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

To: ChinuSFO who wrote (109)	7/7/2002 2:47:26 PM
From: goldsnow	Respond to of 3959

By refusing even to name Yasir Arafat, the president showed that he's just not ready for an honest attempt at peacemaking. >>> With Yassir Arafat sure. He was served dismissal papers as peace partner

To: ChinuSFO who wrote (109)	7/7/2002 2:51:25 PM
From: Raymond Duray	Respond to of 3959

BUSH'S FRAUDULENT SPEECH ON ISRAEL-PALESTINE DISPUTE Chinmoy, The important thing that I took away from the Bush speech on the Middle East recently is that the entire thing was contingent upon impossible conditions being met by the belligerent parties. Thus, the entire thing was a nullity, and a vacuous means to fill the airwave and editorial pages with mush-headed nothingness. -Ray

To: ChinuSFO who wrote (109)	7/7/2002 11:39:25 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Respond to of 3959

Beyond the debate about Arafat's viability as a leader, Bush's call for Arafat's removal is the mark of a grossly immature statesman. Good diplomacy means finding solutions to a conflict, even a stalemated one, rather than childishly asking for a new partner. You can't call for a leader's ouster when he doesn't do what you want. It's fine to call for regime change, as the United States has done in Yugoslavia and Iraq, when the regime is not an essential part of the solution. But the Palestinian Authority won't go away, and Arafat is not a genocidal war criminal on par with Slobodan Milosevic or Saddam Hussein. The Palestinian Authority will be a necessary part of the solution in the Middle East, whether Bush likes it or not. Or, in this case, we can see the work of a grossly immature journalist. This is a new law of diplomacy he's discovered here -- that the Serbs can topple Milosevic, who will then be discovered to not be a necessary part of the solution, but Arafat and PA are somehow grafted onto the final Mideast solution for eternity. With the unstated corollary: no matter how they behave. If they chose peace, democracy, diplomacy, great; but if they choose (as they have) terrorism, irredentism, sacrificing immediate hopes of a state or prosperity on the altar of destroying Israel, even if it takes a hundred years, well then, everybody must continue to negotiate with them, offering concessions that are repaid only with war. Kushner himself says that Arafat is not a "credible negotiator". Well, what the hell is the point in negotiating with a partner with no credibility? I really must ask how Yasser Arafat, alone among the dictators of the world, has achieved such a rule? Could his choice of enemy have anything to do with it? Why aren't the Palestinians entitled to democracy or a credible leadership? Why do they think that they are entitled to the results that a responsbile leadership could achieve, even if they present an irresponsible and terrorist leadership? Kushner, like many smarter people, has misread Bush's intentions. Bush's speech did not set forth a plan for peace. The Mideast suffers from a surfeit of plans. It set forth a new American policy in the region -- we are not going to talk with Arafat anymore because it's a total waste of time. If the Palestinians ever get serious about negotiating, they can start by sending someone who is not a proven terrorist and liar. If they insist on sending Arafat, that's their loss. After all, the Palestinians want quite a lot from us; they want us to bully one of our few reliable Mideast allies (Turkey is the other one) into giving them a state despite the huge security risks it entails. If they want us to go to bat for them, the least we can demand is some respect in return. Arafat has spit in the face of every American diplomat for the last two years.