ISRAEL - IRAN - SYRIA - HAMAS - HEZBOLLAH - WWWIII?

So what's your problem with a Yahoo group?

Apparently you can't dispute what they say.

Excuse me,but I wasnt pissing or moaning about anything.
I saw the story,posted it and commented on it.

If you dont like it,dont read it.

You seem to be a master at changing the subject of a discussion,yet now you are getting your panties in a wad because someone else did it.

Grow up!!

It might be a good idea to start your own thread about this topic so that we can look at the actual report (warning pdf) and determine whether the article is indeed correct. Hint: it's not. It's helpful to notice that the publication you referenced considers News and Showbiz the same topic.

Oh yeah you were--you post a phony story with a dubious source which has a sensationalist theme, and want everyone to either take your point of view, or prove that they are witless and evil liberals who aren't prepared to take your version of the world for gospel. You were pissing and moaning about the evil Muslims--once again.



Yeah, posted it and commented on it in a completely inappropriate place. Whether or not i like it has nothing to do with it. But i'm not surprised at the snotty, grade school tone.



Seem is the operative verb--it "seems" to be useful for you to characterize me in a manner which will allow you to display your own "maturity" by enjoining me to "grow up."

Buy a mirror.

Here is an interesting piece by Friedman, which seems to be about the hopelessness in the relationship between Israel and Palestine.


^6/6/07: What a Mess

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

RAMALLAH, West Bank
The Middle East has gotten itself tied into such an impossible knot that
Biblical references or Shakespearian quotations simply don't suffice
anymore to describe how impossibly tangled politics has become here.
Shira Wolosky, a Hebrew University English scholar, suggested to me that
maybe Dr. Seuss, in "The Cat in the Hat," offered the best way to sum up
the Middle East today.

Then he shut the Things
in the box with the hook.
And the cat went away
With a sad kind of look.
"That is good," said the fish.
"He has gone away. Yes.
but your mother will come.
She will find this big mess!
And this mess is so big
And so deep and so tall,
we can not pick it up.
There is no way at all!"

Just look around. Gaza is turning into Mogadishu. Hamas is shelling
Israel. Israel is retaliating. Iraq is a boiling pot. Iran is about to
go nuclear.
Lebanon is being pulled apart. Syria is being investigated for murdering
Lebanon's prime minister. I could go on. Yes, this mess is so big and so
tall. Who knows where to pick it up at all?

In Israel, officials are mulling all alternatives -- from the Saudi peace
initiative to negotiating with Hamas to opening talks with Syria to
reoccupying Gaza to looking for a "trustee" for the West Bank -- because
no one is sure anymore what to do.

That is, the Left's way -- land for peace -- was discredited by the
collapse
of Oslo. The Right's way, permanent Israeli occupation of all "The Land
of Israel," was made impossible by Palestinian demographics and two
uprisings. The third way, unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon and Gaza,
has been discredited by Hezbollah's attack from Lebanon and the Hamas
rocket attacks from Gaza.

"Israel is in a place it has never been before," said Moshe Halbertal, a
Hebrew University philosophy professor. "It does not have a picture of
where to go and how, so people are looking for a fourth way."

It is impossible to predict what that fourth way will be. But it is easy to
identify the new realities it will have to take into account.

First is the fact that Yasir Arafat's Fatah group, which has long dominated
Palestinian life, is in disarray. Fatah will not disappear, but it will
never again
totally dominate the Palestinian Authority. Fatah will have to share power
with Hamas, which has largely wiped out Fatah in Gaza already. Sooner or
later, the U.S. and Israel are going to have to drop the economic sanctions
they imposed on Palestinians to pressure Hamas into recogniz-ing Israel.
"As repulsive as [Hamas] is to me as an Israeli, I don't think it's
coming to
the Palestinian Authority just to pay a visit -- it is here to stay,"
said Israeli
TV's top Arab affairs reporter, Ehud Yaari.

