The Folly of Gaza

We're about to make a huge mistake in the War on Terror:

But Gaza isn't Eden, and this isn't the apple of knowledge. It's a Rohypnol-like apple of ignorance, and it is blinding us to the danger America faces — a danger our Islamofascist enemies see clearly and are primed to take advantage of. We think Gaza is all about Israel and the Palestinians; our enemies know it's mainly about us. We think we are encouraging Israel to hand Gaza over to Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party, local Palestinians with purely local ambitions — ambitions that encompass the whole of Israel, perhaps, but nothing beyond it — ambitions that have nothing to do with us. Our enemies know that behind a Fatah fig leaf, we are handing Gaza over to Hamas, an international terrorist organization of global reach and ambition that is one of America's deadliest enemies. We think Hamas only attacks Jews. They know that Hamas is a main recruiting agent for Arab jihadists, not just from among the 2.4 million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and from the much larger numbers of Palestinians scattered in strategic enclaves throughout the region and the world, but for other Arabs too. We think Hamas sends all these jihadists only to Israel. They know Hamas sends a never-ending stream of them to Afghanistan, Chechnya, the Balkans, Kashmir, Lebanon and, most critically for us right now, to Iraq. And when our press insistently refers to Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the master terrorist who directs the foreign jihadists in Iraq, as "a Jordanian," our enemies laugh. They know Zarqawi has always called himself a Palestinian, and is recognized as such, in Jordan and throughout the Middle East.

To see what Hamas control of Gaza will mean for us in Iraq, we have to see it as our enemies do — not just Hamas, but its parent organization, the Brotherhood, and its longtime partners Hezbollah, al Qaeda, and the Wahhabi and Salafist movements. To do that, forget Israel entirely for a moment. Look only at the terror war against America, and at the geography of Islamofascism that supports it. Place Gaza in that context, and its strategic location jumps out at you. Control of Gaza gives Hamas and its partners direct access to the land border with Egypt, as well as access by sea to terrorist supply ports in Lebanon and Syria, and from them, overland, to the terror training camps in Syria, Lebanon, and Iran and to the ratlines from Syria into Iraq.

This is the reality we face: The "Palestinian democracy" we rattle on about is a mirage no desert-dweller is seduced by. Abu Mazen is president of nothing; his Fatah party no longer exists. It never was anything but a collection of competing terrorist gangs, but Arafat was a master manipulator who controlled them all by keeping the big carrots and sticks in his own hands and wielding them with ruthless cunning. With his death, Fatah splintered into a multitude of shifting groups and now they're not just competing — they're at war, regularly breaking up each others meetings with gunfire and shooting each other down in the streets, along with hapless bystanders. We pretend that with our help and a huge new infusion of Western cash the 58,000-man Palestinian security forces will be able to create order out of this internecine chaos, but this too is a mirage. It's the security forces that are doing most of the shooting, mostly at each other. As U.S. special envoy General William Ward, our no-nonsense military expert on the ground in Gaza told us last week, Palestinian security forces are "dysfunctional." Only about a third of them actually show up for work, and it doesn't make much difference when they do, because the chain of command that supposedly links them to their leaders is so broken that Abbas and his few remaining loyalists can barely get them to protect his headquarters in Ramallah, let alone the whole of Gaza and the West Bank.