S9, the public method chosen for this hit, overt and military, may have some meaning to it too. Speculate?Sharon to Abbas - Since you aren't going to take on Hamas, we will in a public fashion. You can diss us, but we are doing your job for you.
Abbas cooperates by badmouthing Israel in return.
And Hamas starts taking it on the chin.
Yah, brahs, but you don't help your negotiating partner by missing the target with a sledgehammer. Now, instead of being good and dead, the terrorist al-Rateisi is sitting in a hospital in Gaza, screaming on al-Jazeera about how he's going to take his revenge on the Jews.
And the Pallies are cheering him on. He could have been good and dead using quieter methods. It's not as if the Israelis didn't know where he was. But noooooo! The Israelis not only missed their target, which really ruined my day, but also killed a girl and some other bystander.
Don't give Abbas too much credit. He's Arafat's cutout. The minute he tries to freelance on his own, Arafat will send him to Allah by means of an outraged shahid, having been convinced that Abbas is a traitor who is in the Pay of the Jew.
Either they'll strap bomb him or the head of Abbas' bodyguard team, also a stooge in the pay of Arafat, will put nine grams in the back of Abbas' head.
It's really almost a joke. I mean, Arafat runs this little gangster outfit out of some bunker in Nablus. He's sitting on several billion dollars that those stupid-sh*t Eurotrash just handed him. Fatah controls the West Bank the way the Yakuza controls Yokohama: extortion, murder, kidnapping, narcotics trafficking, gunrunning, and of course, that old standby, protection. He's got terrorist contacts up the wazoo. And we're really supposed to believe that Abbas is a free agent?
Bush, Rice, and Powell are pretending that Abbas is some sort of free agent. They are trying to make the Israelis cooperate to build up Abbas, but everything proceeds from the assumption that Arafat can be sidelined. And we're doing all this as payback to the Saudis and the Jordanians for remaining silent while we kicked Saddam in the yarbles.
And this is all going to come unraveled, I promise you. Bush will get burned, big time, by the Arabs. They have no intention of leaving the Israelis in peace, especially the Pallies. To them, the only good Jew is a dead Jew.
Even good, conservative Republicans like Bush and Rice can make mistakes like this. The Middle East will never cease to disappoint us. Why? Because, you have to remember Peter O' Toole's lines from Lawrence of Arabia, when he was speaking to Omar Sharif, who played a Hashemite, iirc: "As long as the Arabs fail to unite, they will be seen as a little people, a silly people, greedy, barbarous, and cruel."
The Jews could invent a way to irrigate the entire Arabian desert and turn it into a new Garden of Eden, and the Arabs would find a way to describe it as a dirty Zionist plot. Nothing changes with the Arabs. Nothing ever will. Because even if they did unite, they would still be a little people, a silly people, greedy, barbarous, and cruel.
I give Bush credit for trying. But it won't succeed.
Be Seeing You,
Chris