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me: mebbe it's time for us to say to them all "Fuck You, settle it yourselves"
Personally, I think that Arafat is a worthless wind-bag, but my main "Bad Guy" in this is the punk Sharon, the murdering, vainglorious spineless piece of shit leader of Israel, Ariel Sharon. "He was forced to resign after an Israeli inquiry found him indirectly responsible for the massacre by pro-Israeli Lebanese Christian militiamen of more than 800 Palestinians at Beirut refugee camps in September 1982." The same Sharon who sparked this latest "war", 18 months of non-stop fighting started by his visit to the Temple Mount...
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A BOSTON GLOBE EDITORIAL
An American failure
3/28/2002
HE PRINCIPAL EFFECT of the unraveling Arab League summit in Beirut has been to reveal the discord among Arab regimes and their true attitudes toward the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Hopes that the summit might help resolve that conflict were dashed before the deliberations began when the Bush administration failed to persuade Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to let Yasser Arafat travel to Lebanon. This unacknowledged humiliation for American diplomacy, if left unredeemed, could make a bad situation even worse.
Sensibly, the administration wanted Arafat in Beirut so he could approve the peace initiative broached there by Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Abdullah. Another aim was to upstage denunciations of preparations by the United States to help remove Saddam Hussein from power.
But all parties went on working at cross-purposes. Arafat did not or could not enforce a cease-fire on the Palestinian side, appearing to validate one of the two excuses Sharon gave for keeping Arafat in Ramallah. The second excuse, the one Arafat cited for deciding not to visit Beirut, was Sharon's warning that he might prevent Arafat from returning home after the summit in the event another suicide bomber struck at Israelis during the summit - like the one Hamas perpetrated yesterday in Netanya.
The world saw Arafat and Sharon, each in his own way, refuse to do American bidding. This is what comes of President Bush's reluctance to summon all the powers and prerogatives of US diplomacy to herd Israelis and Palestinians toward a negotiated agreement that can save thousands of lives. Like certain weapons, America's diplomatic clout can be a use-it-or-lose-it asset. By letting the violence and madness loosed on both sides spiral out of control, Bush has made it much harder than it would have been a year ago for Washington to bring the belligerents to the negotiating table.
As if American embarrassment weren't bad enough, Arafat's humiliation at the hands of Arab leaders at the summit cast doubt on the entire exercise. There was Arafat, who defines himself as the embodiment of the Palestinian cause, sitting in front of a TV camera in Ramallah, his written speech before him, waiting to address the dignitaries in Beirut. But after the Syrian ruler, Bashar Assad, spoke, the Syrian puppet, Lebanon's President Emile Lahoud, refused to permit Arafat to speak.
The regime of the Assads, with its long history of feuding with Arafat, did not want to give him the opportunity to endorse the Saudi plan, which the Syrians regard as not sufficiently aligned with their less flexible demands. Syria was performing its variation on a theme by Sharon: the irrelevance of Arafat.
All parties to this conflict are playing with fire. Only America can take the matches away and oblige all the pyromaniacs to come to their senses. This is what Bush has to do. Now.
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