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| Middle East |
| David Warren: "Removing Arafat" |
| 2003-09-13 |
| EFL The news is that the Israeli security cabinet has provided Ariel Sharon with a "licence to kill" Yasser Arafat, at a time of Mr. Sharon?s own choosing. (Their word was "remove" and might also include expulsion, isolation, or imprisonment.) The mystery is, why didn?t this happen many years ago? Before reaching their decision -- predictably execrated in capitals around the world -- the security cabinet reviewed recent evidence linking Arafat directly to several of the terrorist hits within Israel?s Green Line. To their information, he didn?t just know about them, he ordered them. And he did that, not out of any psychopathic desire to see more dead Israelis on TV, but rather out of cold political calculation. He decided it was time to rid himself of Mahmoud Abbas, a.k.a. Abu Mazen, the prime minister he appointed to be the "acceptable face" of Palestinian terror for the Israelis and Americans to negotiate with. It was time to remind both the foreigners, and his colleagues, who is boss. . . . The idea that Arafat had been sidelined was one of the more ludicrous of the "pious frauds" circulated by all partners to the "peace process" recently. I ?m sorry to say President Bush invested some of his credibility in this. Arafat was never sidelined, and the appointment of Abu Ala to replace Abu Mazen changes nothing. The men of Arafat?s diplomatic wing are as interchangeable as the men of his military-terrorist wing, it?s all one bird. The strategy remains, wear Israel down by both terror and diplomacy, as opportunities arise, and continue wearing her down, patiently, until eventually she collapses. The domestic propaganda of the PLO -- also under Arafat?s control -- has never made any bones about this. Nor has Arafat recently, or ever, ceased to utter incitements to the Palestinian mob. An occasional, contrastingly benign remark in English to the Western media is all he requires to remain semi-respectable to the outside world. Israel is a country as diverse in its opinions as any Western land. It contains more Jews than New York, and at least as many "liberals". Israel itself has taken ten years to come to terms with the hopeless situation that was created by the Oslo accord, in which a man dedicated to Israel?s destruction was given unchallenged dictatorial power over a de facto country as far away as Hull from Ottawa, while being internationally accredited as Israel?s "peace partner". At several points in her past -- most memorably when she struck first in the Six-Day War of 1967, and when IDF pilots levelled the Osirak reactor in Iraq in 1981 -- Israel became convinced that she must ignore world opinion and do what she must to survive. This is another of those times. . . . The verbal threats of retaliation against Israel for anything done to Arafat are now running very shrill. But there is a Baghdad Bob quality about all of them. In practice, the actual dangers associated with leaving Arafat in power exceed the likely dangers of removing him. By pre-announcing their decision, the Israeli leadership gave themselves the opportunity for sober second thought, should any unexpected danger present itself. Their one hesitation is over the reaction of the Bush administration. Would it, too, be purely verbal? I think the consensus of Israeli politicians is that domestic views in the U.S. will prevent the Bush administration from abandoning Israel, after Israel has done precisely what the U.S. did in Afghanistan and Iraq -- "regime change". It would look too much like hypocrisy. They have given Arafat, in effect, the equivalent to President Bush?s last warning to Saddam. They cannot expect it to be heeded. We shall see: but I think under the present circumstances, Arafat will actually be removed. The man is the regime, as throughout the Middle East; and regime-change is necessarily quite personal. A couple weeks ago, I put the question of Arafat?s life expectancy on the WoT Futures market. The betting has been running against the proposition that he will be assasinated, but after the events of the last week and a half, I think that should perhaps be reconsidered. |
| Posted by:Mike |
#5 Jumping into the "question mark" discussion a day behind... The problem is Microsoft-related. They use "...their own "extension" to Latin-1 [the standard character coding for English-language web pages], in which a variety of characters which do not appear in Latin-1 are inserted in the range 0x82 through 0x95--this having the merit of being incompatible with both Latin-1 and Unicode... These characters include open and close single and double quotes, em and en dashes... [T]he result that the owners of these [Microsoft generated] pages look like semi-literate morons when their pages are viewed on non-Microsoft platforms (or on Microsoft platforms, for that matter, if the user has selected as the browser's font one of the many TrueType fonts which do not include the incompatible Microsoft characters)." --Demoroniser man pageWhen your browser doesn't understand a character, it substitutes a "?". Usually the culprits are MSFT's ?smart? opening and closing quotes, or the use of a "right single quote" [?] in place of the apostrophe [']. There's probably more than you want to know about this at the link above. |
| Posted by: Old Grouch 2003-9-14 1:42:59 PM |
| #4 Their one hesitation is over the reaction of the Bush administration. Would it, too, be purely verbal? I think the consensus of Israeli politicians is that domestic views in the U.S. will prevent the Bush administration from abandoning Israel, after Israel has done precisely what the U.S. did in Afghanistan and Iraq -- "regime change". It would look too much like hypocrisy. About time someone put two and two together over there and decided that they can count on the vocal support of the American people. This may be time to write a letter and let our representatives know how we feel about this. |
| Posted by: Ptah 2003-9-13 9:08:53 PM |
| #3 I get the question-marks too, and I'm using Opera. Guess it's a transliteration problem. I've seen it before - in fact it's quite prevalent on Christian Science Monitor, and on a couple of other large sites. You get used to it. |
| Posted by: Old Patriot 2003-9-13 8:59:23 PM |
| #2 That seems to happen when I post from my home machine, but not when I use the one at the office. I use Netscape at home and IE at the office; could this be the reason? |
| Posted by: Mike 2003-9-13 12:08:59 PM |
| #1 Anyone else seeing apostraphes displayed as question marks here or is it just me? |
| Posted by: Parabellum 2003-9-13 11:37:52 AM |