When Is It Appeasement?
2. “To satisfy; relieve: The fruit appeased his hunger.” Does sniping at Senator Barack Obama (and then denying that he targeted the Democratic front runner) from the Israeli Knesset satisfy the Republican appetite for Swift-Boating? Nope, it just whets it – this is an opening salvo in the next phase of a stomach-churning American election campaign.
3. “To yield to the demands of in a conciliatory effort, sometimes at the expense of one’s principles.” It’s this last definition (courtesy of Random House Webster’s College Dictionary) that Bush presumably had in mind when he warned against “the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”
But the root of appeasement is peace, and Neville Chamberlain’s efforts to stave off World War II only gave the word a negative connotation because he failed. Luckily, this signal failure didn’t give peacemaking a bad name forever, or else we wouldn’t have the Middle East Peace Process as an eternal source of Presidential ambition.
The notion that an American president – a President Obama, for example – would be practicing appeasement if he had an open dialogue with leaders like Iran’s Ahmadinajad and the (elected, as Senator McCain reminds us below) Hamas government in Gaza is very selective, and almost entirely a function of American politics. President Bush’s favored Palestinian interlocutor, PA President Abbas, hails from the Palestine Liberation Organization, which was for years anathema as a terrorist organization.
Luckily, some elements in the US government have long thought it politic to open up discreet channels of communication. I once worked for a Republican political appointee ambassador who, in a previous life as a Senate staffer, was a regular interlocutor with Yasir Arafat’s Fatah and the PLO when us diplomats couldn’t even be in the same room as a Palestinian official. Those back channel contacts eventually led to Oslo and Camp David, and to the modicum of Palestinian self-rule that is allowed to exist.
Bush has been castigated for criticizing (albeit not by name, but he’s kidding no one) the Democratic presumptive candidate while traveling abroad. From the podium of Israel’s parliament, no less. But Israel, more than most countries, can claim a “special interest” in the outcome of the US presidential elections. Often dubbed “the 51st state,” many Israelis hold dual Israeli-US citizenship, and the settlements in the West Bank are especially popular with transplanted American Jewish emigrants. Bush probably felt sufficiently at home to inject a bit of partisan politics into his address.
But after blasting Obama for supposed “appeasement,” Bush then hops on a plane for Saudi Arabia, where appeasement is happenin’ big time. You don’t have to be a Michael Moore to note that US consumers help appease Saudi Arabia every day by paying sky-high prices for its oil. And that of all people, George W. Bush, who owed his pre-presidential oil wealth to his family’s Gulf sheikhdom connections, should now lecture Obama about kowtowing (Webster’s: “1. To act in an obsequious manner; show servile deference”) to foreign leaders.
And what of Senator John McCain, that “clean” campaigner who touched off the latest firestorm by equating Senator Obama’s openness to discussions with pariah states and organizations with weakness against terrorism? Today’s Washington Post carries a stinging op-ed by former Clinton Administration official James P. Rubin, who assails McCain’s “guilt by association” attack as hypocrisy of the worst sort. He recalls a Sky News TV interview with McCain two years ago, after Hamas won freely-contested Palestinian elections, when he asked The Maverick "Do you think that American diplomats should be operating the way they have in the past, working with the Palestinian government if Hamas is now in charge?" McCain then:
They're the government; sooner or later we are going to have to deal with them, one way or another, and I understand why this administration and previous administrations had such antipathy towards Hamas because of their dedication to violence and the things that they not only espouse but practice, so . . . but it's a new reality in the Middle East. I think the lesson is people want security and a decent life and decent future, that they want democracy. Fatah was not giving them that.Apparently it wasn’t appeasement then, when the Straight Talk Express was rolling. Huffington Post has a nice video of the Rubin-McCain interview. Now, if Michael Moore just had a video of Bush and Abdullah...
(Photo source: "House of Bush, House of Saud," by Craig Unger)
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