George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

Bush's mention of East Jerusalem had toughened that line. [fn 26] Baker had added some
tough talk of his own when he had told a Congressional committee that if and when the
Israeli government wanted peace, they had only to call the White House switchboard,
whose number he proceeded to give. But on June 20, Bush suspended the US dialogue
with the PLO which he had caused to be started during December, 1988. The pretext was
a staged terror incident at an Israeli beach.
July, 1990 was full of the hyperkinetic travel and diplomacy which has become George's
trademark. Over the July Fourth weekend, Bush went to Kennebunkport to prepare for
the London NATO summit and the successive Houston summit of the seven leading
industrial nations. There is evidence that he was already in the full flush of the manic
phase, and that the "read my lips" press conference and the Neil Bush affair had produced
massive psychic carnage. According to a press account, Bush passed the time in
Kennebunkport
with his usual breakneck round of throwing horseshoes, casting fishing lures, bashing
golf balls, and careening across the waves in his speedboat. Instead of arriving in London
a day before the meeting began, Mr. Bush squeezed in one more golf game on
Wednesday morning, and left that night. But here, it seemed that the bottomless well of
energy had a bottom after all. Mr. Bush got off Air Force One looking tired, eyes puffy
and his stride less spry than the "spring colt" to which he always compares himself.
During the London summit, Bush appears to have been unusually irritable. One small
crisis came when he found himself waiting for his limousine in front of Lancaster House
while his aides scrambled to bring his car around. Bush "craned his neck around, pursed
his lips, stuck his hands in his pockets, and glared at the nearest aide until his car finally
appeared." [fn 27]
The secret agenda at this summit was dominated by the NATO out of area deployments,
transforming the alliance into the white man's vengeful knout against the third world.
According to a senior NATO consultant, the Lancaster House summit focussed on
"increasing tension and re-armament in a number of countries, in North Africa, the
Middle East including Palestine, and Asia through, increasingly, to Southeast Asia. There
are new dangers from new directions. We are shifting from an exclusive focus on the
east-west conflict, to a situation of risk coming eventually or potentially from all
directions." The talk in London in that July was about a possible new Middle East war,
which "would tend to escalate horizontally and vertically. A real conflict in the Levant
would extend from the Turkish border to the Suez canal. It would involve the neighbors
of the main combatants. The whole thing would be in a state of flux, because the great
powers couldn't afford just to sit there." In order to avoid public relations problems for
the continental European governments, who still had qualms about their domestic public
opinion, these debates were not featured in the final communique, which complacently
proclaimed the end of the Cold War and invited Gorbachov to come and visit NATO
headquarters to make a speech. [fn 28]