Needlenose

Biden decries Israel’s illegal colony expansions!  Compare and contrast with the Status Quo Ante, Shrubya’s envoy’s reaction to getting sand kicked in his face.

*Update 3/11/10* We should retaliate for the snub by cutting off their annual $5B handout.  Ingrates.

*Update 3/15/10* The Empire Strikes Back.  Let’s see if Obama wusses out.

Palestinian leaders have responded to Sharon’s threats to unilaterally impose the boundaries of a Palestinian ‘Homeland’ with the promise to call for a “single Arab-Jewish state.” Colin Powell dismissed the idea of a one-state solution (although he opposes a two-state solution for Iraq), saying:

“We’re committed to a two-state solution,” Powell said in Washington. “I believe that’s the only solution that will work: a state for the Palestinian people called Palestine and a Jewish state, state of Israel, which exists.”

What a cunundrum! The Sharon alternative, potentially featuring a torturously gerrymandered and discontinuous Palestinian state similar to the Bantustans of Apartheid, or a single country where extremists on both sides could continue to use acts of terror to advance their ‘no compromise’ positions.

Personally, I don’t see how the Bantustan solution would really stop the violence. A reactionary-dominated Israeli government would most likely choose to keep many of the older settlements in place, along with their water sources. Denied water, numerous Palestinian villages and towns would not be economically viable. With no access to ports (except in Gaza, where goods would have to pass through a foreign country to get to the West Bank), the Palestinian Homelands would not be an attractive manufacturing center. Who would invest in such a place? Where would its inhabitants work? How would they feed their families? Pushing the Arabs farther into the corner at a time when extremists are on the verge of acquiring dirty bombs and potentially even nuclear weapons strikes me as a recipe for disaster.

The linked article goes on to point out the ‘demographic’ issue; the Jewish population of the country, at 5.5 million, would hold only a slight majority over the theoretical Arab population of a unified state – 4.7 million. With a higher Arab birthrate, along with limited ‘right-of-return’ legislation that future ‘coalition’ governments might pass, Israel would be quickly looking at Jews returning to the minority in the region.

Along with sticky issues such as ‘right-of-return’ or compensation for lost property, the new, presumably secular state would need to deal with the extreme poverty of its new citizens, major infrastructure development and water rights. Security and crackdown on extremist elements of both sides would be another major challenge.

A
King George the Witless delegated ‘the Israel problem’ to Colin ‘Spineless’ Powell when it became apparent that Sharon was going to give the Roadmap, and the U.S., the finger.

After whinging and dithering and doing nothing for half-a-year after gaining responsibility for something from his stupid boss, Colin finally took a stand on the building of a particularly flagrant piece of the Sharon’s Roadmap-defying Great Wall of Greater Israel – that is, he took a stand ‘sort-of.’

You see, Sharon wanted to build a particularly gerrymandered piece of wall to protect a settlement located deep within occupied territory – one that would cut through the middle of a Palestinian University, among other things. When Powell whined a bit (and threatened to reduce Israel’s annual $8 billion dollar handout by the amount of the cost of the fence), Sharon graciously decided to leave a few gaps in the wall, so the locals along the path wouldn’t be 100% cut off from their former neighbors, friends and families.

And like the proverbial 90-lb. weakling comic-book advertisement fame, Powell is just standing there and taking it as the bully kicks sand in his face and walks off with the girl. Says Mr. Powell:

“The gaps in and of themselves do not satisfy me,” Powell said in an interview Friday. “The question is what becomes of the gaps in due course. We have not yet come to a conclusion about what to do and what our action should be, [but the officials] examined the fence, where it’s going and how it’s going, the settlements and what our obligations are under the law under these matters.”

Yeah, I bet ‘The Butcher of Sabra” started quaking in his boots when he heard that!

MSNBC on WMD

It’s Colin Powell’s turn this week as lead dog pulling the administration’s PR sled in Iraq, describing our occupation there as part of the WarOnTerrorWarOnTerrorDon’tAskQuestionsWe’reFightingAWarOnTerror:

He said the security situation remains challenging, with a “major new threat” coming from “terrorists who are trying to infiltrate into the country for the purpose of disrupting this whole process.”

The secretary gave a rough estimate of 100 such infiltrators and said he was confident that the U.S. military can handle the problem.

