April 01, 2002

Sadly, I think Perry de

Sadly, I think Perry de Havilland is probably right about The Palestinian Götterdämmerung and the irrelevance of Arafat. Killing Arafat won't make much difference; neither will allowing him to survive.

The killings will go on, the bombings will go on, the murderous hatreds will continue unabated until Israel shrugs off the last political restraints and finally by sheer force of arms imposes the quiet of the graveyard over the occupied territories.

Israel must do terrible things to survive and be damned for doing them. Do them they must... and be damned they must. Israel will survive but there will be no winners in this ghastly inter Semitic madness. Now today Tel-Aviv has been subjected to the insane horrors and thus individual Palestinians move a day closer to the end of their identity as a member of a distinct identifiable society, regardless of their personal responsibility.

I would just love to be completely wrong about this.

So would I.

Steven den Beste has a lengthy, thoughtful disquisition on the subject as well. I think he's right about the motivation behind the current campaign, which is only peripherally "about" whether to grant Arafat his supposed wish of martyrdom:

what they do seem to be doing now is to make the anti-terrorist sweep that they think Arafat should have made all along, that they think Arafat never had any intention of making because he's actively behind the terrorist campaign. They won't get everyone, and they'll bag a lot of uninvolved Palestinians, and they'll make the Palestinians royally pissed off, but maybe the rate and intensity of the attacks will fall off because the organizations opposing them will have been reduced substantially. Given that it's difficult to imagine the Palestinians being any more angry than they already are, and given that Israel is already internationally isolated, there's really little to lose, and a decrease in the attack rate is a victory.

That's true, but it's not enough of a victory. Things are going to get worse before they get much better. "Everyone knows," said Jacques Chirac in a recent radio interview cited by a justifiably puzzled Moira Breen, "there cannot be a military solution to the conflict in the Middle East." This is, unfortunately, true enough, though it's just as true if you take out the word "military." However, while they fall short of "solution" status, military options are the only ones that are now available. And they won't be pretty.

(By the way, den Beste also has, I believe, the right take on this report about US interest in establishing bases in Romania and Bulgaria. It's a message to the Turks that it's in their interests to "play along" when it comes to Iraq.)

Posted by Dr. Frank at April 1, 2002 11:26 AM | TrackBack