Hammas is Palestine


The rolling boil in the Middle East just got hotter
Oh yes, be worried. But it is not all over yet.

"We are watching liberty beginning to spread in the Middle East," declared George W Bush cheerily yesterday. But plainly, this is not what he had in mind when his administration set about redrawing the political map of the Middle East by invading Iraq. Mr Bush's so-called "forward strategy of freedom" has crashed into his "global war on terror".

Arab leaders - and not a few Europeans - will be muttering to the Americans: "We told you so. Allowing the ordinary Muslims to vote freely is a bad idea."

Yet this would be the wrong lesson to draw. The popularity of political Islam reflects the bankruptcy of the political order that has gone before. When the state fails, as it has done across the Middle East since the end of the colonial era, then Muslims instinctively turn to the mosque.

So the first lesson has to be a gradual reform of autocratic Arab states, risky as that may seem. The other lesson is that the force of Islamism cannot be ignored. The attempt to turn back the clock can only result in greater disaster, as happened in Algeria in 1991, when the army's attempt to halt the electoral victory by Islamists resulted in a war of appalling carnage.

The challenge is not to eradicate political Islam, but to moderate it. If Islamists want to take part in democratic life, then they must learn to live by its rules. The question is not whether Muslim radicals should be elected to power, but what they do in office and whether they can be voted out.

The real wild card is just showing up. Evidently the Palestinian government is flat broke.

"The Palestinian Government is destitute, and in desperate financial straits. I hope that support for the new government will be forthcoming," Carter said at a Jerusalem press conference.

He added that if international law barred donor countries from directly funding a Hamas-led government than the US and the EU should bypass the Palestinian Authority and provide the "much-needed" money to the Palestinians via non-governmental channels such as UN agencies.

"Regardless of the government, I would hope that potential donors find alternative means to be generous to the Palestinian people [even] if the donor decides to bypass the Palestinian government completely," Carter said, stressing that his main concern was to avert the "suffering" of the Palestinian people, which he said could lead to a new cycle of violence.

He noted that the heavily funded Palestinian Government would run out of money at the end of next month.

I find it interesting that a former U.S. President would suggest circumventing the law.

But we do owe Jimmy Carter one thing, he has pretty much exposed the weakness of the Palestinian government. Palestine has no major infrastructure, it is totally dependent on outside cash. There lies opportunity, if only President Bush and the State Department will act on it.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Fri - January 27, 2006 at 04:44 AM  Tag


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