Hamas's triumph in Wednesday's Palestinian elections is the best news from the Middle East for a long time. The poll was a more impressive display of democracy than any other in the region, outstripping last year's votes in Lebanon and Iraq both in turnout and the range of views that candidates represented.
Whereas in Iraq parties that opposed the occupation had to downplay or even obscure their views, Palestinian supporters of armed resistance to Israel's expansionist strategies were able to run openly. It is true that Hamas candidates did not make relations with Israel the centrepiece of their campaign. They focused on reform in the Palestinian Authority. But few voters were unaware of Hamas's uncompromising hostility to occupation and its record in fighting it.
Wednesday's election was remarkable also in owing nothing to Washington's (selective) efforts to promote democracy in the Arab world. Instead, it was further proof that civil society in Palestine is more vibrant than anywhere else in the region and that Palestinian politics has its own dynamics, dictated not by outside pressure but the social and economic demands of ordinary people in appalling conditions. Providing a forum to freely express hopes and fears, debate policy and seek agreed solutions is, after all, what democracy is about.
In Israel and Washington reaction to Hamas's victory has been predictably negative. European governments should take a more sensitive view. The first watchword is caution. Applaud the process but don't take issue with the result. While the dust settles and Hamas works out its own priorities for government, Europeans should calmly analyse why Hamas got so much support.
Among several Hamas leaders I met in Gaza last summer, Mahmoud Zahar, one of its last surviving founders, exuded the clearest sense of inner steel. Trained as a medical doctor in Cairo, and now a short middle-aged figure with combed-over grey hair, he left several impressions. This is no mosque-driven revolutionary or wealthy jihadi of the Osama bin Laden type, motivated by ideology or a desire for adventure. Like other Gazans, he has felt the occupation on his skin. His wife was paralysed and his eldest son killed by an Israeli F-16 attack on his house in 2003. Zahar was in the garden and lucky to survive. In spite of that, he took the lead last year in persuading colleagues that Hamas should declare a truce or period of "calm" with Israel. For 11 months no Hamas member has gone on a suicide bombing mission. That is no mean achievement, which foreign diplomats rarely credit.
Zahar's reasons were not just tactical - a desire to deny Sharon a pretext for abandoning his retreat from Gaza. His strategy is to de-escalate the confrontation with Israel for a long period so that Palestinian society can build a new sense of unity, revive its inner moral strength and clean up its institutions. He feels western governments give aid and use the issue of negotiations with Israel only as a device for conditionality and pressure, not in the interests of justice.
So he wants Palestinians to have a broad-based coalition government that will look to the Arab and Islamic worlds for economic partners and diplomatic support. It's a kind of "parallel unilateralism", matching the mood in Israel where the peace camp clearly has lost all real purchase. "Israeli attitudes show they don't intend to make any agreement. They're going to take many unilateral steps," Zahar told me. "In this bad unbalanced situation and with the interference of the west in the affairs of every Arab country, especially Syria and Lebanon, we can live without any agreement and have a 'calm' for a long time. We're in favour of a long-term truce without recognition of Israel, provided Sharon is also looking for a truce. Everything will change in 10 or 20 years."
Zahar also left me with no sense of embarrassment about the imminence of power. He pointed out that Mahmoud Abbas would remain president for three more years, as though implying he could be a convenient front for inevitably unproductive talks with Washington and Israel while Hamas acted as a watchdog on the main issues. "There will be no contradiction between the Palestine legislative council and the president," he said. "We will be the safeguard, and the safety valve, against any betrayal."
Along with caution in reacting to the Hamas victory, Europe's second priority should be to maintain continuity. Any cut-off in EU aid would only be a gift to Israel's hardliners. The EU is the largest international donor to the Palestinian Authority, and Javier Solana, the EU foreign policy chief, blundered last month when he told a Gaza press conference that "it would be very difficult for the help and the money that goes to the Palestinian Authority to continue to flow" if Hamas were in government.
