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

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (23510)	1/8/2004 4:02:57 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 793618

Self-Defense Fence By Clifford D. May Scripps Howard News Service January 8, 2004 It takes some nerve to scold people for defending their children from terrorists -- the more so when their method of defense is simply to erect a fence to keep the murderers from reaching their intended victims. Yet critics have lashed out at the Israeli government's decision to erect a security barrier to separate Israel proper from the West Bank communities that have harbored suicide terrorists for years. Not the least of these critics is the International Court of Justice in The Hague which has granted itself the jurisdiction to hold a hearing on Israel's fence next month. Using fences to keep out those intent on committing crimes is hardly an innovative idea. As the media watchdog group PRIMER (Promoting Responsibility in Middle East Reporting) has illustrated in a series of pictures available at its website (www.tampabayprimer.org) such barriers can be found virtually all over the world. For example, the U.S. has a fence along its southern border. That fence is primarily to keep out Mexicans seeking jobs rather than bombers seeking children. But if the former is justifiable, surely the latter is as well. A well-fortified zone divides Korea. The purpose is to keep out North Koreans who, one supposes, consider Americans to be “military occupiers” of South Korea. India is in the process of erecting barriers to separate its territory from that of Pakistan -- from which Jihadi terrorists have frequently infiltrated. The terrorists say India is “occupying” Kashmir. Heard any objections from the European Union? Botswana is erecting an electric fence to keep out Zimbabweans attempting to escape Robert Mugabe's oppression. Apparently, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan hasn't a problem with that barrier – or with the Marxist, racist dictator Mugabe, for that matter. Unlike the countries above, Israel is fighting a war. The enemy's base is on the West Bank. Over the past three years since Yasser Arafat turned down the offer of an independent state in more than 95% of the West Bank and Gaza, 900 Israelis have been killed and 6,000 injured by terrorists whom Arafat has never seriously attempted to suppress. On the contrary, Arafat has encouraged and funded them. Those who argue that the fence should not represent a final border have a point. The Israelis concede that point, agreeing that any borders between Israel and what may become an independent Palestinian state should be “determined by negotiations.” The problem is that the Palestinians who now wield power refuse to negotiate a deal that would lead to a Palestinian state living peacefully next to a Jewish state. Some Arab leaders are candid enough to acknowledge this reality. Last week, Prince Hassan Bin Talal, uncle of Jordan's ruler King Abdullah, told the Italian newspaper La Stampa that Israeli Prime Ariel Sharon is a pragmatic leader who is having trouble finding a pragmatic partner on the Palestinian side. "Unfortunately, we can see the growing influence of Hamas and Hezbollah among the Palestinians," he told the newspaper. Indeed, Hamas and Hezbollah are not interested in borders with Israel. Their openly stated goal is to destroy Israel and to replace it with a radical Islamist state. Such intransigence also is not new. It was pursuit of this same goal – Israel's annihilation -- that led to Israel's occupation of the West Bank in the first place. In 1967, Egypt (which then ruled Gaza), Syria (which then held the Golan Heights) and Jordan (which then administered the West Bank) explicitly announced that their intention was to wage a final war to drive Israelis into the sea. But Israelis prevailed in that conflict. In so doing, they took possession of territories that had long been a staging ground for terrorism and from which the aggression against them had been launched. Israel did not annex most of this property, as many other countries have done in similar circumstances. Instead, they returned the Sinai to Egypt in exchange for a peace treaty and have said they are willing to trade most of the West Bank for a similar arrangement with Palestinians. This history has been generally forgotten in media coverage of the fence. Reports have tended to focus instead on how the barrier is inconveniencing innocent Palestinians who live near it. That's a real and troubling dilemma. But complaints about how and where the fence is being built will be taken more seriously if they come from critics even-handed enough to acknowledge that Israelis do have the right to protect their children from suicide terrorists. What's more, if the fence works as planned, Israel will be able to remove road blocks, check points, tanks and troops from the West Bank. Would that not be an enormous benefit for Palestinians? As noted, security barriers are not a new innovation – not even in Israel. On my first visit to that country -- a fact-finding trip taken with former vice presidential candidate Jack Kemp and Senator Frank Lautenberg shortly after 9/11 -- I visited Gilo, a community in suburban Jerusalem that overlooks a valley in which the scenic Palestinian village of Bet Jallah spreads out. From Bet Jallah, snipers had repeatedly fired at Israeli children as they walked to school. A concrete wall was erected to stop the bullets. On that wall, Israelis had painted a picture of Bet Jallah -- a poignant reminder of the neighbors who had become too dangerous even to gaze upon. Clifford D. May, a former New York Times foreign correspondent, is the president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies a policy institute focusing on terrorism. defenddemocracy.org

