World War III - What is Endgame to Latest Israeli Strategy with Hezbollah and Hamas - Iraq Showed The Islamic World Limits to US Power

July 19th 2006

Lebanon Evacuation

Gordon Chang was on "The Daily Show" at 11 PM Monday, July 17. He's the highly-respected author of Nuclear Showdown: North Korea Takes on the West

Chang made many of the same points I've previously made. North Korea has nuclear weapons. North Korea is actively working with Middle Eastern terrorist groups, including Hezbollah. North Korea has missiles which can reach anywhere in Israel from any of several surrounding countries.

North Korea has sold every single weapon it has ever developed to whomever had the money to pay for it.

I also watched a show earlier tonight (Monday) on the history of nuclear proliferation in the Islamic world. Origins in Pakistan, which also aided North Korea. To Iran, via Dubai (remember Dubai?). Ironically, the technology was offered also to Iraq, but Saddam turned it down, fearing that it was some sort of UN "sting" operation. The Pakistani behind it was Abdul Qadeer Khan, still revered in Pakistan, despite the official sanction by Pakistani dictator General Pervez Musharraf.

The idea that the US achieved anything at all in its own interests by invading Iraq is not credible. Iraq had nothing. We showed the Islamic world the severe limits of US power in Iraq (leaving us helpless to deal with North Korea and Iran, much less fight "World War III"). Before Iraq, we still had military credibility. Now we have no military flexibility to engage on other fronts and the limits of our power have been exposed. While legions have been drawn to Jihad through the nightly Al Jazeera highlight reels.

It is inevitable that Islamic terrorists will acquire better missiles, better bombs, and eventually nuclear bombs.

How in the world did we allow ourselves to get sucked into this? The Islamists were never out to conquer the US or even Europe by military force. They want to recover Palestine and they want the US and Europe to butt out of their world. They are doing perfectly well in Europe through non-military means. Islam is the fastest growing religion in Europe, including England. More Christians convert to Islam than non-Christians are converted to Christianity. This is in a country (England) with an official state Christian religion.

The impact of a single nuclear bomb going off in a small boat in Long Beach harbor would be unimaginable. When it happens, what do we do then? An angry wounded beast, do we really start dropping nuclear bombs in the mid-East and where precisely do we drop them? Lebanon? Palestine? Syria? Iraq? Iran? Pakistan? North Korea? Yemen?

How does Israel actually defend itself? The only thing its been able to do which made any sort of an impact is to build their security fence. This reduced terrorist bombings within Israel by 90%. It didn't solve Israel's problems, because Israel has inherently non-defendable borders. For this reason, its future is decidedly dim.

Israel is currently acting like a wounded bull, looking for targets to gore, but looking increasingly like a nation playing blind man's bluff, blindly poking in all directions, without important long-term effect, more than like the nation which so effectively launched its planes and tanks against the country of Egypt nearly 40 years ago. Such is the nature of 21st century warfare.

What are the interests of the US in the Middle East? To protect Israel? To protect oil? At what point does it start to make more sense to abandon SUVs, figuratively speaking?

We have to start by defining our true objectives. Our objective has to be something beyond "rooting out terrorists," because terrorists can't simply be rooted out in a world where 67% of Iranians agree that Israel should be wiped off the map and 77% of Palestinians agree with Hezbollah and Hamas and where I dare say a majority of the world's considerable Muslim population is conspicuously silent precisely because they largely agree, as well.

So "rooting out terrorism" either means "final solution," writ large or it means making some tough choices regarding the most sensible "homeland" for the world's Jewry and regarding our present and future energy policies, and regarding whether our national security is better served by maintaining the bulk of our combat forces and military budget maintaining law and order in Islamic Asia or in building the equivalent of the Israeli security fence here at home, beginning in our ports.

Comment on this article at our Forum

Submit your own article

RSS Feed to our content