Yesterday's EU statements were more measured. If Europe, weak though its power may currently be, wants to have an independent role in the Middle East, clearly different from the manipulative US approach, it is vital to go on funding the PA regardless of the Hamas presence in government. Nor should the EU fall back on the cynical hope that Hamas will be as corrupt as Fatah, and so lose support. You cannot use European taxpayers' money to strengthen Palestinian institutions while privately wanting reforms to fail. Hamas should be encouraged in aiming to be more honest than its predecessors.
Above all, Europe should not get hung up on the wrong issues, like armed resistance and the "war on terror". Murdering a Palestinian politician by a long-range attack that is bound also to kill innocent civilians is morally and legally no better than a suicide bomb on a bus. Hamas's refusal to give formal recognition of Israel's right to exist should also not be seen by Europe as an urgent problem. History and international politics do not march in tidy simultaneous steps. For decades Israel refused even to recognise the existence of the Palestinian people, just as Turkey did not recognise the Kurds. Until 15 years ago Palestinians had to be smuggled to international summits as part of Jordan's delegation. It is less than that since the Israeli government accepted the goal of a Palestinian state.
Hamas may eventually disarm itself and recognise Israel. That will be the end of the process of establishing a just modus vivendi for Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East. It cannot be the first step. Today's priority is to accept that Palestinians have spoken freely. They deserve respect and support.
Posted by: Dan Darling ||
01/27/2006 03:13 ||
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#1
Yes, Israel please leave us alone so we can get on with building a decent army over the next 10 years. An army built on Russian weapons and EU finance. Until then we'll happily have a '2 state solution' where we don't recognise you and you don't recognise us. Abbas can be the front man to keep the EU smily and happy. So lets have a 'truce' so we can get on with building a new military state. Then after 10 years or so we'll be ready to have a war with you.
Posted by: Howard ||
01/27/2006 5:39 Comments ||
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#2
Whereas in Iraq parties that opposed the occupation had to downplay or even obscure their views, Palestinian supporters of armed resistance to Israel's expansionist strategies ....
#3
Hamas may eventually disarm itself and recognise Israel.
Someone been a taken them black acids agin.
Posted by: Howard UK ||
01/27/2006 6:35 Comments ||
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#4
Incredible. That piece of terror-worshiping drivel is just dripping with pure Jew-hate, yet somehow gets presented as journalism? The writer strikes me as evil, in it's purest form.
#5
I always wonder what the quid pro quo for these guys is . At least during the cold war, you could read between the lines and in every pro-communist screed you could see a job application for minister of culture or head of the writers union in the future People's Republic of [fill in the blank]. These kafirs can't possibly hope for a position of influence in the caliphate, can they? Or are they like Galloway. Does a little bit of zakat end up in a bank account in the Caymans after each of these propaganda pieces?
Otherwise, I don't know what to say. Every line in Steele's blather is either a lie, a distortion, or a moral abomination. Fisking it makes about as much sense as debating Baghdad Bob about journalistic ethics.
Before the Internet, I really had no idea that most of the European press (and most Europeans, it seems) see Israel as a colonial enterprise. In a very real way, Israel has become the scapegoat for 450 years of European colonialist atrocities. The high priests of European culture heap their own sins upon Israel and very literally abandon it in the desert to die. And since the colonialist narrative won't work without a colonizing power, the US has been drafted to fill that role, regardless of how illogical that may be (given that the Europeans, then the Arabs, cast the Jews out in the first place).
On days like this, I feel like saying to Hell with the whole continent. May their granddaughters wear abayas and their grandsons sport beards. The only intervention we sould make is to secure their nukes before the fall.
#6
Murdering a Palestinian politician by a long-range attack that is bound also to kill innocent civilians is morally and legally no better than a suicide bomb on a bus.
Bus bombing was invented by the Paleos decades ago. To equate such with the standard retaliation, long range beheading, is logically off the reservation. Sometimes, morally and legally depends on who started it. Morally, the retaliators have a free move. Legally, bus bombing is only legal in Islam.