Israel's real choice is between dealing with a Hamas-led Palestinian
Authority or watching it collapse into little pieces, which Israel would
have to pick up. (Think Iraq and Somalia.) West Bank and Gaza unem-
ployment is now around 40 percent. Talking with Palestinians in Ramal-
lah, the phrase I heard most was not "Israeli occupation" but "Palestinian
disintegration."

Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki told me that as bad as things are
today,
his polls show most Palestinians still don't blame Hamas. They blame
Israel and America for withholding funds from the Hamas government
that Palestinians elected. The best way to diminish Hamas's influence,
or to moderate it, is by forcing it to assume responsibility. Ask it: "Do
you want Palestinians to be able to work in Israel? Then sit down with
Israel and work out the details." We need to "force Hamas through a c
orridor of difficult decisions," said Israeli strategist Gidi Grinstein. If
America can talk to Iran, Israel can talk to Hamas.

Second, Hamas says it will only offer Israel a long-term cease-fire. Fine,
take it. Fact No. 1: the real history of Israeli-Arab relations is: war,
lull,
war, lull, war, lull -- from 1948 until today. Fact No. 2: "Since 1948,"
said Mr. Yaari, "the Jews have always made better use of the lulls than
the Arabs." Israel doesn't need Hamas's recognition. It needs a long lull.

The third new reality is that Hamas's shelling of Israel from Gaza means
Israel can never hand over the West Bank to the Palestinians, without an
international trustee -- because from there Palestinians could close
Israel's
airport with one rocket. Only Jordan, or an international force, can be
that
trustee.

Bottom line: I don't know if there is a fourth way, but, if there is, it
will
have to include these new realities. Otherwise, this mess will get even
bigger, deeper and taller.
------------------------------------------------------------------

No Pyrrhic Victory
Most of the conventional wisdom about the Six Day War is wrong.
BY BRET STEPHENS
WSJ
Tuesday, June 5, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

On the morning of June 5, 1967, a fleet of low-flying Israeli jets surprised the Egyptian air force on the ground and destroyed it. This act of military pre-emption helped save Israel from what Iraq's then-President Abdul Rahman Aref had called, only several days earlier, "our opportunity . . . to wipe Israel off the map." Yet 40 years later Israel's victory is widely seen as a Pyrrhic one--"a calamity for the Jewish state no less than for its neighbors," according to a recent editorial in The Economist.

And the alternative was?

The Six Day War is supposed to be the great pivot on which the modern history of the Middle East hinges, the moment the Palestinian question came into focus and Israel went from being the David to the Goliath of the conflict. It's a reading of history that has the convenience of offering a political prescription: Rewind to the status quo ante June 5, arrange a peace deal, and the problems that have arisen since more or less go away. Or so the thinking goes.

Yet the striking fact is that all of Israel's peace agreements--with Egypt in 1979, with the Palestinians in 1993, with Jordan and Morocco in 1994--were achieved in the wake of the war. The Jewish state had gained territory; the Arab states wanted it back. Whatever else might be said for the land-for-peace formula, it's odd that the people who are its strongest advocates are usually the same ones who bemoan the apparent completeness of Israel's victory in 1967.

Great events have a way not only of reshaping the outlook for the future but also our understanding of the past, usually in the service of clarity. "Why England Slept" was an apt question to ask of Britain in the mid-1930s, but it made sense only after Sept. 1, 1939. By contrast, the Six Day War laid a thick fog over what came before. Today, the pre-1967 period is remembered (not least by many Israelis) as a time when the country's conscience was clear and respectable world opinion admired "plucky little Israel." Yet these were the same years when Israel lived within what Abba Eban, its dovish foreign minister, called "Auschwitz borders," with only nine miles separating the westernmost part of the West Bank from the Mediterranean Sea.

