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Posted on 10/18/2001 11:46:13 PM PDT by MadIvan

Colin Powell is attempting to fight the war on terrorism on too many fronts

Assassination, Benjamin Disraeli said after the death of Abraham Lincoln, “has never changed the course of history”. That view, as events in the Middle East will prove, was mistaken. The murder of Rehavam Zeevi, Israel’s Tourism Minister, on Wednesday does, however, prove that assassination is a paradoxical business. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) is dedicated to the destruction of the state of Israel and is hardly sympathetic to American interests. Yet by its deeds it has strengthened the political hand of Ariel Sharon and may have saved the United States from a diplomatic initiative of considerable folly.

There is no doubt which member of the Bush Administration is currently the most uncomfortable. Colin Powell has set himself three separate but interconnected tasks and is making minimal progress on all of them. The Secretary of State has sought to construct an alternative regime for Afghanistan acceptable to just about everyone; to reassure India and Pakistan that both are held with equal affection by the United States, which agrees with each of them on Kashmir; and aspires to a new American approach to the Middle East which could simultaneously placate Israeli and Arab opinion. This strategy certainly does not want for ambition, merely credibility.

The intervention of the PFLP has reduced the prospects of outright political conflict between the United States and Israel. The Secretary of State is due shortly to deliver a speech on the Middle East peace process which, his aides insist, would be but an “amplification” of an approach hammered out within the Administration before the attacks on New York and Washington. This address is ostentatiously scheduled to take place “before Ramadan”, thus leaving little doubt as to its intended audience. The notion of “amplification” is only valid if one regards the difference between Trappist monks and members of a heavy metal rock band as simply a matter of volume.

The Administration had decided, tentatively, before terrorism struck, that if Yassir Arafat could impose a ceasefire of any duration then President Bush would hold a low-profile meeting with him on the fringes of the United Nations General Assembly meeting. This notion was propounded most enthusiastically by George Tenet, the Director of the CIA first appointed by President Clinton, who was dispatched to the region by Mr Bush during the summer. Mr Powell was at that stage relatively cool about the enterprise, preferring benign neglect to active engagement.

In the aftermath of September 11, however, the Secretary of State seized control of policy. An improbable alliance within Washington emerged between the State Department bureaucracy, which had always wanted the Bush White House to continue in the Middle East where the Clinton Administration had left off, and some crucial figures at the Pentagon who, while normally close to Israel, believed that Egypt and Saudi Arabia needed to be brought onside if they were to be able to convince the President that he should take the military campaign to Baghdad. To the bemusement of Israel, those who favoured both the most limited war and the most assertive war against terrorism had become de facto allies of Mr Arafat against Mr Sharon.

Mr Powell was, and perhaps still might be, poised to recast American foreign policy. He intended to indicate that America favoured the division, or “sharing”, of Jerusalem and that he would appoint a new envoy, probably General Antony Zinni, former Commander in Chief of the US Central Command and a figure well known to Arab leaders, as his representative to the region.

There might be some short-term advantages to such a statement. But countries such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia would have needed more than words from the Secretary of State to appease local populations. The United States would have had to engineer a peace settlement on this basis. And the impact of such a blueprint in Israel would be absolutely explosive. While most Israelis believe that Mr Sharon was intemperate when he asserted that his country would not be “another Czechoslovakia”, they were largely in accord with his sentiments. A Powell peace plan in these circumstances would have broken the current Likud-Labour coalition and prompted fresh elections. And the man most likely to emerge as Prime Minister, endorsed on a “not one more inch” manifesto, would be Binyamin Netanyahu — an ironic and unhelpful outcome.

The contraints imposed, and the contradictions inherent, in Mr Powell’s pursuit of Peter Pan policy are the real source of the frustration which is building within the Pentagon. It is not the case, as reported in some circles, that Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, is at war with his generals or vice versa. They are all being driven to distraction by a political approach which, as one official put it privately, smacks of a new version of St Augustine: “Give me victory, but not just now.”

The military aspect of Operation Enduring Freedom is supposed to be “Gulf War plus”, but the diplomatic dimension, at the moment, is “Gulf War minus”. Ten years ago the United States announced its objective (the complete expulsion of Iraqi troops from Kuwait) and then assembled an international coalition to achieve it. That process appears to have been reversed a decade later.

The real question that is haunting American commanders now is not whether to expand the war to encompass Saddam Hussein but when the State Department will allow it to be extended to Osama bin Laden.

I've never heard of Tim Hames before, but he nails it. We need to keep our mind focused on victory, victory above all else, and victory above diplomacy. The State Department is apparently littered with holdovers from Clinton's time. Purge them!

Regards, Ivan

But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, "This was their finest hour."

Today is Trinity Sunday. Centuries ago words were written to be a call and a spur to the faithful servants of Truth and Justice: "Arm yourselves, and be ye men of valour, and be in readiness for the conflict; for it is better for us to perish in battle than to look upon the outrage of our nation and our altar. As the Will of God is in Heaven, even so let it be." - Winston Churchill, 1940

This then, my lords and gentlemen, is the message which we send forth today to all states and nations, bound or free, to all the men in all the lands who care for freedom's cause. To our Allies and well-wishers in Europe, to our American friends and helpers drawing ever closer in their might across the ocean, this is the message-lift up your hearts, all will come right. Out of depths of sorrow and sacrifice will be born again the glory of mankind. - Winston Churchill, 1941

"What kind of a people do they think we are? Is it possible that they do not realize that we shall never cease to persevere against them until they have been taught a lesson which they and the world will never forget?" - Winston Churchill, 1941


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