The absurdity of the State Department's position on Arafat is compounded by its efforts to build a coalition against terrorism that will include some of the very states--especially Syria and Iran--against which we have in effect declared war for harboring and sponsoring this evil (in their case it is the Hezbollah, which almost certainly was connected with the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut and of American embassies in Africa in 1998). For the State Department and the elite media, building coalitions is not a means to an end, but an end in itself. If carrying out a mission interferes with coalition-building, then the mission must be changed, or even sacrificed entirely.
And as Rich Lowry pointed out yesterday, Colin Powell is not enough of a leader to overcome the biases of the State Department bureaucracy and the media.