Desperate Middle East Regimes

By Alan Caruba

The world hasn’t seen this much turmoil since the years leading up to World War II. By contrast even the collapse of the former Soviet Union in 1991 did not cause this much uncertainty.

The Middle East currently holds the greatest prospect for a hot war as Iran and its close ally, Syria, struggle to maintain control over their populations. Iran’s proxies in Syria and Lebanon, Hezbollah, and, in the Gaza, Hamas, are being told to get ready for a war on Israel. Meanwhile, the Arab League has turned on Syria and is hostile to Iran. Turkey is stationing troops on its border with Syria.

The Syrian dictator, the second generation Bashar Assad, is fighting for his life in much the same way as Libya’s former dictator, Moammar Gadhafi did. In Egypt, the people are occupying Cairo’s Tahir Square demanding that the military step aside for a government composed of elected representatives. An election is being held with the likely outcome that the Muslim Brotherhood will acquire political power there. This pattern will be repeated elsewhere.

The dictatorial regimes of Iran and Syria are using Israel in an attempt to divert the attention of their people from their efforts to remain in power. Anti-Semitism in the Middle East is as rabid as anywhere on Earth; but it is not working its old magic. An all-out war on Israel could, in fact, bring the regimes down, but these are desperate men in charge.

The real news is the covert efforts being used to undermine the military power of Iran and Syria. Iran just claimed it had captured twelve CIA spies. Additionally, Israel’s famed covert service, the Mossad, it also being blamed for recent events that must surely terrify the mullahs and the Assad regime.

DEBKA File, an Israeli news agency, in a November 25 analysis noted an “explosion which wiped out Iran’s entire missile command, including Maj. Gen. Hassan Moghaddam, at the secret Revolutionary Guards base in Aghadir near Tehran on October 12.” Apparently it was not so secret!

On November 27 there was a tremendous explosion that rocked Isfahan, home to one of Iran’s main facilities for refining uranium for its nuclear program and Iran’s largest facility for research and development of ballistic missiles. Some reports say neither was affected, but speculation persists that one of them was.

On November 23, an illegal Hezbollah arsenal in Siddiqin housing Iranian-made missiles was blown up. These missiles were intended to be used in a war against Israel, but the explosion was credited to the anti-regime Free Syrian Army. “Graffiti left at the scene of the blast said it was revenge for Hezbollah’s aid to the Assad regime’s crackdown in Syrian cities and promised more.”

The DEBKA analysis concludes that “Both Iran and Hezbollah are gearing up for war” noting that Iranian Revolutionary Guard and Basji military units “began organizing in battle array in the various theaters assigned to them in the country.” The old order in the Middle East has been overthrown in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and is under attack in Syria. There is unrest in Bahrain and Yemen as well.

Both the U.S. and Russia have positioned aircraft carriers off the coast of Syria. A U.S. carrier fleet stands at the ready near the Persian Gulf. It is doubtful Russia wants to be drawn into a conflict. The drubbing it took in Afghanistan led to the downfall of the former Soviet Union. The U.S., bleeding money in all directions, withdrawing from Iraq, and isolated in Afghanistan, is unlikely to engage militarily in a land war, though air power remains an option.

As the DEBKA File analysis makes clear, the U.S. and Israel are having considerable success with covert attacks in Iran and Syria, either directly or by proxies receiving intelligence and other assistance.

When Syria falls—as it surely will—it will leave Iran further isolated. Any admission that it has nuclear-equipped missiles would seal its fate. Its desperation is seen in a recent threat to unleash hundreds of missiles against Israel and, indeed, a northern Israeli city sustained a brief rocket attack from southern Lebanon on Monday, perhaps in an effort to lure it into a response.

The news of the day is an Iranian attack on the British Embassy in Tehran which mirrors the 1979 attack on the U.S. embassy that put the ayatollahs in command and led to the present crisis sparked by Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons. Iran is running out of friends and its Islamic tantrums only speed the process. This is a rogue nation that does not play by the rules. It seems to be inviting an attack and that fits its apocalyptic view that includes the sacrifice of large portions of its population, chaos, to secure the return of the mythical Twelfth Imam.

No matter how this plays out, it will have a serious affect on the price of oil, a global commodity. It may remind Americans of the failure and refusal to permit access to our own vast reserves of oil and natural gas in Alaska, North Dakota’s Bakken area, and of course the offshore reserves along our Eastern and Western coasts. The delay of the Canadian Keystone XL pipeline will be felt. And then there is the Obama administration attack on coal producers and users.

