Strange times in which we find ourselves. Just last week the
United States inexplicably retreated from its intentions to
develop or at least explore effective anti-ballistic missile
defense. Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld revealed the
administration’s decision to put off two scheduled missile
tests planned for October 24th and another purposed
for the middle of this month. As the Secretary explained to
reporters, "We will not violate the treaty while it remains
in force. In recent days, to keep from having it suggested that
we might not be keeping our commitment, we have voluntarily
restrained our ballistic missile defense test program." How
can they say this stuff with a straight face?
Apparently, the handful of tests previously carried out these
past two years did not violate our commitment to the 1972 ABM
treaty nor sufficiently offend the Russians until now, or
so Rumsfeld will have us believe. Go figure.
On another front, the United States is continuing to
marginalize Israel in the hopes of pacifying what Secretary of
State Colin Powell purports is a solid coalition of moderate
Arab states. In the process, this State Department-induced
reversal of 50 years of sound regional policy has only hurt the
U.S. in the long run. Cajoling known Palestinian hoodlums and
Arab states that sponsor terrorists have only agitated and
weakened U.S.-Israeli ties. It also sends the wrong message to
these Arab states in portraying U.S. foreign policy as driven by
a "do whatever the particular situation demands"
approach rather than a consistent, "pro-Israeli,
pro-democracy, and anti-benign/overt dictatorship" (see
Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Pakistan, Egypt and even Saudi Arabia)
policy.
When conservative Israeli cabinet minister Rehavam Zeevi, was
gunned down October 17th by Islamic hacks operating
within the PLO structure, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon rightly
promised massive retaliation against the Palestinian regime.
Sharon assured the world that Israel was prepared to now wage
"war to the finish against the terrorists, their helpers
and those who sent them." Instead of welcoming Israel into
the fold in this fight to destroy radical Muslim terrorists,
President Bush and the geniuses at State Department lectured
Israel on restraint. We’ll get to this later.
In any event, before Israel set about to wage a retaliatory
strike, the Prime Minister asked the PLO to turn over the
bastards to Israeli authorities, a responsible act of goodwill
that Arafat would have been wise to accept. (Incidentally, the
U.S. offered the same alternative to the Taliban before
commencing with air-strikes.) But repeated requests to those
peace-loving peoples known as the Palestinians, demanding they
turn over Zeevi’s killers (the terrorists), were met with
derision and stonewalling. Defiantly, the terrorist outfit
responsible for the murder--operating under the umbrage of the
PLO and known as the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine-- mocked the Israelis and Israel’s attempts to
extradite the two murderers.
What is so significant about these two developing stories,
one may ask? Perhaps it is the fact that not only has the world’s
one superpower reversed its Constitutionally- mandated
intentions to develop and subsequently deploy common sense
missile defenses (not offense) all because the once outdated and
ineffective 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, co-signed by a
now-defunct nation, is suddenly and inexplicably en vogue, but
also because there was once a day not too long ago when our
President made the case for our sovereign nation, being able to
defend it’s citizens in the event of attack by terrorists or
anyone else, and yet the occurrence of repeated acts of murder
and carnage perpetrated against the state that is the United
States’ only real friend in the Middle East, Israel, is not
sufficient enough to warrant massive retaliation by the Jewish
state, and that not in the eyes of the same American leaders
that speak daily to the right of our country to defend its
citizenry! The double standard!
American foreign policy has been hijacked by unprincipled
State Department diplomats who have thrown out common senses,
including loyalty, for the sake of "coalition
building" with nations historically hostile to American
intentions.
Consider: For a few minutes every day, our country’s
fighting men (the best in the world) strap on their high tech
aeronautics equipment and snuggle into the cockpits of the world’s
most awesome offensive weapons, known affectionately as fighter
jets, and streak through the sky till they get somewhere over
Afghanistan, where they drop a few bombs on Kandahar, Kabul and
elsewhere in strikes premised on our Constitutionally derived
right to self defense. And no matter how ineffective these
strikes will ultimately prove to be, we can be sure they are
warranted.
Yet when Israel has one of its leading politicians
assassinated in the Palestinians’ latest act of Islamic
hatred, the U.S. condemns and impugns Israeli military actions
taken for ostensibly the same purpose as American actions
in Afghanistan. The question is therefore posed, "Why can
we act accordingly yet Israel’s cause is deemed insufficient
to justify American support and encouragement in their
concurrent attempts to "root out and bring to justice"
all terrorists and those who harbor them?
