"I go to war for my family, for my country," Amin said. "Because (Assad) has killed everyone. He killed my cousin. He destroyed my village. He destroyed my home."
Yet despite what is at stake, neither those European countries that support nor those that oppose the Palestinian resolution have a Plan B for the “day after” the resolution.
Angela Merkel, the German chancellor who is a staunch defender of Israel, said last week that she was concerned about the “day after,” asking what might happen on the ground if the Palestinians unilaterally went to the U.N. General Assembly.
“The big question is the day after,” said Yaacov Bar-Siman-Tov, an international relations specialist at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “The settlements will still be there. The Israeli Army will still be there.”
The situation might quickly deteriorate if the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, stops, as he has threatened, the transfer of customs revenues owed to the Palestinians. The Obama administration, too, might cut aid to the Palestinians and even downgrade its ties.
There is a danger, too, that riots among the Palestinians could ignite the anger of Israel’s other Arab neighbors.
All of this, analysts say, would make it imperative for the Europeans to think hard about how they could help the situation on the “day after.”So, Palestinians want statehood and independence from Israeli occupation, but EU states can't allow Palestine statehood because the territory is still occupied. The article recognizes that withdrawal and Israeli concerns can be negotiated first, but the writer immediately dismisses any such reasonable solution:
But the truth is that the Europeans have no Plan B. “It’s because we have not seen the text of the resolution,” said an E.U. diplomat. But when they do, chances are it will be too late.So, UN and EU diplomatic negotiators could develop a plan but because they haven't already, they can't support Palestinian statehood when it comes to a vote at the UN. The New York Times does a faithful job towing the State Department's line.
One oft-used phrase by government administration officials and therefore journalists and pundits is "lack of opportunity". A quick Google search suggests the phrase comes most readily when writing about US domestic issues, but it also comes in handy for international discussions. NPR recorded a prime example last month when quoting a nameless official during coverage of President Obama's latest address to Muslims of the Middle East and North Africa:It's important to note that the political movements we've seen are rooted in part in a lack of opportunity in the region ... We see this as a critical window of time to take some concrete actions.A people who lack opportunity to this degree may trend toward revolution. Power voids abound in such an environment, potentially opening the door for enemies of elite US interests to seize control.
With Saleh’s departure for Saudi Arabia, where he continues to receive medical treatment, this isn’t a time for inaction. There is a government that remains in place there, and they need to seize the moment and move forward.So, our government supports an authoritarian regime that presides over poverty, unemployment, and corruption--a lack of opportunity--in turn creating a power vacuum which opens the door for enemies of elite US interests to seize control. If the elite in this country perceive a threat to their interest from abroad, it seems they are creating the bed in which they lie.
Even in death, Osama bin Laden will be taking revenge on American taxpayers for years to come ...
... One of every four dollars in red ink the U.S. expects to incur in the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1 will result from $285 billion in annual spending triggered by the terrorist scion of a wealthy Saudi family ...
... Indeed, the meter didn’t stop running May 2 when bin Laden’s corpse slipped into the Arabian Sea ...
... The government’s finances also will groan beneath the weight of the Department of Homeland Security, the 216,000- employee bureaucracy created to protect Americans from additional terrorist attacks ...
... And small erosions of personal liberty, conceded in the interests of security, may yet deepen ...And, finally,
... Not since the early days of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union threatened, has an enemy so bedeviled Americans and their leaders. Where once children prepared for nuclear war with “duck and cover” drills, Americans after Sept. 11 stockpiled duct tape and canned food ...While the prose here is unique among political articles and the numbers therein are stunning, the validity of the decisions behind these outrageous expenditures goes unexamined. The author treats the costs as a natural occurrence rather than symptomatic of bad, corrupt politics. Worse, the conclusion whitewashes the last decade by pretending the nation's middle and lower classes are not right now suffering from unemployment and inflation as city, state, and federal budget gutting hacks away our standard of living. If bin Laden hoped to bankrupt the country, the monies spent in his name combined with Wall Street's crimes may just well do the job.
For the second time in two weeks violence has broken out in a restive Arab ally of the United States, confronting the Obama administration with the question of how harshly to condemn a friendly leader who is resisting street protests against his government ... At least five people were killed early Thursday when heavily armed riot police officers fired shotguns and concussion grenades into a crowd ...
... What the administration does with Bahrain is likely to be a telling indicator of how it will deal with the balance between protecting its strategic interests, and promoting democracy — a balance some critics said it never properly struck in its sometimes awkward response to the Egyptian turmoil. What will make this diplomatic maneuvering even more complicated is Bahrain’s proximity to Saudi Arabia, another Sunni monarchy with even greater strategic value to the United States.
- http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/world/middleeast/ 18diplomacy.html
