Shifting Dynamics in the Middle East

Israeli land grabs erode confidence, says Rice

This is not the first time an official in the Bush administration has chastised Israel for its treatment of Palestinians. I remember well the gut feeling I had when the Iraq war began, that one of the unspoken reasons for taking out the Butcher of Baghdad was to put Israel in a position where they owed the US big time. Israel would then have to make some long overdue concessions. I even read an article which quoted then Israeli Prime Minister Sharon saying as much.

I have also noticed that the media has not been reporting on Palestinian terrorist attacks in Israel for a long time. Three possible reasons may account for this: 1) with the principal funder of Pali-Terror now out of the way, the dirty job has become more difficult to pull off; 2) Arafat is dead and along with him, his movement, allowing for the seeds of a Palestinian democracy of sorts to have been planted; or 3) the media was bored and moved over to Iraq instead.

The first one is likely the most important and we can thank the Bush administration for that and for a whole host of democratic reforms, though none yet particularly dramatic, that followed throughout the Middle East, including the establishment of self-rule in the Palestinian territories.

However, the game ain't over yet. Palestinian government is rather thuggish, to put it mildly. And surely, the external interference in Iraq, which has now pretty much subsided and been defeated, was a reaction to what was correctly perceived by Arab and Iranian dictators as a bigger threat than Israel - namely the unleashing of a grassroots desire for democracy among their own demoralized, brainwashed citizens. The external interference in Iraq certainly succeeded in halting that nascent development by taking attention away from it. And thank you, Western media, for your complicity!!

How, then, do the Americans nurture and breathe new life into what they had started by invading Iraq and removing the worst example of Arab Nationalism that had ever emerged? By encouraging the Israeli-Palestinian dynamic to shift, that's how. It will be a long, slow, methodical process, but genuine peace in the Middle East will not be possible as long as those grotesque bastard offspring of Arab Nationalism can point to Israel's continued propensity to lay new claims to Arab land, even if by doing so, decades of Palestinian terrorism may actually be seen as having borne its intended fruits.

So goes the course of history. Nothing ever ends in a bed of roses, with perfect solutions and everybody living happily ever after. The petty thugs now in charge of Palestinian territory are small potatoes compared to Saddam Hussein and his capacity to keep the terror machine well oiled and running at optimum capacity. A slow, inch by inch movement toward compromise and realism will very likely empower those Palestinians who are sick and tired of the old ways of their brutish masters. Israeli hawkishness will only give way to more moderate forces, when conditions have been created that allow for Palestinian moderates to come to the table. Condi Rice's open criticism of Israeli actions is one more example that the process has advanced another inch. When the media's fixation on terrorist events dries up, one more inch along the road will have been gained.

Hmmmm. Does that mean the Blackwater fiasco has an upside?