Ohmigod. The System...Works? - Both Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post and Steven Postrel in e-mail have laid out plausibly dire outcomes from the current cross-border sniping between Hezbollah and Israel among southern Lebanon, nothern Israel and the Golan Heights. Hezbollah gets funding and support from Iran and Syria. Here's Krauthammer's analysis of the possible dangers:

Hezbollah is armed with 8,000 Katyusha rockets. Practically all of northern Israel lies under its guns. They are ready for firing. Hezbollah's spiritual leader, Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, threatened Monday to hit Haifa with Katyusha rockets if Israel dared to respond to Hezbollah attacks.

Were that to happen, the northern front would explode. Israel has been sending urgent messages through the United Nations and the United States that it would not tolerate such aggression. It would be forced to counterattack -- on Lebanon, on Syrian army positions in Lebanon and possibly on Syria itself, Syria being Hezbollah's boss and patron.

Syria could not withstand such an Israeli attack conventionally. It might then launch its missiles equipped with chemical weapons into Israeli cities. And that could trigger Armageddon. Israel was established so that never again would the gassing of Jews be permitted.

The Lebanon seed could flower into Nuclear/Biological/Chemical Hell.

Krauthammer and Professor Postrel apparently aren't the only ones to see this danger and worry. Comes this interesting story on the BBC website:

Iran has called for Lebanon's Hezbollah guerrilla group and Israel to rein in their cross border attacks, to prevent a wider inflammation of the Middle East conflict.

"There is concern that Israel could extend the perimeter of war in the region," said Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi after meeting his Lebanese counterpart, Mahmud Hammud, in Beirut.

Israeli troops have responded with retaliatory strikes on Lebanon

"We should exert self-restraint in the face of Israeli provocations," he said.

Note: Unqualified Offerings commends not this report unto its readers because it agrees with Minister Kharazi's assessment of blame. You aren't going to go to Hezbollah's biggest state patron for a judicious account of events. But he sure doesn't sound like he's enthusiastic about "extend[ing] the perimeter of war in the region" - you can be darn sure he doesn't want to extend it to Iran.

It certainly seems like deterrence is working. UO does not kid itself that Iran wants peace. It and Syria must still want Hezbollah to keep poking at the Golan region. And Hezbollah, fanatics that they are, surely would love to lob some shells into major Israeli cities, just as Castro tried to hector Kruschev into nuking Washington over the Cuban missile crisis. Israel would surely like complete cross-border calm; but its minimum requirement is that Hezbollah leave its major population centers unmolested. Israel has said, "Don't go there." Iran has now echoed them. Israel in turn appears not to consider the present level of violence worth the catastrophic risks to it that a general war would bring.

The Iranian Foreign Minister is on his way to visit officials in Lebanon's parent corporation, Syria. It will be very interesting to hear what gets said during that visit.

Gasp - Is Emmanuel Goldstein the only blogger/pundit to have this thought?

So farewell then Hugo Chavez of Venezula...Pound to a penny that some "Agricultural Attache" or "Junior Trade Consul" with the American Embassy is up to his ears in this one.

Inverts - Andrew Sullivan links to an OpinionJournal finger-wagging that blames rogue Catholic breeders for gay pederasty by priests. I mean, the hets use contraception and everything, and the American hierarchy forebeareth to thunder:

The fact that this crisis for Catholicism revolves around sexual misconduct is not coincidental either. For too long Catholic pastors have given lip service to the more controversial Church teachings on sexual behavior while quietly tolerating the violation of those norms. Most prelates have chosen to ignore the abundant evidence that many Catholic married couples use contraceptives and that many Catholic priests are active homosexuals. The gross inconsistency between public teaching and private practice has given rise to a culture of hypocrisy and secret vice.

There's a very interesting, um, inversion here. Anti-gay activists are forever arguing that societal acceptance of gay conduct undermines "the family," meaning heterosexual-couples-with-children like Unqualified Offerings, Mrs. Offering, Offering Boy and The Littlest Offering. Now finally, a religious conservative accuses heterosexual couples of undermining, by their conduct, the morality of gays!

Bad gays! Bad straights! Bad bad bad!

Wobbly Watch - My mother has this cat. I don't hate it nearly as much as I hate my own cat - my mother's cat is pretty inoffensive. Until you put it in a car. Then it complains, loudly and without cease, in excruciating fashion. This comes up chiefly when my mother in northern Silver Spring, MD, who does not drive, makes an extended visit to my sister in Sterling, VA - about a thirty-five-mile trip. The driver ends up being either me or my brother-in-law, the finest man I know, and a craftsman who will make you superb custom jewelry, so go buy some.

