Posted 7/25/2003 05:19:00 PM by Ocean Guy
Time for Hope?

Thanks to Solomon, who pointed me to this... I hope she's right. In the NRO Barbara Lerner seems to have faith that the President has not lost his commitment to win the war on terror, that he is not ignoring the palestinian terrorists.

I think Dubya knows the odds against ever reaching peace on the Oslo Road are a million to one. I don't think he's counting on the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians to stop celebrating and practicing terror any more than he counted on the U.N. to stop appeasing it. I think he is giving the Palestinians a last chance to choose — statehood or continued terror — for the same reason he gave the U.N. a last chance to choose between defeating Saddam Hussein's terror state or continuing to appease it. He did it because a democratic leader cannot simply tell his countrymen that widely believed fantasies are just that. He has to show them.

...Dubya had to blow away the fantasy haze and make America see the U.N. as it is, and he did. He went to the U.N. and issued a ringing challenge: Don't let the threat to America and the world that Saddam Hussein's Iraq poses continue to fester and grow. Back us in bringing it to an end. And then he waited and waited and waited some more, allowing a full six months to pass while U.N. types ran through their routines — strutting and preening, dodging and dealing, and gleefully dissing us. As he often says, "I'm a patient man."

But the American people paid attention to the real U.N. this time — they had a felt stake in the outcome — and they hated what they saw. When their illusions were stripped away and their patience was exhausted, Dubya went to war.

The news today, after the Abbas visit to the White House is not nearly as gloomy as I feared. The President let Abbas have his say, but gave him little to take home. He was tough in his words in rooting out the terrorists, an act that Abbas/Arafat have repeatedly refused to do. So maybe Ms. Lerner is right. I hope so. Take the time and read the whole article.

Shabbat Shalom.