The fact that a new U.S. oil refinery has not been built since the 1970s is testimony to a massive national failure to anticipate and prepare what is occurring in the Middle East. We are a decade or more behind the curve.

It is a common error to believe that the leaders of Iran and Syria think like their western counterparts. Baghdad is beginning to have more bombings. Pakistan is in a state of panic. In Turkey, a group of NATO and Arab officers have quietly established a command post for possible intervention in the Syrian crisis.

No one in the West, nor Russia or China, wants to participate, but the rabid dogs of war are loose and history has a nasty way of repeating itself.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Syrian Horror Show

By Alan Caruba

Name me a country where funeral processions get fired upon and more people die on the way to burying the latest martyrs for peace and freedom? It’s just about any country in the Middle East and on July 19 it was Syria where ten people died in Homs, a place where some fifty have died in the past week protesting the second generation of the Assad dictatorship.

A week earlier an alleged "pro-Assad mob" attacked the U.S. embassy in Damascus after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said of Basher Assad that he as “not indispensable” and that the U.S. has “absolutely nothing invested in him remaining in power.” So far this has been the position of the U.S. on Egypt’s Hosni Mubarack, Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi, and just about everyone else in the Middle East short of Abdullah, the King of Saudi Arabia.

It was not the first time the Damascus embassy had been attacked. In December 2006, al Qaeda was credited with blowing up a car bomb outside as a gang of armed men tried to break in. The attack, though, has all the earmarks of an Iranian operation.

Let’s see, when was the last time a U.S. embassy was attacked? It was 1979 in Tehran when the Iranians took its staff hostage and held them for 444 days. The Iranians were behind the 1983 suicide attack on the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241. These days they all but own Syria as they patiently work their way toward possessing nuclear-tipped missiles with which to threaten the Middle East and everywhere else.

After World War I, Syria was carved out of the former Ottoman Empire and ceded to French colonial control. In 1946, the French granted it independence. It then passed through a series of military coups until Basher’s father, Hafez Assad, took control of Syria.

Upon his death, it passed to his son, Bashar in 2000. In May 2007, Bashar was “elected” to his second term.This is not exactly a definition of a democracy, but neither is any nation in the Middle East and never was.

In the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, Hafez joined with Egypt and, in the process, lost the Golan Heights, a strategic victory for the Israelis who have shown no intention of returning it or the ancient Israeli provinces of Samaria and Judea, won from Jordan, and now commonly but mistakenly called the West Bank. The Israelis do not “occupy” it. They lived there three thousand years ago.

The Egyptians lost the Gaza at that time, but the Israelis have since ceded it to the Palestinians in the hope they might establish a state, but they have never shown the slightest inclination of establishing one except as a base from which to attack the Israelis.

From 1976 until April 2005, the Syrians had occupied Lebanon which is now a base for Hezbollah, a Palestinian terrorist group that has successfully taken control. They take their orders from Iran.

Syria has been a classic police state. Reportedly, Iran has deployed 10,000 troops to Syria to protect the Assad regime and are in effective control of the nation. Iranian troops have been in Syria since 2008 and, not surprisingly, their northern headquarters have been in Homs, the site of the latest killings.

In February 2009, it was reported that President Obama had decided to send a new U.S. ambassador to Syria and lift sanctions against a nation believed to have aided al Qaeda in Iraq and of secretly building a nuclear reactor. The Israelis, as they had done earlier with a reactor Saddam Hussein was building, bombed it to rubble in 2009.

So far, President Obama’s philosophy of talking nicely to our enemies in the Middle East has not worked and anyone with the slightest knowledge of the history of the region could have told him that.

President Bush’s decision to eliminate Saddam Hussein was based on the fact that Saddam was a constant destabilizing factor, having waged war against Iran for eight years in the 1980s, used poison gas to kill thousands of Kurds, and in 1990 attacked Kuwait to seize its oil fields.

The current U.S. policy is to withdraw troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. Expecting the Middle East to act in any civilized fashion or thinking it can be taken over and reformed by sheer military force is clearly a fool’s dream.