But that's not important right now. He and I have often suggested to my mother that, the way they make cars these days, there is simply no chance whatsoever that a cat in a properly-designed carrier could suffocate or otherwise come to harm riding in the trunk. But you know how people get when they get older. My mother just refuses to listen to reason on the subject. As it happens, my sister just had a new baby girl, Skylar, last week. My mother went over to "help," then decided to help more my going home again. For reasons that don't bear going into, she left the cat at my sister's place for a few extra days. And since I work over in Virginia, I got the task of driving the squalling thing home. By myself. No witnesses.

I had it in the trunk. I had the engine on. I had the lights on. I had my seatbelt on! Then I popped the lock, popped the door, popped the trunk and popped the cat into the backseat. Then I cranked the radio in self-defense.

Now how in hell is a country that has such wimps in it supposed to win a war on terrorism?

The Second Time As Farce - Reader and gaming buddy Mike Jacobs sends this link about the parents suing Sony Entertainment because they blame the addictive nature of the massively-multiplayer computer roleplaying game Everquest for their son's suicide.

Some of us were around when the "D&D suicide" genre was at its zenith. For me, the high point was the Post article about a Virginia boy who killed himself - the local sherrif solemnly informed the media that a search had turned up D&D "paraphernalia" in the teen's room. You just couldn't beat that for loaded verbiage. During my hiatus from roleplaying games (it lasted a decade), I apparently missed the Vampire: the Masquerade murder genre.

The standard gamer reaction to such stories is to adduce non-gaming features of the case in question like psychological history, home situation, social disappointments - the same issues that crop up in the suicides of non-gamers. Another approach is to advert to demographic data that suggests the suicide rate for gamers is lower than the suicide rate for non-gamers. For my part, I have no trouble believing that, all things considered, some bad thing that happened in RPG play has been the proximate cause of someone's suicide at some point, probably more than one case. Heck maybe as many as two orders of magnitude fewer people than have killed themselves because they hated being MIT students have killed themselves because they lost their half-elf cleric or everyone walked out on their campaign. Will they, on examination, turn out to have had other personal problems? You betcha. But would it turn out that the game reversal was the last straw? I have a harder time believing this has never happened than believing that it has happened at some point.

Trying to defend an activity on the basis of its utter safety is a losing proposition. Perhaps there is something that is utterly safe. But nothing worthwhile is utterly safe. I wouldn't still be in that hobby if I didn't think it worthwhile. The only way to defend freedom, either in the general or the specific case, is to affirm the moral worth of risk.

But Ne'er So Well Express'd - The indispensible Andy Kashdan weighs in, again, on current criticisms of libertarian isolationists and "libertarian isolationists." Here's the money shot:

[Brink] Lindsey seems to think that because not every country that the U.S. has ever meddled in wants to kill us, there is no such thing as "blowback." In our next foreign adventure, it will be said that perhaps, theoretically, those kooky non-interventionists had a point, but now it's too late, again. I have just one question: When will it be a convenient time to start learning from history?

One Lee-tull Problem - In Wednesday's column, "Short Takes," Antiwar.com's Justin Raimondo comes that much closer to just getting it over with and starting a blog. But that's not what I wanted to talk about. It's the section about Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute and relations with Pakistan in Monday's column, largely devoted to attacking Virginia Postrel and Brink Lindsey. (Yes, Loyal Readers, I do have Things to Say about the "libertarian isolationist"-libertarian, um, non-isolationist crossfire of recent days. That's coming this weekend, after which perhaps no one will be speaking to me. But now is not the time.)

Anyway, Justin is aghast that Carpenter advocates invading Pakistan:

Yes, Pakistan, the most loyal and completely cooperative of our Muslim allies. According to Carpenter, it would be "misplaced gratitude," you see, to a government that has cracked down on Islamic militants, whose army has fought Al Qaeda and whose support was instrumental in the Afghan war to refrain from doing so. Why? Because, we are told, there is "overwhelming evidence" that Pakistan is "harboring" Al Qaeda – indeed, it is so overwhelming that Carpenter doesn't even bother citing any of it. Even Donald Rumsfeld, the chief hawk in this administration, shied away from the suggestion that the US might turn on General Pervez Musharraf, the country's ruler, but this is just not acceptable to super-hawk Carpenter...Will we invade Pakistan, perhaps with Indian help, and set off the first fully-nuclearized war? Will we invade and "liberate" Pakistan, as we did Afghanistan, and install an army of occupation? What a wonderful lesson for our Muslim-Arab allies. Fail to cooperate, as in Afghanistan, and we'll crush you; agree to cooperate, and we'll still crush you. Oh, yes, that's the way to build a broad united front against international terrorism….

