[Peace-discuss] Unpoisoning the wells

[C. G. Estabrook]

[From Uri Avnery, a self-confessed optimist.  --CGE]

...As far as the national interests of the US are concerned, the "larger Middle 
East" is not a secondary theater. It is one of the most important, and the new 
administration will have to deal with it right from the beginning. This is also 
the theater where the catastrophic failures of Bush are the most obvious.

When Obama and his people -- and I hope that they will be new people, not the 
wrecks from the Clinton era -- examine this subject, they will be compelled to 
arrive at a self-evident conclusion: that the hatred for the US that is boiling 
from Morocco to Pakistan is inextricably bound up with the Israeli-Palestinian 
conflict. This is what has poisoned all the wells. This is the trump card in the 
hands of the Sunni Osama Bin-Laden and the Shiite Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This 
conclusion was already made clear in the bi-partisan Baker-Hamilton report, 
which Bush has thrown into the wastebasket.

This conclusion leads to another one: that it is in the American interest to 
turn over a new page in our region and to really work for an 
Israeli-Palestinian, Israeli-Syrian, Israeli-all-Arab and perhaps even 
Israeli-Iranian peace. This conclusion was apparent already on the morrow of 
9/11. I wrote at the time that this was going to happen, any minute now, as the 
inevitable lesson from the disaster. I was wrong. Bush and the Bushites went in 
the opposite direction, and made the situation ten times worse. I hope that it 
will happen now...

http://www.counterpunch.org/avnery11032008.html