Israel won its audacious military reputation during the age of Arab state armies. Because Arabs never believed in their own secular states, their armies were never very good in the first place, and thus Israel had no trouble impressing the world in its wars against them. But at the sub-state level of movements like Hamas or Hezbollah, the Arabs very much believe in their cause, and thus Israel has a real challenge on its hands.
He provocatively contends:
Iran has built its dominion on a combination of anti-western ideas and the dynamic wiliness of its intelligence operations (which, in turn, are a reflection of a civilization more developed and urbanized than that of the Arabs). Iran’s message of anti-Semitism and hatred toward the United States plays well across sectarian lines in the Sunni Arab world, which identifies its own fatigued, uninspiring, and detested rulers with the side of the U.S. and Israel. Sunni Arabs hate their own rulers, but despairing of changing their own lot, they channel that hatred toward us: thus the potency of the Iranian message. A nuclear weapon will only supply Iran with more prestige among the Arab lumpen faithful.
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And yet the one place where Moslems are cynical about Iran is in Iran itself, where the regime relies on a narrow base of support amid a state that (despite its vast oil reserves) is in economic shambles. Thus, the supreme irony of the Middle East is that the place where anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism are least potent is in the Iranian heartland.
Also, see Max Boot's opinion piece about Gaza in the Wall Street Journal. He contends that Israel, being a liberal democracy, cannot crush its opponents, like the Russians, Syrians, and Burmese do. It simultaneously cannot tolerate attacks on its citizens from Gaza. Thus, the Israelis must fight a long-term war of attrition. Victory is not a possibility in the current calculus. Retaliatory measures will continue for a long time.
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