New York Times
With 20,000 troops in action, Israel is currently engaged in the biggest military offensive in the Palestinian territories since the 1967 war. In less than two weeks it has killed more than 160 Palestinians. Soldiers in full battle dress, riding in tanks and backed by fire from Apache attack helicopters, have ripped their way through large refugee camps. Tanks have torn up roads, missiles have gutted homes and Palestinian Authority offices and troops have rounded up and questioned all male camp residents between the ages of 15 and 45.
While no one expects Israel to remain passive when Palestinian snipers and suicide bombers kill Israeli civilians and soldiers, this kind of extended military operation is unacceptable. President Bush was notably restrained when he dryly characterized the actions yesterday as "not helpful." They are in fact utterly counterproductive, undermining Israel's own interests and immensely complicating American diplomacy just ahead of today's arrival of Mr. Bush's special Mideast envoy, Anthony Zinni.
Israel must cut way back in its use of military force, as Washington urges, and direct its actions against suspected terrorists rather than against the broader Palestinian civilian population. ...
Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, needs to realize that while Washington remains fully committed to Israeli security, it cannot accept a policy that relies increasingly on military force alone and seems indifferent to American efforts to help negotiate an early cease-fire as a first step toward an eventual fair and lasting peace.
Baltimore Sun
President Robert G. Mugabe of Zimbabwe has a big problem no rigged elections can solve: His time is running out.
At 78, he is revered in Africa as the guerrilla leader who brought black majority rule to the former Rhodesia in 1980. But most of his country's population is five decades younger than he. Past glories have little meaning to the young; they are disillusioned about today, worried about the future.
Over the 22 years of Zimbabwe's independence, Mr. Mugabe has ruthlessly marginalized most of his opponents. After years of bitter feuds, he co-opted one-time rival Joshua Nkomo, for example.
Morgan Tsvangirai, 50, Mr. Mugabe's presidential challenger in the national elections held last weekend, is different.
Unlike the late Mr. Nkomo, he is not trying to agitate tribal passions. Instead, Mr. Tsvangirai derives strength from his ability to mobilize masses of disaffected city dwellers. Because of his former position as Zimbabwe's labor union chief, he also has close links to South Africa's ruling party.
In coming days, as the ballots are counted in Zimbabwe, South African intermediaries are likely to try to convince Mr. Mugabe to craft a power-sharing arrangement with Mr. Tsvangirai. But instead, he wants to prosecute his challenger for treason.
This kind of blind disregard for the country's realities only makes Mr. Mugabe's Pyrrhic victory worse. After two decades of mismanagement and corruption, his country is falling apart. The future may not belong to Mr. Tsvangirai, but it certainly belongs to the younger generations. Sooner than he realizes, Mr. Mugabe will be irrelevant.
Chicago Tribune
In two weeks, leaders will gather in Lebanon for an Arab League summit that amounts to a moment of truth not just for Palestinians and Israelis, but for the Arab states themselves.
At stake is an Arab-generated peace initiative, supported by the Bush administration, that offers the Arab world an opportunity to stop the worst Arab-Israeli violence in 20 years.
Last weekend, foreign ministers from virtually all the league's states endorsed the proposal, introduced by Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah. The plan would offer Israel full peace, normalization of relations and commercial ties with the Arab world in exchange for Israel's withdrawal from Arab lands it occupied in the 1967 Six-Day War. It is expected to be debated by the Arab League at its summit March 27-28 in Lebanon.
After years of Arab leaders paying lip-service to the Palestinian cause from the sidelines, it is time for those states to put up or shut up. ...
Here is a chance for Arabs to help the Palestinians secure a just, independent state of their own, with East Jerusalem as its capital, alongside Israel. ...
Israel must do its part. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has to signal that he's willing to call off Israel's intensifying military operations and to negotiate a withdrawal from the occupied territories.
Everything, however, will hinge on how the Arab nations respond at the upcoming Arab League summit. If they are not willing to act in concert, and they are not willing to make a true offer that recognizes Israeli's right to exist, then the Israelis will have little incentive to respond.
