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It’s a War, Stupid
Someone remind Colin Powell.
The president ought to remind his secretary of state that we are at war, because Secretary Powell has had a very dangerous senior moment these past few weeks. He has forgotten the mission laid down so elegantly by W. last September, and again in the State of the Union: We will wage war against terrorists and those who harbor them until we have defeated them. The mission of this administration is to win that war.
In one of those confusions typical of people our age, Powell has instead noticed that other people are at war, and his real mission is to get them to stop. He may think it's an admirable mission, but it isn't the one he's supposed to be carrying out. Thus, the all-too-obvious confusion throughout the administration. And from confusion, as any good strategist will tell you, comes defeat.
Powell has fallen prey to several masters of confusion, those in many Middle East capitals, and those in his own building, to whom he has entrusted his policies and thus his reputation. Both are determined to slow and perhaps even stop America's war against terrorism, since neither has any idea how to wage and win it. So the secretary of state has sloshed back into the endless swamp of "peace process" and "shuttle diplomacy," and he is doomed to fail, as all his predecessors since Henry Kissinger failed. They all failed — and he will fail — because they thought they could "solve" the Israel/Arab "problem" by just talking it out and finding some clever scheme that would split all differences and find a way to make everyone happy.
It can't be done. All the skilled diplomats and all the deep thinkers have, from the very beginning, insisted on looking at the wrong problem. The Arab/Israeli matter is a small piece — say it again, a small piece — of a much broader conflict, in which we are directly involved.
That broader conflict is the latest battle between freedom and tyranny, and we only have two choices: We can win or lose. We cannot opt out, we cannot find clever solutions, we cannot invent brilliant schemes. It is simply win it or lose it. It's the war, stupid.
Arafat is but one of many petty tyrants who wish to extinguish freedom in the Middle East. He is but one element in the terror network against which we declared war following their attack against us on September 11. That network, once proclaimed to be so shadowy that it would require an entirely new kind of war to thwart its evil designs, is now crystal clear. Its fighting men and women are enlisted in the PLO, Fatah, Hizbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, al Qaeda and their lesser formations. Its commanders are the terror masters in Baghdad, Damascus and Tehran. Their ideologues and financiers range from Riyadh to the Gulf States. They all saw what happened in Afghanistan, and trembled.
Unable to mount an effective counteroffensive, they stalled for time, tempting us with a variety of "peace" plans and processes, lecturing us that we could not possibly continue the war until we had dealt with the Israelis and the Palestinians, hoping we would fall for it.
We did fall for it, and in falling for it lost our focus. The question is whether the president will reassert the mission and refocus his war cabinet.
It should not be hard, if he has the will. There will be innumerable excuses to call off the Powell exercise and bring home the secretary. It does not much matter, frankly, if this is blamed on Arafat or Sharon, the important thing is to get our bearings firmly fixed. To all those who demand that we get involved in the Israel/Arab morass, the president should simply say, "we're going to win the war first, and then look at it again."
That is the bottom line, from which there is no successful escape. For if we destroy the tyrannies in Iran, Iraq, and Syria, and compel the Saudis to stop funding the global network of murderous Wahhabi schools and mosques that is the assembly line of terrorism, then the Israel/Arab question will look entirely different, both to us and to the combatants.
Deprived of weapons, ammunition, intelligence, and guidance from the terror masters, the Palestinians will suddenly find themselves able to choose their own destiny. And then we can ask them a simple question: What do you really want? They cannot answer it truthfully today, because they are likely to be killed if their tyrannical masters were to hear them say, "I want to be a free person in a normal state." They can only answer it truthfully if freedom is a real option.
And freedom is what America is supposed to be all about. Tell the secretary of state: We are fighting a war for freedom. Stop playing into the hands of the tyrants. It's unworthy of a great democratic power.
In one of those confusions typical of people our age, Powell has instead noticed that other people are at war, and his real mission is to get them to stop. He may think it's an admirable mission, but it isn't the one he's supposed to be carrying out. Thus, the all-too-obvious confusion throughout the administration. And from confusion, as any good strategist will tell you, comes defeat.
