Osama bin Laden gives his State of the Union address.

I recommend that everyone participate in this project.
The location also happens to be where last month's Blogger Bash took place, so the project gets a double endorsement.

Tom Wolfe celebrates the 25th anniversary of the Manhattan Institute:

The matter is perhaps summed up by a comment attributed to Henry Kissinger after a long, Byzantine discussion of why a certain controversial position of his had in the end prevailed: "Also, it helped that we were right."

That's what you'll do after reading this summary of French military history by Silflay Hraka.

Apparently even Regis Philbin is fed up with the French's obstinancy and unilateralism over the war with Iraq. He joins Oprah Winfrey in embracing the new zeitgeist.

I think the Regis & Oprah moments represent the obverse of the legendary LBJ story, where he supposedly watched Walter Cronkite come out against the Vietnam War on his newscast and asserted: "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost the country."

I've harped on how critics of American policy post 9/11 never seem to come to grips with the ramifications of their own arguments (click here and here, but James Lileks does it much better than I ever could:

One of the speakers quoted in the article said we’d insulted Arab cultures: “Long after the Gulf War was over, we had arms depots outside of mosques, American servicewomen dressed inappropriately for where they were.” So women shouldn’t be in the military? No, of course they should serve. So they shouldn’t be posted to the Middle East? No, they should have the same opportunities as men. So they should wear the veil while they’re on the base? No, but we have to understand that their presence upsets the local culture. So you support overturning the governments that impose strict miserable sexist regulations on females? No, we just have to realize how they see us. And then we do what? I don’t understand the question. Once we realize that they see us as a Godforsaken culture that lets women drive cars AND planes AND wear shorts and thongs, AND dance with someone they just met five minutes ago AND have a day job operating machine guns, then what? Well, we enter into a cross-cultural dialogue that enables a syncretic process aimed at facilitating strategies of coexistence. Yes, but what if they want to kill us because we actually think that their concepts of female servitude are negotiable? Well, I don’t accept your definitions; I think we have to change the terms of the debate so violence is never an option. It’s an option for them. It’s Job One, as the Ford ads used to say - oh, look, it’s a fellow with a bomb-belt, running towards us. Should I shoot him? Violence never solves anything. It’s about to solve you, ma’am. It’s about to solve you for good.

As has often been the case since 9/11, Chirstopher Hitchens has the last word on European timorousness in the face of Saddam and "toughness" (or at least hysteria) in the face of America. He discusses the applicability of the term "cowboy" to President Bush's behavior:

How well—apart from some "with us or with the terrorists" rhetoric—does the president fit the stereotype?

To have had three planeloads of kidnapped civilians crashed into urban centers might have brought out a touch of the cowboy even in Adlai Stevenson. But Bush waited almost five weeks before launching any sort of retaliatory strike. And we have impressive agreement among all sources to the effect that he spent much of that time in consultation. A cowboy surely would have wanted to do something dramatic and impulsive (such as to blow up at least an aspirin-factory in Sudan) in order to beat the chest and show he wasn't to be messed with. But it turns out that refined Parisians are keener on such "unilateral" gestures—putting a bomb onboard the Rainbow Warrior, invading Rwanda on the side of the killers, dispatching French troops to the Ivory Coast without a by-your-leave, building a reactor for Saddam Hussein, and all the rest of it.
In the present case of Iraq, a cowboy would have overruled the numerous wimps and faint hearts who he somehow appointed to his administration and would have evinced loud scorn for the assemblage of sissies and toadies who compose the majority of the United Nations. Instead, Bush has rejoined UNESCO, paid most of the U.S. dues to the U.N., and returned repeatedly to the podium of the organization in order to recall it to its responsibility for existing resolutions. While every amateur expert knows that weather conditions for an intervention in the Gulf will start to turn adverse by the end of next month, he has extended deadline after deadline. He has not commented on the eagerness of the media to print every injunction of caution and misgiving from State Department sources. The Saudis don't want the United States to use the base it built for the protection of "the Kingdom"? Very well, build another one in a state that welcomes the idea. Do the Turks and Jordanians want to have their palms greased before discovering what principles may be at stake? Greased they will be. In a way, this can be described as "a drive to war." But only in a way. It would be as well described as a decided insistence that confrontation with Saddam Hussein is inevitable—a proposition that is relatively hard to dispute from any standpoint. It's true that Bush was somewhat brusque with Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, but then Schröder is a man so sensitive that he recently sought an injunction against a London newspaper for printing speculation about his hair color and his notoriously volatile domestic life. What we are really seeing, in this and other tantrums, is not a Texan cowboy on the loose but the even less elevating spectacle of European elites having a cow.