Wow. If 100 foreigners in the entire country are the cause for 150-plus dead Americans, the 1,200-plus wounded, the destruction of Iraq’s water and electricity infrastructure and more, I’m not sure our military can handle these terrorist supermen!

The fact, of course, is that foreign “terrorists” are at most a small fraction of the problem our military is dealing with. This Knight-Ridder article (link via Juan Cole) shows the real nature of the resistance, from a reporter who interviewed actual guerrilla cell leaders:

The two cell leaders said their fighters primarily were former Iraqi army officers and young Iraqis who had joined because they were angry over the deaths or arrests of family members during U.S. raids in the hunt for Saddam Hussein and his supporters.

The group also shelters remnants of a non-Iraqi Arab unit of Saddam’s elite Fedayeen militia force as well as foreigners who slipped across the country’s long and porous borders to battle American troops, they said. Abu Abdullah, who directs the camp near Baquba, said he came to Iraq shortly before the United States invaded it last spring.

Both cell leaders said they were willing to talk because they didn’t want the story of what was going on in Iraq to be told only from the American military’s standpoint. Abu Abdullah said he wanted to tell people he didn’t consider himself a terrorist, but the enemy of “U.S. imperialism.”

. . . Both spoke disdainfully of “Wahabbis,” as hard-line Sunni Muslim followers are called. Abu Mohammed said there was no contact with members of al Qaida at his level; Abu Abdullah broke off the interview before the question could be asked. But he said his fighters were too valuable to participate in suicide missions, a hallmark of al Qaida, and he rejected the label of terrorist.

“Can you describe a man who defends his country as a terrorist?” asked Abu Abdullah, who said he was 31. “Iraq is the land of prophets and the birthplace of civilization. We will fight until we shed the last drop of our blood for this country.”

This is really a fascinating article, by the way, with glimpses of how the guerrillas operate — I strongly recommend reading it.

Another example of how revenge feeds the anti-U.S. resistance is shown in this article on the funerals of the Iraqi policemen we killed a few days ago:

Mourners gathered under tribal banners and vowed to spill “the blood of the American killers” for the death of an Iraqi policeman and eight security guards killed when US troops opened fire during a high-speed police chase.

Many of the scores of gunmen in the town 50 kilometers (30 miles) west of Baghdad wore masks. A few carried rocket-propelled grenade launchers (RPGs) and one pledged “we will conduct an operation tonight to avenge the martyrs.”

And they were as good as their word, with one American killed and three wounded near Fallujah that very evening.

Meanwhile, the killing of the Iraqi police is bound to encourage the “terrorist” sympathizers in other police departments:

KHALDIYA, Iraq, Sept. 13 — The convoy of U.S. military engineers had just entered this rough-and-tumble town when disaster struck. They had a flat tire, stopping the convoy along a ribbon of desert asphalt some Iraqis have nicknamed “the highway of death.”

Soon after, masked guerrillas fired two rocket-propelled grenades. Machine guns crackled across the late afternoon sky. When it ended an hour later, witnesses said, homes were gouged with large holes, two U.S. vehicles were burning, and the soldiers had beat a retreat.

On the sidelines throughout the clash Thursday were Khaldiya’s police, who are supposed to be the allies of the U.S.-led occupation in restoring order to Iraq. Not only was it not their fight, several said this week, but the guerrillas fighting U.S. soldiers had their blessing.

“In my heart, deep inside, we are with them against the occupation,” said Lt. Ahmed Khalaf Hamed, an officer with the 100-man force trained, equipped and financed by U.S. authorities. “This is my country, and I encourage them.”

And I guess these people are more terrorists:

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Black-robed women wept for lost sons. Old men brandished death certificates with photos of bombed homes and scarred bodies. Jobless men begged for work.

As Secretary of State Colin Powell visited the main U.S. headquarters in Baghdad Sunday, desperate Iraqis kept up a daily ritual at barbed wire barriers outside.

Knowledge that Powell was just a stone’s throw away — meeting Iraq’s U.S. governor Paul Bremer inside one of the former palaces of deposed President Saddam Hussein — heightened the clamor beyond the gates.

“He must be told that the Iraqi people have gained nothing from the American war. Now it is much worse than under Saddam,” said Mushtaq Talib, 28.

A message from the cluephone for Secretary Powell: Until your administration admits that its problems in Iraq are homegrown — and often of our own making — it’s going to be very hard to believe that you’re serious about solving them.