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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Condor who wrote (21836)	3/20/2002 9:36:53 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Respond to of 281500

First, international peacekeepers are likely to have even less stomach for being used as human shields than American troops (and some of them may be more susceptible to bribes, as we have seen in Lebanon). Second, one other factor to be remembered regarding peacekeepers (this goes for journalists too) is that they are more likely to be afraid of the Palestinian side than the Israeli side, which has a clear chain of command. Arafat always has organizations under his control but with deniable links. And obviously his organizations don't have any red lines about shooting civilians, peacekeepers or journalists. This addresses your second point too: I'm not convinced the West feels Arafat is the total instigator as you believe. I believe they think he has lost control and these forces are acting mostly independantly IMO. This is always a question with Arafat, who always arranges multiple overlapping organizations with various levels of deniability. It is also a question whether, having spent years whipping up extremism, Arafat could really change direction and stay in control. But "mostly independently" is clearly not true; Arafat retains tight control over the money, and the Tanzim and the Al Aqsa Brigades of Fatah are on his payroll, though his control over the Islamist organizations is definitely indirect at best. In the past, he has controlled the Islamists by force when he had to. And as always, the question remains, if Arafat has no control over anything, why talk to him at all? Which brings up your third point: >>They are bowing (foolishly imho) to pressure from our so-called Arab allies. This pressure would still be operative with American peacekeepers on the ground. Not quite sure how this relates to the issue we were dealing with. I meant that the forces keeping the Bush administration from cutting off ties with Arafat now, would still be in force to prevent the US from cutting off ties with him if he decided to use the peacekeepers (wherever they came from) as human shields in terrorist attacks, or to attack them directly.