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

To: stockman_scott who wrote (25111)	4/14/2002 2:22:33 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Powell's Suicide Mission (April 14) - So it looks as if Yasser Arafat isn't alone these days in wanting to be a martyr to his cause. With his decision late yesterday to meet Chairman Arafat, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell has performed the diplomatic equivalent of shouting shaheed, shaheed, shaheed as he puts the Bush administration's Mideast policy on a suicide course. There had been a moment of hope. On Friday, following the latest suicide bombing, word went out that the Secretary had postponed a planned meeting with Arafat. The White House chimed in with a demand that Arafat denounce the terror, or else. Lo, Arafat wheezed out a statement - sandwiched like a pickle slice in a Big Mac-sized denunciation of Israel - condemning "the last operation in Jerusalem." It was enough. Barring last-minute surprises, Powell and Arafat will shake hands today. According to State Department spokesman Richard Boucher, the purpose of Powell's meeting is to "work with Chairman Arafat and the Palestinian leadership to show leadership and to help make these statements a reality, with effective action to bring an end to terror and violence and an early resumption of the political process." Whatever that means. When Vice President Dick Cheney was in the region a month ago, he made the implementation of the Tenet plan the sine qua non of a meeting with Arafat. Now even Tenet has been brushed aside in the breathless chase of "an early resumption of the political process." Of course that may not be the whole story. Talk to more inside sources and you'll learn that Powell is going read Arafat the riot act, tell him this is it, really it, last and final chance. But again, whatever that means. Arafat has heard it before - From James Baker, in 1989, and from German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, after last year's Dolphinarium attack. He's still kicking. Of greater import is the meeting's symbolic dimension. Powell was plainly willing to take whatever thin reed Arafat handed him so he can be seen "doing something" about the Arab-Israeli conflict. Maybe America's friends in Europe will be impressed. Maybe the Arab street will be assuaged. We doubt it. Meanwhile, Arafat was willing to bend to heavy US pressure to condemn "the last operation" because the legitimacy conferred by a meeting with the secretary of state guarantees his hold on power for months or years to come. Not a bad return for such a reluctant statement. We are told that the main purpose of all this high-level Kabuki theater is to smooth the road to Baghdad, the theory being that absolute quiet on the streets of Ramallah is what's needed to overthrow Saddam Hussein. We don't get it. To us, that sounds like an open invitation to Saddam to raise all the hell he can among Palestinians in order to keep his own regime afloat. Maybe he'll up the going rate on his suicide bomber life-insurance scheme to $50,000. Maybe he'll send the Martyrs' Brigades a batch of anthrax spores on the theory that Israel's reprisals will actually serve to complete its international isolation. Given reactions to Israel's response to the Park Hotel massacre, it's not an implausible theory. But this only hints at the deeper conceptual failing at work in Powell's diplomacy. Iraq may remain the principal military threat in the region, but ideologically it is a spent force. By contrast, the Palestinian Authority may not count for much militarily, especially after the IDF gets done with it. Ideologically, however, it reigns supreme. And the threat to the U.S., or even Israel, does not come from the Arab world's depletable, and defeatable, weapons arsenals. It comes from the seemingly inexhaustible furies that the cause of "Palestine" arouses in the Arab mind. It is this that has to be quashed if there's ever going to be any kind of political hope for the Middle East. As with nature, diplomacy is also subject to the second law of thermodynamics. That is, there is an entropic process in which purpose and principle, like matter and energy, ultimately degrade to a state of inert uniformity. When Powell shakes hands with Arafat today, he will have proved to the entire Arab world that, pace President Bush, there is such a thing as a "good terrorist," and that a policy of indiscriminate murder will ultimately bring political pressure on the murdered and concessions to the murderers. How a "war against terrorism" can be reconstituted after this shameful episode is, frankly, beyond our ken. jpost.com