Tony Blair to be the new Mideast peace envoy? Huh??

According to this WAPO article, The Bush Administration is touting soon-to-be ex British PM Tony Blair to be the new Mideast peace envoy.

The deal is that Blair would report to the so-called Quartet overseeing Middle East peace efforts--the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia--and mainly work on issues limited to the internal workings of a future Palestinian state, while the actual arm twisting and pressure on Israel to make suicidal concessions negotiations between the Palestinians, Israel and the Arab states would be left in the hands of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

What's more, Dubbya is apparently scheduled to make a speech later this month marking the five years since his June 24, 2002, speech calling for a Palestinian state and reiterating his and our tax dollar's support for it...again.

I guess he forgot these parts in the speech:

"...the United States will not support the establishment of a Palestinian state until its leaders engage in a sustained fight against the terrorists and dismantle their infrastructure. {..} If Palestinians embrace democracy, confront corruption and firmly reject terror, they can count on American support for the creation of a provisional state of Palestine. {...}


I've said in the past that nations are either with us or against us in the war on terror. To be counted on the side of peace, nations must act. Every leader actually committed to peace will end incitement to violence in official media, and publicly denounce homicide bombings. Every nation actually committed to peace will stop the flow of money, equipment and recruits to terrorist groups seeking the destruction of Israel - including Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah. {...}

( ff notes: gee Dubbya, does that include the Al Akasa brigades and the Tanzim on Abbas' payroll? And have you gotten a load on what's on the Fatah controlled Palestinian media lately? Or what they're teaching in the schools?)



Leaders who want to be included in the peace process must show by their deeds an undivided support for peace. And as we move toward a peaceful solution, Arab states will be expected to build closer ties of diplomacy and commerce with Israel, leading to full normalization of relations between Israel and the entire Arab world."

Yeah, I guess the President forgot..although I didn't.

A good definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

As for putting Tony Blair in as Mideast envoy....is this a joke?

Britain has never been particularly pro-Israel - or for that matter, even neutral in the Arab-Israeli conflict. This goes back to the beginning, a mere three years after the Holocaust when the British armed the Arabs to the teeth for the Arabs' openly announced jihad in 1948, turned over their arsenals and strategic places intact to the Arabs and in the case of Jordan even provided officers under the notorious anti-Semite Colonel John Glubb. But Blair's Labour government has been decidedly pro-Arab and heavily dependent on Muslim votes in Britain to stay in power.

Blair's government,from the beginning has had a defacto arms embargo on Israel ...even when it came to the mechanisms on ejector seats designed simply to save the lives of Israeli pilots. And some of you may remember the hysterical fit British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett threw during the Israel-Lebanon War when US planes merely landed in Scotland to refuel en route to Israel with armaments aboard.

It's not as well known here in the US, where Blair's oratorical flourishes have given him a fairly good public image, but Britain's Labour Party actually made Tory Leader Michael Howard's Jewish ancestry a covert issue in the last election, with posters aimed specifically at Muslim voters. Among other things, the Labour campaign featured Howard in posters on a pigs' body, and openly asked, `can we trust this man to be impartial and put Britain first?'

There's also the issue of Blair's wife, Cherie, a well known civil rights lawyer in Britain who's an outspoken Palestinian advocate and who never saw a Muslim terrorist she couldn't defend.

If Blair does have a hand in dealing with the Palestinians, you now know what kind of a `peace process' to expect.