And the violence will go on, and on, and on.
Los Angeles Times
Religious violence is India's shame and one of its biggest internal threats. A ruling Wednesday by that nation's Supreme Court gives the government a chance to atone for the abysmal failure of state and local authorities to stop Hindus from slaughtering hundreds of Muslims this month.
The court barred Hindus from holding a prayer ceremony planned for Friday in the northern Indian town of Ayodhya until a lower court rules whether the site should be given to Muslims or Hindus. For centuries a mosque stood on the site, but in 1992 Hindu fundamentalists destroyed it, saying it was the birthplace of the god Rama and they would build a temple of their religion there. Riots between adherents of the two faiths after the destruction of the mosque killed at least 3,000. ...
About 80 percent of India's 1 billion people are Hindu and 12 percent Muslim. India prides itself on being a secular nation, allowing adherents of all religions to practice their faiths, a contrast with Pakistan, which was founded as a home for Muslims fearing persecution in India.
Hundreds of thousands of people died in the religious riots of 1947, when the countries became separate, and periodic outbreaks of sectarian violence have tested India's commitment to its constitutional guarantees of secularism. The nation still has hundreds of thousands of troops along its border with Pakistan. It can't afford internal chaos.
Providence Journal
The United States has acted wisely and decisively -- and with superb timing -- in winning the U.N. Security Council's approval of a U.S. resolution that endorses, for the first time in such a document, the concept of a Palestinian state. The resolution includes, quite properly, a demand for an immediate cease-fire.
Gratifyingly for the usually avidly pro-Palestinian U.N., the resolution avoids references to the Israeli occupation of territory claimed by Palestinians, and other terms critical of the Jewish state. This, too, makes the resolution seem a substantial -- and surprising -- step on the rocky road to peace.
That both Israeli and Palestinian officials lauded the resolution might suggest how war-weary both sides are -- and that now is indeed the time for a diplomatic breakthrough.
America should press swiftly for talks on a substantive, if interim, agreement aimed at preventing the resolution from becoming just another puff of gaseous U.N. rhetoric. ...
The aim must be to create two peaceable, and economically and politically viable, states living side by side. The prospect of a heavily militarized Palestinian state would be a deal-killer to the Israelis.
Yes, it all seems almost impossibly out of reach. Still, the U.S.-sponsored resolution comes just when it is most needed.
Washington Post
Gen. Alfredo Stroessner, the longtime dictator of Paraguay, simply loved to be elected. In 1978 he announced he had won 89 percent of the vote; in 1983 he claimed 90 percent; five years later he awarded himself 88.5 percent. It is perhaps a mark of progress that Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, a contemporary dictator, pretends to have won only 56 percent in the election that concluded on Monday. But the fraud is basically the same. A thug who crushes popular opposition to his rule is claiming popular legitimacy.
In the run-up to the vote, Mr. Mugabe denied his opponent, Morgan Tsvangirai, access to state radio and television. When Mr. Tsvangirai tried to get his message across through public events, the police used a newly invented security law to stop him. Mr. Tsvangirai's followers were beaten up and detained, and Mr. Tsvangirai himself was accused, wildly, of treason. ...
The minimum response to this stolen election is to describe it honestly. The Bush administration lost no time in condemning the vote, as did several European allies. ...
Much is at stake here, both for Zimbabwe and for Africa. There can be no economic development, and no progress against the continent's awful poverty, if dictators such as Mr. Mugabe mock the rule of law and the wishes of their people. Foreign investors will stay out of Zimbabwe so long as Mr. Mugabe is there, rightly fearing that any money they put in might be stolen by the government. Aid donors -- at least sensible ones -- will make the same judgment. And the extent to which investors and aid donors send money instead to other African countries will depend on the signals they receive. If other Africans can endorse Zimbabwe's fraudulent election, why should outsiders believe in their commitment to the rule of law? And if that commitment is in doubt, how can outsiders sustain hope that their aid will make a real difference?
(Compiled by United Press International.)