Now, on the one hand, I sort of take Justin's point here. It's bad realpolitik to teach other countries that there's no reward for cooperating with you. And yet. And yet.

What if it's true? That is, what if (Warning: Fictitious Entity Invocation!) "The Pakistani Government" really is playing footsie with al Qaeda and the Taliban - or at least the ever-popular "elements of Pakistani intelligence" are, and Musharraf and the Army either can't or won't stop them? What if the Pakistanis, perhaps in cahoots with their buddies the Chinese, really are watering the quag until it's good and mired for us? Then what?

For all the sport Warbloggerworld makes of Justin Raimondo, I've never made a secret of the fact that he and I are in complete agreement on a very important thing: that we keep the focus of the War on Terror on our actual attackers, al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, and not invoke it as an excuse to go tearing around the rest of the world putting it to alleged right. But what if the goal of destroying al Qaeda and showing the rest of the muslim world what stand-up guys we are by sticking with the Pakistanis conflict? Here is Pakistani leftist Tariq Ali on the subject:

The story everyone wants to know is Al Qaeda’s links to Pakistani military intelligence. Most people believe the links are there, and they were there on Sept. 11. Whether [the military] knew about [bin Laden’s plans] no one knows. People don't even speculate – they don't want to know. But the links were definitely there. These people were going in and out of Pakistan, landing in Pakistani airports. The circumstantial evidence is there to suggest that Daniel Pearl had got close to this story, and that rogue elements within the intelligence agencies laid a trap for him and he fell into it.
The thing is, the United States must know this. This is the shocking thing. They must know it. Whereas Colin Powell has gone out of his way to say, "We know the Pakistan government was not involved." How do you know that? No one in Pakistan believes that. General Musharraf himself described Daniel as "an over-intrusive" journalist.

I got the link from Ken Layne's site, mind you, but the website where I first discovered Tariq Ali a couple of years ago was Antiwar.com.

Independent Expenditure Watch - Michael Croft discusses actual politicians running for office on Ones and Zeros. I hope it's more than sixty days until the elections there in Texas.

Lies, Damn Lies and Psychotic Episodes - The Illuminated Donkey has the Last Word on the latest hot topic in the blogosphere: site traffic metrics. Pray that he does, anyway.

Holy Hanna! - Bruce Bawer has a blog! Anyone who remembers when The New Criterion was actually worth reading must rejoice at the news. Thank heavens the net now has a devoutly Christian, gay protestant to offset the blogosphere's alarming level of Romish influence.

Brother Arabs - Charles Dodgson has a useful quibble with an aspect of "Scorpions and Undershorts":

First, [The unhappy experience of the Palestinian diaspora] sheds light on the true motives of the "support" the Palestinians get from their Arab brethren, which isn't to improve their lot, but rather to preserve their squalor as a casus belli.

Second, the existence of the refugee camps for a separate population of "Palestinian Arabs" within Arab states is itself a historical anomaly. Historically, Arabian nationalism has been pan-Arab; the current Arab states in the region and their borders are to a great extent colonial artifacts, which are seen by the Arab themselves as fragments of the historic caliphate, and even recent history has seen repeated attempts to put Humpty Dumpty back together (like the United Arab Republic which for a brief time united Egypt and Syria). And there was certainly no "Palestinian nation" before 1948; if the Arabs there identified with any Arab state at all before that time, it was Syria.

So, Palestinian nationalism is itself a fact that the Arab governments have created for political purposes, much as the Israeli annexationists are trying to "create facts" with the settlements. But, at this point, it's a fact regardless, which Israel has acknowledged as such at Oslo. Much as the annexationists would like to contest it, it's probably too late now.

I would largely agree, though I think Palestinian nationalism is also, as I said, a recognition by the Palestinians that they've been jobbed by the existing Arab governments and can't look to them for their deliverance.

