Krauthammer

Charles Krauthammer has a great piece today on the Palestinian situation:

Was not Barak the good guy? And Sharon the tough guy? Surprise. Arabs respect toughness. Sharon launched a massive invasion of the Palestinian territories after the Passover massacre of 2002. Western experts and the media were practically unanimous that this would achieve nothing.
Completely wrong. In fact, it is precisely Israel's aggressive counterattack against Palestinian terrorists, coupled with the defensive fence (which has prevented practically all suicide attacks wherever it has been built), that has brought us to this point of hope.

...The second intifada was fought under the old land-for-peace slogan: The terrorism would stop only when Israel agreed to full territorial withdrawal to the 1949 lines, a Palestinian state, Jerusalem as the capital and God knows what else. The Palestinians got none of this. They got death and destruction instead. What do the Palestinians now demand from Israel in return for a cease-fire? That Sharon stop hunting down and killing terrorist leaders. Not land for peace. Peace for peace.
Sharon agreed. And a tenuous truce has begun. Of course, at some point Hamas and other terrorist groups will surely try to destroy the cease-fire. (They tested it yesterday in southern Gaza, firing rockets and mortars at a Jewish settlement. Luckily, no one was hurt.) At that point Abbas -- and the Palestinians as a national community -- will have to decide whether to take them on. If they do, they will have their state. If they don't, they are back on the road map to ruin.

Exactly right. The Arab world does respond to toughness and power, a crystal-clear fact that the Left fails to grasp. On second thought, maybe they do understand this worldview but lack the resolve or mind to utilize the power we possess.

Here's one simple question; what major peace initiative has ever been enacted in the Arab world where the will of the US was not brought to bear?

Perhaps the Camp David Accords signed by Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin, but all that did was get Sadat murdered and forced the Egyptians to go covert against Israel (I.E. weapons tunnels into Gaza).

I'll say it for the three thousandth time; Afghanistan and Iraq woul not be democracies if we took the tack of negotiation over military force. Although the Afghanis are not Arabs, they too understood the power of raw force.