drewish.com

more on bush's "peace plan"

nytimes: Bush Demands Arafat's Ouster Before U.S. Backs a New State; Israelis Welcome Tough Line

Israeli officials were delighted. "I thought all the way through the speech, this is the carrot, now comes the stick," a senior Israeli official said. "There was no stick � because we don't deserve the stick."

salon: Fiddling while the Middle East burns

Forget the fact that it is far from clear that Arafat, and the Palestinian leadership in general, supports the current wave of terror attacks or has the power to stop them. The Bush administration presumably knows that the Palestinians are not going to suddenly elect to throw out the corrupt leadership of the Palestinian Authority and replace it with a bunch of hitherto nonexistent Martin Luther Arafats just because the American president -- whose words and actions have shown him to be a one-note moralist who is ignorant of the issues -- told them to.

salon: "Clear moral vision" or "sugar-coated palliative"?

This is the cycle. The only way to break that cycle is to stop rewarding the terrorists. Sharon is rewarding the terrorists. Sharon, in effect, is saying any single person who doesn't want to see a Palestinian state can take an act of terror and destroy the process. This would be as if the U.S. government had said to African-Americans in the 1960s, "We will give you civil rights as long as there's an end to all black crime in the United States. There has to be an entire year with no murders of white people by black people." It's never going to happen.

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