The political considerations that drive our mistreatment of
Israel have been sufficiently batted around on the nightly news
shows. Colin Powell has President Bush convinced that the
proverbial glue that holds together this very precarious montage
of Arab and central Asian countries is the further distancing of
the U.S. from Israel. If the United States hopes to get anything
done in Afghanistan, posits Powell, we’ll have to mollify the
Muslim world, even at the expense of Israeli security. Hence,
the newly issued Bush commitment to see to the creation of a
Palestinian state sometime down the line and the current censure
of Israel for Israeli occupation of terrorist lands in various
parts of "Palestine". That this type of reasoning
continues to reign at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is an
abomination!
Seeing as we’re the nation that had 6,000 of our citizens
slaughtered and not one of these "peaceful" Islamic
Republics, why do we still have to get the "okay" from
these people? And why does their approval come at the expense of
our friend Israel? Shouldn’t it be the Syrians, the Egyptians,
the Iranians and Pakistanis who placate us, who give us
concessions? Maybe in the world of utopian State Department
diplomacy this type of cut and dry, common sense approach that I’m
espousing is viewed as arcane and unworkable, but for goodness
sakes, this is the same State Department that believes giving
Palestinians land is the way to cool their antipathy towards
Israel. These are the same idiots that run the U.S. consulates
that issued visas to several of the suicide hijackers and the
same idiots that regularly get angry when Israel, God forbid,
responds in force to another Palestinian terrorist attack that
kills scores of Israeli women and children. These people live in
a dream world, but it seems they have the ear of the President
of the United States. That’s troubling.
How can we even deal with these Muslim states if the
conditions they impose on us in exchange for their compliance
are in total contradiction to their stated sympathy with the
American people over September 11th? If these Muslims
truly condemn the barbaric acts of terrorism, then why the
conditions placed on their participation in "the mother of
all coalitions?" Why the hesitation? I though Islam
categorically condemned this sort of thing? Okay, maybe not
those 30 or so verses sprinkled throughout the Koran that
demands the murder of Jews and Christians and other infidels,
but Islam is about peace, right?
The truth is even the so-called moderate Arab states are not
so moderate in their universal anti-American sentiment. If Saudi
Arabia was such a friend, why the wavering "support"
since September 11th? Could it be that their weak
knees result because they have a vast majority of citizens,
military brass and palace officials that think the same way as
Usama Bin Laden? If it were otherwise, I don’t think we’d
see the hesitation that we’ve seen on the part of Cairo,
Riyadh, Damascus and other Gulf States. I venture to say that
the ones cooperating with us are doing so only because we have
some deal-making on the side or else, like in the case of Egypt,
they don’t want to risk millions and billions in tax-payer
subsidized U.S. aid.
So while the Saudis and states known for vitriolic
anti-American outbursts and terrorist financing are courted
everyday by Colin Powell, our friend Israel is pushed further
and further away. The American condemnation of their recent
forays into Palestinian territories is insulting to Israelis and
stupefying to American Christians and Jews. Does the
administration believe that when this war is over and presumably
we resume our pro-Israeli posture, the Arab states now backing
us will not be made hopping mad by our doing an about face? Will
these "peaceful" Muslim states stand for it or will
they launch more and more attacks into Israel? Might they start
encouraging militants to resurrect their terrorist activities
against the United States?
Even more sinister is the possibility American policy makers
realize the folly of temporary schmoozing with the Arabs and
consequently, what we are actually seeing now is a preventive,
paradigm shift away from supporting the Jewish state and towards
placating totalitarian Arab monarchies? Let’s hope not.
Invariably, these rogues will once more resort to terrorism
as soon as the U.S. military goes away. And when the terrorism
begins anew, will we be able to defend our nation or protect
Israel, our one friend in the region, from missile attack?
Because this is the next method at making us bleed, launches of
ICBM’s at American cities. With preventive security becoming
more overtly ensconced in every aspect of American society these
next several years, the Muslim terrorists of tomorrow won’t
hassle with trying to get into the U.S. by combating beefed up
domestic security. They’ll utilize the missile-delivery
technology that is floating around freely in the Middle East,
Europe and Asia and launch an attack from the anonymity of the
mountains of Afghanistan, Pakistan or Iraq. They might even be
insane enough to launch from within an Arab capital city.
And when they do, we won’t be able to knock their
projectiles from the sky because we are abiding by a worn-out
treaty that never should have been signed in the first place…all
because we didn’t want to offend the Arab/Persian Muslims and
the Russians. Tell that to 500,000 dead Americans someday.
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