Ames Progressive

George W. Bush’s ability to create chaos and violence has consistently trumped his capacity for diplomacy. Bush’s unique cocktail of petulance, arrogance and incompetence have produced a foreign policy characterized by the use blunt force (and borrowed money) on the one hand and a dismissive attitude toward diplomatic relations on the other. Two of the diplomatic weapons in Bush’s near-empty arsenal were employed during the president’s recent tour of the Middle East. Those weapons are loyalty and the silent treatment.

On May 15, Bush spoke before the Knesset in honor of the 60th anniversary of Israel’s statehood and his speech was filled with fellow-feeling, nationalism and generosity. “On this landmark anniversary,” he said, “America is proud to be Israel’s closest ally and best friend in the world.” Loyalty. Friends stick together. We’ve known each other for a long time. What’s good for you is good for me. Yes, and more importantly: “The alliance between our governments is unbreakable, yet the source of our friendship runs deeper than any treaty. It is grounded in the shared spirit of our people, the bonds of the Book, the ties of the soul.” More than simply a political relationship, Israel and America share a spiritual bond, which Bush claimed to have experienced personally: “I have touched the Western Wall, seen the sun reflected in the Sea of Galilee, I have prayed at Yad Vashem.”

In his speech on the 15th, Bush skillfully exercised his diplomatic technique of expressing his loyalty toward his friends in no uncertain terms. But his speech has become famous for the judgment the president passed on politicians who would like to establish diplomatic relations with “enemy” governments. Bush invoked the specter of the Nazis to express his disdain for difficult diplomatic engagements: “Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is - the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.” The statement became famous when Barack Obama determined that “some people” referred to him and denounced the president’s position as “the politics of fear.” Obama has asserted that if he were the president, he would talk to the leaders of nations that Bush has shunned, not excluding Iran.

Bush was defending the second of his dull diplomatic tools: the silent treatment. Bush has refused to talk to the leaders of groups or nations classified as terrorists or terrorist supporters, though he is fully willing - desperate, really - to kill them and their members. His administration spins the no-talk policy as strength and toughness and moral seriousness but, really, it is weakness and petulance and cynicism. We can say for certain that the enactment of Bush’s policy in the Middle East has been horribly destructive. And the heart of the policy is the impenetrable division of the world into “friends” and “enemies”, with deep loyalty to the former and a scowling silence toward the latter. The result: violence and one-upmanship has filled the communication void.

Bush made much of the premise that Americans and Israelis share a common spirit. Yes, but all people of all religions in all places on the globe share far more in common with one another a religion or a Book: we share a species, we have our humanity in common. To sincerely acknowledge this fact would be the beginning of communication and to ignore it is, as we have seen by now, the beginning of violence.