It is also often said today that the Six Day War humiliated the Arabs and propelled the region into future rounds of fighting. Yet President Aref of Iraq had prefaced his call to destroy Israel by describing the war as the Arabs' chance "to wipe out the ignominy which has been with us since 1948." It is said that the war inaugurated the era of modern terrorism, as the Arab world switched from a strategy of conventional confrontation with Israel to one of "unconventional" attacks. Yet hundreds of Israelis had already been killed in fedayeen raids in Israel's first 19 years of existence.

It is said that the Palestinian movement was born from Israel's occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. Yet the Palestine Liberation Organization was already in its third year of operations when the war began. It is said that Israel enjoyed international legitimacy so long as it lived behind recognized frontiers. Yet those frontiers were no less provisional before 1967 than they were after. Only after the Six Day War did the Green Line come to be seen as the "real" border.

Fog also surrounds memories of the immediate aftermath of the war. To read some recent accounts, a more sagacious Israel could have followed up its historic victory with peace overtures that would have spared everyone the bloody entanglements of its occupation of the Sinai, Gaza, the West Bank and the Golan Heights. Or, failing that, it could have resisted the lure of building settlements in the territories in order not to complicate a land-for-peace transaction.

In fact, the Israeli cabinet agreed on June 19 to offer the Sinai to Egypt and the Golan to Syria in exchange for peace deals. In Khartoum that September, the Arab League declared "no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it." As for Jewish settlements, hardly any were built for years after the war: In 1972, for instance, only about 800 settlers had moved to the West Bank.

It's true that the war caused Israel to lose friends abroad. "Le peuple juif, sûr de lui meme et dominateur" ("the Jewish people, sure of themselves and domineering") was Charles de Gaulle's memorable line in announcing, in November 1967, that France would no longer supply Israel militarily. Such were the Jewish state's former friends.

On the other hand, Israel gained new friends. The U.S., whose declared policy during the war was to be "neutral in thought, word and deed," would never again pretend such indifference, something that made all the difference to Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Tens of thousands of American and European Jews immigrated to Israel after 1967, sensing it was a country not on the brink of extinction. Christian evangelicals also became Israel's firm friends, expanding the political base of American support beyond its traditionally narrow, Jewish-Democratic core.

None of this is to say that the Six Day War was an unalloyed (or unironic) blessing for Israel. By gaining control of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Israel swapped its old territorial insecurities for new demographic ones. As Palestinian numbers grew, Israel's efforts to find a new strategic equilibrium--first through negotiations with the PLO, later through unilateral withdrawals--became increasingly frenetic. Who knows whether they will succeed.

Then again, when the sun rose on June 5, 1967, Israel was a poor, desperately vulnerable country, which threw the dice on its own survival in the most audacious military strike of the 20th century. It is infinitely richer and more powerful today, sure in its alliance with the U.S. and capable of making concessions inconceivable 40 years ago. If these are the fruits of Israel's "Pyrrhic victory," it needs more such of them.

Mr. Stephens is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. His column appears in the Journal Tuesdays.

Israel had no choice but to attack the 70,000 Egyptian soldiers marching across the Sinai toward Israel. Before that, Egypt demanded that the UN remove peacekeeping troops at the border, and was amazed when U Thant complied. The head mullah in Egypt declared that Allah demands that Israel be destroyed. Most important, Egypt blockaded the Straits of Tiran, an act of war.

Israel can't afford to lose a war. Its mistake was to allow settlements in the WB and Gaza, which the Pals will not tolerate.

You are strangely insistent on your particular rationalizations of the 1967 war. Why? History is pretty clear that Nasser was NOT going to attack Israel and that neither he nor his generals believed they were ready for a conflict. Instead he stupidly allowed his provocartions to escalate, until Israel took the initiative and attacked in a well planned and rehearsed canmpaign that quickly took the Egyptians, the Syrians and the Jordanians in quick sequence, gaining them Jerusalem, the whole West Bank, and Gaza.



