Let's consider what has just happened. A farce.
What
is shocking is the lack of outrage by mainstream journalists and
foreign policy opinion-makers. This has required the slanderous
consignment of normal and proper and competent foreign policy
practices--as would have been demanded and done at any time in U.S.
history--to silly partisanship that isn't even worth discussing.
The
United States of America officially announced the resumption of
negotiations when they are nowhere near arranged. The mass media
breathlessly followed each claim and got it WRONG.
No
one seems to have noticed. No one pointed out why there will NOT be
serious talks. No one pointed out that the Palestinians have refused to
negotiate for 13 years.
No one pointed out the PA cannot negotiate peace because it cannot commit the Gaza Strip to anything
Nobody
pointed out in the establishment that the United States is supposed to
be on Israel's side or why the settlements are NOT the problem for
peace.
Has
this happened before? Yes, in late 2010 when President Obama announced
at the UN that the talks would soon restart at Camp David. Prime
Minister Netanyahu agreed; the Palestinians refused. Is there a pattern
here?
Does anyone notice that the Palestinians keep demanding more preconditions, Israeli concessions but never come to the table?
Why,
if Palestinians are so eager and desperate to get a state do they not
try to get one? Has anyone considered the non-logic of that claim?
Why
should Israel have to again make a concession of freeing Palestinian
terrorists who murdered Israeli civilians to get peace talks? Especially
when the Palestinian Authority--and even those previously
released--have returned to murder!
Why
dd the U.S. promise to Israel that it would support the 1947 ceasefire
lines PLUS settlement blocks as its new borders, even get mentioned in
the coverage? The U.S. made a conflicting promise of the precise 1947
ceasefire lines to the Palestinians. This was a huge breaking of a
promise to Israel on which Israeli concessions that were made at the
risk of lives had been based!
Why,
then, should any future U.S guarantee to Israel be believed? What if
the U.S. decides that it doesn't want to respond decisively when the
state of Palestine let's cross-border terror raids since, for example,
it has not done very much about backing up Israel from attacks by Hamas
or assaults from the intifadahs? If America is so neutral between the
two sides will that always be true even if Palestine will commit
aggression against Israel?
These
are only some of the questions that should be raised. This public
debate is being conducted on a false, sloppy, inaccurate basis in which
the main news media and the U.S. government can't even get their faces
straight and remember what happened a few years ago.
This article is published on PJMedia
This article is published on PJMedia
Posted: 22 Jul 2013 04:25 PM PDT
By Barry Rubin
Kerry shuttle diplomacy? Ha. Let's talk about what is really going on in the Middle East:
Chattanooga, Tennessee, November 25, 1863
At
the assault on Lookout Mountain, the Union advance faltered against the
Confederate lines high atop Missionary Ridge. Suddenly Union soldiers
spontaneously advanced without orders led by six flag-bearers, one of
them Arthur MacArthur, father of Douglas MacArthur. A Union officer
remembered:
“Each
battalion assumed a triangular shape, the colors at the apex....[A]
color-bearer dashes ahead of the line and falls. A comrade grasps the
flag.... He, too, falls. Then another picks it up... waves it defiantly,
and as if bearing a charmed life, he advances steadily towards the
top.”
And
so sometimes when the general is incompetent, incapable of delivering
victory, even ready to throw it away, those in the ranks must take up
the slack.
“To
those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the
silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history,
but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your
fist,” said Obama in his 2009 inaugural address."
Instead
it was Obama who, in the Middle East, was on the wrong side of history.
“Corruption,” “deceit,” ”clinging to power,” “silencing of dissent?”
That’s a description of the regimes in Iran, Turkey, the Palestinian
Authority (PA, its refusal to negotiate or make peace), the Gaza Strip
(Hamas, which the White House protected from overthrow), Sudan, Tunisia,
Syria (where the White House courted the regime for more than two years
and then supported Muslim Brotherhood leadership over the opposition) d
until recently Egypt. Perhaps we should say: Mr. Obama, join us, get on
the right side, and tear down that wall. Then you will be on the right side of history.
It
is the proper duty of the president of the United States to clench his
fist and, in some manner, bop these enemies of America and of freedom
upside the head.