Afghanistan has resisted control since the days of Alexander the Great. The Ottoman Empire, run by the Turks from the 1300s until the early 1920s did a fairly good job of maintaining the peace until it collapsed of its own dead weight

As nations such as Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan did little other than accept various dictators, the prospect of expecting anything but turmoil is utterly futile. What the West wants is access to and through the Suez Canal, along with the oil of the Middle East. The template of Western influence disappeared with both World War One and Two.

Just because those in the Middle East have the outward appearance of modernity, it is an illusion. This is a region of the world dominated by a warrior cult called Islam. As such it will remain an enemy of the West and of each other. It is a huge horror show.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Lebanese Tinderbox

By Alan Caruba

Readers of the Old Testament know that Lebanon is mentioned in Deuteronomy, Judges and Joshua, Chronicles and Kings, in the Psalms, and the erotic poetry of the Song of Solomon.

Today’s Lebanon was one of several new nations that followed World War One when the Versailles Treaty divided up the Middle East, re-creating Lebanon by splicing it from Syria, while also creating Trans-Jordan for the Hashemite tribe, Iraq, and making Palestine a British mandate to administer. In 1948, Israel declared its independence and sovereignty.

A French colony until it was granted independence in 1943, Lebanon’s political system was created to make sure its Christians, Druze, Maronites and Muslims all had a place at the governing table. For decades it was known as the Paris of the Mediterranean, a place where multiculturalism actually worked.

That ended in 1975 when Palestinians, many of whom had been driven out of Jordan after attempting to overthrow the king, fled into Lebanon, and over time began to demand a larger role in the political life of the nation. A civil war that lasted fifteen years until 1990 ensued. It enabled Syria to insert its troops in Lebanon in the guise of peacekeeping.

Hezbollah, a Palestinian group and an Iranian proxy has been supplied with weapons for years. In July 2006, Hezbollah kidnapped two Israeli soldiers, setting off a 34-day conflict with Israel, despite the fact that Israel had previously withdrawn its troops from southern Lebanon in May 2000. That action led the United Nations Security Council to call for a withdrawal of Syrian troops in 2004.

The assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri and twenty others in February 2005, widely believed to be by agents of Hezbollah acting for Iran and Syria, led to massive demonstrations in Beirut against the Syrian presence. The remainder of its military force was withdrawn in April 2005.

Hezbollah has been so fearful of the outcome of a current UN investigation into the Hariri assassination that it recently pulled out of the Lebanese government. Having been heavily rearmed since the 2006 conflict with Israel, Lebanon could be used to create a diversion from the expected verdict that it came to power via this murderous route.

All this is related in order to provide a brief insight into the way Lebanon has been used as a pawn of other nations in the region and prepared as a platform for Iran’s long stated intention to “wipe Israel from the map.” Israel, caught between Lebanon to the north and Gaza to the south where Hamas is also an Iranian proxy, will once again face another war.

Lebanon has its own small army, supported by French UNIFIL peacekeeping troops. The latter has been sporadically attacked in Hezbollah-controlled towns. They are there presumably to keep the lid on Hezbollah. The UN, however, will run when the first shot is fired.

The situation in Lebanon is now extremely volatile given the withdrawal of Saudi Arabia from efforts to mediate its political crisis. Observers believe that Hezbollah has gained control of Lebanon without firing a shot.

All this is happening as the Obama administration is about to show its true hand in the United Nations. If it fails to veto a Palestinian-Arab Security Council motion to condemn Israel for its settlement policy in the West Bank and Jerusalem, Obama will become the first U.S. President to let an anti-Israel motion stand.

Attention is understandably focused on Egypt, but what happens in Lebanon could have an explosive impact on peace in the region. Much depends on the position the U.S. takes in the U.N.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Israel Holds Its Breath

By Alan Caruba

After more than three thousand years of varying calamities, Jews have perfected survival against the odds. There is a joke they tell about “Jewish Zen”:

“Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out.
Forget this and attaining Enlightenment will be the least of your problems.”

Right now, Israel and those who support the Jewish State are holding their breath, watching events in Egypt. What is happening is not inconsequential, given that Egypt made peace with Israel in 1979 after a series of wars in which it had been soundly defeated.

When the flamboyant Gamal Abed Al Nasser died, Anwar al-Sadat became Egypt’s president and, together with Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, they turned a corner toward peace. The treaty was greeted with angry demonstrations throughout the Arab world. Sadat, the peacemaker, was assassinated by Muslim zealots.