#7
I always wonder what the quid pro quo for these guys is .
They expect to be beheaded with sharp knives, not the dull ones the rest of us kaffir will get.
Posted by: Robert Crawford ||
01/27/2006 12:08 Comments ||
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#8
Bus bombing was invented by the Paleos decades ago.
Suicide Bombers are much older than that, I have a very old black-and-white Popeye cartoon fron the 20's where the "Suicide Squad" (a very short muslim with an artillery shell strapped to his head) is sitting on a sideline bench like in a football game, cheering on the fighters and waiting for the "Coach" to call on him.
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
01/27/2006 14:40 Comments ||
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#9
Popeye cartoon/Suicide Squad
Damn Redneck...that is one helluva obscure reference...but it works for me.
#11
Whereas in Iraq parties that opposed the occupation had to downplay or even obscure their views, Palestinian supporters of armed resistance to Israel's expansionist strategies were able to run openly.
I'd comment, but 115AS is right, it's like fisking Baghdad Bob.
#13
Murdering a Palestinian politician by a long-range attack that is bound also to kill innocent civilians is morally and legally no better than a suicide bomb on a bus.
It is is the Palestinian is a MURDERER and TERRORIST who TARGETS INNOCENT CIVILIANS. In that case it is targetting a MURDERER who is deliberately hiding among 'innocent' civilians.
So now if Hamas sponsors or engages in suicide bombing it is an act of war. And should be treated as such.
I dont think Ham-Ass can restrain itself -- the leadership is addicted to murdering innocents, ordering murder, and bloodshed as tightly as any crack-addict.
European communists have reacted with fury to the news that the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe has voted to formally condemn "the crimes of totalitarian communist regimes."
The PACE issued a statement expressing "sympathy, understanding and recognition for the victims of these crimes" which it described as "massive human rights violations... including individual and collective assassinations and executions, death in concentration camps, starvation, deportations, torture, slave labour and other forms of mass physical terror."
It called on communist parties in European states "to reassess the history of communism and their own past [ ] and condemn them without any ambiguity.
Fat chance. Russian newspapers reacted predictably, with former Soviet mouthpiece Pravda describing it as a "ridiculous attempt to condemn communism." It also expressed unease over the prospect of Russian officers being categorised as no different from members of the Nazi SS. Russian MPs on the assembly warned that Moscow was opposed to a condemnation.
Russian opposition to the statement is only to be expected: After all, this is a nation where around 50 percent of the population profess an admiration for Stalin and close to that number admit that having a similarly tough guy around might do their country some good.
However, the antics of western socialists and communists are more shameful. The vote, which passed by 99 to 42 (with 12 abstaining), was ferociously opposed by western leftists.
Spain's supposedly moderate socialists opposed the resolution, while the absurd Belgian Communist Party described it as ""a violent attack on history, present and future of communism." Various Greek factions condemned the resolution as "neo McCarthyism" and, laughably, "persecution."
French Communists attempted to throw the Holocaust into the debate, arguing that to compare the horrors of Hitler's Nazis to what they must imagine to be the benign and gentle acts of their heroes "banalises the Holocaust." They added that the resolution ignored the role of Communists in fighting fascism.
Other Communists in France complained that the vote was a capitalist ploy, consigning Communism to the graveyard of history of closing off any alternative to liberalism.
The vote was a belated attempt to recognise the 100 million who have died at the hands of Communist regimes, including over 20 million in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Its sponsor, Sweden's Goran Lindblad, also proposed a memorial day to remember those who were killed by Communist regimes, though this resolution failed to reach the required two-thirds majority.
#2
My theory: it's gotta be something genetic. Or something in the water...