I haven't done a full-scale rant about an editorial from the NYT recently, but this one is too much to let slide. Shall we?

We urge the administration to brake the momentum toward war. Saddam Hussein is obviously a brutal dictator who deserves toppling. No one who knows his history can doubt that he is secretly trying to develop weapons of mass destruction. But this war should be waged only with broad international support. To go it alone, or nearly alone, is to court disaster both domestically and internationally.

It's a good thing that the administration isn't intending to "go at it alone, or nearly alone," as described in this article (which attempts to show the paucity of allies but ends up demonstrating the opposite). Or , as a certain NYT editorial states:
Britain, Spain, Italy, Turkey, Australia and a number of Persian Gulf states have offered military assistance or access to bases...

(That's the same editorial? More on that later.)

Mr. Bush has enough support among American voters to undertake the kind of clean, quickly successful military action his father directed in the Persian Gulf war of 1991. But every poll, every anecdotal reading of the American mood makes it clear that he has not sold the public on anything difficult or drawn out. Iraq is a large and complex Arab nation of 24 million people in the heart of the Middle East. America's overwhelming advantage in firepower might not prevent a prolonged period of street-to-street fighting in Baghdad that would be murderous to Americans and Iraqis alike. A desperate Iraq might try to attack Israel, disable Saudi and Kuwaiti oil fields or even destroy its own oil industry before it fell into American hands. It might fire whatever chemical and biological weapons it has against American troops. These are risks that could be well worth taking, but the American public has not signed on for them. This nation should never begin a fight it is not prepared to carry out to the bitter end, no matter what the cost.

Well, as Bill Keller points out, President Bush's father had much less public support when he launched the first Gulf war. More to the point, I don't think anyone believes that the military phase of the battle will take a very long, even if every possibility mentioned by the Times editors occurs and causes casualties.
More fundamentally, the Times' editors "misunderestimate" the American public's likely response to the casualties if they occur. The Times' editors assume that the public's immediate response would be to turn tail and concentrate its fire on President Bush. But the majority of the public is not the Clinton administration after Mogadishu.
Bush may pay an eventual political cost, but what would happen first if Iraq used chemical weapons against our troops? Wouldn't the American public's initial reaction be a lot closer to "NUKE THE BASTARDS!!!" (Not that we should.) Outside of the Times' offices, the blame would first be focused on those actually responsible for the evil, as opposed to those who try to stop it.

That isn't true of this engagement, and the fault lies mainly with the president himself. Mr. Bush has never been open with the American people about the possible cost of this war. He has not even been clear about exactly why we are preparing to fight. Sometimes his aim appears to be disarming the Iraqis or punishing Baghdad for defying the United Nations; sometimes the goal is nothing short of deposing Mr. Hussein. The first lesson of the Vietnam era was that Americans should not be sent to die for aims the country only vaguely understands and accepts.

Let's see... "Sometimes his aim appears to be disarming the Iraqis or punishing Baghdad for defying the United Nations; sometimes the goal is nothing short of deposing Mr. Hussein. " DING-DING-DING - we have a match! The general criticism of the administration being unclear about its goals may have some merit, but is that the best the Times can do? Draft some bloggers - they'll tell you what to say...
And Vietnam pops up, for the first time...

The second lesson of Vietnam was that the country should never enter into a conflict without a clear exit strategy. We have nothing close to a plan for how, once in Iraq, we get back out again. Even if Mr. Hussein is easily eliminated, the United States will be left to govern and police Iraq for an extended period. Without clearly acknowledging the possibility to the American public, Washington could easily find itself involved in an open-ended occupation.

I'll let Max Boot handle the argument for the necessity of a clear "exit strategy." And perhaps the Times needs to review its archives; they might discover some references to an administration plan for postwar Iraq.

