Talking to Hamas
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, May 16, 2008

Exchange from a Sky News interview, Davos, Switzerland, January 2006, soon after Hamas had won free and fair democratic elections in the West Bank and Gaza:

James Rubin: 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?

Sen. John McCain: 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.

As Winston Churchill famously said, “To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.”

Churchill, unlike George Bush, was eminently well equipped to employ the power of language. Churchill understood that negotiation is not the same as appeasement.

If we were able to drill down into the psychological roots of the pathology of the Bush presidency, is it possible that the core fear embedded in so many of Bush’s postures is his awareness that whenever he opens his mouth he risks looking like a fool?

It would hardly be surprising that a president who is so intimidated by words would have a strong preference for violence.

But that’s his failing – it doesn’t have to be everyone else’s.

In 2006 John McCain — perhaps slightly intoxicated by the rarefied atmosphere of Davos — uttered a heretical yet utterly common sense view. In free and fair elections, the Palestinian people had expressed their democratic will. They had chosen Hamas. “Sooner or later we are going to have to deal with them,” McCain said.

The proponents of democracy – and this of course included the Bush administration which in the face of Fatah’s objections had called for Hamas’ inclusion in the election – faced a challenge: they could honor the democratic process and find out whether Hamas was ready to live up to the challenge of governing, or, they could perpetuate a political narrative that precluded the very possibility of a Hamas government.

By choosing to do the latter, Bush sent a clear message across the Middle East: In the eyes of America, terrorism matters more than democracy.

Naturally, under George Bush’s watch, terrorism has flourished much more than democracy.

If an American president isn’t willing and capable of negotiating with adversaries, he or she isn’t fit for office. Bush would have us believe that he has taken a bold stand on principle. In truth he has merely tried to conceal his incompetence.

Bush’s bullshit
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, May 15, 2008

In his eighth year as president, George Bush still lacks the courage to address anyone but an overly sympathetic audience. Indicative of his plummeting approval rating, he now has to travel six thousand miles to find such company. Should we be surprised that in front of the Knesset he would come out with a crowd pleaser like this?

Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: “Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.” We have an obligation to call this what it is – the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.

That so many would be now be trotting out a prissy line like, “…beneath the dignity of the office of the president…,” is probably comforting to both Bush and McCain. It shows the GOP how easily Democrats will rise to the bait. That said, at least Joe Biden gave a straight response: “This is bullshit.”

Meanwhile, Bush said something else that is sure to be ignored: his prediction about when a Palestinian state will come into existence.

In 2002, Bush supposedly boldly crossed a political frontier by becoming the first president to express his commitment to seeing the creation of a Palestinian state. Bush was so full of it at that time that he suggested it could come into being by 2005.

By 2004 he started hedging, saying 2005 was unlikely. He pushed back, but still said, “I’d like to see it done in four years. I think it’s possible.”

So now it’s 2008 and what does Bush see in his crystal ball? A Palestinian state some time in the next sixty years! This is Bush’s bold vision: By the time Israel celebrates it 120th anniversary there will be a Palestinian state.

Were it not for global warming, I’d say that the pace Bush has set for advancing the peace process is glacial in its speed. Unfortunately in this era, glaciers actually move faster – but like the peace process, they move in the wrong direction.

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Going back to Bush’s appeasement line, it does articulate something worth noting. That is, the Bush communications model.

Here’s how Bush defines “negotiate”:
1. Use words to force the other party to think the way you do, or if that doesn’t work,
2. Use the threat of violence to bend your opponent’s will, or if that doesn’t work,
3. Use violence to force your opponent into submission, or if that doesn’t work,
4. Use violence to annihilate your opponent.

What the Bush communications model precludes is the possibility that Bush can or ever will change the way he thinks. What this suggests is that the Bush brain is impervious to any influence whatsoever from experience. In other words, the Bush brain is a closed circuit that can neither process nor be modified by new information.

Essentially, the president is brain dead.

Let’s not get too agitated about what comes out of his mouth.