Powell has fallen prey to several masters of confusion, those in many Middle East capitals, and those in his own building, to whom he has entrusted his policies and thus his reputation. Both are determined to slow and perhaps even stop America's war against terrorism, since neither has any idea how to wage and win it. So the secretary of state has sloshed back into the endless swamp of "peace process" and "shuttle diplomacy," and he is doomed to fail, as all his predecessors since Henry Kissinger failed. They all failed — and he will fail — because they thought they could "solve" the Israel/Arab "problem" by just talking it out and finding some clever scheme that would split all differences and find a way to make everyone happy.
It can't be done. All the skilled diplomats and all the deep thinkers have, from the very beginning, insisted on looking at the wrong problem. The Arab/Israeli matter is a small piece — say it again, a small piece — of a much broader conflict, in which we are directly involved.
That broader conflict is the latest battle between freedom and tyranny, and we only have two choices: We can win or lose. We cannot opt out, we cannot find clever solutions, we cannot invent brilliant schemes. It is simply win it or lose it. It's the war, stupid.
Arafat is but one of many petty tyrants who wish to extinguish freedom in the Middle East. He is but one element in the terror network against which we declared war following their attack against us on September 11. That network, once proclaimed to be so shadowy that it would require an entirely new kind of war to thwart its evil designs, is now crystal clear. Its fighting men and women are enlisted in the PLO, Fatah, Hizbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, al Qaeda and their lesser formations. Its commanders are the terror masters in Baghdad, Damascus and Tehran. Their ideologues and financiers range from Riyadh to the Gulf States. They all saw what happened in Afghanistan, and trembled.
Unable to mount an effective counteroffensive, they stalled for time, tempting us with a variety of "peace" plans and processes, lecturing us that we could not possibly continue the war until we had dealt with the Israelis and the Palestinians, hoping we would fall for it.
We did fall for it, and in falling for it lost our focus. The question is whether the president will reassert the mission and refocus his war cabinet.
It should not be hard, if he has the will. There will be innumerable excuses to call off the Powell exercise and bring home the secretary. It does not much matter, frankly, if this is blamed on Arafat or Sharon, the important thing is to get our bearings firmly fixed. To all those who demand that we get involved in the Israel/Arab morass, the president should simply say, "we're going to win the war first, and then look at it again."
That is the bottom line, from which there is no successful escape. For if we destroy the tyrannies in Iran, Iraq, and Syria, and compel the Saudis to stop funding the global network of murderous Wahhabi schools and mosques that is the assembly line of terrorism, then the Israel/Arab question will look entirely different, both to us and to the combatants.
Deprived of weapons, ammunition, intelligence, and guidance from the terror masters, the Palestinians will suddenly find themselves able to choose their own destiny. And then we can ask them a simple question: What do you really want? They cannot answer it truthfully today, because they are likely to be killed if their tyrannical masters were to hear them say, "I want to be a free person in a normal state." They can only answer it truthfully if freedom is a real option.
And freedom is what America is supposed to be all about. Tell the secretary of state: We are fighting a war for freedom. Stop playing into the hands of the tyrants. It's unworthy of a great democratic power.
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Phil Reeves in Jenin
16 April 2002
The Guardian
A monstrous war crime that Israel has tried to cover up for a fortnight has finally been exposed. Its troops have caused devastation in the centre of the Jenin refugee camp, reached yesterday by The Independent, where thousands of people are still living amid the ruins.
A residential area roughly 160,000 square yards about a third of a mile wide has been reduced to dust. Rubble has been shovelled by bulldozers into 30ft piles. The sweet and ghastly reek of rotting human bodies is everywhere, evidence that it is a human tomb. The people, who spent days hiding in basements crowded into single rooms as the rockets pounded in, say there are hundreds of corpses, entombed beneath the dust, under a field of debris, criss-crossed with tank and bulldozer treadmarks.
