There are lots of similarities between the Israeli troops handling the Palestinians and the American troops handling the Iraqis.

One is haunted, however, by the words of President George W. Bush's father, who, after expelling the Iraqis from Kuwait, wrote: "Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different and perhaps barren outcome.

Raoul