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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (7748)	9/12/2003 3:28:20 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793781

New York Times, When I said "you and the left," I was thinking of the Times. Fortunately, they and you are not running FA for us. Am watching a "Carnegie endowment" symposium on CSPAN with a panel composed of Freidman and Professors with ME accents. It's called "Democracy in the ME." Not making much sense to me. But everybody seems to dislike us. Oh, well.

To: JohnM who wrote (7748)	9/12/2003 6:57:34 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793781

As Charles Krauthammer says, the NYT editorial page is so consistently wrong that it's become a reliable contra-indicator. There's no getting any improvement whatsoever out of the Palestinians, like for instance at least a temporary cessation in blowing up buses? Well, obviously we need to press the Israelis for concessions, gotta keep up "progress". Hamas and Arafat will regard such concessions as proof of the success of their current policy, but this the NYT will never get. They have this faith that everything must be negotiable, and if one party won't budge then it's obviously up to the other party to make unilateral concessions and hope.

To: JohnM who wrote (7748)	9/13/2003 12:55:28 AM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 793781

John, here is an answer to your NYT editorial: Cycle of Vengeance? by Elliot Chodoff Opponents of Israel's policy of targeting terrorist leaders have coined a new phrase to explain the error in the method: cycle of vengeance. This term is no better and certainly no more accurate than the erroneous "cycle of violence" or, as Danny Rubinstein of Ha'aretz prefers, "cycle of terror." The cycle image, that each side's attacks are equally in response to the previous attack on them, provides its advocates with the argument that the only way to break the cycle is for one side to refrain from taking the next action. Since the terrorists are certainly not going to be the first to stop, it only stands to reason that Israel lead the way. The central problem with this thesis is that it has nothing to do with reality. Terrorist leaders continue to plan attacks, whether the IDF is engaged in active operations against them or not. There is no cycle: not of violence, nor terror, nor vengeance. There is a campaign of terrorism being perpetrated against the population of Israel and the actions of the IDF and other security services attempting to prevent these attacks or, at least, minimize their effects. Rubinstein ("Terror doesn't need Hamas leaders," Ha'aretz, September 11, 2003) argues further that the attacks on Hamas leaders are actually detrimental to Israeli security. Since the Hamas leaders have no fear of death, and since the terrorist organization is so decentralized that it has no need of leaders, the only result of the attempts on the lives of the leadership is vengeance-based enhanced motivation to commit terrorist attacks. Rubinstein is wrong on all counts. Hamas leaders care very much about their own lives. They may have no regard for the lives of their followers, but they scramble like rabbits when they anticipate and IDF attack against them. If they were so devil-may-care about their own safety, they would not have gone underground and refrained from meeting except under conditions of extreme security. Incidentally, following last Saturday's attack on Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and colleagues during their meeting in Gaza, it is unlikely that the Hamas leadership will appear in the same place at the same time. This will surely put a cramp in their organizing styles. The terrorist organizations are certainly decentralized, but they are still organizations. Direction, strategy, recruitment of leaders and the like are the functions of the higher leadership. It may be a low level operator who straps a bomb on himself and blows himself up in a cafe, but the bomb came from somewhere, as did the materials to make it. It would be folly to assume that killing off the leadership will end terrorism overnight. It would be even greater folly to think that the organization can survive for long without a higher leadership. As we wrote earlier this week ("Hamas' Revenge," September 7, 2003) Hamas' threats of revenge would carry much greater weight if they weren't threatening to kill Israelis all the time. There may be a certain increase in short term motivation to accelerate terrorist attacks immediately after a Hamas leader is killed, but there is certainly no indication that periods in which Hams leaders were not killed were any less afflicted by terrorism. The cycle of (pick your term) violence/terror/vengeance is not a cycle because it is not symmetrical. It may hold some attraction for those who believe that terrorism will cease as soon as its victims stop fighting it. This approach is worse than wrong; it is dangerous. chodoff.blogspot.com