No Peace But the Peace of the Grave

That's all Palestinians have to offer Israelis:

Palestinians are the only people apparently incapable of acting in their own self-interest. For generations they have been willfully ignorant of the fact that their refusal to make peace with Israel serves only their enemies. Since Israel was created by UN mandate, the Palestinians have been rejected by Jordan (itself 60% Palestinian), Egypt and Syria. Saudi Arabia and Lebanon don't want them. But for decades under Arafat, the Palestinians did the bidding of the same countries that rejected them. Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and others bought Arafat's regime for the price of terrorist campaigns against Israel. They fund and provide sanctuary for Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups for two reasons: first, to keep alive the Palestinians' hope of erasing Israel from the map; and second to absorb the casualties in the terror war against Israel that those nations don't wish to suffer. In the Middle East, the stability that we have helped nurture is the stability of terrorist states.

Last year's Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip was a council of despair. Ungovernable and with a deeply-embedded terrorist infrastructure, Gaza was only a source of casualties for Israel. Withdrawal - accompanied by sealing the borders to prevent terrorist incursions - appeared the last best hope. Maybe Ariel Sharon could have brought off the idea of withdrawing and sealing off Gaza as a terrorist base. But Ehud Olmert is no Sharon, and as Olmert watched Gaza became Hamastan.

Terrorist, anarchic Hamastan proved a jar that couldn't be sealed. This year alone about eight hundred rockets were fired from it into Israel and though dozens of terrorist incursions were foiled, more and more succeeded as the Gaza-based terrorists learned how to penetrate the Israeli barriers. Still, the Olmert government hung back. It lacked the courage and decisiveness needed to re-enter Gaza to stamp out the terrorist enclaves. And, more importantly, it couldn't go back into Gaza without admitting that its withdrawal policy was a failure. Instead, Olmert ineptly struck back at rocket launch points and Israel's ability to defend itself seemed - thanks to Palestinian disinformation campaigns directed at sympathetic media -- to produce innocent civilian casualties among the Palestinians.

Hamastan poses problems both too large and too small for Israel to solve. The small problems, such as terrorists excavating the terror tunnel used to surprise Gilad Shalit's unit, can never be entirely prevented. The military strike into Gaza this week won't re-establish Israeli occupation, and it will from time to time be repeated. Bigger problems, such as the Hamas government and the support it gets from Israel's neighbors, won't, say some top Israelis, be solved by topping Hamas because there's no moderate Palestinians to take their place. That is another counsel of despair. Israel is stuck in a military cycle it thinks can't be broken. But it can, and it must, for our benefit as much as Israel's.

Israel can never settle the Palestinian problem by dealing only with the Palestinians just as we cannot ever settle Iraq's problems by dealing only with Iraqis. Because Israel's neighbors, and Iraq's, are the sources of their problems, so they must be the focus of the solutions. They are regional problems. If they are not solved throughout the region, they will not be solved at all.

I had hoped that the Iraq War would have been swiftly followed up by the toppling of the mullahs in Iran and Assad's Ba'athist regime in Syria. The Palestinian problem then would have been solved, with the two chief state sponsors of Palestinian terrorism removed from the board.

Instead, we've dawdled, and let the wet concrete around our feet set.

The untold story of the Iraq War is that the insurgency is nothing more than an act of war by Iran and Syria against the United States. As with bin Laden, we choose to ignore this.

The Israelis at least sent a message to Assad by buzzing his house with warplanes. We have been too meek, too weak, to do anything. We won't even support the homegrown insurgencies within Iran and Syria.

For all our military might, is there any nation on Earth with a weaker political will than America? Not her people, assuredly, but those spineless little wimps in Washington, so afraid to be criticized in Le Monde.

One must be feared, loved, or respected in this world to endure. We are not feared. We are not loved. And we certainly are not respected.

The biggest mistake the Israelis ever made was listening to Bill Clinton. George Bush's biggest mistake was emulating him.

I don't know what the President does to occupy his time these days, but it might be nice if he spent some of it seizing the initiative in the terror war. We'll know it's working when Assad is dead and the mullahs gone. Until then, it's just the same old Foggy Bottom gobbledygook.