These risks would be tolerable if the rest of the world were working alongside the United States, prepared to share the danger of the invasion and — much more critically — the responsibility for creating a more humane and progressive Iraqi government in its wake. There are some threats and some causes that require fighting even if America has to fight alone, but this isn't one of them. And the world — like the American public — is not yet really convinced that a Hussein-free Middle East is a goal worth fighting a war for.
Britain, Spain, Italy, Turkey, Australia and a number of Persian Gulf states have offered military assistance or access to bases, but there should be no mistaking this ad hoc group for a united international front. France, Germany, Russia, China and even Canada are not on board. They may all have their parochial reasons for not joining the fight, but their resistance to war should be a powerful signal that if anything goes wrong — and something will go wrong sooner or later — the United States will bear the responsibility alone.
One of the most disturbing aspects of the Bush administration's campaign to get broader international support is the implication that France or any other nation that fails to get on board now will be cut out of the administration of postwar Iraq and its oil fields. Freeing the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein's brutality and freeing the world from the threat of his belligerence are causes worth fighting for. Winning control of Iraq's oil fields is not, particularly when the attacking nation is a country whose wasteful use of energy is an international scandal.

Even Canada? Say it isn't so!
More seriously, what's the likelihood that those nations' "parochial concerns" accurately noted by the Times' will be mollified by anything the US does in the future? And if, as the Times notes in the next paragraph, "[f]reeing the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein's brutality and freeing the world from the threat of his belligerence are causes worth fighting for", does it become less worthy if those nations' parochial concerns prevent them from seeing it?

Forty years ago, the United States entered into a conflict in Southeast Asia with good intentions. When it emerged, it was torn at home and humbled abroad. The men and women now preparing to take the country into war in Iraq are, in the main, products of the Vietnam generation. They should be the first to remember how easy it is for things that begin well to end badly.

Here we are: the Times' true target is the Bush administration's unwillingess to learn the "proper" anti-military force lessons of Vietnam. With that viewpoint, it's easy to see how the U.S.' energy consumption patterns are a greater international scandal than the Franco-German axis of appeasement; how other nations' parochial interests overrule that which is worth fighting for, and all other forms of unsophisticated views which the rubes in the Administration insist on holding to despite the NYT's lessons to the contrary.

Very quietly, Rob Neyer and Rany Jazayerli have resumed their "Rob & Rany on the Royals" feature. Welcome back, guys!

Yossi Klein HaLevi explains the case against Amram Mitzna:

In the last two years, a new post-ideological majority has emerged that is ready to consider almost any measure to ensure security and also ready, in principle, to make almost any territorial concession for genuine peace. That majority of hard-line pragmatists lives between the insights of the first and second intifadas - that we cannot occupy the Palestinians and we cannot make peace with them.

However improbably, Sharon managed to refashion himself from the symbol of our divisiveness into the embodiment of the centrist consensus. Sharon exchanged the wholeness of the land for the wholeness of the nation, becoming our most passionate advocate of national unity.

There's more, all of which should be read.

Joanthan Rauch compares the war against terorrism to the Cold War, and knocks down certain historical myths about the latter:

Communism and the Soviets were, of course, very different from jihadism or Saddam or Kim. Yet the casting of the Cold War as a chess game between two titans is all hindsight. "Right now, we look back at Communism as centralized and so easy to contain," said Leebaert in an interview, "but that's not how it looked at the time." Communism could mean Moscow or Beijing, Cuba or Vietnam, North Korea or Nicaragua. It could mean armored divisions or shoeless guerrillas or palace coups. It had a hundred guises and a hundred redoubts. And the United States intended to fight them all, everywhere? Surely this was madness.
Today's Americans congratulate themselves on the patient determination that finally brought down the Soviet Union; but, again, that was not how it looked at the time. "So much of the Cold War activity was just winging it, just stumbling along, not getting serious," Leebaert says. U.S. policy fluctuated between poles of confrontation and accommodation. Consistency? You must be joking. Critics said, often rightly, that America was applying double standards left and right.
And for what? Cozying up to murderous African or Latin dictators was no way to win converts to American values; it would mainly create new Communists. Militarily, the Cold War wasn't winnable, as even hawks conceded. If the battle was ever to be won, the decisive front would be economic, and there America's military spending was more hindrance than help. The Cold War was thus the problem, not the solution.
All plausible -- and yet. We know how the story ended.
...Like Truman, Bush has set the country on a potentially long course of wearying and far-flung conflict, not because he wants to, but because "the alternative is much more serious." Is he biting off more than the country can chew? Probably, but so did Truman.

