthroned in what looked
suspiciously like the kind of casual blue cardigan he
might wear on his own Texan ranch; he had even received
a jangling gold " Order of Merit" - it looked a bit
like the Lord Chancellor's chain, though it was not
disclosed which particular merit earned Mr Bush this
kingly reward. Could it be the hypocritical merit of
supplying yet more billions worth of weapons to the
Kingdom, to be used against the Saudi regime's
imaginary enemies.
It was illusory, of course, like all the words that the
Arabs have heard from the Americans these past seven
days, ever since the fading President began his tourist
jaunt around the Middle East.
You wouldn't think it though, watching this
preposterous man, prancing around arm-in-arm with the
King, in what was presumably meant to be a dance,
wielding a massive glinting curved Saudi sword, a
latter-day Saladin, who would have appalled the Kurdish
leader who once destroyed the Crusaders in what is now
referred to by Mr Bush as "the disputed West Bank".
Is this how lame-duck American presidents are supposed
to behave? Certainly, the denizens of the Middle East,
watching this outrageous performance will all be asking
this question. Ever since the 1979 Iranian revolution,
a Muslim Cold War has been raging within the Middle
East - but is this how Mr Bush thinks one should fight
for the soul of Islam?
Already by dusk last night, the US President's world
was exploding in Beirut when a massive car bomb blew up
next to a 4x4 vehicle carrying American embassy
employees, killing four Lebanese and apparently badly
wounding a US embassy driver. And while Mr Bush was
relaxing in the Saudi royal ranch at Al Janadriyah,
Israeli forces killed 19 Palestinians in the Gaza
Strip, most of them members of Hamas, one of them the
son of Mahmoud Zahar, a leader of the movement. He
later claimed that Israel would not have staged the
attack - on the day an Israeli was also killed by a
Palestinian rocket - if it had not been encouraged to
do so by George Bush.
The difference between reality and the dream-world of
the US government could hardly have been more savagely
illustrated. After promising the Palestinians a
"sovereign and contiguous state" before the end of the
year, and pledging "security" to Israel - though not,
Arabs noted, security for "Palestine" - Mr Bush had
arrived in the Gulf to terrify the kings and oligarchs
of the oil-soaked kingdoms of the danger of Iranian
aggression. As usual, he came armed with the usual
American offers of vast weapons sales to protect these
largely undemocratic and police state regimes from
potentially the most powerful nation in the " axis of
evil".
It was a potent - even weird - example of the US
President's perambulation of the Arab Middle East, a
return to the "policy by fear" which Washington has
regularly visited upon Gulf leaders. He agreed to
furnish the Saudis with at least £41m of arms, a figure
set to rise to more than £10bn in weaponry to the Gulf
potentates under a deal announced last year - all of
which is supposed to shield them from the supposed
territorial ambitions of Iran's crackpot President,
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. As usual, Washington promised the
Israelis that their "qualitative edge" in advanced
weapons would be maintained, just in case the Saudis -
who have never gone to war with anyone except Saddam
Hussein after his 1990 invasion of Kuwait - decided to
launch a suicidal attack on America's only real ally in
the Middle East.
This, of course, was not how the whole shooting match
was presented to the Arabs. Mr Bush could be seen
ostentatiously kissing the cheeks of King Abdullah and
holding hands with the autocratic monarch whose Wahhabi
Muslim state had only recently showed its "mercy" to a
Saudi woman who was charged with adultery after being
raped seven times in the desert outside Riyadh. The
Saudis, needless to say, are well aware that Mr Bush's
reign is ending amid chaos in Pakistan, a disastrous
guerrilla war against Western forces in Afghanistan,
fierce fighting in Gaza, near civil war in Lebanon and
the hell-disaster of Iraq.
The bomb in Beirut, just before five in the evening,
must still have come as a rude shock to the luxuriating
President who has such close ties with the Saudi regime
- despite the fact that the majority of hijackers in
the crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001 came
from the kingdom - that he allowed its junior princes
to fly home from the United States immediately after
the attacks. Two trips to Mr Bush's Texas ranch by King
Abdullah was apparently enough to earn the US President
a night in the Saudi king's palace-farm, surrounded by
groomed lawns and grassy hills.
