Sharon’s Contribution

My vote is that General Sharon's offensive is the stupidest campaign in recent memory. Defined here as a campaign that has: solved nothing, increased Israel's problems, intensified Palestinian hatred of Israel, estranged many Europeans and Americans, and fanned Islamic hostility. What is General Sharon up to?

What he said was that he was determined to destroy the "infrastructure" of the suicide terrorists.

Well, how do you do that?

We Americans are trying to do that to al Qaeda. This involved a war on the government of Afghanistan, a nation formally identified with terrorists it sheltered, trained, and dispatched to do their grisly work. The U.S. in effect declared war on the Taliban government and pursued that war as best it could. Having toppled Kabul, our anti-terrorist forces are now deployed here and there, doing such things as raiding a terrorist nest in Pakistan and hauling in a suspected leader.

Sharon's policy is scorched-earth. Under his command, the Israeli army has engaged not in isolating the infrastructure of the suicide terrorists. What he is engaged in is wanton damage. The New York Times's Serge Schmemann, reporting from Jerusalem, tells it in a dispatch on Thursday with a memorable lead:

The images are indelible: piles of concrete and twisted metal in the ancient casbah of Nablus, husks of savaged computers littering ministries in Ramallah, rows of storefronts sheared by passing tanks in Tulkarm, broken pipes gushing precious water, flattened cars in fields of shattered glass and garbage, electricity poles snapped like twigs, tilting walls where homes used to stand, gaping holes where rockets pierced office buildings." And he uses Sharon's missionary mandate without apparent irony: "It is safe to say that the infrastructure of life itself and of any future Palestinian state — roads, schools, electricity pylons, water pipes, telephone lines — has been devastated.

How's that for retaliation for the Passover massacre?