From the time that president Bush took office in 2001, he has spent little of his diplomatic concern on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Middle East. During the 1990's peace in the middle east was a main foreign policy goal for the Bush and Clinton administrations, with constant talks and conferences that came close to peace, and did a lot to advance the process not only between the Israelis and the Palestinians, but the Israelis and Egypt and Jordan. Now finally that the Israeli Palestinian conflict cannot be ignored after the war of last summer the Bush admin is taking an interest.
For a better part of this decade the Bush administration sat by idly and did little to continue America's traditional support for peace in the Middle East. Now in the recent year since the war between Hezbollah and Israel and the Hamas take over of Gaza, the Bush administration as finally stepped up with the President calling for a peace conference in October with the regions major players, for peace between Israel and Abbas's "official government" of Palestine. What I say is where was the call for this peace conference early on. Why did the president not continue the hard work that Bill Clinton pored into the Middle East peace process? I know that Arafat was a road block, but after his death look what America was left to deal with: A democratically elected Hamas government, and the last thing they want is peace with Israel. President Bush, if you would have been more involved throughout the last decade in the middle east peace process, the rise and support that Hamas has received, might have been averted, with a strong American commitment to peace through talks, conferences, and aid to the struggling people inside Gaza and the West Bank. But now we have two Palestinian governments and basically two states. Now Bush administration has promised $80 million in aid to the Abbas government. The problem is that the people who desperately need that aid are the people inside the Gaza strip, and maybe they would not have been in the predicament their Hamas government has put them in, if the Bush Administration spent less time on the starting and for some reason maintaining a quagmire in Iraq, and more time on bringing peace and help to the Palestinian people, and peace to the people of Israel.