Well, I will agree with you there. The settlement of the West Bank, in particular, has proven to be a grave error - Israel is, in effect hostage to its most aggressive settlers and advocates of Judaea = Israel. This has led to 40 years of oppression and the development of a large, permanently hostile subject population, more focused on revenge than accomodation.

Interestingly, in the first few days of the war, Egypt lied to Jordan and the other Arab allies that the war was going great, thus conning the allies into attacking Israel.

I may be wrong about the lack of merit in allowing settlements. Israel concluded that it could never trust the Pals, and that an unfettered militarized Palestine could, for instance, put the main airport out of action with some well-placed shelling.

"History" read Nasser's mind and determined that "Nasser was NOT going to attack Israel"

That's ridiculous malarkey!

Israel offers the Golan Heights to Syria
Israel offers the Golan Heights to Syria
By Charles Levinson in Katzrin, Israel
09/06/2007
Telegraph UK

The Israeli prime minister has offered to return the Golan Heights to Syria in exchange for peace, the nation's press reported yesterday.

In a secret communique, Ehud Olmert demanded that in exchange for the return of the strategic highlands, Syria dissolve its alliances with Iran, Hezbollah and Palestinian militant factions who maintain headquarters in Damascus.

Syria, under the regime of Bashar al Assad, is a key supporter of the Lebanese Shia Hizbollah militia, who battled Israel to a standstill last summer. Many of the anti-tank rockets that wreaked havoc on Israeli ground forces originated in Syria, a crucial conduit for the Iranian Katyushas and other rockets that rained down on Israeli cities throughout the 34-day war.

Were Syria to abandon its Shia allies in Lebanon and Iran in exchange for peace with the Jewish state, it would seriously weaken Israel's most potent foes.

"I am your partner for making peace between our countries," Mr Olmert told Damascus through German and Turkish mediators, Israel's Yediot Ahranot newspaper reported. "I know that a peace agreement with Syria requires me to return the Golan Heights to Syrian sovereignty. I am willing to fulfil my part in this deal."

Mr Olmert reached out to Syria only after America's president George W Bush gave the green light in an hour-long phone conversation last month. The prime minister's office would neither confirm nor deny the reports.

Israel and Syria participated in arduous peace talks throughout much of the 1990s. But those efforts collapsed in 2000 amid disagreement over sovereignty of a narrow strip of land near the eastern shore of Lake Kinneret.

BBB, so what is your prediction? I predict that Syria is too wedded to its hatred of Israel and Jews, and will stick to the terrorists.

Hezbollah is a bigger threat to the Western world than al-Qaida.


http://www.hawaiireporter.com/story.aspx?5f634d14-ada6-49cc-8e4e-0cc204b79eca

And the US is the greatest threat to the world while dumbass Bush is in the white house.

CI, I agree with you that Bush is the biggest threat to the world. Terrorism has surged greatly since he took office. Moreover, he is the most hated man in the world.

Karzai angry over West's tactics
Nato and US-led troops are failing to co-ordinate with their Afghan allies and thereby causing civilian deaths, President Hamid Karzai has said.
He criticised his Western allies' "extreme" use of force and said they should act as his government asked.

"Innocent people are becoming victims of reckless operations" because the troops had ignored Afghan advice for years, Mr Karzai told reporters.

He was speaking after a week in which up to 90 Afghan civilians were killed.

More civilians have been killed this year as a result of foreign military action than have been killed by insurgents, correspondents say.

'Indiscriminate'

Mr Karzai was speaking a day after the head of Nato called for an investigation into an air strike in the Afghan province of Helmand in which 25 civilians were killed.

Your silly malarkey post is like part of another"shaggy dog story."

"1st Judge: That's the shaggiest dog at this dog show."
2nd judge: That's without a doubt the shaggiest at this dog show."
3rd judge: That's the shaggiest dog I have ever seen."
4th Judge: That dog aint shaggy."