At that point Hosni Mubarak became Egypt’s president and he has held the position for three decades as the head of what is essentially a one party system. There have been a half dozen assassination attempts on his life. He is 83 years old. Like most Arab nations and other third world nations, he ran an authoritarian regime.

The peace deal included the return of the Sinai desert to Egypt by Israel. Under former Prime Minister Arial Sharon, Israelis who had lived in the Gaza strip were forced to leave and it was turned over to the Palestine Authority in a “land-for-peace” swap. The peaceloving Palestinians turned Gaza into a launch site for thousands of rockets into Israel.

Today, Egypt shares a border with Gaza which features an unknown number of tunnels used to smuggle in weapons and goods. Gaza is run by Hamas, a terrorist Palestinian organization that drove the PA out at gunpoint.

So the fate of Egypt is of importance to Israel. To Israel’s north, another terrorist group, Hezbollah, has taken over the government of Lebanon without firing a shot. Christians, Druze and Marists, along with others in Lebanon have once again lost control over their nation, formerly peacefully governed by a constitutional coalition of Christians and Muslims.

None of this bodes well for Israel as it looks around at Middle Eastern and northern African nations in which governments are being overthrown for being noxious oppressors.

Of great importance to Israel at this time is the question of what action the United States will or will not take regarding the current turmoil. Since the Egyptian uprising appears to be a genuine people’s rebellion, the question is who ends up with the reins of power there? My bet is on the military.

Meanwhile, however, yet another United Nations resolution aimed at Israel like a guided missile is making its way through the Security Council and, at this point, only the U.S. can shoot it down with a veto.

The UN resolution declares that any construction in the West Bank by Israel is illegal, even if it is in its capitol, Jerusalem.

No American administration has been able to broker peace between Israel and the so-called Palestinians, the oldest existing group of “refugees” in the world.

Following the end of a failed war against the then new state of Israel, the Arab population that fled became the sole object and purpose of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). No other refugee group in the world enjoys this status.

There is a Palestinian problem because there is a United Nations problem.

The United Nations is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of its Middle Eastern and Islamic members.

What was to be a UN emergency response in May 1950, UNWRA has cost American taxpayers billions since then. Today, UNRWA continues to operate in both the Palestinian Authority-ruled West Bank and the Hamas-ruled Gaza, taken from the PA in June 2007. As noted in a recent article by Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, in 2007 UNRWA employed more than 29,000, all but 200 of whom were Palestinians. Its “facilities and personnel have been tied to numerous terrorist attacks on Israel.”

Sixty years of stalled and failed peace talks, as well as terror campaigns against Israel, have deligitimized Palestinian claims.

Following Israel’s operation Cast Lead in December 2008 to stop Hamas and Islamic Jihad rocket attacks, the Obama administration promised $400 million for Gaza and $600 million for the West Bank.

Though not confirmed, the rumor-mill in Washington is saying that the Obama administration will not veto the latest in an endless succession of anti-Israel resolutions.

If true, President Obama would become the first U.S. President to not defend Israel’s sovereignty.

If true, it would signal to the entire Middle East and the world that America is abandoning the only true democracy in the region and its longtime ally.

The United Nations was founded in 1945 after World War Two. It has since become a cesspool of corruption and an international cancer determined to become a one-world government. The time is long overdue for the U.S. to stop funding it and, indeed, to withdraw from it.

If Obama does not veto the Security Council resolution, the U.S. will pay for that decision for decades to come. Israel will be in ever more certain peril.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Israel's Next War Begins

By Alan Caruba

As this is being written, the news is about an Israeli effort to interdict a “humanitarian” flotilla of ships that refused to dock at its port of Ashdod to have its passengers and cargo checked. When Israeli troops boarded a Turkish ship in international waters on Sunday they were met with violent resistance that led to casualties.

The Israeli navy stopped six ships ferrying 700 people and 10,000 tons of supplies toward the Hamas-run Palestinian enclave.

I don’t know what the flotilla was delivering, but it is likely that among its passengers were Hamas terrorists and that there are weapons hidden among its cargo. That is why they refused orders to proceed to the Israeli port where tons of cargo routinely docks before making its way to Gaza.

The flotilla was a deliberate provocation. Naturally, much of the world will blame Israel.

