Wishful Thinking?

Submitted by Ruth Morton Fazio (United States), Mar 4, 2003 at 09:40

I agree with your depiction of Bush's seeming ambiguity, and I hope that your interpretation of his true intent is accurate, but you may be engaging in wishful thinking.

American presidents, no matter how pro-Israel their rhetoric, especially before they're elected, have a way of caving in to the knee-jerk notion that a "peaceful solution" can be negotiated. It's just too pessimistic to realize that only force and negative reinforcement can compel the Arabs to accept the fact that their genocidal hopes will be dashed.

Presidents and the State Department simply must believe in diplomacy, or, in their minds, they would just be war mongers. (I suppose in the case of the State Department, they would have to defer to the Defense Department, and that would put them out of business.)

We have other examples of this, such as the North Korean fiasco, where we engaged in years of negotiation because we could not accept the fact that in cases such as these, there's nothing to talk about.

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