Gaza, a preview of Democrat strategy in Iraq

Ralph Peters:

WONDER what Iraq would look like if we left to morrow? Take a look at Gaza today. Then imagine a situation a thousand times worse.

We need to stop making politically correct excuses. Arab civilization is in collapse. Extremes dominate, either through dictatorship or anarchy. Thanks to their dysfunctional values and antique social structures, Arab states can't govern themselves decently.

We gave them a chance in Iraq. Israel "gave back" the Gaza Strip to let the Palestinians build a model state. Arabs seized those opportunities to butcher each other.

The barbarity in Gaza has become so grotesque that not even the media's apologists for terror can ignore it (especially since Islamist fanatics began to target journalists).

Over the weekend, Hamas gangbangers-for-Allah grabbed a Fatah functionary and dropped him from the roof of a high-rise to check out the law of gravity (the only law that still obtains in Gaza). Tit-for-tat, Fatah gunmen grabbed a Hamas capo and gave him the same treatment.

Thereafter, cooler heads prevailed and both sides returned to their everyday routines of kidnapping, torturing and assassinating each other's leaders, gunning down teachers and doctors and, of course, murdering women, children and stray pedestrians.

Educated Palestinians flee, if they can. Civilians cower, wondering where the next rocket-propelled grenade will hit. And, amid the carnage, students risk death to take their final exams so they can qualify to study abroad - and get out. The indiscriminate violence is the Palestinian version of democracy: Every citizen gets a chance to be killed.

And there's humor in Hell: The Islamist madmen behind Hamas call Fatah fighters "the American Jew Army." We've come a long way, boychick, when fellow Arabs anoint the late Yasser Arafat's thugs as tools of the Great Satan and the Lesser Satan.

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Meanwhile, back home, the get-out-now crowd pretends that, if only we pull out our troops, Iraqis will magically settle their internal grievances (presumably, the way the Palestinians have).

The left doesn't care how many Iraqis die, as long as President Bush can be humiliated. Four years ago, the neocons fantasized about a post-Saddam Age of Aquarius. Now the Murthacrats insist that, once we bail out, Atlantis will rise from the Tigris and Euphrates. The willful naivete is identical. The only differences are the timing and who gets blamed.

Look at Gaza, at the orgy of self-destructive savagery, the macho idiocy, the junkyard-dog religion and the murder-suicide cult sweeping Arab civilization. Then note that, barring a few fringe players, only two sides are fighting in the Gaza Strip.

In Iraq, we have foreign terrorists fighting everybody, Sunni Arabs fighting Shia, Shia fighting Shia, Sunni fighting Sunni, Christians and other minorities persecuted by Sunni and Shia, Kurds struggling to preserve their patch of civilization, with American troops and our allies in the middle . . . on a quiet day.

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The sickness in the Arab culture festers in places like Gaza and Iraq. It was this sickness that led to 9-11 and running away from it is not going to make it go away. As Gaza points out, it only makes it worse. Israel's leaving of Gaza has demonstrated many things and one of the most important is that the problems with the Palestinians have very little to do with Israeli occupation. The same could be said if we departed Iraq, but the problems for us and the rest of the world would be much harder to isolate than they are in Gaza. An enemy who wants to destroy us would have the gift of substantially more resources with which to accomplish that goal.