--wow... am I on the right list? take everything i said about Friedman and -apply it to the great Bradford DeLong's gem here
Say, rather, that once again Yasser Arafat has shown his remarkable talent at never missing an opportunity at missing an opportunity...
Had I been Yasser Arafat, on the evening of September 11--just after sending my goons in to beat up and disperse the people celebrating the destruction of the World Trade Center in the streets--I would have decided that it was time to embark on a program to "differentiate my brand" from that of Al Qaida. I would have told Hamas and Al Aqsa and company that they needed to turn in their weapons--and that they would get them back later after the political situation had settled--and sent the PA Police to collect them. If a few gun battles ensued, fine: I would have spun them as my "Altalena moment."
I then would have spent the next two months condemning in the hardest possible terms Al Qaida's cowardly terrorist atrocity, and pointed out that the Palestinian people had renounced terrorism at Oslo, and relied on the justice of their cause to bring about their state and their victory.
I would also have sent Bandar bin Sultan to tell George W. Bush and company that while we understood that America's commitment to Israel's security was absolute, that the presence of settlers outside of greater Jerusalem was a major, major irritant. And as long as the U.S. was funding an Israel that expanded settlements, that Arab support for the campaign against the Taliban and Al Qaida could not be guaranteed. In the end, I would have had the other Arab governments say that they could not support the counterstrike unless there was concrete evidence that 60+ percent of West Bank settlements would be removed, and unless Yasser Arafat were offered Camp David + with a capital somewhere in Jerusalem. I would have pointed out that George H.W. Bush had frozen pieces of aid to Israel to simply get Shamir to send a diplomat to Madrid, and that with the domestic national security of the U.S. at stake George W. Bush could hardly do less than cut off aid to Israel to enforce the removal of Israeli settlers from regions where they had no business at all.
I would then have ducked, and watched the resulting political battle between Bush, Powell, and Rumsfeld on the one hand and Sharon on the other either achieve a substantial part of my political aims or destroy U.S.-Israeli good feelings.
And then, either as head of a Palestinian state with its capital in Jerusalem and a reduced settler presence, or with Bush and Sharon glaring at each other across the globe, I would have handed their weapons back to Hamas and Al Aqsa...
Instead, Arafat's strategy has led a very large chunk of the Bush Administration and 75%+ of Americans to believe that Sharon is faced with a guy who--like Osama bin Laden--gets his jollies from blowing up twelve year olds, and regards massive civilian casualties not as an unfortunate byproduct of attacks on the enemy's military, but as the raison d'etre of the entire exercise. The U.S. leash on Sharon is now looser than ever before, and it is so loose because the suicide bomber waves since September 11--the pictures of ambulances and blood outside Israeli hotels--have erased any differentiation between Osama bin Laden's "brand" and Yasser Arafat's.
And when there is only one superpower in the world, to embark on a campaign to erase any distinctions in the mind of its citizens between yourself and its worst enemy is an extremely, extremely dangerous thing to do...
Brad DeLong