Ayoon Wa Azan (The Burdensome Legacy).

Byline: Jihad el-Khazen

"The Inheritance" (in the sense of the "legacy" left by George W. Bush to Barack Obama) is a book written by the prominent American journalist David E. Sanger. This book reminded me in part of another book published a year before it and entitled "The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder", written by Vincent Bugliosi, who was up until his retirement perhaps the most famous public prosecutor in California.

Bugliosi presented an indictment against the former president, in a manner that would be enough to convict him before a United States Court of law. Sanger, on the other hand, examined the burdensome legacy left by George W. Bush for the President that succeeded him in the White house, and what the latter would need to correct the flaws at every level, from domestic issues to foreign policy and the ongoing losing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and the war on terror.

It should be mentioned here that I am reviewing these books as an Arab citizen and writer. When I reviewed Bugliosi's book, I noticed that he wants Bush prosecuted for the death of four thousand American soldiers in an unjustified war with forged causes, and where opposing intelligence information was withheld. At the time, however, I complained that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed and that no one seems to care about them, but perhaps Bugliosi's excuse is that he is an American legalist, and his prosecution of Bush is based on the laws of his country that he knows.

However, I find no excuse for Sanger. He is a veteran journalist whom I have always found to be objective. As such, he started his presentation about the burdensome legacy with four chapters on Iran, then two on Afghanistan, followed by two on Pakistan before moving to North Korea and China and concluding with possible catastrophic scenarios. However, he does not bring up the Palestinian cause at all, and not even the word Palestine is mentioned in his book.

The Palestinian cause is behind all other subsequent causes in the Middle East. Hence, failure to resolve it, along with the alliance between all American administrations since Lyndon Johnson and Israel, is what prompted the Palestinians, and consequently the Arabs and Muslims, to breed these extremist fundamentalist groups. As such, we ended up having the terrorism of al-Qaeda and many other similar organizations, with all of them using the Palestinian cause as their raison d'E[logical not]tre.

I want to say to President Obama, and to David Sanger and others, that unless the Palestinian cause is resolved, no other issue will be. Not only is a solution to this conflict required for its inherent benefits, but also in order to pre-empt the terrorists acquiring weapons of mass destruction, and then using them against America or Israel.

Moreover, the book does not present any new information about the original cause. Rather, the names of Hosni Mubarak and President Mahmoud Abbas were not even mentioned, and the name of King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz was only mentioned once where an American [female] official had spoken to him. As for President Bashar al-Assad , he was only mentioned within the context of the Israeli raid against the alleged Syrian nuclear facilities.

I do not blame Sanger because what he has omitted is part of a general American failure, as if the successive administrations and the American media have convinced themselves that the Palestinian Cause does not exist. In fact, I found the book to be quite beneficial and informative in its subjects of interest, and rich in facts which Sanger managed to gather by virtue of his work as a political correspondent for the prominent New York Times newspaper.

Moreover, the chapters about Iran begin with the National Intelligence Estimate's report for 2007, which concluded that Iran has suspended its military nuclear program in 2003. The author mentions that everyone involved stopped at this bit of information which seemed as if it was aimed at thwarting the efforts led by the former Vice President Dick Cheney to provoke a war against Iran. The report, however, included other information about Iran's ongoing bids to enrich uranium, a necessary step towards producing a nuclear weapon.

While I was in New York in the autumn of 2006, I had a brief chat with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad inside the UN General Assembly. In the book however, I read many new and interesting bits of information about the Iranian President's speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, and his insistence upon denying the Holocaust, after he had started reminding the audience of the usurping of Palestine from its own inhabitants and the suffering of the Palestinian people.

Meanwhile, the book's chapters are full of special information, but once again I find the author to be reiterating a Western opinion that is strange to people like myself: He gives an account of the corruption during Hamid Karazai's first term, and how Karazai had surrounded himself with individuals accused of corruption and wanted for trial. It seems that history is now repeating itself since the returning Afghan President has appointed General Mohammad Qasim Fahim as his deputy, who is being accused of drug trafficking, something that is even worse than corruption in a country that produces 93% of the world's opium. What I find to be strange here is the belief that in the absence of corruption, the projects of reconstruction in the country will succeed and the crisis will be over, which is nothing but an illusion. The Afghans will not be bribed with projects, and will fight against the soldiers remaining in their country, while I also emphasize on the need to combat and eliminate corruption.

The last three chapters of the book conclude with horrific scenarios: The first is a scenario where a nuclear explosion occurs near the Jefferson Monument, and in the second, deadly bacteria are spread during an anti-war demonstration. In the third scenario, an electronic attack disrupts electricity in much of the country along with the ability to call the emergency number 911.

I want to say here that all of this could happen, nay, will happen I'm afraid, if the original cause which motivated all other causes continues to be ignored. Imagine for a minute that President Obama followed his Cairo speech with another, addressing Arabs and Muslims a year or two from now, and in which he says: We have finally established two states, Palestine and Israel, living in peace side by side.

If he did that, we would all follow him.

2009 Media Communications Group

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