Sunday, July 01, 2007

Pseudorealities

Jordan rejects a confederation with Palestinians in the West Bank. So ends the hope of some diplomats and pundits that Jordan would ride to the rescue of the Palestinians living there. It would appear that the Arab world is continuing to forsake their Palestinian brethren.

Of course, those Arab countries, including Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia have little use for the Palestinians, who have been troublesome since the get-go and whose leaders have started wars and conflicts wherever they go.

Israel will be releasing tax revenues to the Palestinian Authority in coming days. I have a bad feeling about that as the money will help Abbas and the terrorists fund their operations. I have an even worse feeling about the idea of the US training Fatah thugs in the West Bank. Why should we be dealing with Fatah when they are just as dedicated to Israel's destruction as Hamas? The diplomats continue to ignore that detail in pressing their psuedorealist vision.

The rockets keep hitting Israel. No doubt the US media will only highlight this fact in passing when Israel goes after Palestinian terrorists with airstrikes.

An attempt to eliminate Hizbullah's Nasrallah by Israeli agents, with assistance from Fatah's Dahlan and Saudi Arabia supposedly failed. Damn. Politics and national security would make strange bedfellows if that report is accurate and I have my doubts. There are many reasons to plant a story like that - to show that slightly less radical terrorist groups are willing to deal with Israel as collaborators against the more radical groups (which is a strategy that Hamas has been pressing against Fatah).

Egypt says that it will restart efforts to secure the release of Gilad Shalit. Shalit has been held by Hamas for more than a year and there's no sign that Hamas is any closer to releasing Shalit today than they were a year ago unless Israel decides to release hundreds of Palestinian terrorists from Israeli jails.

UPDATE:
The pseudorealism extends all the way to Pakistan, where it has taken more than a year for Musharaf to realize that appeasement of tribes who have been offering sanctuary to al Qaeda and Taliban would not work.
The Pakistani president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, was warned this month that Islamic militants and Taliban fighters were rapidly spreading beyond the country’s lawless tribal areas and that without “swift and decisive action,” the growing militancy could engulf the rest of the country.

The warning came in a document from the Interior Ministry, which said Pakistan’s security forces in North-West Frontier Province abutting the tribal areas were outgunned and outnumbered and had forfeited authority to the Taliban and their allies.

“The ongoing spell of active Taliban resistance has brought about serious repercussions for Pakistan,” says the 15-page document, which was shown to The New York Times. “There is a general policy of appeasement towards the Taliban, which has further emboldened them.”
UPDATE:
So, instead of realizing the error of their ways and deciding to end the experiment of backing Fatah thugs against Hamas, the State Department is looking at how to reorganize the funding of the same. Why? There is no good reason to believe that Fatah will ever reform itself. It's had a decade to do so. Arafat died and Abbas assumed power and they did no such thing. They've now lost Gaza to Hamas and there is no reason to believe that Fatah's leadership will take the steps necessary to actually bring peace.

They instead hold their hands out to get a piece of the action. They remain thugs and kleptocrats to the end.
“I see no evidence that [Dayton’s mission] succeeded,” said Shoshana Bryen of the Washington-based Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs of efforts to reform the Palestinian security forces and secure the Gaza crossings.

“They simply didn’t fight, they abandoned their posts,” she said of the Fatah forces outgunned but not outnumbered by Hamas. She said, though, that the failure was larger than the battle in Gaza and stemmed from flawed American expectations that any US security coordinator could lead Fatah security services in a direction amenable to US and Israeli interests rather than their own.

Many Israeli security officials said they have been turned off from the whole Dayton enterprise since Fatah forces fell to Hamas, saying that it’s now hard to take his efforts at security reform seriously and interpreting the situation as an example of American inability to grasp the realities of the Middle East.
The flaws in the US security plan was that they continued to operate under the assumption that Fatah could be turned away from terrorism to a functioning government. The diplomats deluded themselves, and misled the leaders in government that this could happen.

Fatah remains led by terrorists. Their security forces are led by terrorists, and the most capable faction of Fatah is a terrorist splinter group answerable to Abbas; the al Aqsa Martyr's Brigade. Yet, the US, Israel, the Quartet, and the diplomats ignore this hoping that they can paper over those inconvenient facts.

They can't.

The facts are exactly as they appear. Fatah remains dedicated to Israel's destruction and does just enough to continue getting money from the West, and everyone limps along from one crisis to the next. Hamas threw a huge monkey wrench into the situation by claiming Gaza for themselves and will then seek to liberate the West Bank and all of Israel from occupying forces, whether it is Israel or Fatah and their minions.

Oh, and you know that the world has gone mad when there is 42% of Israelis who think that the US is too supportive of their country (page 27). (HT: Conflict Blotter).

If this is what passes as support, I'd wonder what they mean by opposition.

86% of Palestinians have an unfavorable view of the US. Heh, big surprise there. We're back the kleptocrat-terrorists against the homicidal terrorists. Egypt and Jordan also have high unfavorables for the US.

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