Time for a new approach in the Occupied Territories

Since Hamas was democratically elected to govern the Palestinian Authority, the Quartet has maintained that it will not engage the PA until Hamas renounces violence and recognizes Israel's right to exist.

As a result of Hamas's refusal to meet those conditions, the Quartet imposed a financial and diplomatic boycott of the PA that resulted in the PA being unable to meet its obligations to its employees and provide basic services for its citizens. This unfairly punished the Palestinian people, creating further animosity towards the West and sparking conflict between Fatah and Hamas. The conflict ended once they agreed on a unity government during meetings in Mecca, in which it was agreed that a power-sharing agreement would take place, with many key ministerial posts being occupied by neutral persons.

The U.S. continues to re-enforce its nearly irrelevant position in the Middle Eastern peace process by sticking to the premise that Hamas must recognize Israel's right to exist, while at the same time condoning Israel's right to illegally occupy East Jerusalem and portions of the West Bank while building an illegal land-grab barrier. In short, the position is neatly summarized by Ahmed Amr:

"Hamas wants a state that doesn't recognize Israel and Israel wants recognition without granting the Palestinians a state...As recent events has demonstrated, the recognition of Israel by Yasser Arafat was rewarded with more illegal settlements, more collective punishment, more repression, a monstrous apartheid wall and a stubborn refusal to negotiate a reasonable peace deal. Oslo was a scam and the Road Map was conceived as a public relations campaign to cover up for the Bush administration's abandonment of the 'peace process...Those Palestinians who feel obliged to accept Israel as a concrete reality should merely be required to recognize it for what it is - a racist colonial land grabbing settler state built on the premise that the native people of the land should be evicted based on a test of faith.

It is infuriating that Israeli apologists continue to argue that a European convert to Judaism has an inherent 'right to return' to the Holy Land after two thousand years of presumed absence. And yet these very same voices insist that the Palestinian Muslims and Christians should give up on their dream to return to their native soil after only two generations of well-documented exile.

It is unreasonable to expect an occupied nation to recognize its occupiers as a pre-condition for negotiation, as I write it I am reminded of how absurd the claim is.

Today a voice of reason emerges from Russia, which has announced that, according to BBC: "Russia says it will work to lift sanctions which western governments imposed on the Palestinian Authority after Hamas won elections last year. The announcement came as Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal was visiting Moscow. Russia risked the wrath of the United States and Israel when it decided to hold talks with Hamas."

I suspect the gesture from Russia was done more to slight the U.S. then out of compassion for the Palestinian's plight, but regardless of the motive, it is a step in the right direction that was recently echoed by the Economist:

Mr. Olmert will ask how he can be expected to do any business at all with a Palestinian gov. whose dominant party denies Israel's right to exist...It is a good question. But here is a better one. What is the Alternative? Refusing to talk to the Palestinians' two-headed monster will not make Hamas go away. It has shown over the past year that it is too widely supported to be browbeaten into concessions either by sanctions or by pressure from Fatah.

The trick now is to make statehood look real enough to Palestinians for the majority to abandon Hamas's bleak vision of war to the end. When Palestinians come to believe that a generous two-state deal is really available, many may re-consider their support of Hamas...this is a better way to win the argument against Hamas than the past year's vain efforts to make the Palestinians jump through verbal hoops they have come to find humiliating.

The Bush Administration's refusal to engage with the PA is an interesting one that further highlights the administration's duplicity and hypocrisy. William Arkin, in The Problem with Pakistan, highlights how in their typically over-simplified world view of Good vs. Evil, it is odd that we continue to support General Musharraf in Pakistan. Arkin writes:

Saying that 2007 will be a "pivotal year" for Afghanistan, as well as raising concerns that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda leadership are rebuilding and that the Taliban is in resurgence, retired Vice Adm. McConnell, Director of National Intelligence for just a week, had some special words about Pakistan.

Any new attack on the United States, McConnell said, is "most likely" to emerge from Pakistan, which hosts the al Qaeda leadership and other international terrorists in the ungoverned northwest region, and which serves as the breeding ground for broader Islamic radicalism.

"Many of our most important interests intersect in Pakistan, where the Taliban and al-Qa'ida maintain critical sanctuaries," McConnell said in his written report.

Maples said that despite a September 2006 accord between Islamabad and North Waziristan tribes to curtail attacks into Afghanistan, "the tribes have not abided by most terms of the agreement," leading to increased "freedom of movement and operation" for al-Qaeda's network.

