Eyeless In Gaza

NRO: Terrorists To Benefit From A Not-So-Peaceful 'Solution'

(National Review Online) 

To see what Hamas control of Gaza will mean for us in Iraq, we have to see it as our enemies do -- not just Hamas, but its parent organization, the Brotherhood, and its longtime partners Hezbollah, al Qaeda, and the Wahhabi and Salafist movements. To do that, forget Israel entirely for a moment. Look only at the terror war against America, and at the geography of Islamofascism that supports it. Place Gaza in that context, and its strategic location jumps out at you. Control of Gaza gives Hamas and its partners direct access to the land border with Egypt, as well as access by sea to terrorist supply ports in Lebanon and Syria, and from them, overland, to the terror training camps in Syria, Lebanon, and Iran and to the ratlines from Syria into Iraq.

This is the reality we face: The "Palestinian democracy" we rattle on about is a mirage no desert-dweller is seduced by. Abu Mazen is president of nothing; his Fatah party no longer exists. It never was anything but a collection of competing terrorist gangs, but Arafat was a master manipulator who controlled them all by keeping the big carrots and sticks in his own hands and wielding them with ruthless cunning. With his death, Fatah splintered into a multitude of shifting groups and now they're not just competing -- they're at war, regularly breaking up each others meetings with gunfire and shooting each other down in the streets, along with hapless bystanders.

We pretend that with our help and a huge new infusion of Western cash the 58,000-man Palestinian security forces will be able to create order out of this internecine chaos, but this too is a mirage. It's the security forces that are doing most of the shooting, mostly at each other. As U.S. special envoy General William Ward, our no-nonsense military expert on the ground in Gaza told us last week, Palestinian security forces are "dysfunctional." Only about a third of them actually show up for work, and it doesn't make much difference when they do, because the chain of command that supposedly links them to their leaders is so broken that Abbas and his few remaining loyalists can barely get them to protect his headquarters in Ramallah, let alone the whole of Gaza and the West Bank.

What, then, of Abu Mazen's presumed popularity, you ask, the popularity that led to his easy victory in the first post-Arafat election, which so many American pundits of the right as well as the left praised as a birth of democracy, like the election in Iraq? That too is a mirage. The Palestinian election was nothing like the one in Iraq. Abu Mazen won the top job only because Hamas chose not to run, preferring to take control from the bottom up. Hamas ran in the subsequent municipal elections and swept to victory in almost every major Palestinian population center.

It was poised to do the same in the parliamentary elections, until Abu Mazen postponed them indefinitely, and invited Hamas to join him without an election. It hardly matters. Hamas is taking over, with or without elections or invitations, and most Palestinians are glad. Hamas is a disciplined terrorist organization, and they are sick of chaos and corruption. Besides, like their Islamofascist brothers everywhere, they believe that it is Hamas that is forcing the Israelis to retreat in Gaza, and America with her. They see it as another terrorist victory, a harbinger of more to come. Meanwhile, they are enjoying the sight of the great American Samson, stumbling about, "eyeless in Gaza." They think our acquiescence in the once-mighty Sharon's appeasement plan puts us "at the mill with slaves," and they are jubilant.

The good news is that unlike the Biblical Samson, we are not irrevocably blind, only seduced and blindfolded by a mix of propaganda, ideology, and wishful thinking that prevent us from seeing reality. If we tear off our blindfold and call a halt to the Gaza retreat before August 17, we will save ourselves and our friends in Iraq much anguish, and save our Israeli friends and perhaps our Lebanese friends too. And if we do it boldly, proclaiming our determination to defeat Islamofascist terror in Gaza as we are defeating it in Iraq and Afghanistan, we will bring a final American victory much closer.

Barbara Lerner is a frequent NRO contributor.