Where I Stand — Brian Greenspun: Arafat has made his bed

Thursday, Dec. 6, 2001 | 8:57 a.m.

I am talking about my colleague, friend and chairman, Mike O'Callaghan, who for the last 22 years has helped guide the Las Vegas Sun towards a very bright and promising future. During that time he has never pulled any punches when it has been his turn to write in this "Where I Stand" space. Tuesday was no exception. It was the first time, though, that he has taken the words right out of my mouth and, this is the part that hurts, he did a lot better job committing them to paper.

Under the headline "Terrorism is terrorism," Mike laid it out very clearly that the United States could no longer chase the Taliban and Osama bin Laden through the hills and caves of Afghanistan because they planned, aided, abetted and committed the horrific acts against the United States on Sept. 11, and had to pay the price; that we could no longer shut down financial organizations that fed, clothed and cared for the terrorists around the world who continued to plot against the United States and its friends; and that our country could no longer cry out against the murderers who used religion as their shield and destroyed innocent people in the name of God; that we could no longer do any of that unless we recognized Israel's right to do the very same thing.

And that President George W. Bush has done. To the president's credit and against the advice he had heretofore been given about offending our "friends and allies" in the region who we "needed" for our coalition efforts in Afghanistan and elsewhere, the commander in chief of the United States' armed forces made it very clear: Israel has a right to defend itself. By doing that, he legitimized what every administration before him had done when it came to publicly condemning Israel's defense tactics while privately cheering them on. This time, though, the times we live in have made it different.

Americans, at least those who don't hold public office, have had a very clear picture of what has been going on in the Middle East for the last 50 years. It is not a difficult concept to grasp that when your neighbor hits you, you must either hit him back or otherwise convince him of his errant ways. And if you know he is on the way over to your house to hurt your family, then you must act before he gets there. Somehow, it seems to get more complicated once you are elected to high office, and a simple concept like self-preservation gets all muddled up on its way through the corridors of the U.S. State Department.

That's where we have been all these years, so tangled up in the international politics of oil that we have lost sight of a simple concept of right and wrong. And as terrible and unconscionable and as inconceivable (and every other description that doesn't seem to work) as the Sept. 11 attacks were, there has been at least one silver lining that will serve this country well into the future. It is the one President Bush finally learned the other night when he, along with millions of other Americans, watched the horror in Israel as innocent children were blown apart by a series of suicide bombers who were nurtured, trained and inspired under the leadership of Yasser Arafat.

The president made it clear. Not only is the Taliban and al-Qaida bad but so, too, is Hamas. And I think now that the Islamic Jihad took credit for the suicide bomber who blew himself up and not much else the other day, they will also get to sign up on the sheet that has U.S. friends on one side and its enemies on the other. And it shouldn't be long before Hezbollah sees its name along with the other murderers, because even though our new "friend" Iran feeds, clothes and sponsors those butchers, she will have to make a choice whether or not to continue her evil ways. George Bush is on to them and there is nowhere to run.

While I read Mike's column in my office the other day I glanced at a picture on my wall. It showed President Bill Clinton beaming over the handshake between former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Arafat on the lawn of the White House. That was in 1993, when hopes for a Middle East peace were high and dreams of a better life for everyone in the region even higher. A fundamentalist nut's bullet ended that dream just like a hail of fundamentalist bullets ended the dream of another peacemaker, Anwar Sadat of Egypt. And, clearly, it was the plans and actions of fundamentalist zealots from the Islamic world that felled the World Trade Center and slammed into the Pentagon, murdering thousands of innocent people.

It doesn't take a genius to see the fundamental issue that runs throughout these stories of violence. It takes an idiot, though, to think that we can fix this problem by ignoring the problem or those who feed the sickness that contributes to it.

As I write this column, the news from the Middle East is ... no news. That means the streets are quiet, as are the skies above from which have rained down upon Yasser Arafat's gang a host of problems in the form of missiles and other munitions designed to stop any more murderers from crossing into Israel from the PLO-controlled areas of the West Bank and Gaza. Any time it is quiet over there, especially during the past year or so, it is a time for hope.

As I looked at Arafat's picture, shaking hands in the spirit of peace, I wondered what the PLO leader had to be thinking, holed up in a safe place near his offices in Ramallah: If one more suicide bomber steps across the border into Israel to kill another innocent child, the next missile that came from the sky would not destroy his helicopters or even a police station near the front door of the office from which he conducts the business of the PLO. No, that next missile might find a different target and then the dilemma Arafat has had to deal with -- whether to risk endangerment from the militant Palestinians if he makes too nice-nice with Israel, or a loss of friendship with the United States and the stature that goes with it if he fails to stop the violence which he secretly fosters -- will no longer be his concern.

Admittedly, it is a difficult decision for Yasser Arafat. But, as the saying goes, he made his bed and now he must figure out how to lie down in it, if only just for a well-needed nap. For thousands of good reasons, all them with Israeli and innocent Palestinian names attached to them, I don't much care about his sleep. What I do care about is that he makes the right and only decision left to him if he wants to find a way toward peace with Israel while he is alive. For if he chooses another path, the world will no longer worry about what Yasser has to say. If it isn't an Israeli missile that changes his world, it will come from within his own ranks, from people much smarter than he who understand the post 9-11 world we live in, and who see a place in it for their people.

Mike said it all first and he said it better. I feel better for having said it, too.

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