Yasr or No?

The State of Israel has decided to remove Yasr Arafat. Remove. Isn't that a word the C.I.A. uses? NYTimes reports: The decision, which Israeli officials said was unlikely to be put into action immediately, drew no direct criticism from the Bush administration, which simply repeated its opposition to any expulsion...The Israeli news media reported that the options included killing him.

Now, don't get me wrong - Arafat needs to go. He's out of ideas, out of friends, out of political clout, and out of date. He and Ariel Sharon were both at their prime in 1982, when first they warred in Lebanon. In Gaza two decades later, neither is contributing to the peace and well-being of Israel or Palestine. That said, Israel has taken another bold stride down the path to making Arafat a martyr. Yasr may be "irrelevant" now, but if he's killed, jailed or even forcibly exiled by the Israelis, he's going to be irrevocably relevant as a symbol and a hero to Palestinians and Arabs worldwide. Israel, the U.S., Egypt and many of our other allies could pay a high human or economic cost for this decision. The only way to get rid of Arafat is to wait - "removing" him would only make his absence a popular force equal to his presence.

The U.S. government is trying to play both sides by timidly disapproving of the Arafat removal. Essentially, we'd like to go on the record as not endorsing this. However, when you're giving someone $3 billion per year it doesn't matter what the record says. What Israel does is seen by most of the world as an extension of U.S. policy by other means, and as the NYTimes quotes in another article, it was unclear whether the decision would prompt a protest from President Bush to the Israeli leader, Ariel Sharon, which [an official] called "the only phone call that's going to carry any weight." Arafat's fate is going to be on American hands, whether we like it or not. Again we must choose: do we control our client state, cut it loose, or suffer the consequences? Multiple choice, folks - only freshmen think that's easy.

Of course, for Arafat's personal life exile might not be such a bad way to end his days. A group of Mr. Arafat's security guards, with semiautomatic rifles at hand, gathered around a reporter's computer to watch as the screen saver displayed pictures of the Maine coastline. As the stony beaches and pine trees flashed by, the men joked about which spot they hoped to be exiled to.