From an article in today's NYT about the first Israeli to fly aboard the space shuttle:

The delays gave Colonel Ramon more time to personalize his journey into space. While other Jews have gone on space flights, he is the first to request an all-kosher menu. (NASA found a supplier, and all the food in his sealed meal packs is kosher.)
Colonel Ramon describes himself as a secular Jew, but he said that in space he would try to observe Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath, if it did not interfere with his duties. Shabbat, observed every seventh day, normally goes from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. This raised the question of when the day of observance occurred in orbit, since the shuttle circles Earth every 90 minutes. The astronaut consulted a group of rabbis, who developed a consensus that the day of rest should be observed based on times at his launching point, Cape Canaveral.
Before becoming an astronaut, Col. Ramon was part of the group of Israeli pilots who destroyed the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq, thus preventing Saddam Hussein from obtaining nuclear weapons.

Thomas Friedman makes many good points in his most recent column. I especially liked the following:

The Palestinians still act as if they believe they can get more out of Israel by making Israelis feel insecure rather than by making them feel secure. After a while, you can't call this a mistake. After a while, you have to ask whether it reflects a conviction that a thriving Jewish presence in the middle of the Islamic world is simply not acceptable to them.

Y' think? What gave it away?

More seriously, the Ari Shavit quote seems on-target as well:

"I compare it to open-heart surgery. Israelis know that if we don't do it, if we don't separate, we will die. But if we do it in a rushed or messy way, we will also die. So when Mitzna calls for separation, 70 percent of Israel agrees. But when he says he is ready to do it unilaterally, if necessary, or to negotiate with Arafat, or even to negotiate under fire while the Intifada goes on, most people refuse to go along. It feels wrong to them in their guts. So they want a left-wing surgery to be carried out by a right-wing doctor. The problem is, Sharon won't carry out that surgery. He is so committed to the settlements that he built, he appears to be paralyzed."

I have a problem with Friedman's usual conclusion, though:

But if there is no separation, by 2010 there will be more Palestinians than Jews living in Israel and the occupied territories. Then Israel will have three options: The Israelis will control this whole area by apartheid, or they will control it by expelling Palestinians, or they will grant Palestinians the right to vote and it will no longer be a Jewish state. Whichever way it goes, it will mean the end of Israel as a Jewish democracy.

Friedman seems to be coming out in favor of unilateral separation as a last resort, even if the Palestinians won't make a reasonable agreement (hardly a crazy scenario). But won't that essentially entail some of the same things as Friedman's parade of horribles? Building and policing a really good border, keeping a seething Palestinian population out of Israel, etc. will entail some pretty nasty things - possibly including expelling some Palestinians from their current homes. Surely that would be seen, by Friedman as well as the rest of the world, as the equal of the "transfer" hatefully advocated by Israel's current extreme right-wingers. (I'm not getting into the question of whether expelling the Palestinians could conceivably be compatible with Israel's democratic character - just pointing out that "separating" doesn't make the question go away.)

Lee Harris has an excellent piece on how today's anti-American protestors pledge fealty to Marx bututterly misinterpret him:

Those who, speaking in Marx's name, try to defend the fantasy ideology embodied in 9/11 are betraying everything that Marx represented. They are replacing his hard-nosed insistence on realism with a self-indulgent flight into sheer fantasy, just as they are abandoning his strenuous commitment to pursuit of a higher stage of social organization in order to glorify the feudal regimes that the world has long since condemned to Marx's own celebrated trash bin of history. ...The belief that mankind's progress, by any conceivable standard of measurement recognized by Karl Marx, could be achieved through the destruction or even decline of American power is a dangerous delusion. Respect for the deep structural laws that govern the historical process--whatever these laws may be--must dictate a proportionate respect for any social order that has achieved the degree of stability and prosperity the United States has achieved and has been signally decisive in permitting other nations around the world to achieve as well. To ignore these facts in favor of surreal ideals and utterly utopian fantasies is a sign not merely of intellectual bankruptcy, but of a disturbing moral immaturity. For nothing indicates a failure to understand the nature of a moral principle better than to believe that it is capable of enforcing itself.
It is not. It requires an entire social order to shelter and protect it. And if it cannot find these, it will perish.

Read the whole thing.

