April 20, 2002

Sternly-worded Concessions United States Assures

Sternly-worded Concessions

United States Assures the Arab World That It Will Keep Working With Yasser Arafat. I wonder how the rope-a-dopers will spin this. All part of the master plan?

I'm still reserving judgment, but it sure sounds like they're sticking to the usual arrangement of rewarding Arafat's terrorism with sternly-worded concessions. To be sure, Israel's campaign has made progress towards weakening the terrorist organizations in its midst and capturing or killing some dangerous individuals. Israel is marginally more secure. Yet with regard to the security of the US and the West, the overall message of "working with" Arafat remains: terrorism is worth a try, and suicide bombing works. (And further, perhaps, that there is no act of wanton murder so outrageous that the "international community" will not eventually forgive you for it, provided that the victims are Jews.)

As for "rope-a-dope," I'm with Stryker:

Let's apply Occam's Razor to all of this. Which is more plausible:

Bush and the Gang are playing a high stakes game of Diplomacy with the rest of the world, incorporating doubletalk, feints, blind alleys and Sun Tzu-based stratagems. They have constructed a complicated Rube Goldberg-like strategy which will result in the destruction of every regime in the middle-east, starting with Iraq.

Or

Bush and his advisors are torn about what to do and how to do it. They're just riding the wave hoping for a lucky break while at the same time trying not alienate anybody in the Middle East with their actions.


The Bush administration, quite understandably really, isn't sure what it ought to do here. They're trying to keep all their options as open as they can. As a practical matter, perhaps that is the best that can be done right now. Who knows? But morally and logically, it looks like a great muddle.

Over the last few days, the American media have been spinning a vaguely "European" analysis of Bush's foreign policy predicament: according to this typical example President Bush, "whose clarity in responding to foreign policy crises propelled him to unprecedented popularity, is watching global events overtake his black-and-white view of the world." Actually, there's nothing wrong with a "black-and-white" view of the world where Islamo-fascism and terrorism are concerned. Those who threaten us and our allies with suicide bombing campaigns are unequivocally our enemies. What's complicated is how best to organize the campaign to vanquish them; and there are lots of "gray areas" there. The Bush administration's contradictory rhetoric, reflecting not a lack "resolve" but rather a surfeit of options amongst which it cannot decide, has begun to blur the distinction between these two, formerly discrete, categories. Hence the "loss of focus." Hence the Wall Street Journal's nostalgia for the GWB of yester-month.

Is it possible to grant statehood to the Palestinians-- generally agreed to be a desirable goal-- without compromising Israel's security and threatening her continued existence? That's a complicated and vexing question. Should they be allowed to advance towards this goal by means of terrorist blackmail? Should we negotiate with the perpetrators of terrorist atrocities? The answer is a simplistic, black-and-white, "absolutely not."

The Israelis are wrong about a lot of things, but they have one thing, at least, right: Arafat is an enemy, no less than OBL. The Bush administration has apparently decided, for the time being at least, to refrain from acknowledging this truth. How long can they keep this up? Not forever, surely.

Posted by Dr. Frank at April 20, 2002 11:07 AM | TrackBack