How to solve the Israel/Palestine problem:

Meteor Blades asked everyone on D-Kos, and my position got a lot of good ratings, more than almost any on the message thread, so I thought I should put it up here too.

1. Palestinians have to recognize that Israel exists. It's not going anywhere. It's not part of the International Elders of Zion Conspiracy. It's people who started out as poor refugees, just like the Palestinians are today. It's not even a European invasion. As much as it is Holocaust refugees, it is the Jewish millets of the Ottoman Empire coming together. If the Palestinians want to blame anyone for that, they can blame their "Arab brothers" the same "brothers" who don't do anything for the Palestinians except say "Let's you and him fight." and "Here are some guns. Please kill our Jews for us. We'd do it ourselves, but we're scared of the big bad Jews."

2. Israel has to recognize that Palestinians exist. Not Arabs, Palestinians. Arabic has been called a dead language that they refuse to bury. Israelis and their apologists have to stop insisting that other Arab countries have to take in refugees the way Germans took in refugees after World War II. Besides the fact that Germans realized that they had brought their problems on themselves, while Palestinians blame others for the situation, Arabs are coming to speak different languages. Arab nationalism is bull[bleep] and even Colonel Qaddafi has come around to realizing it.

3. Obviously that means a two-state solution. Recognizing the need for a Palestinian State is probably the only thing G. W. Bush has gotten right his whole time in office. But he hasn't moved it forward, he's moved it backward. That's why going back to a Democratic administration is necessary to solve this problem. Carter and Clinton moved things forward. Bush balled it all up.

4. Back when Clinton was helping the negotiations they almost got it solved. They had everything divvied up except for one small hill in Jerusalem. The only way I can see out of that is to internationalize the city under religious control. I know many Muslims and Jews think this is just a Christian conspiracy to take over without fighting, because Christians outnumber Muslims and Jews put together. Tough. The Jews and Muslims have, between them, driven out almost all the Christians. The least they could do is let the Christians share in the rule of one city.

That's my two cents, FWIW.

Ah, the white man's burden!

Remember the push to get a UN force into Darfur, where genocide is happening? Notice how long it is taking to agree on that force, and get approval, and coordinate the logistics? Notice how by the time anything is done, at the rate things are moving, that all the non-Arabs in Darfur will be dead?

This news is just in from the Middle East:

Planning for the force is in early stages, but officials said they anticipate it including 10,000 to 20,000 troops led by a contingent from France or Turkey.

That's right, the world body, allegedly dominated by third world governments and their concerns, is once again rushing to stop attacks against white people. In this case they do not even rise to the level of genocide. This is not to argue in favor of Israel's attacks on Lebanon, which I consider disproportionate. It is simply to point out that systematic murder of people from other ethnic groups, genocide, is going on in Africa, while the world dithers. There are plenty of African troops willing to go into Darfur, they just don't have the money. Now watch the "international community" (anyone have any idea who that is? I sure don't) send their money to Lebanon instead.

Dr. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, first African Secretary General of the United Nations, put it best:

A genocide in Africa has not received the same attention that genocide in Europe or genocide in Turkey or genocide in other part of the world. There is still this kind of basic discrimination against the African people and the African problems.

Crazier and crazier

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Tuesday once again charged that the Holocaust was a fantasy concocted for the West to take over the Middle East through Israel, and proclaimed that Israel was on the verge of collapse, the news agency ISNA reported.

I wonder what kind of historical research is permitted in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The government is active in publishing copies of The International Jew by Henry Ford and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and distributing them around the world.

Worst president ever?

You gotta read this article by Sean Wilentz in Rolling Stone magazine:

George W. Bush's presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace. Barring a cataclysmic event on the order of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, after which the public might rally around the White House once again, there seems to be little the administration can do to avoid being ranked on the lowest tier of U.S. presidents. And that may be the best-case scenario. Many historians are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history.

From time to time, after hours, I kick back with my colleagues at Princeton to argue idly about which president really was the worst of them all. For years, these perennial debates have largely focused on the same handful of chief executives whom national polls of historians, from across the ideological and political spectrum, routinely cite as the bottom of the presidential barrel. Was the lousiest James Buchanan, who, confronted with Southern secession in 1860, dithered to a degree that, as his most recent biographer has said, probably amounted to disloyalty -- and who handed to his successor, Abraham Lincoln, a nation already torn asunder? Was it Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, who actively sided with former Confederates and undermined Reconstruction? What about the amiably incompetent Warren G. Harding, whose administration was fabulously corrupt? Or, though he has his defenders, Herbert Hoover, who tried some reforms but remained imprisoned in his own outmoded individualist ethic and collapsed under the weight of the stock-market crash of 1929 and the Depression's onset? The younger historians always put in a word for Richard M. Nixon, the only American president forced to resign from office.

Now, though, George W. Bush is in serious contention for the title of worst ever. In early 2004, an informal survey of 415 historians conducted by the nonpartisan History News Network found that eighty-one percent considered the Bush administration a "failure." Among those who called Bush a success, many gave the president high marks only for his ability to mobilize public support and get Congress to go along with what one historian called the administration's "pursuit of disastrous policies." In fact, roughly one in ten of those who called Bush a success was being facetious, rating him only as the best president since Bill Clinton -- a category in which Bush is the only contestant.

They're not even pretending to look for bin Ladin!

This has been going around the news lately. Here's the New York Times take:

C.I.A. Closes Unit Focused on Capture of bin Laden

WASHINGTON, July 3 — The Central Intelligence Agency has closed a unit that for a decade had the mission of hunting Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants, intelligence officials confirmed Monday.

The official administration spin is that it doesn't mean anything:

Agency officials said that tracking Mr. bin Laden and his deputies remained a high priority, and that the decision to disband the unit was not a sign that the effort had slackened. Instead, the officials said, it reflects a belief that the agency can better deal with high-level threats by focusing on regional trends rather than on specific organizations or individuals.

"The efforts to find Osama bin Laden are as strong as ever," said Jennifer Millerwise Dyck, a C.I.A. spokeswoman. "This is an agile agency, and the decision was made to ensure greater reach and focus."

What does the guy who knows most about it have to say?

Michael Scheuer, a former senior C.I.A. official who was the first head of the unit, said the move reflected a view within the agency that Mr. bin Laden was no longer the threat he once was.

Mr. Scheuer said that view was mistaken.

"This will clearly denigrate our operations against Al Qaeda," he said. "These days at the agency, bin Laden and Al Qaeda appear to be treated merely as first among equals."

So why are they really doing this?

In recent years, the war in Iraq has stretched the resources of the intelligence agencies and the Pentagon, generating new priorities for American officials.

That's right, the War in Iraq is making it impossible to fight the people who really attacked the United States.

Is George Bush really so stunningly incompetent, or doesn't he want to catch the people who attacked us on September 11th?

That's the real question about almost all of the administration's policies. Stupidity and incompetence, or deliberate sabotage of the United States? Was the Hurricane Katrina response just an incredible foulup, or deliberate ethnic cleansing? The list goes on and on and on and on and . . . .

Let me get this straight

The same people in the American administration who hate the UN, who think it is incompetent and worthless and ought to be scrapped or at least totally overhauled, want it to take over the African Union mission in Darfur?WTF?