I've been meaning to write about the NYT's most recent fatuous editorial on Israel for a while. It's not their most objectionable effort, and it concerns a British conference that is so forgettable that it never even got to the "news" stage (despite the best efforts of the Palestinian liars-du-jour).
What impressed me about this editorial is that it is so obviously taken from the "template" files. The template has the following structure:
1) The most recent terrorist atrocity deserves to be condemned,
2) Israel "has every right to respond swiftly and firmly to Palestinian terrorist outrages,"
but
3) Whatever response Israel is actually using at the moment is excessive and counterproductive, usually because
4) It threatens to undercut some initiative that promises to reduce violence, despite the failure of the last 47,000 inititatives to do so.
Examples of such promising initiatives and the Times' prescriptions thereof include the Saudi "peace plan" and a Beirut summit thereof. And as an illustration of points 1-3, you can't get much better than this high-minded editorial after the Passover Massacre and this hissy-fit thrown after Sharon refused to listen to instructions (extensively Fisked here).
As evidence that the editorial was from the NYT's form:
1) Look at the sentence in the last paragraph:
"Israel's military response to the latest twin suicide bombing, which killed 23 people in Tel Aviv on Sunday, has so far been restrained." It seems tacked-on and completely out of place with the rest of the piece's tone.
2) The piece doesn't even mention a major reason the Israeli government prevented the Palestinians from attending the conference: the fact that the British government had announced its intentions to meet opposition candidate Amram Mitzna while snubbing current Foreign Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. In other words, screwing the British was a feature, not a bug - it was a response to a British diplomatic snub.
It would have been completely defensible to editorialize against the Israeli government's motivations; it's not crazy to argue that the move was counterproductive. But the Times' editorial doesn't even mention the basis for the Israelis' actions! After all, it's not in the form.

Anyone who wonders why public-school systems in many American metropolitan areas are in such bad shape must read this article. And make sure you're sitting down.
(Link via the Corner.)

Several long posts have been eaten in the last week by ill-timed computer crashes. Is a jealous Blogger seeking revenge for my defection to Movable Type? This sounds like a plot for a really bad horror movie. Just to be safe, I'll keep the lights on when blogging for a while...

I finally read Glenn Reynolds' article on nanotechnology and regulatory policy, and have a couple of comments, which I'd like to share with everyone rather than do the decent thing and give Prof. Reynolds the chance to respond first.

1) When discussing potential regulatory risks, I think he leaves out one that may become a big deal as the technology becomes more viable - entaglement with health-care politics. Specifically, the history of most new technologies - also applicable to new medical treatments - is that they start out hideously expensive and as such are only available to the rich, and become mass-market as the price drops (with the two reinforcing each other in a virtuous circle). I assume (correct me if you feel this is incorrect) that nanotech medical treatments would also be pretty expensive in their initial phases, even as they really work.
What happens in the interval between demonstrated effectiveness and price reduction? If such treatments are initially covered by insurance (as may be mandated by Congress) then that would place another sever stress on the system, maybe a back-breaking one. If it is not initially covered by insurance, what will happen when such treatments of demonstrated effectiveness are only available to the rich (even for a short time)? Will there be price controls? (If so, that would be an efficient way to destroy the research in the U.S.).
The caterwauling over the "digital divide" of Internet access has fortunately died down without producing any truly harmful policies. Would the same be true when the selectively-available resource is one that is directly live-saving? I'm not sure.
An excellent example of the mindset behind such potential reactions was set forth by Paul Krugman in a 1997 piece for the NY Times Magazine, discussing the potential future of health care. (Click here, then on the "American Economy" sidebar. Scroll down to and click on the 3/9/97 article.)

Some might then say ... we must abandon the idea that everyone is entitled to state-of-the-art medical care. (That is the hidden subtext of politicians who insist that Medicare is not being cut -- that all that they are doing is slowing its growth.) But are we really prepared to face up to the implications of such an abandonment?
We have come to take it for granted that in advanced nations almost everyone can at least afford the essentials of life. Ordinary people may not dine in three-star restaurants, but they have enough to eat; they may not wear Bruno Maglis, but they do not go barefoot; they may not live in Malibu, but they have a roof over their head. Yet it was not always thus. In the past, the elite were physically superior to the masses, because only they had adequate nutrition: in the England of Charles Dickens, the adolescent sons of the upper class towered an average of four inches above their working-class contemporaries. What has happened since represents a literal leveling of the human condition, in a way that mere comparisons of the distribution of money income cannot capture.
There is really only one essential that is not within easy reach of the ordinary American family, and that is medical care. But the rising cost of that essential -- that is, the rising cost of buying the ever-growing list of useful things that doctors can now do for us -- threatens to restore that ancient inequality with a vengeance.
Suppose that Lyndon Johnson had not signed Medicare into law in 1965. Even now there would be a radical inequality in the prospects of the elderly rich and the ordinary older citizen; the affluent would receive artificial hip replacements and coronary bypasses, while the rest would (like the elderly poor in less fortunate nations) limp along painfully -- or die.
The current conventional wisdom is that the budget burden of health care will be cured with rationing -- the Federal Government will simply decline to pay for many of the expensive procedures that medical science makes available. But what if, as seems likely, those procedures really work -- if there comes a time when those who can afford it can expect to be vigorous centenarians, and perhaps even buy themselves smarter children, while those who cannot can look forward only to the biblical threescore and ten. Is this really a tolerable prospect?
...For all we know, the future may belong to the medical welfare state, a state whose slogan might be "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."

