MARKA REFUGEE CAMP, JORDAN — It's on the hard blue floors of the Paradise nursery school in this sprawling refugee camp, amid the scattered toy trucks and Lego blocks, that the three disasters left behind by George W. Bush's eight years of trying to remake the Middle East converge.
Two kidnapped soldiers and 1,200 people dead: Globe correspondent Mark MacKinnon reports from Beirut's shattered southern suburbs during Lebanon's war with Israel.
Two kidnapped soldiers and 1,200 people dead: Globe correspondent Mark MacKinnon reports from Beirut's shattered southern suburbs during Lebanon's war with Israel.
In the morning, Palestinian preschoolers come to play with the toys and learn their English and Arabic alphabets. Mr. Bush oversaw, some would say half-heartedly, two distinct attempts to bring about peace and a Palestinian state, yet these kids are no closer to going home to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
In the afternoon, it's the turn of Marka's Iraqi children, many of whom were infants in 2003 when their families fled the war Mr. Bush began.
For both groups, it's difficult to imagine that anything but poverty and violence lie ahead. “When they play with their Lego, the Iraqi kids only make guns and fighter planes,” says Rihab, the school's fussy deputy headmistress.
The third disaster may be the worst: fear. The parents and teachers of these preschoolers are afraid to talk, lest someone, such as the mukhabarat, Jordan's secret police, is listening. Rihab would not even give her last name.
Mr. Bush deserves much of the blame because, as well as promising a Palestinian state and a “free” Iraq, he told the democrats and dissidents of the Arab world that change was coming – a “New Middle East” – and the United States would stand beside them.
“We seek the advance of democracy for the most practical of reasons: because democracies do not support terrorists or threaten the world with weapons of mass murder,” he said in a 2004 speech that emboldened the reformers.
In Lebanon, thousands took to the streets in what became known as the Cedar Revolution. Protests in Egypt brought Hosni Mubarak's creaking totalitarian regime to the brink. Syrian activists put their names to the “Damascus Declaration,” calling for Bashar Assad to loosen his grip.
But now, just as he is leaving the Palestinians and Iraq in turmoil, Mr. Bush leaves reformers worse off than before. Seven years of relentless military activity – including this week's Israeli assault on Hamas-ruled Gaza, which clearly has U.S. support – have empowered the extremists.
It's little wonder the President found himself ducking size 10 shoes during his farewell tour of the region.
WATCHING SADDAM TOPPLE
The President and I both turned our attention to the Middle East on Sept. 12, 2001. He was the leader of a nation suddenly at war with an enemy it couldn't quite define, and I was arriving in Amman, Jordan's capital. My editor suspected that Mr. Bush's furious and flailing administration might invade neighbouring Iraq, as well as Afghanistan.
Jordan was shocked at what had happened – and rightly fearful of what would come next. At a candlelit multi-faith prayer service atop one of Amman's famous seven hills, worshippers offered condolences (assuming that I was an American) but warned against turning the “war on terror” into a war on Islam.
Which, most Jordanians feel, is exactly what Mr. Bush did. Less than two years later, I stood in the centre of Baghdad and watched the U.S. army topple the statue of Saddam Hussein, igniting an inferno that continues to this day.
And rather than nudging Israel and the Palestinians toward compromise, Mr. Bush backed the Jewish state as it stepped up repression in the West Bank and Gaza and, in 2006, fought a war with Lebanon's Hezbollah movement that claimed more than 1,200 lives after the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers.
Today, the goodwill displayed at the hilltop ceremony is long gone. According to a global survey, only Turkey had a less-favourable view of America and Americans than Jordan did last year.
The cultural ripple effect is clear: When I arrived, the Islamic head scarf was still something of a rarity in middle-class parts of Amman; now, it is worn by the vast majority of women. Where two-thirds of Jordanians in 2006 told pollsters that they supported pro-democracy reformers in their struggle against Islamist groups, the most recent survey found that 48 per cent now back the hard-liners.
“We've lost a lot of ground,” says Adnan Abu Odeh, who was once a top adviser to King Abdullah II and his late father, King Hussein, and who nearly ended up in jail after he criticized Jordan's election law on the al-Jazeera television network. “It's become more, not less, difficult to speak out.”
Mr. Abu Odeh says that after promoting democracy, Mr. Bush “backtracked quickly because the administration came to believe that friends and allies were more important than political reform.”
Even so, Jordan remains an oasis of relative calm compared with what I found this fall when I took a month-long journey through Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and the West Bank. Almost everywhere I went, Mr. Bush is blamed not only for waging wars, but for strengthening the very extremists he set out to defeat.
BETRAYED BY THE BALLOT BOX
Oddly enough, it was an election that turned the tide. Early in 2006, Palestinians gave a resounding mandate to Hamas, the Islamist movement dedicated to Israel's downfall.
Washington responded with a boycott. In the process, Mr. Bush – with an assist from Prime Minister Stephen Harper – contributed to a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza even before Israeli warplanes went into action this week. He also made a mockery of his democracy agenda and lost any chance of achieving his stated aim: remaking the region into a less anti-American place.
“It was a giant error to cut Hamas off,” says Ahmed Fatfat, a former Lebanese cabinet minister instrumental in the Cedar Revolution.
Mr. Fatfat says the snub, combined with Iraq and unquestioning support for Israel, has done more than tarnish the image of the United States; terms such as “democracy” and “freedom” have almost become dirty words.
