George W Bush?s Last War Crime

George Bush's rubber stamp alliance with Israeli military savagery
against Gaza adds to the list of criminal-level disasters he has
involved the United States during his eight-year regime. Will Barack
Obama be a peacemaker? Asks Robert Dreyfuss.


The Israeli invasion of Gaza, launched Saturday, might very well be
George W. Bush's last and final war crime. For eight years, Bush has
coupled unparalled ignorance of the Middle East with supreme arrogance.
It is precisely that deadly combination of ignorance and arrogance that
is on display now, as a politically motivated Israeli invasion of Gaza
unfolds with the full support of the Bush administration.

In his weekly radio address, delivered as Israeli tanks and armor
rumbled into the Gaza Strip, Bush declared: "This recent outburst of
violence was instigated by Hamas -- a Palestinian terrorist group
supported by Iran and Syria that calls for Israel's destruction. ...
Another one-way ceasefire that leads to rocket attacks on Israel is not
acceptable. And promises from Hamas will not suffice -- there must be
monitoring mechanisms in place to help ensure that smuggling of weapons
to terrorist groups in Gaza comes to an end. I urge all parties to
pressure Hamas to turn away from terror."

A more sweeping endorsement of Israel's action is hard to imagine.
Writing in the Washington Post, columnist Jim Hoagland, a reliable,
neoconservative-allied scribbler, describes it this way: "He did not
just give Israel a green light to inflict as much damage as possible on
Hamas once that radical movement foolishly renounced a six-month-old
truce. Bush knocked down the traffic light post and waved the Israelis
through the intersection."

Personally, I find Hamas despicable. It is a right-wing Islamist group
with open terrorist inclinations, motivated by a fanciful notion that
it can defeat Israel with its pinprick attacks. I've also written
extensively in my book, Devil's Game: How the United States Helped
Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, how Israel created Hamas systematically
and deliberately during the 1970s and 1980s, building up the Muslim
Brotherhood and Ahmed Yassin's proto-Hamas movement as a counterweight
to Fatah.

But Israel could easily have absorbed the rockets launched by Hamas,
nearly all of which crash harmlessly in remote areas, if it had truly
sought to work out an accommodation with the Palestinians. Most
important, Israel could have endorsed and supported efforts by Saudi
Arabia, Egypt, and others to create a lasting accord between Hamas and
Fatah. Instead, Israel did the opposite, meeting each of Hamas' acts of
violence with far greater violence of its own.

The outcome of Israel's action is likely to be to strengthen, not
weaken, Hamas. It will also have the following collateral effects:

? It will undermine the moderate wing of the Palestinian movement,
perhaps fatally.

? It will weaken the government of Egypt, boosting the power of the
radical-right Muslim Brotherhood there, to the point where Egypt's
regime could collapse, with incalculable consequences.

? It will boost radicalism across the region, especially its Islamist
variant, in Lebanon and Iraq in particular, and help Iran gain traction
among otherwise unreceptive Arab populations.

Hamas is unlikely to seek a deal now. Having watched Israel blunder
into Lebanon two years ago, in a futile effort to eradicate Hizbullah,
only to see that movement emerge victorious and take control of part of
Lebanon's own government, Hamas is not going to sue for peace. In that,
they may be wrong, since Gaza is not Lebanon. In Gaza, Hamas has no
access to resupply its armaments, and the territory on which it
operates is extremely limited. So it is going to suffer severe military
losses and vast casualties against the lethal Israeli Defense Forces.

Israel's objectives aren't clear. Israeli hawks, including Bibi
Netanyahu -- appearing Sunday on CNN's Late Edition -- insist that
Israel cannot stop its action until Hamas is utterly defeated, whatever
that means. In the New York Times, two top Israeli leaders are quoted
to the effect that Israel's objective is regime change and the
elimination of Hamas. Foreign Minister Livni put it this way: "There is
no doubt that as long as Hamas controls Gaza, it is a problem for
Israel, a problem for the Palestinians and a problem for the entire
region."

And Haim Ramon, the vice premier, said: "What I think we need to do is
to reach a situation in which we do not allow Hamas to govern. That is
the most important thing."

But in trying to eliminate Hamas, Israel will revive Hamas, which has
been losing popularity dramatically until the current explosion. With
Barack Obama maintaining his sphinx-like silence, it's the Bush-Cheney-
Rice administration that remains in charge. They clearly have no
intention of intervening, unless Israel gets into trouble and requests
help.

And I am yet to be convinced that the next US president will change
things: So far, at least, Barack Obama has given no indication that
he'd do anything different. I'd like to think he would. Some of his
advisers, before the election, told me that they thought Obama would
talk to Hamas. Let's hope so.

Robert Dreyfuss is a contributing editor of The Nation magazine, and
the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash
Fundamentalist Islam (Metropolitan).

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