I think that Congress would feel intense pressure to meddle with the distribution of nanotechnological medical treatments in the early stages of availability, and I doubt the consequences would be beneficial.

2) As an aside, Reynolds alludes to Cass Sunstein's arguments that requiring "best available practices" stifles innovation. Why? In the private sector, wouldn't such a requirement create an incentive to innovate, as the first to discover the new "best practice" would gain a competitive advantage over its rivals who need to catch up?
The reason I fixate on this point is that one of the Official Regulatory Policy Consultants to Blissful Knowledge, Prof. Charles Sabel of Columbia Law School (who is as yet unaware of his position), uses it as one of the bases for his ideas for saving the world, or at least U.S. regulatory policy. He argues that such pressure to innovate can be harnessed for use in the public sector. For those who are interested, check out just about any of his papers or specifically, this Columbia Law Review article (warning: it is NOT easy reading).

For those of us fortunate enough to not personally know a victim of the latest terrorist atrocity in Israel, it is hard to imagine anything more that could further increase pessimism about an eventual settlement.
As usual, the Palestinians are up to the task.
Via Tal G., I saw this article in Ha-aretz about Mohammed Dahla, founder of the Palestinian legal advocacy group Adalah. Dedicated to advancing the cause of the Palestinians through legal means, Dahla would seem emblematic of the segment of the Palestinian population most likely to work for peace with Israel.
Until you see what his idea of "peace" is based on:

In the meantime, it's metropolitan Tel Aviv. Gedera to Hadera. And Mohammed Dahla, my friend and my rival, says to me: Look at this architecture - it's so foreign, so alien to the place. It's as though some kind of invasion force emerged from the sea and landed on the beach. Without any sensitivity, without any connection to the land. As though the immigrants who arrived don't feel the land and its past. And you build with dizzying speed. You build arrogantly and high, and glued - absolutely glued - to the earth.
Look at the road signs, Dahla says. Most of them are in Hebrew and English, without Arabic. Because what you want, after all, is for a tourist from the moon to be able to come and wander around the country and believe that it really is a Jewish country. That there really is a Jewish state here. But I'm in your way. I and a million other Arabs are in your way. That's why it's so complicated for you with us. And in order to be able to continue with this adorable fiction of a Jewish-European state, you are trying to hide our existence. To erase our geography, our history, our identity. Now you are even trying to erase our parliamentary representation.
Does the idea of a Jewish state truly lack all justification? Don't the Jews have the right to self-determination within the boundaries of June 4, 1967? Mohammed says that the Jewish public now living in the country has the right to self-determination. But one can understand why the Palestinians rejected the UN partition plan in 1947. And one must understand that there is no balance of rights here. There is no balance of our right v. your right. And that is because at the point of departure, the young lawyer Dahla says, the Jews had neither legal right, nor historical right, nor religious right. The only right they had was the right of distress. But the right of distress cannot justify 78 percent [of Mandatory Palestine becoming Israel]. It cannot justify the fact that the guests became the masters.
At the end of the day, it is the natives, not the immigrants, who have a supreme right to the country. Those who have lived here for hundreds of years have become part of the land, just as the land has become part of them. We are not like you. We are not strangers and we are not wanderers and we are not migrants. For hundreds of years, we lived on this land and we multiplied on it. Therefore, no one can uproot us from it. No one can separate it from us. Not even you.