Having been in a state of war since its founding, Israel routinely has interdicted shipments of weapons to the PLO and Hamas. One of the most notable was in January 2002 when the Karine-A, a Palestinian ship, was found to have more than fifty tons of Iranian weapons and explosives.

Largely unreported are the fierce battles Egyptian Special Forces are waging in central Sinai with Bedouin tribesman smuggling weapons and fighters into Gaza on behalf of al Qaeda. As always, the Middle East is an asylum for the insane who, when not trying to kill Israelis, stay busy killing one another.

I believe that war will come again soon and will originate in Lebanon. In the end, the decision will be Iran’s, not Syria’s, its sock puppet and stalking horse. Syria has reportedly provided the Lebanon-based Hezbollah an estimated 1,000 Iranian-made rockets and missiles, all aimed at Israel.

The last time the Israelis had to deal with Hezbollah aggression from Lebanon was in 2006. The conflict lasted 34 days. It is widely agreed that the Israeli Defense Force performed poorly and, not surprisingly, the most criticism came from the Israelis themselves.

Part of the problem at the time was an indecisive Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, who has since been replaced by Benyamin Netanyahu. If “Bibi” gets any intelligence regarding a pending attack, he will not wait around for it to start. On word of the confrontation with the flotilla, he cancelled a June 1 meeting with President Obama and returned to Israel.

You may recall that in March Barack Obama accorded Netanyahu one of the nastiest receptions ever given an Israeli Prime Minister. Only the Dalai Lama fared worse, being ushered out the White House back door.

One might reasonably assume that the president is no fan of Jews after having spent twenty years in the Chicago pews of the Trinity United Church of Christ listening to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright say hateful things about them and about America.

Obama has many close ties with black nationalists and anti-Semites such as Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan. One of his longtime associates is Palestinian apologist Rashid Khalidi, a Columbia University professor.

There is ample reason to believe another attack on Israel is likely. The Syrians have reportedly moved the number of their army units to the Israeli border and have been supplying arms to Hezbollah ever since the last war.

Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been saying ever more crazy things of late. He even lectured the United Nations on the coming of the Twelfth Imam, a Shiite spook whose return will require massive worldwide death and destruction. More recently Mahmoud got into a fight with the Russians over the proposed UN sanctions. Iran is running out of friends even if its oil is not.

The Israelis have been practicing war games that include long distance flights, the purpose of which may have something to do with dropping some very big bombs on places with Persian names.

While all this is going on, the United States is significantly building up its fighting strength in the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf regions. Carrier Strike Group 10, led by the USS Harry S. Truman, pulled up anchor on May 21st and headed to the Middle East. That will put two carrier groups in the area. More vessels, including guided-missile cruisers and destroyers will be there as well.

No matter how it plays out, the Middle East is going to turn into a shooting gallery again. The Iranians, Syrians, and Palestinians in Hezbollah and Hamas are living testimony to why all those people demanding that Israel make peace with them are clueless or worse.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

The Muslim House of Mirrors

By Alan Caruba

The problem with living in a house of mirrors is that everything you see is in reverse polarity. There is no way to come to grips with anything resembling reality.

A case in point is the recent announcement by Mohamed ElBaradei, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) who said, “Israel is the number one threat to the Middle East.” He was referring to its nuclear arms.

ElBaradei had just arrived in Iran for talks with Iranian officials who have lied about their nuclear program since it began. Nobody believes the Iranians are enriching uranium or plutonium or whatever for “peaceful purposes.” Nobody doubts that the Iranians, once they can put a nuclear warhead on top of a missile, will do so and very likely launch it at Israel.

But as far as ElBaradei is concerned, the number one threat is Israel.

Let’s briefly review some of the hostilities which have occurred in the Middle East. Hours after Israel announced its independence on May 14, 1948, it was attacked by Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and what was then called Transjordan. Their intention was, in their words, “a war of extinction.”

There were wars against Israel in 1967 and 1973. In November 1975, the United Nations passed a resolution that “Zionism is racism.” Prior to and during this period, Israel was subject to constant acts of terrorism. Among the most famous was the September 5, 1972 murder of eleven Israeli athletes at the summer Olympic Games in Munich.

