POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY THE DAILY TELEGRAPH'S DAVID BLAIR
The United States has just promised $30 billion worth of arms to Israel - already a garrison state much like the Crusader fortresses of an earlier era - and $20 billion to Gulf states over the next decade.
It is literally packing the region with high explosives, and yet Condoleezza speaks of Iran as though it were a threat.
This is right out of Cloudcuckooland.
The Gulf states' 14th-century regimes will always be willing to accept more weapons, if for no other reason than to keep their own people suppressed. So much for democracy in the region.
Israel never saw a weapon it didn't like. Here is a state with a population the size of Ecuador's and a military the equivalent of France's, including nuclear weapons.
An unsustainable military nightmare, but one which serves as a proxy for, a miniature geo-political replica of, the United States in the region, so America's gifts of arms are bounteous.
Every good analysis of history shows that this kind of militarization brings on, rather than protects from, war.
Only in the Cold War with the stand-off of two sides with unthinkable weapons can it be argued that arming people kept some kind of weird peace.
I'm not, but one could argue reasonably that a nuclear-powered Iran would contribute better long-term to peace in the region, balanced against, as it would be, Israel's dreadful arsenal.
These countless tons of conventional weapons might then be reasonably reduced over time.
But we get no effort at reasonableness at all. We get the United States not even willing to talk to Iran - except in the most cursory way recently and despite conducting an aggressive war on its border - and we get Israel behaving like a mad house run by inmates towards the Palestinians.
Israel came close to starving out the Palestinians after a free and fair election. Now, after inducing a virtual civil war, it starts handing over money it has illegally kept, starts talking with the Abbas it has treated like a low-level servant for years, makes a big show of releasing 250 prisoners (Note: Israel holds about 9,000 Palestinians, mostly illegally arrested and given no rights), and reportedly is now secretly sending tons of automatic rifles to Abbas.
How can any thinking person imagine that this whole set of behaviors does anything but stoke hatred and suppress advancement in the region?
You've sure stimulated some silly stuff here, David.
'It occurs to me that some pretty loathsome and dangerous characters are powerful and prospering in the world today simply because of elevated oil and commodity prices.'
How insightful, people are prospering because the price of what they have to sell is good? And their undemocratic leadership – supported and protected by the United States for decades in most cases – is ‘loathsome and prospering.’
Economic growth is good anywhere, no matter what the nature of the leadership. It is the only way that real democracy comes eventually. The faster the growth, the sooner comes the end of anti-democratic government.
We sure know one thing now, Condoleezza’s democracy by B-52 is black humor (no pun intended).
And how is it any different for the United States? Its unique history has endowed it with a much greater variety of things to sell, giving it more balanced growth.
How does its leadership - ostensibly the very opposite of 'pretty loathsome and dangerous characters' - work with this blessing?
Why by using tens of billions to kill others and tens of billions more to arm others to kill others.
Good God, what arrogance blended with ignorance and prejudice.
I'm sure readers can now look forward now to an extensive, angry, blubbering press release from the Israeli Foreign Office.
Over to you, 'susanx.'
