...The truth is that Yasser Arafat's moment in history has ended. The world would do well to think hard about how it came to pass, after so many years and so much talk and blood, that the era of Arafat arrived at this endpoint--with Israel saying that it may be worth the trouble simply to kill him. How far we've come from the Rose Garden in 1993.

It is a fine irony that Mr. Powell spoke of the need to soldier on with Yasser Arafat while the Secretary himself was standing in Baghdad for the first time. Mr. Powell is in Baghdad because President Bush concluded after September 11, and after the political failure of the first Gulf War, that the years of Western self-delusion about the nature of global terror must be brought to an end. Similarly, the delusions about Arafat also must now end.

"Arafat" should enter history not merely as the name of one autocratic man, but as the name we assign to an entire Western phenomenon of false thinking. "Arafat," we now see, has come to represent the act of self-delusion on a massive, international scale. "Arafat" is about refusing to believe that an adversary is simply irredeemable. Most importantly at this particular moment, "Arafat" is about allowing barbarism, or its techniques, to challenge the political tenets of civilized life...