Of course you do. Its your MO. The problem is that you never look at this country and wonder what it may have done to influence this outcome. Why be introspective when you can blame the people living in extreme poverty?
Arafat was living high on the hog, what did he do for Palestinian poverty? That's exactly why Fatah was booted.
We poured billions into Arafatistan...with no strings attached, because they wouldn't allow any outside help in trying to structure a decent government. That's what you get when you throw money at a problem without having any control.
================
January 29, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
The Long Transition
By DAVID BROOKS
As I watched the images from Gaza on Friday — the shocked Fatah activists burning cars and firing rifles — I couldn't help thinking that Yasir Arafat didn't live in vain. He instilled habits of mind that still shape his people.
Arafat channeled Palestinian aspirations into a romantic cause. He created symbols: the kaffiyeh, stubble and gun. He created a nationalist mythology, and instilled in his followers a revolutionary mentality: that political struggle is heroic; that lofty militancy is better than mundane governance; that vehemence is better than compromise; that opponents are evil, terrorism is noble and the eventual triumph will be sublime.
Arafat's organization grew decrepit as he aged, but it never became ordinary. Arafat rejected peace at Camp David because it would have meant giving up the struggle for mere administration. Fatah never really had a place for the prosaic tasks that concern most governments.
And so a rival grew in Palestine. Hamas is attentive to average people, but in one way it is like Fatah. Hamas is also driven by a heroic and revolutionary ideology. It also sees politics in absolutist terms, as vengeance and glory, victory or martyrdom.
The Islamists of Hamas are not as fanatical as the leaders of Iran, the former U.S. envoy Dennis Ross says, but one look at their founding charter reveals a mentality that is hate-filled, paranoid and apocalyptic.
And so while Fatah and Hamas are rivals, neither has a democratic mentality. Democracy in its everyday manifestation is bourgeois and unheroic. It is about partial victories, partial defeats and issues that are never resolved and never go away.
Yet a democratic tide is sweeping the globe, promoted not only by the U.S. but by the spirit of the times, and an election came to Palestine. Voters had to choose between two revolutionary movements, one corrupt and one attentive to their needs.
Such bad choices are becoming common across the Arab world. Democratic success depends on democratic voters and leaders, but those voters and leaders can't be created amid tyrants and terrorists. Under these conditions, the transition to democracy is like building a plane during takeoff.
But flight has begun and the democratic transition hurtles on. Palestine is entering the most traumatic phase, when a romantic, revolutionary people is compelled to transform itself into an ordinary, democratic polity.
This is, as I say, a matter of shifting mentalities, from the heroic and inspiring to the pluralistic and mundane, from poetry and theology to prose and administration. The African National Congress mostly achieved this transition in South Africa, thanks to Nelson Mandela. The Russians have only partially achieved this transition, and still favor the vehement, totalitarian politics encouraged by communist education.
There is no Mandela to lead the Palestinians toward this new mentality. There are only terrorists, the friends of terrorists or the hapless Mahmoud Abbas, a corrupt but democratic man perched precariously atop an organization of militants.
The U.S. promoted democracy in the Middle East on the bet that the transition, though traumatic, would not be catastrophic. But it must be conceded that, as Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker has observed, sometimes the fever doesn't break and leave the patient cured. Sometimes the fever leaves the patient dead.
The crisis moment we all knew was coming is at hand, and all we can say now that it's begun is that the old Arab world led by absolutist movements was no paradise either.
But there is progress. Palestinian voters have already brought some accountability to the Palestinian Authority. Europe never held Arafat and his successors accountable for their corruption, lies and killing. But Palestinian voters, beginning their democratic self-education, have.
The first thing we can do now is to in turn hold the Palestinian people accountable for their choice. By clearly and steadfastly isolating Hamas, we can remind Palestinian voters that their choices too have consequences, that in democracy radical options are self-destructive, even if they make you feel good at the time.
