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

To: michael97123 who wrote (183802)	3/20/2006 11:42:01 AM
From: Hawkmoon	Respond to of 281500

A New Landscape: Hamas Digs In Digs in, or is digging a hole. The one thing that was in the favor of the Iranian Ayatollahs is that they had tremendous economic resources to prop them up. Hamas has none of that. There are some natural gas reserves off the Gaza coast, but who's going to provide them the investment and development capital necessary to develop them? Palestine, aside from agriculture, has few resources to generate income and tax revenue. In this case, they resemble Afghanistan, more than Iran. And thus, Hamas will have to use extremely coercive internal controls, as well as distractive political policies focusing upon their conflict with Israel, in order to sustain their political dominance. But eventually economic realities will have to be recognized by the Palestinians. Even with additional support and aid from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, it is not certain that these governments will want to risk alienating the US by maintaining this support. How much timewill be necessary for Palestinians to recognize these realities is obviously uncertain. But Hamas will not likely receive the same manner of "special status" that Arafat and Fatah enjoyed amongst European governments. Hawk