After years of Katyusha rocket attacks from Lebanon, in 1982 the Israelis invaded to protect their citizens. They had to do this again in 2009 when, after years of rocket attacks from Gaza, they were compelled to invade a territory from which they had unilaterally withdrawn and turned over the Palestinian Liberation Organization (Fatah). Instead, Hamas, another Palestinian group drove out Fatah at gunpoint.

The founder of the PLO, Yassir Arafat’s idea of peace with Israel was summed up in the “Intifada”, a long series of suicide bombings and other attacks on Israel. The “second” Intifada followed Israel’s signing of the Oslo Accords!

Israel, however, wasn’t the only nation in the Middle East having to fight wars. A long, bloody civil war raged from 1975 to 1990 in Lebanon between the Muslims and Christian factions that had fashioned a peaceful democracy until Hezbollah, a tool of the Iranians, showed up.

During the 1980s, having fought Iran for eight years to a stalemate, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990. Initially repulsed in 1990-1 by a U.S. led force, the decision was made to rid the region of this despot. America and “a coalition of the willing” invaded Iraq in 2003.

Following 9/11, America invaded Afghanistan to drive out Al Qaeda and the Taliban. The decision to stay or leave is being evaluated by the Obama administration.

Did I mention that Muslim Pakistan has waged three major wars, one minor war, and numerous skirmishes against India?

But Israel is “the number one threat to the Middle East” according to the longtime chief of the IAEA.

This is the house of mirrors in which the Muslims, Arabs and Persians, of the Middle East see the world. Everything is in reverse.

Tiny Israel is declared the big threat, but nations that have been at war with it and with each other are not.

And while the United States, Europe and the United Nations dithers, the Iranians are building nuclear weapons. This isn’t an issue of another nation joining “the nuclear club.” It is about the annihilation of Israel and suicide by default when it becomes America’s and Europe’s turn.

I hope and pray that Israel destroys Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities and that the United States joins them, refueling their bombers and ours. Israel’s motto is “Never again” and ours should be “Enough!”

President Urges Mid-East Peace. Forgetaboutit!

By Alan Caruba

“President Pushes for Mid-East Peace” was the lead story in the Monday edition of my local daily and I suspect others around the nation.

You could have opened a newspaper on any day since the 1919 Versailles Treaty and found a similar headline. The real question is why.

The first reason is that the culture of the Middle East is Arab and Arabs do not trust one another. They have a saying among themselves, “I against my brother. My brother and I against our cousins,” and so on. Arabs are raised in a family context that pits one family against another and in a tribal context that pits one tribe and sect against another. They are hard-wired for conflict, but mostly for an inability to collaborate and cooperate.

This mindset is so foreign to Americans who create new organizations at the drop of a hat to address common issues and concerns that it is literally incomprehensible.

When you layer in the contempt that the majority Sunni sect of Muslims have for the Shia sect, you have the reason why blowing up each other’s mosques is perfectly acceptable to them and, by extension, burning Christian churches is as well. The Middle East is a sinkhole of intolerance and one in which violence in the name of Islam is sanctioned.

The President was in Israel to attend the ceremonies to celebrate the 60 years that nation has been in existence. It has suffered seven wars and a long standing Intifada or resistance movement. When not fighting the Israelis, the late Yassir Arafat’s Fatah finds itself under attack from Hamas.

Those called Palestinians have been in existence since the founding of Israel. Many have failed to peacefully integrate into the many Arab nations that surround Israel. Often they were not permitted to do so. An exception to this is Jordan which is composed primarily of Arabs who either lived in the former disputed territories or who were members of the Hashemite tribe led by the monarchal family of the Husseins.

In 1917 the British Balfour Declaration announced its approval of a Jewish homeland.

After World War I when the Middle East was carved up between England and France from the dead body of the Ottoman Empire, the British were given a mandate to help establish a Jewish National Home in an area designated as Palestine. The land allocated to the Jews—early Zionists—those already there or expected to migrate was considerably larger than the 1967 borders Arabs keep insisting the Israelis “return” to.

In fact, in 1920-21 Winston Churchill was instrumental in giving away three-quarters of the British mandate over the area to create Trans-Jordan for the Hashemites, an Arab tribe who had fought with them to expel the Turks (Ottomans) that had controlled much of the Middle East for centuries. That’s how Lawrence of Arabia gained fame as the British emissary. The Hashemites had lost out to the Saudis for control of that vast peninsula.

