Troubles persist at the peace-processing plant. One and one half decades ago Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, was taken at his selectively public word that but for Israeli garrisons, he and his Arab fellows would have independence, nationalism, civility — and detente with the Jewish state beside them.
The effort to rehabilitate terrorists and turn a gangster into a gentlemen was supplied with manpower, resources, and nominal demands of conduct and governance. To Yasser Arafat, of course, one step closer to his patrons' definition of peace was his apprehension of the end of Israel. Western patience became extenuation, and then indiscrimination. The domain comprised of the Palestinian territories was to be the first state built on the cusp of the fanciful "end of history," and instead rose up as an industrial monument to antisemitism. Following the violent takeover of Gaza by Iranian proxy Hamas, it is now a staging ground for total war against American interests and allies.
Arafat is dead; his deranged beliefs still dwell. From Washington, the word is that calls for any reckoning are importunate: confidence in anyone but Arafat's protége is too much worry, and, too, the supplementary guns have already shipped out. Were President Bush to have the political strength or will, he might think about methods used to piece together neighborhoods, then societies, of good men — as accomplished in Mosul, Ramadi, and Tal Afar. American troops would move into the Palestinian slums and kill or capture every man who serves Fatah or Hamas. Then they would establish and safeguard a parliament attended by bookkeepers, streetsweepers, greengrocers, and all other manner of the mistreated, deluded people who have known the forced choice between one thug and another thug first as righteousness and then as democracy.
As in Iraq and Afghanistan, our forces and those governing in Ramallah would be under exceptional assault by the opponents of liberalism, but then, whither Oslo? For the greatest chance for peace in Palestine now: send in the Marines.