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I don't really know what this means or how it really fits in with theories that Zionists are controlling US Mideast policy, but 75% of Israelis think that Bush's Mideast peace initiative of only six weeks ago was little more than a photo-op. Oh, and violence has risen. In December, Hamas fired 303 rockets from the Gaza Strip into Israel. It might simply mean that Israelis are discouraged from having entrusted their foreign policy hopes to a President who was incompetent to see to it that those hopes were met.I watched the film No End in Sight tonight. It's about the incredible c*f* that was and, very sadly, still is the occupation of Iraq. I thought back to all the times since the fall of Baghdad that I just stared at the latest news from that benighted country and wondered how the inhabitants could put up with it. Unfortunately, of course, the answer to that is that they often don't. What are the latest figures? In October 2007, 1.1 million Iraqis had been internally displaced with two million having left the country.
Thinking of the film, not many people count it as an infamous Bush vacation, but I see his August 2003 vacation as one of Bush's most ill-advised. That was taken at a time when it had become clear to citizens like myself that Iraq was undergoing a full-blown insurgency. The Middle East Institute published a study of the Iraq Insurgency during that month (The Pentagon found the study so useful that they asked the author to do an update a year later). What our President needed to do was to cut his vacation down to a week or ten days and to get back to Washington and figure out how to get his Iraq policy back on track. One may find it possible to forgive a war leader for having initially followed a bad plan, but failing to adjust when the plan is a clear failure is utterly unforgivable. The film makes it clear that the screw-ups continued long after that.
