Witless in Gaza

David Seaton's News Links
Nowhere, not even in Iraq, are the miseries and failings of American foreign policy as evident as in the Gaza strip. Nowhere has the distance between the rhetoric and the reality so painfully, so obscenely evident.

And nowhere has Israel acted more stupidly... The two state solution is dead and short of ethnic cleansing on a huge scale or an atomic war against all comers... or both, Israel's future consists of facing eternally a people who fight them by day and make babies by night. DS

Few Good Options for U.S. on Palestinian Violence - New York Times
Abstract: For two years, the United States has tried to choke off Hamas, the militant Islamic group that has been ascendant in Gaza and the West Bank, while throwing limited aid and support to Fatah, its more moderate Palestinian rival. Now, with Fatah, the party of the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, on the verge of collapse in Gaza, Washington is facing a shrinking menu of alternatives. “We have limited options, and most of them are bad,” said Martin S. Indyk, the former United States ambassador to Israel. America’s options are limited in part because its role has been limited, with the Bush administration pursuing what for the most part has been a hands-off policy toward the Palestinians. In public comments on Wednesday, Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, said that the hope of averting a wider civil war remained largely in the Palestinians’ hands.(,,,) “There are a lot of people now who are angry and are saying, ‘Let Hamas govern Gaza, let Gaza go to hell,’ ” said Ghaith al-Omari, a former foreign policy adviser to Mr. Abbas who is now a fellow at the New America Foundation, a public-policy institute in Washington. But that is a prospect that Israel and the United States fear could lead to a situation in which Gaza becomes a breeding ground for terrorists. “There appears to be a near-total takeover of Gaza by Hamas, which could create a major danger because it would result in an Iranian-backed terrorist state on our doorsteps, between us and Egypt,” Sallai Meridor, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, said in an interview. “We are watching the developments very seriously.” Mr. Indyk, who is head of the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy, argued that such a development could have consequences far beyond the carnage of a civil war between rival Palestinian factions. “What would happen is that Hamas would take over and Gaza will be a full terrorist state, right on the fault line of the Western world,” Mr. Indyk said. “We should all understand what the stakes are here. It will be a haven for all the bad guys — Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad.”(...) Israeli and some Fatah officials have appealed for an international force — possibly under the auspices of the United Nations — to try to restore order in Gaza. But Middle East experts say that few countries are willing to send troops into the increasingly lawless territory, and Bush administration officials expressed little interest on Wednesday in supporting such a force. READ IT ALL