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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: craig crawford who wrote (252213)	5/1/2002 8:44:36 AM
From: Scumbria	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

Craig, I think you are parroting the words of the terrorists, just as they hoped people would do. Here is a well written commentary from today's National Review. Force, then, has a way of making people change. Even the most militant citizenries can be disabused of their rather dangerous ideas — but only after they understand that the logical consequences of their extremism are impoverishment, ruin, and humiliation. Currently in the Middle East we are shown glimpses of small boys with plastic replicas of bomb-belts, and then told that "an entire generation will grow up to despair and anger." CNN reporters stick microphones into the faces of angry residents of Jenin, and logically get the response they hoped for — pledges of undying hatred for Israel "and the Jews." Pundits wrinkle their brows and then pontificate that "violence breeds violence," and that hatred has become so deeply embedded that real peace is impossible. In fact, peace in the region has never been more likely than it is at the present moment. Both our own war against the terrorists and the Israeli response on the West Bank — if conducted forcefully and coupled with the clear intention to help the defeated to rebuild their societies — can prompt real peace rather than breed endless war. Already the fragile Afghani government not only is far better than the Taliban, but in many ways offers more hope than anything in the region — from Syria to Pakistan. We pray to prompt a similar metamorphosis in Iraq, where the most evil nation in the Islamic world might transmogrify into the most promising. And it would not be naïve to envision that, after the current Mideast war, a newly regrouped Palestine — under far better and real democratic leadership — could have a more liberal and humane government than its thuggish neighbors such as Syria and Lebanon. As the smoke clears from Jenin, many Palestinians slowly — but still privately — will begin to assess the catastrophe. What will they learn? That murdering bombers ultimately draw a devastating Israeli response. That their own leadership that condoned and at times sponsored the terror, and so prompted the war, allows neither dissent nor freedom in formulating its policy — and thus is solely responsible for its own failure. Most will grudgingly admit that 97 percent of the West Bank was a better deal than Jenin and Israeli tanks. The Palestinian Authority's state-run propaganda that "ten thousand were murdered" and that the fighting "was a real Holocaust" proved deceitful and ultimately lost, rather than gained, credibility for the Palestinians. The very spokesmen who allege an unending war against the Israelis also know that their own youths mined streets and homes that magnified the carnage in Jenin; and they know those murderers whom they now cherish as martyrs are also the culprits who brought them weeks of misery. nationalreview.com