Old Diplomacy Useless in Age of Fanatic Terror

On Hamas Saud al-Faisal Agrees with Colin Powell...
By Steven Clemons Washington Note, November 27, 2007

A brief reply by Con George-Kotzabasis

My dear Steven,

To agree with Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal, who is the embodiment of Saudi nepotism and has the reputation of being a political manipulator, is hardly a pass to political wisdom.

Time and time again it was a futile and wasted effort to bring Hamas to the negotiating table. You cannot entice Hamas to embrace diplomacy. You can only force it to enter negotiations by isolating it more and more from its people. And only by making it fear a revolt of Palestinians against it will it enter the discourse of diplomacy but from a weakened position and hence make its hard line demands politically untenable.

As for the constellation of bright stars from Powell, Brzezinski, to Whitman, they are all bound to fall into the black hole of their present idealistic uselessness. The diplomacy of the past was successful because one was dealing with rational actors. But in the Age of fanatic terror such diplomacy is no longer applicable and is a parody of the art of Talleyrand.