Conventional wisdom in the Obama administration is that somehow peace between Israel and local Arabs is the lynchpin for peace and success in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some Obama officials have gone so far as to imply (if not say outright) that US soldiers are dying because of Israel.
The problem is that once again the Obama administration has the situation completely backwards.
Peace in the Holy Land will only be possible once there is peace and democracy in the rest of the Middle East.
The US troubles in Iraq stem from Iran and other Islamic fundamentalists. And Afghanistan? That’s been a problem ever since the Russians got there, if not before.
And let's not get started on Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Lebanon.
And none of them were caused by the problems of the Holy Land. They were caused by fundamentalist Islam and their individual dictatorial forms of government (and the colonial powers that created these artificial Arab states in the Middle East).
And the solution to their problem has nothing to do with Israel (or Jameel trying to expand his house).
But the opposite is true.
If the US is unable to establish, implement and maintain a strong and stable democracy in these two countries which are lynchpins in US Middle East policy, and if the US can't bring Iran back into the cradle of civilized countries, then the US will have no credibility in being able to implement a solution to the Israel-Arab war either.
As Sharansky pointed out, you can only make a real, lasting peace with a stable democracy.
Egypt is eventually going to go over the Islamic edge, and the Kingdom of Jordan is probably not long for this world either. And Lebanon may fall to Hezbollah any day now (seriously). And meanwhile, Iran will be destabilizing everything.
The PA and Hamastan have both long thrown out their fictional fronts as a democracy.
Any peace treaty with them isn’t worth the paper its written on, as there is no other incentives for them to keep the peace (Egypt at least has US military aid to prop up the government).
It's the failure of US policy to implement democracy that is preventing peace in the Middle East.
Let the US start really introducing freedom and stable democracy into these hard-line belligerent countries, and peace will naturally fall into place everywhere else.
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Wherever I am, my blog turns towards Eretz Yisrael טובה הארץ מאד מאד
1 comment:
Something about Israel being in the center makes me wonder about past history.... I once heard an alternate perspective to the Jewish sources about all the conquest of Eretz Yisrael - our sources teach us about all the conquests over the centuries as if Israel is a central focus, while really our land was merely strategic - a way from one empire to the other, perhaps one that offered more resources for feeding and sheltering armies than most of the region. But not a "center."
But now we're thought of as very central, even by some major non-Jewish "empires."
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