Tourists in Washington: Anatomy of a European Mideast Failure
Article posted on www.foreignpolicy.com
The ‘weakness’ of Europe – and also that of the US – in the Middle East is not essentially one of waning power and influence. Although the scent of decline always has had a powerful affect in this region, the root of this western debilitation consists of a more profound ailment: that its solution, its generic cure for a range of ills in the Muslim world, is seen to provide no conceivable cure to these regional and Islamic stresses and maladies, which it is supposed to alleviate.
The nature of the two-state solution – but not the idea of a Palestinian state per se – that the US and Europe prosecutes as the solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, even were it to be pursued to a successful conclusion, is likely to resolve nothing: the West Bank would stay much as it is currently — as would Gaza. And the external refugees would molder on, in some form of unfunded, unresolved international limbo.
It’s about time someone took on the EU for its sycophancy. How long have we all been waiting for the EU to get up off its Washington knees? Ehud Barak has it exactly right: there will be no “peace” agreement until Abu Masen agrees to what Arafat turned down at Camp David. And the US and the EU will spin that as a triumph. And when Abu Masen is assassinated for caving, the Palestinians will be characterized as “ungrateful.”
Personally, I don’t know where Chas Freeman finds the patience to speak so diplomatically to the EU:
http://www.mepc.org/articles-commentary/speeches/america-s-faltering-search-peace-middle-east-openings-others