Posted by: Dave D. ||
01/27/2006 20:42 Comments ||
Top||
#3
As posted before around the Net, true Rightists are by definition Moralists, hence don't gener give a damn about others have to say about thier actions or decisions - why, becuz they believe are doing the right thing. Leftists and Commies, on the hand, ascribe to anarchism, alternatism. and super-laissez faire where not even the Left is for the Left, thus ascribe to being Super-PC in all things - reality and truth is tertiary or subordinate to populist propaganda.
#5
Heh... I'm looking at this phenomenon and just boggled.
RatherGate - Fake but accurate.
Oprah - Feelings count more than facts.
BDS - Truth D.O.A.
CogDis - Just take meds, don't adapt to reality.
Hundreds of contemporary examples.
My first real contact with this was when I was going through my divorce. The Psychologist who was our "councilor" told me that it didn't matter that what she perceived, the goofy shit that upset her, was not true -- what mattered was how she felt. I told him he was insane and full of shit as she was. That was 25+ yrs ago.
I didn't realize back then that he was onto something big.
#6
It also expressed unease over the prospect of Russian officers being categorised as no different from members of the Nazi SS.
Tough sh!t. You better get used to it. Stalin made Hitler look like a schoolboy. Same goes with the Islamists. You want Holocaust? You'll get one all your own. All of these genocidal, mass murdering maggots need to be greeted with the same intransigent hostility. Nothing less will save us from another round in the barrel with Nazism 2.0.
By Thomas P.M. Barnett | Tuesday, January 24, 2006
Even as the United States, the EU and others work to stop it, Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons seems inevitable. But is this such a bad outcome? In "Blueprint for Action," Thomas P.M. Barnett explores the security implications involved from a U.S. point of view of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons and why it may be the best thing for the United States and the wider Middle East.
With Saddams Iraq out of the way, Iran now stands as the only Gulf power that can effectively veto regional efforts at peace through either its explicit support of transnational terrorist groups or the employment of its military power especially as it achieves status as a nuclear power.
There is no other state in the region that combines the same assets and ambition in terms of politics, economics and security.
Saudi Arabia has no effective security profile (nor does Egypt for that matter), and the House of Sauds political ambitions are more limited in scope, concentrated as they are primarily on keeping the monarchy in power at all costs.
Pakistan possesses a far larger population, but its largely uncontrollable domestic situation consumes whatever ambition the political leadership there has for a larger regional role.
The power of Iran
It is Iran that can effectively veto movement toward peace and stability in either Jerusalem or Baghdad through its effective support to, and manipulation of, the political agendas of regional terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas. It is Iran that has the capacity to destabilize the flow of oil out of the Gulf.
It is Iran that determines how much of the energy coming out of the Caspian Basin may be safely accessed by both India and China. And it is Iran, which, by virtue of being a top-five player in both oil and natural gas and a longtime diplomatic pariah as far as the United States is concerned, that offers Asia the best possibilities for locking in long-term bilateral energy ties, a process already begun by India and China.
Regional security partner?
And yet, oddly enough, for all the same reasons why the Shah of Iran was once the preferred security partner of the United States in the region, todays Iran still retains many of those same attributes.
Iran is not a source for, or a supporter of, the jihadist movement embodied by al Qaeda. As a Shiite state, its definition of revolution differs from that track altogether.
Irans Islamist regime results in a sort of tired authoritarianism, never truly aspiring to the sort of totalitarianism pursued by the Salafis, who can be thought of as the over-the-top Maoists (or Trotskyites) to Irans rather pedantic post-Stalin Soviet Union. Iran is a nation-state first and foremost, not some transnational religious-inspired movement.
Yes, like Brezhnevs Soviet Union, Iran is more than willing to exploit transnational terrorist movements to its own ends, but this is a cynical pursuit of national power, not a millenarian fantasy of regional, much less global, revolution.
Iran is not interested in overthrowing the Wests political and economic order, it just wants to receive its due place in those corridors of power.
The mullahs' pretend rule
In many ways, the Shiite revolutionary spirit died a long time ago in Iran, leaving behind a cynical political order where the mullahs pretend to rule, the citizens pretend to obey and the government pretends to reform.
