I really should stop reading the Washington Post

Now that the war in Iraq is over, almost everything I see in Post makes me angry. Take the op-ed page. More than Michael Kelly’s death is required to explain why lately, on most days, this page is a wasteland of liberal cliche and Robert Novak. Today, the Post goes five-for-five, with regular liberal columnists Richard Cohen, David Ignatius, and E.J. Dionne joined by guest authors Sen. John Edwards and Warren Buffett, opposing the tax cut.
The worst of the batch is Ignatius’ piece on why Israel should embrace the “road map” for peace. Ignatius argues that Israel “cannot cut the nut of Palestinian terrorism by itself” and thus must forge a security partnership with the new Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas. It is true that Israel will not adopt the measures necessary to end Palestinian terrorism. But the real question is whether Israel can do a better job of this than the Abbas/Arafat can, and that question answers itself. The notion that Israel and the Palestinian Authority can work together on this project is not only unrealistic, it is contrary to the road map itself. As Ignatius points out, the road map requires that Israel “take no actions undermining trust, including deportations, attacks on civilians or destruction of Paletinian institutions and infrastructre.” As the U.S. knows from its own experience, one cannot combat embedded terrorists without killing civilians and destroying infrastructure. So the road map, as crafted by Israel’s enemies at the U.N., the E.U., and in our own State Department, would bar Israel from attacking the terrorists who are killing its citizens, leaving the task exclusively to the Abbas/Arafat government.
Ignatius concludes by imploring the Bush administration to persuade the Sharon government “to accept the road map as the best route to Israeli security.” Sounds like a tough sell to me.

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