Rami Khouri on policy being created on the basis of faulty analysis:

I have carefully read and considered US President George W. Bush's words to British Prime Minister Tony Blair that were inadvertently caught on an open microphone during the G-8 Summit in Russia last weekend: "See the irony is that what they need to do is get Syria to get Hizbullah to stop doing this shit and it's over" - and I respectfully conclude that Bush doesn't know shit about shit.

Bush's comment is worth analyzing because it is very telling of many things, all of them problematic for the United States and the Middle East region. In that single phrase of his, the American president compressed into two dozen words the cumulative negative consequences of Washington's unusual capacity to forge a self-defeating and counter-productive Middle East policy on the basis of a faulty analysis, in turn built on misreading local realities and not speaking to the main actors. [...]

The real irony in Bush's statement is that he wants others to pressure Syria to pressure Hizbullah to change its policies - at a moment when the central pillar of Washington's Middle East policies appears to be a refusal to speak to some of the most important political groups in the region. The US has no relations or known contacts with Iran, Hamas and Hizbullah, and is not on speaking terms with Syria, which it has mildly sanctioned.

Bush ignores at his own peril the fact that Islamist political sentiments and resistance movements are the fastest growing sector of national life in the Middle East. For the US to be squarely opposed to and unable to speak with this large part of the public spectrum is foolish enough; it is even more reflective of amateur American foreign policy-making that Washington's policies in the region are an important contributor to the expansion of such Islamist sentiments and organizations.

Posted by Laura at July 23, 2006 09:32 AM