Iran is a frightfully young society, full of ambition for a better life and chafing under what the majority of the population consider to be the rather idiotic rule of the religious fundamentalists, one that offers them no future worth pursuing in an increasingly globalized world that demands far more rational rule sets.
Soviet parallels
Iran most resembles the late-Brezhnevian period of the Soviet Union: A bankrupt ideology, a vastly underperforming economy and workforce, a sullen majority detached from political life as well as economic ambition and an out-of-touch political leadership (the mullahs) increasingly at odds with the technocratic leanings of its governments bureaucratic elite.
However, as the presidential election of 2005 proved, most Iranians will nonetheless vote for a hard-liner as president if he promises a reduction in the political regimes pervasive corruption such is the states perpetual failure in Iran.
Like the late Soviet Union, Iran does not wield military power so much as security vetoes. It can prevent security from arising but it cannot deliver security effectively anywhere beyond its borders.
Because Iran lacks any true client states, its regional security influence is derived primarily from its support of transnational terrorist groups and its persistent quest of weapons of mass destruction.
Quest for the bomb
But even in its quest for the bomb, Tehran displays a calculated cynicism throughout, demonstrating all too well that it understands that nukes are for having, not for using.
Iran will get the bomb, no matter how the United States or its allies seek to prevent that outcome. Tehran was the regional power most pleased by seeing both the Taliban and Saddam deposed.
Unintended consequences
In many ways, the U.S. global war on terrorism has inadvertently made Iran the greatest beneficiary so far in the region in terms of security obstacles removed, begging the question Would it not be nice to get something in return from Iran for all that effort?
So if Tehran is going to get the bomb no matter what, the question shifts from What can the United States do to prevent it? to What does the United States get out of it?
If Iran was our natural security partner in the past for a lot of good reasons, then most of those reasons remain today, simply obscured by the continuing dictatorship of the mullahs (of which we have some very bad memories).
Our natural goal with Iran, then, is to marginalize that religious leadership while capturing the same security partnership we once enjoyed.
Believe it or not
Inconceivable? No more than having Russia acquiesce to our growing military domination of both the Persian Gulf and Central Asia, not to mention Eastern Europes merging with both NATO and the EU.
After all, we once pursued détente with a very similarly evil regime in the Soviet Union in the early 1970s (e.g., tired authoritarianism, bankrupt ideology, enabler of transnational terrorism, finger on the nuclear button), only to effectively kill that regime with connectivity over the subsequent years, yielding a compliant security ally in the process.
History repeating?
Why not pursue the same pathway with Iran? Iran is the one country in the region where it is the rulers who hate the United States and the public that loves us.
Yes, the Iranian hostage crisis was a hugely embarrassing experience for us a quarter-century ago, but typically the passage of that much time allows us to move beyond such humiliations as a new generation of political leadership ensues.
Our grand bargain with Iran is not hard to imagine. Iran gets the bomb, diplomatic recognition, the lifting of sanctions and the opening of trade, and its removal from the axis of evil.
In return, what Iran must offer the United States is long-term support for both the two state solution in Palestine and a stable Iraq dominated by a Shiite majority, the cessation of its support for terrorist groups in the region, joint pressure on Syria for an end to its hegemony over Lebanon (removing their troops is only a nice start) and most symbolically its recognition of Israel diplomatically and its formal declaration of that countrys right to exist.
The future Middle East peace
Is this bargain too much to hope for? Ask yourself this: Can you imagine a future Middle East peace where these steps have not been achieved? I cannot, and so I choose to see Irans reach for the bomb as possibly the best thing thats happened to the Middle East peace process in decades.
Why? Because a huge hang-up in the Palestinian-Israeli struggle has been the Muslim worlds sense of military inferiority, which was first proven in a series of wars across the latter half of the twentieth century and which remains codified in the popular imagination by Israels possession of both the bomb and a nuclear superpower sponsor willing to wage war on its behalf two things the Middle Easts Muslim states have always lacked.
