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5763: Articles posted from September 2002-September 2003 Get the real situation in Israel every day. March 20, 2003
On the Gulf War
It won't be easy to sleep here through this weekend, as the armies close in on Saddam Hussein. My biggest worry is even if the Americans hang his body in UN plaza he'll have followers who think he lives on, like Osama bin Laden, and will disappear into the desert and perhaps never be heard from again or suddenly reappear by himself or through loyalists in a very nasty guise. More immediately, the closer he comes to having his back up the wall, the itchier will be his finger on something truly ugly that will reunify the West and much of the East, as well, which sounds great except he'll take it out on Israel. I don't think the world has the right to wait while someone is trying to gas the Jews to death for the second time in less than 100 years, no matter how fast things change nowadays because the 24 hour cycle of news insists on telling us there's something new all the time a concept that didn't really exist until electricity was harnessed, instead of horses. There was very little new under the sun from the time Ecclesiastes wrote it, to the time in the middle of the 1980s when people could finally be moved faster than the speed of a horse or the wind. And while I usually use the phrase, "the better it gets, the worse it gets," to sometimes explain this country, it might as well describe the world, as things change at an ever-increasing peace ever since. I have two hopes. The first is that by the time Saddam reaches for the switch, nobody will be there to run across the sand, into the blockhouse and press the plunger, or even better, nobody willing to pass on the message. He financed and provided logistical support to enough terror in the 1970s and 1980s to prove he'd have no second thoughts other than tactical (to delay the inevitable) about using a nuclear weapon, the fashion nowadays for people like him is to go out like a Samson, and there's no doubt he had no intention of really cooperating with any disarmament process, starved his people while building palaces for himself and his family with money that was supposed to be used for medicine, and most of all -- as far as I'm concerned -- has already tried to kill me once in 1991, throwing Scud missiles in my direction. So yes, I'm in favor of gettng rid of the guy. I'm afraid the Americans went at blinded by the hubris of humans who believe in their omnipotence, and with a naivete compounded by a certain level of ignorance about the world beyond the oceans. The French behaved ignominiously, much less so the Germans, whom I'd prefer to see stay out of any war machinery, though they can use their soldiers in peackeeping. The Russians, meaning Putin, are as difficult to predict as the Chinese, but of course theyr'e the youngest capitalist economies, with the longest imperial-style histories. The vast majority of the Iraqi people will welcome the English speakers and the world, which it brings them. This is really about how George Bush Jr., no matter how you look at it, was a much less accomplished person when he became president than his father, but junior's trying to accomplish what his father didn't manage to do -- largely because of the American armed forces at the the time, as expressed by Colin Powell as chief of staff under the senior Bush. But I'm not worried by Powell. As a Jew, it's the Jews I'm worried about -- and there is nothing more Jewish than wanting to repair the world, which is partly what Ariga has been about since it began. Curiously, and they'd hardly admit it, the so-called neo-conservatives (a hugely disproportional amount of whom are Jewish, including Bibi), more than anything, echo the ultimate icon of the post-Auscwitz and Hiroshima era in the Democratic Party, John F. Kennedy. In his inaugural address JFK explictly stated America would "pay any price" to bring freedom to the world - and the world cheered. Trouble is, few of the poeple now setting policy in the have ever seen war. In fact, until 9/11 only a tiny proportion of American citizens had a clue that war was not some Hollywood bang em up. Until 9/11. There is nothing more noble in human endeavor than to free a person from fear. So, my second hope is that the English speaking armies arrest more people than they kill, finding whom they're looking for to find what they were looking for, and then start the peace side of the equation. There should be no doubt that an American victory in Iraq will lead to an international conference that imposes on the Israelis and the Palestinians the peace deal everyone knows must be done -- and which Ariel Sharon (and Yasser Arafat) must, to stay true to his ideals, refuses to do. Yes, a lot depends on Mahmoud Abbas, the soft-spoken backroom dealer. But it depends on Sharon. So, if the Americans are serious -- and they were serious enough to go to this war on their own -- they will have to constitute that Iraqi democracy, and help democracy sprout and flourish elsewhere in the Arab world, and to do so they must make sure the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is not in the way to disrupt the process. The road map is kind of silly, when it's obvious what has to be done, but so is a lot of psychological therapy, which is what both sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict need. And if therapy's that's not possible, then someone to police them, while the therapy is administered. Ariel Sharon's strategy is based on the idea Bush will ned Jewish support and the Christian-right's vote to get re-elected. But if he wins the war, he won't need those votes, or at least not the Jewish vote. Sharon's calculations therefore are wrong. He may yet go down in Israeli history as the ruler whose incompetence at bringing safety and prosperity to the Jewish state eventually forced the real rulers of the time -- the English speakers (even if they're Texans with a vocabulary of less than 4,000 words) -- to force Israel and the Palestinians to start behaving like grownups. George Bush better understand that he better keep his word and show Israel that when you bomb a place, you should end up paying for fixing it.
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