The Northern Front - Steven Postrel feels I have not taken sufficient heed of the situation in South Lebanon since Israel's unilateral withdrawal from there, and it's lessons for Israel's situation in the Occupied Territories. Charles Krauthammer agrees with him, and devotes today's column to the topic. I'll have more to say on this and similar matters when I'm working less. The Thursday Post has a news item on the subject too, available, by the miracle of the internet, Wednesday night.

What Am I, Chopped Liver? Dept. - This hurts:

The idea of a "wall" between Israel and the Arabs in Judea and Samaria has merit. It also has some disturbing implications, however, and I think that we might do well to look at them before settling on this policy.

The principal advocate (not necessarily in the sense of believing it, but certainly in the sense of putting it forward) of this idea in the blogosphere is Tony Adragna.

John Braue, in the Rat's Nest.

Hey, we kid because we love. Tony, BTW, continues to worry that bone of an idea today.

A Minor Streak - Unqualified Offerings enjoys Richard Cohen maybe a third of the time. The rest of the time it thinks he's a gasbag. But the man has had two good columns in two weeks now. In today's, he demolishes a recent op-ed that went out under the byline of Saudi Ambassador to the US, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who first came to public prominence during the Iran-Contra hearings

The truest thing in Bandar's piece is his anger. It is white hot. He feels, to his very depth, that the Palestinians are being -- and have been -- pushed around. He feels that they are treated like dirt.

I'm with Bandar on that. The persistent expansion of West Bank settlements is an outrage. Palestinians have been living under occupation long enough. When Arafat's man in Washington said on "Meet the Press," "I, Hassan Abdel Rahman, have been in exile 29 years," it overlaid the personal on the political so that it was, for once, easily understood.

Bandar may be entitled to his anger. But we are entitled to ask just what exactly his government did until very recently to advance the peace process. We are entitled to ask, in other words, what was the Saudi role before its own nationals started flying airplanes into American buildings and the kingdom embarked on a public-relations campaign, once again throwing money at a problem.

In an April 2nd column about the War in Israel and the Territories, he made some points I thought of working into my various pieces on disgorgement. Specifically, he compares the situation between Israel and the Palestinians to the Algerian civil war with France:

The Battle of Algiers is now being fought in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, in Haifa and Netanya -- anywhere a Palestinian suicide bomber can infiltrate. It is being fought, too, with increasingly desperate Israeli tactics -- first pre-emptive assassination, now the virtual reoccupation of the West Bank.

The turn that the war -- the Palestinian struggle -- has taken may be lost on Sharon and, it seems, President Bush, but not on some of those involved. "If they kill us, we kill them," said Muhammad Odeh. "It will never stop." Odeh knows whereof he speaks. His son, Abdel Basset, blew himself up in Netanya last week, killing 22 others at a Passover seder.

In the week since reading it, I've come to realize that the "Algiers" column is not valuable chiefly for sort of echoing my own ideas on the topic, nor even as advice to Israel. No, it is most valuable for its implicit warning to the Palestinians. It does matter, however some deny it, how you win your independence. Algeria prevailed over France by adopting a Fanonist strategy. Their enthusiast, Jean-Paul Sartre famously said that "to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there remain a dead man, and a free man; the survivor, for the first time, feels a national soil under his foot."

Things have worked out real well for independent Algeria. It's been suffering a vicious civil war between Islamist radicals and the aging socialist revolutionaries Sartre and Fanon so celebrated since the Algerian Army nullified the election of 1992. The Islamist parties turned, of course, to terrorism. The government to brutal counterinsurgency. But one of the things that hamstrung the government in the "hearts and minds" battle was its own genesis. Algeria was birthed in terrorism. Its founding myth necessarily reified that "dead man and free man" stuff. Its civic education stressed the rightness of terroristic violence in the nation's struggle for "freedom."

And their civics lessons bit them in the ass. Because while the religious radicals may have despised the Old Guard, they also took it as their model. And the Old Guard had no moral case to make over the heads of the terrorists to their people.

Palestinians who want the West Bank and Gaza for some reason other than the chance to engage in factional bloodletting unmolested should think about the Algerian example long and hard.

Reading Around - New Liberty on the newsstand reminds me that: 1) Their website still sucks; 2) Dang, I wish Stephen Cox had a weblog.