Mr. Bush also erred in offering his blind support of Israel. In the words of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, “there are many things we cannot discuss – the $30-billion we received over 10 years are only the very tip of the iceberg of the things Bush has given us.”
The peace processes Mr. Bush instigated were destined for failure. The 2002 “road map” to peace was supposed to end the fighting and create a Palestinian state by 2005, and yet it insisted on putting an end to Palestinian violence ahead of Israeli withdrawals from occupied territory. A year ago, Mr. Bush kicked off a desperate last-ditch summit, but then doomed the effort by refusing to include Hamas. You can't make peace if you don't talk to your enemy.
Israeli leaders have behaved every bit as badly. Israel could become a truly dynamic and inventive place, but no government has been brave enough, after 41 years, to pull out of the West Bank. Instead of ending the occupation, Israel has become consumed by it.
The illegal, red-roofed Jewish settlements that cover the West Bank (more than 120 of them housing 260,000 people) continue to grow, along with the checkpoints, gates, walls, fences and settlers-only roads, to such a degree that odious comparisons are being made.
“Apartheid was a horrific system. But it's like [Israel] has taken the model, the Bantustan idea, and made it 10 times worse,” Pregs Govender, a visiting former South African MP and member of the African National Congress, told me after soldiers warned our group to disperse because we'd gone too close to the barrier built to seal in Palestinians and protect the settlements.
Ms. Govender made the comparison, which is incredibly controversial to Israelis, even without having seen Gaza. Israel won plaudits in 2005 by withdrawing its soldiers and settlers from the narrow strip along the coast, but it never fully relaxed its grip, closing it to commerce when Palestinian militants resumed their senseless rocket fire.
Gaza today is a desperate place where a young and growing population faces a future that includes food rations, no jobs and little hope of seeing the world outside its 360 square kilometres. It's unlikely the inmates of this open-air prison will emerge more moderate, pro-American and accepting of Israel.
Of course, Palestinian and Arab leaders deserve blame too, starting with the weak and indecisive Mahmoud Abbas. He has done almost everything Israel and the West have asked of him, including dismissing the elected Hamas government and disarming militants across the West Bank, and received almost nothing but scorn in return.
Hamas poses a daunting challenge for President-elect Barack Obama and his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. It will be difficult for any U.S. administration to reach out to a group whose charter still calls for the destruction of Israel.
Hamas officials have welcomed the election of Mr. Obama and claimed to have already made contacts with members of his team, but the president-elect has kept his distance so far.
THERE IS A SOLUTION
Will the Israeli-Palestinian dispute ever be resolved? The answers may already be out there, contained in the Arab Peace Initiative that Saudi Arabia advanced first in 2002 and again in 2007. The basic principles are simple: a full Israeli withdrawal from all the lands it seized in the 1967 war in exchange for peace and normal relations with its neighbours.
That is what Israel's founders said they wanted in 1948, and the departing Mr. Olmert said in a recent interview with an Israeli newspaper that the time has come for Israelis to accept that their country will not include the West Bank, East Jerusalem or the Golan Heights. The man who tirelessly promoted settlements while he was the right-wing mayor of Jerusalem now acknowledges he and many others have been wrong for a long time.
Mr. Obama takes office in just over two weeks and could ask Mr. Olmert's successor to start where the departing Prime Minister has left off. Whoever wins next month's Israeli election – the hawkish Benjamin Netanyahu or the more practical Tzipi Livni – would realize that building more settlements, walls and checkpoints will not attract another $30-billion. Securing a fair settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – including finding a home for the four million Palestinian refugees – would be a great victory for the White House in its battle against Islamic extremism.
Israelis seem to be bracing for such tough love. “Ever since Jimmy Carter was kicked out of the White House, we haven't had the chance to meet an objective American president …,” columnist Yair Lapid wrote in the mass-selling newspaper Yediot Ahronoth.
“For Obama, any dollar sent to us means one dollar less for Detroit's poor neighbourhoods. … Any dispute with the Saudis will turn into inflated fuel prices at gas stations in Los Angeles.”
Quite likely, this kind of apprehension influenced Israel's decision to strike Hamas this week while its old friend, Mr. Bush, is still in office.
The good news is that Mr. Obama has some hope of undoing much of the damage. As Marwan Kabalan, a political scientist at the University of Damascus, puts it, “People here believe Obama has an inclination to use diplomacy instead of military force. He likes to talk rather than flex his muscles, and I think we need to talk rather than fight.”
And fate may yet intervene. The security situation in Iraq is improving (though still far from normal) and the Iraqi government has made it easier for Mr. Obama to deliver his avowed troop reduction by insisting that all American forces leave by the end of 2011.
At the same time, both Iran and Syria responded warmly to Mr. Obama's victory, suggesting they, too, want to start over – a sentiment shared by mothers who drop their children off each day at Marka's nursery.
“Bush is the one who shattered every one of our families,” says Mahasen, 45, an Iraqi widow and mother of two who fled Baghdad three years ago with her five-year-old daughter after her mentally handicapped older son was kidnapped for being a Sunni in a Shia neighbourhood.
“Is this Obama a good man? Does he like Iraqis?” she asks, suddenly hopeful.
When done cursing Mr. Bush, she admits that the West still appeals to her. “God willing, things get better with Obama. I'd like to go to America some day.”
Mark MacKinnon soon will take up his post as The Globe and Mail's China correspondent.
