🚀 go-pugleaf

Leonard Fein, Forward
http://www.forward.com/issues/2003/03.05.16/oped5.html

On the face of it, the nomination of Daniel Pipes by President Bush to be 
one of the 15 directors of the United States Institute of Peace seems 
weird. The nomination, which now awaits confirmation by the Senate, has 
quite predictably outraged Arab Americans, who see Pipes as their enemy. 
But though it is curious that Bush would gratuitously provoke the 
Arab-American community, the more serious question is why the president 
would select a vigorous enemy of the "road map" - indeed, of any 
negotiation between Israel and the Palestinians - as his choice for any 
high office.

Here is the president, in a March 14 Rose Garden speech: "America is 
committed, and I am personally committed, to implementing our road map 
toward peace."

And here is Pipes, in the February issue of Commentary: "Then there is the 
road map, which asks the Palestinians to undertake a temporary reduction in 
violence, in return for which they will gain a state.And while ultimately 
it is up to the Palestinians to liberate themselves from the demons of 
their own irredentism, others, especially Israelis and Americans, can 
indeed help - by holding firm against the seductive appeal of road maps 
that lead exactly in the wrong direction."

And Pipes again, more broadly, in the February 25, 2002, issue of the New 
York Post: "Diplomacy rarely ends conflicts. Hardly a single major 
interstate conflict has concluded due to some one's clever schema. The idea 
that a 'peace process' can take the place of the dirty work of war is a 
conceit."

Odd, no? Is Bush playing both ends against the middle, waiting to see 
whether Secretary of State Colin Powell develops any traction regarding the 
road map? Or is the president being duplicitous, endorsing the peace plan 
to placate British Prime Minister Tony Blair and, in lesser measure, the 
State Department, fully expecting that the road map will fail - and 
prepared, if by some chance it does not, to find a way to scuttle it?

Pipes, for his part, voted for duplicity in the March 4 issue of the New 
York Post: "The road map is for show, not true policy, and U.S. endorsement 
of a Palestinian state remains remote."