Ginger Stampley has redesigned What She Really Thinks! It looks great, nearly as devoid of visual interest as UO. Ginger writes to say that Movable Type 2.0 is "sweet." She's got new entries about the changing world of beef, her usual sharp comments on immigration news, and a bit spreading the Gene Wolfe meme, along with

Eve Tushnet, who, despite the fact that she is a bigtime blogger now, was kind enough to announce this site's return from DNS Hell. It occurs to Unqualified Offerings that there just may be some people who read this site and don't read Eve's - stop that! In attempting to describe the tenor of her site, I have temporarily settled on "funky gravitas."

Justin Slotman has apparently, happily for his readers, renounced that silly "give up blogging for studying" plan he rashly adopted last week. As long as he keeps the Insolvent Republic of Blogistan going, surfers need only one site for all the basketball, pornography-business, middle-east policy and libertarian inside baseball news you need.

I mentioned the Objectionable Content blog in the "Scorpions and Undershorts" post two items below. I want to specifically recommend it. Not just because of his great domain name either. Jim is an American, and another self-described "libertarian isolationist," about which class one can read much in the blogosphere these days. He's also (self-described) half-Palestinian. Even if you don't agree with what he has to say about the Middle East - he clearly seeks a grand coalition of Palestinian and Israeli peaceniks - he offers a different perspective on some much-blogged topics. Mind you, if I leave you with the impression that all he writes about is Israel and Palestine, I'll have done his site a disservice. You also get stuff like this:

A remix of Bjork's "Big Time Sensuality" is on the radio during the time change. It seems almost ridiculous to find a song called "Big Time Sensuality" sexy. You like to believe that you are far too sophisticated in your reactions to art to actually respond to something so overtly titled.

Just after Bjork said "yeehow!" I realized I wanted her.

Thanks to Gary Farber and (yikes!) The Sarge for referencing last night's long, long post.

When All the Time There's This Great Plank In Your Own - Among the things libertarian isolationists favor is getting one's own house in order before "fixing" the rest of the world. France, where marching against Israeli policy seems more important than protecting the lives and property of French Jews, could use a little libertarian isolationism. (Link via Amygdala.)

Of Scorpions and Undershorts: A Response to Steven Postrel [LATE LATE UPDATE: You may be following a link to this piece from Virginia Postrel's site. In the item linking to this, she points out that I left an important element of Steven Postrel's original argument undiscussed below. (As if what follows weren't long enough...) A (lengthy!) response to what both Postrel's consider Steven Postrel's "central point" can now be found here. It would still be tremendously generous of you to read the following article first, though. UO]

The following piece kind of got away from me. It is too damned long, it rambles, and is no doubt full of loose ends. By way of recompense, I have tossed in several points where various readers will stop in disgust. Best I could do.

A few days ago, Steven Postrel wrote to disagree with the Offerings/Adragna Plan for unilateral disgorgement by Israel of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. There is a lot to say in return, because it was a detailed argument resting on some important assumptions. Ideally, I would like a way to respond to the specific points he raised without falling into tit-for-tat, usenet-style interlinear mode, partly because interlinear exchanges tend toward a certain level of snarkiness, and partly because they end up making each atom of an argument look equivalent, when many times they are not. I think it is fair to say that SP's central claims are

1. "There is zero tolerance among the Arabs for Israel's presence"
   
2. That "the Israelis have not really tried a serious occupation"
   
3. That Israel has the option, now, of a "serious occupation," with gradual progress, on Israel's timetable, toward a Palestinian state.

He also adds an important strategic option to the previous mix (extermination, ethnic cleansing and separation): separation as part of a continued, but firmer occupation. Most of his specific criticisms seem to rest on those three legs. I certainly invite Steven Postrel to tell me if I've misconstrued his argument, and I invite readers to follow the link above to the complete text of his e-mail and decide for themselves if I have interpreted wrongly.

I think all three of his core claims are wrong.

First the question of Arab tolerance. This is surely the key. The blogosphere does not lack for examples of irridentist rhetoric against Israel by Arab journalists and politicians. There is absolutely a core constituency for Israel's destruction as a state, both in Palestine and outside it. And yet. "Zero tolerance" seems a serious overstatement.

