TALKING OF PALESTINE

I think that R Cheney believes “he owns the world“, and since he and those around him own the world it is a case of do as I say, and not as I do. It is an odd thing to claim ownership of the world and to be the most indebted nation in human history. It is a case, perhaps sad, perhaps not, of the mouth opening and closing, when the mind has not caught up with reality. The sound and fury that signifies nothing, awaits the awakening. You may choose to remember that G Bush and R Cheney are the criminals, so defined by the US prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, responsible for the invasion of Iraq.

ABC News Online reports (via AFP/Reuters):

US Vice President Dick Cheney has warned that Palestinian strikes on Israel, including rocket attacks ‘kill the legitimate hopes and aspirations’ for a Palestinian state.

Mr Cheney held talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad after meeting with top Israeli officials in Jerusalem as part of an effort to revive Middle East peace talks.

“A difficult but immutable truth must continue to be told: Terror and rockets do not merely kill innocent civilians, they also kill the legitimate hopes and aspirations of the Palestinian people,” Mr Cheney said during a joint public appearance with Mr Abbas.

Mr Cheney has said achieving Israeli-Palestinian peace would require painful concessions from both sides.

Mr Abbas, who met with Mr Cheney at the Palestinian Authority’s Muqata headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah, said Israeli settlement expansion, military checkpoints and raids were blocking progress towards peace.

The two convened shortly after the Palestinian leader’s Fatah faction and its Hamas Islamist rival signed a Yemeni-sponsored reconciliation deal vowing to revive direct talks.

. . . Speaking to reporters, Mr Cheney said achieving US President George W Bush’s vision of a Palestinian state living alongside a secure Israel, “will require tremendous efforts at the negotiating table and painful concessions on both sides”.

“It will also require a determination to defeat those who are committed to violence and who refuse to accept the basic right of the other side to exist,” said Mr Cheney, on his first visit as vice president to the Palestinian territories.

The United States and other Western countries have said there could no contacts with Hamas until it recognised Israel, renounced violence and accepted existing interim peace deals.

Then maybe R Cheney can do, what Secretary of State, C Rice has been unable to do, despite her talk then of “the the birth pangs of a new Middle East”. It was going to be that the invasion of Iraq and the installation of a puppet government there was going to fix the Palestine problem. The trouble with puppet governments is that sometimes as is true for Abbas they lose the support of the population, and then they do things you cannot control.

Of course, R Cheney could have visited Damascus and offered to help with the Iraqi refugee problem caused by the invasion and occupation of Iraq – that would be truth telling and would never do.

The interesting speculation, in my opinion, is what is going to happen in Egypt. Governments that are severely repressive do not by that fact become models of efficiency, if anything they tend to become more dysfunctional.