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (23510)	1/8/2004 4:14:39 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 793618

One could take the second line and yet advocate a more cautious stance. Yes, that was my point. The choice is not between bandits/police action and political movement/war. The paradigm and the implementation approach are not absolutely connected as your original statement implied. There are two levels of choice. First is a choice between bandits and political movement. Then, for the former, police action is the default. However, for the latter, there is a second choice among war with Iraq and some other unnamed actions. I didn't think it was correct to assert that the political movement paradigm lead automatically to war. I'm glad we've sorted at least that much out. <g> At least part of the disconnect we see between the Administration approach and reticents like me is that the process leading up to the start of the Iraq war seemed like a leap, a rush to judgment, almost a knee-jerk reaction. Those of us not ready to make that leap were naturally distressed by that. It may be that all other options were considered and deemed unfeasible. But that's not the way it came across, which partially accounts for the "cowboy" and "unilateralist" perception and other criticisms. The communication about the reasons for war was framed to rationalize and stir the true believers. The messages really resonated with them even as they further turned off the rest of us. Nadine, if you look at the communication from the perspective of someone from a different subculture, someone not predisposed to send troops to fight evil around the world, it really looked just like the critics said. It looked arrogant and unilateral and predetermined. What was delivered was a justification that would resonate with those predisposed to follow the President into war. What was never presented was a rationale that would make sense to people like me. It seemed they didn't care what we thought, which further exacerbated the unilateralist perception. Had the message been delivered that, while this was triggered by the heinous terrorist act of 9/11, after due study and deliberation it was determined that, sadly, there was no way to stop the terrorists without both draining the swamp and concurrently building a democratic future for the middle east, that the problem wasn't terrorism but islamism, hey, I would have bought it. But that's not the message we got. They called it a war on terrorism. To any self-respecting cultural elite, terrorism is a behavior, an evil, uncivilized behavior. It isn't a political movement, it is a tool, which can be used by political movements. Of course we suffered cognitive dissonance when we're supposed to be at war with terrorists who might once again drop planes on our heads yet there we were putting all our energy into taking over Iraq. Not that Iraq wasn't a blot on civilization and better off out of business, only that the connection between it and terrorism on our shores was tangential. The Prez spent his energy trying to jury rig a weapons connection between 9/11 and Iraq when he should have been framing it as a war on Islamism complete with swamp draining and democracy. When we're faced with such cognitive dissonance, the natural reaction is to distrust competence or motives or both. Which is what happened. With a vengeance. Maybe they expected us all to react like true believers and buy their line, no matter how shaky. Maybe they're so imbued with their own way of thinking and so inbred that they really think that we would all understand their coded messages so that everyone who didn't automatically buy their line really was a fuzzy-headed leftie or a traitor or interested only in partisan advantage. Maybe the war on terrorism morphed into a war on islamism somewhere along the line and they didn't notice it until after the fact. Maybe that's why they never explained it to us. Or maybe they're just cowboys and unilateralists after all. The true believers think they know which. The opposing partisans and the professional pacifists think they know which. The rest of us don't know. What we know is that's we'd like to be treated with respect and have things explained in a way that make sense to us, thoughtful, serious, logically compelling, solemn. "Bring 'em on" may play great with the red team, but it's at best offputting to the rest of us. I have not seen any opponents of Perle's thinking, whether from the Left or from the Realists at State, seriously acknowledge Islamism as a political movement and explain how they would approach the problem. Maybe because they think we're fighting a war on terror. After all, that's what they've been told.