Living the Apocalypse

DK at TPM has this background to the current fiasco:

This passage from Ron Suskind's The Price of Loyalty has special resonance given current events. The scene is the White House Situation Room in January 2001, where Bush is meeting for the first time with his National Security Council, 10 days after taking the oath of office. Bush has just asked who in the room has met Ariel Sharon:

He'd met Sharon briefly, Bush said, when they had flown over Israel in a helicopter on a visit in December 1998. "Just saw him that one time. We flew over the Palestinian camps," Bush said sourly. "Looked real bad down there. I don't see much we can do over there at this point. I think it's time to pull out of that situation."

And that was it, according to [Paul] O'Neill and several other people in the room. The Arab-Israeli conflict was a mess, and the United States would disengage. The combatants would have to work it out on their own.

[Colin] Powell said such a move might be hasty. He remarked on the violence on the West Bank and Gaza and on its roots. He stressed that a pullback by the United States would unleash Sharon and Israeli army. "The consequences of that could be dire," he said, "especially for the Palestinians."

Bush shrugged. "Maybe that's the best way to get some things back in balance."

Powell seemed startled.

"Sometimes a show of strength by one side can really clarify things," Bush said.

With that, the rest of the meeting was devoted to Iraq.

Josh Marshall adds:

It actually goes way beyond the incoming administration's decision to ignore the Israel-Palestine track from the get-go, though that has played a very big part in this unfolding disaster. The Bush administration has always seen the situation in Israel-Palestine as essentially a side issue in the larger context of the Middle East, one to be solved through overthrowing regimes either in Baghdad or Damascus. The Israelis and the Palestinians themselves had already done quite a lot to make a mess of things by January 2001. But by comparison with today things six years ago seem almost idyllic.

The thinking of the Bush administration was that the Clinton folks had put tons of time into the Peace Process and what had it gotten them? Just a big headache and no achievements, either political or substantive.

But what I think you learn when you watch the region over time is that things can always get worse. And quite a lot of effort is often required to keep things on the barely tolerable level of miserable without slipping into the truly horrible. To prevent going from one to the other is a job of international management that really a greater power alone can accomplish. Us. Us with the Europeans. Probably also the Russians and even the Chinese. Easy? No. Do these different countries have different agendas, not all of them wholesome? Sure. But that's life. Or rather, that's running the world.

Is this crisis the Bush administration's doing? No, it has deep roots that go well beyond it. Would things have gotten quite this bad if the administration hadn't basically ignored these problems for six years and simultaneously blown up the Fertile Crescent? No way.

This is the Bush administration's apocalypse. We are, to borrow the phrase, just living in it. But then, that's quite bad enough, isn't it?