Gość: Bert
IP: *.tnt1.brockton.ma.da.uu.net
09.04.02, 09:49
Prosze przeczytac, bo to ciekawe, i jednoczesnie pozbyc sie zludzen.
April 9, 2002
BUSH VS SHARON: THE SEQUEL
Who will prevail in the showdown between President Bush and Prime Minister Sharon?
Bush has asked Sharon to cease offensive military operations on the West Bank and begin
to withdraw immediately; Sharon has replied that he will stop on his timetable, not
Washington's.
Events have forced Bush to recognize that Washington's one-sided support for Israel is
gnawing away at every American relationship in the Arab world, undermining the
President's war against terrorism and potentially threatening its oil supplies. The
President seems finally to understand that America's vital security interests are
jeopardized by the absence of a peace process between Israel and the Palestinians.
Sharon for his part has always felt that the only way to deal with Palestinian national
aspirations is military force; throughout his long career, he has opposed every peace
proposal and negotiation. Now, in the midst of intensifying war of terror and
counter-terror, he seems to have enough political support in Israel to carry out a plan of
destroying the nascent institutions of a Palestinian state. America's interests mean zilch to
him.
Try to imagine the subject as it plays out in George W. Bush's mind. He is a man who did
not read or reflect very much about the wider world for most of his life, now thrust
suddenly into a circumstance in which hundreds of millions scrutinize his every word and
gesture for nuance, and where his decisions have life and death consequences for much
of the planet.
If he is like most Americans, with no particularly strong convictions about the Middle
East other than a vague desire not to get harmed by the issue, the course of least
resistance is to cede the Arab-Israel portfolio to the most pro-Israel people he knows.
Running for president with something of a reputation as a lightweight to overcome, there
was no downside to doing this. If you are Bush and let it be known early on that you are
completely on Israel's side, meet regularly with neoconservative intellectuals, have one or
two of them on your campaign staff, you are likely to find yourself the beneficiary of
articles describing your intellectual curiosity and surprising range, what a quick study
you are, etc. Shelving a vexatious issue and solidifying your reputation on a vulnerable
front, a pro-Israel stance kills two birds with one stone.
In Bush's case however, the matter is hugely complicated by what happened to his
father. In 1991, President George H.W. Bush had the most noteworthy showdown with
Israel and the American Israeli lobby of any American president. While the outcome was
mixed, the President definitely lost on points.
In early September of 1991, Israel's right wing government had asked Washington for a
loan guarantee for $10 billion in commercial paper � seeking the new credit line to
finance the resettlement of Jews leaving the Soviet Union. Bush had six months earlier
driven Saddam Hussein's armies from Kuwait, helped by a broad Arab coalition; he then
was planning to convene an unprecedented peace conference in Madrid. And he didn't
want to undermine the conference by subsidizing massively the settlement of a million
new immigrants to Israel on Palestinian land in the West Bank � where the Shamir
government was inclined to place many of them.
Bush asked Congress to delay the loan guarantees for four months. The Israeli lobby
shifted into gear; one day, about a thousand lobbyists began paying visits to
Congressional offices, making the case for the United States to dispense the guarantees
immediately.
Anyone who has worked on the Hill will tell you that Israel lobbyists always present their
case well. Three or four lobbyists will arrive, each prepared to make a different point. But
behind the presentation is an understanding that never has to be made explicit: the Israeli
lobby has tremendous financial clout, and if it decides to start funneling campaign
donations to your opponents, your future in politics will become difficult and probably be
short. As Michael Lind pointed in out in the British journal Prospect, the Israel lobby
functions differently from other ethnic lobbies, which promise to mobilize voters for and
against various candidates. The Israel lobby works more on the model of the national
lobbies like the NRA and pro-choice and right-to life movements, dispensing funds on a
national basis to help or punish. It has the reputation of being the most effective and
potent lobby of them all.
Confronting a lobbying storm against his effort to slow down the loan guarantees, then
President Bush stepped before the microphones and said "I heard today there were
something like a thousand lobbyists on the Hill working the other side of the question.
We've got one lonely little guy doing it." He spoke further about being "up against some
powerful political forces."
At this point, the loan guarantees had massive political backing in Congress, the branch
of government which attends lobbies most closely � the Israel lobby and others. For a
while, Bush's complaint helped shift the balance; Congressional support for overriding the
President's opposition to the four month moratorium on the guarantees dissolved
overnight. It wasn't actually a showdown � Israel got its funds later; and the Madrid
Peace Conference spawned the Oslo agreements. But there was a confrontation of sorts,
and initially the President seemed to come out ahead.
But at a price. Within days there a buzz of commentary, audible to anyone paying
attention: many Jews interpreted Bush's words about the lobbyists as an anti-Semitic
attack on them. Malcolm Hoenlein, director of the Presidents Conference, an influential
and centrist Jewish organization, issued a statement decrying Bush's comments as an
assault on the Jewish right to practice citizen advocacy. Meanwhile, the White House
began receiving a lot of troubling mail, congratulating the President for speaking out
against "the lobby."
President Bush wrote an apologetic letter to the chairman of the Presidents Conference,
talking of his great respect for lobbyists, and apologizing for being the source of any hurt
feelings.
That seemed to put the issue to rest. But it didn't go away. In September, a close Bush
political ally, Richard Thornburgh, held a big lead in an off year race for Pennsylvania's
vacant Senate seat. Suddenly his 44 percentage point lead began to evaporate, and Harris
Wofford began to gain. The media attributed Wofford's surge to a sudden outbreak of
interest in the health insurance issue. But insiders noted that money, the mother's milk of
politics, played a decisive role. As J.J. Goldberg points out in his book Jewish Power (my
principle source for this discussion) "within a week after Bush's September 12 press
conference, Republican and Democratic fundraisers alike began noticing a distinct shift in
donations away from Thornburgh and towards Wofford." FEC filings showed that while
Thornburgh throughout 1991 had been raising money at twice the rate of Wofford, that
ratio was reversed in the campaign's final weeks. Jewish donors who had played
prominent roles in Thornburgh's campaign throughout the year abandoned it at the end.
After the campaign, Thornburgh told Bush that he felt he had been the proverbial canary
in the mineshaft, the tell-tale first victim of President Bush's suddenly emergent problem
with Jewish voters and contributors.
Many factors went into Bush's 1992 defeat. Ross Perot's ascendance and the weak
economy make it difficult to gauge the importance of the loan guarantee issue in taking
him down from stratospheric approval ratings he enjoyed in the spring of 1991.
But in 2002 it is hard to imagine that the topic of the defeat and all the reasons for it
doesn't come u
