Posted 6/27/2002 08:19:00 AM by Ocean Guy
Not exactly a conservative, Hugo Young of the Guardian thinks We've missed the point of Bush's Middle East policy. Actually it's not as condescending as you might expect....

Europeans, for their part, think Bush exaggerates. And even if he doesn't, they think his answers, whether in Israel or Iraq, are counter-productive. That may be so. But there's one thing he is not. He is not crazy but, by his own lights, quite rational. He and his people have their eye on a purpose. The danger they run is that they think they can achieve it, if necessary, alone. They're the most grudging of multilateralists, the stance that most distinguishes them from Clinton. But they take a harsher, more apocalyptic view than Europeans, including the British, of the possibilities ahead, and no one can say for sure they are mistaken. That view does not allow for equal treatment as between Israel and unreformed Palestine. In reality it does not give prime place to a Middle East peace process at all. Instead it says that the prime enemy is terror - and it doesn't much care whether anyone else agrees.

yes, he's right, we do think we can go this one alone if need be. At least for as long as it takes for the EUnuchs to come to the realization that they are part of the same 'infidel' world that Islamists want to destroy.

Earlier he makes this point:

For Americans, in the political class and a long way beyond, the war against terrorism is directed at an enemy that looms as large as the Soviet Union once did, and has made itself felt much closer to home. Everything, including Israel/Palestine, is subordinate to that. Telling Yasser Arafat he must go, and laying his terroristic guilt ineradicably on the line, far exceeds in relevance the pettifogging democratic details about how his departure will happen and who might replace him.

It seems someone at the Guardian gets it, even if they haven't seen the Islamists as an immediate threat. They'll see it and experience it if they continue down the road of appeasement and moral equivalence.