New York – We've been here before. Though it wasn't a Wednesday forenoon, it was a Sunday afternoon at a rural golf course near Mr. George “Dub-yah” Bush's Western White House at Crawford.
The pack of telecasters caught he and the security detail on a tee box at the Bosque Valley Golf Club, a dusty track located on a farm to market road that leads from Clifton to the County seat at Meridian.
Dub-yah was on vacation at the ranch, clearing brush, punching cattle, playing a round of golf. "I'm not at home much, but when I am, I like to be around the cows," he told newsmen the day before when they visited him out on the spread near Crawford.
Someone asked the President about the prospects for the Arab-Israeli peace talks then convened in Jerusalem, New York, Washington, Camp David, and all points in between.
He gave the camera that shrug and smirk that soon became so familiar, and said, “Well, you know, you have to have some kind of incentive for peace before you can have peace.” Then, with a quizzical look on his face, he tried to turn back to his tee shot.
Unsatisfied, the newshounds pressed him and learned that, sometimes, no comment is a comment.
It was a moment.
That was Sunday afternoon.
Slightly before 9 a.m. On Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001, the world was on fire and Dub-yah was reading to a group of elementary school kids in Florida.
He appeared very surprised when his aide de camp whispered some very disturbing news in his ear.
Trillions of deficit dollars later, his successor is caught in the same trap, no less disturbing.
There are four conditions precedent before the issue of the establishment of a Palestinian state may be settled:
1. ) the precise borders of the new Palestinian homeland;
2. ) security for Israel;
3. ) the status of Palestinian refugees who left or were forced to go;
4. ) and the fate of Jerusalem, which both sides claim as their capital.
No real solutions or answers to those questions are anywhere in sight.
There are some complications that have arisen in the ensuing 10 years. The Egyptian strongman dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak is no more. That coalition between Arab and Israeli is kaput, and it was an important element in holding off radical Arabic nations and fundamentalists from raiding Saudi Arabian and Gulf Emirate oil and gas fields.
Arab Spring is a far-ranging political phenomenon. Similar uprisings in Tunisia, Libya, Morocco, Bahrain, Yemen, Syria and other fundamentalist Islamic states have followed close behind. The once rock solid pax Americana is now in shreds.
There are no guarantees.
Said Barack Hussein Obama, president of he United States, in his address to the General Assembly of the United Nations today, “We saw in these protesters the moral force of non-violence that has lit the world form Delhi to Warsaw; from Selma to South Africa – and we knew that change had come Egypt and to the Arab world.”
Such a deal. What do we get out of it?
Nothing, at least, until the deadlock is broken. How?
“The deadlock will only be broken when each side learns to stand in each other's shoes.” Good luck, buddy. Didn't know you are a shoe salesman, too.
He called on the U.N., “founded, as it was, out of the ashes of war and genocide; dedicated, as it is, to the dignity of every person, must recognize the reality that is lived by both the Palestinians and the Israelis. We will only succeed in that effort if we can encourage the parties to sit down together, to listen to each other, and to understand each other's hopes and fears. That is the project to which America is committed...”
Uh, yeah.
The “New York Times,” which was there when the State of Israel was created by a U.N. Security Council resolution in 1948, looked on with less than amused skepticism:
“For Mr. Obama, the challenge in crafting the much-anticipated General Assembly speech on Wednesday was how to address the incongruities of the administration’s position: the president who committed himself to making peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians a priority from Day One, who still has not been able to even get peace negotiations going after two and a half years; the president who opened the door to Palestinian state membership at the United Nations last year ending up threatening to veto that very membership; the president who was determined to get on the right side of Arab history ending up, in the views of many on the Arab street, on the wrong side of it on the Palestinian issue.”
It took Barack Hussein Obama 47 minutes to tell the world to hurry up and wait.
For what?
For hell to freeze over, as U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson told the Soviets. America would wait for their answer to his questions about strategic missiles in Cuba - the ones they lied to President Kennedy about having placed there, he told the Soviet Ambassador - on worldwide television.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas spent most of the 47 minutes with his forehead in the palm of his hand.
Arab negotiators said they found the speech “disappointing.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu termed it “a badge of honor.”
We will see. After all, the camera never blinks, as some old country boy from Texas used to say all the time when he was still on TV.
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