“Hamas will never sign a peace agreement with Israel if it stays in power…” — from this article
Also sprach Mubarak, who is most concerned about:
1) His Family-and-Friends plan, and how to ease in glossy-haired, tassel-loafered Gamal as next pharoah to receive American largesse.
2) The Shi’ites, who so unsettle Mubarak, and worry Abdullah of Jordan. They are even more worrisome — because of the Shi’a in the oil-bearing Eastern Province — to the daggers-and-dishdashas Al-Saud. They need to be cut back down to size.
Of course the Sunni Arabs themselves can’t and won’t push back the Shi’a. They can’t destroy Iran’s nuclear project. Furthermore, much as they hate the “Persian Shi’a,” the idea that Infidels could be allowed to prevent Muslims, even the most awful of Muslims, from acquiring nice nuclear weapons, is a very disturbing idea. There is no doubt that such an attack will lead to shrill cries after the fact, and demands that “now you really have alienated the world’s Muslims, and the only way to get back in our good graces is to push Israel back to the 1967 lines and let us take it from there.” And there are people in the American government who are dumb or malevolent enough, or both, to believe it, and act on it.
Meanwhile, however, Mubarak needs the Americans to deal with the Shi’a, those meretricious Shi’a — as he might be thinking. Say, doesn’t Al Qaeda in Iraq have a point when it calls them “Rafidite dogs”? The Shi”a, after all, betrayed Baghdad to Hulegu (yes, they did, the Shi’a and the Jews did it together — Sunnis know all about that, you know). They are those who have those absurd self-flagellating rites and all those saints and martyrs and so on (why, at Ashura time they almost make one embarrassed to be a Muslim).
If those pathetic Shi’a managed to inveigle the policymakers of Uncle Sap to get rid of Saddam Hussein and dissolve the Sunni-run army, surely we Sunni Arabs of Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, all described formulaically in the American press as “America’s staunch allies,” can figure out how to get the Americans to remain in Iraq for a few more years. Yes, let’s be hysterical on the subject of a Shi’a crescent, the very idea of which should make American flesh creep. Let’s tell them they simply have to bring the Sunnis back to some kind of power. They simply have to make Baghdad safe for the Sunnis. They simply have to round up or kill many of the Shi’a militia members. They’ll fall for it. Tell them it’s that, or otherwise its Al Qaeda all over the place, Al Qaeda from the Syrian border to the Iranian border, from the Turkish border right down to Umm Qasr. They’ll believe it. After all, it’s exactly what at this point the Bush Administration uses in its last, desperate attempt to justify its folly, and to play things out for the next administration. Say, would you like to be running things when it comes time to withdraw those troops safely from Iraq? Of course you wouldn’t. And Bush doesn’t. He’s no fool. Not about rescuing himself, or having others do it, when he gets in a jam, he isn’t. He’s been doing it successfully for his entire adult life.
Meanwhile, the hotheads of Hamas simply don’t understand. What’s to understand? All they have to do is look at Egypt. We forced the Israelis, with lots of help from that “disinterested” mediator Jimmy Carter and the equally “disinterested” Zbigniew Brzezinski, to give up the entire Sinai in three slices, together with three major airfields, oil fields, and sixteen billion dollars in other infrastructure. And what did Israel get? It got promises that Egypt would try to encourage friendly relations between both governments, and both peoples, of Egypt and Israel, and would do everything to discourage “hostile propaganda.” Well, can’t Hamas turn on Egyptian television, or read the Egyptian press, or do any number of things to find out whether or not we fulfilled those promises? Don’t those boys learn anything? And people call me thick.
What do they think Al-Hudaibiyya was all about? They claim to revere Muhammad even more than the rest of us. Well? What would Muhammad do? We know what he would do. He’d be with Fatah. He said “war is deception.” Abbas knows that. But then Abbas also puts on a coat and tie, and a mild demeanor. Works wonders with the Infidels. Fools them every time.
These are some of the thoughts Mubarak must be thinking — though he’s not another Lincoln. And they are thoughts of Fatah, and would be those of Hamas too, if its members….only had a brain.