Heard across many miles of the Lebanese capital, the
bomb devastated buildings in a narrow street in the
east of the city through which the vehicle was passing,
just as the US ambassador - on a different route into
the city - was travelling to a central Beirut hotel
reception before leaving for Washington. A State
Department spokesman, however, insisted that no US
citizens had been hurt. The American SUV had taken an
obscure laneway close to the Karantina bridge to travel
north of Beirut along the bank of the city's only river
when it was struck, leading local Lebanese military
officials to ask themselves if the bomber had inside
knowledge of the route they were taking.
There was talk that this was a "dummy" convoy staged to
distract potential bombers from the journey which
Ambassador Jeffrey Feltman was taking to a reception at
a downtown hotel. A carpet manufacturer's factory was
smashed by the blast which tore down roofs and smashed
windows more than half a mile from the scene.
For Arab leaders, Mr Bush's message to the Gulf leaders
was wearily familiar. In the 1980s, when the Reagan
administration was supporting Saddam Hussein's invasion
of Iran, Washington spent its time warning Gulf leaders
of the danger of Iranian aggression. Once Saddam
invaded Kuwait, America's emphasis changed: It was now
Iraq which posed the greatest danger to their kingdoms.
But once the emirate was liberated, the oil-wealthy
monarchs were told that - yet again - it was Iran that
was their enemy.
Arabs are no more taken in by this topsy-turvy "good-
versus-evil" narrative than they are by Washington's
promises to help create a Palestinian state by the end
of the year, scarcely a day before Israel publicly
admitted to plans for yet more houses for settlers on
Arab land amid Jewish colonies illegally built on
Palestinian territory.
Yet to understand the nature of this extraordinary
relationship with the Gulf monarchs, it is necessary to
recall that ever since the President's father promised
a weapons-free "oasis of peace" in the Gulf, Washington
- along with Britain, France and Russia - has been
pouring arms into the region.
Over the past decade, the Gulf Arabs have squandered
billions of their oil dollars on American weapons. The
statistics tell their own story. In 1998 and 1999
alone, Gulf Arab military spending came to £40bn.
Between 1997 and 2005, the sheikhs of the United Arab
Emirates - Mr Bush's hosts before he continued to
Riyadh - signed arms contracts worth £9bn with Western
nations. Between 1991 and 1993 - when Iraq was the
"enemy" - the US Military Training Mission was
administering more than £14bn in Saudi arms
procurements and £12bn in new US weapons acquisitions.
By this time, the Saudis already possessed 72 American
F-15 fighter-bombers and 114 British Tornados.
How little has changed in the past 17 years. On 17 May
1991, for example, George Bush Snr said there were now
"real reasons to be optimistic" about a peace in the
Middle East. "We are going to continue to work in the
[peace] process," he said then. "We are not going to
abandon it."
James Baker, who was the American Secretary of State,
warned on 23 May 1991 that the continued building of
Jewish settlements on Palestinian land " hindered" a
future Middle East peace, just as the present Secretary
of State said last week. At the time, the Israelis were
reassured by Dick Cheney that the US would safeguard
their "security".
The West may have a short memory. The Arabs, who happen
to live in the piece of real estate which we call the
Middle East and who are not stupid, have not. They
understand all too well what George W Bush now stands
for. After advocating "democracy" in the region - a
policy which gained electoral victories for Shia in
Iraq, for Hamas in Gaza and a substantial gain in
political power for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt -
it seems to have dawned on Washington that something
might be slightly wrong with Bush's priorities. Instead
of advocating a "New Middle East", Mr Bush, lying amid
his silken sheets in the Saudi king's palace, is now
pursuing a return to the "Old Middle East", a place of
secret policemen, torture chambers - to which prisoners
can be usefully " renditioned " - and dictatorial
"moderate" presidents and monarchs. And which of the
Gulf despots is going to object to that?
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