Posted by
J-GOP on Monday, January 14, 2008 2:40:46 PM
During his tour of the Yad Vashem memorial during his visit to Israel, President Bush commented with tears in his eyes that "We should have bombed it", referring to the Nazi death camp, Auschwitz. At the time, many U.S. Jews in the 1940s were calling for the bombing of the death camp to halt the genocide of the estimated 1.1 million to 1.5 million Jews that took place at the camp during World War II.
Bush emerged from a tour of the Yad Vashem memorial calling it a "sobering reminder" that evil must be resisted, and praising victims for not losing their faith. Wearing a yarmulke, Bush placed a red-white-and-blue wreath on a stone slab that covers ashes of Holocaust victims taken from six extermination camps. He also lit a torch memorializing the victims.
"Bush was visibly moved as he toured the site", said Yad Vashem's chairman, Avner Shalev.
The interesting part of this story is that at one point during his visit, President Bush called Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice over to discuss why the American government had decided against bombing the site.
What type of answer did Bush think he was going to get to his question from Rice? A history lesson? Perhaps an unbiased view of U.S. Foreign Policy under the Roosevelt Administration?
Maybe the visit was as beneficial for her as is was for him. After all, according to an article in the Washington Times, both Rice and Bush seem to believe that the original roadmap for peace that was approved by former Prime Minister Sharon in 2004 is now considered an impediment to the peach process, instead of a requirement going forward. According to Rice's statement:
The "road map" for peace, conceived in 2002 by Mr. Bush, had become a hindrance to the peace process, because the first requirement was that the Palestinians stop terrorist attacks. As a result, every time there was a terrorist bombing, the peace process fell apart and went back to square one. Neither side ever began discussing the "core issues": the freezing of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, the rights of Palestinian refugees to return, the outline of Israel's border and the future of Jerusalem.
"The reason that we haven't really been able to move forward on the peace process for a number of years is that we were stuck in the sequentiality of the road map. So you had to do the first phase of the road map before you moved on to the third phase of the road map, which was the actual negotiations of final status".
Hopefully, the visit to Yad Vashem provided both Bush and Rice an explanation as to why the Israelis are so adamant in requiring that the Palestinians recognize the State of Israel and stop their rocket attacks from Gaza before handing over more land as a condition for peace negotiations. When someone says they are going to anhiliate you, not only do you take them seriously, but you also require your enemy to take very specific measures as a test of their sincerity if you're going to sit down and attempt to negotiate peace.
But given their statements, it appears that both Bush and Rice haven't learned very much from their visit to Yad Vashem. Maybe instead, both President Bush and Secretary Rice need to pick up a book on 20th Century World History are re-read the chapter on the Neville Chamberlain's "peace process" in 1938.
That would provide a much better lesson on how to prevent the next Holocaust from taking place.