Farther up the totem pole, though, Neorabbi B. Lewis's perpetual question is bound to arise, What Went Wrong? That is, it will arise assuming that "wrong" is the way Gaza went, a point our GOP genius classes seem not to have up their minds about altogether. Neocomrade T. Rose, writing for The Weekly Standard , however, is not one whit perplexed or uncertain, and talks as if the rest of the pack weren't either:
| The past week has been a good one for terrorists. The birth of the world's first truly terrorist state in Gaza was quickly followed by a Western response that, if sustained, all but guarantees that terror state's survival. |
Naturally T. Rose makes a number of polemical assumptions that cannot pass muster outside Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh, as for instance that the sulta fílístíniyya presided over by M. ‘Abbás is a "true state" -- a proposition only slightly less jokey than the same claim made on behalf of the brave new Gaza. The resemblance of these occupational contraptions to Massachusetts or Prussia is not entirely imaginary, but it comes close to being entirely unimportant.
However T. Rose was probably not thinking about statism when he surged into his scribble like that, and almost certainly he was not thinking of the incidental concessions he makes as he surges -- the Hitlerites, it now appears, did not run a proper "terror state," nor did the Bolsheviki, nor did M. Pol Pot, nor Ruhollah Cardinal Khomeiní, nor the Taliban out in their remote Khurasanian boondocks, nor even Saddam Hussein himself, he of the forty-five-minute terror-tipped specials, now happily done away with! These are rather serious factual concessions for the Boy-'n'-Party crew to make, and so it is just as well that T. Rose cannot really make them unilaterally and preëmptively and bindingly.
On the other hand, here is T. Rose in the columns of The Weekly Standard, very nearly at the pinnacle of all "conservative" "intellectualism." He cannot merely be informing us that that he, personally, happens to be more terrorized of neo-Gaza than of all those other candidates. It seems unlikely that T. Rose is actually cowering under his bed, but to suppose his terrorization to be exemplary or figurative does not mend matters.
| While there are plenty of examples, past and present, of states that encourage, fund and even practice terrorism, no nations have ever been created explicitly for the sake of terrorism. Not even the Taliban. Hamas was built upon the terrorist edifice created by the organization it recently supplanted--the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), or "Fatah" as it is has become more recently known. The PLO was created in 1964, three years before the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, not to create the world's 22nd Arab state, but to destroy its only Jewish state. Hamas overthrew the PLO in Gaza not to change the PLO's dream, but to fulfill it. |
In addition to being a "state," neo-Gaza is a "nation" also. And it's become both since just last week! Golly, who'd 'a' thunk it?
On the doubtful assumption that this Party rhetor is in control of his own claptrap, the TWS customer is being solicited to regard neo-Gaza as a sort of faith-crazed suicide bomber writ large, quite content to perish as long as she takes a lot of her enemies with her when she goes to glory. Ah, well, Gaza is quite a suitable place to stage that melodrama!
| What, then, is Washington's answer to Hamastan in Gaza? Why, another bailout of the one organization responsible for the entire debacle in the first place--the PLO. After 45 years of ground work preparing for Hamas' takeover by radicalizing Palestinian society through blood-curdling terrorism, mind-boggling corruption, and world-class inefficiency, the U.S. and Israeli governments have announced their gratitude to Fatah with a billion dollar emergency aid package. Worse than being just another advertisement for diplomatic incompetence, this feeble response to the Hamas takeover will achieve the opposite of what we claim to want. Force-feeding life back into the PLO will not weaken Hamas; it will strengthen it by giving the PLO another chance to demonstrate its fraudulent duplicity. Funding the PLO will not strengthen any real Palestinian moderates; it will discredit them by seeming to tie their fortunes once again to a corrupt, inept--and immoderate--organization. |
(Anybody who is a hyphen-lover like that can't be all bad.)
It is hard to avoid thinking that T. Rose may be just a bit disordered in his intellectuals. The TWS customer is asked to be terrorized of neo-Gaza not for what it can do itself, but for what it will somehow enable the fiendish M. ‘Abbás to do if he ever becomes rich enough. I think that's what the claptrap adds up to, but even so, it is rather odd to exhort one's troops to be terrorized of corruption and ineptness. Onwards!
| Palestinian society cannot be transformed by reviving the group responsible for its degradation. How does one fight terrorism by rewarding those who invented it? Do "Fatah first" advocates believe that financially rewarding the already heavily-armed and well-funded "security" fighters of Fatah, who turned tail and ran at the sight of Hamas gunmen, will lead them now to fight to retake their posts, having gotten a check from Washington? Do they think the PLO's corruption is best combated by re-upping the employment contracts for its 200,000 dysfunctional bureaucrats--60,000 of whom are the gangsters, thugs, and terrorists associated with the PLO's 13 so called "security services"? |
Corrupt and inept and cowardly, it looks like! If Ms. TWS Customer isn't scared of that trifecta, what on earth would it take to scare her?
| With Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert dutifully nodding by his side, President Bush called last week's debacle "a wonderful opportunity for freedom." How exactly is the resurrection of the world's founding terrorist organization a "wonderful opportunity" for anything other than more terrorism and corruption? |
T. Rose is farther down the great chain than I expected. Obviously he agrees with the hormone-basers, not to mention the jihád careerists, that THEY are immutable, that there can never exist such a creature as an "ex-terrorist." A large percentage of the population of Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh nods assent to that, and it is slightly mysterious that they should, for if there exists some great Party work that demonstrates, or even purports to demonstrate, the dogma in question, I have yet to encounter it. A pious belief that "History is bunk" is a necessary condition for buyin' the T. Rose product, but hardly a sufficient condition. (As regards terrorism, that is, for Bob Cardinal Spencer at least tries to demonstrate his own favorite neo-dogma about the jihád monsters. T. Rose bein' terrorized chiefly of the Fatáh, it would obviously be silly for him to claim that the Qur’án makes THEM be unalterably that way.)
