More Fantasy From A Middle East "Hulk"

Victor Davis Hanson’s column in this morning’s Inquirer compels me to post once more on my least favorite topic.

Syria and Iran wouldn't like the West when it's angry

If they reject sensible peace offers, the U.S. has just one option: massive air strikes.

The conventional wisdom is that the United States is so tied down that it can't do much about the rocket attacks on Israel, the blatant sponsorship of terrorists by Iran and Syria, or the Iranian nuclear program.

The “conventional wisdom” sounds spot-on to me.

Oil prices are already sky-high. Any unilateral American action might disrupt tight global supplies. That would derail the economies of our Western allies and only further enrich enemies with windfall profits.

By “enemies,” doesn’t Hanson mean our “friends” the Saudis, who are currently trying to get Dubya to pull his thumb out and do something about the war raging between Israel and Hezbollah – something besides sending more bombs to Israel, that is? Or does he mean Chevron, Exxon-Mobil or BP?

And by the way, in the truthout story about sending bombs to Israel, Condoleezza Rice shows her total cluelessness as to the art of international diplomacy with her revealing quote.

Hanson should read this Seattle Times article and get some understanding of the fact that the other countries of the world would prefer to act in their own interest when it comes to oil instead of trying to figure out whether or not our greedhead cowboy cabal that is currently drunk with power will ever look out for anyone else besides themselves – and of course, Bushco has already proven to us that it has no interest in anyone or anything but itself.

Trying to win hearts and minds for the fragile democracy in Iraq also means we can't afford to offend Arab sensitivities elsewhere. And a lame-duck George Bush, low in the polls and facing uncertain congressional elections this fall, certainly doesn't want to involve the American taxpayer with more costly commitments abroad.

Assuming that you can consider what currently exists in Iraq as a democracy – and by the way, isn’t a “democracy” supposed to provide a basic infrastructure allowing its people to live something that approximates a normal life, as opposed to the bloodshed of civil war? – shouldn’t Dubya and his gang be doing more than trying to fund it on the cheap to make sure it is sustainable?

And I don’t consider Iraq a “democracy” just because a bunch of self-styled freeper pundits say it is, by the way.

But despite that sound conventional wisdom, an exasperated West is running out of choices in the Middle East.

An exasperated rest of the world is actually tired of waiting for fleeting moments of sanity from Bushco also. And if we’re “running out of choices,” it’s because all we’ve done is blow the Middle East to pieces in Iraq for reasons that were lies and then take ourselves completely out of the loop in anything that looks remotely like a peace process.

For years, the Arab world clamored for the Israel "problem" to be solved. Then peace and security would at last supposedly reshape the Middle East. The Western nations understood the "problem" as being Israeli retention of lands it had captured in Sinai, the West Bank, Gaza, Syria and Lebanon after defeating a series of Arab forces bent on destroying the Jewish state.

Great Britain partitioned Israel and Palestine after World War II, which was a dumb idea then as it turns out, though that is hardly a reason for blowing up innocent Israelis on school buses or shopping markets. As for the rest of Hansen’s history lesson, I’m not going to comment on it because I care about our people who are in danger over there, not the people of the countries where Americans are at risk. Many books have already been written on this subject. The people who actually live there should be able to solve their own problems without our military involvement.

But after the Israeli departure from Sinai, Gaza and Lebanon, and billions of dollars in American aid to Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinians, there is still not much progress toward peace. Past Israeli magnanimity was seen as weakness. Israel's diplomacy has earned it another round of kidnapping, ransom and rocket attacks.

Some of this is true when it comes to Yaser Arafat and Ehud Barak's negotiations in the '90s prior to the latest intifadah, but a student of history like Hanson purports to be should know there's more to it than that.

Finally, the world is accepting that the Middle East problem was never about so-called occupied land - but only about the existence of Israel itself. Hezbollah and Hamas, and those in their midst who tolerate them (or vote for them), didn't so much want Israel out of Lebanon and Gaza as pushed into the Mediterranean altogether. And since there will be no second Holocaust, the Israelis may well soon transform a perennial terrorist war that they can't easily win into a conventional aerial one against a terrorist-sponsoring Syria that they can.

Followed quite possibly by nukes from Iran, it should be mentioned.

For its part, the United States has spent thousands of lives and billions in treasure trying to birth democracy in Iraq.

Yes, and it would have been nice if Bushco had bothered to let us know that that was the plan all along – was it? – the moment we found out that Saddam Hussein’s WMD capability had been disabled. Of course, Hans Blix had already pointed that out before the war began, but I guess I’m not “supporting our troops” by pointing that out.

We wished to end our old cynical support for Middle East dictators that earned us such scorn and instead give liberated Iraqis a choice other than either theocracy or autocracy.