In 1948, the entire Arab League banded together to attempt to prevent the establishment of the State of Israel. In 1967, only the front line states - Egypt, Syria, Jordan - plus Iraq participated. By the end of the War of Attrition (1970), Jordan had ceased belligerency. The Lebanese war pitted Israel against Syria only. (For the purpose of this analysis and, for that matter, almost anything else, Lebanon does not count as a separate country.) In my lifetime the number of Arab countries formally at peace with Israel has gone from zero to three, and the number of Arab countries that would rather not be bothered - just about every Arab country west of Sinai, plus many of the Gulf States - has grown larger yet. (Though Operation Defensive Shield is getting them interested again, which actually helps my argument.) In Steven Postrel's and my lifetime, the word "Israel" did not cross the lips of any Arab politician, let alone a PLO official. The only way Arab politicos referred to Israel was as "the Zionist entity." Now the Arab League adopts a resolution formally offering peace and normal relations to Israel by name, in return for a withdrawal to the 1967 borders. Leave aside for the moment the exact mixture of sincerity and publicity stunt in the "Abdullah Plan" (or "Friedman Plan" if you prefer). I can't help recall the widespread belief that Sadat's offer to "go to the Knesset" was a publicity stunt too, and hey, maybe it started out that way. Just as wars develop their own momentum, so can peace. A generation ago, the Abdullah Plan couldn't even have been offered as a ruse.

The tide, in other words, runs in both directions. We can expect a violent, irridentist faction to persist among the Arabs generally and the Palestinians particularly. The question is what Israeli policies will move enough Arabs and Palestinians to the "can't be bothered" column that the irridentists wither as an effective force.

The obvious answer is ending the Occupation.

There is, among warbloggers and pro-Israel old-media punditry, a tremendous unwillingness to credit Palestinian sincerity about hating the Occupation. The claim is either that resistance to the Occupation is "really" always resistance to Israel's existence as such, that no matter how awful the Occupation is, it doesn't justify terrorism, or that, while the Occupation might be "rough" in some abstract way, really the Palestinian diaspora has been treated far worse by the Arab nations. Let's start with the last: the Arabs say that, while the Arab-Israeli wars might be tough on the Jews, "really" the Jews have been treated far worse by the Europeans, and they should seek their recompense from the Germans, the Poles, the Russians, even Spain - hell, it was the Romans who scattered the Jews in the first place, so, say the Arabs, why come here for redemption, Jews, when your problems are in Europe.

It's a spectactularly impractical argument in both cases, and the Palestinians can as easily flip it around: "Yes, we are sick of cleaning Kuwait's toilets and scrounging vaccines in Lebanon's camps. The only solution to our woes is a national one - a state of our own on our ancestral land."

The middle claim is that the Occupation does not justify the murder of civilians. I agree completely. What the Occupation justifies is the Palestinians' conviction that they need their own country - not the means chosen by many Palestinian leaders.

Lastly: the claim that it's not Occupation the Palestinians object to, but Israel itself. Let's be careful here: there are surely some Palestinians, including all of Hamas, all of Islamic Jihad and at least some of the PLO, for whom the problem is Israel itself. But to argue that, despite Palestinian and outside Arab statements to the contrary, the Occupation is not the issue for enough of them to make all the difference in the world for Israel's prospects is another claim altogether. There is the further possibility that the specific history of the Occupation has convinced a sizable number of Palestinians and other Arabs that destroying Israel as a state is the only way the Occupation can be ended. That is, it is possible that Israeli policy makes irridentists of people who need not be such.

At bottom this is the "Are they all a bunch of fanatics?" question. I suggest, for starters, the empathy test. I do not say "sympathy." I am not so interested in whether any given reader's heart aches for the people of Palestine. As I've said before, if you were twelve years old for the Munich Olympics, you have a hard time, even thirty years later, having much in the way of heartaches for the people of Palestine. No, it is reason, not emotion, I want to summon; but - this is important - reason about emotion. Theirs. And not just their emotions, but their reason too.

Since the signing of the Oslo accords, the settler population in the West Bank and Gaza has grown about 72%, and housing by about 50%. (The figures come from Peace Now, but I've already accepted that I'm not going to be making a lot of friends with this piece. Anyone who has figures showing a static or declining settlement population since Oslo is invited to send them.) Grown. The annexationist elements in Israeli politics - never just the religious fringe, or even just "the right" - have always had a term for the settlement policy: "creating facts." Since Oslo, many, many facts have been created.

Then there's "Barak's generous offer" at Camp David. There is a Shockwave presentation of the actual contours of the Camp David Plan on the Gush Shalom site. The authors note that

1. Their map does not reflect the Israeli-controlled roads and checkpoints that would vitiate the territorial integrity of even this rump Palestine.
2. That the PLO actually accepted the successor "Taba Plan" (last slide in the Shockwave presentation) as a basis for negotiation, but that Barak withdrew the Taba offer on his way out of office.

