ILAN Berman says, "Iran is the chief culprit among the outside players behind much of Iraq's current instability." No. The United States is the chief culprit. Iraq was stable under Saddam. So we ousted him. Berman also refers to Iraq as Iran's "eastern neighbor". Iraq is to Iran's WEST, in every sense. Further, readers must recognize that when Berman says "the recipe for long-term stability in Iraq rests in taking up the thorny issue of external influence - and in unequivocally demonstrating to regional rogues that their troublemaking carries real consequences", he is calling for an even wider war, against Iran and Syria. Is the present war going so well that we can take on more?
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It's refreshing that a Post piece calls Hezbollah "the Iranian-backed, Lebanon-based Shi'ite militia" instead of "terrorist group", but he reverts to form in calling Hamas "the Palestinian terrorist group". Why is Hezbollah a "militia" but Hamas a "terrorist group"? They are both guerrilla movements, with similar goals. We have got to stop calling unconventional warriors "terrorists". They don't wear uniforms, but they are nonetheless soldiers, in a war that they see as having been inflicted upon them by outsiders, starting with the British Empire's Balfour Declaration, which took a nutso, pie-in-the-sky pipedream, recreating ancient Israel in 20th Century Palestine, and made it a reality. It is that nutso scheme that produced the region's endless violence, as Colonel House, Woodrow Wilson's aide at Versailles, warned the British at the time. They went ahead anyway, and we are paying the price for insane British arrogance, giving away somebody else's country.
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Only when we accept that Israel is not a permanent fact but as reversible as the Bolshevik Revolution (of the same year, 1917, as the Balfour Declaration) will we achieve peace in the Middle East: by merging Israel back into Palestine, and creating a "secular, pro-Western regime" not just in Iraq but in Palestine as well.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:52 PM