Shoving “democracy” down the throat of a sovereign nation after blowing it to bits doesn’t constitute a “choice” as far as I’m concerned. And as far as our support for Middle East dictators, one can look back on our cozy relationship with Hussein in the ‘80s when Iraq was fighting Iran, and you can also go back to the ‘50s when we installed Reza Pahlavi in Iran after a coup before he was deposed by Khomeni prior to the hostage crisis. We’ve supported these people of our choosing and rightly earned scorn in the region.

In multilateral fashion, America has also welcomed the help of the European Union, the United Nations, China and Russia in convincing the Iranians of the folly of producing nuclear weapons. But like Hezbollah and Hamas, Iran does not wish to parley - just as the beheaders and kidnappers in Iraq don't, either.

China and Russia already have business relationships with Iran; I somehow doubt that they give a particular damn about humanitarian interests. And it’s nice for America to suddenly “welcome” these nations and decide that multilateralism isn’t such a terrible thing after all, since we went into Iraq with the UK and comparatively token forces from Australia and a bunch of other countries that didn’t have a hell of a lot of interest in engaging in actual combat.

And Hanson may actually be right when he says that Iran “doesn’t wish to parley.” Why on earth should they? By blowing up Iraq, a country with an overwhelming Shia majority like Iran, we’ve enhanced Iran’s influence in the region to a considerable degree.

The two most liberal societies in Europe - Denmark and the Netherlands - welcomed almost anyone to their shores from the Middle East. Their multicultural hospitality was supposed to have led to a utopian "diverse" nation of various races, nationalities and religions.

Instead, such liberality has earned both small nations pariah status in the Muslim world for the supposed indiscretions of a few freewheeling filmmakers and cartoonists.

Why the hell am I supposed to care about Demark and the Netherlands in this discussion? And call me crazy, but gee, I haven’t heard much in the way of cartoon protests lately. Somehow I think the possibility of Lebanon being bombed into a charred cinder and the attendant humanitarian catastrophe – which will do nothing but spawn more terrorism, by the way – is just a tad more important at this time than the Danish cartoon fiasco.

Yet for all their threats, what the Islamists - from Hezbollah in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley to the Iranian government in Tehran to the jihadists in Iraq's Sunni Triangle - don't understand is that they are slowly pushing tired Westerners into a corner. If diplomacy, or aid, or support for democracy, or multiculturalism, or withdrawal from contested lands, does not satisfy radical Islamists, what would?

Perhaps nothing.

By “westerners,” who exactly does Hanson mean besides us? What “westerners” would countenance further unilateral military action on our part in that region after the destruction of Iraq?

What then would be the new Western approach to terrorism? Hard and quick retaliation - but without our past concern for nation-building, or offering a democratic alternative to theocracy and autocracy, or even worrying about whether other Muslims are unfairly lumped in with Islamists who operate freely in their midst.

Bomb and thus spawn more terrorism, bomb and thus spawn more terrorism…this is a recording.

Any new policy of retaliation - in light both of Sept. 11 and the messy efforts to birth democracies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and the West Bank - would be something of an exasperated return to the old cruise-missile payback. Yet in the new world of Iranian nukes and Hezbollah missiles, the West would hit back with something far greater than a cruise missile.

If they are not careful, a Syria or an Iran really will earn a conventional war - not more futile diplomacy or limited responses to terrorism. And history shows that massive attacks from the air are something that the West does well.

Oh brother – and by the way, Hansen should actually have the guts to say “the U.S.” instead of “the West,” because that’s what he means.

Hanson has spent a good deal of this article giving us a history lesson. Well, I’m going to give him one of my own.

We involved ourselves in Lebanon in 1983 to help Israel replace the PLO (and gee, didn’t THAT turn out well), and two terrorist bombings resulted: one in April on our embassy that killed 63 people, and the second in October that killed 241 of our Marines.

So what did we do? We withdrew in February 1984 and started lobbing bombs into the Shuf Mountains. So what happened next? Hezbollah’s Shia terrorists started taking U.S. hostages.

We may launch bomb and missile attacks “well” against people living on such a level of poverty that suicide is a preferable alternative, but I would say that that leads to an aftermath of BIG problems (it would be nice if Hanson would actually bother to mention that).

So in the meantime, let us hope that democracy prevails in Iraq, that our massive aid is actually appreciated by the Middle East, that diplomacy ultimately works with Iran, that Syria quits supporting terrorists, and that Hamas and Hezbollah cease their rocket attacks against Israel - more for all their sakes than ours.

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

Ok, boys and girls, lets all click the heels of our shoes together and chant aloud, “There’s no place like the safe confines of Stanford academia, there’s no place like the safe confines of Stanford academia...”

The rush to war in Iraq was aided by people like Hanson with their freeper wet dreams of an American/Israeli empire across the Middle East, which of course dovetailed nicely into Bushco’s fantasy of plundering Iraq’s oil riches while being greeted as “liberators” by Iraq’s various tribal factions.

As far as I’m concerned, they all have blood on their hands.