New York Times
At a time when Washington has staked much of its credibility in the Middle East on demanding democratic change in the Palestinian Authority and Iraq, it can no longer remain indifferent to the persecution of democrats in Egypt, the Arab world's most populous country and its biggest recipient of American aid. The Bush administration's decision to freeze additional American assistance to Cairo to protest the treatment of Saad Eddin Ibrahim is a commendable step. Washington's freeze affects only new aid, not the $2 billion a year Egypt continues to receive for signing the 1979 Camp David peace agreement.
Mr. Ibrahim, a 63-year-old sociologist, human rights advocate and campaigner for democracy, was sentenced to seven years hard labor earlier this summer after a sham trial in a state security court. He has already begun serving his sentence and suffers from a serious neurological condition.
Democracy remains a distant vision in most of the Arab world, but a crucially important one. ...
But two decades of stultifying rule by President Hosni Mubarak has degraded Egyptian political life. ...
In the past, Washington has been too reluctant to criticize President Mubarak. He has been cherished as one of a handful of "Arab moderates" who do not automatically oppose America on every issue. ...
But his rule has been unremittingly repressive and his economic stewardship of Egypt a miserable failure. His state-run news media have promoted anti-Semitism and incited hatred of Israel. Islamic fundamentalists have been allowed to harass secular Egyptians and the Coptic Christian minority. Mr. Mubarak needs to understand that Washington will no longer write him blank checks.
Washington Times
"Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001," observed Diane Ravitch, a distinguished professor of education, "no one needs to be reminded about how important it is to learn history." No one, it now seems, except the National Education Association (NEA).
The nation's largest teachers' union has essentially used the September 11 massacre to peddle its own version of moral equivalency. And when it becomes impossible to avoid assessing blame, the reliably left-wing union recommends pointing the finger at the United States in a classic blame-America-first fusillade.
NEA staff have apparently busied themselves this summer preparing lesson plans cautioning teachers not to "suggest any group is responsible" for the terrorist airliner hijackings that led to the massacre of more than 3,000 innocent people on American soil on September 11. "Blaming is especially difficult in terrorist situations," the NEA bemoans, "because someone is at fault." Yes, the wholesale murder of thousands of innocents does tend to cause some to become obsessed with finding the blameworthy perpetrators.
But not the NEA. "In this country," the NEA disgustingly lectures long after overwhelming evidence has been provided, "we still believe that all people are innocent until solid, reliable evidence from our legal authorities proves otherwise." In other words, the moral equivalizers at the NEA refuse to take at face value the words representing the de facto admission of guilt by the anti-Western fanatic Osama bin Laden. The leader of al Qaeda, an Islamist terrorist organization, has both been seen and heard on videotape bragging, "We calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy who would be killed based on the position of the tower."...
"Clearly, our high schools are failing to teach U.S. history well," Miss Ravitch concluded in May. That assessment surely will not be changed by the September 11 lesson plans prepared by the NEA.
Washington Post
Credit President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe with transforming his country from southern Africa's breadbasket into a southern Africa basket case. Thanks to his mismanagement, corruption and the damage he has inflicted on Zimbabwe's economy, a nation that once fed its regional neighbors cannot now feed itself. To plunge Zimbabwe even further into international disrepute, Mr. Mugabe, thief of his last election, is now trying to mask his failures by scapegoating the country's white commercial farmers as the main source of the country's ills. Even as he, in the name of "land reform," expropriates private farms and arrests white farmers for defying orders to get off their land, Robert Mugabe is fooling no one but himself. ...
He deserves all the sanctions the world can muster.
Robert Mugabe was once a hero, leading his country's struggle for independence. Today he stands as a representative of all that is wrong with postcolonial African leadership: a self-centered, power-hungry dictator who has lost the support of his people, yet clings to the trappings of office through the help of the mob, the gun and a demagogic political appeal to the worst kind of human emotions. Zimbabwe would do well to be rid of him.