If the Europeans refuse to isolate Hamas, if they forgive radicalism, they will destroy this budding cycle of accountability. They will reward the old revolutionary mentality. They will stop the momentum that makes this the most promising moment as well as the most dangerous. For this is the moment when a truly democratic movement might emerge, opposing both Hamas and the old Fatah.
Finding and fostering that opposition will be the next phase of the long transition.
* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
=======================
the dubya/ head administration doesn't have the will and political talent to navigate such a phase and to seek and foster that opposition.
Last edited by boutons_; 01-29-2006 at 08:00 AM.
One problem with your theory. You are dealing with people who like
Mexico are corrupt to the core. Doesn't really matter which party you
attempt to deal with. Like old I-are-fat used to do, speak in English and
tell us that he was against terrorism and then in Arabic and tell them
we were bad. And all the while pocketing every dime he would get his
hands on.
If Israel, the US and Europe isolate the palestinians and refuse to talk to them that will only leave the door open to Iran's and Syria's influence and funding and therefor an increased radicalization (if thats even possible) by Hamas.
First, it's not possible because Hamas embodies the extremism Iran and Syria are in the middle of trying to renew.
Second, the U.S. and Europe have been engaging that region for decades in an attempt to bring them to the table of world nations. If they step backwards, and this is definitely a step backwards, what's the point in continuing to pour our treasure and time into their future?
Screw 'em.
Yeah, but by funding them, at least in a part, Europe and the US did have some kind of influence in the palestinian leadership, even if it was because of a corrupt interest. If thats stop then there is a absolutely nothing stopping to break loose.
If they ever did, they don't anymore.
Arafat played nice in english and fomented hate in whatever language the Palestinians speak. He was busted doing it several times.
Hamas isn't even pretending.
The Council of Foreign Relations describes the Palestinian Authority's financial system this way:
Sixty percent of the PA's funds come from foreign donors. American Future, quoting the Times of London, has a breakdown of donor contributions to the Palestinian Authority.
How well have these monies been spent? EUFunding.Org has copies of two reports commissioned by the European Parliament in 2003 which examined whether funds provided by the EU were used in a legal and responsible manner. This ought to give some indication of how well donor money is spent in general. The site describes the conclusions reached.
Apparently 60% of all payrolls were disbursed in cash and not by bank transfer, making it difficult to rule out the possibility that vast sums have been used for purposes other than intended. Nor is it clear whether these monies have been largely used to benefit the ordinary Palestinian people and not to line the pockets of the PA officials.
The Chicago Tribune is reporting tensions between the defeated Fatah and the newly elected Hamas.
Part of the problem may be rivalry over who will control the money. The fact that a large proportion of the Palestinian Authority's money comes from external sources can create what can be called the Simple Plan effect, after a book written in 1994 about a group of friends who stumble onto four million dollars and eventually wind up killing each other for its possession. Roger Stern of Johns Hopkins University writing at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has a more sophisticated version of the Simple Plan effect applied to regional politics. He argues that monopoly rents arising from the huge difference between the lifting cost of oil and the cartel price has created a vast inflow of money from the rest of the world which has destabilized the Middle East. Stern writes that warfare in the Middle East is:
The Congo too has been cursed by wealth which is there for the taking, because it is independent of whether the society which surrounds it is devastated. Global Security writes:warfare for monopoly proceeds. In such war, the aggressor’s goal is not to deny supply but to gain more of it to sell, as in Iraq’s invasions of Iran and Kuwait. Although this logic escaped U.S. policymakers, it was plain to one economist:
Adelman’s insight is that oil market power, not oil per se, creates instability in the Persian Gulf. More simply, each firmstate’s monopoly proceeds are a potential war prize to another.
But whereas the Congo is wracked by a war over its natural riches, the struggle for donor funds in Palestine is a perverse scavenger's brawl over the begging bowl of the Palestinian people. Perhaps never before has a government stood to gain more from the misery of its people (60% foreign aid) than their prosperity (40% taxes). It creates a perverse set of incentives and one wonders whether 'in such wars, the goal is not to diminish misery but to gain more of it to sell ...'. Just wondering. Just thinking out loud...
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