Perpetual fantasy
The decision by the governments of Israel and the United States to supoprt Mahmoud Abbas -- a peacemaker of the kind who still goes under his nom de guerre -- seems misguided to me. In a compelling column, Caroline Glick argues that lending support to Abbas is grounded in fantasy. Fouad Ajami also invokes the term "fantasy" in his New York Times op-ed column today. He also gets off a good aphorism:
The political maxim that people get the leaders they deserve must be reckoned too cruel to apply to the Palestinians.Ajami concludes:
Palestinian society has now gone where no “peace processors” or romantic poets dare tread.But fools rush in. Yesterday's Washington Times editorial -- "Munich 1934, Gaza City 2007" -- seems to me to capture something of the essence of the situation:
The ugly reality today is that Tehran and Damascus are on the offensive, and right now the United States seems to lack any comprehensive strategy to respond. These rogue states continue to send weapons and terrorists over the border into Iraq to kill and maim American soldiers and Iraqis who want to live in peace. Tehran is helping to arm its onetime arch-enemy, the Taliban of Afghanistan, to enable it to kill and maim as many American soldiers and Afghans as possible. Damascus has apparently provided safe passage to some jihadists moving from Iraq to northern Lebanon in an effort to foment terror there. And now, for good measure, the axis's allies have just staged a coup in Gaza in order to destroy their "democratic" opposition -- the Fatah organization formed by the late Yasser Arafat and now headed by Mr. Abbas -- who Washington (and regrettably, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in particular) and Jerusalem have been desperately trying to prop up.The Hamas thugs who invaded what had been Mr. Abbas's office in Gaza City on Friday were certainly under no illusions about who the big international superpower loser was in last week's Gaza bloodbath. The newspapers have been blanketed with pictures of armed, masked men putting their feet up on desks and lounging on sofas as they make mock telephone calls to Miss Rice's office in Washington. In response to this debacle, Washington and the Europeans are discussing a a resumption of aid to the Palestinian Authority and ending the economic embargo imposed after Hamas won legislative elections last year. Mr. Olmert, a politician whose popularity is barely above zero, is under considerable pressure from Washington to help Mr. Abbas.
But to what end? Congress needs to take a hard look at U.S. policy toward Mr. Abbas and the PA. Given the corruption that has long been endemic, how do we know that money going to Mr. Abbas will be usefully spent? How do we know it won't "trickle down" to the al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades -- a terrorist arm of Mr. Abbas's Fatah that has worked with Tehran and its allies in the past and remains one of the dominant terrorist gangs in the Abbas-controlled West Bank? It's time for some serious congressional oversight hearings about the continued usefulness of U.S. assistance to Mr. Abbas.***
And Washington needs to think long and hard about Palestinian security training programs and America's image abroad -- particularly if people come to associate Washington's image with Mahmoud Abbas and his men who were stripped to their underwear and dragged out of that building in Gaza last week.
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