Bush Faces Crises from Palestine to Pakistan
Analysis by Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Jun 15 (IPS) - Four years after the emergence of the first signs of a serious insurgency in Iraq, U.S. President George W. Bush finds himself beset with major crises stretching from Palestine to Pakistan.
With U.S.-backed Fatah forces routed by Hamas in Gaza this week, Bush's five-year-old vision of a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict now looks more remote than ever, while a new Pentagon report in Iraq suggests that his four-month-old "surge" strategy is failing in its primary objective of reducing the violence there.
Meanwhile, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, to whom Washington has provided virtually unconditional support since al Qaeda's 9/11 attack, faces a growing popular revolt, while much of the country's tribal border regions have come under the control of forces allied with Afghanistan's Taliban.
And Iran, which senior U.S. officials this week accused of arming the Taliban, as well as Shi'a militias in Iraq, has continued to defy Washington's demands that it halt its nuclear enrichment programme, while Tehran's regional allies, Syria and Lebanon's Hezbollah, not to mention Hamas itself, appear to have successfully withstood intensified U.S.-led efforts to isolate them.
This week's events in Gaza, in fact, are also likely to have dealt a heavy blow to U.S. hopes of forging an anti-Iranian coalition consisting of Israel and the "Arab Quartet" led by Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Indeed, Saudi King Abdullah appeared to have grown disillusioned with Bush even before the U.S.-backed dissolution by Palestine Authority President and Fatah chief Mahmoud Abbas of the government of national unity whose birth was personally midwifed by Abdullah himself last March.
"There's a strongly held view among our Arab friends that we don't know what we're doing," observed ret. Amb. Daniel Kurtzer, Washington's chief envoy to Israel during Bush's first term and now a professor at Princeton University, earlier this week before Hamas' takeover of Gaza.
(Continued here.)
WASHINGTON, Jun 15 (IPS) - Four years after the emergence of the first signs of a serious insurgency in Iraq, U.S. President George W. Bush finds himself beset with major crises stretching from Palestine to Pakistan.
With U.S.-backed Fatah forces routed by Hamas in Gaza this week, Bush's five-year-old vision of a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict now looks more remote than ever, while a new Pentagon report in Iraq suggests that his four-month-old "surge" strategy is failing in its primary objective of reducing the violence there.
Meanwhile, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, to whom Washington has provided virtually unconditional support since al Qaeda's 9/11 attack, faces a growing popular revolt, while much of the country's tribal border regions have come under the control of forces allied with Afghanistan's Taliban.
And Iran, which senior U.S. officials this week accused of arming the Taliban, as well as Shi'a militias in Iraq, has continued to defy Washington's demands that it halt its nuclear enrichment programme, while Tehran's regional allies, Syria and Lebanon's Hezbollah, not to mention Hamas itself, appear to have successfully withstood intensified U.S.-led efforts to isolate them.
This week's events in Gaza, in fact, are also likely to have dealt a heavy blow to U.S. hopes of forging an anti-Iranian coalition consisting of Israel and the "Arab Quartet" led by Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Indeed, Saudi King Abdullah appeared to have grown disillusioned with Bush even before the U.S.-backed dissolution by Palestine Authority President and Fatah chief Mahmoud Abbas of the government of national unity whose birth was personally midwifed by Abdullah himself last March.
"There's a strongly held view among our Arab friends that we don't know what we're doing," observed ret. Amb. Daniel Kurtzer, Washington's chief envoy to Israel during Bush's first term and now a professor at Princeton University, earlier this week before Hamas' takeover of Gaza.
(Continued here.)
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