SABOTAGING PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Israel's continued pounding of Gaza must stop and the peace movement in the U.S. needs to begin to strongly speak out against the destruction of the Palestinian people.

Israel and the U.S. have consistently used the excuse that the 2006 election of Hamas put a "terrorist" government in charge of the Palestinian people. But the truth is that the U.S. and Israel began attacking the Hamas government from their first day after winning the election. The peace process never stood a chance because the Bush administration then provoked a civil war between the victorious Hamas and the losing Fatah. Instead of losing the election, Hamas ended up seizing control of Gaza and Israel has been on the attack ever since. In recent weeks well over 125 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have been killed.

In the April edition of Vanity Fair, an article called The Gaza Bombshell by David Rose, tells the story of the real Bush plan for "peace".

"Within the Bush administration, the Palestinian policy set off a furious debate. One of its critics is David Wurmser, the avowed neoconservative, who resigned as Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief Middle East adviser in July 2007, a month after the Gaza coup."

"Wurmser accuses the Bush administration of 'engaging in a dirty war in an effort to provide a corrupt dictatorship [led by Fatah's Mahmoud Abbas] with victory.' He believes that Hamas had no intention of taking Gaza until Fatah forced its hand. 'It looks to me that what happened wasn’t so much a coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was pre-empted before it could happen,' Wurmser says."

"The botched plan has rendered the dream of Middle East peace more remote than ever, but what really galls neocons such as Wurmser is the hypocrisy it exposed. 'There is a stunning disconnect between the president’s call for Middle East democracy and this policy,' he says. 'It directly contradicts it.' "

I believe it is just one more example of the Bush pirate team sabotaging the possibility of peace. That is their modus operandi. It's what they did in Iraq, have done in Palestine, intend to do in Iran, and are now doing in North Korea. If your agenda is endless war and increased Pentagon spending then you cannot allow any peace negotiation process to succeed. It is dark and it is the way of the American empire today. My guess is before Bush is done we will see him expand the war in the Middle East and make an even bigger mess.

If we had a real opposition party in the U.S. Bush's crew would be thrown in jail for what they have done over and again to destroy world peace. But in our two-party collaborative model of empire building it is routine for the Democrats to sit back and nibble at the edges as chaos ensues. That only leaves the public to intervene on the side of humanity and sanity. We'd best get on the stick before it is too late.