(Steven Postrel says that for Israel to give up the heights along the Jordan River would be "military malpractice." Take a look at the final Barak Plan contours of Palestine - what would you call a government that accepted those contours? "Military malpractice" would be praising such a move with faint damnation.)

Okay, let's talk "roads and checkpoints" for a second. "Checkpoints" is not a word that conveys much flavor. So let's give it a try:

Everyone talks about how officious, degrading and stupid airport security has gotten since al Qaeda massacred 3,000 people last September. To get a sense of what "checkpoints" means for one's daily life, imagine a similar experience every few miles. Every day. Now, populate airport security with people that you believe despise you and all your kind. If you are white, imagine checkpoints staffed entirely by resentful African-American municipal employees from any large American city. If you are black, imagine that they are run by the department store detectives that lock onto you the instant you cross the lease line, or the rental agents who - what a coincidence - find that there are no units available all of a sudden.

Now give them guns.

Put your daily experience - these people control whether you get to your job, if you have one; whether you make it to the family dinner - in the context of settlement activity and a map that suggest that this will not end in your lifetime. Now don't forget the stupid part. Because at the same time you are undergoing what President Bush calls "humiliations," you see on the news that another suicide bomber has gotten through. The airport security metaphor is complete: at least as far as you can tell, checkpoints ain't working. They're just there to piss you off.

I've said it before: Few of my fellow warbloggers would abide such conditions for one minute.

And that's the good news. Because we are reasonably people, and we know, after a moment's reflection, that the Occupation would fill us with rage. Which means there is a possibility that the Palestinians - enough of them - are reasonable people who are just really really really pissed off by conditions that are within Israel's power to change. Of course, just because the Palestinians may be reasonable doesn't mean that they are. But this item is so damned long for a reason: we've had to cover some history and the history provides a context, and that context is that there is more than zero tolerance among Arabs for the existence of Israel and it's possible for Israeli actions to move parties from belligerency to non-belligerency. And speaking of history, the al Aqsa Intifada has not been going on forever. Palestinian resistance, in both terrorist and non-terrorist manifestations, has a history too. There is more to say about that.

Time next for Steven Postrel's second core claim: that Israel has not tried "a real occupation, with all the dirty and messy problems that entails--informers, arrests, reprisals against the families of terrorists, control of the schools, provision of economic opportunity, setup of tame governing bodies which could be transitioned toward democracy, etc." This is at least partly a semantic claim. Certainly Israel has used "informers, arrests, reprisals against the families of terrorists." The Palestinians, among others, would probably agree about the provisioning of economic opportunity. (In a follow-on e-mail, SP said he was not advocating that Israel use lethal reprisals against the families of terrorists; rather he suggests more comprehensive economic reprisals than bulldozing people's houses because, with the survivor payments to suicide bomber families, they still profit even after house destruction is factored in.) I suppose whether you consider Israel to have simply not done enough in the way of informers, arrests and reprisals against families of terrorists is a question of opinion, or taste. I doubt Karl Popper would class it with the falsifiable claims. But it's inarguable that Israel has always used informers. During the 1980s Intifada, almost the only people the Palestinians actually killed were "collaborators," and while that term certainly included people whose "crime" was selling property to Jews, or doing "too much" business with Israelis, it also included quite a number of Shin Bet assets.

The real question is whether Israel can try "a real occupation" now. (And it's significant that SP uses the word "try," I think - it implicitly acknowledges that "a real occupation" is also a gamble; the wisdom of it is as provisional as any of my suggestions, or Tony Adragna's, or Gershom Gorenberg's.) Pause very briefly to ask who would pay for "a real occupation?" Where does the manpower come to enforce it? The Israeli economy is already pinched by the reserve call-ups for Operation Defensive Shield. What are the chances that an armed occupying power actually finds it politically feasible to provision economic opportunity against possible short-term interests of some of its own constituent groups? Note that the ANC has already shown how to oppose "control of the schools" - you just don't go. This turns into a tragedy, of course, because an entire generation grows up ignorant, but it happens anyway.

That leaves tame governing bodies and gradual easing of the occupation if progress is being made. The tame governing bodies are another difficulty: SP says that under "a real occupation" that there would be casualties, "but they'll be uniformed ones." Well, no they won't either. They'll be the Palestinians foolish enough to join the tame governing bodies. One of the things terrorism and guerilla warfare have always been about is scaring your own people out of cooperating with the enemy. Whatever the contours of the SP occupation in practice, terrorists will strike the weak points of it, not the strong. Indeed, the terrorists will do their best to see to it that "progress" never gets made. They want draconian measures because they want mass hatred of the occupier.

