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

To: D. Long who wrote (52310)	10/16/2002 4:53:39 AM
From: zonder	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

Re: Arafat is replaced by a moderate, secular government I would be interested to hear why you believe Arafat has a religious government. If he is ruling with "Sharia", I must have missed it. Otherwise, I am not so sure his rule is more religious than, say, that of Saddam. For the record, I am not defending Arafat. He may be the worst leader on earth (or perhaps not), but what I am concerned about is that nobody seems to worry (enough) that whoever comes after Arafat might be far more of a religious fanatic than he is.

To: D. Long who wrote (52310)	10/16/2002 9:05:25 AM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Either Arafat is replaced by a moderate, secular government that can live with Israel - and destroy HAMAS and Islamic Jihad, or Arafat is replaced by HAMAS or some other Islamist militant group. Hmm, I see you've modified my first scenario to include the notion that any government which follows Arafat must take out Hamas. I do see that, in that scenario, any government will need to manage the Hamas relation and that will be somewhere between difficult and impossible. But I would not make that a condition for the scenario to be successful. Right now it's my impression that Hamas is emboldened by the level of general Palestinian anger at Sharon's govt. Should, first scenario still, the transition make a secular based successor to Arafat much more palatable to the general Palestinian population, Hamas just might go quiet for a while. I, frankly, see this as a series of small steps. Unless some sort of Israeli re-invasion of the West Bank or Gaza changes the conditions.