Security through nuclear equality?
Irans possession of nuclear weapons levels that playing field in a proximate sense, by finally allowing the Muslim Middle East to sit one player at the negotiating table as Israels nuclear equal. This is not just opportune, it is crucial.
As for the fears that Irans possession of the bomb will destabilize the region, there is no good historical evidence for that.
Rather, the historical record is quite clear: Two relative equals with nuclear weapons is a far better equation than one that features a permanent imbalance.
Would Iran give terrorists the bomb? Only if terrorists could get Iran something that it could not otherwise achieve directly with the West.
Iran the rational actor
Tell me, since Iran is getting the bomb anyway eventually, would you feel less comfortable about this possible scenario if Iran were to open up to the West or if it remained isolated and surrounded by hostile American troops?
In which scenario do you think Tehran might risk it all by sponsoring a terrorist WMD strike against Israel or the West when it has something to lose or nothing to lose? If America wants Iran to act responsibly in the region, it needs to give Iran some responsibility for regional security.
Everybody wins
Meanwhile, offering Tehrans government-reform elements economic carrots in exchange for denying the hard-line mullahs their self-perceived nuclear security blanket remains an unworkable approach.
In sum, this scenario pathway presents wins for all sides. The United States finally gets a Muslim security partner in the region worth having (as opposed to, say, the sick man of the Arab world, Egypt, or even the let-them-eat-cake royal mafia in Saudi Arabia).
Israel finally gets enough buy-in from the Islamic world for the two-state solution to proceed. Iran gets to return to its rightful place as regional-power-of-note and its public experiences growing economic connectivity with the outside world, which in turn, will inevitably restart a political reform process that rapidly marginalizes the mullahs religious-based political rule.
There are really only two bad choices, Senator Clinton. One is the present "outsourcing" course: Let the Europeans exhaust negotiations, pressure the Chinese and Russians to allow the matter to go to the U.N., bolster Turkey and the Arab Gulf states and advise them to build a regional coalition to contain the problem, hope that Ahmadinejad alienates the world even more. Then, perhaps, sometime during this process, a popular uprising or even a right-wing worried cleric will thwart the nuclear party in Iran before this latest Great Mahdi gets the bomb, and with it impunity through national adulation.
The other unmentionable alternative —if we set aside the real appeasement of letting the mullahs have the bomb, or the equally cowardly policy of gently suggesting that the Israelis do the deed, or some Lord of the Rings fantasy about a grand aerial armada of NATO, American, and Russian jets descending in bombing formation over the modern forge of Mordor —is a preemptive (or in-sourced) American "air strike."
Perhaps two or three weeks of messy bombing, shown on CNN round-the-clock. Unavoidable collateral damage served up hourly on Al Jazeera as "genocide". Missed targets, followed by worries about retribution from terrorists, now armed with nuclear waste and righteous indignation, vowing to "avenge" the infidel attack. Shiite turmoil in Iraq. Investigations into overflights of Muslim airspace. Contention over American use of Turkish, Iraqi, or Kuwaiti facilities to attack another Muslim country. Iranian-backed Hezbollah incursions into Israel. Fierce denunciations from the Russians and Chinese. Private glee and public 'remorse' from the Europeans. Pulitzer-prizes and whistle-blower adulation for CIA leakers and Washington Post up-and-coming reporters. More Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky rants, reverberated by yet more shrillness from Sens. Boxer, Durbin, and Kennedy. Sky-high oil prices with the attendant conspiratorial talk about oil grabs and Zionist plotting. And more still.
All that mess is what killing bin Laden and stopping Iranian nukes may well be about, if we don't "outsource" responsibilities —however glib that sounds on a Democratic blog or thrown out as a gnarly bone to an oohing and aahing academic audience.
#1
some Lord of the Rings fantasy about a grand aerial armada of NATO, American, and Russian jets descending in bombing formation over the modern forge of Mordor
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