San Diego Union-Tribune
It is reassuring that President Bush is listening to the gathering debate, at home and abroad, over whether to wage war against Iraq. As he made plain in comments at his Texas ranch, he is not ignoring the counsel of some elder statesmen of the Republican foreign policy establishment who are urging restraint amid the administration's drumbeat to oust Saddam Hussein from power.
A decision of this magnitude -- whether to mount a potentially costly military campaign against Iraq -- merits a robust national debate. That is precisely what is now unfolding, not only in the White House and Congress, but also among television commentators, in letters to the editor and around family kitchen tables.
What is needed now is a full public airing of the complex web of issues surrounding Iraq. ...
As we have said previously in this space, before resorting to armed conflict Bush must present a persuasive brief to Americans, to our European allies and to Muslim nations in the region that Saddam poses an intolerable threat. And, in the end, the president must seek congressional approval before going to war, just as his father did in 1991. A decision of this gravity warrants nothing less.
San Francisco Chronicle
Middle East skeptics were sounding the death knell for the latest deal to reduce Israeli-Palestinian violence even before the first Israeli troops were pulled back. The cease-fire plan is indeed ridden with uncertainties. But as the first security agreement worked out directly between the contending parties (rather than through U.S. mediation), since the start of the second intifada in September 2000, it could mark the beginning of a more hopeful phase of the crisis. ...
The prospect for the cease-fire is not helped by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's coolness toward it, and its entanglement in Israeli politics. Ben- Eliezer, of the Labor Party, is seen positioning himself for a future bid to unseat the Likud's Sharon, or to battle a politically reborn Benjamin Netanyahu.
If leaders on both the Palestinian and Israeli sides push for the best interests of their embattled peoples, this sensible phasing out of conflict will progress as it should. We wish it were that simple.
Baltimore Sun
Do President Bush's policy advisers really believe the more they repeat the phrase "Saddam Hussein must go" the more likely it will happen? They keep repeating the president's mantra of "regime change" even as a cross-section of influential voices in the country caution against a preemptive strike to oust the Iraqi dictator. Is anyone listening? ...
If the Iraqi regime poses a unique threat to the United States and its allies, one that warrants a break with the conventions of modern warfare, then now is the time for the administration to prove it.
But if that case can't be made, Mr. Bush and his advisers will be going it alone -- both at home and abroad. It's difficult to see how that would serve anyone's interests.
Boston Globe
It has been a tense summer in Northern Ireland, with violence in ethnic trouble spots and a murder in a coastal resort that ought to be immune from conflict. But the peace process enshrined in the Good Friday agreement endures, and still offers the best hope of putting a damper on hatreds that are not easily extinguished. ...
By US standards, Northern Ireland is a safe place (48 murders in the last fiscal year, in a population of 1.68 million). But religion and ethnicity provide a familiar cover for violence. So the ethnic no-man's-land on the Ardoyne Road in North Belfast is the scene of periodic flare-ups, as is the Short Strand, a Catholic enclave in Protestant East Belfast, where 13 police officers were hurt last week trying to stop a riot.
What is missing, thankfully, is the orchestrated political violence of the Irish Republican Army and the savage reprisals of the security services and their Protestant allies, which were hallmarks of the long war in the north. ...
While sectarian flashpoints remain a problem, the traditionally divisive Protestant parades are proceeding with few incidents of violence this summer. There is enough hatred left in Northern Ireland that it would be unwise to predict the parades will be quiet next year. The war has ended, but a peace of sectarian conciliation is not yet at hand.
Buffalo News
The Israeli High Court on Sunday did the Ariel Sharon government a big favor -- whether it acknowledges it or not. By granting a one-week restraining order against using Palestinians as human shields to enter homes of suspected terrorists, it has, at least temporarily, halted an abhorrent practice that erodes the moral justification of Israel's battle to defend itself and battle terrorism.
Israeli hard-liners, quick to criticize Hamas and Fatah for using West Bank and Gaza residents as human shields around militant leaders, now have their own charge to answer. The Israeli Defense Forces' neighbor procedure is equally offensive, and needs to be stopped permanently. ...
