On the Palestinian "problem"

The song lyrics from this morning?

It's a little too little
It's a little too late...

The effects of the "embargo" maybe won't be so easily erased by just turning the money spigots back on again. Something about starving dogs -- women and children too -- that doesn't make them lick your hand the next time you deign to feed them...

Good luck, but so many of these initiatives are backwards-looking. Maybe next time actions should be considered before you get an elected slate of "terrorists" in there. Start winning the hearts and minds earlier, backed up by action, rather than trying to force or buy cooperation. Of course, assuming your opponent is genetically incapable of reason, peace or trust isn't such a great starting place. And now that the race is being run, it's amazing how many ill-advised opponent actions get blamed on that genetic inferiority when people react naturally to oppressing forces. Suddenly, Mr. Sharon's tactics don't seem so smart as a long-term strategy, eh? Anybody celebrating news out of Gaza in the past week, thinking you're pitting the dogs against themselves, is foolish. This is failure, folks. And when your neighbors fail through whatever fault, it's never good regionally. No matter how pretty you might think you're sitting today, how secure you are that all those problems are theirs, "over there".

Daniel Levy, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and a former Israeli peace negotiator, said the American move to back Mr. Abbas “looks suspiciously like there’s an effort afoot to reimpose single party rule on the Palestinian body politic.”

...

A “West Bank first” strategy would mean leaning on the Israeli government to dismantle settlements, ease up on travel restrictions for Palestinians moving around the West Bank, and release a substantial number of Palestinian prisoners being held by Israel, Middle East experts said. Such moves would probably require significant prodding from the Bush administration; it is unclear whether Mr. Bush, who has thus far refrained from pressuring Israel to make political concessions to Mr. Abbas, will actually do so now.

“This is as serious as it gets,” said Ziad Asali, head of the American Task Force on Palestine. “It is time to lift the siege off the Palestinian people. This is the time to open up the political and economic horizons, and wage a campaign for the hearts and minds of the Palestinian people.”

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Here's another one you may have missed:

On Fox News Sunday General David H. Petraeus expressed concern about the new US plan to arm Iraqi Sunnis who promise only to fight al Qaeda.

"How do you know, or do you worry, that they are going to end up using those weapons to either attack US forces or to fight their civil war against the Shiites?" asked host Chris Wallace.

"Those are legitimate concerns," replied Petraeus, but said that the US was taking precautions to prevent that from happening.

The Iraqi government has strongly objected to to the US strategy of arming Sunni insurgents. In a Newsweek interview published Saturday, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki blasted that strategy, saying that it "will create new militias."

Link to Larry Kaplow, Newsweek interview w/Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki

UPDATE: I thought that name sounded familiar...
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Reading this account now, I see Rep. Ackerman and I think alike:

"It's a day late and a $100 million short," said Rep. Gary Ackerman (news, bio, voting record), D-N.Y., who chairs a House subcommittee focused on the Middle East. "If we were delivering goods to Abu Mazen and making him the Muslim Santa Claus in the Arab world so we was giving out the goodies, instead of Hamas, they wouldn't have lost the last election. And Hamas would have withered in the desert."

Hamas' surprise 2006 legislative victory ended decades of rule by Abbas' Fatah Party. Hamas won largely on the strength of the services and smooth government it delivered in its Gaza stronghold.

You wonder what Secretary of State Rice really thinks, what's worth fighting for most effectively in her position and how much she has been pushing back from within lately, if at all, on some of this administration's policy choices:

As a first step, Rice said she will ask Congress to rework an existing $86 million aid request for the Abbas-led government. At the same time, she announced a separate $40 million contribution to United Nations relief for Palestinian refugees, a gesture to the 1.5 million Palestinians living in increasingly desperate conditions in Gaza.

"We are not going to countenance that somehow ... the Palestinians are divisible," Rice told reporters. "We're not going to abandon the Palestinians who are living in Gaza."

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Reading this weekend of the father who raised her makes her more interesting a figure to me; I don't think she's as simple a read as say, the Cheney girls (the one just got hired to push Fred Thompson as president). Sometimes the workings of the mind are hidden, and you risk misinterpreting outward actions. This book, I think I'll (deign to:) read:

Twice As Good: Condoleezza Rice and Her Path to Power, by Marcus Mabry of Newsweek, provides insights into the professional and private life of a powerful, polarizing woman. Yet the most intriguing personality in the book is not Condoleezza Rice but her father, preacher and educator John Wesley Rice.

Mr. Mabry reminds us that for the most part, the upper-middle class and black professionals preferred to carve out a bubble of freedom within the boundaries of segregation rather than agitate to overthrow the system. John Wesley Rice subscribed to that premise. Living in the then-elite black enclave of Titusville on the outskirts of Birmingham, Ala., he created a kind of discrimination-free sanctuary for his only child.

Rather than submit Condoleezza to the discrimination that other blacks routinely endured, he chose to block it from her view. When the segregated state fair came to Birmingham, he would drive "5 miles out of the way" to keep her from seeing the soaring Ferris wheel. For such an experience, he took her to Coney Island in New York City. He did not involve her in protest demonstrations or otherwise permit her to participate in the civil rights movement. With his wife, Angelena Ray Rice, he set out to create a highly educated, well-mannered, perfect child, who as an adult would conduct herself in a dignified manner at all times.

...
In 1968, the Rev. Rice moved his family to Tuscaloosa, where he became dean of students at Stillman College. He went on to become vice chancellor and the first African-American administrator at the University of Denver. Having been hired because he "was socially conscious but not radical," he learned early on to establish covert relationships with the local black community. By working both sides of the color divide, he brought significant change to a very white, highly privileged university.

To educate white students as well as blacks, the Rev. Rice created the course "The Black Experience in America," which brought in such African-American speakers as Quincy Jones, Fannie Lou Hamer and Louis Farrakhan. But when Chancellor Maurice Mitchell, who had hired the Rev. Rice, left the university, his protégé was forced out and his position eliminated. Angelena having died in 1985, the Rev. Rice moved to California to be near his beloved daughter, then provost at Stanford. He had advised her to become a Republican because "they look after their own."
...
In John Rice, Mr. Mabry has profiled all the black fathers who during segregation sought to advance their children by holding them above the fray. Such fathers were convinced that they could shield their own from racial prejudice that could limit ambition and achievement by making them twice as good as those who would deny them opportunities for advancement.

The irony is that self-imposed paternal classism has made possible extraordinary individual advancement but left behind most of the masses that stormed the racial barricades to gain blacks' civil rights and freedom.