| It might be one thing if a policy of saving the PLO had never been tried. But it has been tried, and it has failed, not once, not twice, but three times. It was tried and failed in 1970 when President Nixon pressured Jordan's King Hussein to let the PLO decamp to Lebanon after the PLO failed to destroy Jordan. It destroyed Lebanon instead. In 1982 the United States again came to the PLO's rescue by arranging its exit from Lebanon during the Israeli invasion. The third, most damaging resuscitation came with the Oslo Peace Accords in 1993, this time not at American hands, but at Israel's. President Bush's "wonderful opportunity" pabulum is not only an embarrassing absurdity; it misses the whole point of what has happened in Gaza. Now there are two Palestines, an East Palestine (the West Bank) controlled by competing and discredited PLO warlords, and a West Palestine (Gaza) ruled by a fervently jihadist, well-organized, and highly disciplined Hamas. Even if something could be done to support Fatah in the West Bank (which in itself is undesirable), this would not enable Fatah to return to Gaza. |
Hmm. Has "Central Palestine," the Tel Aviv statelet, actually been wiped off the map while nobody was watching?
But seriously, why should T. Rose take for granted that most of the Party lemmin's are eager to put M. ‘Abbás back in control of Gaza? If they wanted to do so, the trick would be easy enough to perform, of course, given the disproportion in numbers and wealth and (hyper)powerful foreign friends. Not a West Point alumnus, obviously!
| The PLO is finished. The Palestinians know it. The Arabs know it. Only we don't know it. The PLO's leader, Abu Mazen, is as likely to use the West Bank to retake Gaza as Chiang Kai-shek was to use Taiwan to retake Communist China. Today's lifeline to the PLO will do no more to reverse the Hamas takeover of Gaza than American support for Chiang in the 1950s did to reverse Mao's takeover of the Chinese mainland. But at least with Taiwan we eventually got a model prosperous democracy--far more than we will ever get from supporting Fatah. Even in the West Bank, where the PLO is supposedly strong, Fatah is more a fiction than a fact. Its leader, Abu Mazen, is Palestine's version of the Holographic Doctor from Star Trek Voyager. As far as most Palestinians are concerned, he is nothing but a figment of the West's imagination, and not a very imaginative one at that. The 13 private militias and armies that make up Fatah control Abu Mazen. He does not control them. Abu Mazen is a puppet with no strings. He has no following in either Palestine, East or West. And the Bush-Olmert plan to prop him up won't succeed for long. The immediate danger to Israel and the West comes from Gaza, not the West Bank. It is in Gaza that Hamas can assemble serious and dangerous weaponry with which to attack Israel (not to mention other Palestinians). It is in Gaza, not the West Bank, where agents of the Iranian regime will plant themselves for renewed war against Israel. It is in Gaza where al Qaeda and other terrorists are already establishing themselves. Gaza is a terror threat, and the West Bank could well become even more of one than it is now. This is the reality democratic leaders should face, rather than wishing what is happening were not. |
What scheme is T. Rose wink-wink-nod-noddin' at? Should Dr. Gen. Petraeus of Princeton, or somebody like him, whether Crawfordite or Telavivistani, be put in charge at Gaza rather than T. Rose's old buddy "Abu Mazen"? What a pity the man should have to surge off away from us like that without havin' made quite altogether clear what he's so brilliantly right about and the rest of his Party neocomrades so sadly mistaken!
With libido dominandi as with most other things, the devil is in the details. Of course it is desirable that both components of Gentile Palestine should instantly be reduced to compliance with The Weekly Standard, but how on earth is it to be done? And who's to do it? Ruling out M. ‘Abbás is a first step, but that leaves about six billion other possibilities.
What will Ms. TWS Customer make of T. Rose, I wonder? Since we are dealing with a vanity press publication of Rupert Baron Murdoch's, it is not easy to guess the position of its mere supererogatory readers in the great chain of rightism. If they are mostly a slightly superior type of hormone-baser, perhaps T. Rose will go down well enough. True, he has the impertinence to speak of their Little Brother's "pabulum," but because of the Great Xenophobia Schism in the GOP, many a loyal lemmin' has allowed herself that sort of verbal disrespect lately.
On the other hand if Ms. TWS Customer is located way up there at the average level of TWS scribblers, how shall she be anything but disappointed by T. Rose? How avoid wondering what Rear-Colonel F. Kagan of AEI, for instance, might have written on the same topic? Freddy would not wander off vaguely after tantalizin' her with "This is the reality democratic leaders should face," he would spell out exactly where "democratic leaders" should station their Hessians to shoot back at the upstart reality. To be sure, it's quite possible that Freddy himself might want all available Hessians invested in the former Iraq. He's perhaps not entirely disinterested, so let's imagine some TWS scribbler as competent as Freddy K. No name comes to mind at once, but doubtless there must be a number of able tank-thinkers in the Jewish State who specialize in questions like this one.
It would also be interesting to hear from Colonel R. M. G. Spook, also of AEI, also an occasional TWS scribbler. Neo-Gaza looks like being yet another potential problem of success for the Gerecht Doctrine, according to which "we" must allow THEM to do democracy all wrong at first, because that is the only way THEY will ever learn how to do it right. Come to think of it, Spook never did properly explain, or explain away, how the Hamás won that election in the first place. He owes us one.
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