Bush of Galilee
Can the president go from 'warmonger' to 'peacemaker'? What he's learning in the Holy Land.
There are a lot of lovely, sloping hills around the Mount of Beatitudes, an idyllic site that descends to the shore of the Sea of Galilee. The spot is so unspoiled that it is easy to squint your eyes, rid the scene of its few paved roads and other modern encroachments, and imagine Jesus preaching his Sermon on the Mount on these same gentle green hills, as he is said to have done 2,000 years ago.
When I squinted, however, I saw only George W. Bush, holding the hands of two giggling nuns. Visiting the Church of the Beatitudes here, built on or near the hill where Christ delivered his most noted sermon, Bush was presented with a crystal icon that bore an inscription from it: "Blessed are those who are peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God." The words apparently referred to the president's efforts to forge a historic peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians, who must figure out a way to share this tortured but beautiful land.
Over two days the president was actually retracing, mile by mile, the course of his Savior's life (though he was doing it by Marine helicopter, not mule). Asked by a reporter during his tour of Galilee today what it was like to be "walking literally in the footsteps of Jesus," the president replied, "It's an amazing experience." His visit, under a bright blue sky, came a day after his trip to Bethlehem, where Bush saw the site of Jesus' birth. A few miles away from the Mount of Beatitudes, Bush also toured Capernaum, the hamlet where the young rabbi Jesus is said to have preached in a local synagogue and hung out with his disciples at Simon Peter's house. Bush listened, stiff-armed and gray-suited, as a friar read to him passages from the New Testament that described Christ's miracles there.
The president may need something close to one of those miracles now. That is, if he is ever to truly walk in Jesus' steps (Bush once called Christ his favorite philosopher), rid himself of his rep as warmonger and instead join the ranks of the peacemakers. The famous lines from the Sermon on the Mount--"blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth"--have often seemed as out of place in his administration as the president himself did today at Capernaum. Far from blessing the meek, the administration has spent far more time battering and bashing them. Think of Dick Cheney and his minions manhandling CIA analysts over Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld dissing the Europeans over their early offers of help in Afghanistan and the vice president's chief counsel, David Addington, riding roughshod over soft-spoken State Department lawyers who dared demur that there might be actual legal restraints on interrogations.
But it's hard to avoid the conclusion that Bush's foreign policy today betrays a little ... meekness. The president badly wants a deal between the Israelis and Palestinians, but he's hesitant about intervening in their talks. Whereas the administration asserted, on scant evidence, that Iran had a nuclear weapons program back in 2005, it's now diffidently giving Tehran the benefit of the doubt--even though the CIA says it has hard evidence the Iranians had such a program. When Prime Minister Ehud Olmert asked Bush this week to explain this new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, which concluded with "high confidence" that Iran halted its "nuclear weapons program" in 2003, Bush replied that he had no control over the U.S. intelligence community wrote, a senior administration official told me. And the administration is constantly finding excuses these days for North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il, whom Bush belittled as a "pygmy" in the first term but who is being given more and more time to divulge his nuclear-arms program under a negotiated deal.
Nothing wrong with meekness, of course, as long as it's not overdone (the same goes for confidence). Even Jesus said at one point that he came "not to bring peace but a sword," at least in dealing with the old establishment of belief. And Bush, paradoxically enough, may have to reclaim a bit of his old unilateralist bluster if he is going to break through the wall between Israelis and Palestinians and leave a legacy as peacemaker. Call it another lesson from the Holy Land.
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Michael Hirsh covers international affairs for NEWSWEEK reporting on a range of topics from Homeland Security to postwar Iraq. He co-authored the November 3, 2003 cover story, "Bush's $87 Billion Mess," about the Iraq reconstruction plan. The issue was one of three that won the 2004 National Magazine Award for General Excellence.
Hirsh writes a column on Newsweek.com entitled "The World from Washington" focusing on foreign policy issues and serves as Washington Web Editor for Newsweek. He also edited NEWSWEEK's "Issues 2007" special issue, which explores all facets and issues of globalization.
Hirsh was the magazine's Foreign Editor from January 2001 to January 2002, and helped guide Newsweek's award-winning coverage of the September 11 attacks and the war on terror. Before that he was a Senior Editor/Chief Diplomatic Correspondent in the Washington bureau, writing about foreign affairs and international economics. Hirsh was also managing editor for the Newsweek International special issue "ISSUES 2001," the second in a series of three annual reviews of the global economy in the new century.
From September 1998 to December 1999, as Diplomatic Correspondent, Hirsh covered foreign policy, the State Department and the Treasury. He moved to the Washington D.C. bureau in May 1997, previously serving as a senior editor of Newsweek International, covering the same beat.
Prior to joining NEWSWEEK in October 1994 as a New York-based senior writer, Hirsh served as the Tokyo-based Asia Bureau Chief for Institutional Investor from 1992 to 1994. Previously, he was a correspondent for the Associated Press in Tokyo and a National Editor in New York.
Hirsh was co-winner of the 2002 Ed Cunningham Award for best magazine reporting from abroad for Newsweek's terror coverage and contributed to the team of Newsweek reporters who earned the magazine the prestigious 2002 National Magazine Award for General Excellence, also for the magazine's coverage of the war on terror. Hirsh also won a Deadline Club Award in 1997 for investigative reporting on his expose of the IRS's abusive practices, and was one of five finalists for a 1994 Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism for his article, "China's Financial Revolutionaries." It profiled the new generation of mainland Chinese businessmen who are striving to build a capitalist financial system from scratch. Hirsh is the author of the nonfiction book "At War with Ourselves" (Oxford University Press, 2003) which explores America's foreign policy and its global role.
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