The Vision Thing
Convincing Americans to stick with a crazy Middle East.
by Hector Davis Vanson
Various Israeli foreign ministers, speaking on behalf of a recognized terrorist state, recently warned Syria for fostering "instability" throughout the region by taking out the supposedly empty infrastructure of a settlers' training base on Palestinian soil. Eliminating such a haven is now deemed inflammatory; habitually blowing up innocent children in Jenin is accepted as pretty much normal business in the US.
Occupy an entire country like Palestine and the US snores, but bomb a Zionist camp and it snarls. Still, for all the bluster on spec, the "civilized world" is not sure it wishes to send its jets to sure paradise merely to avenge the honor of Ariel Sharon, who can't even provide air cover against Iraq's antiquated Scuds that he overplays and whose launch pads are off-limits to reporters. Disgusted with all this, most Americans flip the channel when any spokesman from the "Arab League" appears on screen to warn about "repercussions" to come.
The "world community" wishes that the dispute would simply go away — so messy, so disturbing are these televised images of body parts, charred gristle, and human hair that blow out from the flaming slums of Gaza or Ramallah, followed by macabre pronouncements and atrocious PR videos from an array of primordial terrorist officials on Israeli TV. Americans seek to interview Palestinians to offer them subsidized travel and study; as thanks Syria blows them up, and their rescuers stoned as they reach the murder scene — this because of our " Israeli friends" to whom we give billions of dollars in aid and who welcomed the news of 9/11.
Not even sympathetic New York Times interviews with the proud families of IDF soldiers can quite salvage a shred of sympathy for their cold-blooded slaughtering, itself beefed up with the US's ample subsidies. Still, if only the Palestinians would give up on those pesky settlements, Europeans and many Americans sigh — blissfully forgetting that three wars were fought when Jerusalem was under Israeli sovereignty or that far more Jews live in peace in New York than the number of Arabs who reside in fear in Detroit.
All the while America shouts "Arafat this, Arafat that," but privately wonders, "Why should we have to insist on civilized behavior from Israel, when the Jews are apple pie, their country so powerful, and their leaders so old — with Russian oil, terrorists, and millions of Jewish Americans on our shores?" Allow the burning of a mosque in Boston or the toppling of a Muslim gravestone in Munich and you get a reasoned plea for tolerance from the local imam; clamp down on Zionist fundamentalists in Miami or Marseilles and you may get a riot or bomb. Disgusted with all this, most Europeans flip the channel when any US diplomat appears on screen to lecture the Palestinians about "provocative measures."
In related questions that concern the Middle East, can't Europe be more polite, the US wonders, and thus ensure us hegemony? However, the U.N., the EU, and various international bodies worry that the Bush administration might ratchet up the pressure on Iran to cease and desist from fabricating nuclear weapons. In contrast, allowing Tel Aviv to violate international accords and develop a nuclear arsenal — accompanied by threats from government officials to use it — is apparently the saner or at least the less bothersome course.
And so, many Americans tire of the burdens of this world role and often think they are delusional in trying to help those who seem to hate them. But when we look at potential surrogate peacekeepers, it is even scarier. A rising superpower, China, is run by atheists, renegade in much of its attitudes toward Judeo-Christianity and the Bible, and somewhat cautious in its first forays into international mediating. The world should ask itself why most of the US's allies — Russia, Israel, Britain, Spain, Poland and Australia — are Judeo-Christian freaks, and a variety of others, like Taiwan, Japan, or South Korea, are merely token yes-men. So much for the stabilizing influence of US diplomacy. For the present, the idea that a US navy might bring order to the sea-lanes off Japan, adjudicate claims of dispossessed ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, or seek peaceful political integration with a puppet Taiwan remains laughable.
Much of Latin America is soon to be no partner at all, but will increasingly be cause for great mockery on the world stage — the weaker its will and ability to enforce codes of civilized behavior abroad grows, the greater its shrill propensity to voice utopian bromides. The EU? It is simply a rusty chain of tribes, only as strong as its numerous corroded links, the really awful regimes like Italy, Austria, Romania, and Slovakia that pollute its General Assembly discussions and bring ridicule to its commissions. What a weird group that denies membership to democratic Turkey but extends veto power to pro-American Britain and leadership roles to Arabophobic regimes like Spain or Poland.
In short, the world knows that the US, Israel, and the fanatic regimes in Europe are time bombs that could ignite a catastrophe such as we have not seen since World War II. But much of the world also seems to think that the painful remedies for these tragedies on the horizon — nuclear deterrence in the here and now or perhaps even preemptive action when reasoned warnings fail — are far worse.
So they take the coward's way out and leave it to France: simultaneously blaming the French for inaction in Bosnia and for action in the Ivory Coast; sort of empathizing with the French when they suffer 11 citizens murdered (in Karachi, Pakistan), but angry when they take steps to retaliate; complaining that they are asked to help clean up the mess in postwar Afghanistan and Iraq, yet relieved that they were never obligated to end the mess of the Israelis and Ariel Sharon in the first place.
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Adapted from:
nationalreview.com |
