Looting Gaza

Latest news from Gaza is that Yasser Arafat's house has been looted.

A crowd has looted the home of longtime Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, destroying one of the strongest symbols of the Fatah movement in the Gaza Strip.

Fatah officials said the crowd took furniture, wall tiles and Arafat's personal belongings.

The villa had been empty since Arafat left for the West Bank in 2001 shortly after the outbreak of the second Palestinian uprising. Israel confined Arafat to the West Bank until permitting him to fly to France for medical care in late 2004. Arafat died in France several weeks later.

Fair is fair. Yasser looted the Palestinians of several billion dollars. In any case I don't think he will be needing the house any time soon.

So what is next for Gaza in particular and the Middle East in general? Ralph Peters has some interesting thoughts.

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.

Such charming people. Perhaps if they only had a state of their own it would civilize them. Or not.

So what does all this mean for Iraq?

We're stuck in Iraq, and it sucks. But were we to leave in haste, far more blood than oil would flow in the Persian Gulf. The disaster in Gaza's just a rehearsal for the Arab-suicide drama awaiting its opening night in Iraq.

What we need is some kind of soft landing program for the Middle East. The trouble is that they seem to prefer hard landings. The Israelis keep whipping the Arabs and yet they want to come around for another pass.

In fact, if you believe the news, Hizballah and Boy Assad seem poised to start up last years unfinished war with Israel. Obviously with the hope of taking all of Lebanon this time.

H/T Instapundit