“If George W. Bush were to discover a cure for cancer,” Peretz writes, “his critics would denounce him for having done it unilaterally, without adequate consultation, with a crude disregard for the sensibilities of others. He pursued his goal obstinately, they would say, without filtering his thoughts through the medical research establishment. And he didn’t share his research with competing labs and thus caused resentment among other scientists who didn’t have the resources or the bold – perhaps even somewhat reckless – instincts to pursue the task as he did. And he completely ignored the World Health Organization, showing his contempt for inter-national institutions. Anyway, a cure for cancer is all fine and nice, but what about aids?”
Bush, argues Peretz “has attacked with un-precedented vigor and with unprecedented success” the Middle East’s political culture, a “historical pathology” that “the president may actually have changed. And he has accomplished this genuinely momentous trans-formation in ways that virtually the entire foreign affairs clerisy – the cold-blooded Brent Scowcroft realist Republicans and almost all the Democrats – never thought possible.”
Peretz acknowledges (no secret here – he’s not only a liberal but an old mentor and friend to Al Gore, whom he championed over Bush in the 2000 election) that “up to the moment Bush became president, I was convinced that his mind, at least on matters Levantine, belonged to his father and to James Baker III, whose worldview seemed to be defined by the pecuniary prejudice of oil and Texas: Keep the ruling Arabs happy.”
Following a detailed review of events in the Middle East since the fall of Saddam Hussein and a lamentation over the Clinton administration’s desultory approach in the 1990’s to fighting the growing threat of Islamic terror, Peretz contrasts the approach taken by the Bush White House to Mideast realities with that of prior Democratic administrations, arguing that
“Clinton (and the sanctimonious Jimmy Carter even more so) had absolutely no interest in trying to modify the harsh political character of the Arab world. What they aspired to do was to mollify the dictators – to prefer the furthering of the peace process to the furthering of the conditions that make peace possible. The Democrats were the ones who were always elevating Arafat. He was at the very center of their road map. After he stalked out of a meeting room in Paris during cease-fire talks in late 2000, Albright actually ran in breathless pursuit to lure him back. It was the Democrats who perpetuated Arafat’s demonic sway over the Palestinians, and it was the Democrats who sustained him among the other Arabs.”
Though he writes from the perspective of one who has long advocated a land-for-peace approach to Middle East peace – and his insistence that “everyone who is at all rational on these issues now sees the Israeli prime minister as a man of his word” fails to take into account the long trail of broken promises the hawkish candidate of 2001 and 2003 has left in his wake – Peretz is a fairly traditional Zionist with no illusions about Mahmoud Abbas or Palestinian virtue. He’s also a fairly traditional liberal with no illusions about Democratic proficiency in foreign affairs.