The Week.(Column)

-- So, who's the worst ex-president? A question to give you a heheadache.

-- If the Bush administration's foray into Middle East peace-making isis an elaborate deception, as some clever pundits have suggested, the ruse keeps getting better. The optimistic theory was that Bush stopped talking about Iraq and started leaning on Ariel Sharon only as a feint to appease Arab public opinion. But the administration keeps sinking deeper and deeper into the morass of the peace process. Successful Arab-Israeli negotiations -- e.g., the Sadat-Begin deal -- have always been the product of secret, bilateral talks, not involving U.S. pressure. So the likely fruit of the administration's effort now is only wasted time and energy. It is a hopeful sign that there is talk of "marginalizing" Yasser Arafat. But the cleanest way to do that would be to make it clear that the U.S. won't force Israel to talk with him or grant him a state -- and wait for the Palestinians, should they ever so choose, to support a more respectable leadership.

-- Meanwhile, the question of whether Mohamed Atta had a meeting with anan Iraqi agent in Prague, in April 2001, is becoming a proxy for the Iraq debate. Hawk William Safire says yes, dove Bob Novak says no. The incident is murky, but Czech officials are standing by their account that Atta (who definitely had been in Prague in June 2000) met with the Iraqi in 2001. The larger point about the meeting is simple: It shouldn't matter. A direct, unmistakable connection to Sept. 11 is not necessary for a casus belli. The U.S. should topple Saddam because of his pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, his flouting of the Gulf War cease-fire agreements, his declared hostility to the United States, and his generally nefarious influence in the region. The details of all the nasty things done by his intelligence agents can be sorted out later.

-- During Operation Defensive Shield, the Israelis captured around 50500,000 documents from various Palestinian ministries and organizations. Here is a pretty complete X-ray of Yasser Arafat and his deeds. The documents are still being analyzed but already they establish beyond argument what everyone really knew even if they didn't care to admit it, namely that Arafat is one of the world's leading international terrorists. The Islamist groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad are sponsored by Saudi Arabia and Iran respectively, but they liaise closely with Arafat and act with his full knowledge and backing. We now have evidence that he orders terrorism, and authorizes payments for it. For the Palestinians and their supporters it is a horrible embarrassment to be caught so red-handed. Unable to wriggle out of it, they have no alternative to pretending that the documents are forgeries. Think of the laboratories equipped and large enough to accommodate enough forgers and paper and ink for so many documents, and all in Arabic too, and the work finished within so few days! Those clever Israelis. On CNN, Lou Dobbs said that Prime Minister Sharon had come to Washington on a "smear campaign" against Arafat. This man can't be smeared. The truth about him speaks for itself.

-- The siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem ended after 39 dadays. Thirteen Palestinian gunmen were exiled to a three-star hotel in Cyprus, and 26 were sent to the Gaza Strip. These men hijacked a Christian holy site, evidently hoping to provoke the Israeli army into an assault. But the Israelis sat tight, picking off armed men with sniper fire, and when conditions inside the church became too uncomfortable, the occupiers negotiated a retreat. The Christian clerics who were caught in the middle have been discreet in their accounts -- "There was shooting from the inside, and shooting from outside," said one Greek Orthodox priest; "I don't know who fired first." Well they might be. Native Christians are a shrinking minority in an increasingly Islamized West Bank. Come Palestinian Independence Day, they will shrink ever more rapidly.

-- Even granting that some people buy a book, especially a short, totopical one, because it is in the window, not necessarily because they agree with it, the success of Noam Chomsky's 9-11 is revolting. ...