Indecision Points
George W. Bush and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
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- USD 9.99
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- USD 9.99
Descripción editorial
How a president who prided himself on his decisiveness vacillated between policy approaches in the Middle East.
Although George W. Bush memorably declared, “I'm the decider,” as president he was remarkably indecisive when it came to U.S. policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His administration's policymaking featured an ongoing clash between moderate realists and conservative hard-liners inspired by right-wing religious ideas and a vision of democracy as cure-all. Riven by these competing agendas, the Bush administration vacillated between recognizing the Palestinian right to self-determination and embracing Israeli leaders who often chose war over negotiations. Through the years, the administration erratically adopted and discarded successive approaches to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The results of this irresolution included the stunning triumph of Hamas in the 2006 Palestinian elections, Israel's 2006 invasion of Lebanon, the 2008–2009 clash between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, and, in the end, virtually no diplomatic progress toward lasting peace.
In Indecision Points, Daniel Zoughbie examines the major assumptions underpinning U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East during the Bush years. Was there one policy or two? Was the Bush administration truly serious about peace? In a compelling account, Zoughbie offers original insights into these and other important questions. Drawing on the auhtor's own interviews with forty-five global leaders, including Condoleezza Rice, former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, Kofi Annan, Colin Powell, Tom DeLay, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, Leon Panetta, Chuck Hagel, Shlomo Ben Ami, and Salam Fayyad, Indecision Points provides the first comprehensive history of the Bush administration's attempt to reshape political order in a “New Middle East.”
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Zoughbie, a scholar of international governance, criticizes the Bush administration's dithering and unfocused approach to diplomacy in the Middle East. Much of this volume is devoted to the tension between the ideas of sequentialism, which holds that the U.S. should pursue spreading democracy throughout the region as its priority, and parallelism, the view that concessions should be sought simultaneously from all parties to the conflict. Bush, according to the author, seemed perpetually susceptible to his advisors' conflicting counsel, and "never truly made a decision as to which view should guide U.S. foreign policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict." When Bush did enter the debate, he had a tendency to miss the point entirely as when he asserted that removing Yassir Arafat was of greater importance to the Palestinians than ending the occupation. Zoughbie clearly and concisely records Bush's missteps and his pervasive double standards: enraged by corruption in the Palestinian Authority, Bush turned a blind eye to the scandal that would bring down Olmert's government. Zoughbie reveals Bush as a man whose tentative yet hubristic forays into international affairs were overtaken by events, with his positions changing from day to day: "erratic shifts in the president's decision-making process were not an isolated occurrence; unfortunately, they were the norm."
