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«No one can control or change this revolution» Yasser Arafat said on a sunny day in September 1983.  “No one can control or change me.»

At the time, many ignored the Palestinian leader’s statement. To this very day, many continue to disregard Arafats commitment to his revolutionary cause — chief among them, Kofi Annan, the European Union, the U.S. Department of State and most of the liberal media.

But some never trusted Arafat: Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Right, Donald Rumsfeld and the U.S. president. In Monday’s speech — characterized by The Jerusalem Post as «perhaps the greatest injection of realism into U.S. policy in 35 years — President Bush addressed the fundamental problem with Palestinian politics today: the lack of a genuinely democratic leadership.

Listen to Bush: «Peace requires a new and different Palestinian leadership, so that a Palestinian state can be born. I call on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror…  A Palestinian state will never be created by terror. It will be built through reform. And reform must be more than cosmetic change or a veiled attempt to preserve the status quo.» Which is why Arafat has to go.

Bush mentioned five times the need for Palestinian democracy. He essentially vanquished the «one last chance» policy of his secretary of state. He also made Palestinian statehood conditional on the fulfillment of certain Palestinian actions (e.g. stop terror, fight corruption, clean up the judiciary). While all this was long overdue, it is nonetheless a most welcome development.
Although Bush’s remarks contained enough material to entertain political analysts and diplomats for a long while, the statement that elicited the most reaction was his call for ousting the current leadership, including and primarily, the Rais himself.

Bush’s political exile of Arafat is protested on the grounds that the United States has no business interfering with Palestinian domestic affairs — that it was an insult to «democracy and the outcome of elections that were supervised by the whole world,» as a Palestinian Legislative Council member put it.

Yes, the elections were «supervised,» but they also were rigged.

In January 1996 — 32 years after the establishment of the PLO — the Palestinian people were given the chance to vote for the first time. They overwhelmingly voted Arafat into office, as president of the Palestinian Authority.

Mind you, this was not a Swiss election. It was democracy, PLO-style. Independent Palestinian journalists were so strongly intimidated that most chose not cover the event at all. Unwanted candidates were threatened or bribed, therefore, Arafat faced no credible opposition. The only challenger was a grandmother who, by virtue of being a woman, stood no chance of success in a predominantly chauvinistic and traditionalist Muslim society. Whereas international observers did witness the elections, they failed to guarantee the protection of the ballot boxes during transportation and did not supervise vote counting. As a result, in some districts, there were more votes than registered voters, and some ballot boxes disappeared.

Besides, both the international community and the Israeli government needed Arafat to win the elections. After they had invested so much political capital in the peace process inaugurated 2 1/2 years previously, they were not going to allow an unexpected newcomer to jeopardize their political program. Whats more, a defeat of Arafat would have shaken their axiomatic belief in his being the «sole representative of the Palestinian people» — also a key marketing point used to persuade the Israeli people of the inevitability of having to deal with the head of the PLO.

In reality, Arafat was elected as legitimately as Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic, whom the West turned into pariahs after they became a threat to global peace. The tyrant of Gaza should be no exception.

«Arafat is not a leader; he is a myth» said former Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Shlomo Ben-Ami when the Camp David talks collapsed. It was high time someone shattered this «myth.» That it was done by the president of the United States and leader of the Free World is nothing short of a diplomatic revolution. To which I say: Thank you, Mr. President.

Julián Schvindlerman is a political analyst and journalist in Washington D.C.