1st Poster. The Bush administration is the greatest threat to the world now.
2nd Poster. Without a doubt, the Bush administration is the greatest threat to the world now.
3rd Poster: The Bush administration is the greatest threat to the world I have ever seen.
4th Poster. The Bush administration aint a threat to the world.

Murder of peacekeepers raises stakes in Lebanon
Robert Fisk: Murder of peacekeepers raises stakes in Lebanon
Published: 25 June 2007
Independent UK

At last it happened. Every one predicted - not least the United Nations officers on the team - that the international UN peacekeeping army in southern Lebanon would be attacked by a Sunni Muslim group attached to al-Qa'ida, and yesterday afternoon three Spanish and three Colombian soldiers paid with their lives for the fulfilment of this prediction.

A roadside bomb between the villages of Marjayoun and Khaim, only six miles from the Israeli border, exploded next to two UN armoured vehicles, killing five UN soldiers and wounding at least four others. Three of the injured were from Spain. The road was at the centre of fierce fighting between the Israeli army and Hizbollah last summer and it is possible - although highly unlikely - that the bombs were munitions left over from those battles. But the straight and remote road between the two villages has been cleared by de-mining officers in the months since the war, and the Lebanese army discovered months ago that Sunni groups around Tripoli had put together maps of southern Lebanon which showed UN patrol routes, including those of the Spanish army.

The Spanish suffered severely for their support for George Bush in the Iraq war, and now, it seems they are paying the price for being part of an expanded UN army in the south of Lebanon, one which was put in place with the encouragement of George Bush and Tony Blair to secure Israel's northern border after last summer's conflict. It is an international army commanded by four Nato generals, and many Lebanese regard it as an extension of Nato rather than a UN peacekeeping mission.

Lebanese fire brigade units as well as neighbouring UN contingents rushed to the scene of the attack, but elsewhere in Lebanon an almost equally dangerous outbreak of violence was taking place in the northern city of Tripoli. Here, Lebanese troops were forced to storm an apartment block in the Abu Samra neighbourhood after guerrillas from the Fatah al-Islam group - which the army has been fighting for at least 33 days in the Palestinian camp of Nahr el-Barad - took over the building. At least 10 of the armed men were killed when the soldiers burst into the building - only to find that the fighters had apparently murdered a young Lebanese policeman in front of his wife and young daughter.

At least 62 soldiers and 32 members of Fatah al-Islam - along with 30 civilians - have been killed in the camp, fighting that Lebanese Defence Minister Elias Murr rashly claimed last week to have ended in a Lebanese army victory. Yesterday violence in Tripoli was clearly intended to humiliate him.

Previously, the UN has come under attack from Israeli forces, pro-Israeli guerrillas in southern Lebanon and, occasionally, from Palestinian and Hizbollah fighters. But the Hizbollah has been at great pains to try to protect the new UN force because they fear that just such an attack as occurred yesterday will prompt the US to claim falsely that it was their organisation - which is supported by Iran - that was responsible. In fact, intelligence officers from the French, Spanish and Italian embassies met secretly with Hizbollah officials in Sidon more than three weeks ago to seek assurances that Hizbollah would do their best, as the local armed militia, to protect the international force. The Hizbollah men agreed that they would do their best, but warned that al-Qa'ida-type groups in the Sunni areas of northern Lebanon may well try to breach their security. We shall now find out if America believes this - and it is the truth - or whether Western governments decide to blame Iran by claiming Hizbollah was behind the bombing of the UN troops.

The attack now raises serious questions about whether the enlarged, 11,000-strong UN army - originally placed in the south of the country in 1978 - can fulfil its duties as peacekeepers. Once a peacekeeping army's soldiers are assaulted, their first priority immediately becomes their own protection rather than that of the civilians around them, or the international Lebanese-Israel border which they patrol. Already massive concrete walls surround the various Nato contingents of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon, since their officers have long feared just such an attack.

