Bush's trip to the Middle East

President Bush appears to have two nefarious goals in his current Middle East trip, both of which are thankfully being thwarted. First, he is hoping to persuade Arab states to accept Israeli terms for Israeli/Palestinian peace, terms which are quite the opposite of the fair and just Arab League Peace Plan. The Israelis do not care to return to the 1967 borders, which would include the sharing of Jerusalem, and they do not care to allow even one Palestinian refugee to return home. The Arab League Peace Plan offers peace and recognition of Israel, including full normalization of diplomatic and trade relations, in exchange for an end to the occupation, i.e. a return to the 1967 borders, and justice for the Palestinian refugees. Israel and the Bush neocons only like the first part: they want full recognition of Israel with restoration of diplomatic ties right now without any justice for the Palestinians. The Arab states rightfully say no. Bush's second main goal is the creation of a war-mongering anti-Iranian alliance of neighboring Arab states, and the Arab states are correctly saying no to that too. As pointed out in a letter to the editor in today's The New York Times by Professor William O. Beeman, "The Truth About Iran," the Arab states have deep longstanding ethnic, cultural, and economic ties to their neighbor Iran and thus have a aversion to hostility. The Arab states favor diplomacy and reject the wars preferred by the Bush neocons and Israel. Clearly the Middle East is waking up to the Israel Lobby's goal of perpetual Muslim vs. Muslim wars, which succeed in fracturing Muslim societies while benefiting Israel and the military industrial complex. With that in mind, the fact that Arab states are buying up our economy, which is being bankrupted by the Iraq war, may not be a bad thing.