Gaza: Tomorrow's Iraq

Richard Cohen wrote in WaPo It is the solemn obligation of a columnist to connect the dots.

But unfortunately they select which dots they want to connect, and ignore others, and then they pick the route they want to connect them, to support their preconcieved agenda.

So let's call one dot Iraq and another the Gaza Strip, and note that while they are far different in history and circumstance, they are both places where Western democracies, the United States and Israel, are being defeated by a common enemy, terrorism. What is happening in Gaza today will happen in Iraq tomorrow.

A lot of distortion in that statement. What do you think is happening in Gaza? Israel has decided that the PA can't control Gaza, so rather than having a lot of soldiers defend small settlements, they are pulling both the soldiers, and the people they have been protected, back inside a defensable wall. Totally different from helping Iraq form a new constitution.

In both cases politicians will assert that it is not terrorism that has forced their hands. President Bush says this over and over again: denunciations of evil, vows to get the job done, fulsome praise for Iraq's remarkably brave democrats. But the fact remains that Iraq is coming apart -- the Kurds into their own state (with their own flag), the Sunnis into their own armed camps, and the dominant Shiites forming an Islamic republic that will in due course become our declared enemy.

There certainly are people in each camp that might like it that way, perhaps even as much as Richard Cohen does, but there are a lot who have really liked the idea of democracy, and who are working hard to come up with a constitution.

Similarly, Israeli politicians assert that it is not terrorism that has chased Israel from Gaza but the realization that a minority of Jews (about 8,500) cannot manage a majority of Arabs (more than 1 million), and this is surely the case. But it was terrorism that made that point so powerfully. After all, Israel took Gaza from Egypt in the 1967 war. It took 20 years for the Palestinians there to launch their first uprising. Without the violence, Israelis would still be farming in Gaza.

If Israel had been smart it would have insisted that Egypt take back the Gaza when they signed their peace agreement, but Egypt did not want the headache of the million Arabs, and did not want to assimilate them into their large country. Israel never should have started farming in Gaza.

Israel in Gaza, like America in Iraq, underestimated its enemy. Palestinians have been tenacious, not merely fighting but doing so in ways that elude our understanding. Since the 1993 Oslo accords, there have been more than 90 suicide bombings. Israel has responded wisely by erecting a security fence. It has not responded by pulling out of the West Bank. But what's true in Gaza is also true in the West Bank. For Israel, the numbers are all wrong -- too many Palestinians, too few Jews. Ultimately demographics will trump Zionism.

Perhaps

The same holds for Iraq. There, suicide bombings are an almost daily occurrence -- more than 400 since the U.S. invasion in March 2003. The guerrillas, the insurgents, the terrorists -- who are those guys, anyway? -- attack U.S. forces an average of 65 times a day. The insurgency is unrelenting, and so is the mayhem. Sunnis and Shiites are at each other's throats, killing and retaliating and killing some more. No one, it seems, can figure out who is allied with whom. The thing's a morass, a mess, a mystery and, unforgivably, a surprise. This was not supposed to happen. American troops would be greeted as liberators. Remember? There would be no insurgency. Where would it come from? What would be its purpose? Who would possibly die for such a cause?

Things are not perfect, but they are not nearly as bleak as Richard thinks, and if we are successful in getting a Democracy launched in Iraq, it will really be good for the area