Wishful thinking

From THE JERUSALEM POST Editor's Notes: Aug. 17, 2007, by David Horovitz [my own emphasis added - SL]....

....The sadly proven fact that should have long since been internalized is that Mahmoud Abbas has neither fought the terrorism that has blighted our day-to-day life here, nor even been moved to stave off his own political demise by reforming the governance his rotten Fatah apparatus offers his disillusioned people. His Prime Minister Salaam Fayad, the new great white Palestinian hope of the world diplomatic community, meanwhile, is paying the salaries of the very Hamas politicians who seek his humiliation and ouster, and even funding some of Hamas's murderous gunmen, albeit apparently because of some nefarious machinations in the PA's computer room.

Rewarding all this failure with an attempt at substantive diplomacy smacks of desperation - by the Bush administration, by the Quartet, and by Israel's government. It smacks of wishful thinking, of the pursuit of false ideas. And it won't work, because it can't work.

No diplomatic framework can succeed so long as the killers who seek its collapse are free to detonate bombs, gun down civilians and fire off rocket barrages at the first hint of real progress. That's why the only process that can possibly succeed is one that places the countering of terrorism, and the attempt to marginalize it, as the first crucial step.

Funding and arming and embracing Abbas's hollow Palestinian Authority without demanding the tackling of terrorism is a veritable disincentive to reform. It prevents Abbas from so much as telling his own people that terrorism must be rooted out as a precondition for progress. And consequently it is a recipe for disaster.

Far from guaranteeing good results, the good intentions of Bush, Rice, Blair and Olmert, pursued via this track, are guaranteed to fail.....

....Competent leadership would measure the practicalities of dealing with the extremists against the possibilities for marginalizing them, assess the prospects for genuine reform of the PA, listen to advocates and opponents, heed its own warning bells, and marshal its own wisdom and understanding to formulate the most effective path forward. What we have instead, domestically and chivvying from the outside, are wishful thinkers. But wishful thinking won't make Hamas go away.