The Abbas chimera

Submitted by Vijay Dandapani (United States), Jun 10, 2003 at 15:20

Learning from Oslo is a timely piece by Daniel Pipes. President Bush and his team have swung from the self evidently correct position of not dealing with the corrupt Palestinian leadership to fully embracing the putative new leadership of Abu Mazen. But that this new emperor has no clothes should be obvious to even the most casual observers of the Middle-East conflict. Al-Aqsa has not even hinted at renouncing violence let alone accept the road map. Abbas is little more than a puppet of Arafat and the seemingly public conflict between the two over the appointment of Dahlan as Security chief only points to Arafat's remarkable ability for disinformation.

Mr. Bush rightly pulled one plug from the murderous money source for Palestinian violence - the Iraqis. He needs to focus on eliminating the other two principal sources - the Saudis and Iran - in that order. The Israeli-Palestininian problem never has been defined with the right hyphen as the Arab-Israeli problem. Let's start with the Saudis unequivocally recognizing the right of not just Israel but other nations to exist. A theocratic state with explicit prohibitions on all other forms of religion and atheism is the root of all problems and has brought terrorism to its present level.

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