Lebanon therefore now descends into another, even more serious crisis involving not only their own semi-al-Qa'ida satellite groups, but Western armies as well. Whenever Nato has been involved in Lebanon in the past, it has always been attacked - most devastatingly when US Marines and French paratroopers were assaulted by suicide bombers in Beirut in 1982 at a cost of almost 300 lives. Scarcely an area of Lebanon has not been involved in violence in the past 12 months and each crisis has been worse than the previous crisis, so, as the Lebanese say, here we go again.

After the Spaniards, who will be next to die in Lebanon?
Robert Fisk: After the Spaniards, who will be next to die in Lebanon?
ndependent UK
Published: 26 June 2007

Which United Nations contingent in southern Lebanon will be next? It is a ghoulish, terrible question after the car bomb attack that killed six Spanish soldiers of the 13,000-strong international army on Sunday evening, but one which the officers of the UN Interim Force - Unifil - are asking at their intelligence meetings. For the UN army from 30 countries under the command of four Nato generals - the Spanish contributed 1,100 soldiers - is clearly going to be attacked again. The usual expressions of determination of Western leaders who are not going to "cut and run" - so reminiscent of the Iraq war - are not going to change that.

Will it be the French, who appear to have the highest blast walls around their base? Or the Italians with their heavy armour - little protection, it would seem, after Sunday's bomb blew one of the Spanish armoured personnel carriers into the air?

Or one of the smaller, more vulnerable contingents? Qatar has a small unit here. So does China. Would Lebanon's bombers dare to touch the People's Army? Even the UN's Beirut headquarters now has a 13ft wall around it.

Either way, the UN - and thousands of Western troops - are now in the firing line in another Arab country, and the Lebanese government's appeal not to be left to fight off its enemies alone reflects the concern of Fouad Siniora's fractured cabinet that it may be abandoned as violence continues to grow in intensity and geographical area.

Sunday's battles in Tripoli between the Lebanese army and Islamist militants who took over an apartment block in the city clearly proved that the brutal guerrilla fighting around the city has by no means ended. The army, without showing evidence, claimed the dead included three Saudis, two Lebanese and a Chechen. And it now transpires that a woman was among those killed by the army - apparently the wife of one of the militiamen, Bassem el-Sayyed, who is reported to hold Australian citizenship.

What is incontestable is that the innocent dead included a Lebanese police officer, Khaled Khodr, who lived in the apartment block in the Abu Samra district, along with his two daughters - one aged four and the other eight - and his father-in-law. Neighbours claimed they were used as human shields by the armed men and were then coldly executed as the army closed in on the building. The gunmen were variously said to be members of Fatah al-Islam - the same group fighting the Lebanese army in the Palestinian Nahr el-Bared refugee camp to the north - or from a group called Ahl al-Hadith whose leader, Nabil Rahim, is on the run.

In the UN, all the usual suspects are being considered for the attack on the Spanish troops; the Syrians, whose foreign minister vigorously condemned the bombing; or Hizbollah, which had been trying to protect UN personnel from al-Qa'ida-type fighters; or al-Qa'ida itself, whose supporters in Lebanon were encouraged to "resist" the United Nations army by al-Qa'ida's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri himself. The UN has noted that Fatah al-Islam claimed only a few days ago that it was the UN which was shelling its fighters in Nahr el-Bared from the sea. The UN has German warships patrolling the coast - on the ridiculous assumption that Syria might supply Hizbollah with weapons by sea - but the Lebanese army has already shown tape of its own antiquated British-built gunboats firing at the camp.

The sensitivity of France's current refusal to talk to Syria was emphasised when President Nicolas Sarkozy's wife, Cécilia, denied to a Lebanese newspaper the contents of a French report that she had met with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's sister, Bouchra - whose husband, Assef Chawkat, just happens to be head of the Syrian intelligence services.

The radicals win again. What's he answer?


