Iraq: 1st or 5th? and Israel-Palestine
Daniel Schorr recently wrote this column for the CS Monitor: Was Bush fixated on ‘getting Saddam’? It’s a second-source story, so take it with a grain of salt. He recounts how, in the final meeting between Bush and Clinton before Bush took office, Clinton put Iraq 5th on the list of security threats faced by the US (behind Al Qaeda and North Korea), and Bush responded that he thought Iraq really should be 1st. If this is a true account, it’s just another of many pointers of the tunnel-vision that seems to have been driving the Bush administration’s foreign policy. It’s also an indication that Bush’s team interpreted the Iraq WMD intelligence information differently than Clinton’s team.
What’s particularly interesting to me is that Clinton put the Israel-Palestine conflict first. In retrospect he probably would change that to Al Qeada, but I can see why he put it first - it’s a conflict that provides a lot of fuel for other problems, especially given our unwavering support of Israel (both Saddam and Al Qaeda have used the conflict as a rallying cry). When the Bush administration first came into office, they almost completely halted all US efforts in this area. I can understand that they may have wanted to devise their own policies, but I think disengagement was an unfortunate choice. Some of the personnel in Clinton’s negotiating team were retained from the Bush I administration - Clinton kept them on since they knew all the players on the Israeli and Palestinian sides, as well as the history. So Bush II could have inherited a seasoned team, but he instead disbanded the group. It was only after pressure from both Israel and the Palestinians that Bush slowly got involved again. Of course it’s hard to say if things would have turned out differently if Bush had kept us engaged from the start of his administration, but it’s safe to say that those months of disengagement didn’t help.
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