Blowback, from Palestine to Pakistan

Jim Lobe | June 20, 2007



Four years after the emergence of the first signs of a serious insurgency in Iraq, President George W. Bush finds himself beset with major crises stretching from Palestine to Pakistan.

With U.S.-backed Fatah forces routed by Hamas in Gaza last week, Bush's five-year-old vision of a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict now looks more remote than ever, while a new Pentagon report on Iraq suggests that his four-month-old "surge" strategy is failing in its primary objective of reducing the violence there.

Meanwhile, Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, to whom Washington has provided virtually unconditional support since al-Qaida's 9/11 attack, faces growing popular revolt, while much of his country's tribal border regions have come under the control of forces allied with Afghanistan's Taliban.

And Iran, which senior U.S. officials last week accused of arming the Taliban, as well as Shiite militias in Iraq, has continued to defy Washington's demands that it halt its nuclear enrichment program, while Tehran's regional allies, Syria and Lebanon's Hezbollah, not to mention Hamas, appear to have successfully withstood intensified U.S.-led efforts to isolate them. more http://rightweb.irc-online.org/rw/4321