As has been pointed out by many, events in Gaza have offered a "clarifying moment." Gaza will now be led by an avowedly Jew-hating terrorist group, part of an alliance of genocidal terror groups and states, dedicated to the destruction of the state of Israel and the imposition of a narrow and vicious form of Islam upon as many as they are able to cow and control. Clearly, the HISH alliance (Hezbollah, Iran, Syria, Hamas) see the tide of history moving in their direction; the next few years are going to be difficult for those of us who believe in tolerance and liberty.
In the midst of the rush of events, however, a most interesting nidus of agreement has emerged from both the left and the right. Unfortunately this area of agreement is based on wishful fantasy, bordering on delusion, and is causing great damage to our ability to influence the course of events.
Note the stories in the press describing the current situation in Gaza. From The New York Times, the paper of record: [All emphases mine-SW]
White House Seems Ready to Let Hamas Seize Gaza
Bush administration officials said Thursday that they had been discussing the idea of largely acquiescing in the takeover of Gaza by the militant Islamic group Hamas and trying instead to help the Fatah party of the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, retain its stronghold in the West Bank.
The United States had quietly encouraged Mr. Abbas to dissolve the Palestinian government and dismiss Prime Minister Ismail Haniya, steps that Mr. Abbas announced Thursday, administration officials said. Before the announcement, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice telephoned Mr. Abbas to reiterate American support for the move, they said.
“President Abbas has exercised his lawful authority as the president of the Palestinian Authority, as the leader of the Palestinian people,” Ms. Rice said. “We fully support him and his decision to try and end this crisis of the Palestinian people and to give them an opportunity for — to return to peace and a better future.”
I chose the Times story because it so beautifully demonstrates the fatuousness of our reporting and our policy. Here is some more:
The state of emergency that Mr. Abbas announced has underscored the widening rift separating Gaza, where Hamas has largely routed Fatah’s forces, and the West Bank, where Mr. Abbas still has a strong base. But diplomats and Middle East experts said a “West Bank first” strategy might now be the last option for Ms. Rice to salvage something from her plans to push for an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal.
The State Department insisted that the United States had no plans to abandon Palestinians living in Gaza.
... it would be diplomatically perilous for the United States to be seen as turning its back on Gaza. Almost half of the Palestinian population lives on the teeming strip of land. A more desperate Gaza could become a breeding ground for Al Qaeda.
“Nobody wants to abandon the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people in the Gaza Strip to the mercies of a terrorist organization,” said the State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack. “We’re certainly not going to participate in extinguishing the hopes of a whole swath of the Palestinian population to live in a Palestinian state.”
...
“The fundamental decision to be made is whether they’re going to say, ‘Gaza, we’ll cut it off and they’ll have to learn to live in utter poverty and isolation,’ ” said Robert Malley, director of the International Crisis Group’s Middle East program.
Ms. Rice now has a much tougher task if she still hopes to get a peace deal before President Bush leaves office in 2009, Middle East experts said Thursday. Several faulted the administration for not doing more to prop up Mr. Abbas two years ago, after Yasir Arafat died but before Hamas won the legislative elections.
There is a marvelous disconnect from reality in the State Department's comments. Have they already forgotten that the Palestinians freely chose to be ruled by a terrorist organization that did not disguise its intent to destroy Israel and kill Jews? That is a policy platform that sells very well among the Palestinians who have completely bought into the idea that because they are the helpless victims of Israeli aggression any and all acts of violence no matter how heinous against the Israeli occupier/oppressor (whose oppression apparently has outlived their occupation) is understandable and excusable. When the Koran and Islamic fatwas lend their imprimatur to the Palestinian struggle, they have the perfect combination of secular and religious apologia for the worst atrocities. Furthermore, their victimhood absolves them of any necessity to actually create a functioning state or behave in a minimally civilized manner.
And here is where the left and the right have come to some fundamental agreements. The left has been most overt in their belief that all ills in the world, most especially in the Middle East, stem from the historical and ongoing malevolent actions by the neo-colonialist oppressors of the United States and Israel to keep the Arab world in a subservient state in order to maintain the flow of oil, control hate land, etc. The right has apparently bought into the idea that we have some level of fundamental control over events in the Middle East. Thus, we have Condoleezza Rice imagining that we are acquiescing in the Hamas take over of Gaza rather than helplessly accepting reality and, in a particularly disconnected inversion of reality, suggesting that the Palestinians can yet be helped to return to a peace which they have never supported and to which they have never aspired.
One definition of war is that the rules governing relations between peoples and states have broken down and violent action has replaced language as the primary tool to resolve disputes. The Middle East, a region which has been, to use Barak Obama's comments from a different context, a "quiet riot" from time immemorial, has now gone from a simmer to a moderate boil. The HISH have brilliantly executed their plans to encircle Israel, though have not yet made their move on the West Bank (a situation which would certainly draw Israel into an overt confrontation.) At the same time, we have nearly surrounded Iran, yet have been crippled by our difficulties in Iraq, difficulties that arose from the mirror image of the left's idea expressed as the belief that we could bring democracy to Iraq without exerting the level of force that was necessary to impose democracy on Japan and Germany after WWII.
In effect, both left and right have unconsciously accepted that American hyper-power was significant enough to shape the world. Of course, the left believed we would shape it in ways inimical to their vision of peace and justice, while the right believed we could shape the world in our image, the fact is both left and right have consistently discounted the fact that our enemies have their own interest and agency that is independent of both the left and right vision of the world as it "ought to be."
The sad fact of the matter is that wider war is coming and there is very little, short of surrender, that the United States and Israel can do to avoid it. Our mutual enemies require war to survive and thrive and believe they are winning. They will continue winning, waging limited and terror war, until they have won our surrender or have reached the threshold at which we will need to respond.
A realistic assessment of our limitations and abilities would be welcome and necessary if we are to understand how the various crises are likely to evolve and what we can do to minimize the damage.
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