In case his view of the Jewish presence in the land isn't clear, here's the kicker:

Then he tells me about his breaking point. It was during one the talks with Beilin, in Oslo, when they requested that the compensation that Israel would give the Palestinian state serve it in the same way that the German reparations to Israel served it. That was all they asked. It was a kind of gentle hint, not quarrelsome. But, nevertheless, Yossi Beilin's Israelis went wild. Because of that sentence the talks broke down. They returned empty-handed. Without even the shadow of historical justice.

This is further proof that David Brooks was right when he identified the driving factor behind the current war:

The Palestinians know that they cannot threaten the existence of Israel in a material sense. Israel's GDP per capita is over ten times that of its Arab neighbors, and its military might is unquestioned. But the Palestinians can hope to undermine the moral legitimacy of the Jewish state. More than anything, it now seems, this is what they want: for the Israelis to capitulate intellectually and morally; for the Israelis to admit that their state was founded on a crime; for them to apologize for what their existence has done to the Palestinians.
The Palestinians will not, it now appears, stop fighting until the Israelis acknowledge the justice of the Palestinian cause and absolve the Palestinians of all guilt for the terrorism perpetrated in their name. They're like a man in a bitter feud whose enemy's opinion begins to matter more to him than anything else: He craves his enemy's admission of guilt. To secure this, the Palestinians are willing to endure another century of refugee camps, road closures, violence, and conflict.
In other words, the Middle East conflict has been polarized and simplified. The whole dispute hangs on a simple question: Is Israel a criminal state? Arab populations have swung behind the idea that it is, and the Jewish population has swung behind the idea that it isn't. Not since 1948 has the issue been so stark and each side so unified. There is simply no middle position on this central question, and so all those who were trying to span the divide between the two peoples—the businessmen who want to trade with the other side, as well as the peace activists who want to build bridges—have found that the ground has vanished from under their feet.

And if the Israelis so capitulate, they will be helpless to resist Palestinian demands for the "right of return," autonomy for the Galilee and all the other items enumerated in the Ha-aretz piece that would destroy Israel as a Jewish state. In Dahla's view, this is the goal of any peace agreement.
And Dahla's demographic is that of the educated elite, in whom the Israeli peace camp placed such high hopes during the Oslo period. Reassuring, isn't it? If you want to know why Ariel Sharon is almost guaranteed to win re-election this month, look no further.
P.S. I suspect that Dahla might be the "Palestinian peace activist" featured in this Hirsh Goodman column which I blogged a while ago.

Last year, Joan Didion's writings on U.S. politics were brilliantly eviscerated by Joe Klein in the New Republic:

Didion's political essays seem very dated now. They are artifacts of the most placid and prosperous moment in American history, a time when allegedly serious news organizations and journals of opinion turned to cynics and stylists--people who knew little about politics and nothing at all about policy--to make pronouncements about public life. These people practiced a form of theater criticism, assuming and sometimes even asserting that politics was a lesser branch of show business, that politicians were merely actors reading lines, that political performance consisted only of public speaking and image-making; while the quiet work of governance, the true work of elected officials, was largely ignored. This was, almost by definition, a flagrantly superficial conceit. It is probably finished now. When reality visits, there is no need for political fictions.

Unfortunately, her fatuous preaching has continued with respect to the aftermath of September 11 and the proposed war in Iraq. Andrew Sullivan has a wonderful demolition of her views and though-processes, or lack of such:

She doesn't seem to grasp that people who differ from her views about this might also have read history, theology, sociology, philosophy, and so on. Does she think that Bernard Lewis or Fouad Ajami have not devoted years to inquiring into "the nature of the enemy we faced"? Does she think that my own post-9/11 essay, "This Is A Religious War," was devoid of any historical or philosophical analysis? Does she think that John Keegan and Victor Davis Hanson are uninterested in military and diplomatic history? The sheer intellectual snobbery of Didion blinds her to the real scholarship on the other side of the debate. Which makes life easier for her, but it doesn't help shed any light for the rest of us.
Perhaps this is a function of being in a liberal intellectual cocoon. When the only educated people you know hold identical views to yours, it's an easy step to assuming that all those other mysterious creatures out there who disagree with you are simply dumb anti-intellectual jingoists. The cocoon blinds Didion in other ways as well. Many times in the piece, she recounts going out into the country to talk to real people about 9/11. She doesn't seem to realize that the people Joan Didion might meet in bookstores -- the ones who have come explicitly to hear her speak, no less -- might not be completely representative of the country as a whole. Memo to Didion: Get out a little more.

There's much more.