"The way the U.S. has handled this so far, in failing to seize a moment a few weeks ago when a cease-fire might have been managed, has actually united Shia and Sunni sentiment in the streets against the U.S.," said Steven Simon, a former U.S. National Security Council official and now senior analyst at the Rand Corp. in Washington. By uniting Muslim opinion against it as never before, the U.S. has become less effective in the region, he said.
Dale, this was the paragraph you bolded and I agree. It's the telling comment in the article. Seymour Hersh has a piece in this week's New Yorker. The url was sent to me via private e-mail. I'll post the link in a few minutes.
I have yet to read Hersh but, from comments on other places on the internet, I gather the combination of the information in Hersh's piece about the way the US tried to manage the beginning of the conflict with the way it managed the end, makes us all that much more vulnerable.
Thomas Ricks, in his book, Fiasco, on the Bush invasion and occupation of Iraq, has two central chapters in the book on the early stages of the occupation which he entitles How to Create an Insurgency, I and II. One could observe about the Lebanon adventure something in the same vein, how to unify an inchoate and mildly antagonistic but divided population into a cohesive, very angry enemy, in one simple lesson.
US policy in the ME has been set so far back it may well not recover in either of our lifetimes. |
