The Columbia government captured Rodrigo Granda, who was known as the Foreign Minister for the FARC, last month. This is another big success in Columbia's effort to defeat the terrorists that have been plaguing this country for nearly four decades.

However, then things got interesting. Venezuela's President claimed that Columbian agents entered Venezuelan territory and grabbed Granda off the streets of Caracas. Columbia later granted it had paid bounty hunters to help arrest Granda and that informants provided Columbia with information about Granda's movements in Venezuela. But, they insisted that they had not violated Venezuelan sovereignty. Chavez had five National Guard officers and three police officers arrested for aiding Columbia.

Meanwhile Chavez has continued pushing the issue. He has recalled Venezuela's Ambassador to Bogota and a group allied with Chavez claims the CIA was in on the operation (if so it would be a much needed resurgence in operational competence). This is exactly the sort of controversy a demagogue like Chavez feeds on. One fears another raid on the Colegio Hebraica cannot be far off.

Of course no one has put the most important question to Chavez - why was a wanted terrorist permitted to operate openly in his territory?

In the wake of the Tsunami, many Sri Lankans took some small solace in the hope that perhaps this terrible natural disaster would bring the government and the LTTE (Tamil Tigers, who seek an independent Tamil state in the north of Sri Lanka) together and end the bloody war that has wracked the island nation for decades. Initial reports that the Tamil Tigers and the government were cooperating in distributing aid were encouraging.

But the Tamil Tigers make the Palestinian terrorists look like amateurs. They pioneered suicide bombing, and recruiting women for suicide bombing. They have been effective at mass terror and assassinating political leaders - including Indian PM Rajiv Ghandi. They are infamous for recruiting child soldiers. To fracture a metaphor - tigers don't change their stripes. Despite a peace process (brokered by, who else, the Norwegians) there were regular reports that the Tigers were continuing to smuggle weapons, recruit (abduct) children.

Now, UNICEF says it has monitored the cases of three girls who had been recruited by the LTTE. Apparently, UNICEF has been successful in securing their release.

But it is a jolting reminder of the human capacity for evil. Cooperating with the Sri Lankan government would have earned the LTTE good will, both from the Sri Lankan government and also with the international community. Instead, they viewed the enormous tragedy of the tsunami as an opportunity to foster a new generation of martyrs. Although they are not Muslim, the Tamil Tigers, again like the Palestinians, have forged a grim culture of death that reveres the suicide bombing. When these forces are unleashed they become all-consuming. Ultimately political goals are forgotten and the real end becomes murderous martyrdom in and of itself.

Based in the southern Philippines, Abu Sayyaf has been a major target of U.S. anti-terror efforts because of its high profile kidnappings (and beheadings - way before Zarqawi got in the act - Abu Sayyaf means "Bearer of the Sword"). I have written before that U.S. assistance reduced Abu Sayyaf's effectiveness. Although Abu Sayyaf is going out with a bang, in February 2004 they bombed a ferry, killing over 100, when the owners refused to pay $1 million in protection.

But I also wrote that the far larger Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) could be the real threat.

Officially the MILF is engaged in a peace process, but the government and the MILF still occasionally shoot each other. In a recent spat MILF fighters took a remote army outpost - apparently in response to the army killing a leader of Abu Sofia (a group of brigands) who was related to the local MILF commander. The army massed substantial forces and re-took the outpost. Both sides insisted it was an isolated incident and that the peace process was continuing.

However, the International Crisis Group did an exhaustive report showing substantial links between MILF and Jemaah Islamiyah, the main al-Qaeda affililate in Indonesia and the perpetrators of the 2002 Bali bombing that killed over 200. The links were forged in Afghanistan where Indonesian, Malaysian, Filipino, and Thai Muslims trained for Jihad. The MILF apparently has been training Indonesian Islamists in bomb-making and firearms for about a decade. This has been further confirmed in the testimony against Jemaah Islamiyah spiritual leader Abu Bakr Bashir. Nasir Abbas claims he was at a training camp in the Philippines when Bashir visited and praised the graduates.

Analysts are debating whether MILF's leadership is devoted to peace but simply does not have control over the organization or they are consciously deceiving the government so that they can re-arm and continue to act as strategic depth for Jemaah Islamiyah. If that is the case, one can imagine MILF's top leadership cursing the local commander who recently mixed it up with the Philippine army. More than likely the truth is somewhere in the middle. MILF's leadership does not exercise complete control, but is also not trying that hard to reign in the Islamists, and is biding its time for when it can confront the government of the Philippines on more equal terms - that is either when it has a greater legitimate role within Philippine politics or when it has the support of an Islamist Indonesia.

None of these scenarios bodes well for real peace coming to the southern Philippines.

Having mastered all of Castro's tricks, Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez is now cribbing agriculture policy from Zimbabwe. He is calling for massive land reform to ease the burdens on the impoverished masses. I will not go in great depth because my friend at Venezuela News And Views has already done a great job.

Suffice to say, this never works. Agricultural production will plummet (making the people more dependent on the government to keep order and with less energy to overthrow him.) The rural upper class will be broken as a source of opposition - and the President will be able to award his cronies with choice estates.

Venezuela is going downhill fast.

Over a year and a half-ago, when Abu Mazen was briefly the Palestinian Prime Minister, I wrote three articles about him. Since he is about to win the PA Presidency, I thought it would be a good idea to take another look at that material.

