Even a president of the United States must get used to being defied by his enemies. But it is far more galling to be defied by one's friends. And when a president of the United States on one of his extremely rare visits to the Middle East manages to get humiliatingly defied by Saudi Arabia and Israel on the same trip, something is clearly very wrong somewhere.
That was the hapless fate of U.S. President George W. Bush on his much heralded swing through the region to promote his current favorite causes of peace and democracy.
In Saudi Arabia, the president donned traditional robes and requested King Abdullah to act quickly to bring down global oil prices. Within a couple of days, Saudi Arabia instead made clear it was content to see short-term price stabilization continuing at the current record high levels.
Even in Israel, Bush's vanishing clout was cruelly exposed. The president appealed to small coalition parties supporting Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's government to remain in it and to give U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's Annapolis peace process a chance.
Instead, hard-liner Avigdor Lieberman pulled his small but important Russian immigrants' party out of the government forcing Olmert to look for fractious new partners to maintain his precarious majority in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. If he cannot find and reconcile them, as seems likely, then general elections will have to be held this fall, and more likely than not, they will return former Prime Minister and Likud party leader Benjamin Netanyahu to power, destroying whatever is left of Bush and Rice's dreams of succeeding as peacemakers at the last moment after disdaining the peace process for most of their years in power.
Ingratitude and self-interest have been the staple of international relations since the dawn of history, but Bush and Rice have only themselves to blame for the humiliations they have just received in Jerusalem and Riyadh. Bush and his super-hawks led by Vice President Dick Cheney and long-time Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld favored the super-hawks in Israel and their neoconservative allies in America for almost all their years in office and Rice has never dared to confront them head-on. For more than seven years, the Bush administration turned a blind eye to the growing power of Lieberman and his followers in Israel or happily did their bidding. They can hardly complain if the forces they appeased turn on them now.
Nor can the president's latest crusade for democracy have helped his efforts to plead for lower global oil prices in Riyadh, where King Abdullah, a serious, but careful and responsible reformer, has seen the havoc that Bush's intemperate efforts at fostering democracy have unleashed in countries as disparate as Gaza, Pakistan and Iraq. The president's renewed attempts to foster ill-judged, poorly thought out and destabilizing pro-democracy policies throughout the region were not likely to leave the king inclined to make major, unilateral concessions to him.
Front Page Features