And
since, then, he wouldn’t help them defend themselves and sided so often
with their enemies, the people and non-Islamist governments of the
Middle East have now turned a corner—not the corner but a corner—toward victory. Out of self-preservation they have acted. If only they had more help!
In
Egypt, they rebelled against the Islamist regime that the Obama
Administration and the Muslim Brotherhood in partnership with many even
more extreme Salafists gave them. True, it is not an ideal situation and
the Egyptian army was--as in 2011-- the determining factor. Yet at
least the Egyptians—at least about half of them who don’t want a
fundamental transformation of their society—will get their way. Obama
was on the wrong side.
In
Turkey they have rebelled at last they demonstrated peacefully and were
attacked by the repressive forces of another elected dictatorship. In
Tunisia despite the elected dictatorship’s assassination of their most
dynamic leader, they are trying to defend their rights. And they would
do so in Lebanon as well if the United States had not spent years
appeasing a Hizballah-Syrian puppet regime there.
As
for Israel, the real democratic government in the region was treated
with disdain for effectively defending itself, refusing to make risky
and unrequited concessions. Sure, the words were still fine but the tone
and ideas were that these Israelis were too stupid or too mean they
didn't know what was in their own interests. For the first time ever
much of the American Jewish community, hypnotized, didn’t remember who
the good guys are any longer.
In
Iran people voted for the least of seven evils, the regime-backed
hardliner who at least signaled that he was a little less so,
unfortunately in a Tehran government-hatched bait-and-switch scheme.
The
true tragedy is Syria where, due in large part to foolish U.S. policies
that backed the Muslim Brotherhood rather than the real moderates, the
progressive forces—how ironic!—in that society were left with a choice
between a repressive dictatorship that would massacre some of them and a
would-be repressive dictatorship that would massacre others.
The
small remnant of Christians have been left on their own in Iraq, must
seek protection from an authoritarian regime in Syria, were run out of
the Gaza Strip, and face daily attacks in Egypt. No U.S. government
voice has been raised. Is a Christian-free Middle East being on the
right side of history?
Even
the Saudis and Gulf Arab states at times (except for Qatar) have tried
for their own strategic interests, been on the right side of history, in
Lebanon and Egypt if not in Iraq and Syria. With U.S. leadership they
would have done better.
But
as I showed in my previous article, the Obama Administration really
does believe that the future belongs to the Islamists, just as others on
the wrong side of history once thought that history was on the side of
Communists, fascists, Third World radical dictatorships, and Arab
nationalists.
Like defeatists and those who would trade away others freedom have always said—and as two National Security staffers recently argued explaining the words out of Obama’s mouth, any effort to defeat the Islamists would fail and turn them toward even more terrorist tactics.
Guess
one should help them win peacefully then? The film, ‘’Bridge on the
River Kwai” describes how Colonel Nicholson, British commander of World
War Two prisoners-of-war, so loses his sense of priorities that he tries
to prevent the sabotage of a bridge being his slave laborers had to
build to help the Japanese enemies’ war effort. When one of his officers
asks,
"The
fact is, what we're doing could be construed as - forgive me, sir -
collaboration with the enemy. Perhaps even as treasonable
activity....Must we build them a better bridge than they could have
built for themselves?"
Nicholson responds:
"We
can teach these barbarians a lesson in Western methods and efficiency
that will put them to shame." To help them construct a better
dictatorship, a better enemy.
No.
For the last four years the United States should either have been on
the side of the freedom-seeking peoples, U.S. strategic interests or,
whenever possible, both. But if U.S. policy and misguided and
uninformed elitists who know nothing about the Middle East are on the
wrong side of history don’t help, the battle will be carried on without
the United States.
On another occasion in the "Bridge on the River Kwai" the officers' have this discussion:
Commander Shears: “You mean, you intend to uphold the letter of the law, no matter what it costs?”
Colonel Nicholson: “Without law, Commander, there is no civilization.”
Commander Shears: ”That's just my point; here, there is no civilization.”
Colonel Nicholson: “Then we have the opportunity to introduce it.”
No, this isn't going to happen.
Many
people in the Middle East—most of whom are Muslims who don’t interpret
that religion this way--reply, No Axis-style or Islamist authoritarian
civilization, thank you very much. We now know the West won's help us.
We'll have to fight for our own survival.'Win or lose.
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