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HAVE THE PALESTINIANS REACHED A DEAD END ?

It is easy and partially correct to read President Bush’s dramatic shift on Israeli settlements as another election year tilt toward Israel, albeit a more consequential one than the usual aid package. On the other hand, I question whether the Palestinian political leadership composed mostly of Arafat’s highly corrupt leftist gangsters and the Islamist extremists of HAMAS and Islamic Jihad have reached a historical dead end ? `

Justice makes a claim for a Palestinian state. The ideal solution to the Mideast would be two states, Israel and Palestine, both liberal and democratic, as part of a regional free trade organization or common market. However, politically there seems to be a creeping realization caused by Arafat’s endless terrorism, intifada, corruption and intransigence that in essence, expending any effort to work with these people is worse than useless. They want a state and the ” right ” to commit terrorism and if forced to choose between the two the Palestinian leadership will choose terrorism every time. The Palestinian celebration of 9/11 stuck a raw nerve in this country; outside of leftist and anti-semitic circles the Palestinians are becoming identified erroneously in the public mind with al Qaida, Saddam and Hezbollah into a generic ” enemy “. This is a shame because the PA is not a democracy and the average Palestinian has little control over the PA, still less over Hamas type extremists.

The objection can be made that Ariel Sharon is also an anti-Arab extremist, which is true and that Israeli settlements are a major obstacle to peace, also true. However, had the PA not launched it’s suicide-bomber campaign against Israeli civilians, Sharon almost certainly never would have been elected and the PA might have reached a livable compromise with a Labor government. Not an ideal bargain for revanchist nationalists and Islamists but something that would have allowed both Palestinians and Israelis to live relatively normal lives in separate states.

Palestinians do not have the strength to wrest their demands by force. Their leaders have brought them into a diplomatic and moral blind alley and earned the hostility of the world’s most powerful nation. What they need most now is a Mandela or a Gandhi, not an Arafat.

THE EVOLUTIONARY BASIS FOR ARCHIMEDES AND DA VINCI

Neuroscientists have discovered clues to two tantalizing aspects of human cognition that have a fundamental relationship to the advent of civilization – aesthetics and insight.

According to Scientific American, brain mapping experiments have pinpointed the prefrontal cortex and the right hemishere’s temporal cortex respectively as the locations where appreciation of beauty and creative, intuitive, thinking take place. These findings may explain the relative explosion of tool-making, decorative ornamentation, symbolic conceptualization and emerging social complexity among humans in the last 10,000 – 100,000 years as Homo sapiens sapiens superceded Neanderthals and earlier hominid relatives.

TOO MANY CHIEFS AND NO ONE IN CHARGE

Much has been written- some of it hysterical, some of it pollyannish – about the current uprisings in Iraq. Set aside the complexities of Iraqi society for one moment because recent American occupation policy would be counterproductive if implemented virtually anywhere. I say this as a fervent supporter of the war who considered Saddam’s Iraq to be part of one interrrelated set of strategic threats facing the United States that encompass the War on Terror – we are disorganized, uncertain and are losing our way at a critical moment.

I’m not certain which conflict is most responsible for the current debacle – Rumsfeld vs. Powell, Bremer vs. Abizaid, Army vs. Marines, neocons vs. pragmatists but I do know President Bush is responsible for not choosing one approach to occupation policy in principle and insisting that we stick with it !. Iraqis are coming to see the occupation as ineffective yet brutal, trigger-happy yet weak, determined yet confused – a dangerous, lurching, incomprehensible giant that they wish to depart yet fear will abandon them in the lurch.

It did not have to be this way.

What sense was there – militarily speaking – in the midst of an important punitive operation against Fajullah to suddenly and incompetently provoke the Sadrist lunatic fringe while allowing al-Sadr free movement to set an uprising in motion ? Al-Sadr, the Shiite equivalent of a noisy, up and coming ” punk ” out to make his bones has been elevated from a minor nuisance to a potent symbol of anti-Americanism. Does Somalia and Mohammed Farrah Aidid not ring any bells within the bureaucracy ?

If Fajullah was going to face an operation along the lines of Abraham Lincoln’s General Order 100 then the task should have been taken to completion or not begun at all. Now we stand with hundreds of Iraqi dead but American forces prematurely halted but still not in control of the city and seemingly afraid or incapable of asserting martial law. Al-Sadr, instead of being dead or in jail, is going to be perhaps going to be allowed a dignified, negotiated surrender that makes a mockery of CPA bluster. What conclusion It is better to be feared than loved but not if you make yourself hated.

Worse. The headless occupating policy will make America both hated and ridiculous. A mean achievement that. Mr. Bush needs to get engaged or lose the war- a war that Mr. Kerry and his party have no stomach for any more than Spain’s Socialists or Labor’s dissident backbenchers.

A CASE OF LIMITED INTELLIGENCE

Ted Gup, author of The Book of Honor, takes America’s Intelligence Community to task. This is a friend of the IC speaking so perhaps, in psychobabble parlance, we can consider this an ” intervention “.

UPDATE:

Tenet agrees.

THE RETURN OF ZENPUNDIT

I’m finally back. Actually I’ve been back but a number of projects have fully engaged my time to the point where blogging was very far down my list of things to do. Thank you for the well-wishes via the comment board and email – Mrs. Zenpundit and I enjoyed the time away, neither of us having had a vacation for several years.

Many topics to tackle tomorrow – especially Iraq.