And all the time, the Demographic Bomb ticks.

That's the real weapon of mass destruction that Israel needs to fear. There are actually two of them. The smaller one ticks between the Jordan and the Med: the Palestinians. The larger extends from Gibralter to the Euphrates. Strategy is supposed to be your grand scale thinking, I believe, and the D-Bomb is about as grand as the scale gets. Vaster than anthrax, and more slow.

I'm damned if I see more than two possible solutions to the D-Bomb:

1. "Exterminate them all," where "all" = "all arabs." I would remind my readers that this option is: a) as evil as evil gets; and b) kind of hard to do.
   
2. Convince the arabs not to use it. That is to say, Israel needs to become just not that big a deal any more to Arabs outside the Levant, and not the worst thing in the world to the Palestinians. (The notion that a caring US occupation and transformation of the entire Arab world on Israel's behalf will make Arabs less hostile toward Israel strikes me as suffering the same flaws as the SP Occupation Plan itself, but this piece is already overlong and overly scattered. The issue goes in the Some Other Time bin.)

NB: I have in the past and continue to agree that Israel needs a "doomsday deterrent" relevant to the concerns of Arab decisionmakers, which is to say, their tender concerns for their own pampered skins, their power and their privileges. Nukes are an important component of that, plus delivery systems that can guarantee the obliteration of any government that launches a "final solution" attack on the State of Israel. As a strategist, Steven Postrel undoubtedly recognizes that "deterrence" does not mean only the ability to wipe out someone else's population. (Justin Raimondo and Ran HaCohen just stopped nodding and gagged.)

Now, finally, the biggie. (No, I promise: finally.) The fatal flaw of the SP Plan is the same as the fatal flaw in Israel's implementation of Oslo: "gradual easing." Once again, we need to temper game theory with history.

When news of Oslo broke, I figured, "There will be a Palestinian State in five years." Bad prediction. Smart assumption though.

Oslo was signed in 1993 - two to three years after the failed Moscow Coup, the overnight dissolution of the Soviet Union, the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, the suppression of Tienanmen. And in 1985, Gorbachev was taking the first steps toward Glasnost. It's a truism of political history, particularly the history of revolutions, that the time of maximum danger and instability is when a repressive regime begins to liberalize. Viz, Russia 1917 and 1989. Viz, France in the late 18th century. Liberalization raises expectations, which lead to revolutionary change or an iron fist, or both. Maybe, clueless analysts suggested in 1989, some kind of provisional German reunification would be possible in a generation.

Uh huh.

If any Israeli strategists seriously saw Oslo as the first steps in a generation-long evolution, well, "anti-idiotarians" should not need to search far for applicable vocabulary to describe them. The evidence was staring them in the face. As John LeCarre wrote in another context, "Nowadays, these things are done quickly or not at all." Once Israel started down the Palestinian Authority road, it needed to prepare for a quick divorce.

Let me be clear: when I say "repressive regime," I mean not Israel as a whole, or the Israeli government as such. But I do mean the Occupation. All the defensive blather about how really the Palestinians have it much worse in Arab countries does not mean that they do not, in an absolute sense, have it bad in the West Bank and Gaza. Nor does the fact that there was a time, at least, when the Occupation made military sense. Countries can't become prisoners of their own illusions about themselves. The National Greatness types are big fans of Pericles. Pericles, of course, famously told the Athenians regarding their own empire that "what you hold is, to speak somewhat plainly, a tyranny..." - or at least Thucydides would have us believe that he said that. Now hawks everywhere love the part that comes next:

...to take it perhaps was wrong, but to let it go is unsafe.And men of these retiring views, making converts of others, would quickly ruin a state; indeed the result would be the same if they could live independent by themselves; for the retiring and unambitious are never secure without vigorous protectors at their side; in fine, such qualities are useless to an imperial city, though they may help a dependency to an unmolested servitude."

A fine, tough speech. Athens lost. Athens was, in fact, conquered by its enemies. I don't believe Steven Postrel's suggestions keep Israel from suffering the same fate. I think unilateral disgorgement remains the more practical course.

(Note: I am grateful to Objectionable Content for links to maps of Camp David and Taba and to the figures on Israeli settlement activity in the Oslo Era.)