Hamastan
By Barry Rubin, Wall Street Journal, June 15, 2007

The seizure of the Gaza Strip by Hamas opens a new period in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Middle East. A new Islamist state is being established and it doesn't bode well for the West or regional stability.

And yet we can hope that something will be learned from this experience. Israel's left-leaning Ha'aretz expresses the lesson with what some would call British understatement: "Anyone in Israel still contemplating the question of a Palestinian partner might also need to do some rethinking. In Gaza, at least, it seems there is nobody left for Israel to talk to."

In 2000, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat turned down President Bill Clinton's offer of an independent Palestinian state with its capital in east Jerusalem and an opening offer of $23 billion in aid. Ever since then it has been clear that there is no diplomatic solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Arafat's renewal of terrorist violence only reinforced this point.

The problem was not just Arafat, but the overall strategy of the Fatah-dominated Palestinian movement. Since the peace process began in 1993 with the Oslo Accords, that leadership made hardly a single effort to move Palestinian society toward peace and moderation. Fatah did have an attractive alternative it could have offered: We will get a state, return the refugees to live in it, develop our economy and culture and enjoy large-scale international aid in exchange for ending the conflict.

Instead it continued to glorify violence, spread hatred of Israel and America, and raise a new generation with a belief in eventual "total" victory and the extinction of Israel. After Arafat died, Fatah remained incompetent and corrupt but lacked a strong leader. Unable to obtain a state, unwilling to make peace and uninterested in governing well, Fatah dug its own grave. Why should anyone be surprised that Hamas replaced it? At most, Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and American pressure to hold fair elections only accelerated this process.

There has been another important lesson in this recent history: Most of the Arab states and movements need the conflict to continue. After all, what would mismanaging dictatorial regimes do without having Israel as a scapegoat? If, for example, Syria made peace with Israel in exchange for getting back the Golan Heights, it would be the beginning of the end for that regime. Within weeks, its people would be demanding human rights and free-enterprise economic reforms. The regime could not use anti-Israel and anti-American demons as an excuse to continue the dictatorship, deprive its people of rights and material well-being, and mobilize support. The same applies to radical Islamist movements seeking to gain power.

So let's get this straight: There is no near-term solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. There is no Palestinian side with which a compromise agreement can be negotiated. Many Arab states seek to exploit the conflict. Others would like to make peace but are too scared, and it is to the West's discredit that such states don't believe that it can or will protect them.

There are several key policy conclusions to be drawn from the Hamas triumph. First, Western and especially U.S. policy must get beyond an obsession with solving this conflict. It is going to go on for decades. Peace plans will go nowhere. Hamas will not be persuaded to moderate -- why should it when it expects victory at home and appeasement from Europe? Hamas is the enemy, just as much as al Qaeda, because it is part of the radical Islamist effort to seize control of the region, overthrow anything even vaguely moderate, and expel any Western influence.

Second, since Palestinian politics have clearly returned to a pre-1993 status, so must Western and U.S. policy. This means no Western aid and no diplomatic support until their leaders change policies. The Palestinian movement can only earn financial help and political backing on the very distant day when it accepts Israel's right to exist, stops endorsing and using terrorism, and is serious about negotiating a real two-state solution.

Third, it is time to support Israel proudly and fully. Israel has done everything possible for peace, taking great risks to do so. But the idea that evenhanded, confidence-building behavior can broker peace is regrettably dead.

There are wider strategic implications for U.S. and Western interests in this dramatic yet predictable development. The radical forces have gained a major new asset that will encourage the recruitment of new cadre. Iran, Syria and Hezbollah will grow more confident and aggressive.

We are now in the middle of the third great battle with totalitarianism in living memory. As with the struggles against fascism and communism, this conflict can only be won by a mobilization of Western resources and resolve. What has happened in the Gaza Strip is a lost battle in that process. There is not room for too many more of these defeats.