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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