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

To: GST who wrote (118192)	10/31/2003 4:07:00 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

The overall pattern of "tactics" is what is at issue. Israel appears committed to "tactics" that center around a military solution to what many see as a political problem. Your premise is that military tactics and political tactics are an either/or choice. This is a false premise. In the real world, diplomacy always uses either force or the threat of it. Moreover, for the past three years, it has been the Palestinians who have been waging the war, having decided that the diplomatic solution they were offered at Taba was inadequate, and their bargains at Oslo no longer held. Why don't you address the Palestinians with the inevitability of a political solution? Any political solution is completely intractable while Arafat lives. That has been proven again and again; scarcely any Israeli disagrees by now (well maybe not Yossi Beilin; he's incorrigible). What the Israelis are arguing about, is essentially the nature of the current war - fight aggressively to keep down Israeli casualties, or wage more of a holding action, even if more Israelis die in the meantime? The thing you seem to forget, is that any approach to an Israeli cease-fire, or quieting of action, is met with more immediate Israeli casualties, a thing very hard for any democratic government to bear. If there were any Palestinian leader who wanted a cease-fire, he could get one easily. But Arafat doesn't want one, and nobody else can do much while he lives.