The British turned a blind eye to the Arab terrorism aimed at the early Zionist migration to their holy land. Later, those Jews seeking escape from Europe as the Nazis gained power often had few other places to go.

At no time did a Palestinian nation or state exist. Those Arabs living in the area considered themselves as residing in southern Syria and, after Jordan was created, as Jordanians.

Even after the Holocaust, the British tried to thwart the influx of Jewish survivors. The movie, “Exodus”, tells the story of efforts to force their departure so that progress toward the establishment of a Jewish state could progress. The Israelis would endure to date seven wars to destroy them.

The notion that there has been peace in the area is simply wrong.

No American president from the days of Woodrow Wilson to the present has ever been able to bring peace or enforce it in the Middle East. Today, our troops are in Iraq to defend the new state emerging from the former dictatorship as well as protecting the Gulf States against any aggression from Iran. Without our presence, it is likely that the entire Middle East would be in flames.

Pan-Arabism, advocated by Egypt’s Nasser, lies in the ruins of comparable attempts to unite the Middle East. Lebanon is again in turmoil, threatened with yet another civil war. The Turks keep an eye on northern Iraq’s Kurds, positioning troops on its border. Kuwait only exists due to an earlier U.S. military intervention.

So President George W. Bush can urge peace all he wants and whoever the next president will be can do the same. It’s not going to happen.

Palestinians are Destroying Lebanon. Again!

By Alan Caruba

The difficulties encountered by the nations of the Middle East to integrate the so-called Palestinians, a group of Arab refugees that did not exist when Israel came into existence, have their origins in the first attack on the new nation of Israel in 1948.

They were told by the invading Arab nations to abandon their homes and farms with the assurance that they would be restored once the Israelis were defeated. Sixty years later Israel is thriving and succeeding generations of the largest and oldest refugee group in the world continues to wreak havoc on Israel and neighboring nations.

The Palestinians have become a human pestilence. Wherever they gather in sufficient numbers their only export is death. When not at war with the Israelis, they make war among themselves.

That’s why the May 9th headline, “Hezbollah overruns west Beirut as Lebanon on brink”, is a reminder of how the Palestinians living in Lebanon continue to repay the hospitality of their host nation by seeking to overthrow it. Indeed, earlier when they attempted to overthrow the monarchy of Jordan, the father of the present king drove out large numbers of Palestinians who then fled to Lebanon.

This is not to say that Lebanon, though a nation with a history as old as Israel’s, had not been a political patchwork quilt since its modern reincarnation following the breakup of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. Lebanon was ceded to France along with Syria, while the British took control of Iraq, Jordan, and the protectorate of Palestine. The protectorate was understood to precede the founding of a Jewish state. The Arab states were pure invention for colonial purposes.

Lebanon, launched on September 1, 1920, joined together a population of Christian Maronites, a Muslim sect called the Druze, and Sunni Muslims. In 1943 a National Pact would establish a government of sorts that would have a Christian as president, a Sunni Muslim as prime minister, and a Shia Muslim as speaker of its Assembly.

As Sandra Mackey, author of “Mirror of the Arab World”, put it, “The whole elaborate system worked because the Lebanese, largely a product of Arab culture, possessed no clear sense of institutions.”

As Muslims gained in population, swelled by the Palestinians fleeing Jordan, the delicate political balance that had brought modernity and prosperity to Lebanon fell apart. From 1975 to 1990, the nation remained in a state of civil war.

Why the “pearl of the east” did not completely disappear as a nation is a mystery. Why it engaged in a civil war for fifteen years is not. The answer lies in the Palestinian inability to live in peace with any host nation. They are a cancer in the body politic of the Middle East.

Mackay writes, “The Lebanese civil war had proved neither heroic nor redemptive. Nor had the terrible bloodshed enabled the Lebanese state to establish its integrity. Nor had it advanced the process of transforming a fragile state into an authentic nation.”

Neither the Syrians who have always coveted Lebanon and occupied it militarily for a decade after the civil war, nor the Palestinians in the form of Hezbollah, an Iranian satanic spawn, want to permit a free, democratic, and independent Lebanon.

Those that keep telling Israel it must make peace with the Palestinians need to take a look at what is occurring in Lebanon again.

No doubt the Israeli army will return again in response to yet another attack by Palestinians from Lebanon. The world will send up a hue and cry about the horrid Israelis forced to defend themselves. Wiser heads will be rooting for them.