McConnell spoke of the need to eliminate the "safehaven" that the Taliban and others have found in Pakistan's tribal areas, but he also bent over backwards to explain the country's failure to bring the region under central government control: "We recognize that aggressive military action, however, has been costly for Pakistani security forces and appreciate concerns over the potential for sparking tribal rebellion and a backlash by sympathetic Islamic political parties.

So, here is the American contradiction: Al-Qaeda is the greatest threat to the United States, at least according to the U.S. intelligence community and conventional wisdom. The terrorist organization is headquartered and lodged in northwest Pakistan, where it has virtual impunity. It operates within a country that has nuclear weapons and is labeled "a major source of Islamic extremism."

And yet the United States excuses and explains away a military dictatorship for eschewing a "costly" battle that might weaken it? Isn't the very core argument of the Bush administration in Iraq that we need to accept the cost and sacrifice -- no matter what -- in the name of our future security? But Pakistan doesn't? No wonder the Bush administration's worldview is so questionable.

Credibility

On these pages I have previously commented on the lack of credibility of the current Administration and its repercussions on the ability of the United States to execute its foreign policy objectives. Most recently these have been fairly obvious: the justification for the Iraq invasion and America's lack of support for liberal political movements around the world. Following the investigation into the Douglas Feith's intelligence manipulation at the Office for Special Plans ( a dubious moniker) it is becoming alarmingly apparent that there is a serious disconnection between the broad Intelligence Community and those that formulate Policy. For those not familiar:

Pentagon officials undercut the intelligence community in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq by insisting in briefings to the White House that there was a clear relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, the Defense Department's inspector general said Friday.

Acting Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the office headed by former Pentagon policy chief Douglas J. Feith took "inappropriate" actions in advancing conclusions on al-Qaida connections not backed up by the nation's intelligence agencies.

Over the past several months, anyone paying attention can not have missed the increased drum-beating over Iran, from nuclear development to most recently that the highest levels of Iranian government have been supporting Shi'ite militia in Iraq that have been killing American soldiers.

Now this:

A top U.S. general said Tuesday there was no evidence the Iranian government was supplying Iraqi insurgents with highly lethal roadside bombs, apparently contradicting claims by other U.S. military and administration officials.

Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said U.S. forces hunting down militant networks that produced roadside bombs had arrested Iranians and that some of the material used in the devices were made in Iran.

“That does not translate that the Iranian government per se, for sure, is directly involved in doing this,” Pace told reporters in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta. “What it does say is that things made in Iran are being used in Iraq to kill coalition soldiers.”

His remarks might raise questions on the credibility of the claims of high-level Iranian involvement, especially following the faulty U.S. intelligence that was used to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Three senior military officials in Baghdad said Sunday that the highest levels of Iranian government were responsible for arming Shiite militants in Iraq with the bombs, blamed for the deaths of more than 170 U.S. troops

Asked Monday directly if the White House was confident that the weaponry is coming on the approval of the Iranian government, spokesman Tony Snow said, “Yes.”

In Jim Webb's rebuttal to the President's State of the Union Address, he uttered these profound thoughts:

Like so many other Americans, today and throughout our history, we serve and have served, not for political reasons, but because we love our country. On the political issues - those matters of war and peace, and in some cases of life and death - we trusted the judgment of our national leaders. We hoped that they would be right, that they would measure with accuracy the value of our lives against the enormity of the national interest that might call upon us to go into harm's way.

We owed them our loyalty, as Americans, and we gave it. But they owed us - sound judgment, clear thinking, concern for our welfare, a guarantee that the threat to our country was equal to the price we might be called upon to pay in defending it

I believe that not only the President, but also Congress, has failed its citizens in that regard.

In Case of Attack

Hilarious interpretations of Homeland Security Warning Signs.

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce

Thanks to the Daily Dish for bringing this to my attention.

"Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose, and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after having given him so much as you propose. If to-day he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, — 'I see no probability of the British invading us;' but he will say to you, 'Be silent: I see it, if you don't.'

"The provision of the Constitution giving the war making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons: Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions, and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our President where kings have always stood," - Abraham Lincoln, in a letter to William H. Herndon, Feb. 15, 1848.

(Herndon, Lincoln's law partner, had written him arguing that the president as commander-in-chief possessed the right to initiate a war against Mexico without specific Congressional authorization. Photograph by Gardner, Alexander, 1821-1882, taken five days before Lincoln was assassinated.)