In one nearby half-wrecked building, gutted by fire, lies the fly-blown corpse of a man covered by a tartan rug. In another we found the remains of 23-year-old Ashraf Abu Hejar beneath the ruins of a fire-blackened room that collapsed on him after being hit by a rocket. His head is shrunken and blackened. In a third, five long-dead men lay under blankets.
A quiet. sad-looking young man called Kamal Anis led us across the wasteland, littered now with detritus of what were once households, foam rubber, torn clothes, shoes, tin cans, children's toys. He suddenly stopped. This was a mass grave, he said, pointing.
We stared at a mound of debris. Here, he said, he saw the Israeli soldiers pile 30 bodies beneath a half-wrecked house. When the pile was complete, they bulldozed the building, bringing its ruins down on the corpses. Then they flattened the area with a tank. We could not see the bodies. But we could smell them.
A few days ago, we might not have believed Kamal Anis. But the descriptions given by the many other refugees who escaped from Jenin camp were understated, not, as many feared and Israel encouraged us to believe, exaggerations. Their stories had not prepared me for what I saw yesterday. I believe them now.
Until two weeks ago, there were several hundred tightly-packed homes in this neighbourhood called Hanat al-Hawashim. They no longer exist.
Around the central ruins, there are many hundreds of half-wrecked homes. Much of the camp – once home to 15,000 Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war – is falling down. Every wall is speckled and torn with bullet holes and shrapnel, testimony of the awesome, random firepower of Cobra and Apache helicopters that hovered over the camp.
Building after building has been torn apart, their contents of cheap fake furnishings, mattresses, white plastic chairs spewed out into the road. Every other building bears the giant, charred, impact mark of a helicopter missile. Last night there were still many families and weeping children still living amid the ruins, cut off from the humanitarian aid. Ominously, we found no wounded, although there was a report of a man being rescued from beneath ruins only an hour before we arrived.
Those who did not flee the camp, or not detained by the army, have spent the bombardment in basements, enduring day after day of terror. Some were forced into rooms by the soldiers, who smashed their way into houses through the walls. The UN says half of the camp's 15,000 residents were under 18. As the evening hush fell over these killing fields, we could suddenly hear the children chattering. The mosques, once so noisy at prayer time, were silent.
Israel was still trying to conceal these scenes yesterday. It had refused entry to Red Cross ambulances for nearly a week, in violation of the Geneva Convention. Yesterday it continued to try to keep us out.
Jenin, in the northern end of the occupied West Bank, remained "a closed military zone", was ringed Merkava tanks, army Jeep patrols, and armoured personnel carriers. Reporters caught trying to get in were escorted out. A day earlier the Israeli armed forces took in a few selected journalists to see sanitised parts of the camp. We simply walked across the fields, flitted through an olive orchard overlooked by two Israeli tanks, and into the camp itself.
We were led in by hands gesturing at windows. Hidden, whispering people directed us through narrow alleys they thought were clear. When there were soldiers about, a finger would raise in warning, or a hand waved us back. We were welcomed by people desperate to tell what had occurred. They spoke of executions, and bulldozers wrecking homes with people inside. "This is mass murder committed by Ariel Sharon," Jamel Saleh, 43, said. "We feel more hate for Israel now than ever. Look at this boy." He placed his hand on the tousled head of a little boy, Mohammed, the eight-year-old son of a friend. "He saw all this evil. He will remember it all." So will everyone else who saw the horror of Jenin refugee camp. Palestinians who entered the camp yesterday were almost speechless.
Rajib Ahmed, from the Palestinian Energy Authority, came to try to repair the power lines. He was trembling with fury and shock. "This is mass murder. I have come here to help by I have found nothing but devastation. Just look for yourself." All had the same message: tell the world.
1) Who can declare war (U.S. Constitution) (Hint: Congress)
2) Have they declared war? (Hint: No)
"To argue with those who have renounced the use and authority of reason is as futile as to administer medicine to the dead" - Thomas Paine
It would be helpful, however, if Annie attributed the article to its actual author, Michael Ledeen, Contributing Editor of the National Review Online. The article was posted by NRO on Monday morning, April 15, 2002.