Only US Can End War
By HECTOR R.R. VILLANUEVA (Manila Bulletin, Philippines)ONLY the United States of President George W. Bush can effect an immediate ceasefire, an uneasy truce, and a negotiated peace with the Hamas of Palestine, the Hezbollah of Lebanon, and Israel. To aggravate matters, the smoldering tribal conflicts in Iraq, which is about to explode into a fullblown civil war, could engulf the entire region and ricochet around the world.
The United States itself may be blundering into the same mistakes in Iraq and Palestine as the British did from 1920 to 1930, and from 1940 to 1948, as the Americans found to their chagrin in Vietnam from 1968 to 1975.
While the world may live in the shadow of US nuclear primacy for many years to come, and while US influence and power are firmly anchored on economic superiority and financial stability that will not fade anytime soon, America may suffer from overstretching and budget deficits.
First, it has been argued, with sound validity, that the main difference between Iraq and Vietnam is that, in the former, the conflict centers mainly in the increasing hostility between rival tribes and competing religious sects among Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds, Assyrians, Druzes, Wahhabis and others, while Vietnam was a Maoist "people’s war" against western imperialism.
Thus, the Iraq and Palestine of today have their roots in the unpopular, indeterminate policies, pro-Israel bias, greed for oil of the Western Powers, fear of World War II Nazi Germany, which incidentally the Iraqi military dictatorship at that time signed an alliance with, and the postwar fear of Soviet infiltration during Stalin’s reign which ultimately left the national territorial boundaries to the strongest and fittest of the autocrats until the US invasion and overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2001.
As the American political analyst, Joel Rayburn puts it, "In retrospect, it seems clear that the political and public pressure to quit Mesopotamia led the British government first to overstate its progress in Iraq and then to abandon the project too early – with disastrous consequences" which we aver the United States is about to repeat the same mistakes of the past.
Second, the United States must share the shameful, irresponsible, and excessive abuse of armed power by Israel and the destruction of Lebanon and wholesale killings of Lebanese civilians which the United States could easily stop with a direct order to Israel, or else, which it has not done for fear of Jewish backlash at home, and withdrawal of financial support in next year’s midterm elections.
Today, the shoe is on the other foot.
That is, the United States today is singlehandedly "administering" and protecting the region that the British was policing between 1920 to 1930, and during World War II as a Protectorate while the zionist patriots, led by Ben Gurion, were tagged as "terrorists" as the "chosen people" killed, bombed, assassinated, and undermined British authority until the western allies unilaterally, with or without Palestinian people’s consent, declared the creation of the independent State of Israel whose legitimacy is still being questioned by the Arabs.
In summary, it is opined that, by its geopolitical naivete, shortsightedness, obsession with American democracy for all, fickle foreign policies, and hawkish Bush advisers, the United States is not only tending towards repeating the blunder of the British administration in the thirties and forties in Iraq and Palestine, but America is also remissed in not reining in the excesses and abuses of Israeli forces which only the United States can abort.
By its ineptitude and lack of imperial experience, the United States is, in fact, exacerbating the bloodshed, hatred, destruction, death, and demoralization in the Middle East, and the unrequited hatred of all Islam. The ball is in America’s court.
You be the judge. (For comments and views, please email: chaff_fromthegrain@yahoo.com.ph)
posted by e-journalist @ 7:14 PM
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