There is no argument here that Israel eliminated a strong Hamas threat when it eventually bulldozed the house and crushed its only occupant, Nasser Khaled Ibrahim Jerar, a key Hamas figure in the Samaria region.
Jerar, 44, had been pinpointed as a leading recruiter of suicide bombers and the planner of what Israeli intelligence described as a major terror attack designed to bring down a high-rise building. His wheelchair was testament to his violent history: Last year, a premature detonation cost him both legs and a hand as he was on his way to a terror attack involving mortar shells and explosives. But the IDF had Jerar. It did not need to push another Palestinian, a bystander, into the killing ground. There are other ways to warn neighbors -- indeed, troops had evacuated the surrounding buildings before they sent Daraghmeh to his death. The next step in eliminating the threat posed by this terrorist belonged to the army, not to a 19-year-old neighbor.
Chicago Tribune
In one of the great, economical editorials of all time, the Philadelphia Daily News in 1975 noted the passing of Spain's ruthless ruler with two sentences:
"They say only the good die young. Francisco Franco was 86."
That came to mind Monday with the reports that Sabri Banna, better know as the terrorist Abu Nidal, was dead. He was about 65.
He was said to be suffering from cancer. According to sketchy and unverified reports, he died of self-inflicted gunshot wounds in his Baghdad apartment --though the news that more than one shot was fired suggests this might be categorized as an "assisted" suicide.
America's most wanted terrorist in the 1970s and '80s, he lived most of his life in exile, dependent upon the transient support of regimes that hoped to profit from his activities. ...
His successors in terror represent a more complicated system in which lines of authority are murkier and the motivation less mercenary, but he does have one common thread with the next generation: He was, first and last, a murderer.
Dallas Morning News
The administration's internal debate over what to do with Saddam Hussein and Iraq is beginning to look like a cross between the West Wing and Family Feud.
The games began when Brent Scowcroft -- national security adviser to former President George H.W. Bush, known in family circles as "41" -- penned an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal that picked apart arguments for charging into war with Iraq. One of Mr. Scowcroft's major concerns is that trying to oust Saddam Hussein now would "seriously jeopardize, if not destroy" the U.S.-led coalition against terrorism. Mr. Scowcroft also expressed worry that, if Saddam were attacked, the Iraqi despot might respond as he did during the Gulf War -- by attacking Israel. The difference is that, this time, Scud missiles could give way to weapons of mass destruction. If Israel responded with a nuclear strike, Mr. Scowcroft predicted, we would see an "Armageddon in the Middle East."
The op-ed piece was an effective strike in its own right. It prompted administration hawks -- including Scowcroft protege and current National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice -- to hit the air with competing sound bites about how Mr. Hussein cannot be ignored any more than one could have ignored Adolf Hitler. ...
War is such a serious affair that any leader must first confront his own doubts and the doubts of those individuals closest to him. Exposure to competing concerns, worries and objections does not distract from the task of leadership. Far from it. In the end, it should leave President Bush better able to fulfill it.
Los Angeles Times
Israel's agreement Sunday to withdraw troops from the West Bank city of Bethlehem and parts of the Gaza Strip in exchange for a Palestinian crackdown on militants has produced a limited, shaky cease-fire. It could, however, open the way to a broader halt in the two years of violence that has killed nearly 600 Israelis in mostly suicide bombings and 1,500 Palestinians in targeted assassinations and army assaults.
The most obvious stumbling block is the refusal of radical Palestinian groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad to stop their terror attacks no matter what the Palestinian Authority agrees to. ...
The Bush administration, which has strongly backed Israel and has also proclaimed its support for an eventual Palestinian state, has a role as well. CIA Director George J. Tenet outlined plans for a cease-fire more than a year ago, but it never took hold. Tenet met with Palestinian officials in Washington this month. He and other U.S. experts can help keep negotiations going, but it's up to Israel and the Palestinians to do the early work, to provide a first, tenuous thread of trust.
(Compiled by United Press International)