I had some background on him that had escaped the general media. The key document was this article translated by MEMRI which discusses Abu Mazen's monograph Racial and Religious Polarization in Israel in which he asks:

"What may better increase and escalate the conflicts and racial and religious contrasts in the Israeli society: a state of war or a state of peace?"

Here is a link to "Peace as a Means" which I wrote on this for NRO. Following is an op-ed on Abu Mazen I wrote for the Wall Street Journal Europe. (I wrote another for the Jerusalem Post.)


COMMENTARY

March 19, 2003

Don't Pin Hopes On New Palestinian PM

By AARON MANNES

At his speech in Parliament yesterday, as at the Azores summit last weekend, British Prime Minister Tony Blair singled out for special praise the appointment of Mahmoud Abbas, better known as Abu Mazen, as prime minister of the Palestinian Authority. "The appointment of Abu Mazen," Mr. Blair said in the Azores, "gives us the right partner to take [the Middle East process] forward." U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice echoed those sentiments yesterday, saying he would soon visit the White House. "I think there would be nothing better," she said.

These are understandable hopes, but would that any of this were so. Abu Mazen, due to become prime minister formally yesterday, is not the man on whom to pin these expectations; he is unlikely to make a real peace with Israel and free the Palestinians from the murderous ideologies that have dominated Palestinian politics.

Although the office is nearly powerless, the appointment of the long-time PLO number two is an important step because it positions him as Yasser Arafat's successor.

But would Abu Mazen be an improvement? His commitment to peace talks with Israel was essential to his nomination for the premiership, and no doubt accounts for the Western hopes.
He helped initiate a dialogue with Israeli peace groups in the 1980s and he was an architect of the Oslo process -- signing for the PLO on the White House lawn in 1993. Most recently Abu Mazen has called for a halt of the armed intifada and argued that it has been a failure for the Palestinians, although he continues to support violence against Israelis living in the West Bank and Gaza.

However, his commitment to dialogue has overshadowed Abu Mazen's long career as a leader within the Fatah and PLO terrorist organizations and his reputation for corruption -- he has built vast residences in Gaza and Ramallah estimated to be worth millions. Moreover, under scrutiny, Abu Mazen's vision of peace does not deviate from that of Yasser Arafat.

Abu Mazen for example supported Arafat's rejection of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's offer at Camp David in August 2000 because it did not meet the minimum Palestinian requirements. These requirements, which Abu Mazen has maintained consistently and shares with Arafat, are Israel's complete withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders and the complete right of return for Palestinian refugees. These conditions are fundamentally unacceptable to Israel.

A complete Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders would leave Israel with long, difficult to defend borders and would place the Palestinian Authority in complete control of the Old City of Jerusalem and all its holy sites. Abu Mazen has even rejected Israeli proposals for shared sovereignty over the Temple Mount, insisting that it be under Palestinian sovereignty. He is willing to guarantee Jewish prayer rights at this most sacred site of the Jewish people, but he continues to deny that there is any evidence to support Jewish claims to the site.

The complete right of return for Palestinian refugees, not to a Palestinian state but to Israel itself, would be the effective destruction of Israel. Abu Mazen insists that recognizing the right of return is not a formula for Israel's destruction, but a symbolic recognition that is necessary for peace. But for Israel this is a nonstarter, because any recognition of a Palestinian right of return could place Israel in an untenable position, forcing it to accept millions of refugees and be swamped demographically. Its other choice, to pay compensation to those who do not return, would bankrupt the country.

In Abu Mazen, then, the Palestinians have a leader who claims to be committed to peace, but at the same time holds positions that make peace impossible. But this is not a contradiction -- it is a strategy. In July 1999 in the London-based pan-Arab daily, Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, Saleh Qallab, an Arab journalist, discussed a book Abu Mazen had written:

"In the introduction to his book "Racial and Religious Polarization in Israel," Abu Mazen poses a question: "'What may better increase and escalate the conflicts and racial and religious contrasts in the Israeli society: a state of war or a state of peace?' . . . All the conflicts within Israeli society were exposed only after the beginning of the peace process . . . All that is required from us is to bring the Israelis to the absolute conviction that we Arabs really want peace, because such conviction will deepen the dispute in Israeli society and bring the Israelis down from their tanks and out of their fortresses."

This cynical cunning is of Soviet vintage, and for a good reason. Abu Mazen wrote this book based on his work at Moscow's Oriental College where he earned a Ph.D. in the early 1980s. His dissertation questioned whether six million Jews were really murdered in the Holocaust and raised the question of whether there were links between the Nazis and the Zionists. During that period he also served as liaison between the Soviet Union and the Iranian revolutionary government.

These Soviet links bode ill. While Abu Mazen may bring Israel a period of quiet, he could also prove a subtler, more sophisticated threat. But the true danger is to the Palestinians themselves. Hopefully, post-Saddam, the Middle East will begin to free itself from the radicalisms that have created the region-wide poverty and oppression. It would be a tragedy if Abu Mazen insulated the Palestinians against these changes, and kept them in the grip of a self-destructive ideology.

Mr. Mannes is director of special projects at Morris J. Amitay P.C., a Washington D.C.-based lobbying group, and is the author of "Profiles in Terror."