الرجل غير المناسب في المكان غير المناسب

بقلم: أدريان هاملتون

الانديبندنت - 28/6/2007

حتى و لم يكن لدى توني بلير "نمط" في الشرق الأوسط, فانه سيبقى الرجل غير المناسب في هذا المكان.

Adrian Hamilton:

 The wrong man for the wrong job

Even if Tony Blair had no ' form ' in the Middle East , he'd still be wrong for this post

Published:  28 June 2007

Enough has been said of the outrage at the thought of Tony Blair's appointment as envoy to the Middle East , considering the damage he has done there. "Obscene" is the only appropriate word, or "grotesque" if you prefer to see the world in terms of black comedy.

What hasn't been said enough, however, is precisely why it is the wrong appointment in terms of the job itself. Even if Iraq had never happened and Blair had not supported Israel 's invasion of Lebanon - even, indeed, if Blair had no "form" in the Middle East , he would still be the wrong man for the post.

Theoretically the role of envoy in this case is to act as the representative of the so-called "Quartet" of the US , UN, the EU and Russia in furthering the road towards a two-state solution in the Middle East . In practice, as the role has now been defined, it will now become an agent of a drive to impose a particular form of government and peace settlement on the Palestinians in the wake of Hamas's take-over of Gaza .

What for the Palestinians has been a catastrophe, dividing their territory and threatening permanent impoverishment for the third of their population living in Gaza, to the international community, and particularly the US and Israel, is now being presented as an opportunity.

This is the moment, they declare, when the West can throw itself behind a battle between "moderation" and "extremism", promoting the regime of the so-called "secular moderates" of Fatah and isolating the "fundamentalists" in Gaza . The hated Hamas has overplayed its hand. Now it can justifiably be made an international pariah.

We've heard all this before, of course, when Arafat was first brought in from the cold to sign the Oslo agreements and, more disastrously, when Israel invaded Lebanon to destroy finally the power of Hizbollah. But this time it has special attraction to the international community.

President Bush needs the sense of new possibilities to sanction his final year in power and give credence to his failed Iraqi policy. Israel needs it because its Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, desperately requires some achievement to counter his disastrous Lebanese venture.

The EU wants it because it is now led by two new leaders, one of whom [Nicolas Sarkozy)]has no time for Muslims, let alone Palestinians, and the other of whom [Angela Merkel], just wishes they would go away and cease to trouble the Western world.

Add to that a Russia which subscribes to a global view of the war against terror because of its own battles in Chechnya and a UN, embarrassed by the failure of its past efforts in the Middle East and now under the weakest leadership in its history, and you can see why the Quartet wants nothing so much as a drive towards some kind of imposed solution, whether just or not.

Which is why Blair is so attractive as a choice for the post of envoy. The last incumbent, James Wolfensohn, resigned because he was getting nowhere. But he, as a former head of the World Bank, genuinely wanted to promote measures to make Palestine a viable state and he sought a real commitment from Jerusalem to a two-state solution.

Blair suffers from no such compunctions. As a fully paid-up member of the "War of Civilisations" Society and a particularly "close friend" of Israel (as Jerusalem called him when he announced his retirement), his interests are the same as President Bush and the new French President. Build up President Abbas, bash down Hamas, draw in America 's client Arab states, Egypt and Jordan , pressure Israel to make some token concessions such as prisoner releases, and you can clear the West's conscience of this knotty problem.

Only at the bottom of this there is a people, the Palestinians. And their cause is not served by this policy of intensifying their divisions, building up the power of the widely discredited and corrupt sectional interest of Fatah and sidestepping the thorny questions of Israel 's settlements and security wall.

There is another route. It consists of returning to the Mecca agreement between Hamas and Fatah negotiated so painfully by the Saudi Arabians, helping to draw the Palestinian community back together again and promoting peace on the lines outlined by the Arab League - full recognition of Israel in return for a withdrawal to the pre-1967 boundaries.

But then a fair and just solutionis not what the game is all about. The West wants a short-term solution on its and Israel 's terms and, in Tony Blair, they have a man after their own desires.

a.hamilton@ independent.co.uk

http://comment.independent.co.uk/columnists_a_l/adrian_hamilton/article2717248.ece

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نشرنا لهذه المقالات لا يعني أنها تعبر عن وجهة نظر المركز كلياً أو جزئياً

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من حق الزائر الكريم أن ينقل وأن ينشر كل ما يعجبه من موقعنا . معزواً إلينا ، أو غير معزو .ـ