Page 2 of
2 If you so dumb, how come you ain't
poor? By Spengler
That,
I suppose, is the point of the January 6 report in
the London Sunday Times that Israel is prepared to
use tactical nuclear weapons to destroy Iran's
capacity to build nuclear bombs. Israel has no
intention of doing any such thing in the near
future. With the prospect of an Iranian nuclear
device at least three years away, why would it?
But the Sunday Times report at least reminded
Tehran of what might be in store should it
continue to misbehave.
It is a good wind
that blows no one ill. Last month King
Abdullah
of
Jordan warned poignantly against the outbreak of
multiple civil wars in the Middle East, in Iraq as
well as between the main Palestinian factions. The
Hashemite Kingdom has reason to worry, given that
1.8 million of its 5.9 million population are
displaced Palestinians, and that the country also
harbors several hundred thousand Iraqi refugees.
Jordan has reason to fret about the prospective
spillover. But more broadly, civil carnage is part
of the solution.
In a January 7 op-ed in
the Los Angeles Times, Edward Luttwak of the
Center for Strategic and International Studies
wrote, "Civil wars can be especially atrocious as
neighbors kill each other at close range, but they
also have a purpose. They can bring lasting peace
by destroying the will to fight and by removing
the motives and opportunities for further
violence." [3]
Luttwak was writing about
Iraq, but the same applies to Palestine. I can
only reiterate what I wrote on August 29, 2003 (in
Civil war: A do-it-yourself
guide):
It is unpopular these days to draw
attention to the merits of violence,
particularly the sort that inevitably entails
"collateral damage", that is, the slaughter of
innocents. Progress supposedly brings us
non-violent conflict resolution. Au
contraire. The faster the world changes, the
more people find themselves left behind, and the
more people are left behind, the more diehards
are willing to fight to the death. Real nations,
as opposed to romantic visions of nations, have
no room for irredentists and other
rejectionists. They need the sort of people who
show up on time, pay dues to a respectable
political party and get along (if grudgingly)
with the neighbors.
Contrary to what
almost everyone has maintained for years - that
the solution to the problems of the Middle East
lies in the resolution of the Israel-Palestinian
problem - the present civil war in Palestine
proves that no one cares about the
Israel-Palestinian problem. The so-called
Palestinian issue has been subsumed into the
broader problem of containing Persian imperialism,
and the Palestinians have been left to fend for
themselves, rather like the Kurds - but without
the Kurds' language, 3,000-year history, and
success in creating institutions of self-rule.
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