George Lucky Luke Bush: Shoot first, think later

The patient George W. Bush suffers from a serious case of chronic political myopia

The pre-emptive, unilateral, "at a stroke", all-guns-blazing policy of crisis management adopted by US President George W. Bush becomes more incredible by the day. After the assertions that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction and the resulting act of butchery, after the construction of the world's first concentration camp since Auschwitz and Dachau, he now praises fellow murderer Ariel Sharon for a peace plan which is bound to inflame the Palestinians and which shoots the Road Map to pieces.

George Bush's acceptance of Ariel Sharon's peace plan (drawn up in the 1970s by Sharon himself) without bothering to consult the Palestine Authority, was a spectacular act of political myopia, even for Bush. In one meeting, when the two mass murderers stood side by side, grinning inanely at each other and smirking arrogantly, George Bush brushed off the table years of delicate and complex peace negotiations among the Quartet (UNO, Russian Federation, European Union and USA), Israel and the Palestine Authority on a permanent and peaceful settlement to a deep-rooted problem which is half a century old.

Like a drunkard who comes home and sweeps the carefully-cleaned and immaculately placed crockery onto the floor, and kicks a screaming and frightened wife in the pit of the stomach, George Bush displays a blatant disregard for the Palestinian cause, a total ignorance of world events and a shocking inability to grasp simple issues.

What did Bush do?

Ariel Sharon's Road Map, which he drew up three decades ago, is a State of Israel which excludes Gaza (from which he now proposes to withdraw) but includes large parts of the West Bank and makes no concessions whatsoever for Palestinians who had their property inside Israel confiscated (stolen) after the creation of the State of Israel.

Given that the West Bank is Palestinian territory, what he calls a "disengagement plan" based on pulling out the Jewish settlements in Gaza - but not in the rest of the occupied territories - can never be called a peace settlement but a hideous and sinister partial compromise which could never be accepted by any Palestinian, Arab or Moslem with a heart and a soul.

To turn the analogy against George Bush, suppose Mexico invaded the southern United States, occupied it for 50 years, built colonies, shot US children in the eye with rubber bullets, massacred whole communities of civilians because they resisted and claimed what was rightfully theirs, only to see some foreign leader tell him that he had to accept part of southern California and a slice of Texas?

That any such settlement can be made in Washington between Sharon and Bush and without Arafat, the democratically elected President of the Palestine Authority, speaks volumes about Bush's world of international politics, where Hollywood-style solutions are applied to cartoon fantasies, where the good guy who wears the white hat is white and western and rich and the bad guy in the black hat is one whose skin is dark (the darker the skin, the worse the person), or who is poor.

Such a world belongs to the annals of history, to the dark ages of medieval feudalism, of lords and vassals, not to a modern world that wishes to develop together, based on the principles of diplomacy, democracy and equality, on dialogue and discussion, and the acceptance that not everything is black and white, but has various shades of grey.

In this world, George Bush does not and cannot exist. He and Sharon have just committed another grave error, a monster of bad judgment and a mountain of sheer arrogance. Like all demagogues, they are both bound to fail.