The Hole - How Deep?

In a recent posting, How Lame, I mistakenly indicated that the President had shown the door to the neoconservatives. He hasn’t. Everything that is playing out in the Middle East smacks of their tender touch. If the disaster in Iraq wasn’t enough to demonstrate to the President the folly of listening to these so-called `idealists’, nothing will, and we are doomed to another two years of nail biting.

Let’s get this straight; there is a civilization out there, Islam, with 1.2 billion members. The vast majority of its adherents want nothing more than peace for themselves and the opportunity to pursue happiness for themselves and their offspring. Many of them live in nations governed by despots and while they’d like it to be otherwise, they – like others so burdened - just keep getting up in the morning to seek their daily bread.

There is no doubt that a small but significant and growing minority of Islam is outraged at the West, the United States, and, most especially, at the governments of many Islamic countries for selling out to foreigners and for suppressing the true faith. These people are extremely dangerous and are the sworn enemies of us all. Assuming the argument that these jihadists are hopeless cases, we must do our best to stop them by all means fair and foul.

But the policies of George Bush that are clearly those inspired by the neocons have got us further from a solution to terrorism than when we began to react against the horror that was 9/11. The mad dream of the neocons for us to go it alone and by force of American arms to deal with this militant cancer on Islam has got us into far greater difficulties than we could have possibly imagined three years ago.

True Republican conservatives and moderates of all stripes have to react in a manner that’s in the best long term interests of the country. Our support and encouragement of the overwhelming response to the incursions of Hamas and Hezbollah into Israel while completely justified at one level plays right into the hands of the jihadists and the leaders of Syria and Iran.

The very idea of an axis between Syria and Iran should give us pause. That a mostly secular Arab state could find common cause with a Shiite inspired religious state populated by an ethnic group that is classically its antagonist is shocking. By our war on Iraq we’ve made the strangest bedfellows imaginable.

Hezbollah bit us on our backside. They will pay a great price for this point, but, in the process, they have destroyed the last vestiges of our role as an honest broker in the region. The neocons with their purity of vision and purpose have us and Israel in the position of being right but this isn’t a world of black and white. The larger grays of the Islamic world see us as supporting the destruction of Lebanon and the oppression of innocent Arabs.

The longer and harsher the neocon inspired response to the immediate Hezbollah attack, the worse off Israel and we become. This neocon vision that we must demonstrate no weakness – or even moderation – to bellicosity from our enemies inspires little confidence in the long term.

Bush has got to stop listening to these people. Since the idea of attacking Iraq first surfaced, each day we’ve been drawn deeper and deeper into the quagmire of the Middle East and gotten further away from our proper goal of pursuing those who planned and executed 9/11.

That’s a deep hole we’re in; we better stop digging pretty soon.

Blog on!

Wild Bill